Telephus was nursed by a doe and the Persian, Cyrus the Elder, by a bitch) and then drove his father out, threw him into prison, and held the sovereignty himself; that, in addition to many other wives, he at last married his sister, following the laws of the Persians and the Assyrians; that, being passionate and prone to the pleasures of love, he soon filled Heaven with children, some of whom he got by his equals in station and some illegitimately of mortal, earthly stock, now turning into gold, this gallant squire, now into a bull or a swan or an eagle, and in short, showing himself more changeable than even Proteus; and that Athena was the only one to be born of his head, conceived at the very root of his brain, for as to Dionysus, they say, Zeus took him prematurely from his mother while she was still ablaze, implanted him hastily in his own thigh, and cut him out when labour came on.
Their rhapsodies about Hera are of similar tenor, that without intercourse with her husband she became the mother of a wind-child, Hephaestus, who, however, is not in great luck, but works at the blacksmith's trade over a fire, living in smoke most of the time and covered with cinders, as is natural with a forge-tender; moreover, he is not even straight-limbed, as he was lamed by his fall when Zeus threw him out of Heaven. In fact, if the Lemnians had not obligingly caught him while he was still in the air, we should have had our Hephaestus killed just like Astyanax when he fell from the battlements.[1]
- ↑ The notion that the Lemnians caught Hephaestus as he fell is Lucian's own contribution. He expects his audience to be aware that he is giving them a sly misinterpretation of Homer's ἄφαρ κομίσαντο πεσόντα (Iliad, 1, 594).
