A Plea for the Christians 28

Perhaps it is necessary, in view of what has been said, to say a little about the names of the gods. Herodotus, and Alexander son of Philip in his letter to his mother (both are said to have conversed with the priests at Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes), say that they learned from the priests that the gods had been human beings. Herodotus says: “They showed that those whose statues these were had been men of this kind, far removed from gods. Before these men, however, gods had been the rulers in Egypt, dwelling together with human beings, and one of them was always supreme; the last to reign over it was Horus son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo; he put down Typhon and was the last king of Egypt. Osiris is Dionysus in the Greek language.” So the others, and last of all Horus, were kings of Egypt. From them the names of the gods passed to the Greeks. Apollo is the son of Dionysus and Isis, as Herodotus again says: “They say that Apollo and Artemis are children of Dionysus and Isis, and that Leto became their nurse and preserver.” These, as if they had come from heaven, they had as their first kings; partly from ignorance of true piety toward the divine, partly out of gratitude for their rule, they held them to be gods together with their wives. “All Egyptians sacrifice pure bulls and bull calves, but they may not sacrifice cows, for these are sacred to Isis; for the statue of Isis is a woman with a cow's horns, as the Greeks portray Io.” Who would be more believable in saying these things than those who inherit, son from father, the priesthood and the history together? For it is not likely that the temple-keepers, who make the idols venerable, would falsely say that they were human beings. If Herodotus alone had said that the Egyptians tell of the gods as of human beings, since he also says, “The divine parts of the accounts I heard I am not eager to relate, except only their names,” one might have had to disbelieve him as a teller of myths. But since Alexander, and Hermes called Trismegistus, who joined their own lineage to the gods, and countless others (not to list them one by one) say the same, there is no room left to doubt that they were kings who came to be regarded as gods. That they were human beings is shown by the most learned of the Egyptians, who, while calling the ether, the earth, the sun, and the moon gods, regard the others as mortal human beings and their tombs as temples; Apollodorus shows it too in his work On the Gods. Herodotus even calls their sufferings mysteries: “How they celebrate the festival of Isis in the city of Busiris I have described before. For after the sacrifice all of them, men and women, a great many thousands of people, beat their breasts; but for whom they beat them it is not holy for me to say.” If they are gods, they are also immortal; but if people beat their breasts for them, and their sufferings are mysteries, they are human beings. So Herodotus himself says: “There are also at Sais, in the temple of Athena, behind the shrine and along the whole wall of Athena's temple, the burial places of one whose name I think it unholy to reveal in such a matter. There is a lake beside it, adorned all around with a stone rim, in size, it seems to me, as large as the one at Delos called the Wheel. On this lake the Egyptians enact by night the representations of his sufferings, which they call mysteries.” And not only is the tomb of Osiris shown, but also his embalming: “When a corpse is brought to them, they show those who bring it wooden models of corpses, painted to look lifelike; and they say that the most elaborate of these is the model of one whose name I think it unholy to name in such a matter.”