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In Greece and Italy: Plato

Cicero relates, in his work on divination, the belief concerning Plato: - "While Plato was an infant in his cradle, a swarm of bees settled on his lips during his slumbers; and the diviners answered that he would become extremely eloquent; and this prediction of his future eloquence was made before he even knew how to speak."

And Pliny says the same thus: "Bees settled upon the lips of Plato when still an infant even, announcing thereby In Greece and Italy the sweetness of that persuasive eloquence for which he was so noted."

Xenophon, who was as eloquent as a writer as he was excellent as a leader and a swordsman, was called the Attic Bee.

Sophocles was also called the Attic Bee; and Pindar, as he lay sleeping, was visited by bees who refreshed the darling of the Muses with delicious honey. "The divine Homer," too, is said to have received his first nourishment from a priestess whose breasts distilled honey. In short, there are very few of the sweet singers or eloquent pleaders of ancient days whose future renown was not fabled to have been foretold in this way by the bees.

IN GREECE AND ITALY (continued) THE bee is mentioned in one way or another by nearly all the writers of classical antiquity.

The poets used the bees, after the manner of poets, to beautify their verse, and from Æschylus to Theocritus the bees and their honey grace the pages of the Greek and Roman singers.