The Olympians enjoy the mauling and brawling of their playthings, their little human pets. They thrill to mortal war. They are as fired up and involved as Elizabethan nobles wagering on the outcome of a bearbaiting, or Regency lords ringside at a cockpit in the East End, or Wall Street bankers at an illicit downtown cage fight. “Slumming it,” nineteenth-century sprigs of the nobility called such excursions into the mud and blood of the commonality. The appalling appeal of the dirt and its heady threat of violence. And like those sporting aristocrats, the gods have their favorites.
