and sprung to catch them, scuffling and struggling and making
the parchment sound on his neighbor's head.

Some of the women had jumped on to the processional biers and were being
carried round the hall by staggering youths, screaming with alarm and
laughter; if one of them lost her balance and fell she was captured with
shrieks of merriment and forced to mount her insecure eminence again.
Presently the car of Dionysus came to wreck over the body of an
unconscious toper, but no one stopped to set it right; and though the
hapless representative of the god howled loudly to them to stop while
he extricated himself from the machine, in which he had stuck, it was
in vain; the score or so of youths who were dragging it tore on, passing
close by Gorgo, who noted with indignation, that the brasswork of the
axles was cutting deeply into the splendid mosaic of the pavement.
At last the burly god fell out by his sheer weight, and his followers
restored him to consciousness by taking him by the heels and dipping his
towzled and bleeding head into a huge jar of wine and water. Then some
hundreds of his drunken votaries danced madly round the rescued god; and
as all the tambourines were split and the flute-players had no breath
left, time was kept by beating with thyrsus-staves against the pillars,
while three men, who had found the brazen tubas among the temple
vessels, blew with all their might and main.

Strong opposition, however, was roused by this mad uproar. A party of
worshippers, in the first place, rebelled against it; these had been
standing with veiled heads, near the statue of Serapis, muttering
exorcisms after a Magian and howling lamentably at intervals; then a
preacher, who had succeeded in collecting a little knot of listeners,
bid the trumpeters cease; and finally, a party of actors and singers,
who had assembled in the outer hall to perform a satira play, tried
to stop them, though they themselves were making such a noise that the
trumpet-blast could have affected them but little. When the players
found that remonstrance had no effect they rushed into the hypostyle and
tried to reduce the musicians to silence by force.

Then a frenzied contest began; but the combatants were soon separated;
the actors and their antagonists fell on each other's necks, and a
Homeric poet, who had compiled an elegy for the evening on the "Gods
coerced by the hosts of the new superstition," made up simply of lines
culled from the Ili