A Piping Odysseus in Ptolemy the Quail  Timothy Power, Rutgers
University, New Brunswick A strange bird indeed Even in the odd
company of Imperial mythographers, paradoxographers,
antiquarians, and literary revisionists, Ptolemy the Quail
(Ptolemaios Chennos), an Alexandrian writing around the turn of
the first into the second century CE, qualifies as a fringe
figure. While the Quail was certainly not the only author of his
time (or earlier) to walk the weirder byways of myth,
literature, and history, no one else makes such incredible
claims about what he discovers there. The contents of Ptolemy’s
New History ) are summarized in the Bibliotheca of the ninth-
century CE patriarch Photius.  This summary, though greatly
condensed, indicates that the work was a collection of
curiosities akin to others of its age, only more consistently
bizarre: astonishing tales of birth, death, and love alongside
fragments of secret histories and forgotten poems, eccentric
onomastic lore, biographical trivia about the most minor