Exhortation to the Greeks 2.22–2.41

These rites, then, are worthy of night and fire, and of the “great-hearted,” or rather empty-headed, people of the Erechtheids, and of the other Greeks too, “for whom there wait, when they die, things they do not expect.” Against whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? “Night-roamers, magi, Bacchants, Lenaean women, initiates”: these he threatens with what comes after death, to these he prophesies the fire; “for the mysteries that are customary among men are celebrated in an unholy way.” The mysteries, then, are mere custom and empty opinion, and a deceit of the serpent that is worshiped, when people turn with a counterfeit piety to initiations that are really no initiations and rites that are no rites. And what are the mystic chests like? For I must strip bare their holy things and speak out what is not to be spoken. Are they not sesame cakes, pyramids, balls of wool, cakes with many knobs, lumps of salt, and a serpent, the sacred emblem of Dionysus Bassareus? And besides these, pomegranates, fig branches, fennel stalks, ivy, and also round cakes and poppies? These are their holy things. And further, the secret emblems of Themis, the Earth: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, and a woman's comb, which is, to put it euphemistically and in the language of the mysteries, a woman's private part. What open shamelessness! Once night was a silent veil for the pleasures of the self-controlled; now for the initiates night is a much-talked-of trial of incontinence, and the fire, carried in torches, exposes their passions. Put out the fire, hierophant; torchbearer, have some respect for the torches; the light exposes your Iacchus. Let night hide the mysteries; let the orgies be honored in darkness. The fire does not play a part; it is ordered to convict and to punish.

These are the mysteries of the godless. And I rightly call godless those who do not know the God who truly is, but shamelessly worship a child torn apart by Titans, a grieving woman, and parts that are truly unspeakable for shame. They are caught in a double godlessness: first, that they do not know God, failing to recognize the God who truly is; and second, this further error, that they consider as existing beings that do not exist, and call gods those who do not truly exist, or rather do not exist at all, but have received only the name. That is why the apostle convicts us too, saying: “You were strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”

May many blessings come to the king of the Scythians, whoever he was [Anacharsis]! When one of his fellow citizens was imitating among the Scythians the rite of the Mother of the gods practiced at Cyzicus, beating a drum, clanging a cymbal, and hung about the neck with images like a begging priest of the goddess, the king shot him dead with arrows, as one who had become unmanly among the Greeks and was teaching the other Scythians the effeminate disease. For this reason (it must not be concealed) I am led to wonder how Euhemerus of Acragas, Nicanor of Cyprus, Diagoras and Hippo of Melos, and besides these that Cyrenian (Theodorus was his name), and many others, came to be called atheists. They lived temperate lives and saw more sharply than the rest of humankind the error about these gods; and even if they did not perceive the truth itself, they at least suspected the error, which is no small seed, springing up as a living spark of wisdom toward the truth. One of them charges the Egyptians: “If you believe they are gods, do not lament them or beat your breasts for them; but if you mourn them, stop thinking them gods.” Another took a Heracles made of wood (he happened to be cooking something at home, as one does) and said: “Come now, Heracles: now is your chance to perform for us, as you did for Eurystheus, this thirteenth labor, and cook Diagoras's dinner”; and then he put him into the fire like a piece of wood.

Atheism and superstition, then, are the two extremes of ignorance, and we must make every effort to keep clear of both. Do you not see Moses, the hierophant of the truth, commanding that one who is crushed or castrated shall not enter the assembly, nor the son of a harlot? By the first two he hints at the godless way of life, deprived of divine and fruitful power; and by the third, the one who claims many falsely named gods instead of the only God who is, just as the son of a harlot claims many fathers because he does not know his true father. Yet there was in human beings an innate and ancient fellowship with heaven, darkened by ignorance, but at times suddenly leaping out of the darkness and shining forth, as in the saying of one poet: “Do you see this boundless ether on high, which holds the earth around in its moist embrace?” and “O you who carry the earth and have your seat upon the earth, whoever you are, hard to guess and to behold,” and all the other sayings of this kind that the sons of the poets sing.

