Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/42

32 can alter and adapt it a little. That's the plan most of our modern orators adopt.

His Olympian majesty begins his oration, accordingly, with an adaptation of the opening of the First Philippic. But he presently descends to his own matter-of-fact style ("here," he says, "my Demosthenes fails me"), and relates how he had been present the day before, with some other gods, at a sacrifice of thanksgiving offered by a merchant-captain for his preservation from shipwreck—a very shabby affair, he complains it was, a single tough old cock for supper among sixteen gods. On his way home, he had heard two philosophers disputing, and, wishing to listen to their arguments, assumed a cloak and a long beard, and might, he declares, have very easily, for the nonce, passed for a philosopher himself. It was that rascal Damis the Epicurean, disputing with Timocles the Stoic, asserting that the gods took no heed to mortals or their affairs—in fact, practically denying their existence. Poor Timocles had been making a stout fight of it on the other side, but was so hard pressed by his opponent that Jupiter found him all in a perspiration and almost exhausted; he had therefore thrown the shadows of night round the disputants at once, and so put an end to the discussion. Following the crowd on their way home, he had been shocked to find that the majority were on the side of the atheistical Damis; and he had now summoned this assembly to take into their serious consideration the terrible results that would ensue if this opinion became the popular one.