5
Is it not true that the poets gravely tell these tales about the gods, and others, too, far more hallowed than these, about Hephaestus, Prometheus, Cronus, Rhea and almost the whole family of Zeus? Yet, in beginning their poems, they invite the Muses to join their song! Inspired, no doubt, by the Muses, they sing that as soon as Cronus had castrated his father Heaven, he became king there and devoured his own children, like the Argive Thyestes in later time; that Zeus, stolen away by Rhea, who put the stone in his place, and abandoned in Crete, was nursed by a nanny-goat (just as Telephus was nursed by a doe and the Persian, Cyrus the Elder, by a bitch) and then drove his father out, threw him into prison, and held the sovereignty himself; that, in addition to many other wives, he at last married his sister, following the laws of the Persians and the Assyrians; that, being passionate and prone to the pleasures of love, he soon filled Heaven with children, some of whom he got by his equals in station and some illegitimately of mortal, earthly stock, now turning into gold, this gallant squire, now into a bull or a swan or an eagle, and in short, showing himself more changeable than even Proteus; and that Athena was the only one to be born of his head, conceived at the very root of his brain, for as to Dionysus, they say, Zeus took, him prematurely from his mother while she was still ablaze, implanted him hastily in his own thigh, and cut him out when labour came on.
