Preparation for the Gospel

Christianity, whatever it may be, I have thought it right to set out for those who do not know it, by means of the present treatise, which promises to contain the Demonstration of the Gospel. This treatise I have addressed to you, Theodotus, divine treasure among bishops, beloved of God and holy head, with prayers, in the hope that I may obtain help from you, as you assist me in great matters by your God-loving priestly ministrations on my behalf toward the subject I have set before me: the teaching of the gospel.

But first of all it is right to explain what this word we use, "gospel," means. It brings to all people the good news of the presence of the highest and greatest goods, long ago foretold and recently shining out upon all. It does not offer wealth that is blind, nor this small and much-suffering life, nor the things that belong to the body and to corruption, but the things that are dear and akin to souls which possess an intellectual nature; on these even bodies depend, following them like shadows.

The chief of these goods would be piety: not the falsely named and much-wandering kind, but that which bears the name together with the truth. And this is the turning upward toward the one and only God, who is truly confessed and truly is, and the life lived in accordance with him. From this comes friendship with him, and on that friendship follows the end that is truly dear to God and thrice blessed, hung from above, from the higher things, steered toward them, and ending once again in them.

What then could be more blessed than this good and all-happy friendship with God? Is not he himself the steward and giver of life and light and truth and all good things to all? Has not he himself encompassed the cause of the being and the life of all things? What, then, could still be lacking to one who has gained his friendship? What could he want who has made the creator of good things his own? Or in what could he be the poorer who has enrolled the great protector and universal King of the universe as his father and guardian?

No, it is impossible to name anything in which the one who draws near in disposition to God the universal King, and has been counted worthy of his all-blessed friendship through piety grounded in knowledge, would not fare well, in soul and body alike and in all external things.

This good and saving friendship of human beings with God, then, the Word of God, sent down from above from the all-good God like a ray of light of boundless greatness, announces as good news to all people. He does not summon them from here or there only, but from everywhere, out of all nations, urging them to come to the God of the universe and to hasten and receive the gift with all eagerness of soul: Greeks and barbarians alike, men together with women and infants, poor and rich, wise and unlearned; nor does he despise the class of slaves in his calling,

because the Father, having constituted the being and nature of all as one, rightly also counted all worthy of one and the same generous gift, granting knowledge of himself and friendship with himself to all who are willing to obey and who gladly embrace the grace.

This friendship with his Father the Word of Christ came to announce as good news to the whole world: "For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them," as the divine oracles teach; and "coming," it says, "he proclaimed the good news of peace to those far off and peace to those near."

These things the sons of the Hebrews, inspired by God, foretold long ago to the whole world. One cries aloud: "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him; for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he rules over the nations"; and again: "Say among the nations that the Lord reigns; for he has set the world right, and it shall not be shaken." Another says: "The Lord shall appear among them and shall utterly destroy all the gods of the nations of the earth, and they shall worship him, each from his own place."

These things, laid up long ago in divine oracles, have now been made plain to us ourselves through the teaching of our Savior Jesus Christ. So the Word, lately come to us from heaven, rightly announces to us the good news of the knowledge of God for all the nations, which was proclaimed of old and expected by those not unacquainted with these things, showing that what is accomplished in deeds agrees with the voices of the ancients.

But why should I hurry on and in my eagerness outrun the sequence of the intervening arguments, when I ought to take things up from the beginning and clear away every obstacle? For some have supposed that Christianity has no reason to give for itself, but that those who desire the name confirm their opinion by an unreasoning faith and an unexamined assent. They say that no one can offer, by clear demonstration, any proof of the truth of what is promised, but that those who come to it are required to attend to faith alone, and that this is why they are called "faithful" (pistoi), because of their uncritical and untested faith. So, setting out on this treatise of the Demonstration of the Gospel, I think it right, as a preparation for the whole subject, first to discuss briefly the questions that might reasonably be raised against us both by Greeks and by those of the circumcision, and by everyone who inquires into our affairs with careful examination.

For in this way I think my account will proceed in order to the more complete teaching of the Demonstration of the Gospel and to the understanding of the deeper doctrines, if the matters of the Preparation come first on the road, holding the place of elementary instruction and introduction and suited to those from the nations who are just coming to us. What follows will hand on, to those who have passed beyond this stage and have already prepared their disposition for receiving higher things, accurate knowledge of the most essential points of the mystical dispensation of God concerning our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ.

Let us begin, then, the Preparation, bringing forward the things that might reasonably be said against us both by Greeks and by those of the circumcision, and by everyone who examines our affairs with careful inquiry.

For in the first place someone might reasonably be at a loss to know who we are who have come forward to write: whether Greeks or barbarians, or something between these; and what we claim to be, not in name, since that is plain to all, but in the manner and choice of our life. For they see that we neither think as the Greeks nor practice the customs of the barbarians.

What then, they ask, could be the strangeness about us, and what is the novelty of our life? How could those not be in every way impious and atheists who have abandoned their ancestral customs, by which every nation and every city is held together? Or what good can people reasonably hope for who have set themselves up as enemies and foes of what saves them, and have thrust away their benefactors? And what else are they doing but fighting against the gods?

And what pardon will be granted to those who have turned away from the beings honored as gods from all ages among all Greeks and barbarians, in cities and in the countryside, with all kinds of sacred rites, initiations, and mysteries, by kings, lawgivers, and philosophers alike, and have chosen instead what is impious and godless among human beings? To what punishments would they not justly be subjected, who are fugitives from their ancestral ways and have become zealots for the foreign myths of the Jews, which are slandered by all?

Must it not be a sign of utter depravity and levity lightly to cast aside the customs of one's own people, and with unreasoning and unexamined faith to choose the ways of the impious and of the enemies of all nations; and not even to hold to the God honored among the Jews according to their own customary rites, but to cut out for themselves a new and lonely track in a pathless waste, keeping neither the ways of the Greeks nor those of the Jews?

These are the difficulties that one of the Greeks, knowing nothing true either of his own affairs or of ours, might reasonably raise against us. But the sons of the Hebrews too might find fault with us, if, being foreigners and of another race, we make use of their books, which do not belong to us at all; and because, as they would say, we shamelessly and brazenly thrust ourselves in, and try by force to thrust out the members of their own household and their kinsmen from their ancestral possessions.

For if there is a Christ who is foretold, it was the prophets of the Jews who proclaimed his coming beforehand, and they announced that he would come as redeemer and king of the Jews, not of foreign nations. And if the Scriptures contain any other brighter promises, these too, they say, were spoken to the Jews, and we misunderstand them, and not to our credit.

And it is very absurd, they say, that we eagerly snatch up the rebukes against that nation for its sins, but pass over in silence the promises of good things foretold to them in turn, or rather wrest them by force and transfer them to ourselves, plainly grasping at what is not ours and doing nothing more than deceiving ourselves.

But the most unreasonable thing of all, they say, is that, though we do not keep the law's ordinances as they do but openly transgress them, we draw to ourselves the better rewards promised to those who keep the laws.

Since these difficulties may reasonably be raised against us first of all, come, let us call upon the God of the universe through our Savior, his very Word, as through a high priest, and clear up the first of the points proposed, first showing to be slanderers those who declare that we have nothing to establish by demonstration but hold to an unreasoning faith.

We shall refute this at once and not from far off: from the demonstrations we use toward those who come to us for instruction in our teaching, from the counter-arguments we make against those who oppose us in the more reasoned inquiries, and from the discourses, unwritten and written, which we take pains to hold, both privately with each inquirer and publicly before the crowds;

yes, and also through the writings now in hand, which contain the whole treatment of the Demonstration of the Gospel. In it the present work announces to all people all the grace from God and the heavenly benefaction, confirming by reasoning, through very many clear demonstrations, the dispensation concerning our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God.

Many of those before us have devoted great effort to many other kinds of writing: sometimes composing refutations and counter-arguments against the arguments opposed to us; sometimes interpreting the inspired and sacred Scriptures in exegetical commentaries and in homilies on particular passages; and sometimes championing our doctrines more combatively.

But the purpose now in hand is worked out in a way of our own. First of all, indeed, the holy apostle Paul, rejecting deceitful and sophistical plausibilities and using demonstrations beyond dispute, says somewhere: "And my word and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power." To which he adds: "Yet we speak wisdom among the perfect, but not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away; but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom." And again: "Our sufficiency," he says, "is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant."

Rightly, then, all of us have been commanded to be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks us for a reason for the hope that is in us. Hence one may find among recent writers countless demonstrations, most wise and clear, with syllogisms, written on behalf of our doctrine, and not a few commentaries composed on the sacred and inspired Scriptures, establishing by geometrical demonstrations the truthfulness and infallibility of those who from the beginning proclaimed to us the word of godliness.

Yet all words are superfluous where the deeds are clearer and more evident, deeds which the divine and heavenly power of our Savior still plainly displays even now, as it announces to all people the good news of the inspired and heavenly life.

For instance, he foretold that his teaching would be preached throughout the whole inhabited world of mankind for a testimony to all the nations; and by divine foreknowledge he declared that the church which would one day be formed by his power out of all the nations, though at the time when he became man it was not yet seen nor established, would be invincible and undismayed, would never be conquered by death, but would stand and remain unshaken, as founded and rooted by his power on an unshaken and unbreakable rock. The fulfillment of this prediction, beyond all argument, would rightly stop every unbridled mouth of those prepared to be shamelessly impudent.

For who would not confess that the prediction is true, when the facts all but cry aloud so plainly that it was the power of God, and not human nature, which saw beforehand that these things would come to pass in this way, foretold them, and accomplished them in deed?

At any rate, the report of his gospel has filled the whole world that the sun looks upon and has run through all the nations, and the proclamation about him still grows and increases even now, in accordance with his own words.

And his church, foretold by name, stands mightily rooted, raised aloft to the vaults of heaven by the prayers of holy and God-loving souls, glorified day by day, and flashing out to all the intellectual and divine light of the piety he proclaimed. It is in no way defeated by its enemies or yielding to them; it does not give way even to the gates of death, because of that one saying which he himself declared: "Upon the rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it."

And by collecting in a work of its own countless other things said and foretold by our Savior, and showing that the outcomes of events agree with his divine foreknowledge, we demonstrate beyond dispute the truth of what we believe about him.

Besides all these, no small demonstration of our truth is also the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures. In them the prophets among the Hebrews, countless years before, proclaimed the promise of good things to all mortal life, mentioned by name the title of Christ, and foretold his coming among human beings. They announced the new manner of his teaching, which has run through all the nations, and predicted the unbelief and opposition of the Jewish nation toward him, what they would do against him, and the grievous things that would come upon them immediately afterward and not long after: I mean the final siege of their royal metropolis, the complete overthrow of their kingdom, their dispersion among all the nations, and their slavery under enemies and foes. These things they are seen to have suffered after the coming of our Savior, in accordance with the predictions.

Besides this, who would not be amazed to hear the same prophets, after the coming of Christ and the falling away of the Jews, announcing in bright and clear words the good news of the calling of the nations? This too has plainly come to pass, in accordance with the prophecies, through the teaching of our Savior.

Through him countless people of every race have turned away from the error of idols and accepted the true knowledge and worship of the God over all, all but confirming the oracles of the ancients, both the others and in particular the one spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: "O Lord my God, to you nations shall come from the end of the earth and shall say: How false were the idols our fathers acquired, and there was no profit in them. Shall a man make gods for himself? And these are not gods."

All these things confirm the account of our affairs: that it was not devised by human impulse but foreknown by God, proclaimed beforehand by God through the written oracles, and, much more, set before all people by God through our Savior; and that it is again strengthened and upheld by God. For though it has been driven hard through so many years by invisible demons and by the visible rulers of each age, it shines out all the more, excels and grows day by day, and multiplies far more, since the help from above, from the God of the universe, plainly gives to the name and teaching of our Savior a strength that cannot be fought, that is invincible, and that conquers its enemies.

And the immediate benefit for the good life which it has set before all people, not only from his plain words but also from a secret power, how could this fail to prove his divine power? For it was the work of a divine and secret power that, together with his word and with his teaching about the sole rule of the one God over all, the human race was set free at once both from the much-erring working of demons and from the rule of many over the nations.

In ancient times, at any rate, countless kings and local rulers held power in each nation; in the cities some were governed by democracies, others by many rulers; and as a result, naturally, wars of every kind arose, nations dashing against nations and continually rising up against their neighbors, ravaging and being ravaged, and marching out to besiege one another. So for these reasons all, everyone, both those who lived in cities and those who tilled the fields, were taught the arts of war from childhood and constantly carried swords on the highways and in villages and fields.

But when the Christ of God came, of whom it had been said long before through the prophets, "In his days righteousness shall spring up, and abundance of peace," and "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles, and nation shall not take up sword against nation, and they shall no more learn to make war," the deeds followed in accordance with the predictions. At once all the many governments of the Romans were removed, Augustus becoming sole ruler at the same time as the appearing of our Savior. From then until now you would not see, as before, cities at war with cities, nor nation fighting against nation, nor life worn away in the old confusion.

And yet how could one who considers it fail to wonder why, in ancient times, when the demons tyrannized over all the nations and human beings paid them great worship, people were driven to frenzy by the gods themselves and inflamed to wars against one another, so that at one time Greeks fought against Greeks, at another Egyptians against Egyptians, Syrians against Syrians, and Romans against Romans, enslaving one another and wearing one another out with sieges, as the histories of the ancients about these things show; but together with the most pious and most peaceful teaching of our Savior the destruction of polytheistic error was accomplished, and the conflicts among the nations at once found rest from their old evils? This I consider the very greatest proof of the divine and secret power of our Savior.

