To conclude, then, with your consent,
Zeus, I shall read a motion on this subject which
has already been committed to writing.
 ZEUS 
Read it, for not all your criticisms were unreasonable, and we must put a stop to most of this, so that
it may not increase.
Momus (reads)
“With the blessing of Heaven! In a regular
session of the assembly, held on the seventh of the
month, Zeus presiding, Poseidon first vice-president,
Apollo second vice-president, Momus, son of Night,
recorder, the following resolution was proposed by
Sleep: Obtaining from fourth-century Athens a formula for decrees of the senate and people, Olympus has filled in the blanks as best it could. At Athens, the name of a ph le, or tribe, would go in the first blank of the preamble, as “exercising the prytany’’; but Ob ympus has no tribes, and anyhow Zeus should come first. So his name is set down there. The next two offices might now be crossed off; for as Zeus presides at assemblies, there is no function left for the proedros, or chairman of the board of presidents, and the office of epistatés, or chairman of the prytanies, is already filled, since Zeus can hardly be “exercising the prytany” in any other capacity. However, there are the blanks!—and Poseidon, second in the Olympian hierarchy, will do all the better for proedros if it is a sinecure, while the duties actually performed by Apollo as Zeus’ right-hand man and more or less of a factotum, are not too dissimilar to those of an Athenian epistatés in the fourth century B.o. These problems solved, the remaining blanks were easy to fill. 



 

“WHEREAS many aliens, not only Greeks but barbarians, in nowise worthy of admission to our body
politic, by obtaining fraudulent registration in one
way or another and coming to be accounted gods
have so filled heaven that our festal board is packed
with a noisy rabble of polyglot flotsam; and
WHEREas the ambrosia and the nectar have run low,
so that a cup now costs a mina, on account of the
vast number of drinkers; and wHereas in their
boorishness they have thrust aside the ancient and
genuine gods, have claimed precedence for themselves, contrary to all the institutions of our fathers,
and want to be pre-eminently honoured on earth:
therefore