But ideas that went astray and turned aside from the straight path, truly deadly ideas, turned the heavenly plant, the human being, away from his heavenly way of life and stretched him out on the ground, persuading him to cling to earthly figments. Some, deceived at once by the sight of the heavens and trusting in sight alone, watched the movements of the stars, admired them and made gods of them, calling the stars gods (θεοί) from their running (θεῖν); and they worshiped the sun, as the Indians do, and the moon, as the Phrygians do. Others, gathering the cultivated fruits of what grows from the earth, called the grain Demeter, as the Athenians do, and the vine Dionysus, as the Thebans do. Others, observing the requitals of wickedness, make gods of retributions and worship calamities. Hence the poets of the stage have invented the Erinyes and the Eumenides, the Avengers of blood and the Avengers of suppliants, and also the Alastores. Some of the philosophers too, following the poets, make idols of the forms of your passions, Fear and Love and Joy and Hope; just as old Epimenides set up altars at Athens to Insolence and Shamelessness. Others, starting from actual things, are made gods for human beings and fashioned in bodily form: a certain Justice, and Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, and Fate, and Auxo and Thallo of Attica. A sixth way of introducing deceit and producing gods is the one by which they count the twelve gods; Hesiod sings their theogony in his own way, and Homer tells what he tells about the gods. The last remains (for there are seven ways in all): the one that starts from the divine benefits bestowed on human beings. For not understanding the God who is their benefactor, they invented certain saviors, the Dioscuri, Heracles the averter of evils, and Asclepius the physician.

These are the slippery and harmful deviations from the truth, which drag the human being down from heaven and tip him into the pit. I want to show you the gods themselves at close quarters, what they are like and whether they exist at all, so that at last you may cease from your error and run back again to heaven. “For we too were once children of wrath, like the rest; but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, when we were already dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” For the Word is living, and whoever has been buried with Christ is raised up with God. Those who are still unbelieving are called “children of wrath,” reared for wrath; but we are no longer the nurslings of wrath, since we have been torn away from error and are rushing toward the truth. So we, who were once sons of lawlessness, have now, through the Word's love for humankind, become sons of God. But to you your own poet, Empedocles of Acragas, says: “Therefore, distraught with grievous evils, you will never relieve your heart of wretched sorrows.” Most of what you say about the gods is myth and fiction; and what is supposed to have really happened is recorded about shameful men who lived licentiously. “You walk in conceit and madness; you have left the right and straight path and gone off by the way of thorns and stakes. Why do you wander, mortals? Stop, you fools; leave the darkness of night, and lay hold of the light.” So the prophetic and poetic Sibyl urges us; and so the truth urges us too, stripping the crowd of gods of these terrifying and bewildering masks, and exposing the reputations made for them by showing how many share the same names.

For example, there are those who record three Zeuses: one the son of Aether in Arcadia, and two sons of Kronos, one of them in Crete and the other, again, in Arcadia. Some suppose there are five Athenas: one the daughter of Hephaestus, the Athenian; one the daughter of the Nile, the Egyptian; a third, the daughter of Kronos, the inventor of war; a fourth, the daughter of Zeus, whom the Messenians call Coryphasia after her mother; and last of all the daughter of Pallas and Titanis, the daughter of Ocean, who impiously sacrificed her father and adorned herself with her father's skin as with a fleece. Aristotle counts first an Apollo who was the son of Hephaestus and Athena (so here Athena is no longer a virgin); second, the son of Cyrbas in Crete; third, the son of Zeus; and fourth, the Arcadian, the son of Silenus, who is called Nomius among the Arcadians; besides these he lists the Libyan, the son of Ammon; and Didymus the grammarian adds a sixth, the son of Magnes.

And how many Apollos are there even now, countless mortal and perishable human beings, named like the ones just mentioned? What if I were to tell you of the many Asclepiuses, or of the Hermeses that are counted, or of the Hephaestuses of mythology? Would I not seem excessive, flooding your ears with so many names? But their native countries, their crafts, their lives, and above all their tombs prove that they were human beings. Ares, for example, whom the poets honor as much as they can, “Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, bloodstained, stormer of walls,” this fickle and hostile god, was, as Epicharmus says, a Spartan; Sophocles knows him as a Thracian; others make him an Arcadian. Homer says he was bound for thirteen months: “Ares endured it, when Otus and mighty Ephialtes, the sons of Aloeus, bound him in a strong bond; he lay bound in a bronze jar for thirteen months.” Many blessings on the Carians, who sacrifice dogs to him! And let the Scythians not stop sacrificing asses, as Apollodorus says, and Callimachus: “Phoebus is honored among the Hyperboreans with sacrifices of asses.” The same poet says elsewhere: “Rich slaughterings of asses delight Phoebus.”

