A Conversation with Cronus (28-31)

Take the noisy complaints you made to me just now, that they gorged on pork and cakes in the feasting—what do they amount to? Both of them are perhaps sweet and not disagreeable for the moment, but in the aftermath the matter is turned right round. Then, whereas you will get up on the next day without the headache their drinking gives them and the foul, smoky belching from over-fullness, they not only have the pleasure of all this but having spent most of the night in debauchery with boys or women or in any way their lechery takes them, without difficulty they pick up consumption or pneumonia or dropsy from their excessive indulgence. Again, would you find it easy to point out one of them who was not absolutely pale, looking very much like death? Or one who reached old age on his own feet and not carried on four men’s backs, all gold on the outside, but with his inside cobbled like the costumes in tragedy, patched up out of quite worthless rags? You paupers never taste or feed on fish, true enough, but don’t you see that you’ve no acquaintance with gout or pneumonia either, or of anything else that they catch for some other reason? Yet even they themselves don’t find it pleasant eating this food every day beyond what they want of these dishes; no, you’ll see them sometimes with a better appetite for vegetables and thyme than even you have for hare and pork.

I say nothing of the other things that worry them—a licentious son, a wife in love with a servant, a loved one who yields because he has to and not because he

In fact most of what they have you would find they get on your account, not for their own use, but to impress you poor people.

This, then, is the advice I give you, knowing both ways of life as I do. And it is right that during the festival you should remember that after a little time you must all depart from life, the rich giving up their wealth and you your poverty. But I shall write to them as I promised and I know they will not despise my words.

3. Cronus to the Rich—Greetings!

The poor have recently written me complaining that you don’t let them share what you have, and, to be brief, they asked me to make the good things common to all and let everyone have his bit. It was right, they said, for there to be equality and not for one man to have too much of what is pleasing while another goes without altogether. I replied that Zeus would see to that better than I, but with regard

Now these requests seem to me to be reasonable. “How,” they say, “can we, shivering in this extreme cold and in the grip of famine, keep festival as well?” So if I wanted them too to share in the festival, they bade me compel you to give them a share of any clothing you have above your needs or any too coarse for you, and to sprinkle on them a little of your gold. If you do that, they say, they will not even argue with you before Zeus any more about your possessions. Otherwise they threaten a summons for redistribution of property just as soon as Zeus begins his cases. These things are not at all difficult for you to grant out of all that you are rightly blessed with.