Of the benefit that appears from his words you would see a clear example if you considered that never before since time began, nor by any of the famous men of old, but only by his words and by his teaching spread through the whole inhabited world, have the customs of all the nations been set right, even those that were formerly savage and barbarous: so that the Persians who have become his disciples no longer marry their mothers; the Scythians no longer eat human flesh, because of the word of Christ which has come even to them; other barbarian peoples no longer have lawless intercourse with daughters and sisters; men no longer rage with lust for men and pursue pleasures contrary to nature; those who formerly did so no longer expose their own dead to dogs and birds; they no longer strangle the aged, as before; they no longer feast on the flesh of their dearest dead, after the ancient custom; they no longer offer human sacrifices to the demons as to gods, as in ancient times, nor slaughter those dearest to them in the belief that it is piety.

For these things and countless others like them formerly corrupted human life. The Massagetae and Derbices are reported to have thought the most wretched of their people those who died of their own accord; therefore they sacrificed beforehand and feasted on the aged among those dearest to them. The Tibareni threw their nearest old relatives alive over cliffs. The Hyrcanians and Caspians exposed them to birds and dogs, the one people while living, the other when dead. The Scythians buried alive with the dead, and slaughtered on the pyres, those whom the dead had most loved. And the Bactrians threw their aged to the dogs while still alive.

But these things were so long ago, in former times; now they are no longer the same, since the one saving law of the power of the gospel has put an end to the savage and inhuman disease of them all.

And no longer to regard as gods either dead and dumb wooden images, or the wicked demons who work in them, or the parts of the visible world, or the souls of mortals long departed, or the most harmful of the irrational animals; but instead of all these, through the one gospel teaching of our Savior, for Greeks and barbarians alike who devote themselves genuinely and not in pretense to his word, to come to such a height of philosophy as to worship, hymn, and proclaim as God only the most high God, the very one who is beyond all things, the universal King and Lord of heaven and earth, maker of the sun and stars and of the whole universe; and to live strictly, and to be so taught as to be disciplined even in the look of the eyes, and to entertain no licentious thought from looking with desire, but to cut off by the root from the mind itself every shameful passion: how could all this fail to contribute to the good life of all?

And what of not even needing to keep oaths, much less to swear falsely, because they learn from him not to swear at all, but in all things to be free of falsehood and to speak the truth, so as to be content with "yes" and "no," making their resolve firmer than any oath? And not to be careless even in mere trivial words and ordinary conversation, but to be exact even in these, so as to let slip from the tongue neither falsehood nor abuse nor any shameful or indecent word, because of his further command in which he said, "For every idle word you shall give account in the day of judgment": to what heights of the philosophical life does this belong?

And further, that whole tens of thousands at once, men and women and children, slaves and free, obscure and famous, barbarians and Greeks alike, in every place and city and country, among all the nations under the sun, come to the teaching of such lessons as we have just learned and give their ears to the words, being persuaded to master not only licentious deeds but also shameful thoughts of the mind, and the belly and what is below the belly; that the whole human race is trained in a divine and pious discipline, learning to bear nobly and with a lofty spirit the insults of those who rise up against them, and not to retaliate on the wicked in kind, but to become superior to anger and wrath and every frenzied desire; yes, and also to share their possessions with the poor and needy, to welcome every human being as of one kin, and to recognize the one considered a stranger as, by the law of nature, a member of their household and a brother.

Gathering all these things together, then, how could anyone fail to confess that our doctrine has announced as good news to all people the greatest and truly good things, and has given to human life an immediate advantage for living well?

And what do you think of its having prepared the whole human race, not only Greeks but also the wildest barbarians and those who live at the ends of the earth, to give up irrational savagery and to take up philosophical beliefs?

For example, the beliefs about the immortality of the soul and about the life with God laid up for those dear to God after their departure from here, for the sake of which they have learned to despise this temporary life. So it has shown to be mere children those who were ever celebrated for philosophy, and that much-talked-of death, sung on the lips of all the philosophers, to be a plaything; for among us women and mere children, and barbarian men of seemingly low station, by the power and help of our Savior have shown the doctrine of the immortality of the soul to be true by deeds before words.

And what of the fact that all people in general, in all the nations, are taught from the lessons of our Savior to think soundly and firmly about the providence of God as overseeing all things; that every soul learns the doctrine of the place of judgment and of God's judgment, and to live with care and to be on guard against the practices of vice?

You would recognize the sum of the first and greatest benefit of the saving word if you considered the superstitious error of the ancient idolatry, by which the whole human race was formerly worn down under the compulsion of demons. Out of it, as out of the gloomiest darkness, the word by divine power removed Greeks and barbarians alike and brought them all over to the intellectual and most radiant day of the true worship of God the universal King.

Why should we go on at length trying to show that we have not committed ourselves to an unreasoning faith, but to sober and profitable doctrines containing the way of true piety? Since the present work treats precisely this throughout, we urge those who are fit to follow demonstrations by argument, and exhort them to cultivate understanding, to receive the proofs of our doctrines in a more reasoned way, and to be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks us for the reason of our hope.

But since not all are such, and since the Word is a lover of humankind, turning no one away at all but healing every person with fitting remedies and calling even the ignorant and unlearned to the healing of their ways, we rightly, at the introductory stage, lead by the hand toward the pious life the beginners from among the simpler sort, women and children and the common crowd, and give them sound faith as a kind of medicine, implanting in them right beliefs about God's providence, about the immortality of the soul, and about the life of virtue.

Do we not see the same with those who skillfully heal the sick in body? They themselves have taken up the principles of medicine through long practice and training and perform every operation with reason; but those who come to them for treatment entrust themselves in faith and in hope of better things, though they understand nothing of the science's theory precisely, and depend only on good hope and faith.

The best of physicians comes forward and, like a ruler and master, prescribes with knowledge what must be avoided and what ought to be done; and the patient obeys as if he were a king and lawgiver, believing that what is prescribed will be good for him. So

also pupils receive instruction from teachers, believing that the lesson will be good for them. Yes, and no one would take up philosophy before believing that what it promises will be good for him. One person straightaway chose the doctrines of Epicurus, another emulates the Cynic life, another pursues philosophy after Plato, another after Aristotle, and yet another preferred the Stoic doctrines above all, each embracing what seemed good to him with better hope and faith that it would profit him.

So too people have taken up the ordinary trades, some the soldier's life, others the merchant's, having first taken it on faith that the occupation would give them a living. And the first unions of marriage and partnerships began from good faith in the hope of having children.

Again, someone sails into the unknown, having put out no other anchor of safety than faith alone and good hope. Another farms, casts his seed into the earth, and sits waiting for the turn of the season, believing that what has decayed in the earth and been covered by floods of rain will come to life again as from the dead. Someone sets out from home on a long journey to a foreign land, and again takes along with him hope and faith as good guides.

Since you find, then, that all human life hangs on nothing else than these two, hope and faith, why do you wonder that the higher things of the soul are handed on to some through faith, to those who have no leisure to be taught the details in a more reasoned way, while others may pursue the arguments themselves and learn the demonstrations of what we hold?

But now that we have briefly, and not without use, exercised ourselves in these points, let us go back to the first charge and answer those who ask who we are and where we come from. That we, being Greeks by race and thinking as Greeks, gathered out of all kinds of nations like the picked men of a newly enlisted army, have become deserters from the superstition of our fathers, we ourselves would never deny. And that, devoting ourselves to the Jewish books and gathering from the prophecies among them most of our doctrine, we no longer think it good to live like those of the circumcision, this too we would confess at once.

It is time, therefore, to give the reasons for these things. How else could we appear to have done well in abandoning our ancestral religion, unless we first set it out openly and bring it before the eyes of our readers? For in this way the divine power of the Demonstration of the Gospel would become plain, if it were set before the eyes of all from what evils, and of what kind, it announces the cure.

And how could the reasonableness of our pursuit of the Jewish books appear unless their excellence were also demonstrated? It would be well to explain also on what principle, though we embrace their Scriptures, we decline the like manner of life; and, above all, what is the meaning of our gospel subject, and what Christianity might properly be said to be, being neither Hellenism nor Judaism, but a new and true divine wisdom, bringing its newness from its very name.

Come then, first of all, let us examine the most ancient theologies, and in particular our own ancestral ones, which are still celebrated in every city even now, and the solemn views of the noble philosophers about the constitution of the world and about the gods, so that we may know whether we were right to depart from them or not.

In setting out what is to be shown I shall put forward not my own words, but those of the very people who have been most zealous for the worship of those they call gods, so that the argument may be free of all suspicion that we are making things up.

The prevailing account, then, is that the Phoenicians and Egyptians were the first of all people to declare the sun, the moon, and the stars to be gods, and to be the sole causes of the coming into being and the perishing of all things, and that afterward they introduced into human life the deifications and genealogies of gods that are noised abroad among all.

Before these, no one knew anything more than the phenomena of the sky, except a few men remembered among the Hebrews, who with the purest eyes of the mind looked beyond everything visible and worshipped the maker of the world and creator of all things. They marveled exceedingly at his great wisdom and power, which they perceived from his works, and being persuaded that he alone is God, they rightly proclaimed him alone as God; this true, first, and only piety they received, son from father, and preserved.

But the rest of mankind, falling away from this one true piety and, like children in soul, struck with wonder at the light-bearing bodies of heaven seen by the eyes of the flesh, proclaimed them gods and honored them with sacrifices and acts of homage. They did not build temples or fashion likenesses of mortals in images and wooden statues, but looked up to the ether and to heaven itself, reaching with their souls only as far as the things seen here.

Yet the error of polytheism did not stop at this point for later generations, but drove them into a depth of evils and produced an impiety worse than atheism, the Phoenicians first and then the Egyptians beginning the error. From the Egyptians, they say, Orpheus son of Oeagrus first transferred the Egyptian mysteries and imparted them to the Greeks, just as Cadmus brought the Phoenician rites to the same people, together with the learning of letters; for the Greeks did not yet at that time know the use of letters.

First, then, we shall consider the first cosmogony, how the writers in question have conceived it; next, the first and most ancient superstition of human life; third, the religion of the Phoenicians; fourth, that of the Egyptians; after which, fifth, we shall divide the religion of the Greeks and survey first their old and more mythical error, and then the more dignified and more physical philosophy about the gods. After this we shall go through the account of the wonderful oracles, and then examine the dignified doctrines of the noble philosophy of the Greeks.

When these have been examined, we shall pass on to the religion of the Hebrews, that is, of those who were first and truly Hebrews, and of those who afterward received the name of Jews. After all this, as a seal on the whole, we shall bring forward our own.

Of necessity we shall record the history of all these, so that by setting side by side what is admired in each place the test of the truth may be shown, and it may be plain to readers what kind of things we have left and what kind we have chosen.

But let us come to the first point. From where shall we make our proofs credible? Not from our own writings, so that we may not seem to be doing favors to our own argument; let our witnesses be the Greeks themselves, both those who boast of philosophy and those who have investigated the history of the other nations.

Diodorus of Sicily, then, a man very well known to the most learned of the Greeks, as one who has gathered the whole of history into a single work, the Library, writes, explaining from the beginning the ancient theology of the Egyptians. From him I shall first set out what he has stated at the beginning of his work about the cosmogony of the universe, recording the opinions of the ancient historians in this way.

"What notions about the gods were held by those who first showed how to honor the divine, and what is told in myth about each of the immortals, we shall try for the most part to arrange separately, since this subject requires a long account; but whatever seems to us fitting for the present histories we shall set down in summary, so that nothing worth hearing may be missed.

But concerning the origin of all mankind and the deeds done in the known parts of the inhabited world, we shall write accurately, as far as is possible with matters so ancient, beginning from the earliest times."

"Concerning the first origin of human beings, two views have been held by the most reputable of the natural philosophers and historians. Some of them, supposing the world to be unbegotten and imperishable, declared that the human race too has existed from eternity, its begetting never having had a beginning. Others, holding the world to be begotten and perishable, said that human beings, like it, had their first origin at definite times.

For in the original constitution of the universe heaven and earth had one form, their natures being mingled; but afterward, when the bodies separated from one another, the world took on the whole ordered arrangement seen in it, and the air received continual motion. Its fiery part ran together into the highest regions, since such a nature moves upward because of its lightness; for this reason the sun and the rest of the multitude of stars were caught up in the whole whirl. The muddy and turbid part, together with the mass of moisture, settled in the same place because of its weight; and as it rolled and was continually compressed upon itself, from the moist parts it made the sea, and from the more solid parts the earth, muddy and entirely soft.

This earth at first became firm as the fire of the sun shone upon it; then, as its surface fermented from the heat, some of the moist parts swelled up in many places, and putrid growths covered with thin membranes formed around them. This can be seen happening even now in marshes and swampy places, when, after the ground has been chilled, the air suddenly becomes burning hot, without making the change gradually.

And as the moist parts were brought to life by the heat in the way described, they at once took nourishment by night from the mist that fell from the surrounding air, and by day were made solid by the heat; and at last, when the embryos had reached full growth and the membranes had been burned through and broken open, all kinds of forms of living creatures sprang up.

Of these, those that had shared most in the heat went off to the upper regions and became winged creatures; those that held to an earthy constitution were counted in the class of reptiles and other land animals; and those that had partaken most of a moist nature ran together to the region of their own kind and were called swimming creatures.

And the earth, growing ever more solid under the fire of the sun and the winds, was at last no longer able to generate any of the larger animals, but each kind of living creature was begotten from intercourse with one another.

