famine upon the land, together with all manner of strange diseases; so that they went around to the Hellenic festivals proclaiming and making known everywhere that whoever wished might wreak vengeance upon them for the wrong they had done to Aesop. In the third generation came one Iadmon, a man in no way related to Aesop, but a descendant of those who had bought him in Samos; and to this man, having in some way made satisfaction (for the wrong done to Aesop), the Delphians were released from their calamities. After that date also, they say, the punishment of temple-robbery was transferred to Nauplia from Hyampeia. Those who are great admirers of Alexander, of which number we also are, do not commend him for destroying the city of the Branchidae and putting them all to death, without distinction of age or sex, because their forefathers had betrayed the temple at Miletus. Agathocles, too, the usurper of Syracuse, mockingly told the Corcyreans, in answer to the question why he had laid waste their island, ‘That it most assuredly was because their fathers had kindly received Ulysses.’ To the people of Ithaca he likewise replied when they expostulated with him because his soldiers carried off their sheep, ‘Your king also came to us and even blinded the shepherd.’ And is not Apollo even more unreasonable if he is destroying the present generation of Pheneatae by blocking up the barathrum and inundating their entire territory, because a thousand years ago, as they say, Hercules carried off the prophetic tripod and took it to Pheneus? or when he foretold to the Sybarites a release from their ills, whenever they had appeased the anger of the Leucadian Hera, by a demolition three times repeated? And in truth, it is not long since the Lacedaemonians ceased to send virgins to Troy ‘who without upper garments and with bare feet, like slaves, at early dawn swept around the altar of Athena, without the wimple, even though old age bore heavy upon them,’ on account of the lasciviousness of Ajax. Where, pray, is the logic or justice of these things? We do not approve the custom of the Thracians, who even at the present day tattoo their wives for the purpose of avenging Orpheus, nor that of the barbarians along the Po for wearing black garments in token of mourning for Pentheus, as they say. And it would have been still more ridiculous, I think, if the men who lived at the time when Phaethon perished had not concerned themselves about him, but those who were born five or ten generations after his death had begun to change their garments for his sake and to put on mourning. Nevertheless this is merely silly and has nothing pernicious or irremediable about it. But with what reason does the anger of the gods sometimes suddenly disappear like certain rivers, only to break out afterwards against others in order to plunge them into the direst misfortunes?”