Indeed this very change of language suits the style we have taken up, the art of the rider who leaps from horse to horse. We begin a Greekish story. Reader, pay attention: you will enjoy yourself.

A desultor was a circus rider who leapt from one galloping horse to another. The speaker likens his change from Greek to Latin to that trick, and the book keeps leaping: from tale to tale, voice to voice, man to beast. Lewis & Short gives desultorius a second sense, “desultory, superficial,” and its one example is this sentence; the English word desultory comes from it. Stilus was the pointed stick for writing on wax, and from it comes our “style.” Fabulam Graecanicam: the story has a Greek source. In the ninth century the patriarch Photius read a Greek Metamorphoses by one Lucius of Patrae, and a shorter version of the same story among the works of Lucian, Lucius or the Ass (Bibliotheca, codex 129). The short Greek version survives. Apuleius follows its plot and adds a great deal of his own, among it the tale of Cupid and Psyche and the whole of the Isis book that ends the novel. Lewis & Short glosses Graecanicus as “of Greek origin, in the Greek manner,” and quotes Varro using it of words borrowed from the Greeks.