Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/407

Rh, your vineyard or orchards, for to devour and spoil all your fruits. When Timotheus the musician one day in an open theatre at Athens chanted the praises of Diana, giving unto her in his song the attributes of Thyas, Phœbas, Mænas and Lyssas, that is to say, furious, possessed, enraged, and stark mad, as poets are wont to do, Cinesias, another minstrel or musician, rose up from out of the whole audience, and said thus aloud unto him: Would God thou haddest a daughter of those qualities. And yet these superstitious folk think the same of Diana, yea, and worse too: neither have they a better opinion of Apollo, Juno and Venus; for all of them they fear and tremble at. And yet what blasphemy uttered Niobe against Latona, like unto that which superstition hath persuaded foolish people to believe of that goddess? to wit, that she being displeased with the reproachful words that Niobe gave her, killed with her arrows all the children of that silly woman:

Even daughters six, and sons as many just, Of ripe years all, no help, but die they must:

so insatiable was she of the calamities of another, so implacable was her anger. For grant it were so, that this goddess was full of gall and choler; say, that she took an hatred to lewd and wicked persons, or grieved and could not endure to hear herself reproached, or to laugh at human folly and ignorance; certes, she should have been offended and angry, yea, and discharged her arrows upon these who untruly impute and ascribe unto her that bitterness and exceeding cruelty, and stick not both to deliver in words and also to set down in writing, such things of her. We charge Hecuba with beastly and barbarous immanity for saying thus in the last book of Homer's Iliad:

O that I could his liver get Amid his corpse, to bite and eat.

As for the Syrian goddess, superstitious folk are persuaded that if any one do eat enchoises or such little fish as aphyæ, she will likewise gnaw their legs, fill their bodies with ulcers, and putrefy or rot their liver.

To conclude, therefore, is it impiously done to blaspheme the gods and speak badly of them; and is it not as impious to think and imagine the same, considering that it is the opinion and conceit of the blasphemer and foul-mouthed profane person which maketh his speech to be reputed naught and wicked? For even we ourselves detest and abhor foul language, for nothing so much as because it is a sign of a malicious mind, and