Exhortation to the Greeks 5.65

The followers of Heraclitus, who revere fire as the origin of all things, have suffered the same thing; for others have named this fire Hephaestus. The magi of the Persians have honored fire, and many of those who live in Asia, and the Macedonians too, as Diogenes says in the first book of his Persian History. Why should I list for you the Sauromatae, whom Nymphodorus, in his Barbarian Customs, records as worshiping fire, or the Persians and the Medes and the magi? Dinon says that they sacrifice in the open air, considering fire and water the only images of the gods. I have not hidden their ignorance either. For even if they think they are escaping error as far as possible, they slip into another deception: they have not supposed wood and stones to be images of the gods, as the Greeks do, nor ibises and ichneumons, as the Egyptians do, but fire and water, as the philosophers do. Yet many ages later, Berossus shows in the third book of his Chaldaean History, they came to worship statues in human form; Artaxerxes, the son of Darius Ochus, introduced this: he was the first to set up the statue of Aphrodite Anaitis in Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana, and taught the Persians and Bactrians, Damascus and Sardis, to worship it. Let the philosophers, then, acknowledge as their teachers the Persians or the Sauromatae or the magi, from whom they learned the godlessness of the first principles they revere, ignorant of the supreme Ruler, the maker of all things and the creator of the first principles themselves, God who has no beginning, and worshiping instead these “weak and beggarly elements,” as the apostle says, which were made for the service of human beings.