because of the misbehaviour of Ajax. Where do you find the reasonableness and justice here? Certainly we do not praise the Thracians, because they still brand their own wives to avenge Orpheus, or the Barbarians living about the Eridanus for wearing black, in mourning for Phaethon as they say. It would have been still more ridiculous, I think, if the men living when Phaethon perished thought nothing about it, and then those [Sidenote: E] born five generations or ten generations after the sad occurrence began to change into mourning clothes for him! Yet there is nothing but stupidity in that, nothing terrible or beyond cure; but the angers of the Gods pass underground at the time, like certain rivers, then afterwards breakout to injure quite different persons, and bring the direst ruin at the last. What reason is there in that?’ XIII. At the first check, I, in terror lest he should go back to the beginning and introduce more and greater cases of [Sidenote: F] anomaly, at once proceeded to ask him: ‘Come,’ I said, ‘do you take all these things for true?’ ‘Suppose that they are not all true, but that some are, do you not think that the same perplexity comes in?’ ‘Perhaps’, said I, ‘it is as with persons in a violent fever, who feel the same heat, or nearly the same, whether they are wrapped in one cloak or in many, yet we must give some relief by removing the excess. If you will not allow this, drop the point (though to my thinking, most of the instances look like myths and inventions); but call to mind the recent Theoxenia, and that “fair portion” which is set aside and [Sidenote: 558] assigned by proclamation to the descendants of Pindar, and how impressive that seemed and how pleasant. Who could fail to find pleasure in that graceful honour, so Greek and so frankly of the old world, unless he be one whose _Black heart of adamant Was wrought in chilly fire_, in Pindar’s[232] own words? Then I pass over’, I said, ‘the similar proclamation made at Sparta, in the words, _After the Lesbian bard_,[233]