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APOLLO Is the report true, father, that someone threw himself bodily into the fire, in the very face of the Olympic festivities, quite an elderly man, not a bad hand at such hocus-pocus? Selene told me, saying that she herself had seen him burning.The Olympic games were timed to come at the full of the moon, and the cremation took place at moon-rise (Peregr., 36). ZEUS Yes, quite true, Apollo. If only it had never happened!
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APOLLO Was the old man so good? Was he not worthy of a death by fire?
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ZEUS Yes, that he was, very likely.By dividing Apollo’s question and emphasising the negative in the second part, the translation seeks to reproduce the ambiguity of Zeus’s reply, which in the Greek is sufficiently subtle to have misled more than one scholar into the notion that Zeus (and therefore Lucian) is praising Peregrinus. Nothing could be farther from his (or Lucian’s) real thought, that the fellow deserved death. The ambiguity is of course deliberate, to foil and annoy “Scarabee” and his sort; cf. below, § 7. But my point is that I remember having had to put up with a great deal of annoyance at the time on account of a horrid stench such as you might expect to arise from roasting human bodies. In fact, if I had not at once gone straight to Araby, I should have come to a sad end, you may depend on it, from the awfulness of the reek. Even as it was, amid all that fragrance and abundance of sweet scents, with frankincense in profusion, my nostrils hardly consented to forget and unlearn the taint of that odour; why, even now I almost retch at the memory of it!
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APOLLO What was his idea, Zeus, in doing that to himself, or what was the good of his getting incinerated by jumping into the blazing pyre?
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ZEUS Well, that criticism, my boy, you had better address first to Empedocles, who himself sprung into that crater in Sicily.
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APOLLO A terrible case of melancholia, that! But this man—what reason in the world did he have for wanting to do it?
