Apocolocyntosis | Page 4

trembling hand (which was always steady enough for that, if
for nothing else) by which he used to decapitate men. He had ordered her
head to be chopped off. For all the notice the others took of him, they
might have been his own freedmen.

Then Hercules said, "You just listen to me, and 7
stop playing the fool. You have come to the place where the mice nibble
iron. [Footnote: A proverb, found also in Herondas iii, 76: apparently
fairy-land, the land of Nowhere.] Out with the truth, and look sharp, or
I'll knock your quips and quiddities out of you." Then to make himself all
the more awful, he strikes an attitude and proceeds in his most tragic
vein:

"Declare with speed what spot you claim by birth.
Or with this club fall stricken to the earth!
This club hath ofttimes slaughtered haughty kings!
Why mumble unintelligible things?
What land, what tribe produced that shaking head?
Declare it! On my journey when I sped
Far to the Kingdom of the triple King,
And from the Main Hesperian did bring
The goodly cattle to the Argive town,
There I beheld a mountain looking down
Upon two rivers: this the Sun espies
Right opposite each day he doth arise.
Hence, mighty Rhone, thy rapid torrents flow,
And Arar, much in doubt which way to go,
Ripples along the banks with shallow roll.
Say, is this land the nurse that bred thy soul?"

These lines he delivered with much spirit and a bold front. All the same,
he was not quite master of his wits, and had some fear of a blow from
the fool. Claudius, seeing a mighty man before him, saw things looked
serious and understood that here he had not quite the same pre-eminence
as at Rome, where no one was his equal: the Gallic cock was worth most on
his own dunghill. So this is what he was thought to say, as far as could
be made out: "I did hope, Hercules, bravest of all the gods, that you
would take my part with the rest, and if I should need a voucher, I meant
to name you who know me so well. Do but call it to mind, how it was I used
to sit in judgment before your temple whole days together during July and
August. You know what miseries I endured there, in hearing the lawyers
plead day and night. If you had fallen amongst these, you may think
yourself very strong, but you would have found it worse than the sewers of
Augeas: I drained out more filth than you did. But since I want..."

(Some pages have fallen out, in which Hercules must have been persuaded.
The gods are now discussing what Hercules tells them).

"No wonder you have forced your way into the 8
Senate House: no bars or bolts can hold against you. Only do say what
species of god you want the fellow to be made. An Epicurean god he cannot
be: for they have no troubles and cause none. A Stoic, then? How can he be
globular, as Varro says, without a head or any other projection? There is
in him something of the Stoic god, as I can see now: he has neither heart
nor head. Upon my word, if he had asked this boon from Saturn, he would not
have got it, though he kept up Saturn's feast all the year round, a truly
Saturnalian prince. A likely thing he will get it from Jove, whom he
condemned for incest as far as in him lay: for he killed his son-in-law
Silanus, because Silanus had a sister, a most charming girl, called Venus
by all the world, and he preferred to call her Juno. Why, says he, I want
to know why, his own sister? Read your books, stupid: you may go half-way
at Athens, the whole way at Alexandria. Because the mice lick meal at Rome,
you say. Is this creature to mend our crooked ways? What goes on in his own
closet he knows not;[Footnote: Perhaps alluding to a mock marriage of
Silius and Messalina.] and now he searches the regions of the sky, wants to
be a god. Is it not enough that he has a temple in Britain, that savages
worship him and pray to him as a god, so that they may find a fool
[Footnote: Again [GREEK: morou] for [GREEK: theou] as in ch. 6.] to have
mercy upon them?"

At last it came into Jove's head, that while strangers