Euripides too, a disciple of Anaxagoras the natural philosopher, seems not to disagree with what has been said about the nature of the universe. For in his Melanippe he puts it thus: 'Heaven and earth were once one form; but when they were parted asunder from each other, they bring forth all things and give up to the light trees, birds, beasts, the creatures the brine nourishes, and the race of mortals.'"

"Such are the accounts we have received about the first origin of all things. They say that the first human beings to be born lived a disorderly and beastlike life, going out to pasture scattered here and there and eating the most palatable herbs and the fruits that grew of themselves on the trees. When attacked by wild beasts they helped one another, taught by their own advantage; and gathering together out of fear they gradually came to recognize one another's features.

Their voice being without meaning and confused, they gradually articulated words, and by setting up among themselves symbols for each thing they made the expression of everything known to one another.

And as such groups formed throughout the whole inhabited world, not all had a language of the same sound, since each group arranged its words as chance had it. Therefore every kind of language came into being, and the first groups that formed became the original stocks of all the nations.

The first human beings, then, since none of the things useful for life had yet been discovered, lived a laborious life, naked of clothing, unaccustomed to dwelling and fire, and entirely without any notion of cultivated food. For not knowing even how to gather wild food, they made no store of fruits against times of need; and so many of them perished in the winters through cold and lack of food.

From this, gradually taught by experience, they took refuge in caves in winter and laid up such fruits as could be kept. And when fire and the other useful things became known, little by little the arts also were discovered, and the other things that could benefit common life.

For in general need itself became the teacher of human beings in all things, guiding appropriately the learning of each thing for a creature well endowed by nature and having, as helpers for everything, hands and speech and quickness of mind. Concerning the first origin of human beings and their most ancient life, we shall be content with what has been said, aiming at due proportion."

So much the writer we have cited, who did not so much as mention the name of God in his cosmogony, but introduced an ordering of the universe that was accidental and spontaneous. With him you would find most of the Greek philosophers in agreement. I shall now set out for you their opinions about first principles, and their disagreements and disputes with one another, arising from guesswork and not from sure knowledge, from the Miscellanies of Plutarch. Do you, not carelessly but at leisure and with reflection, observe how the views reported disagree with one another.

"Thales, they say, was the first of all to make water the first principle of all things; for from it all things come, and into it they return."

"After him Anaximander, a companion of Thales, said that the infinite holds the whole cause of the coming into being and perishing of the universe; from it, he says, the heavens were separated off, and in general all the worlds, which are infinite in number. He declared that perishing, and much earlier coming into being, take place as all of them revolve in cycles from infinite ages. He says that the earth is cylindrical in shape and has a depth one third of its breadth. He says that what is productive of the hot and the cold from the eternal was separated off at the coming into being of this world, and that a sphere of flame from this grew around the air surrounding the earth, like bark around a tree. When this was broken off and shut up in certain circles, the sun, the moon, and the stars came to be. He says also that in the beginning man was born from creatures of another kind, since the other animals quickly feed themselves, while man alone needs prolonged nursing; therefore in the beginning, being such as he is, he would never have survived. Such were Anaximander's views.

"Anaximenes, they say, called air the first principle of all things, and said that it is infinite in kind but defined in its qualities; and that all things are generated by a kind of condensation of it, and again by rarefaction. Motion, he says, exists from eternity. When the air was compressed, the earth came into being first, very flat; therefore it reasonably rides upon the air. And the sun, the moon, and the other stars had the origin of their coming into being from earth. At any rate he declares the sun to be earth, which through its swift motion acquired very great heat."

"Xenophanes of Colophon, who went a way of his own different from all those mentioned before, admits neither coming into being nor perishing, but says that the universe is always alike. For if it came into being, he says, it must necessarily not have existed before this; but what is not could not come into being, nor could what is not make anything, nor could anything come into being from what is not. He declares the senses to be false, and in general discredits, together with them, reason itself. He declares also that the earth, continually carried down little by little in the course of time, passes into the sea. He says that the sun is collected from many small particles of fire. He declares also concerning the gods that there is no leadership among them, for it is not holy that any of the gods should be ruled; and that none of them needs anything at all from any; and that they hear and see as a whole and not in part. He declares too that the earth is infinite and is not surrounded by air on every side; and that all things come from earth; and he says that the sun and the other stars come into being from the clouds."

"Parmenides of Elea, the companion of Xenophanes, at the same time laid claim to his opinions and also attempted the opposite position. For he declares the universe eternal and unmoved, even according to the truth of things; for it is 'alone, only-begotten, unshaken, and unbegotten.' But coming into being belongs to the things that seem to exist by false supposition, and he excludes the senses from the truth. He says that if anything exists besides being, it is not being; but non-being does not exist in the universe. So he leaves being unbegotten. He says that the earth came into being from the dense air flowing down."

"Zeno of Elea set out no view of his own, but raised further difficulties about these matters."

"Democritus of Abdera assumed the universe to be infinite, because it was in no way fashioned by anyone. He says further that it is unchangeable; and in general he states expressly that the causes of what now comes to be have no beginning at all, but that all things that have been, are, and will be have been held fast by necessity from above, wholly from infinite time. Of the origin of the sun and moon he says that these were carried along separately, not yet having any hot nature at all, nor indeed any brightness, but on the contrary a nature like that around the earth. For each of these, he says, came into being earlier, still separately, as a kind of foundation of a world; and later, as the circle of the sun grew greater, the fire was enclosed in it."

"Epicurus son of Neocles, the Athenian, tries to put down the vain conceit about the gods. Nothing, he says, comes into being from what is not, because the universe always was such as it is and will be such; nothing strange is brought about in the universe beyond the infinite time that has already passed; everything is body, not only unchangeable but also infinite; the end of good things is pleasure.

"Aristippus of Cyrene held pleasure to be the end of good things and pain of evil things. He rejects the rest of natural philosophy, saying that the only useful thing is to seek 'whatever evil and good has been wrought in your halls.'"

"Empedocles of Acragas held four elements, fire, water, ether, and earth, and their cause to be Love and Strife. He says that from the first mixture of the elements the air was separated off and poured around in a circle; after the air, the fire ran out and, having no other place, ran upward under the solidified mass around the air. There are two hemispheres moving in a circle around the earth, one wholly of fire, the other mixed of air and a little fire, which he thinks is night. The beginning of motion came about because the fire happened to weigh down upon the accumulation. The sun is not fire by nature, but a reflection of the fire, like that which occurs from water. The moon, he says, was formed by itself from the air cut off by the fire; for this air was solidified like hail; and it has its light from the sun. The ruling part of the soul is neither in the head nor in the chest but in the blood; hence in whatever part of the body the ruling part is more widely dispersed, in that part, he thinks, people excel."

"Metrodorus of Chios says that the universe is eternal, because if it had come into being, it would have come from what is not; and infinite, because eternal, for it has no beginning from which it began, nor limit, nor end. Nor does the universe share in motion; for it cannot move without changing place, and it must change place either into what is full or into what is empty. The ether, when condensed, makes clouds, then water, which, coming down upon the sun, quenches it; and when it is rarefied again, the sun is kindled. In time the sun is solidified by the dry, and makes stars out of the bright water, and night and day from the quenching and kindling, and in general it produces the eclipses."

"Diogenes of Apollonia assumes air as the element; all things are in motion, and the worlds are infinite. He makes the world in this way: as the whole was in motion and became rare in one place and dense in another, where the dense ran together it made a mass, and so the rest according to the same principle; and the lightest parts, taking the upper position, produced the sun.

Such is the conception of the all-wise Greeks, those called natural philosophers, about the constitution of the universe and the first cosmogony. They posited no creator or maker of all things, nor made any mention at all of God, but attributed the cause of the universe solely to irrational movement and spontaneous motion.

So great, too, is their opposition to one another, since they agree with one another in nothing and have filled everything with conflict and disagreement. Hence the admirable Socrates also convicted all these of folly and said that they differed in no way from madmen, if Xenophon is a sufficient witness for you, who says in the Memorabilia as follows:

"No one ever saw Socrates doing, or heard him saying, anything impious or unholy. For he did not discourse, as most did, about the nature of all things or about the rest, inquiring how what the sophists call the cosmos is constituted, and by what necessities each of the heavenly things comes to pass; but he even showed those who concerned themselves with such things to be fools." And he adds next:

"He wondered that it was not plain to them that these things are impossible for human beings to discover; since even those who pride themselves most on speaking about them do not hold the same opinions as one another, but behave toward one another like madmen. For among madmen some do not fear even what is dreadful, while others fear what is not to be feared; and among those who busy themselves with the nature of all things, some think that being is only one, others that it is infinite in number; some that all things are always in motion, others that nothing could ever be moved; some that all things come into being and perish, others that nothing could ever come into being or perish."

So said Socrates, as Xenophon testifies. And Plato too agrees with this, recording him as saying in the dialogue On the Soul: "When I was young, Cebes," he said, "I had an amazing desire for that wisdom which they call the inquiry into nature. For it seemed to me a splendid thing to know the causes of each thing, why each thing comes into being, why it perishes, and why it exists. And I often turned myself upside down, considering first questions like these: Is it when the hot and the cold undergo a kind of putrefaction, as some said, that living creatures are bred? And is it the blood with which we think, or the air, or the fire? Or none of these, but is it the brain that provides the senses of seeing and hearing and smelling, and from these memory and opinion arise, and from memory and opinion, when it has become settled, knowledge arises in the same way?

And again, considering how these things perish, and what happens in the heavens and on the earth, I finally came to think myself so unfit for this inquiry as to be good for nothing. I will give you sufficient proof: for things that I had previously known clearly, as I and others thought, I was then so utterly blinded by this inquiry that I unlearned even what I had formerly supposed I knew."

So said Socrates himself, celebrated among all the Greeks. Since, then, the natural philosophy of these men seemed such to so great a philosopher, I think we too have rightly rejected the atheism of all of them, since their polytheistic error also seems not unrelated to what has been said. This will be refuted at the proper time, when we show that Anaxagoras is recorded as the first of the Greeks to set Mind over the cause of the universe. But now pass on with me to Diodorus, and see what he records about the first theology of mankind.

"The people who lived in Egypt in ancient times, looking up at the cosmos and struck with awe and wonder at the nature of the universe, supposed that there were two eternal and primal gods, the sun and the moon, and named the one Osiris and the other Isis, each name being given from some etymology.

For when these names are translated into the Greek form of speech, Osiris means 'many-eyed,' fittingly; for casting his rays in every direction he sees, as with many eyes, all the earth and sea. And the poet speaks in agreement with this: 'Sun, who oversees all things and hears all things.'

Some of the ancient mythographers among the Greeks give Osiris the further names Dionysus and, by a derived form, Sirius. Of these Eumolpus says in his Bacchic verses: 'Dionysus, shining like a star, fiery-eyed in his rays.' And Orpheus: 'Therefore they call him Phanes and Dionysus.' Some say too that the fawnskin hung about him is put on him from the variety of the stars.

Isis, when translated, means 'ancient,' the name having been given to the moon from its eternal and ancient origin. They put horns on her both from the appearance she has whenever she is crescent-shaped and from the cow consecrated to her among the Egyptians. These gods they suppose to govern the whole universe."

So much for this. You have also in the Phoenician theology that the first natural philosophers of the Phoenicians recognized as gods only the sun and the moon and the other planets, the elements and the things connected with them; and that the most ancient of them consecrated the growths of the earth to these, held them to be gods, and worshipped those things by which they themselves, their descendants, and all before them were sustained, and offered libations and drink offerings to them. They consecrated pity, lament, and weeping to the earth's growth when it withered, and to the first generation of living creatures from the earth and their generation from one another, and to death, by which they departed from life.

Such were their notions of worship, matching their own weakness and the timidity of their souls as yet. So says the Phoenician writing too, as will be shown next. But also that very man of our own time who has won renown by his slanders against us, in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food, sets out the record of the antiquity of the ancients in these very words, using Theophrastus as his witness:

"It seems to be a countless length of time since the most learned race of all, as Theophrastus says, who inhabit the most sacred land, founded by the Nile, first began to sacrifice on their hearths to the heavenly gods, not first-fruits of myrrh, or of cassia and frankincense mixed with saffron; for these were taken up many generations later, when man, wandering in search of the necessities of life, with many toils and tears offered drops of these as first-fruits to the gods.

It was not these, then, that they sacrificed at first, but taking up in their hands grass, as it were the down of fertile nature. For the earth brought forth trees before animals, and long before trees the grass that grows each year; and plucking its leaves and roots and the whole shoots of its growth they burned them, greeting with this sacrifice the visible heavenly gods and making their honors immortal by fire.

For to these gods they also kept an undying fire in the temples, as being most like them. From the fumigation (thymiasis) of the products of the earth they named censers (thymiateria), and sacrificing (thyein) and sacrifices (thysiai); words which we wrongly understand as signifying the later transgression, calling the supposed worship by means of animals 'sacrifice.'

So much did the ancients care not to transgress the custom that they invoked curses (arai) against those who abandoned the ancient practice and introduced another, and so called the incense that was burned aromata."

After saying this he adds, after other matters: "But as men advanced far from the first-fruits in sacrifices into lawlessness, the adoption of the most dreadful offerings, full of cruelty, was brought in, so that the curses spoken of before against us seem now to have been fulfilled, when men slaughtered victims and bloodied the altars."

