daniel is offered wine

scene: etemenanki, the great tower of babylon

N: Wine?

D: None for me, thank you. Though if you let me be so indecorous as to address you first — I’d say it’s best if my lord the king refrains from inebriation, as I do.

N: Would it be best indeed?

D: If my lord the king deems it so.

N: Although to refrain like you, is to refrain altogether. You, held in nobility as you are, fed and watered nearly as well I am, refuse the fine roasted meats of my table and chew on chickpeas and legumes with the dregs.

D: Only because —

N (interrupting): Your reasons and rationales are irrelevant. You refuse to drink? Refuse away, leaves more for me and ten other myriads of courtiers.

D: Do not be wroth with me my lord, I—

N (interrupting): Actually, it is a great pity that you do not drink. The soil of Babylon makes for a poor vintage, all our wine is imported from the same place you were. If you’d bothered to try it, you might even feel a little more at home.

D: Is there a home for a man whose god is homeless?

N: No need to fret about such things, whatever’s left of him is safe here — and in good company too. Our temple is the home of every god from Elam to Egypt. Or does he find such a royal dwelling not up to his standards?

D: Woe to the him who serves his neighbour a drink, mixing it with his poison to get him drunk and gaze at his genitals.

N: Good thing you’re a eunuch then, so you don’t need to worry.

D: Woe that wine perverts the proud, making them glut their gaping maws like insatiate Death all the way to the grave.

N: I see you’re a poet.

D: A pity that you’re not.

N: How so?

D: You wouldn’t need me to tell you your dreams and their meanings.

N: No, you see you have it the wrong way round: you are functionally dead. You need to tell me my dreams and their meanings, that you might live.

D: The dead need nothing.

N: Then why, pray, are you here?

D: Because it’s not about you, my lord king.

N: My dreams… are not about me?

D: They are not your dreams. You dreamt them because you are important, and through you they are. No, my lord king, not so — you are important so that you might dream. Your kingship, your conquests, your fame, your, might, and your glory sung across the world entire — this is the cause of all of these things.

legenda:

N — Nebuchadnezzar

D — Daniel (called Balaṭ-ušuṣur in Babylon)