Exhortation to the Greeks 4.46–4.63

If, besides this, I were to bring the statues themselves and set them before you to examine, you would go through them and find that your custom is truly nonsense, since you pray to senseless “works of human hands.” In ancient times the Scythians worshiped the dagger, the Arabs the stone, the Persians the river; and among other peoples those still more ancient set up conspicuous pieces of wood and erected pillars of stone. These were called xoana, because they had been scraped (apexesthai) from the raw material. The image of Artemis on Icarus, for example, was an unworked piece of wood, and that of Cithaeronian Hera at Thespiae a felled tree trunk; and the image of Samian Hera, as Aethlius says, was at first a plank, and later, when Procles was archon, it became human-shaped. When the xoana began to be made in human likeness, they took the name brete, from brotoi (“mortals”). At Rome in ancient times, says the historian Varro, the image of Mars was a spear, since the craftsmen had not yet launched into this handsome but evil art.

But when art flourished, error grew. That they made statues in human form out of stones and wood and, in a word, out of matter, statues on which you put a show of piety while slandering the truth, is already clear in itself; but since the subject needs some proof, I must not decline to give it. That Phidias made the Zeus at Olympia and the Athena Polias at Athens of gold and ivory is surely plain to everyone; and Olympichus records in his Samian History that the xoanon of Hera in Samos was made by Smilis the son of Eucleides. So do not doubt that of the goddesses at Athens called the Venerable Ones, Scopas made two of the so-called lychnite stone, and Calos the one between them; I can show you Polemon recording it in the fourth book of his Reply to Timaeus. Nor doubt that the statues of Zeus and Apollo at Patara in Lycia were again the work of that same Phidias, like the lions set up with them; but if, as some say, they are the work of Bryaxis, I do not dispute it: you have him too as a statue-maker; ascribe them to whichever of the two you like. Further, the nine-cubit statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite worshiped on Tenos are the work of Telesius of Athens, as Philochorus says. Demetrius, in the second book of his Argolica, records both the material of the xoanon of Hera at Tiryns, pear wood, and its maker, Argus. Many would perhaps be amazed to learn that the Palladium, the one called “fallen from heaven,” which Diomedes and Odysseus are said to have stolen from Troy and entrusted to Demophon, was made from the bones of Pelops, just as the Olympian Zeus was made from the bones of another animal, an Indian one. I bring forward Dionysius as my authority, in the fifth part of his Cycle. Apellas, in his Delphica, says that there were two Palladia, and that both were made by human beings. And so that no one may suppose that I have passed over these things out of ignorance, I will add that the statue of Dionysus Morychus at Athens was made of the stone called phellatas and is the work of Sicon the son of Eupalamus, as Polemon says in one of his letters. There were also two other sculptors, Cretans, I think (Scyllis and Dipoenus were their names); they made the statues of the Dioscuri at Argos, the statue of Heracles at Tiryns, and the xoanon of Artemis Munychia at Sicyon.

But why do I dwell on these, when I can show you the great daemon himself, who he was, the one whom we hear was pre-eminently deemed worthy of reverence by all, the one whom they have dared to call “not made by hands,” the Egyptian Sarapis? Some record that he was sent as a thank offering by the people of Sinope to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of the Egyptians, who had won their favor when, worn down by famine, they sent for grain from Egypt; and that this xoanon was a statue of Pluto. Ptolemy received the statue and set it up on the promontory now called Rhacotis, where the temple of Sarapis is honored, and the place is near those parts. Ptolemy brought his concubine Blistiche, who had died at Canopus, and buried her beneath the shrine just mentioned. Others say that Sarapis was an image from Pontus, and was brought to Alexandria with festal honors. Isidorus alone says the statue was brought from the people of Seleucia near Antioch, when they too were in a famine and were fed by Ptolemy. But Athenodorus the son of Sandon, wishing to make Sarapis ancient, fell somehow into refuting himself, proving that it was a manufactured statue. He says that Sesostris, the Egyptian king, having subdued most of the nations among the Greeks, returned to Egypt and brought with him skilled craftsmen. He ordered them to fashion his forefather Osiris lavishly; and the craftsman Bryaxis made it, not the Athenian, but another of the same name as that Bryaxis. He used for the work a mixed and varied material: he had filings of gold and silver, of bronze and iron and lead, and of tin as well; not one of the Egyptian stones was lacking: fragments of sapphire and hematite, of emerald, and of topaz too. He ground them all fine, mixed them, and colored them with dark blue, which is why the color of the statue is rather dark; and kneading it all with the drug left over from the funeral of Osiris and Apis, he molded Sarapis. His name too hints at the shared funeral and at his fashioning from the burial, being compounded from Osiris and Apis: Osirapis.

