“But am I not aware of all the shameful, abominable deeds they do at night, they who by day are dour-visaged, resolute of cye, majestic of mien and the cynosure of the general public? Yet although I see all this, I keep quiet about it, for I do not think it decent to expose and illumine those nocturnal pastimes of theirs and their life behind the scenes. On the contrary, if I see one of them committing adultery or thieving or making bold to do anything else that best befits the night, I draw my garment of cloud together and _ veil my face at once, in order that I may not let the common people see old men bringing discredit on their long beards and on virtue. But they for their part never desist from picking me to pieces in talk and _ insulting me in every way, so that I vow by Night, I have often thought of moving as far away as possible to a place where I might escape their meddling tongues. "So be sure to report all this to Zeus and to add, too, that I cannot remain in my place unless he destroys the .natural philosophers, muzzles the logicians, razes the Porch, burns down the Academy, and stops the lectures in the Walks; for only then can I get a rest and cease to be surveyed by them every day.”

“Very well,” said I, and therewith I pressed on upwards along the road to Heaven, ‘Whence there was naught to be seen of the labours of men or of oxen ;Od. 10, 98. for in a little while even the moon seemed small to me, and the earth had at last disappeared from my view. Taking the sun on my right and flying past the stars, on the third day out I drew near to Heaven. At first I made up my mind to go straight in without more ado, for I thought I should easily escape observation, as I was half eagle and I knew that the eagle was on intimate terms with Zeus from of old; but afterwards I concluded that they would very soon find me out because the other wing that I wore was a vulture’s. Thinking it best, anyhow, not to take any unnecessary chances, I went up and knocked at the door. Hermes answered my knock, inquired my name, and went off in haste to tell Zeus. In a little while I was admitted in great fear and trembling, and found them all sitting together, not without apprehension themselves; for my visit, being so unprecedented, had put them in a quiet flutter, and they almost expected the whole human race to arrive at any moment, provided with wings like maine.

Zeus, however, looked at me with a fierce, Titanic stare and said in a very terrible voice: What is your name, sir, whence do you come, and where is your city and hearth-stone ?The line occurs frequently in the Odyssey, e.g. 1, 170. When I heard this, I nearly dropped dead of fright, but stood my ground all the same, though my jaw was hanging and I was thunderstruck by the loudness of his voice. But in time I pulled myself together and told him the whole story clearly, starting at the very beginning—how I wanted to learn about the heavenly bodies, how I went to the philosophers, how I heard them contradicting each other, how I got tired of being pulled this way and that by their arguments, and then about my idea and the wings and all the rest of it till my arrival in Heaven ; and at the end I added the message of the moon. Smiling and unbending a little, Zeus remarked: “What can one say to Otus and Ephialtes when even a Menippus has the hardihood to come up to Heaven? However, we invite you to be our guest for to-day, and to-morrow, after we have taken action on the matters about which you have come, we shall send you away.” With that he arose and walked toward the best place in Heaven for hearing, as it was time to sit and listen to the prayers.

As he walked along he asked me about things on earth, first the usual questions, how much wheat now costs in Greece, whether the last winter hit us hard and whether the crops needed more rain. Then he inquired whether any of the descendants of Phidias were still left, why the Athenians had omitted the Diasia for so many years, whether they had any idea of finishing the Olympieion for him and whether the men who robbed his temple in Dodona had been arrested.The temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens was completed by Hadrian a generation before these lines were written ; and, if we may trust a casual reference to the Diasia in Plutarch (de tranquil, an. 20), that festival had been reinstituted in some form or other. Here again Lucian seems to be following Menippus.

When I had answered these questions, he said: “Tell me, Menippus, what opinion do men hold about me? “Tell me, Menippus, what opinion do men hold about me?” “What opinion should they hold, sir,” said I, “except the highest possible one, that you are king of all the gods?” “You are fond of your joke,” said he, “but I am thoroughly acquainted with their craze for novelty even without your telling me. There was once a time when they looked upon me as a prophet and a healer, and I was all in all ; “Yea, full of Zeus were all the streets And all the marts of men.’ At that time Dodona and Pisa were rich and highly regarded by all, and I could not even see for the smoke of the sacrifices. But since Apollo founded his oracle at Delphi and Asclepius his hospital in Pergamos and the temple of Bendis arose in Thrace and the temple of Anubis in Egypt and the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, these are the places where they all run and celebrate feast-days and bring hecatombs, and offer up ingots of gold, while I, they think, being past my prime, am sufficiently honoured if they sacrifice to me once every four whole years at Olympia. Consequently, you can see for yourself that my altars are more frigid than the Laws of Plato or the Syllogisms of Chrysippus.”

