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