The emperor of the Romans has reverently deified another new god in Egypt, and nearly among the Greeks as well: his beloved, a youth of great beauty. He consecrated Antinous as Zeus did Ganymede; for desire that has no fear is not easily restrained. And now people worship the sacred nights of Antinous, which the lover who kept vigil with him knew to be shameful. Why do you count as a god for me one who is honored for sexual immorality? Why did you order him to be mourned as a son? Why do you tell of his beauty? Beauty withered by outrage is shameful. Do not play the tyrant over beauty, man, nor outrage the young man in his bloom; keep it pure, that it may be beautiful. Be a king of beauty, not a tyrant; let it remain free. Then I will recognize your beauty, when you have kept the image pure; then I will worship beauty, when it is the true archetype of beautiful things.

Now there is a tomb of the beloved, a temple of Antinous, and a city. Just as temples, I think, so tombs too are admired: pyramids, mausoleums, and labyrinths, other temples of the dead, as those are tombs of the gods. I will set before you as teacher the prophetess Sibyl: “not an oracle-speaker of lying Phoebus, whom vain men called a god and falsely named a seer, but of the great God, whom the hands of men did not fashion, like speechless idols of polished stone.” She calls the temples ruins, foretelling that the temple of Ephesian Artemis will be swallowed up “by chasms and earthquakes,” thus: “Ephesus, laid low, will wail, weeping by her banks, and seeking a temple that no longer has a dweller.” And she says that the temple of Isis and Sarapis in Egypt will be thrown down and burned: “Isis, thrice-wretched goddess, you remain by the streams of the Nile, alone, a speechless maenad on the sands of Acheron”; and then, further on: “And you, Sarapis, lying on many idle stones, you lie, a mighty ruin, in thrice-wretched Egypt.” But if you will not listen to the prophetess, hear at least your own philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, reproaching the statues for their lack of sense: “And they pray to these statues, as if one were to chat with houses.” Are they not monstrous who pray to stones, and then set them up before their gates as if they were active, worshiping Hermes as a god and setting up Agyieus as doorkeeper? If they insult them as senseless, why do they worship them as gods?

And if they think the statues have sense, why do they set them up as doorkeepers? The Romans, who ascribe their greatest successes to Fortune and think her the greatest goddess, carried her into a latrine and set her up there, assigning the privy to the goddess as a worthy temple. But senseless stone and wood and precious gold care nothing at all for the savor of burnt flesh, nor for blood, nor for smoke, by which they are honored and smoked and blackened; nor for honor, nor for insult. The statues are more worthless than any animal. How senseless things have come to be deified leaves me at a loss, and I pity those who wander in this folly as wretched. For even if some animals do not have all the senses, such as worms and caterpillars, and those that appear maimed from their very birth, like moles and the shrew-mouse, which Nicander calls “blind and dreadful,” yet they are better than these xoana and statues, which are completely dumb; for they have at least one sense, hearing, say, or touch, or one corresponding to smell or taste; but the statues share in not a single sense. There are many animals that have neither sight nor hearing nor even a voice, such as the race of oysters; yet they live and grow, and are even affected by the moon. But the statues are idle, inactive, and senseless; they are bound, nailed, and fastened on; they are cast, filed, sawed, polished, and carved. The sculptors dishonor the dumb earth, changing it from its proper nature and by their art persuading people to worship it; and the god-makers worship, to my mind at least, not gods and daemons, but earth and art, which is what statues are. For a statue is truly dead matter shaped by a craftsman's hand; but for us the image is not something perceptible made of perceptible matter, but something perceived by the mind. God, the only true God, is perceived by the mind, not by the senses.

And yet, in actual emergencies, the superstitious, the worshipers of stones, learning by experience not to revere senseless matter, give way to sheer necessity and are undone by their superstition. And though they despise the statues, not wishing to appear to disregard them altogether, they are convicted by the very gods to whom the statues are dedicated. Dionysius the younger, the tyrant, took off the golden cloak of Zeus in Sicily and ordered a woolen one to be put on him, saying wittily that this was better than the golden one, being lighter in summer and warmer in winter. Antiochus of Cyzicus, being short of money, ordered the golden statue of Zeus, fifteen cubits high, to be melted down and a similar statue of some other, cheaper material, covered with gold leaf, to be set up again in its place. Swallows and most birds fly into the statues and foul them, caring nothing for Olympian Zeus, or Epidaurian Asclepius, or Athena Polias, or Egyptian Sarapis; yet not even from them do you learn the senselessness of the statues. There are also evildoers or enemy invaders who, out of greed, have ravaged the temples and plundered the offerings, or even melted down the statues themselves.