Hephaestus, whom Zeus threw out of Olympus “from the divine threshold,” fell on Lemnos and worked as a smith, lame in both feet, “and his slender shins moved nimbly beneath him.” You have a physician among the gods too, not only a smith; but the physician was a lover of money, and his name was Asclepius. I will set before you your own poet, the Boeotian Pindar: “Gold, shown in his hands, turned even him with a lordly fee; and so the son of Kronos, hurling with his hands through both of them, swiftly took the breath from their breasts, and the blazing thunderbolt struck them dead.” And Euripides: “For Zeus is to blame, who killed my son Asclepius, casting fire into his breast.” He lies, then, thunderstruck, in the territory of Cynosuris. Philochorus says that at Tenos Poseidon is honored as a physician, and that Sicily lies on top of Kronos, who was buried there. Patrocles of Thurii and Sophocles the Younger, in some of their tragedies, tell the story of the Dioscuri: these two Dioscuri were mortal men, if Homer is enough to confirm what is said: “But them the life-giving earth already held, in Lacedaemon, there in their own dear native land.” Let the author of the Cypria come forward too: “Castor was mortal, and the lot of death was fated for him; but Polydeuces was immortal, offshoot of Ares.” This was a poet's lie; Homer is more trustworthy than he, when he speaks of both the Dioscuri, and moreover shows Heracles to be a mere phantom, for he calls him “a mortal, Heracles, well versed in great deeds.” So Homer himself knows Heracles as a mortal man; and Hieronymus the philosopher even describes the build of his body: small, bristly-haired, and strong; while Dicaearchus says he was lean, sinewy, dark, hook-nosed, with bright eyes and straight hair. This Heracles lived fifty-two years and ended his life cremated on the pyre on Oeta.

The Muses, whom Alcman makes daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and whom the other poets and historians make divine and worship (indeed whole cities now dedicate shrines of the Muses to them), were Mysian slave women, bought by Megaclo, the daughter of Macar. Macar was king of the Lesbians, but he was always quarreling with his wife, and Megaclo was indignant on her mother's behalf; and why should she not be? So she bought these Mysian slave women, the same number as the Muses, and called them Moisai, in the Aeolic dialect. She had them taught to sing and to play the lyre, recounting the deeds of old in melody. By constantly playing and singing beautifully they charmed Macar and stopped his anger. For this reason Megaclo set them up in bronze as a thank offering for her mother's sake and ordered them to be honored in all the temples. Such, then, are the Muses; the story is told by Myrsilus of Lesbos.

Listen, then, to the love affairs of your gods, and the extraordinary tales of their incontinence, their wounds and bonds, their laughter and battles, their slavery too, and their banquets, embraces, tears, passions, and lewd pleasures. Call me Poseidon and the chorus of those he seduced: Amphitrite, Amymone, Alope, Melanippe, Alcyone, Hippothoe, Chione, and the countless others, among whom, many as they were, the passions of your Poseidon still felt cramped. Call me Apollo too: this is Phoebus, a pure prophet and a good counselor. But Sterope does not say so, nor Aethusa, nor Arsinoe, nor Zeuxippe, nor Prothoe, nor Marpessa, nor Hypsipyle; Daphne alone escaped both the prophet and her ruin. And let Zeus himself come, above all the rest, the “father of men and gods,” as you call him. He was so given to love affairs that he desired all women and satisfied his desire on them all.

