Book 8
1
Since you’ve brought this lad Ganymede. Cf. p. 281. up here, Zeus, this Phrygian you carried off from Ida, you’ve been neglecting me.
1
What, Hera? Jealous already? Of him too, though he’s so simple and harmless? I thought you were only down on my various lady friends.
2
It’s bad enough and quite out of place for you, the master of all gods, to desert me, your lawful wife, and go down to earth, turning into gold or satyr or bull, to commit adultery. Cf. p. 263. But your women do stay on the earth, but as for this boy from Ida, you grabbed hold of him and flew him up here, my fine king of the birds, and you’ve brought him into our family over my head, “as wine-waiter”, you say. Were you so badly in need of wine-waiters? Have Hebe and Hephaestus, then, gone on strike? And you can’t take the cup from him, without kissing him first before all our eyes, and you find his kiss sweeter than the nectar, and so you keep on and on asking for a drink, even when you’re not thirsty. Sometimes, too, you just take a sip, and give him the cup, and when he has drunk, you take it back and drain it, from the side he’s drunk from and touched with his lips, so that you can be drinking and kissing at the same time. And the other day, you, the king and father of all, laid aside your aegis and thunderbolt, and sat down playing dice with him, you with that great beard on your face! I see it all. Don’t think you’re hoodwinking me.
3
And what’s so terrible, my dear, in kissing a pretty boy like that while I’m drinking, and enjoying both the kiss and the nectar? Why, if I let him kiss you just once, you’ll never again blame me for preferring his kiss to the nectar.
3
Admirers of boys may talk like that, but I hope I’ll never be so mad as to give my lips to that Phrygian softie. Oh, the effeminate creature!
3
Please don’t abuse my little darling, noble Hera. This effeminate foreigner, this softie, is more delightful and desirable to me than—I won’t say it, for fear that I make you still angrier.
