Hot foot they hied them to the task,
To fill the pail, to fill the cask;
No beechen bowl or crock of clay,
No pot or pan had holiday;
Wine-skin or flagon, none might stay
Within, that day.[[127]]
But to us he gives tokens brighter and stronger and more evident than these, in having, after the days of drought, of desertion and poverty, brought us plenty, splendour, and reputation. True, I am well pleased with myself for anything which my own |C| zeal or service may have contributed to this result in support of Polycrates and Petraeus, well pleased too with him who has been our leader in this policy, to whose thought and planning most of the improvements are due; but it is wholly impossible that so great, so vast a change could have been effected in this short time by merely human care, with no God present here or lending his Divinity to the place of the oracle.
XXX. ‘But as in those days there were some who found fault with the responses for obliquity and want of clearness, so now there are those who criticize them as too simple, which is childishness indeed and rank stupidity! For as children show more glee and satisfaction at the sight of rainbows or haloes or comets than in that of the sun or of the moon, so do these |D| people regret the riddles, allegories, and metaphors which are so many modes of refraction of prophetic art in a mortal and fanciful medium. And if they do not fully inquire into the cause of the change, they go away having passed judgement against the God, rather than against ourselves or themselves, for having a power of thought which is too feeble to attain to his counsels.’
III
ON THE CESSATION OF THE ORACLES
A DIALOGUE INSCRIBED TO TERENTIUS PRISCUS