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Similarity is the favourite verse form of nature. And no doubt Homer learned his love of simile not just by listening to poets, but by listening to grasshoppers. Or perhaps they were cicadas. The Homeric word τέττιγες gets translated into both insects. A group of old men was sitting by the Skaian Gates, no longer of fighting age, but excellent speakers, like cicadas in a thicket kneeling on the tips of trees send forth their flower-like voices. These ancient Trojans were sitting hunched there on the turret, and when they saw Helen approaching, sent forth their winged voices. What an extraordinary laminated simile, in which the voices of humans have wings, and the voices of insects are flower-like. According to the lexicon, λειριόεσσαν is an adjective formed from a lily. Liddell and Scott suggests their voices are 'lily-pale.' Richard Lattimore translates it as 'delicate.' Robert Fagles avoids the strangeness altogether, saying they were 'eloquent speakers still, clear as cicadas settled on treetops, lifting their voices through the forest, rising softly, dying away.' But none of these catches the Darwinian exactness of Homer, in which an old man can speak the same language as a cicada, speaking the same language as a lily. The likeness is full-bodied, cross-species, synaesthetic, ecological.