A Conversation with Cronus (34-36)

It certainly cannot, I am sure, be as pleasant to have your fill by yourselves, as they say lions and lone wolves do, as to mix with clever

fellows and those who try in every way to please. In the first place they will not allow your banquet to be deaf and dumb. No, their company means convivial stories, harmless jests, and all sorts of expressions of friendship; these are the pleasantest sorts of pastimes, dear to Dionysus and Aphrodite, dear too to the Graces. Then they will talk to everyone next day of your sociability and get you liked. And this is rightly worth a great deal.

I will ask you something. Let us suppose the poor went about with their eyes shut; wouldn’t you be cross when you had no one to show your purple clothes, your thronging attendants, the size of your rings? I leave aside the plots, the hatred you must stir up in the poor against you if you choose to enjoy your luxury alone. Terrible are the curses they threaten to utter against you. May they never be constrained to utter them! For then you will taste neither sausages nor cakes, except what the dog may have left, your lentil-soup will have salt-fish dissolved in it, your boar and deer while they’re being roasted will plan escape from the oven to the hills, and your birds, wingless though they be,—shoo there!—they will be flying at full stretch to the homes of the selfsame poor. And worst of all, the prettiest of your wine-servers will turn bald all at once, and that after breaking your jar.

Well, then, make plans that befit the festival and are safest for you. Lighten their great poverty for them, and at slight cost you will find friends who are far from despicable.

4. THE RICH TO CRONUS—GREETINGS!

Do you really think that you are the only one written to by the poor in this vein, Cronus? Isn’t Zeus already quite deaf from the din of their de- mands for just that, a redistribution of wealth, and of their charges against fate for inequality in distri- bution and against us for not considering giving them any share? But he, being Zeus, knows who is to blame, and for that reason takes no notice of most of their complaints. Nevertheless we shall defend ourselves to you, since you are our lord at present.

We for our part have set before us all you have written—that it was a fine thing to succour the needy out of our plenty, and that it was more agreeable to mix and feast with the poor. This is what we always used to do, putting ourselves on an equal footing with them so that not even our guest himself could find anything to complain of.