The Seba library treats Cicada in 6 passages, across 6 authors (including Kerényi, Karl, Watson, Burton, Beekes, Robert).
Tithonos turned himself into a cicada. Eos bore him sons. The most famous of these was Memnon, who came to Troy from the eastern land of the Sun, Ethiopia, to aid his father’s family
Kerényi presents the Tithonos-cicada metamorphosis as the mythological culmination of immortality without renewal — the voice alone surviving when bodily power has been utterly withdrawn by age.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951thesis
Am I waiting for the scales of a snake or the wings of a cicada? How do I know why it is so? How do I know why it isn’t so?
Zhuangzi deploys the cicada’s wings as a figure for the conditional, dependent nature of all apparently autonomous action, bracketing it with the butterfly-dream to interrogate the grounds of identity and agency.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013thesis
TETTl�, -iyo<; [m.] ‘tree-cricket, cicada’ (ll.); metaph. a hair-pin with the shape of a cicada (Att.).
Beekes establishes the cicada’s onomatopoeic etymology and its dual register in Greek — both the singing insect and an ornamental object shaped in its likeness, attesting to its deep cultural embeddedness.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
voice, properly the human voice with its varied expressiveness; then applied to the cicada, lambs, r 152, A 435.
The Homeric dictionary entry reveals that the Greek term for voice (ὄψ/ossa) is explicitly extended to the cicada, linking the insect’s song to the paradigmatic human faculty of expressive speech.
, Homeric Dictionarysupporting
the dark-winged whirring grasshopper, perched on a green shoot, begins to sing of summer to men—his food and drink is the dainty dew—and all day long from dawn pours forth his voice in the deadliest heat, when Sirius scorches the flesh
Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles situates the cicada (or grasshopper) at the solar apex of summer — its ceaseless voice marking the moment of maximum heat, ripeness, and mortal intensity before the season turns.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700supporting
Like the following poem translated by Suzuki (1970). Of an approaching death Showing no signs The ci
Spiegelman cites a Zen poem apparently invoking the cicada in relation to death’s approach, situating the insect within the Buddhist-Jungian discourse on living fully in the presence of mortality — though the passage is truncated.
, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985aside