And if some Cambyses or Darius or other madman attempted something of the kind, and if someone killed the Egyptian Apis, I laugh because he killed their god, but I am indignant if he did wrong for the sake of gain. So I will willingly pass over this kind of crime, considering it the work of greed and not a proof of the powerlessness of idols. But fire and earthquakes, at least, are not greedy for gain, and they are no more afraid of or abashed by the daemons and the statues than the waves are by the pebbles heaped on the beaches. I know a fire that convicts and heals superstition; if you are willing to cease from your folly, the fire will light your way. This fire burned down the temple at Argos together with its priestess Chrysis, and the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the second time after the Amazons; it has often consumed the Capitol at Rome; nor did it spare the temple of Sarapis in the city of the Alexandrians. At Athens it threw down the temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus; and the temple of Apollo at Delphi was first carried off by a storm and then destroyed by a discerning fire. This is shown to you as a prelude to what the fire promises. And do not the makers of statues shame the sensible among you into despising matter? Phidias the Athenian wrote on the finger of Olympian Zeus, “Pantarkes is beautiful”; for to him it was not Zeus who was beautiful, but his beloved. Praxiteles, as Posidippus makes clear in his book on Cnidus, when he was making the statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, made her resemble the form of Cratina, his mistress, so that the wretched people might worship Praxiteles's mistress. When Phryne, the courtesan of Thespiae, was in her bloom, all the painters copied their images of Aphrodite from the beauty of Phryne, just as the stonecutters at Athens modeled their Hermes statues on Alcibiades. It remains for your judgment to decide whether you want to worship courtesans too.

Moved by this, I think, the ancient kings, despising these myths, since there was no danger from human beings, openly proclaimed themselves gods, teaching by this that the earlier gods too had been made immortal because of their fame. Ceyx the son of Aeolus was called Zeus by his wife Alcyone, and Alcyone in turn was called Hera by her husband. Ptolemy the Fourth was called Dionysus; Mithridates of Pontus was also called Dionysus; and Alexander wished to be thought the son of Ammon and to be represented by the sculptors with horns, eager to outrage the beautiful face of a man with a horn. And not only kings, but private persons too exalted themselves with divine titles, like Menecrates the physician, who was called Zeus. Why need I list Alexarchus (he was a grammarian by profession, and, as Aristus of Salamis records, he dressed himself up as the Sun)? Why need I mention Nicagoras (he was from Zeleia by birth and lived in the time of Alexander; Nicagoras was called Hermes and used the dress of Hermes, as he himself testifies)? For whole nations and cities with all their people, putting on flattery, make the myths about the gods cheap, as men dress themselves up as equal to the gods, puffed up with vainglory, and vote themselves extravagant honors. At one time they decreed that Philip of Macedon, from Pella, the son of Amyntas, should be worshiped in the Cynosarges, the one “with the broken collarbone and the maimed leg,” who had lost an eye; at another they proclaimed Demetrius too a god. Where he dismounted from his horse on entering Athens, there is a temple of Demetrius the Descender, and there are altars to him everywhere; and a marriage with Athena was prepared for him by the Athenians. But he disdained the goddess, being unable to marry the statue; he went up to the acropolis with Lamia the courtesan and defiled the bridal chamber of Athena, showing the old virgin …

… the postures of the young courtesan. There is nothing to resent, then, even in Hippo, who immortalized his own death. This Hippo ordered the following elegiac couplet to be inscribed on his tomb: “This is the tomb of Hippo, whom Fate made equal to the immortal gods when he had perished.” Well done, Hippo! You show us the error of humankind. For if they did not believe you when you were speaking, let them become the disciples of a dead man. This is Hippo's oracle; let us understand it. Those whom you worship were once men, and then they died; but myth and time have honored them. For somehow what is present tends to be despised through familiarity, while what is past, being removed from immediate testing by the obscurity of time, is honored through fiction; the one is disbelieved, the other even admired. So, for example, the dead of long ago, magnified by the long duration of error, are thought gods by later generations. The proof of this for you is your very mysteries, your festivals, the bonds and wounds and weeping gods: “Ah me, that it is fated for Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, to be overcome by Patroclus son of Menoetius.” The will of Zeus has been overpowered, and your Zeus, defeated, wails for Sarpedon. So you yourselves have rightly called them idols and daemons, since Homer, honoring Athena herself and the other gods with a bad name, called them daemons: “And she went to Olympus, to the house of aegis-bearing Zeus, among the other daemons.”

