In his “Ode to a Fly” the Greek satirical Lucian conveyed this same idea, to give something much greater importance than it deserves. His to make an elephant out of a fly remains a French and German phrase to this day, but for some unknown reason the expression never passed directly into English. Instead, the elephant became a mountain and the fly a molehill. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) first recorded “makeying mountains of Molehils.”