HERMES What ails you, Zeus, in lone soliloquy To pace about all pale and scholar-like ? Confide in me, take me to ease your toils : Scorn not the nonsense of a serving-man. ATHENA Yea, thou sire of us all, son of Cronus, supreme among rulers, Here at thy knees I beseech it, the grey-eyed Tritogeneia : Speak thy thought, let it not lie hid in thy mind, let us know it. What is the care that consumeth thy heart and thy soul with its gnawing? Wherefore thy deep, deep groans, and the pallor that preys on thy features ? Compare this parody on Homer with Iliad 1, 363 (=Od. 1, 45); 8, 31; 3. 35. ZEUS There’s nothing dreadful to express in speech, No cruel hap, no stage catastrophe That I do not surpass a dozen lines! A parody on the opening lines of the Orestes of Euripides. ATHENA Apollo ! what a prelude to your speech ! Euripides, Hercules Furens 538. ZEUS O utter vile hell-spawn of mother earth, And thou, Prometheus—thou hast hurt me sore! ATHENA What isit? None will hear thee but thy kin. ZEUS Thundering stroke of my whizzing bolt, what a deed shalt thou do me! HERA 
Lull your anger to sleep, Zeus, seeing that I’m no
hand either at comedy or at epic like these two,
nor have I swallowed Euripides whole so as to be
able to play up to you in your tragedy réle.

 

Do you
suppose we don’t know the reason of your. anguish ?
 ZEUS You know not: otherwise you ‘Id shriek and 
scream. From Euripides, according to Porson. 
 HERA 
I know that the sum and substance of your troubles
is a love-affair; I don’t shriek and scream, though,
because I am used to it, as you have already affronted
me many a time in this way. It is likely that you
have found another Danae or Semele or Europa and
are plagued by love, and that you are thinking
of turning into a bull or a satyr or a shower of gold,
to fall down through the roof into the lap of your
sweetheart, for these symptoms—groans and_tears
and paleness—belong to nothing but love.
 ZEUS 
You simple creature, to think that our circumstances permit of love-making and such pastimes !

 

 HERA 
Well, if that isn’t it, what else is plaguing you ?
Aren’t you Zeus?