How then can idols and daemons still be gods, when they are truly abominable and unclean spirits, admitted by all to be earthly and filthy, weighed down below, “rolling about tombs and monuments,” where they appear dimly as “shadowy phantoms”? These are your gods: idols, shades, and besides these those “lame and wrinkled, squinting-eyed” Prayers, daughters of Thersites rather than of Zeus; so that Bion, it seems to me, put it wittily: how could people rightly ask Zeus for fine children, which he was not able to provide even for himself? Alas for such godlessness! You bury, as far as in you lies, the pure being, and you have heaped up in tombs what is undefiled and holy, robbing the truly existing being of its divinity. Why have you assigned the privileges of God to those who are not gods? Why have you left heaven and honored earth? What else is gold or silver or adamant or iron or bronze or ivory or precious stones? Are they not earth and from earth? Are not all these things you see the offspring of one mother, the earth? Why then, you foolish and empty-minded (for I will repeat myself), have you blasphemed the place above the heavens and dragged piety down to the ground, fashioning earthly gods for yourselves, and, by pursuing these created things instead of the uncreated God, fallen into deeper darkness? Parian marble is beautiful, but it is not yet Poseidon; ivory is beautiful, but it is not yet the Olympian. Matter always needs art, but God needs nothing. Art has advanced, matter has been clothed with a shape; and the richness of the substance makes it worth carrying off for gain, but it becomes worthy of reverence only by its shape. Your statue is gold, it is wood, it is stone; if you think of it from the beginning, it is earth, which has received its form from the craftsman. But I have practiced treading on earth, not worshiping it; for it is not right for me ever to entrust the hopes of the soul to soulless things.

We must go, then, as close as possible to the statues, so that the error may be exposed as familiar from their very appearance; for the forms of the statues are very clearly stamped with the character of the daemons. If anyone goes around and looks at the paintings and statues, he will at once recognize your gods from their disgraceful figures: Dionysus by his dress, Hephaestus by his craft, Deo by her misfortune, Ino by her veil, Poseidon by his trident, Zeus by the swan; the pyre points out Heracles; and if one sees a naked woman painted, he understands “golden” Aphrodite. So that famous Pygmalion of Cyprus fell in love with an ivory statue; the statue was of Aphrodite, and it was naked. The Cypriot is conquered by its form and has intercourse with the statue; Philostephanus records this. Another Aphrodite, at Cnidus, was of stone and was beautiful; another man fell in love with her and had intercourse with the stone. Posidippus records it: the first in his book on Cyprus, the second in his book on Cnidus. So powerful was art to deceive, becoming a procurer that led amorous men into the pit. The craftsman's art is effective, but it cannot deceive a rational being, nor those who have lived according to reason. Doves, indeed, have flown to painted doves because of the likeness, and horses have neighed at well-painted mares. They say a girl fell in love with an image, and a handsome youth with the Cnidian statue; but the eyes of the spectators had been deceived by the art. For no one in his right mind would have embraced a goddess, or been buried with a dead woman, or fallen in love with a daemon and a stone. But art deceives you with another kind of sorcery: if not by leading you to love the statues and paintings, then to honor and worship them. The painting is a likeness: let the art be praised, but let it not deceive the human being as if it were the truth.

The horse stands quiet, the dove is motionless, its wing idle; but the cow of Daedalus, made of wood, caught a wild bull, and art, deceiving the beast, compelled it to mount a woman in love. Such frenzy have the arts, practicing their evil craft, produced in the foolish. The keepers and trainers of monkeys have admired them because none of the wax or clay figures and girls' dolls deceives them; but you will turn out to be worse even than monkeys, devoting yourselves to little statues of stone, wood, gold, and ivory, and to paintings. The makers of such deadly playthings for you are the stonecutters and sculptors, and the painters, carpenters, and poets, who bring in a great crowd of this kind: in the fields Satyrs and Pans, in the woods the mountain Nymphs and the Hamadryads, and indeed around the waters and rivers and springs the Naiads, and around the sea the Nereids. The magi, moreover, boast of daemons as servants of their own impiety, enrolling them as their household slaves, having made them slaves by the compulsion of their incantations. So the marriages, begettings, and childbirths of the gods that are recorded, the adulteries that are sung, the feasts presented in comedy, and the laughter brought in at drinking parties urge me to cry out, even if I wish to keep silent. Alas for such godlessness! You have made heaven a stage, the divine has become a drama for you, and you have made a comedy of what is holy with the masks of daemons, turning true religion into a satyr play through superstition.

