ABSTRACT
That wonderful old weaver of tales, recorder of curiosities, facts, fiction and fantasy, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, wrote his incomparable Histories, in lovely Ionic Greek, around 460 bc. In them, he recalls the Riddle of the Sphinx, the mythical Throttler, who despatched in this fashion travellers unable to solve her eponymous riddle, ‘What walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, on three in the evening?’ The answer was ‘man’, who as an infant crawls on all fours, and in old age walks leaning on a stick. I recently qualified for such a definition, being obliged to graduate to the use of a stick, after the sudden and catastrophic (in all senses) failure of both knee joints: medial meniscus and articulatory cartilage failure. I hoped that surgery, to implant twenty-first-century tungsten prostheses, might for a while reset my life’s Master Clock to the middle, two-legged, phase. Small consolation that I am (I hope!) safe from the Sphinx’s lethal embrace. ‘Eheu fugaces, labuntur anni’, ‘alas, the fleeting years slip by’, was the plangent regret of the Roman poet, Horace.
