Icaromenippus, or the Sky-man (27-30)

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By this time he had pretty well settled everything, and we went away to the dining-hall, as it was time for dinner. Hermes took me in charge and gave me a place beside Pan and the Corybantes and Attis and Sabazius, those alien gods of doubtful status. Demeter gave me bread, Dionysus wine, Heracles

meat, Aphrodite perfume and Poseidon sprats. But I also had surreptitious tastes of the ambrosia and the nectar, for Ganymede, bless his heart, had so much of human kindness about him that whenever he saw Zeus looking another way he would hastily pour me out a mouthful or two of the nectar. But as Homer says somewhere or other,[*]—having seen what was there, I suppose, just like me—the gods themselves neither cat bread nor drink ruddy wine but have ambrosia sect before them and get drunk on nectar; and they are especially fond of dining on the smoke from the sacrifices, which comes up to them all savoury, and on the blood of the victims that is shed about the altars when people sacrifice. During dinner - Apollo played the lute, Silenus danced the can-can and the Muses got up and sang us something from Hesiod’s Theogony and the first song in the Hymns of Pindar.[*] When we had had enough we composed ourselves for the night without any ceremony, being pretty well soused.

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All the others, the gods and the warriors chariot-owning,

Slept until morning, pus I was unbound by the fetters of slumber,

Iliad2, 1-2. for I was thinking about many things, above all how Apollo had not grown a beard in all this while, and how it gets to be night in Heaven with Helius always there and sharing the feast. Well, as I say, I slept but little that night, and in the early morning Zeus got up and ordered procla-: mation for an assembly to be made.

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When everybody was there, he began to speak: "The reason for calling you together is supplied, of course, by our visitor here of yesterday, but I have long wanted to confer with you about the philosophers, and so, being stirred to action by the moon in particular and the criticisms that she makes, I have decided not to put off the discussion any longer.

“There is a class of men which made its appearance in the world not long ago, lazy, disputatious, vainglorious, quick-tempered, gluttonous, doltish, addle-pated, full of effrontery and to age the language of Homer, ‘a uscless load to the soil.[*] Well, these people, dividing themselves into schol and inventing various word-mazes, have called themselves Stoics, Academics, Epicurcans, Peripatetics and other things much more laughable than these. Then, cloaking themselves i in the high- sounding name of Virtue, elevating their eyebrows, wrinkling up their foreheads and letting their beards grow long, they go about hiding loathsome habits under a false garb, very like actors in tragedy; for if you take away from the latter their masks and_ their gold-embroidered robes, nothing is left but a comical little creature hired for the show at seven drachmas.

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“But although that is what they are, they look with scorn on all mankind and they tell absurd stories about the gods; collecting lads who are easy to hoodwink, they rant about their far-famed Virtue’ and teach them their insoluble fallacies; and in the presence of their disciples they always

sing the praise of restraint and) temperance and self-suflicieney and spit at wealth and pleasure, but when they are all by themselves, how can one describe how much they cat, how much they indulge their passions and how they lick the filth off pennies? “Worst of all, though they themselves do no goéd either in public or in private life but are uscless and superfluous,

Neither in war nor in council of any account,

Iliad2, 202. nevertheless they accuse everyone clse; they amass biting phrases and school themselves in novel terms of abuse, and then they censure and reproach their fellow-men; and whoever of them is the most noisy and impudent and reckless in calling names is held to be the champion.