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particularly when they hear the oracles saying that if a certain man crosses the Halys he will overthrow a great kingdom, without specifying whether it will be his own kingdom or his enemy's. And then again the oracle says: Salamis, dear to the gods, thou shalt slay children of women. But I imagine both the Persians and the Greeks were children of women. And then when they hear from the minstrels how we fall in love, and receive wounds, and get put in chains and made servants, and are divided against ourselves, and have a myriad of troubles, all the time claiming to be blessed and indestructible, have they not a perfect right to jeer at us and make us of no account? But we get angry if certain persons who are human beings, and not altogether devoid of wits, sift these matters and deny our providence, whereas we ought to felicitate ourselves if any still continue to sacrifice to sinners like us.
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And now, Zeus, give me an honest answer to a question-for we are alone, and there is no mortal present in the assembly, except Herakles and Dionysos and Ganymedes and Asklepios, who have somehow got naturalized among us—have you ever paid enough attention to the people on earth to distinguish the bad ones from the good? You cannot say you have. Certainly, unless Theseus on his way from Troizen to Athens had incidentally exterminated those malefactors, Skeiron and the Pine-Bender and Kerkyon and the others might have continued to live riotously by the slaughter of wayfarers, as far as you and your providence are concerned. And if Eurystheus, living in the earliest times and full of forethought, had not been moved by philanthropy to inquire into every one's affairs, and had not sent forth his servant here, an active man and keen for labors, you, Zeus, would have given small thought to the Hydra and the Stymphalian birds and the Thrakian horses and the drunken insolence of the Kentaurs.