So much Porphyry, or rather Theophrastus. And a seal on the argument may be Plato in the Cratylus, who, before what he says about the Greeks, speaks thus, word for word: "It seems to me that the first men in Greece held as gods only these, which many of the barbarians hold now: sun and moon and earth and stars and heaven. Seeing all these always going on their course and running, from this nature of running (thein) they named them gods (theoi)."

That the first and most ancient human beings paid no attention to building temples or setting up images, since at that time the arts of painting, modeling, carving, and statuary had not yet been invented, and building and architecture did not yet exist, is, I think, plain to anyone who reasons it out.

And that there was among the people of that time no memory even of the gods and heroes named afterward: that they had no Zeus, no Cronus, no Poseidon, no Apollo, no Hera, no Athena, no Dionysus, nor any other god, female or male, such as afterward were numberless among barbarians and Greeks; that no demon, good or bad, was admired among men, but only the visible stars of heaven received the name of gods, from thein, which means 'to run,' as they themselves say; and that not even these were worshipped with sacrifices of animals and with the honors devised later: this is not our account, but the testimony comes from home, from the Greeks themselves, providing the proof by the words already set out and by those to be set out next.

This our sacred writings also teach, which contain the statement that in the beginning the honor of the visible luminaries was allotted to all the nations, but that to the race of the Hebrews alone was entrusted the insight into God, the maker and creator of the universe, and true piety toward him.

So among the most ancient human beings there was no account of a Greek or barbarian theogony, no setting up of lifeless images, nor the great nonsense of today about naming gods male and female.

At any rate, the titles and names devised later by men were not yet known among them; nor were there invocations of demons and invisible spirits, nor absurd myths about gods and heroes, nor mysteries of secret rites, nor anything at all of the great and garrulous superstition of later men.

These things, then, were inventions of human beings and fabrications of mortal nature, or rather devices of shameful and licentious ways, according to the divine oracle among us that says, "The devising of idols is the beginning of sexual immorality."

At any rate the polytheistic error of all the nations appeared long ages afterward. It began with the Phoenicians and Egyptians, and passed from them to the other nations and even to the Greeks themselves, as the history of the most ancient times again records. It is time to examine this too, beginning from the Phoenicians.

These things are recorded by Sanchuniathon, a very ancient man, older, they say, than the Trojan times, whom they testify to have been approved for the accuracy and truth of his Phoenician history. Philo of Byblos, not the Hebrew, translated his whole work from the Phoenician tongue into Greek and published it. He is mentioned by the man of our own time who composed the attack upon us, in the fourth book of his work against us, who bears witness to the man in these words:

"Sanchuniathon of Berytus records the history of the Jews most truthfully, since it agrees most closely with their places and names. He received the records from Hierombalus, the priest of the god Ieuo. He dedicated his history to Abibalus, king of the Berytians, and was accepted by him and by the examiners of truth in his time. Their times fall even before the Trojan times, and come close to those of Moses, as the successions of the kings of Phoenicia show. Sanchuniathon, having collected and written the whole ancient history in the Phoenician language, with love of truth, from the records in each city and the registers in the temples, lived under Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, who is recorded to have lived before the Trojan war or at about that time. The works of Sanchuniathon were translated into the Greek language by Philo of Byblos."

So says the writer cited, testifying to both the truth and the antiquity of this theologian. But Sanchuniathon, as he proceeds, proclaims as gods not the God over all, nor even the gods in heaven, but mortal men and women, not even refined in character, such as one might accept or emulate for their virtue in philosophy, but clothed in all the vice of baseness and wickedness. And he testifies that these are the very ones who are still regarded as gods by all, in cities and countries. Receive the proofs of this too from the writings.

Philo, then, having divided the whole work of Sanchuniathon into nine books, in the preface to the first book says this in advance about Sanchuniathon, in these very words:

"This being so, Sanchuniathon, a man of great learning and curiosity, who longed to know from all sources the things from the beginning, from which all things were constituted, very carefully searched out the writings of Taautus, knowing that of all who have lived under the sun Taautus was the first, who devised the invention of letters and began the writing of records; and from him, laying the foundation of his account as it were, he began. The Egyptians called him Thouth, the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks translated his name as Hermes."

After saying this he finds fault with the later writers who came afterward, for referring the myths about the gods, forcibly and untruly, to allegories and physical explanations and theories. At any rate he says as he goes on:

"But the most recent of the sacred writers rejected the events that took place at the beginning, devised allegories and myths, invented a kinship with the phenomena of the cosmos, and established mysteries, bringing upon them much smoke of pretension, so that no one could easily see what had really happened. But he, coming upon the secret writings of the Ammoneans that had been found in the shrines, composed in characters not known to all, himself practiced the study of them all; and having completed the work, he set aside the myth and the allegories from the beginning and accomplished his purpose, until the priests who came later, in later times, wished to hide it again and restore it to the mythical; from which the mystical element arose, which had not yet reached the Greeks."

Next to this he says: "These things we have discovered in our eagerness to know the history of the Phoenicians accurately, having searched through much material, not that among the Greeks; for that is inconsistent, and composed by some more for the sake of contention than of truth."

And after other matters: "We came to be convinced that things are as he has written, seeing the disagreement among the Greeks; concerning which I have taken pains to write three books, entitled Paradoxical History."

And again, after other matters, he adds: "For clearness later, and for distinguishing the particulars, it is necessary to state first that the most ancient of the barbarians, especially the Phoenicians and Egyptians, from whom the rest of mankind received it, considered as the greatest gods those who had discovered things useful for life, or had in some way done good to the nations. Regarding them as benefactors and causes of many goods, they worshipped them as gods; and when they had passed away, they built temples and consecrated pillars and staffs in their names, venerating these greatly; and the Phoenicians assigned to them their greatest festivals. In particular, they gave the names of their own kings to the elements of the cosmos and to some of those considered gods. But as natural gods they recognized only the sun, the moon, the other planets, the elements and the things connected with them, so that some of their gods were mortal and others immortal."

Having made these distinctions in the preface, Philo next begins his translation of Sanchuniathon, setting out the Phoenician theology somewhat as follows:

"He supposes the beginning of the universe to be a dark and windy air, or a breath of dark air, and a turbid chaos, black as Erebus. These, he says, were boundless and for a long age had no limit. 'But when,' he says, 'the wind fell in love with its own first principles and a mixture took place, that intertwining was called Desire. This was the beginning of the creation of all things. But the wind did not know its own creation; and from its own intertwining with the wind, Mot came into being.

Some say this is mud, others a putrefaction of a watery mixture. And from it came every seed of creation and the generation of all things. There were certain living creatures without sensation, from which intelligent creatures came into being, and they were called Zophasemin, that is, 'watchers of heaven.' And Mot was formed in the shape of an egg, and shone forth, and sun and moon, stars and the great constellations."

Such is their cosmogony, plainly introducing atheism. Let us see next how he says the generation of living creatures came about. He says then:

"And when the air shone with light, through the burning heat of both the sea and the earth there came winds and clouds and very great downpours and floods of the waters of heaven. And when they were separated and parted from their own place through the burning of the sun, and all met again in the air, one with another, and dashed together, thunders and lightnings were produced; and at the crash of the thunders the intelligent creatures described before awoke, and were startled at the sound, and male and female moved on land and in the sea."

Such is their account of the generation of living creatures. Next the same writer adds, saying: "These things were found written in the cosmogony of Taautus and in his records, from the conjectures and evidences which his mind saw and discovered and made clear to us."

Next, after naming the winds, the south wind, the north wind, and the rest, he adds: "But these were the first to consecrate the growths of the earth, and they held them to be gods and worshipped them, the things by which they themselves, their descendants, and all before them lived; and they made libations and offerings to them."

And he adds: "These were their notions of worship, matching their own weakness and timidity of soul." Then he says that from the wind Colpia and his wife Baau, which he interprets as 'night,' were born Aeon and Protogonus, mortal men so called; and that Aeon discovered food from trees. Those born of these were called Genos and Genea, and they settled Phoenicia. When droughts came, they stretched out their hands to heaven toward the sun; "for him," he says, "they considered the only god, lord of heaven, calling him Beelsamen, which among the Phoenicians means 'lord of heaven,' and among the Greeks Zeus."

After this he charges the Greeks with error, saying: "For it was not without reason that we distinguished these things in many ways, but because of the misinterpretations of the names, which the Greeks, not understanding, took in another sense, misled by the ambiguity of the translation."

Next he says: "From Genos son of Aeon and Protogonus were born again mortal children, whose names were Light, Fire, and Flame. These," he says, "discovered fire by rubbing pieces of wood together and taught its use. They begot sons surpassing in size and stature, whose names were given to the mountains they held, so that from them Cassius, Libanus, Antilibanus, and Brathy were named. From these," he says, "were born Samemroumus, also called Hypsouranius, and Usous; and they were named," he says, "after their mothers, since the women of that time had intercourse without restraint with any they happened to meet."

Then he says: "Hypsouranius lived in Tyre and devised huts of reeds, rushes, and papyrus; and he quarreled with his brother Usous, who first invented a covering for the body from the skins of the wild beasts he was able to catch. When violent rains and winds came, the trees in Tyre were rubbed together, caught fire, and burned the forest there. Usous took a tree, stripped off its branches, and was the first to dare to embark on the sea. He consecrated two pillars to fire and wind, worshipped them, and poured out to them the blood of the wild beasts he hunted.

When these had died, he says, those who were left consecrated staffs to them, worshipped the pillars, and held festivals for them every year. Many ages later, from the race of Hypsouranius came Agreus and Halieus, the inventors of hunting and fishing, from whom hunters and fishermen are named. From these came two brothers, inventors of iron and of its working. One of them, Chrysor, practiced words, incantations, and divinations; he is Hephaestus. He also invented the hook, bait, line, and raft, and was the first of all men to sail; so after his death they worshipped him as a god.

He was also called Zeus Meilichius. Some say that his brothers devised walls of brick. After this, from their race came two young men, one called Technites and the other Geinus Autochthon. These devised mixing straw with the clay of bricks and drying them in the sun, and they also invented roofs. From these came others, one of whom was called Agrus and the other Agrueros or Agrotes, of whom there is a very venerable wooden image and a shrine carried by yoked animals in Phoenicia; and among the people of Byblos he is called, in particular, the greatest of the gods.

These devised adding courtyards, enclosures, and cellars to houses. From these come farmers and huntsmen. They are also called Aletae and Titans. From these came Amynus and Magus, who established villages and flocks. From these came Misor and Sydyk, that is, 'easily freed' and 'just.' They discovered the use of salt.

From Misor came Taautus, who invented the writing of the first letters, whom the Egyptians called Thouth, the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks Hermes. From Sydyk came the Dioscuri, or Cabiri, or Corybantes, or Samothracians. These," he says, "first invented the ship. From them came others, who discovered herbs, the healing of bites, and charms. In their time is born one Elioun, called the Most High, and a female called Berouth; they lived near Byblos.

From these is born Epigeius Autochthon, whom they afterward called Ouranus (Heaven), so that from him they also named the element above us 'heaven,' because of its surpassing beauty. And from the same parents a sister is born to him, who was called Ge (Earth); and because of her beauty," he says, "they called the earth by the same name. Their father, the Most High, died in an encounter with wild beasts and was deified, and his children offered libations and sacrifices to him.

Ouranus, taking over his father's rule, marries his sister Ge and has by her four sons: Elus, who is also Cronus, Baetylus, Dagon, who is Siton (grain), and Atlas. By other wives too Ouranus had a large family. So Ge, angered and jealous, reproached Ouranus, so that they separated from each other.

But Ouranus, having left her, would come upon her by force whenever he wished, lie with her, and go away again; he also tried to destroy the children he had by her. Ge often defended herself, gathering allies for herself. And when Cronus came to manhood, using Hermes Trismegistus as his counselor and helper (for he was his secretary), he took vengeance on his father Ouranus, avenging his mother.

To Cronus are born children, Persephone and Athena. The first died a virgin; but on the advice of Athena and Hermes, Cronus made a sickle and a spear of iron. Then Hermes, speaking magic words to Cronus's allies, put into them a desire for the battle against Ouranus on behalf of Ge. And so Cronus, engaging Ouranus in war, drove him from his rule and succeeded to the kingdom. In the battle the beloved concubine of Ouranus was also captured, being pregnant, and Cronus gives her in marriage to Dagon.

In Dagon's house she bears the child she was carrying by Ouranus, and named him Demarus. After this Cronus builds a wall around his own dwelling and founds the first city, Byblos in Phoenicia.

After this Cronus, suspecting his own brother Atlas, on the advice of Hermes threw him into a pit in the earth and buried him. At this time the descendants of the Dioscuri, having built rafts and ships, went to sea, and being cast ashore near Mount Cassius consecrated a temple there. The allies of Elus, that is Cronus, were called Eloeim, as those called after Cronus would be Cronians.

Cronus, having a son Sadidus, killed him with his own sword, having come to suspect him, and deprived him of life, becoming the murderer of his own child. In the same way he cut off the head of his own daughter, so that all the gods were dismayed at the mind of Cronus.

As time went on, Ouranus, being in exile, secretly sends his virgin daughter Astarte, with two other sisters of hers, Rhea and Dione, to kill Cronus by guile. But Cronus caught them and made them his wedded wives, though they were his sisters.

When Ouranus learned of it, he sends Heimarmene (Fate) and Hora (Season) with other allies to make war on Cronus; and Cronus won these too over to himself and kept them with him. Further," he says, "the god Ouranus devised baetylia, contriving stones endowed with life. To Cronus were born by Astarte seven daughters, Titanides or Artemides.

And again to the same are born by Rhea seven sons, of whom the youngest was consecrated at his birth; and by Dione daughters; and again by Astarte two sons, Pothos (Longing) and Eros (Love).