He had his fill of women no less than the he-goat of Thmuis had of she-goats. And I have admired your poems, Homer: “He spoke, and the son of Kronos nodded with his dark brows, and the ambrosial locks flowed down from the lord's immortal head, and he made great Olympus quake.” You portray Zeus as majestic, Homer, and give him a revered nod. But only show him the girdle, my friend, and Zeus is exposed and his locks disgraced. To what licentiousness did that Zeus come, who spent so many nights of pleasure with Alcmene! For not even nine nights were long enough for the incontinent god (on the contrary, a whole lifetime was too short for his lust), so that he might father for us the god who wards off evils. Heracles, the son of Zeus, truly Zeus's son, begotten in a long night, toiled a long time over the twelve labors, but corrupted the fifty daughters of Thestius in one night, becoming at once the adulterer and the bridegroom of so many virgins. Not without reason do the poets call him “wretch” and “doer of wicked deeds.” It would take long to tell of his adulteries of every kind and his corruption of boys. For your gods did not keep away even from boys: one loved Hylas, another Hyacinthus, another Pelops, another Chrysippus, another Ganymede. Let your wives worship these gods, and pray that their husbands may be like them, so “self-controlled,” so that they may be like the gods by imitating the same things; let your children get used to revering them, so that they too may grow into men who take the gods as a vivid model of sexual immorality. But perhaps it is only the male gods among them who rush after love affairs; “the goddesses, being female, stayed each at home for shame,” says Homer, being ashamed, [the goddesses,] out of modesty, to see Aphrodite caught in adultery. Yet the goddesses are still more passionately licentious, bound in adultery: Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, the Nereid with Aeacus and Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion and Persephone with Adonis. Aphrodite, disgraced with Ares, went on to Cinyras, married Anchises, lay in wait for Phaethon, and loved Adonis; she competed with the ox-eyed goddess, and the goddesses stripped for an apple and presented themselves naked to the shepherd, to see which of them he would judge beautiful.

Come now, let us also survey the games briefly, and put an end to these funeral festivals, the Isthmian, the Nemean, the Pythian, and besides these the Olympian. At Pytho the Pythian serpent is worshiped, and the festival of the snake is proclaimed as the Pythian games. At the Isthmus the sea spat out a pitiful piece of refuse, and the Isthmian games lament Melicertes. At Nemea another child, Archemorus, was buried, and the child's funeral rite is called the Nemean games. And Pisa, you Panhellenes, is the tomb of a Phrygian charioteer, and the Zeus of Phidias claims for himself the libations for Pelops, the Olympian games. The games, then, it seems, were mysteries celebrated over the dead, like the oracles, and both have been made public. The mysteries at Agra and at Halimus in Attica are confined to Athens; but the games, and the phalluses carried in procession for Dionysus, have become a disgrace to the whole world, wickedly spread through human life. For Dionysus, eager to go down to Hades, did not know the way; a man named Prosymnus promised to tell him, but not without payment. The payment was not a decent one, though decent enough to Dionysus: the favor was a sexual one, and the payment he asked for was Dionysus himself. The god was willing, and promised to grant it if he came back, confirming the promise with an oath. Having learned the way, he went off, and then came back again; he did not find Prosymnus, for he had died. To discharge his debt to his lover, Dionysus rushed to the tomb in his lust; and cutting a fig branch that was at hand, he shaped it like the male member and sat on it, fulfilling his promise to the dead man. As a mystic memorial of this passion, phalluses are set up in the cities to Dionysus. “For if it were not for Dionysus that they held the procession and sang the hymn to the shameful parts, it would be a most shameless deed,” says Heraclitus; “but Hades and Dionysus are the same, for whom they rave and keep the Lenaea”; not so much, I think, because of the body's drunkenness as because of the disgraceful priestly display of licentiousness.

Naturally, then, such gods of yours became slaves, slaves to their passions. Even before the so-called Helots of the Spartans, Apollo came under the yoke of slavery to Admetus at Pherae, and Heracles to Omphale at Sardis; Poseidon and Apollo worked for hire for Laomedon, like a worthless servant who could not even obtain his freedom from his former master; it was then that the two of them built the walls of Troy for the Phrygian king. Homer is not ashamed to show Athena “holding a golden lamp” in her hands for Odysseus; and we have read how Aphrodite, like some wanton maidservant, brought and set before Helen, face to face, the chair of her adulterous lover, to draw her into intercourse with him. Panyassis, moreover, records that very many other gods served human beings, writing somewhat as follows: “Demeter endured it, the famous lame god endured it, Poseidon endured it, Apollo of the silver bow endured it, to serve a mortal man for a year; and mighty-hearted Ares endured it too, under his father's compulsion,” and so on.

