Juppiter Tragoedus

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 2. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915.

HERMES

  • What ails you, Zeus, in lone soliloquy
  • To pace about all pale and scholar-like ?
  • Confide in me, take me to ease your toils :
  • Scorn not the nonsense of a serving-man.
    • ATHENA
  • Yea, thou sire of us all, son of Cronus, supreme among rulers,
  • Here at thy knees I beseech it, the grey-eyed Tritogeneia :
  • Speak thy thought, let it not lie hid in thy mind, let us know it.
  • What is the care that consumeth thy heart and thy soul with its gnawing?
  • Wherefore thy deep, deep groans, and the pallor that preys on thy features ?[*](Compare this parody on Homer with Iliad 1, 363 (=Od. 1, 45); 8, 31; 3. 35.)
    • ZEUS
  • There’s nothing dreadful to express in speech,
  • No cruel hap, no stage catastrophe
  • That I do not surpass a dozen lines![*](A parody on the opening lines of the Orestes of Euripides.)
    • ATHENA
  • Apollo ! what a prelude to your speech ![*](Euripides, Hercules Furens 538.)
    • v.2.p.93
    ZEUS
  • O utter vile hell-spawn of mother earth,
  • And thou, Prometheus—thou hast hurt me sore!
    • ATHENA
  • What isit? None will hear thee but thy kin.
    • ZEUS
  • Thundering stroke of my whizzing bolt, what a deed shalt thou do me!
    • HERA Lull your anger to sleep, Zeus, seeing that I’m no hand either at comedy or at epic like these two, nor have I swallowed Euripides whole so as to be able to play up to you in your tragedy réle.