Page:Lucian, Vol 3.djvu/171

Rh caught up his bow and arrows, sat himself down above the ships, and shot down the Achaeans with the plague, even to their mules and dogs.

Having once alluded to Apollo, I wish to mention something else that gifted men say about him, not his misfortunes in love, such as the slaying of Hyacinthus and the superciliousness of Daphne, but that when he was found guilty of killing the Cyclopes and was banished from Heaven on account of it, he was sent to earth to try the lot of a mortal. On this occasion he actually became a serf in Thessaly under Admetus and in Phrygia under Laomedon, where, to be sure, he was not alone, but had Poseidon with him; and both of them were so poor that they had to make bricks and work upon the wall; what is more, they did not even get full pay from the Phrygian, who owed them, it is said, a balance of more than thirty Trojan drachmas!

Is it not true that the poets gravely tell these tales about the gods, and others, too, far more hallowed than these, about Hephaestus, Prometheus, Cronus, Rhea and almost the whole family of Zeus? Yet, in beginning their poems, they invite the Muses to join their song! Inspired, no doubt, by the Muses, they sing that as soon as Cronus had castrated his father Heaven, he became king there and devoured his own children, like the Argive Thyestes in later time; that Zeus, stolen away by Rhea, who put the stone in his place, and abandoned in Crete, was nursed by a nanny-goat (just as Rh