The awkward questions would not go away, and so Zeus agreed to guest on America's top-rated daytime chatshow, with Hera, to set the record straight.
The show's hostess, Paulita Dominguez, started out deferential, as you did with the Olympians, liberally deploying their godly epithets — Zeus the Sign-Giving, Hera the White-Armed, Zeus the Far-Seeing, Hera the Purple-Belted, and so forth. The longer the interview went on, though, the bolder and more pugnacious she became. Neither Zeus nor Hera, side by side on a tasteful beige leather sofa on a set decked out to look like someone's living room, seemed to be giving her acceptable answers. Zeus spoke of unfortunate timing. He said he had had an inkling that Hercules might be a target for these people — these "scuttling cockroaches," as he called them — but had had no idea they would be quite so audacious as to attack him out in the open, with eyewitnesses on hand. No sooner had it become apparent that Hercules was in difficulties then Hermes had raced to the scene, but, fast though he was, he had arrived too late to do anything except punish the perpetrators.
"He could have teleported," Paulita suggested.
"Yes, a good point," Zeus replied, "but you see, he wasn't sure where Hercules was. That is to say, he thought he was somewhere but in fact he was… well, not there, but somewhere else."
He appeared to be floundering. Hera leapt in. "What my husband is trying to say, Miss Dominguez, is that there were too many variables. Hermes didn't believe he could teleport in safely. He thought it better to come in running, so that he could assess the situation as he approached."
In general, Zeus's performance on Paulita was uncharacteristically listless and unconfident. Hera did most of the talking, and kept trying to divert the hostess from confrontational lines of questioning towards a more personal, domestic agenda.
"I'm sure the audience here and your viewers at home want to hear how we're dealing with our shock and grief back on Olympus," she said at one point, and at another said, "I'd prefer to be discussing Hercules's legacy, not his death but his life. Hercules was my stepson but like a son to me. A wayward one, but lively and loveable in spite of it." And on the subject of Hermes: "We hold out hope that he will find his way home safe and sound. My heart aches to think about a stepson — another stepson of mine — lying somewhere, in a remote corner of the earth, injured, perhaps in great pain. Argus is searching high and low for signs of him, and we pray for his return."
"Pray?" said Paulita, intrigued. "Who exactly does an Olympian pray to?"
"Figure of speech," said Hera.
"Are you scared?" This was Paulita's closing question. The floor manager was making winding-up motions, while in the production gallery they were telling her over her earpiece to reel the interview in. There was a sense of disappointment in the air. This edition of the show hadn't turned out to be as riveting as everyone had hoped. Paulita had one last chance to dredge up some TV gold.
"Scared?" said Hera as though unfamiliar with the word, let alone the concept.
"Of these people, these paramilitaries, these terrorists, whatever you care to call them. They've killed most of your monsters. They've killed at least one of you, maybe even two. All I'm saying is, if I were you, I'd be at least a little nervous about stepping foot outside Mount Olympus now."
This roused Zeus from his torpor. "But you are not us, woman," he thundered. "You are mortal, prone to insecurity. You know fear all the time, whether it's fear of your ratings slipping or of people thinking you're fat, or most of all the deep-down fear that you're hideously overpaid for doing a job that a trained monkey could do, and better, what's more. You are a seething mass of anxieties and inadequacies, and I am not. I am king of the Pantheon and I fear nothing and no one!"
Then, having insulted his hostess, although Paulita's desperate grin tried to convey that her skin was thick enough to take it, Zeus found a camera, gazed deep into the lens, and said, "Above all, not you. I am not scared of you. I know who you are now, and I will tell you this. ' Mai phunai ton hapanta nika logon.'"
On the next news bulletin on the same channel, an Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Harvard was consulted. He claimed he could identify the quotation. It was Sophocles, Oedipus At Colonus, a line from the antistrophe to one of the later Chorus interludes, and it translated as "Not to be born is, past all prizing, best" — although, the distinguished academic added somewhat archly, Zeus's pronunciation of Ancient Greek left something to be desired.
The significance of the quotation was much debated in newspaper columns and on TV and radio discussion programmes. It was generally agreed that Zeus had simply been threatening his opponents. When I'm finished with you, he'd been implying, you'll wish you'd never been born. No deeper interpretation of it was needed than that, or could be divined.
Meanwhile, the great vox pop that was the internet spoke. From habit, it spoke guardedly. Argus was the ever-present ear at the door, the ever-present eye at the keyhole, and a careless comment, a blog entry or chatroom post that was overtly anti-Pantheonic, might lead to unwelcome consequences. Argus could smash a website to pieces, reducing it to a shambles of corrupted code with one of his unstoppable, sledgehammer viruses. He could crash servers and wipe hard drives. And a persistent offender could expect something much worse — a knock at the front door, a personal visit from an Olympian for a terrifying "polite word."
Still, there were ways to state your true feelings that didn't automatically alert the Hundred-Eyed One, or at the worst would result in the relatively mild rebuke of him blocking out the offending comment with his icon — a peacock in full tailfeather display — accompanied by a pro forma warning: I am watching. For instance, a set of nicknames had been devised for the Olympians that were so banal as to be unobtrusive. Zeus was "Jerry," Hera was "Jane," Ares "Joe," Apollo "Jack," Artemis "Jill," and so on, meaning that those in the know could write about them in a derogatory or defamatory fashion without fear of censure. Argus had not cottoned on to that particular ruse, the J-Series Cipher.
Nor did he seem to be in on any of the Olympian-uncomplimentary acronyms that were doing the rounds, such as WADWAH (Weak As Dionysus With A Hangover, usually used in reference to a bad joke or a movie that failed to meet up to expectations), MHB (My Hercules's Bitch, a favourite among online gamers, as in "I'm going to beat you at this level and make you MHB"), and LLH (Lame Like Hephaestus, something shoddy or inadequate being compared to that Olympian's physical disability).
Other acronyms were less humorous, less widespread, and more specific in their aim. They were the online equivalent of a Freemasons' handshake, a method of sounding out whether an e-correspondent was a fellow traveller on the path of anti-Pantheonism. These included DODO (Dump Olympians, Destroy Olympus) and GMA! (Gods My Ass/Arse!). Slip one of them into the "conversation" and pretty soon you would know whether you were in sympathetic company or not. The Agonides resorted to them frequently, and Argus remained ignorant of their meaning.