These, deities, are my reasons for summoning you; no slight ones, if you consider that all our honor, revenue, and prestige come from men. And if they should be persuaded either that we do not exist at all or that we have no forethought for them, we shall have no more sacrifices and gifts and honor from earth, and we shall sit idly in heaven oppressed by hunger when we are deprived of those feasts and national holidays and games and sacrifices and vigils and processions. In such a crisis we all ought certainly to devise some means of safety by which Timokles may be victorious and be held to make the truer argument, and Damis may be jeered by the audience. For I myself have small confidence that Timokles will win by his own exertions unless he also receives assistance from us. Accordingly, Hermes, announce in due form that remarks are in order.

Hear ye, silence! Make no disturbance! Who wishes to speak, of those full-grown divinities whose right it is? What is this? Does no one rise? They are all silent, overwhelmed by the importance of the news.

Now I would that you all might turn to earth and to water! But for my part, Zeus, if I am at liberty to speak with perfect freedom, I have a good many things to say.

Speak, Momos, without restraint. I am sure your frankness will be for our good.

Hear, then, deities, what at any rate I think in my heart of hearts, as they say. You must know that I have been pretty confidently expecting that our affairs would come to as bad a pass as this, and that numbers of sophists like these would spring up against us, finding grounds for their temerity in our own conduct. By heaven, we have no right to be angry with Epicurus or with his disciples and successors if they have conceived these notions about us. What, then, could you ask them to think when they see such anarchy in human life, the best of them neglected, perishing utterly in poverty and disease and slavery, while worthless blackguards are preferred to them in honor, and surpass them in riches, and are placed in authority over their betters; when they see that sacrilege is not punished but escapes unnoticed, while sometimes innocent men are impaled on stakes and beaten to death? It is only natural, then, that when they see such things they decide as they do, that we have no existence at all,

particularly when they hear the oracles saying that if a certain man crosses the Halys he will overthrow a great kingdom, without specifying whether it will be his own kingdom or his enemy's. And then again the oracle says: Salamis, dear to the gods, thou shalt slay children of women. But I imagine both the Persians and the Greeks were children of women. And then when they hear from the minstrels how we fall in love, and receive wounds, and get put in chains and made servants, and are divided against ourselves, and have a myriad of troubles, all the time claiming to be blessed and indestructible, have they not a perfect right to jeer at us and make us of no account? But we get angry if certain persons who are human beings, and not altogether devoid of wits, sift these matters and deny our providence, whereas we ought to felicitate ourselves if any still continue to sacrifice to sinners like us.