and then goes into the adytum to learn his fortune.
Ion again expresses his surprise at the strange lady's shrewish, and indeed as he thinks it, rather impious, language; but says, "What is the daughter of Erectheus to me? let me to my task." He admits, however (infected apparently by Creusa's boldness), that his patron has acted unhandsomely to some virgin or other:
"Becoming thus
By stealth a father, leaving then his children
To die, regardless of them."
Xuthus reappears, with this command from the Pythoness: "The first male stranger whom you meet, address as your son." Of course the stranger is Ion; but being greeted with the words, "Health to my son!" by one whom he has never before set eyes on, he is far more offended than pleased by this unlooked-for salutation; and, not at all unreasonably, all things considered, he recoils, when Xuthus proceeds to embrace him, and asks—
"Art thou, stranger,
Well in thy wits; or hath the god's displeasure
Bereft thee of thy reason?"
He, a minister of the temple, objects to being thus claimed as so near of kin by a man whose business there he has yet to learn: he says, "Hands off, friend—they'll mar the garlands of the god;" and adds, "If you keep not your distance, you shall have my arrow in your heart:"—
"I am not fond of curing wayward strangers
And mad men."