Pursuing such topics, we came to the place where he had to sit and hear the prayers. There was a row of openings like mouths of wells, with covers on them, and beside each stood a golden throne. Sitting down by the first one, Zeus took off the cover and gave his attention to the people who were praying. The prayers came from all parts of the world and were of all sorts and kinds, for I myself bent over the orifice and listened to them along with him. They went like this; “O Zeus, may I succeed in becoming king!” “O Zeus, make my onions and my garlic grow!” “QO ye gods, let my father die quickly!”; and now and then one or another would say: “O that I may inherit my wife’s property!” “QO that I may be undetected in my plot against my brother!” “May I succeed in winning my suit!” “Let me win the wreath at the Olympic games!”” Among seafaring men, one was praying for the north wind to blow, another for the south wind; and the farmers were praying for rain while the washermen were praying for sunshine. Zeus listened and weighed each prayer carefully, but did not promise everything ; This by the Father was granted and that was denied them.Iliad16, 250. You see, he let the just prayers come up through the orifice and then took them and filed them away at his right; but he sent the impious ones back un- granted, blowing them downward so that they might not even come near Heaven. In the case of one petition I observed that he was really in a dilemma : when two men made contrary prayers and promised equal sacrifices, he didn’t know which one of them to give assent to; so that he was in the same plight as the Academicians and could not make any aflirmation at all, but suspended judgement for a while and thought it over, like Pyrrho.

When he had given sufficient consideration to the prayers, he moved to the next throne and the second opening, leaned down and devoted himself to covenants and people making oaths. After considering these and annihilating Hermodorus the Epicurean, he changed his seat to the next throne to give his attention to omens derived from sounds and sayings and the flight of birds. Then he moved from there to the sacrifice-opening, through which the smoke came up and told Zeus the name of each man who was sacrificing. On leaving the openings, he gave orders to the winds and the weather, telling them what to do: “Let there be rain to-day in Scythia, lightning in Libya, snow in Greece. North Wind, blow in Lydia. South Wind, take a day off. Let the West Wind raise a storm on the Adriatic, and let about a thousand bushels of hail be sprinkled over Cappadocia.”

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,Iliad 5, 341.—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.Like the Vheogony, this scems to have been a sort of Olympian Peerage ; cf. fragment 29 (Schroeder p. 394). When we had had enough we composed ourselves for the night without any ceremony, being pretty well soused.

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.

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.Iliad 18, 1U4. 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.

“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.

But if you were to ask the very man who is straining his lungs and bawling and accusing everybody else: ‘How about yourself? What do you really do, and what in Heaven’s name do you contribute’ to the world?’ he would say, if he were willing to say what was right and true: ¢1 hold it unnecessary to be a merchant or a farmer or a soldier or to follow'y trade; I shout, go dirty, take cold baths, walk abeut barefoot in winter, wear a filthy mantle and like Momus carp at everything the others do. If some rich man or other has made an extravagant outlay on a dinner or keeps a mistress, I make it my affair and get hot about it; but if one of my friends or associates is ill abed and needs relief and attendance, I ignore it.’

“That is what these whelps are like, gods.

Moreover, some of them who call themselves Epicureans are very insolent fellows indeed and attack us immoderately, saying not only that the gods do not direct human affairs, -but that they pay no attention at all to what goes on. So it is high time you were bethinking yourselves that if they ever are able to persuade the world, you will go uncommonly hungry; for who would continue to sacrifice to you if he expected to gain nothing by it ?

“As for what the moon finds fault with, you all heard the stranger tell about that yesterday. In view of all this, take such action as may be most advantageous to men and most salutary for ourselves.”

When Zeus had finished this speech the assembly fell into a commotion, and at once they all began to shout: “Blast them,” “Burn them,” “Annihilate them”; “To the pit,” “To Tartarus,” “To the Giants.’ Calling for silence once more, Zeus said: “It shall be as you will; they shall be annihilated, and their logic with them. However, just at present it is not in order to punish anyone, for it is the festival-season, as you know, during the next four months, and I have already sent about to announce the truce of God. Next year, therefore, at the opening of spring the wretches shall die a wretched death by the horrid thunderbolt.” So spake Cronus his son, and he bent black brows to confirm it !Iliad1, 528.

“As to Menippus here," he said, “this is my decision: after his wings have been taken away from him so that he may never come again, let him be carried down to earth to-day by Hermes.” With this he dismissed the meeting, whereupon Cyllenius (Hermes) picked me up by the right ear and took me down to the Potters’ Quarter yesterday evening. You have heard it all, my friend, all the news from Heaven. Now I am going off to carry the glad tidings to the philosophers who pace about in the Porch.