28
“By Zeus, it would be nothing unnatural if, among all the dolts that there are, some should be found to assert that they were relieved of quartan fevers by him, and that in the dark they had encountered the guardian spirit of the night! Then too these accursed disciples of his will make an oracular shrine, I suppose, with a holy of holies, at the site of the pyre, because the famous Proteus, son of Zeus, the progenitor of his name, was given to soothsaying.Athenagoras reports that Parium, where Peregrinus was born, cherished a statue of him from which oracles were derived (Leg. de Christ., 26). I pledge m word, too, that priests of his will be appointed, wit whips or branding-irons or some such flummy-diddle, or even that a nocturnal mystery will be got up in his honour, including a torch festival at the site of the pye.
29
"Theagenes, as I have been told by one of my friends, recently said that the Sibyl had made a prediction about all this; in fact, he quoted the verses from memory: But when the time shall come that Proteus, noblest of Cynics, Kindleth fire in the precinct of Zeus, our Lord of the Thunder, Leapeth into the flame, and cometh to lofty Olympus, Then do I bid all alike who eat the fruit of the ploughland Honour to pay unto him that walketh abroad in the night-time, Greatest of spirits, thronéd with Heracles and Hephaestus.
