MENIPPUS
By this time he had pretty well settled everything, and we went away to the dining-hall, as it was time for dinner. Hermes took me in charge and gave me a place beside Pan and the Corybantes and Attis and Sabazius, those alien gods of doubtful status. Demeter gave me bread, Dionysus wine, Heracles meat, Aphrodite perfume and Poseidon sprats. But I also had surreptitious tastes of the ambrosia and the nectar, for Ganymede, bless his heart, had so much of human kindness about him that whenever he saw Zeus looking another way he would hastily pour me out a mouthful or two of the nectar. But as Homer says somewhere or other,Iliad 5, 341.—having seen what was there, I suppose, just like me—the gods themselves neither cat bread nor drink ruddy wine but have ambrosia sect before them and get drunk on nectar; and they are especially fond of dining on the smoke from the sacrifices, which comes up to them all savoury, and on the blood of the victims that is shed about the altars when people sacrifice. During dinner - Apollo played the lute, Silenus danced the can-can and the Muses got up and sang us something from Hesiod’s Theogony and the first song in the Hymns of Pindar.Like the Vheogony, this scems to have been a sort of Olympian Peerage; cf. fragment 29 (Schroeder p. 394). When we had had enough we composed ourselves for the night without any ceremony, being pretty well soused.
