15–17
Cyniscus
Nay, smite, if the thunder-bolt is my destiny. I shall think none the worse of you; I shall know it is all Clotho’s doing; I will not even blame the bolt that wounds me. And by the way—talking of thunder-bolts—there is one thing I will ask you and Destiny to explain; you can answer for her.
Why is it that you leave all the pirates and temple-robbers and tuffians and perjurers to themselves, and direct your shafts (as you are always doing) against an oak-tree or a stone or a harmless mast, or even an honest, God-fearing traveller? ... No answer? Is this one of the things it is not proper for me to know?
Zeus
It is, Cyniscus. You are a meddlesome fellow; I don’t know where you picked up all these ideas.
Cyniscus
Well, I suppose I must not ask you all (Providence and Destiny and you) why honest Phocion died in utter poverty and destitution, like Ayistides before him, while those two unwhipped puppies, Callias and Alcibiades, and the ruffian Midias, and that Aeginetan libertine Charops, who starved his own mother to death, were all rolling in money? nor again why Socrates was handed over to the Eleven instead of Meletus? nor yet why the effeminate Sardanapalus was a king, and one high-minded Persian after another went to the cross for refusing to countenance his doings?
I say nothing of our own days, in which villains and money-grubbers prosper, and honest men are oppressed with want and sickness and a thousand distresses, and can hardly call their souls their own.