Dagon, since he discovered grain and the plow, was called Zeus Arotrius. One of the Titanides, uniting with Sydyk, called the Just, bears Asclepius.

In Peraea too three sons were born to Cronus: Cronus, of the same name as his father, Zeus Belus, and Apollo. In their time are born Pontus, Typhon, and Nereus, father of Pontus.

From Pontus comes Sidon, who by the surpassing beauty of her voice first invented the hymn of song, and Poseidon. To Demarus is born Melcathrus, who is also Heracles.

Then again Ouranus makes war on Pontus, and revolting, attaches himself to Demarus. Demarus attacks Pontus, but Pontus routs him, and Demarus vowed a sacrifice for his escape.

In the thirty-second year of his power and reign Elus, that is Cronus, having set an ambush for his father Ouranus in a certain inland place and got him into his hands, cuts off his private parts near springs and rivers. There Ouranus was deified; his breath was ended, and the blood from his private parts dripped into the springs and the waters of the rivers; and the place is pointed out to this day."

Such, then, are the deeds of Cronus, and such the noble features of the life of the people in the time of Cronus, so loudly praised among the Greeks, whom they say were the first, "a golden race of mortal men," in that blessed happiness of the ancients. Again the writer, after other matters, adds this, saying:

"Astarte the greatest, and Zeus Demarus, and Adodus king of the gods, reigned over the land with the consent of Cronus. Astarte put on her own head, as a mark of royalty, a bull's head; and traveling around the inhabited world she found a star that had fallen from the sky, which she took up and consecrated in Tyre, the holy island.

The Phoenicians say that Astarte is Aphrodite. And Cronus, going around the inhabited world, gives the kingdom of Attica to his own daughter Athena.

When a plague and pestilence came, Cronus offers his only-begotten son as a whole burnt offering to his father Ouranus, and circumcises himself, compelling his allies also to do the same.

And not long after, when another of his sons by Rhea, named Muth, died, he deifies him. The Phoenicians call him Death and Pluto.

After this Cronus gives the city of Byblos to the goddess Baaltis, who is also Dione, and Berytus to Poseidon and to the Cabiri, the Hunters and Fishers, who also consecrated the remains of Pontus at Berytus.

Before this the god Tauthus, imitating the appearances of the gods who were with him, Cronus and Dagon and the rest, gave form to the sacred characters of the letters. He also devised for Cronus, as marks of royalty, four eyes in the front and back parts ... and two quietly closed, and on the shoulders four wings, two as if flying and two as if folded.

The symbol meant that Cronus saw while sleeping and slept while waking; and likewise with the wings, that he flew while resting and rested while flying. To each of the other gods he gave two wings on the shoulders, meaning that they flew with Cronus. And to Cronus himself again two wings on his head, one for the most commanding mind and one for sense perception.

Cronus, coming to the land of the south, gave all Egypt to the god Tauthus to be his kingdom. These things," he says, "the seven sons, the Cabiri, and their own brother Asclepius, were the first of all to put into records, as the god Tauthus commanded them.

All these things Thabion, the very first hierophant of the Phoenicians who have lived from the beginning, turned into allegory and mixed with natural and cosmic phenomena, and handed down to the priests who lead the orgies and begin the rites. They, contriving in every way to increase the vain pretension, handed it on to their successors and to those brought in from outside; one of whom was Isiris, the inventor of the three letters, brother of Chna, who was the first to have his name changed to Phoenix."

Then next he adds again: "But the Greeks, surpassing all in natural talent, at first appropriated most of these things, and then also dramatized them in various ways with added ornaments, and, intending to charm with the pleasures of the myths, embellished them in every way. Hence Hesiod and the much-celebrated cyclic poets fashioned theogonies, battles of giants and battles of Titans of their own, and mutilations; and by carrying these about with them they overcame the truth.

And our ears, having grown up with their fictions and been preoccupied for many ages, guard as a trust the mythology they have received, as I said at the beginning; and this, strengthened by time, has made its hold hard to escape, so that the truth seems nonsense, and the spurious account seems truth."

Let these extracts from the writing of Sanchuniathon be set before you, translated by Philo of Byblos and approved as true by the testimony of Porphyry the philosopher. The same author, in his work On the Jews, also writes this about Cronus:

"Tauthus, whom the Egyptians call Thouth, excelling in wisdom among the Phoenicians, was the first to bring the things concerning the worship of the gods out of the ignorance of the vulgar into scientific understanding. Many generations after him the god Surmubelus and Thuro, whose name was changed to Eusarthis, followed him and brought to light the theology of Tauthus, which had been hidden and overshadowed by allegories."

And shortly after he says: "It was the custom among the ancients, in great calamities of danger, that instead of the destruction of all, the rulers of the city or nation gave up the most beloved of their children to be slaughtered as a ransom to the avenging demons; and those who were given up were slaughtered with mystic rites. Cronus, then, whom the Phoenicians call Elus, who was king of the country and afterward, at the end of his life, was deified as the star of Cronus, had an only-begotten son by a nymph of the country called Anobret, whom for this reason they called Ieoud (the only-begotten is still so called among the Phoenicians); and when very great dangers from war had seized the country, he adorned his son with royal attire, prepared an altar, and sacrificed him."

The same writer again, translating from Sanchuniathon about the Phoenician letters, see what he says about the creeping and venomous creatures, which contribute nothing good to human use but bring destruction and ruin to whomever they strike with their hard-to-heal and grievous poison. He writes this too, word for word, saying something like this:

"Tauthus himself deified the nature of the dragon and of serpents, and after him again the Phoenicians and Egyptians. For the creature was declared by him to be the most full of spirit of all creeping things, and fiery. Hence it shows an unsurpassable speed by means of its spirit, without feet or hands or any other external members by which the other animals make their movements; it forms shapes of various kinds, and in its progress makes its springs in spirals at whatever speed it wishes.

It is also very long-lived, and by nature not only grows young again by putting off its old age, but also receives greater growth; and when it has fulfilled its fixed measure, it is consumed into itself, as Tauthus himself likewise set down in the sacred writings. Therefore this creature has been adopted in temples and in mysteries.

We have spoken about it at greater length in the records entitled Ethothia, in which it is argued that it is immortal and is dissolved into itself, as was said before; for this creature does not die a natural death unless struck by some violence. The Phoenicians call it Agathodaemon (Good Spirit); likewise the Egyptians name it Kneph; and they add to it a hawk's head, because of the hawk's active nature.

And Epeeis, speaking allegorically (he who was named among them the greatest hierophant and sacred scribe, whom Areius of Heracleopolis translated), says word for word: 'The first and most divine being is a serpent having the form of a hawk, exceedingly graceful; whenever he opened his eyes he filled all things with light in his first-born region, and when he closed them, darkness came.'

Epeeis indicates that it is also fiery by saying 'he shone through,' for to shine through is a property of light. From the Phoenicians Pherecydes also took his starting points and wrote theology about the god called by him Ophion and about the Ophionidae, of whom we shall speak again.

Further, the Egyptians, from the same idea, when they depict the cosmos, draw a round circle, airy and fiery, and a hawk-shaped serpent stretched across the middle; and the whole figure is like our theta. By the circle they indicate the cosmos, and by the serpent in the middle they signify the Agathodaemon who holds it together.

And Zoroaster the magus, in the sacred collection of Persian writings, says word for word: 'God has the head of a hawk. He is the first, incorruptible, eternal, unbegotten, without parts, most unlike all, the charioteer of all that is good, not to be bribed, the best of the good, the wisest of the wise; he is also father of good order and justice, self-taught, natural, perfect, wise, and the only discoverer of the sacred natural law.' Ostanes too says the same things about him in the book entitled Octateuch."

All of them, taking their starting points from Tauthus, gave natural explanations, as has been shown. And they built temples and consecrated in shrines the first elements represented by the serpents, and celebrated festivals, sacrifices, and secret rites to them, regarding them as the greatest gods and the rulers of the universe. So much about serpents.

Such, then, is the character of the Phoenician theology. The saving word announces as good news that we should flee from it without turning back, and should seek the cure for the madness of the ancients.

That these are not myths and inventions of poets containing some hidden meaning in their allegories, but true testimonies of wise and ancient theologians, as they themselves would say, containing things older than all poets and prose writers, and drawing the credibility of their words from the names and history of the gods that still prevail in the cities and villages of Phoenicia, and from the mysteries performed among each people, would be plain; so that there is no longer any need to search out forced physical explanations of them, when the facts themselves bring their clear refutation. Such, then, is the theology of the Phoenicians; it is time to pass on and examine that of the Egyptians.

The theology of the Phoenicians, then, has the character described above; and the saving word announces as good news that we should flee from it without turning back, and should seek the cure for the madness of the ancients.

That these are not myths and inventions of poets containing some hidden meaning in their allegories, but true testimonies of wise and ancient theologians, as they themselves would say, containing things older than all poets and prose writers, and drawing the credibility of their words from the names and history of the gods that still prevail in the cities and villages of Phoenicia and from the mysteries performed among each people, would be plain from the agreement of the other writers and especially of those considered theologians. By it they testified that the ancients who first composed the accounts of the gods referred nothing to physical figurative meanings and did not allegorize the myths about the gods, but kept the histories in their literal sense.

For this was shown by the words of the writers mentioned, quoted above; so that there is no longer any need to search out forced physical explanations of them, since the facts bring their clear refutation.

Such, then, is the theology of the Phoenicians. It is time to pass on and examine also that of the Egyptians, so as to understand accurately and see by examination whether our withdrawal from them has not been well judged and reasonable, and accomplished by nothing else than the demonstration of the gospel alone, first of all among the Egyptians themselves and then among those who think as they do.

The whole Egyptian history, and in particular what concerns their theology, has been put at length into the Greek language by Manetho the Egyptian, both in the Sacred Book he wrote and in other writings of his.

Diodorus too, whom we mentioned before, having collected his histories from many sources and set out the customs of each nation as accurately as possible, a distinguished man who won no small reputation for learning among all lovers of letters, gathered all ancient history together, joined the earliest events to the later ones, and made the theology of the Egyptians the beginning of his whole work. I think it better to set out the matters before us from him, since his writing is better known to the Greeks. He records the following, word for word:

"The Egyptians say, then, that at the original generation of all things the first human beings came into being in Egypt, both because of the good climate of the country and because of the nature of the Nile. For it, being very fertile and providing food that grows of itself, easily nourished the living creatures it brought forth.

The gods, they say, were human beings and mortal, but obtained immortality because of their intelligence and their benefits to all mankind; and some of them were also kings. Of these, when their names are translated, some have the same names as the heavenly bodies, while others have had names of their own: Helios (the Sun), Cronus, and also Zeus, called Ammon by some, and besides these Hera and Hephaestus, Hestia, and finally Hermes.

And first Helios reigned over Egypt, having the same name as the star in heaven. But some of the priests say that Hephaestus reigned first, having been the discoverer of fire.

After this Cronus ruled, and having married his sister Rhea he begot, according to some, Osiris and Isis, but according to most, Zeus and Hera, who because of their virtue reigned over the whole world.

From these were born five gods: Osiris, Isis, Typhon, Apollo, and Aphrodite. Osiris is Dionysus, and Isis is Demeter. Osiris married her, succeeded to the kingdom, and did many things for the benefit of the community.

He founded in the Thebaid a city with a hundred gates, which some called the City of Zeus and others Thebes. He also built a temple to his parents, Zeus and Hera, and golden shrines to the other gods, assigned honors to each of them, and appointed priests to care for them.

Osiris was the discoverer of the vine, was the first to make use of it, and taught the rest of mankind agriculture.

Of all his followers he honored Hermes most, who was endowed with an extraordinary nature for devising things that could benefit the common life. For he was the discoverer of letters, arranged the sacrifices to the gods, invented the lyre, and taught the Greeks the art of interpretation (hermeneia) concerning these things; from which he was named Hermes.

He also discovered the olive plant. Osiris, going through the whole inhabited world, set Busiris over Phoenicia and Antaeus over Ethiopia and Libya. He made his expedition with his brother Apollo, who, they say, was the discoverer of the laurel plant.

Osiris's two sons, Anubis and Macedon, went with him on the expedition, and he also took Pan, who is especially honored by the Egyptians; from him the city of Pan is named. While he was near Taphosiris, the race of Satyrs was brought to him.

Being a lover of music, he took with him a crowd of musicians, among them nine maidens able to sing and trained in other arts, those called the Muses among the Greeks, whose leader was Apollo.

Since every nation received Osiris as a god because of his benefits, he left memorials of himself everywhere,

and he founded not a few cities among the Indians.

He went also through the other nations of Phrygia and crossed the Hellespont into Europe. He left his son Macedon as king of Macedonia, and entrusted the agriculture of Attica to Triptolemus.

And afterward, having passed from among men to the gods, he received from Isis and Hermes a sanctuary and the other most distinguished honors among the gods. They also instituted rites and introduced many mystical things concerning him.

He was killed by his brother Typhon, who was wicked and impious; Typhon cut the body of the murdered man into twenty-six pieces and gave a portion to each of his fellow conspirators, wishing all to share in the pollution.

Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris, avenged the murder with the help of her son Horus; and having killed Typhon and his accomplices near the village now called the Village of Antaeus, she reigned over Egypt.

Having found all the parts of the body except the private parts of Osiris, they say she molded around each part a human figure like Osiris in size, out of spices and wax, and gave it to the priests throughout all Egypt to honor; and that she consecrated to him whichever one of the animals among them they chose.

