A Plea for the Christians 20

If the implausibility of their theology went no further than saying that the gods came into being and were formed from water, I would have shown that nothing created is not also dissoluble, and gone on to the remaining charges. But they have described the gods' bodies. They say that Heracles is a god in the form of a coiled serpent; they speak of the hundred-handed ones; and of the daughter whom Zeus fathered by his mother Rhea, or Demeter, they say that she had two eyes in the natural place and two on her forehead, and a second face at the back of her neck, and horns as well, so that Rhea, frightened at the monstrous child, fled and did not give her the breast (θηλή); hence she is called Athela in the mysteries, but commonly Persephone and Kore, and is not the same as Athena, who is named from the pupil of the eye (κόρη). And they have recounted their deeds in detail, as they think: how Kronos cut off his father's genitals and threw him down from his chariot, and how he murdered his children by swallowing the males; how Zeus bound his father and cast him into Tartarus, as Heaven had done to his sons, and fought the Titans for the rule; how he pursued his mother Rhea when she forbade him to marry, and when she became a she-serpent he too changed into a serpent, bound her with the so-called Heraclean knot, and had intercourse with her (the staff of Hermes is the symbol of the form of that union); and then how he violated his daughter Persephone, again in the form of a serpent, and had by her a son, Dionysus. I must say at least this much: what is venerable or good in such a story, that we should believe Kronos, Zeus, Kore, and the rest to be gods? The shapes of their bodies? What man of judgment, trained in contemplation, would believe that a viper was begotten by a god (Orpheus says: “But Phanes brought forth another offspring, terrible, from his holy womb, a viper fearful to behold, whose hair from its head and fair face were lovely to see, but the other parts were those of a dreadful serpent, from the top of the neck down”)? Or who would accept that Phanes himself, a first-born god (for he is the one who was poured out from the egg), had the body or shape of a serpent, or was swallowed by Zeus so that Zeus might become boundless? If they differ in nothing from the lowest beasts (for clearly the divine must differ from earthly things and from what is formed out of matter), they are not gods. Why then should we approach beings whose birth is like that of cattle, and who are themselves beast-shaped and ugly?