The mice against the frogs …

… A Nony Mouse. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Now comes a new translation [of the Batrachomyomachia] in rhyming iambic pentameter by A.E. Stallings, with illustrations by the etcher Grant Silverstein. The handsome large-format book, and the ingenious heroic couplets recounting the deeds of ‘King Pufferthroat’, ‘Morselsnatcher’ et al, suggest Mother Goose or Aesop. That’s one way to look at it. But with two introductions – one under Stallings’s name and another by ‘A. Nony Mouse’ – plus a glossary of dramatis personae, an appendix and the notes of an erudite classicist, this is a playful yet serious work of scholarship in miniature.