Why the Strange Name?

A Greek tyrant named Phalaris (c. 550 B.C.) had a hollow bronze torture chamber in the shape of a bull.  A victim was stuffed inside to cook to death.  The victim would scream in desperate agony, but when the screams emerged from the mouth of the bull, they sounded musical, interesting, or funny.  Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (c. 1830) saw in this a metaphor for the suffering of artists providing pleasure to audiences.  "What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music. His fate resembles that of the unhappy men who were slowly roasted by a gentle fire in the tyrant Phalaris' bull—their shrieks could not reach his ear to terrify him, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock about the poet and say to him: do sing again; which means, would that new sufferings tormented your soul, and: would that your lips stayed fashioned as before, for your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful."  Søren Kierkegaard, Diapsalmata, translated by Lee Milton Hollander