If you correct and adjust this, Cronus, you will have made living really living and your festival a real festival. If not, let them have their festival, and we shall sit on our haunches praying that when they have come from the bath the boy will turn up the wine-jar and break it over them, that the cook will burn the soup and in a fit of absent-mindedness put the fish in the pudding, and that the dog will rush in and eat up all the sausage, while the scullions are busy with the other preparations, and half the cake as well; that while the pork and the venison and the sucking-pigs are being cooked they may do what Homer says Helius’s cattle did Homer, Od. xii, 395. —or rather not only just crawl, but jump up and rush to the mountain, spits and all; and that their plump birds, although already plucked and prepared for serving, should take wing and go off likewise, so that they may not enjoy them by themselves.
