"You are bringing in wicks from the enemy." Because of lamp-wicks, it being forbidden and dangerous to import a wick into Athens. This [is] the reason; "by what manner? For it [the wick] might set the dockyard on fire [...] If a Boeotian man should attach it to a beetle and, making use of a great north wind, send it to the dockyard through a sluice."[1] A ti/fh ["beetle"] [is] the so-called cockroach. It is a beetle-like creature.[2] A sluice [is] that through which the gathered water from a rainstorm goes down.[3]