The sacred bulls, the one named Apis and Mnevis, were consecrated to Osiris, and it was ordained that all the Egyptians in common should reverence them as gods; for these animals had helped those who discovered the fruit of grain in sowing and in agriculture generally.

Isis swore that she would accept no man's intercourse any longer; and when she too had passed from among men, she received immortal honors and was buried at Memphis.

The parts of Osiris that were found, they say, were given burial in the way described. But the private part, they say, was thrown into the river by Typhon, yet was counted worthy by Isis of honors equal to the gods, no less than the other parts.

For she made an image of it in the temples, instituted honors and rites, and made the sacrifices offered to this god most honored. Therefore the Greeks too, having received from Egypt the orgies and the Dionysiac festivals, honor this member in the mysteries and in the rites and sacrifices of this god, calling it the phallus.

Those who say that the god was born at Thebes in Boeotia of Semele and Zeus are inventing. For Orpheus, having visited Egypt and shared in the initiation, received the Dionysiac mysteries; and being a friend of the Cadmeans and honored by them, he transferred the god's birth to them as a favor, while the multitudes, partly through ignorance and partly from wishing the god to be called a Greek, readily accepted the rites and the mysteries.

Orpheus had the following occasions for transferring the god's birth and rites: Cadmus, coming from Thebes in Egypt, begot Semele among other children. She, seduced by someone or other, became pregnant and at the end of seven months bore a child such as the Egyptians believe Osiris to have been;

When the child died, Cadmus gilded it and offered the appropriate sacrifices to it, and ascribed its birth to Zeus, thus glorifying Osiris and removing the reproach from his seduced daughter. Therefore the story was published among the Greeks that Semele the daughter of Cadmus bore Osiris by Zeus.

Then, when the mythographers came on the scene, the story filled the theater and became a strong and unchangeable belief for later generations. In general, they say, the Greeks appropriate the most famous heroes and gods of the Egyptians.

For Heracles, who was Egyptian by race, went through much of the inhabited world because of his courage; and the Greeks claim him as their own, though he was different from the son of Alcmene who was born among the Greeks at some later time.

They say that Perseus too was born in Egypt, and that the birth of Isis was transferred by the Greeks to Argos, where they tell the myth that she is Io, who was changed into the form of a cow. Some regard the same goddess as Isis, others as Demeter, others as Thesmophorus, others as Selene, and others as Hera.

Osiris some regard as Sarapis, others as Dionysus, others as Pluto, others as Ammon, others as Zeus, and others as Pan.

They say that Isis was the discoverer of many medicines and of the science of healing; she also discovered the medicine of immortality, by which, when her son Horus had been plotted against by the Titans and found dead in the water, she not only raised him up by giving him his soul again, but also made him share in immortality.

Horus was the last of the gods to reign over Egypt. When translated, they say, he is Apollo; having been taught medicine and divination by his mother Isis, he benefits mankind through his oracles and healings.

It is agreed by most that in the time of Isis certain giants of huge body, monstrously arrayed, raised war against the gods around Zeus and Osiris. They say too that the Egyptians made it a law to marry sisters, because Isis was married to Osiris, who was her brother."

Such are their accounts of these things. Concerning the animals consecrated in Egypt, an account of this kind prevails among them: "Some say that the gods who were born in the beginning, being few and overpowered by the number and impiety of the earth-born men, made themselves like certain irrational animals and so escaped; and afterward, in gratitude for their safety, consecrated the kinds of those animals they had resembled.

Others say that in their battles with enemies they made images of the animals they now honor, and the leaders wore these on their heads and had them as a mark of their command; and when they won victories over their enemies, they deified the animals whose images they wore, as having been the cause.

Others give a third cause, saying that the animals were honored for their usefulness. For the cow bears calves and plows; sheep bear lambs and provide covering and food through their milk and cheese; and the dog hunts with men and keeps guard. Therefore the god whom they call Anubis has a dog's head, showing that he was the bodyguard of Osiris and Isis.

Some say that when Isis was searching for Osiris, the dogs went before her and kept off the wild beasts and those who met her.

The cat is useful against asps and the other biting reptiles; the ichneumon breaks the crocodiles' eggs and kills the crocodiles themselves, rolling itself in mud, leaping into their open mouths, and eating through their insides so that it leaves them dead.

Of the birds, the ibis is useful against snakes, locusts, and caterpillars; the hawk against scorpions, horned serpents, and the small biting creatures, and because it contributes to divination; and the eagle because it is royal.

The goat, they say, has been deified, as Priapus has among the Greeks, because of the generative member. For this animal is most inclined to intercourse, and the part of the body that is the cause of generation is fittingly honored as the origin of the nature of living things. In general, not only the Egyptians but not a few of other peoples have consecrated the private member in their rites, as the cause of the generation of living things;

and the priests in Egypt who have inherited their fathers' priesthoods are initiated first to this god. They say that the Pans and Satyrs too are honored among men for the same reason; therefore most people set up their images in the temples with the member erect and resembling the nature of the goat; for this animal is reported to be most active in intercourse.

The sacred bulls, Apis and Mnevis, are honored like the gods, partly because of agriculture and partly because they ascribe to them the discovery of the fruits of the earth.

Wolves are honored because of the likeness of their nature to dogs, and because in ancient times, they say, when Isis with her son Horus was about to fight against Typhon, Osiris came from Hades to help his child and his wife, having taken the appearance of a wolf.

Others say that when the Ethiopians marched against Egypt they were driven off by a multitude of wolves; and therefore the district was called Lycopolis. The crocodile, they say, is reverenced because the robbers from Arabia and Libya do not dare to swim across the Nile because of the crocodiles.

They say that one of their kings, pursued by his own dogs, fled into the lake, and then was miraculously taken up by a crocodile and carried to the other side.

Some give still other causes for the honoring of irrational animals. For in ancient times, when the people were revolting from the kings and agreeing to be ruled by kings no longer, one king devised giving them different animals to worship, so that, as each group reverenced the animal honored among themselves and despised the one consecrated among the others, all the Egyptians might never be able to agree together.

When one of these animals dies, they cover it with fine linen, beat their breasts with wailing, and bury it in sacred tombs. Whoever kills one of these animals deliberately incurs death; except that if anyone kills a cat or the ibis, whether deliberately or not, he certainly incurs death.

Moreover, in whatever house a dead dog is found, all the household shave their whole body and go into mourning; and if wine or grain or any of the necessities of life happens to be stored in the house, they would not bear to use it any longer.

They keep Apis in Memphis, Mnevis in Heliopolis, the goat in Mendes, the crocodile in the lake of Moeris, and the other animals in sacred enclosures, offering them fine flour, or groats boiled in milk, all kinds of cakes kneaded with honey, and goose meat, some boiled and some roasted.

To the flesh-eating ones they throw many birds, and for each of the animals they keep the most beautiful females, whom they call concubines.

When Apis dies and has been buried magnificently, they seek another like him; and when he is found, the people are released from their mourning, and the calf is first taken to Nilopolis. Only then do the women see him, standing before him and showing him their private parts by lifting their garments; at all other times they are forbidden to come into the sight of this god. They say that the soul of Osiris passed into this bull after his death."

Such is the shameful atheism, rather than theology, of the Egyptians, which it is disgraceful even to oppose. We have rightly spat upon it and withdrawn from it, having found redemption and freedom from such great evils in no other way than through the saving teaching of the gospel alone, which has announced to those blind in mind the recovery of sight.

Their more dignified theories and natural explanations we shall examine a little later, when we have also discussed the religion of the Greeks. So, as the Egyptian and Phoenician mythologies ran together in a mixture, the superstition of the ancient error naturally prevailed among most of the nations.

But we must speak of the religion of the Greeks too. The dignified features of the Egyptian mythology are such as have been set out; that the Greek religion consists of fragments and misunderstandings of these very things has been said often before, and through the evidence of the writers already quoted;

but it would also become plain from the Greek theology itself, since in their own records about the gods they bring in nothing of their own, but fall in with the mythologies of foreigners.

For they are shown to use similar images and the same mysteries, as one may learn from the history of these matters which he records who gathered the libraries together into one, whom I mentioned before, in the third and fourth books of the work referred to, beginning his history from the times of Cadmus.

That Cadmus lived after Moses the accurate successions of the chronologies establish, as we shall show at the proper time; so that Moses is shown to be earlier even than the Greek gods, if he lived before Cadmus and the gods appear to be younger than Cadmus's time. Listen, then, to the words of the historian:

"Cadmus the son of Agenor, they say, was sent from Phoenicia by the king to search for Europa, who had been carried off by Zeus. Not finding her, he came into Boeotia and founded Thebes there; and having married Harmonia, the daughter of Aphrodite, he begot by her Semele and her sisters.

Zeus had intercourse with Semele and was asked by her to make his embraces like those with Hera. When he came to her as befits a god, with thunder and lightning, Semele, who was pregnant, could not bear it and miscarried the child, and she herself died from the fire.

Zeus took the child, handed it to Hermes, and sent it away to the cave in Nysa, which lies between Phoenicia and the Nile. Dionysus, reared in this way by the nymphs, became the discoverer of wine and taught mankind to plant the vine.

He also discovered the drink made from barley, called zythos. He led about with him an army not only of men but also of women, and punished the unjust and impious among mankind. He made an expedition into India lasting three years.

From this the Greeks instituted the triennial sacrifices to Dionysus, and believe that the god makes his appearances among men at this time; and all mankind reverence him for the gift of wine, as they reverence Demeter for the discovery of grain for food."

"They say there was also another Dionysus much earlier than this one, called Sabazius by some, born of Zeus and Persephone, whose birth, sacrifices, and honors they celebrate by night and in secret because of the shame that attends the intercourse.

He was the first to attempt to yoke oxen, and so they represent him with horns. The younger one, the son of Semele, they say was delicate in body, excelled in beauty, and was much inclined to sexual pleasures; and on his campaigns he led about a crowd of women armed with lances.

They say that the Muses also traveled with him, being maidens and exceptionally educated, who delighted the god with song and dance; and that his tutor Silenus contributed much to his excellence. Against the headaches caused by too much wine, he bound his head with a headband.

They call him 'of two mothers' because the two Dionysuses had one father but two mothers. They give him the fennel stalk because the ancients, drinking their wine unmixed, became frenzied and struck one another with their staffs, so that some were even killed; hence he taught them to use fennel stalks instead of wooden staffs.

He is called Bacchius from the Bacchae, Lenaeus from the treading of grapes in the wine-presses (lenoi), and Bromius from the roaring (bromos) that occurred at his birth.

They say too that he took Satyrs about with him, who gave him delight and pleasure in their dances and tragic performances; and that he instituted the theater and the system of musical performances. Such are the stories about Dionysus."

"Priapus, they say, is the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, because those who are drunk with wine are aroused toward sexual pleasures. Some say that the ancients called the human member Priapus in their myths.

Some say that the generative member, being the cause of human generation, has for this reason received immortal honor for all time; just as the Egyptians said that Isis, searching for the limbs of Osiris and unable to find his member, ordained that it be honored as a god and set it up erect in the temple.

And among the Greeks too this god receives some honor not only in the Dionysiac rites but in all the others, being brought into the sacrifices with laughter and play; as also Hermaphroditus, who was born of Hermes and Aphrodite and received his name from them.

This god, they say, appears among men at certain times and is born with a bodily nature mixed of man and woman. Some say that such creatures are portents and, being rarely born, are signs sometimes of evils and sometimes of good things."

"The Muses are daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or according to some of Ouranus and Ge. Most of the mythographers say that they are maidens, and that they got their name from initiating (myein) men, that is, teaching them what is good."

"About Heracles the Greeks say this: Perseus was born of Danae daughter of Acrisius and of Zeus; of Perseus and Andromeda was born Electryon; and from him was born Alcmene, with whom Zeus had intercourse and begot Heracles. In lying with her Zeus made the night three times as long; and this union alone of Zeus's took place not for the sake of erotic desire, as with the other women, but chiefly for the begetting of a child.

Hera, being jealous, held back Alcmene's labor pains and brought Eurystheus to the light before the proper time, since Zeus had declared that the child born on that day would reign over the race of the Perseids.

Alcmene, having given birth, exposed the infant, they say, for fear of Hera. Athena, admiring the infant, persuaded Hera to give it her breast; but when the child drew on the breast more violently than his age warranted, Hera in pain threw the infant away, and Athena took it and told its mother to rear it."

"After this Hera sent two serpents to destroy the infant; but the child, not dismayed, gripped the neck of each in his two hands and strangled the serpents. When Heracles had become a man, Eurystheus, who held the kingdom of Argos, ordered him to perform twelve labors.

When he fell into great perplexity, Hera sent madness upon him; and being grieved in soul he fell into frenzy. As the affliction grew, he went out of his mind and tried to kill his companion and nephew Iolaus; and when he fled, he shot down with arrows, as if they were enemies, his own children born to him by Megara, daughter of King Creon.

After this, having come quietly to himself, he performs the twelve labors for Eurystheus. He also kills the Centaurs, and among them Chiron, famous for his medicine."

"They say that something peculiar happened at the birth of this god. For Zeus had intercourse first with a mortal woman, Niobe daughter of Phoroneus, and last with Alcmene, the mother of Heracles; they reckon her as the sixteenth generation from Niobe; and with her he put an end to his intercourse with mortal women."

"But when Heracles had completed the labors, he gave his own wife Megara to his nephew Iolaus because of the misfortune with the children; and he himself asked for Iole the daughter of Eurytus in marriage. When her father refused and Heracles fell ill, he received an oracle that he would be freed from his sickness if he were first sold and became a slave.

