ed upon ambrosia and get drunk with nectar, at the
same time their greatest luxury is, instead of victuals, to suck in
the fumes that rise from the victims, and the blood of the
sacrifices that are offered up to them. Whilst we were at supper,
Apollo played on the harp, Silenus danced a cordax, and the Muses
repeated Hesiod's Theogony, and the first Ode of Pindar. When these
recreations were over we all retired tolerably well soaked, {187b}
to bed,

"Now pleasing rest had sealed each mortal eye,
And even immortal gods in slumber lie,
All but myself--" {187c}

I could not help thinking of a thousand things, and particularly how
it came to pass that, during so long a time Apollo {188a} should
never have got him a beard, and how there came to be night in
heaven, though the sun is always present there and feasting with
them. I slept a little, and early in the morning Jupiter ordered
the crier to summon a council of the gods, and when they were all
assembled, thus addressed himself to them.

"The stranger who came here yesterday, is the chief cause of my
convening you this day. I have long wanted to talk with you
concerning the philosophers, and the complaints now sent to us from
the Moon make it immediately necessary to take the affair into
consideration. There is lately sprung up a race of men, slothful,
quarrelsome, vain-glorious, foolish, petulant, gluttonous, proud,
abusive, in short what Homer calls,

"An idle burthen to the ground." {188b}

These, dividing themselves into sects, run through all the
labyrinths of disputation, calling themselves Stoics, Academics,
Epicureans, Peripatetics, and a hundred other names still more
ridiculous; then wrapping themselves up in the sacred veil of
virtue, they contract their brows and let down their beards, under a
specious appearance hiding the most abandoned profligacy; like one
of the players on the stage, if you strip him of his fine habits
wrought with gold, all that remains behind is a ridiculous spectacle
of a little contemptible fellow, hired to appear there for seven
drachmas. And yet these men despise everybody, talk absurdly of the
gods, and drawing in a number of credulous boys, roar to them in a
tragical style about virtue, and enter into disputations that are
endless and unprofitable. To their disciples they cry up fortitude
and temperance, a contempt of riches and pleasures, and, when alone,
indulge in riot and debauchery. The m