No more victims, and gifts, and incense-offering,—"the gods may sit in heaven and starve." Damis and Timocles are to meet again, he understands, for public discussion, and Jupiter verily fears that unless the gods give some help to their own champion, the other will get the best of it. He begs that some one of the assembly will get up in his place and offer some advice. Mercury invites any "who are of the legal standing in point of age" (we are to understand there are a great many newly-introduced deities in the council) to rise and deliver his opinion.
To make the burlesque more complete, it is Momus, the jester of the Olympian conclave, who first rises in reply to Jupiter's invitation.[1] He has long expected this, and is not surprised at it. The gods have brought it upon themselves, by neglecting their duties notoriously. Here, among friends and gods, with no mortal to hear, he may venture to speak openly. Has Jupiter himself been careful to make distinction between the good and the evil upon earth? Has virtue found any reward, or vice any punishment? What have any of them been caring for but their victims and their dues? What shameful stories they have allowed the poets to tell of their private life!—stories which, he
- ↑ Lord Lyttelton, in his "Dialogues of the Dead," makes Lucian give his own explanation of this passage to Rabelais, who does not quite understand the introduction of Momus. "I think our priests admitted Momus into our heaven as the Indians are said to worship the Devil,—through fear. hey had a mind to keep fair with him. For we may talk of the Giants as we will, but to our Gods there can be no enemy so formidable as he. Ridicule is the terror of all false religions."
