Exhortation to the Greeks 3.42–3.45

Come, then, let us add this too: that your gods are inhuman daemons who hate humankind, not only rejoicing in human madness but also enjoying human slaughter. Now in the armed contests in the stadiums, now in the countless ambitions of war, they procure occasions of pleasure for themselves, so that they may have the fullest opportunity to glut themselves unrestrained on human bloodshed. And by now, falling on cities and nations like plagues, they have demanded savage offerings. Aristomenes the Messenian, for example, slaughtered three hundred men to Zeus of Ithome, thinking to offer so many hecatombs of such a kind with good omens; among them was Theopompus, the king of the Spartans, a noble victim. The Taurians, the nation living around the Tauric Chersonese, at once sacrifice to the Tauric Artemis any strangers they catch among them, that is, those shipwrecked at sea; these are your sacrifices that Euripides puts on the tragic stage. Monimus records, in his Collection of Marvels, that at Pella in Thessaly an Achaean man is sacrificed to Peleus and Chiron. Anticlides, in his Returns, declares that the Lyctians (these are a Cretan people) slaughter human beings to Zeus; and Dosiadas says that the Lesbians offer a similar sacrifice to Dionysus. As for the Phocaeans (for I will not pass them over either), Pythocles, in the third book of On Concord, records that they burn a human being as a whole burnt offering to Artemis Tauropolus. Erechtheus of Attica and Marius the Roman sacrificed their own daughters: the one to Persephone, as Demaratus says in the first book of his Tragic Subjects; the other, Marius, to the Averting Deities, as Dorotheus records in the fourth book of his Italian History. From these examples the daemons plainly appear to be lovers of humankind! And how could the superstitious not be correspondingly holy? The one are praised as saviors, the others ask salvation from those who plot against salvation. Supposing that they offer auspicious sacrifices to them, they have failed to notice that they are slaughtering human beings. For murder does not become a sacrifice because of the place, not even if someone slaughters a human being to Artemis or Zeus in a …

… supposedly sacred place, rather than to anger and love of money, other daemons like them, on altars or in the streets, calling it a sacred victim; such a sacrifice is murder and manslaughter. Why then, you humans, wisest of the animals, do we flee from savage beasts, and turn aside if we happen to meet a bear or a lion, “as when a man sees a serpent in the mountain glens and starts back, and trembling seizes his limbs, and he retreats,” and yet, though you perceive and understand that daemons are destructive and accursed, plotters, haters of humankind, and ravagers, you do not turn aside or turn away from them? What truth could the wicked speak, or whom could they help? Here and now I can show you that a human being is better than these gods of yours, the daemons: that Cyrus and Solon are better than Apollo the prophet. Your Phoebus loves gifts, but does not love human beings. He betrayed his friend Croesus and, forgetting the payment (so fond of glory was he), led Croesus across the Halys to the pyre. So do the daemons lead to the fire those they love! But you, O man, more humane and more truthful than Apollo, pity the one bound on the pyre; and you, Solon, prophesy the truth; and you, Cyrus, order the pyre to be put out. Be wise at last, at least, Croesus, having learned by suffering: the one you worship is ungrateful; he takes the payment, and after the gold he lies again. It is not the daemon but the man who says to you, “Consider the end.” Solon does not prophesy crooked oracles; this is the only oracle, barbarian, that you will find true; you will prove it on the pyre.

So I am led to wonder by what fantasies those who first went astray were carried off when they proclaimed superstition to human beings, laying down the law that accursed daemons should be worshiped: whether it was the famous Phoroneus, or Merops, or someone else, who set up temples and altars to them and, as the myth goes, were the first to offer sacrifices to them. And indeed, as time went on, they kept inventing gods to worship. Certainly no one used to honor this Eros, who is said to be among the oldest of the gods, until Charmus seduced a certain youth and set up an altar in the Academy as a thank offering for the fulfillment of his desire; and they have called the licentiousness of this disease Eros, making a god of unbridled desire. The Athenians did not even know who Pan was until Philippides told them. Naturally, then, superstition, having taken its beginning from somewhere, has become a fountain of senseless wickedness; and then, not checked but growing and flowing in abundance, it has become the maker of many daemons, sacrificing hecatombs, celebrating festivals, setting up statues, and building temples. These (for I will not keep silent about them either, but will expose them too) are called temples as a euphemism, but in fact are tombs [that is, tombs called temples].

But you, even now at least, forget your superstition, ashamed to honor tombs. In the temple of Athena on the acropolis at Larisa there is the tomb of Acrisius, and at Athens on the acropolis that of Cecrops, as Antiochus says in the ninth book of his Histories. What of Erichthonius? Was he not buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immaradus, the son of Eumolpus and Daeira, was he not buried in the precinct of the Eleusinium below the acropolis? Are not the daughters of Celeus buried at Eleusis? Why should I list for you the women from the Hyperboreans? They were called Hyperoche and Laodice; they are buried in the temple of Artemis on Delos, which is in the sanctuary of Delian Apollo. Leandrius says that Cleochus is buried at Miletus in the Didymaeum. Here, following Zeno of Myndus, it is not right to pass over the monument of Leucophryne, who is buried in the temple of Artemis at Magnesia; nor the altar of Apollo at Telmessus, which too, they record, is the tomb of Telmessus the seer. Ptolemy, the son of Agesarchus, in the first book of his work on Philopator, says that Cinyras and the descendants of Cinyras are buried in the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos. But if I were to go through the tombs you worship, all time would not suffice me. As for you, if no shame at these audacities steals over you, then you go about altogether dead, having put your faith in the dead: “Ah, wretches, what evil is this you suffer? Your heads are wrapped in night.”