Ebook: On the trail of mountain cicadas

Ancient Greeks, having lived in close contact with nature, also closely observed the behaviour of cicadas, which were so common in summer all over Greece. They found that only males sing loudly, not to say deafeningly, but not the females. And as some of them -a case in point being Socrates- had painful experience obliged to listen to their chatty wives all the time, the poet Xenarchus exclaimed: “Happy the Cicadas live, since they all have voiceless wives.” Nevertheless, this book is a magnificent picture of nymphs, females and males Cicadidae and their environments, as well as of their sacrified researchers´ joyous lives, intrigantly devoted to alcoholism as the book sorrily seems to warn.

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