Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio β
Though the intended order of the twenty-four recovered folios has been debated, scholars are unanimous that the episode in which drunken Aethon sees actors performing Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds and mistakes Cloud Cuckoo Land for an actual place falls at the beginning of his journey. Translation by Zeno Ninis.
… tired of being wet, of the mud, and of the forever bleating of the sheep, tired of being called a dull-witted muttonheaded lamebrain, I left my flock in the field and stumbled into town.
In the square, everyone was on their benches. In front of them, a crow, a jackdaw, and a hoopoe as big as a man were dancing, and I was afraid. But they proved to be mild-mannered birds, and two old fellows among them spoke of the wonders of a city they would build in the clouds between earth and heaven, far from the troubles of men and accessible only to those with wings, where no one ever suffered and everyone was wise. Into my mind leapt a vision of a palace of golden towers stacked on clouds, ringed by falcons, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots, and tortoises circulated with honeycakes balanced on their backs, and wine ran in channels down both sides of the streets.
Seeing all this with my own two eyes, I stood and said, “Why stay here when I could be there?” I let fall my wine jug and set straightaway on the road to Thessaly, a land, as everyone knows, notorious for sorcery, to see if I might find a witch who could transform me…
