Book 15
1
Stop quarrelling, you two; you’re just like a couple of men. It’s quite improper and out of place at the table of the gods.
1
But, Zeus, do you really mean this medicine man to have a place above me?
1
He does, by Zeus, for I’m your better.
1
How, you crackbrain? Because Zeus blasted you with his thunderbolt for your impious doings, In resurrecting men from the dead (cf. Pindar, Pythians, 3, 54). According to Lucian, The Dance 45, one of these was Tyndareus, while other authorities (see Apollodorus, 3.10.3) mention Capaneus, Lycurgus, Hippolytus, Hy- menaeus and Glaucus. The version of Diodorus (4.71.1-3) is that Asclepius’ skill so lowered the death-rate that Hades accused him before Zeus of trespassing on his preserves, and Zeus in anger struck him down with the thunderbolt. and you’ve now received immortality because he relented and pitied you?
1
You must have forgotten, Heracles, how you too were scorched to death on Oeta, For the suicide of Heracles on Mount Oeta see the Trachiniae of Sophocles. that you taunt me with getting burned.
1
That doesn’t mean our lives were the same. I’m the son of Zeus, and performed all those labours cleaning up the world, by overcoming monsters, and punishing men of violence; but you’re just a herb-chopper and quack, useful perhaps among suffering humanity for administering potions, but without one manly deed to show.
2
Have you nothing to say of how I healed your burns, when you came up half-scorched the other day? Between the tunic and the fire after it, your body was in a fine mess. Besides, if nothing else, I was never a slave like you, carding wool in Lydia, wearing purple, and being beaten with Omphale’s A queen of Lydia, as whose slave Heracles had to serve for three years. Lucian describes a painting on this topic in How to Write History 10. golden sandal. What’s more, I never killed my wife Megara. Cf. Euripides’ Hercules Furens. and children in a fit of spleen.
