In _Zeus Cross-examined_ the process is carried further. Cyniscus questions Zeus, who is only too good-natured and falls into all the questioner's traps. He admits Destiny to be supreme, and gets entangled in a terrible net of problems about fore-knowledge, the value of sacrifice and of divination, divine wrath, sin and so forth, till he cries "You leave us nothing!--you seem to me to despise me, for sitting here and listening to you with a thunderbolt on my arm." "Hit me with it," says Cyniscus, "if it is so destined,--I shall have no quarrel with you for it, but with Clotho." At last Zeus rises and goes away and will answer no more. But perhaps, reflects Cyniscus, he has said enough, and it was "not destined for me to hear any more."[37] The reader feels that Zeus has said more than enough. From the old gods of Greece, we naturally turn to the newcomers. When Zeus summoned the gods to discuss the question of atheism at Athens, a good many more came than understood Greek, and it was they who had the best seats as they were made of solid gold--Bendis, Anubis, Attis and Mithras for example. Elsewhere Momus (who is a divine Lucian) complains to Zeus about them--"that Mithras with his Persian robe and tiara, who can't talk Greek, nor even understand when one drinks {211} to him"--what is he doing in heaven? And then the dog-faced Egyptian in linen--who is he to bark at the gods? "Of course,", says Zeus, "Egyptian religion--yes! but all the same there are hidden meanings, and the uninitiated must not laugh at them." Still Zeus is provoked into issuing a decree--on second thoughts, he would not put it to the vote of the divine assembly, for he felt sure he would be outvoted. The decree enacts that, whereas heaven is crowded with polyglot aliens, till there is a great rise in the price of nectar, and the old and true gods are being crowded out of their supremacy, a committee of seven gods shall be appointed to sit on claims; further, that each god shall attend to his own function, Athene shall not heal nor Asklepios give oracles, etc.; that philosophers shall talk no more nonsense; and that the statues of deified men shall be replaced by those of Zeus, Hera, etc., the said men to be buried in the usual way.[38] [Sidenote: Lucian's _Alexander_]