Timocles
Have a care, Damis; this is sacrilege, no less; what you say amounts to razing the temples and upsetting the altars.
Damis
Ob, not all the altars; what harm do they do, so long as incense and perfume is the worst of it? As for Artemis’s altar at Tauri, though, and her hideous feasts, I should like it overturned from base to cornice.
Zeus
Whence comes this resistless plague among us? ‘There is none of us he spares; he is as free with his tongue as a tub orator,
And grips by turns the innocent and guilty.
Momus
The innocent? You will not find many of those among us, Zeus. He will soon come to laying hands upon some of the great and eminent, I dare say.
Juppiter Tragoedus. Lucian. Henry Watson Fowler (Translator), Francis George Fowler (Translator). Medford, MA, USA. 2023-08-01.
Sponsored by Tufts University.
Funding provided by National Endowment for the Humanities.