and Titan-conqueror letting them cut his hair, with a fifteen-foot
thunderbolt in his hand all the time! My good sir, when is this
careless indifference to cease? how long before you will punish such
wickedness? Phaethon-falls and Deucalion-deluges--a good many of them
will be required to suppress this swelling human insolence.

To leave generalities and illustrate from my own case--I have raised
any number of Athenians to high position, I have turned poor men into
rich, I have assisted every one that was in want, nay, flung my wealth
broadcast in the service of my friends, and now that profusion has
brought me to beggary, they do not so much as know me; I cannot get a
glance from the men who once cringed and worshipped and hung upon my
nod. If I meet one of them in the street, he passes me by as he might
pass the tombstone of one long dead; it has fallen face upwards,
loosened by time, but he wastes no moment deciphering it. Another will
take the next turning when he sees me in the distance; I am a sight of
ill omen, to be shunned by the man whose saviour and benefactor I had
been not so long ago.

Thus in disgrace with fortune, I have betaken me to this corner of the
earth, where I wear the smock-frock and dig for sixpence a day, with
solitude and my spade to assist meditation. So much gain I reckon upon
here--to be exempt from contemplating unmerited prosperity; no sight
that so offends the eye as that. And now, Son of Cronus and Rhea, may
I ask you to shake off that deep sound sleep of yours--why,
Epimenides's was a mere nap to it--, put the bellows to your
thunderbolt or warm it up in Etna, get it into a good blaze, and give
a display of spirit, like a manly vigorous Zeus? or are we to believe
the Cretans, who show your grave among their sights?