“But he, playing the lyre, struck up a beautiful song.” Sing us, Homer, that beautiful voice: “of the love of Ares and fair-crowned Aphrodite, how they first lay together in the house of Hephaestus in secret; and he gave many gifts, and shamed the bed and couch of lord Hephaestus.” Stop the song, Homer! It is not beautiful; it teaches adultery. We have declined to commit sexual immorality even with our ears. For we, we are the ones who carry about the image of God in this living and moving statue, the human being: an image that dwells with us, counsels us, converses with us, shares our hearth, suffers with us, suffers for us. We have been made an offering to God for Christ's sake: “We are the chosen race, the royal priesthood, a holy nation, a special people, who once were not a people but are now the people of God”; we who, as John says, are not “from below,” but have learned everything from him who came from above; we who have understood the plan of God; we who have practiced “walking in newness of life.”

But most people do not think so. Casting off shame and fear, they paint the perversions of the daemons in their homes. Devoted to certain painted panels hung up high, they have decorated their bedrooms with licentiousness, thinking lewdness piety; and lying on the couch, even in the midst of their embraces, they gaze at that naked Aphrodite, bound in the act of intercourse, and at the amorous bird fluttering around Leda. Delighting in the depiction of effeminacy, they engrave it on their signet rings, using a seal that matches …

… the licentiousness of Zeus. These are the models of your self-indulgence, these are the theologies of your outrage, these are the teachings of gods who join you in sexual immorality: “for what each wishes, that he also believes,” as the Athenian orator says. And what are your other images like: little Pans, naked girls, drunken satyrs, and erect members, laid bare in paintings and convicted by their own incontinence! Now you look openly, as a public spectacle, at the depicted postures of every licentiousness and are not ashamed; still more, you keep them set up, like the images of your gods, dedicating pillars of shamelessness at home, painting the postures of Philaenis just as you do the labors of Heracles. We proclaim that not only the use of these things, but the very sight and hearing of them, must be forgotten. Your ears have become harlots, your eyes have committed sexual immorality, and, strangest of all, your gaze has committed adultery before the embrace. You who have done violence to the human being and have shamefully broken off what is divine in God's handiwork, you disbelieve everything so that you may give yourselves up to passion: you believe the idols, emulating their incontinence, but you disbelieve God, because you cannot bear self-control. You have hated what is better and honored what is worse, becoming spectators of virtue but competitors in vice.

“Blessed,” then, in a word, are all those alone, with one accord, as the Sibyl says, “who, when they see them, will reject all temples and altars, vain foundations of dumb stones, and stone xoana and statues made by hands, defiled with the blood of living creatures and with sacrifices of four-footed and two-footed beasts, of birds, and slaughterings of wild animals.” Indeed, we are openly forbidden to practice a deceptive art. “For you shall not make,” says the prophet, “the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on the earth below.” Could we still suppose the Demeter and Kore and the mystic Iacchus of Praxiteles to be gods, or the works of Lysippus, or the hands of Apelles, which have clothed matter with the form of divine glory? But while you take pains that the statue may be made as beautiful as possible, you give no thought that you yourselves may not, through your senselessness, be made like the statues. Very clearly and concisely the prophetic word convicts this custom: “All the gods of the nations are images of daemons; but God made the heavens …”

“… made” the heavens and the things in heaven. From this some go astray, I do not know how, and worship a divine work of art, but not God: the sun and the moon and the rest of the chorus of the stars, unreasonably supposing these to be gods, though they are instruments of time. “For by his word they were established, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.” Human art makes houses and ships and cities and paintings; but how could I tell all that God makes? Look at the whole world: it is his work; heaven and sun and angels and human beings are “the works of his fingers.” How great is the power of God! His mere will is the making of the world; for God alone made it, since he alone is truly God. He creates by his bare willing, and their coming into being follows upon his merely wishing it. Here the chorus of philosophers goes astray: they agree that the human being was made, very beautifully, for the contemplation of heaven, yet they worship the things that appear in heaven and are grasped by sight. For even if the works in heaven are not made by human beings, they have at least been made for human beings. Let none of you worship the sun, but long for the maker of the sun; let him not deify the world, but seek the creator of the world. The only refuge left, it seems, for one who is going to reach the doors of salvation is divine wisdom; from there, as from a sacred sanctuary, the human being who hastens to salvation can no longer be carried off by any of the daemons.