Mercury

Among the Gauls a fuller age is slaughtered to Mercury.

We have laughed too, amid the cruelties of the noonday sports, at Mercury examining the dead with his hot iron;

Jupiter, Mercury, and Neptune.

And you appear to me, by Hermes, to be going to be summoned, if you will not pay me the money?

Will you say that Apollo, Vulcan, Mercury, and the rest are gods, but doubt about Hercules, Aesculapius, Liber, Castor, and Pollux?

MERCURY:

MERCURY, who personates Sosia.

But he has so disguised himself, as though he were Amphitryon.

Mercury, too, stands with them, not because reason or eloquence commends benefits, but because the painter thought fit.

Mercury first set forth letters:

Mercury and Serapis not daily.

In short, with these very people they tell that Mercury, having by chance been delighted with the softness of a ram he stroked, flayed the little ewe, and, while he tries it, and — as the pliancy of the material suggested — draws out the thread by a continuing pull, wove it, after the manner of the net he had before joined to strips of linden-bark.

And there is plainly, in the scenic arts too, the patronage of Liber and Venus.

But the gymnastic arts too the disciplines of the Castors and the Herculeses and the Mercurys put forth.

Therefore this kind is reckoned to Castor and Pollux, to whom Stesichorus teaches that horses were distributed by Mercury.

Speech went begging, I suppose — nay, there could be none at all, since even then there were lacking those things without which not even today can speech be richer or more abundant or more prudent — if those things which today are so easy, so constant, so close at hand, brought forth as it were upon the very lips, were not so before, before letters had sprouted in the world, before Mercury, I suppose, had been born.

" But indeed it has been lawful in the world to appease the Diana of the Scythians, or the Mercury of the Gauls, or the Saturn of the Africans, with a human victim;