3
ZEUS Let us have no riddles, Momus; speak in plain and explicit language, and supply the name, too. Asit is, you have flung your statement into the midst of us all, so that many are making guesses and applying your remarks now to one and now to another. Being an exponent of frankness, you must not stick at saying anything.
4
MOMUS It is splendid, Zeus, that you actually urge me to frankness; that is a truly royal, high-souled action. Therefore I shall give the name. It is this peerless Dionysus, who is half human; in fact, on his mother’s side he is not even Greek, but the grandson of a Syrophoenician trader named Cadmus. Inasmuch as he has been honoured with immortality, I say nothing of the man himself—either of his hood or of his drunkenness or of his gait; for you all, I think, see that he is womanish and unmanly in his character, half crazy, with strong drink on his breath from the beginning of the day. But he has foisted upon us a whole clan; he presents himself at the head of his rout, and has made gods out of Pan and Silenus and the Satyrs, regular farm-hands and goat-herds, most of them—capering fellows with queer shapes. One of them has horns and looks like a goat from the waist down, and wears a long beard, so that he is not much different from a goat. Another is a baldpated gaffer with a flat nose who usually rides on a donkey. He is a Lydian. The Satyrs are prickeared, and they too are bald, with horns like those that bud on new-born kids; they are Phrygians, and they all have tails. D’ye see what sort of gods he is making for us, the bounder?
