Exhortation to the Greeks 4.50

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?