So he sailed to Phrygia, was sold by one of his friends, and became the slave of Omphale, queen of those then called Maeonians and now Lydians. During the time of his slavery a son, Cleolaus, was born to him by a slave woman. Then he married Omphale and had a child by her too.

"Returning to Arcadia and lodging with King Aleus, he secretly had intercourse with his daughter, made her pregnant, and went away."

"And after this he married again, Deianeira the daughter of Oeneus, Meleager being already dead. Taking captive the daughter of Phyleus, he had intercourse with her and begot Tlepolemus. While dining with Oeneus, he struck with his fist and killed the servant who had made some mistake in waiting on him.

When on his journey he came to the river Evenus, he found the Centaur Nessus carrying people across the river for hire. Nessus carried Deianeira across first and, falling in love with her because of her beauty, tried to violate her. When she called aloud to her husband, Heracles shot the Centaur; and Nessus, in the very act and dying at once from the sharpness of the wound, said he would give Deianeira a love charm, so that Heracles would never wish to approach any other woman.

He told her, therefore, to take the seed that had fallen from him, mix with it oil and the blood dripping from the arrowhead, and anoint Heracles' tunic with it. Deianeira did this and kept the drug by her."

"Again Heracles took captive the daughter of Phylas, had intercourse with her, and begot a son Antiochus; and again, taking captive Astyaneira, the daughter of King Armenius, he had intercourse with her and begot a son Ctesippus."

"Thespius the Athenian, son of Erechtheus, having had fifty daughters by various wives, and being ambitious to have children for them by Heracles, invited Heracles to a sacrifice, entertained him splendidly, and sent his daughters to him one by one. And he violated them all in one night, and became the father of those called the Thespiadae."

"Having taken Iole captive and being about to offer a sacrifice, he sent to his wife Deianeira asking for the robe and tunic he was accustomed to use for sacrifices; and she anointed the tunic with the charm given her by the Centaur and sent it.

Heracles put on the tunic and fell into the greatest calamity. For since the arrowhead had taken up the venom of the Hydra, and the tunic therefore, through the heat, ravaged the flesh of his body, he was in great agony and killed the servant who had brought it; and he himself, according to an oracle, gave himself to the fire and so ended his life. Such are the stories of Heracles."

"About Asclepius they say that he was the son of Apollo and Coronis, that he devoted himself to the science of medicine, and advanced so far in fame as to heal unexpectedly many sick people who had been given up. So Zeus, provoked, struck him with a thunderbolt and destroyed him; and Apollo, provoked at the killing of his son, murdered the Cyclopes who had made the thunderbolt for Zeus. Zeus, provoked at their death, ordered Apollo to serve as a laborer with Admetus, and took this penalty from him for his offenses."

This is what Diodorus has set out in the fourth book of his Library. And the same writer says again that the Greeks borrowed the rest of their theology from other nations, writing as follows in the third book of his history:

"The Atlantians say that Ouranus was the first to reign among them, and that he had forty-five children by several wives, of whom they say eighteen were by one wife, Titaea; she, being chaste and the cause of many good things, was deified after her death and renamed Ge (Earth).

Ouranus had daughters, Basileia and Rhea, who is also Pandora. Basileia brought up her brothers, showing them a mother's kindness, and was called Mother.

Later, after the death of Ouranus, she lived with her brother Hyperion and bore two children, whom she named Helios and Selene (Sun and Moon).

Rhea's brothers, becoming afraid, slaughtered Hyperion and drowned Helios in the river Eridanus. Selene, learning of this, threw herself from the roof; and their mother, gone mad, wandered about the country with her hair loose, frenzied by the sound of drums and cymbals, and she too entirely disappeared.

The people, marveling at the calamity, transferred Helios and Selene to the stars of heaven, regarded their mother as a goddess, set up altars, and honored her with ecstatic rites with drums and cymbals."

"The Phrygians say that Meion, king of Phrygia, had a daughter Cybele, who was the first to invent the pipe, and was called the Mother of the Mountain. Marsyas the Phrygian, being her friend, first put together the flutes, and remained without experience of sexual pleasures until his death.

Cybele, having come into intimacy with Attis, became pregnant. When this was discovered, her father killed Attis and her nurses; and Cybele, gone mad, rushed out into the country, and there continued wailing and beating the drum.

Marsyas accompanied her; he entered into a contest of music with Apollo, and, being defeated, was flayed alive by Apollo.

Apollo, falling in love with Cybele, wandered with her as far as the Hyperboreans, and ordered that the body of Attis be buried and that Cybele be honored as a goddess. Therefore even to this day the Phrygians do this, lamenting the young man's death, setting up altars, and honoring Attis and Cybele with sacrifices.

Later they built a costly temple at Pessinus in Phrygia and established most magnificent honors and sacrifices."

"After the death of Hyperion the sons of Ouranus divided the kingdom, the most famous of whom were Atlas and Cronus. Of these Atlas received the regions along the Ocean, and became the best of astronomers. He had seven daughters, called the Atlantides. These, uniting with the most distinguished gods, became the founders of most of the race, bearing gods and heroes for their excellence; and the eldest of them, Maia, uniting with Zeus, bore Hermes."

"Cronus, excelling in greed and licentiousness, married his sister Rhea, by whom he begot Zeus. There was also another Zeus, brother of Ouranus, who reigned over Crete, far inferior in fame to the later one.

The later one reigned over the whole world; the Cretan one begot ten sons, who were named Curetes; and they say his tomb is still shown in Crete.

Cronus ruled over Sicily, Libya, and Italy. Zeus, his son, followed a life opposite to his father's. Some say he succeeded to the kingdom when his father yielded it willingly, others that he was chosen by the people because of their hatred of his father.

When Cronus marched against him with the Titans, Zeus defeated him in battle and went through the whole inhabited world. He excelled in bodily strength and the other virtues, and gave all his zeal to punishing the impious and benefiting the good; for which, after his departure from among men, he was named Zen, because he was thought to have been the cause of living (zen) well for mankind.

These are the chief points of the theology of the Atlantians; and they say that the Greeks too make use of them."

So writes Diodorus in the third book of his histories. The same writer, in the sixth book, confirms the same theology from the writing of Euhemerus the Messenian, speaking thus, word for word:

"Concerning the gods, then, the ancients have handed down to later generations two kinds of notions. Some, they say, are eternal and incorruptible, such as the sun and moon and the other stars of heaven, and besides these the winds and the others that have a nature like theirs; for each of these has its generation and its continuance from eternity. Others, they say, were earthly beings who became gods and obtained immortal honor and glory because of their benefits to mankind, such as Heracles, Dionysus, Aristaeus, and the others like them.

About the earthly gods many varied accounts have been handed down by historians and mythographers. Of the historians, Euhemerus, who composed the Sacred Record, has written in a way of his own; of the mythologists, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and others like them have fashioned more monstrous myths about the gods. We shall try to run briefly over what both have recorded, aiming at due proportion."

"Euhemerus, then, who was a friend of King Cassander and was obliged by him to perform certain royal services and long journeys abroad, says that he traveled southward to the Ocean. Setting sail from Arabia Felix, he made his voyage through the Ocean for several days and was carried to islands in the open sea, one of which was called Panchaea. There he saw the Panchaeans who live there, excelling in piety and honoring the gods with most magnificent sacrifices and remarkable offerings of silver and gold.

The island is also sacred to the gods, and there are many other things admired both for their antiquity and for the great art of their construction, of which we have written in detail in the books before this one.

On a very high hill there is a temple of Zeus Triphylius, founded by him when he reigned over the whole inhabited world while still among men. In this temple there is a golden pillar, on which are written in Panchaean letters, in summary, the deeds of Ouranus, Cronus, and Zeus.

After this he says that Ouranus was the first king, an equitable and beneficent man, skilled in the motion of the stars; that he was the first to honor the heavenly gods with sacrifices, and was therefore called Ouranus (Heaven).

Sons were born to him by his wife Hestia, Titan and Cronus, and daughters, Rhea and Demeter. Cronus reigned after Ouranus, and having married Rhea begot Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon.

Zeus, succeeding to the kingdom of Cronus, married Hera, Demeter, and Themis, and had children by them: the Curetes by the first, Persephone by the second, and Athena by the third.

Going to Babylon, he was entertained by Belus; and afterward, coming to the island of Panchaea, which lies by the Ocean, he set up an altar to Ouranus, his own forefather. From there he went through Syria to Casius, the ruler at that time, from whom Mount Casius is named; and going into Cilicia he conquered Cilix, the local ruler, in war. Visiting very many other nations as well, he was honored by them all and proclaimed a god."

Having gone through these things and the like about the gods as about mortal men, he adds, saying: "Concerning Euhemerus, who composed the Sacred Record, we shall be content with what has been said; but we shall try to run briefly over what is told in myth among the Greeks about the gods, following Hesiod, Homer, and Orpheus." Then next he adds the mythologies of the poets.

But let this much, sufficient for us, be cut out from the theology of the Greeks. It is reasonable to add to it the rites of the same gods in their shrines and their secret mysteries, and to consider whether they bear any mark worthy of God, of a theology that is truly divine, or spring from somewhere below, from a long and demonic error, worthy of laughter, or rather of shame, or rather of pity for those still blind.

These the admirable Clement exposes plainly in his Exhortation to the Greeks, a man who had gone through all of them by experience but quickly turned back from the error, as one redeemed from those evils by the saving word and through the teaching of the gospel. Listen, then, briefly to these too:

"Do not, then, pry into godless shrines, nor into the mouths of chasms full of marvel-mongering, nor the Thesprotian cauldron, nor the Cirrhaean tripod, nor the Dodonaean bronze; and the old oak honored in the desert sands, and the oracle there, withered away together with the oak itself, leave to myths grown old.

The spring of Castalia, at any rate, has been silenced, and the other spring of Colophon; and the other prophetic streams are likewise dead. Emptied of their vanity, late indeed but nonetheless, they have been exposed, having run dry together with their own myths.

Tell us also of the useless oracles of the rest of divination, or rather of madness: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, that of Amphiaraus, of Apollo, of Amphilochus;

and if you will, devote to perdition along with them the interpreters of portents and of birds and the judges of dreams. Set beside the Pythian, too, the diviners by flour and by barley, and the ventriloquists who are still honored by the many. Yes, and let the shrines of the Egyptians and the necromancies of the Etruscans be consigned to darkness. These are truly mad schools of sophistry for faithless men, and gambling houses of undiluted error.

Partners in this trickery are goats trained for divination, and ravens taught by men to give oracles to men."

"What if I were to recount to you the mysteries? I will not mock them in dance, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will strip bare, in accordance with the word of truth, the trickery hidden in them; and your so-called gods themselves, whose rites are mystic, I will wheel out, as on the stage of life, before the spectators of truth.

The Bacchants hold orgies in honor of the mad Dionysus, celebrating their sacred frenzy with the eating of raw flesh, and they perform the distribution of the flesh of their butcheries, crowned with snakes, shrieking out 'Eua, Eua,' the name of that Eve through whom error came in; and a consecrated serpent is the sign of the Bacchic orgies.

In fact, according to the exact Hebrew pronunciation, the name Heva, with a rough breathing, is interpreted 'the female serpent.' Deo and Kore have now become a mystic drama, and Eleusis lights up with torches their wandering, the rape, and their grief."

"And it seems to me that orgies and mysteries must be derived, the one from the wrath (orge) of Deo against Zeus, the other from the pollution (mysos) that befell Dionysus. Or if they come from one Myus of Attica, who, Apollodorus says, was killed in hunting, I do not grudge you that your mysteries have been glorified with funeral honors.

You may also understand the mysteries in another way, as 'myth-ries,' by a change of letters; for myths of this kind, as well as other things, hunt down the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most foolish of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks.

Perish, then, whoever began this deceit among men, whether it was Dardanus, who introduced the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Eetion, who founded the orgies and rites of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas who learned the artful deceit from Odrysus and then handed it on to his subjects.

For Cinyras the Cypriot islander would never persuade me, who dared to bring out from night into day the lewd orgies of Aphrodite, ambitious to deify a harlot of his own city.

Others say that Melampus the son of Amythaon brought from Egypt to Greece the festivals of Deo, a grief celebrated in hymns. These I would call the originators of evil, fathers of godless myths and of deadly superstition, who planted the mysteries in human life as a seed of vice and corruption."

"And now, for it is time, I will prove your orgies themselves to be full of deceit and marvel-mongering. And if you have been initiated, you will laugh all the more at these myths of yours that are held in honor. I will proclaim openly what is hidden, not ashamed to speak of what you are not ashamed to worship.

There is, then, the foam-born, the Cyprus-born, the darling of Cinyras: I mean Aphrodite, called philommedes because she was brought forth from the medea, those lustful members cut off from Ouranus, which after the cutting did violence to the wave. See how, from members so licentious, a worthy fruit is born for you, Aphrodite! And in the rites of this sea-born pleasure, a lump of salt and a phallus are given to those initiated into the art of adultery, as a token of her birth; and the initiates bring her a coin, as lovers to a harlot.

"The mysteries of Deo are the amorous embraces of Zeus with his mother Demeter, and the wrath of Deo (I do not know what to call her for the rest, mother or wife), on account of which she is said to have been called Brimo; the supplications of Zeus, the drink of gall, the tearing out of hearts, and unspeakable deeds.

The same rites the Phrygians perform in honor of Attis, Cybele, and the Corybantes. They have spread the tale that Zeus tore off the testicles of a ram, brought them, and threw them into the lap of Deo, paying a sham penalty for his violent embrace, as though he had castrated himself.