It follows naturally from this that these amorous and passionate gods of yours are portrayed in every way as having human feelings. “For surely their skin too is mortal.” Homer bears witness to this when he portrays, very precisely, Aphrodite crying out loud and shrill at her wound, and tells of Ares himself, the most warlike of all, wounded in the flank by Diomedes. Polemon says that Athena too was wounded, by Ornytus; yes, and Homer says that Aidoneus was shot with an arrow by Heracles, and Panyassis records the same of Helios [Augeas]. This same Panyassis records that Hera, the goddess of marriage, was also wounded by the same Heracles, “in sandy Pylos.” And Sosibius says that Heracles himself was wounded in the hand by the sons of Hippocoon. If there are wounds, there is blood; for the poets' “ichor” is even more repulsive than blood, since ichor is understood to be decayed blood. So they have to be provided with treatments and food, which they need. Hence tables and drinking bouts and laughter and intercourse; yet they would not indulge in human sexual pleasures, nor beget children, nor even sleep, if they were immortal and without needs and ageless. Zeus himself shared a human table among the Ethiopians, and an inhuman and lawless one when he was feasted by Lycaon the Arcadian: he gorged himself on human flesh, though unwillingly.

For the god did not know that Lycaon the Arcadian, his host, had slaughtered his own son (Nyctimus was his name) and set him before Zeus as a dish. A fine god indeed is Zeus: the prophet, the protector of guests, the protector of suppliants, the gracious, the author of all oracles, the avenger; or rather the unjust, the lawless, the unrighteous, the unholy, the inhuman, the violent, the seducer, the adulterer, the lover. But that was when he was such, when he was a man; now, it seems to me, even your myths have grown old. Zeus is no longer a serpent, nor a swan, nor an eagle, nor an amorous man; the god does not fly, does not love boys, does not kiss, does not rape; and yet there are still many beautiful women even now, more comely than Leda and more blooming than Semele, and boys more lovely and more refined than the Phrygian herdsman. Where now is that eagle? Where is the swan? Where is Zeus himself? He has grown old, feathers and all; for surely he does not repent of his love affairs, nor is he being taught self-control. Your myth is laid bare: Leda is dead, the swan is dead, the eagle is dead. Look for your Zeus; do not search heaven, but the earth. The Cretan, in whose land he is also buried, will tell you; Callimachus in his hymns: “For the Cretans, O lord, even built your tomb.” For Zeus is dead (do not take it hard), like Leda, like the swan, like the eagle, like the amorous man, like the serpent.

And now even the superstitious themselves appear to understand, unwillingly but nonetheless, the error about the gods; for they are not “from an oak of ancient story, nor from a rock,” but “are of the race of men,” and a little later they will be found to be oaks and rocks as well. Staphylus records, for example, that a certain Zeus Agamemnon is honored in Sparta; and Phanocles, in his Loves or Beautiful Boys, says that Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks, founded a temple of Aphrodite Argynnis for Argynnus, his beloved. The Arcadians pray to an Artemis called “the Strangled,” as Callimachus says in the Causes; and at Methymna another Artemis is honored, Condylitis (“of the Knuckle”). There is also in Laconia a temple of yet another Artemis, “Gout,” as Sosibius says. Polemon knows of a statue of “Gaping” Apollo, and another of Apollo “the Glutton,” honored in Elis. There the Eleans sacrifice to Zeus “Averter of Flies”; and the Romans sacrifice to Heracles “Averter of Flies,” and to Fever and to Fear, whom they also enroll among Heracles's companions.

