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and quite invisible. One of these he fastened underneath the bed, the other he hung from the beam above, afterwards silently gathering and uniting the edges to make an unbreakable cage around the drowsy pair. Then in a loud voice he called his fellow deities to witness this disgraceful act of adultery, and pressed Zeus for a divorce. Aphrodite, though she hid her blushes, was secretly pleased that Hermes and Poseidon had seen how beautiful she looked without even a shift, and how ready she was to deceive her husband. Hera and Athene turned away in disgust on hearing the news, and refused to attend this obscene peep show; but Aphrodite, putting a bold face on the matter, explained that making people fall in love, and doing so herself, was the divine taskwhich she had been allotted by the Fates—who, then, could blame her? Presently Aphrodite’s friends, the Graces, bathed and anointed her with fragrant oil, dressed her in soft, semi-transparent linen robes and set a wreath of roses on her head. She was now so irresistibly charming that not only did Hephaestus forgive her on the spot, but Hermes and Poseidon thereafter came calling on alternate days, whenever he was busy at the forge. Meeting Aphrodite in the corridors of Olympus, Athene called her an idle slut; whereupon Aphrodite flounced away in a temper, sat down at Athene’s loom and tried her hand at weaving. Athene caught her in the act and, since weaving was the divine task allotted to her by the Fates, asked in exasperation: “What would you think if I worked on the sly at
your
shameful trade? Very well, then, dear colleague, go on weaving! I shall never do another hand’s turn at the loom myself. And I hope that it will bore you to the point of misery!”
    Then I wondered: “Are such jests against the Olympians permissible?” Only, I decided, when a god or goddess is worshipped in a manner offensive to public decency and good manners: when the adulteries of Aphrodite, the thefts and lies of Hermes, and the bloody-mindedness of Ares are perpetuated in the cults of these deities and quoted by foolish mortals to excuse their own depravity. Homer goes further than I would dare, in his disdain of the Olympians, whom he makes inflict punishments or bestow protection on mankind for mere caprice, rather than requiting them according to their moral deserts, and quarrel scandalously among themselves. Moreover, in the
Iliad
, Zeus sends a dream to gull Agamemnon, who has always behaved piously towards him;and, prompted by a divine conclave, Athene persuades Pandarus to commit an act of treachery; and Hera uses an erotic charm to distract Zeus’s attention from the battle before Troy; and the Olympians laugh cruelly at the Smith God’s lameness, caused by a devoted championship of his mother Hera against the indecent brutality of his stepfather.
    Finding such anecdotes frankly irreligious, I close my ears and mind when they are declaimed in our Palace. My father once laughed at me for this and explained that Homer is far from being irreligious: in the
Iliad
, on the contrary, he has satirized the new theology of the Dorian barbarians. For these Sons of Hercules, having dethroned the Great Goddess Rhea—once acknowledged as the Sovereign of the World—had awarded her sceptre to the Sky God Zeus; and made him the head of a divine family composed of deities cultivated by their subject tribes, namely Hera of Argos, Poseidon of Euboea, Athene of Athens, Apollo of Phocis, Hermes of Arcadia, and so on. Homer, explained my father, secretly worshipped this earlier Goddess and deplored the moral confusion which the sack of her religious centres had caused, caricaturing the Dorian chieftains in the shameless, ruthless, treacherous, lecherous, boastful persons of the Greek leaders.
    Historically, my father may be right, as when he criticized the Homeric version of Helen’s flight to Troy. Yet the Zeus, the Hera, the Poseidon, the Athene and