I pass over the Argives and Spartans: the Argives worship Aphrodite “the Grave-robber,” and the Spartiates revere Artemis Chelytis (“of the Cough”), since they call coughing chelyttein. Do you think that these things we set before you are brought from some spurious source? You seem not even to know your own historians, whom I call as witnesses against your unbelief; poor wretches, they have filled your whole life, a life truly not worth living, with godless mockery. Is not a Zeus “the Bald” honored in Argos, and another Zeus, “the Avenger,” in Cyprus? Do not the Argives sacrifice to Aphrodite “the Straddler,” the Athenians to Aphrodite “the Courtesan,” and the Syracusans to Aphrodite “of the beautiful buttocks,” whom the poet Nicander somewhere called “fair-bottomed”? I say nothing of Dionysus “the Pig-plucker”: the Sicyonians worship this Dionysus, placing him in charge of women's private parts, revering the author of outrage as overseer of shame. Such are their gods, and such are they themselves, playing with the gods, or rather mocking and insulting themselves. And how much better are the Egyptians, who by villages and cities have honored the irrational animals, than the Greeks who worship such gods! For those, even if they are beasts, are not adulterous nor lewd, and not one of them hunts after pleasure contrary to nature. What the others are like, why need I say any more, when they have been sufficiently refuted? The Egyptians, however, whom I have just mentioned, are divided in their cults: the people of Syene worship the fish called phagrus; those who live on Elephantine, the maeotes (another fish); the people of Oxyrhynchus, likewise, the fish that gives its name to their country; the people of Heracleopolis, the ichneumon; those of Sais and of Thebes, the sheep; those of Lycopolis, the wolf; those of Cynopolis, the dog; the people of Memphis, Apis; those of Mendes, the goat. But you, who are in every way better than the Egyptians (I shrink from saying worse), who never stop laughing at the Egyptians every day, what are you like in regard to irrational animals? The Thessalians among you have honored storks, because they are familiar birds, and the Thebans weasels, because of the birth of Heracles. And what of the Thessalians again? They are said to worship ants, because they have learned that Zeus took the form of an ant and lay with Eurymedusa, the daughter of Cleitor, and fathered Myrmidon. Polemon records that the people living in the Troad worship the local mice, which they call sminthoi, because they gnawed through the bowstrings of their enemies; and from those mice they named Apollo Smintheus. Heraclides, in his Foundations of Temples, says that in Acarnania, where the promontory of Actium is and the temple of Actian Apollo, an ox is sacrificed beforehand to the flies. Nor will I forget the Samians (the Samians worship a sheep, as Euphorion says), nor the Syrians who live in Phoenicia, some of whom revere doves and others fish, as extravagantly as the Eleans revere Zeus.

Well then, since those whom you worship are not gods, it seems to me that we should consider next whether they are really daemons, enrolled, as you say, in this second rank. For if they are daemons, they are greedy and foul. One can even find local daemons openly receiving honor in the various cities: among the Cythnians Menedemus, among the Tenians Callistagoras, among the Delians Anius, among the Spartans Astrabacus.

At Phalerum, too, a certain hero “at the stern” is honored; and the Pythia ordered the Plataeans to sacrifice to Androcrates, Democrates, Cyclaeus, and Leucon, when the Persian wars were at their height. Anyone who can look even a little more closely can see a great many other daemons too: “For thrice ten thousand are there on the much-nourishing earth, immortal daemons, guardians of mortal men.” Who are these guardians, Boeotian? Do not grudge to tell us. Or is it clear that they are these, and those more honored than these, the great daemons: Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Demeter, Kore, Pluto, Heracles, and Zeus himself? But, poet of Ascra, they do not guard us to keep us from running away, nor perhaps from sinning, since they certainly have no lack of experience of sins themselves. Here it is fitting to repeat the proverb: “A father who is himself unadmonished admonishes his son.” And if these really are guardians, they are not moved by goodwill toward us; bent on your destruction, they fasten themselves on human life like flatterers, lured by smoke. The daemons themselves somewhere confess their own gluttony, saying: “Of libation and the savor of burnt flesh; for this is the honor that is our portion.” What other voice would the gods of the Egyptians, cats and weasels, utter, if they were given a voice, than the Homeric and poetic one, the voice of lovers of savor and of cookery? Such are your daemons and your gods, and any demigods, called so as if they were half-asses (hemionoi); for you have no lack even of names for the combinations of your impiety.