The symbols of this initiation, set out over and above, will, I know, move you to laughter, even if you are not disposed to laugh, because of the exposure: 'I ate from the drum; I drank from the cymbal; I carried the sacred dish; I slipped under the bridal chamber.' Are not these symbols an outrage? Are not the mysteries a mockery?"

"What if I were to add the rest? Demeter conceives; the Maiden is reared; and this same Zeus who begot her has intercourse again with Pherephatta, his own daughter, after her mother Deo, forgetting his former pollution, and he unites with her having become a serpent, which is what he was shown to be.

At any rate, in the Sabazian mysteries the sign for the initiates is 'the god through the bosom'; and this is a serpent drawn through the bosom of the initiates, a proof of the incontinence of Zeus. Pherephatta too conceives a child in the form of a bull.

Indeed, a certain idolatrous poet says: 'The bull is father of the serpent, and the serpent of the bull; on the mountain the herdsman's hidden goad,' calling, I think, the fennel stalk the herdsman's goad, the stalk that the Bacchants wreathe.

"Would you have me tell you also of Pherephatta's gathering of flowers, the basket, the rape by Aidoneus, the chasm in the earth, and the swine of Eubuleus that were swallowed up together with the two goddesses, for which reason at the Thesmophoria they cast pigs into the chasms?

This mythology the women celebrate in festivals in various ways in their cities, the Thesmophoria, Scirophoria, Arrhetophoria, dramatizing in many ways the rape of Pherephatta. As for the mysteries of Dionysus, they are utterly inhuman. While he was still a child, and the Curetes were dancing around him with armed movement, the Titans crept in by guile, deceived him with childish toys, and these same Titans tore him in pieces while still an infant, as Orpheus the Thracian, the poet of the rite, says: 'cone, and bull-roarer, and limb-bending toys, and fair golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides.'

"And it is not useless to set out, for condemnation, the useless symbols of this rite: knucklebone, ball, top, apples, bull-roarer, mirror, fleece.

Athena, having stolen away the heart of Dionysus, was called Pallas from its palpitating (pallein). The Titans who tore him in pieces set a cauldron on a tripod, threw in the limbs of Dionysus, and first boiled them; then, piercing them with spits, 'they held them over Hephaestus.'

Zeus afterward appeared (if he was a god, perhaps because he had a share of the savor of the roasting flesh, which your gods agree they receive as their portion) and punished the Titans with a thunderbolt, and entrusted the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo to bury. And he, for he did not disobey Zeus, carried the dismembered corpse to Parnassus and laid it there.

If you wish to look upon the orgies of the Corybantes as well: these two, having killed their third brother, covered the dead man's head with a purple cloth, crowned it, and buried it, carrying it on a bronze shield to the foothills of Olympus.

And these, to put it briefly, are the mysteries: murders and burials. Their priests, whom those concerned call 'kings of the rites,' add further marvels to the calamity, forbidding parsley with its roots to be set on the table; for they think parsley grew from the Corybantic blood that flowed out. Just so the women celebrating the Thesmophoria take care not to eat pomegranate seeds; for they think pomegranates sprang from the drops of the blood of Dionysus that fell to the ground.

Calling the Corybantes Cabiri, they also proclaim a Cabiric rite. For these two fratricides took up the chest in which the private part of Dionysus had been laid and brought it to Etruria, merchants of a glorious cargo. There they lived as exiles, entrusting to the Etruscans the precious teaching of piety, to worship private parts and a chest. For this reason some not unreasonably wish Dionysus to be called Attis, as having been deprived of his private parts."

"And what wonder if the Etruscans, being barbarians, are initiated with such shameful sufferings, when among the Athenians and the rest of Greece (I am ashamed even to say it) the mythology about Deo is full of shame?

For Deo, wandering in search of her daughter the Maiden near Eleusis (this place is in Attica), grows weary and sits down by a well in her grief. This is forbidden to the initiates even now, so that those initiated may not seem to imitate the mourning goddess.

At that time Eleusis was inhabited by the earth-born. Their names were Baubo, Dysaules, and Triptolemus, and also Eumolpus and Eubuleus. Triptolemus was a herdsman, Eumolpus a shepherd, and Eubuleus a swineherd; from them sprang the race of the Eumolpidae and of the Heralds, this priestly race at Athens.

And indeed (for I will not refrain from saying it) Baubo, having received Deo as a guest, offers her a mixed drink (kykeon). When she refused to take it and would not drink, since she was mourning, Baubo, deeply hurt as if slighted, uncovered her private parts and showed them to the goddess; and Deo was delighted at the sight and at last received the drink, pleased with the spectacle."

"These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians; these Orpheus records. I will set before you the very verses of Orpheus, so that you may have the mystagogue himself as witness of the shamelessness: 'So saying, she drew up her robes and showed all her body's unseemly form; and the child Iacchus was there, and laughing he tossed his hand beneath Baubo's breasts. And when the goddess smiled, she smiled in her heart, and received the glittering vessel in which the kykeon lay.'

And the password of the Eleusinian mysteries is: 'I fasted; I drank the kykeon; I took from the chest; having done my work, I put it into the basket, and from the basket into the chest.' Fine sights indeed, and fitting for a goddess!

Worthy of night, then, are the rites, and of fire, and of the 'great-hearted,' or rather empty-minded, people of the Erechtheidae, and of the other Greeks besides, 'whom there awaits after death what they do not expect.'

To whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? 'To night-wanderers, magi, Bacchants, Lenaeans, initiates.' These he threatens with what comes after death; for these he prophesies the fire. 'For the mysteries customary among men are celebrated in an unholy way.'

Custom, then, and empty opinion; and the mysteries of the serpent are a deceit that is worshipped, of those who with bastard piety urge people to initiations that are in truth no initiations and rites that are no rites.

And what are the mystic chests? (For I must strip bare their holy things and speak out what is unspeakable.) Are they not sesame cakes, pyramid cakes, balls, flat cakes with many knobs, lumps of salt, and a serpent, the sacred object of Dionysus Bassareus? And besides these, pomegranates, hearts, fennel stalks, ivy, and also round cakes and poppies? These are their holy things.

And further, the unspeakable symbols of Themis: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, a woman's comb, which is a euphemistic and mystic term for the female member. O the open shamelessness! Formerly, for sober people, silent night was a covering for pleasure; now, for the initiates, the holy night of incontinence is talked about, and the fire, carried in torches, exposes the passions.

Put out the fire, hierophant; respect the torches, torchbearer! The light exposes your Iacchus. Allow the mysteries to be hidden by night; let the orgies be honored with darkness. The fire is no actor; it is commanded to expose and to punish."

"These are the mysteries of the atheists. And I rightly call them atheists, who have not known the God who truly is, but shamelessly worship a child torn in pieces by Titans, a grieving woman, and parts that are truly unspeakable for shame. They are held fast in a twofold atheism: first, that by which they do not know God, not recognizing the God who truly is; and second, this error by which they think things that are not to be, and call these gods, which do not truly exist, or rather do not exist at all, but have obtained only the name." So much this writer too.

Rightly, then, do we confess that we have become free of all these things, redeemed from the long and inveterate error as from some dreadful and most grievous disease: first by the grace and kindness of God Almighty; second by the secret power of our Savior's gospel teaching; and third because we judged with sober reason that it is unholy and impious to honor with the reverend name of God mortal men who have long lain among the dead, who have not even left behind the memory of sober men, but have handed down to those after them examples of the utmost incontinence and licentiousness, of cruelty and madness to preserve.

For how would it not be the height of folly for lovers of self-control to yield the first place to the shameful and licentious, for the wise and sensible to give reverent honor to those who have lost their minds, and for those who practice justice and kindness to give it to those defiled, through the excess of their cruelty and inhumanity, with the pollution of killing children and fathers?

And what extreme of impiety has not been surpassed by bringing down the reverend and all-holy name of God to the unspeakable parts of men and women and to irrational and brutish nature, and by attributing to gods such shameful and inhuman things that, if any human wrongdoers were convicted of them, they would fall under the inexorable penalties of the laws?

And why should we go on at length, announcing to every barbarian and Greek alike the good news of freedom from these evils and bringing to light the reasonableness of our departure from the falsely named gods, when already most even of the extremely superstitious, as if sobering up from a deep stupor and opening the eye of the soul from the ancient mist, have seen through the deep nonsense of their ancestral error, and, standing firm on reason, have chosen the other road and withdrawn from the old one?

Of these, some went straight at it, spat upon the whole mythology of their forefathers, and laughed it broadly to scorn. Others, avoiding the reputation of atheism, neither stood by the former beliefs nor withdrew from them entirely; but, intending to flatter and serve their own reputation, they declared that the histories of the gods celebrated among them, which were true accounts, were myths fashioned by the poets, hiding physical theories within them.

Even though these interpretations bear no mark of truth at all, an exposition of them would still be necessary for us, to examine what is dignified among these people too; for our withdrawal from them could not have been brought about otherwise than if its reasonableness were shown through the gospel teaching of our Savior. Come, then, let us take up their account from the beginning and examine it.

The character of the Greek theology, then (I mean the popular and more mythical theology), and long before it that of the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and the others whom the preceding books recorded, has been shown to be such as has been made plain by the words of the Greek writers themselves set out above. We have rightly set it before our readers at the beginning of the present Preparation for the Gospel for their examination and judgment, so that both we ourselves and those still unacquainted with these things might learn who we formerly were, from what kind of fathers we sprang, by what great evils we were formerly fettered, and in what impiety and drunkenness of ignorance of God our souls were buried, when we were counted worthy of turning back and of freedom from all of these through the one teaching of the gospel alone, which was granted us in no other way than through the appearing of our Savior Jesus, the Christ of God.

He, not in one part of the earth nor in a corner of the land of one nation, but throughout the whole inhabited world, where the most superstitious error prevailed, like a sun of intellectual and rational souls spreading out the rays of his own light, brought over the whole human race at once, barbarians and Greeks alike, all of us, as out of a dreadful mist and the gloomiest and unseen night of superstitious error, to the bright and most radiant day of the true worship of God the universal King.

The words quoted earlier plainly taught that all those excited by the polytheistic error, in cities and villages, worshipped and cherished images of the dead and likenesses of men long departed; for the men of old, through the extreme savagery of life at that time, took no account of God the creator of all, paid no heed to divine justice which punishes wrongdoing, and plunged into every unholy deed.

For laws by which one must live had not yet been established, nor had civilized government been ordered among men; life was unrestrained, nomadic, and beastlike. Some, like irrational cattle, cared for nothing more than filling the belly, and in them the first form of atheism lurks. Others, stirred a little by natural notions, conceived that God and the power of God is something saving and good; and wishing to find him, they stretched their souls up to heaven, but stopped there in their thinking, and, struck with wonder at the beauty of the luminaries that shine and appear in heaven, declared these to be gods.

A third group, casting themselves down to earth, proclaimed as gods, both while they still lived and after their death, those thought to excel in wisdom among their contemporaries, or who had overpowered the many by bodily strength and the might of their power, giants or tyrants; or sorcerers and poisoners who had contrived their wicked arts of magic from some falling away of the more divine beings; or others who had first bestowed some common benefit useful for life.

Hence the houses of the gods are recorded among them to be the tombs of the dead, as Clement relates in his Exhortation to the Greeks, bringing in the Greeks themselves as witnesses of the account. If you like, listen again to him writing in this way:

"Naturally, then, superstition, having taken its beginning from somewhere, became the source of senseless vice; then, not being checked but increasing and flowing in full stream, it became the creator of many demons, offering hecatombs, celebrating festivals, setting up statues, and building temples. These (for I will not keep silent about this either, but will expose it too) were euphemistically named temples but were in fact tombs; that is, tombs were called temples. But you, even now at least, forget your superstition, being ashamed to honor tombs."

"In the temple of Athena at Larissa, on the acropolis, 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.

And what of Erichthonius? Is he not buried in the temple of Polias? And Immarus, son of Eumolpus and Daeira, is he not buried in the precinct of the Eleusinium below the acropolis? And 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 Artemisium on Delos, which is in the temple of Delian Apollo.

Leandrus says that Cleomachus is buried at Miletus in the Didymaeum. Here it is not right to pass over the tomb of Leucophryne, following Zeno of Myndus, who is buried in the temple of Artemis at Magnesia; nor the altar of Apollo at Telmessus, which too they record to be the tomb of Telmessus the seer.

Ptolemy son of Agesarchus, in the first book of his work on Philopator, says that Cinyras and the descendants of Cinyras are buried at Paphos in the temple of Aphrodite.

But if I were to go through the tombs you worship, all time would not suffice me. As for you, if no shame for what you dare creeps over you, then you go about utterly dead, trusting in the dead: 'Ah, wretches, what evil is this you suffer?'"

And a little later he says: "Another new god, in Egypt, and nearly among the Greeks too, the king of the Romans has solemnly deified: his favorite Antinous, who was exceedingly beautiful, he consecrated, as Zeus did Ganymede.

For desire that has no fear is not easily restrained. And people now venerate the sacred nights of Antinous, which the lover who kept the vigil with him knew to be shameful." And he continues: "Already the tomb of the favorite is the temple and city of Antinous. For as temples, I suppose, so tombs too are admired: pyramids, mausoleums, and labyrinths, other temples of the dead, as those are tombs of the gods."

And again, a little later: "Come, let us briefly go round the games too and put an end to these funeral festivals, the Isthmian, Nemean, Pythian, and besides these the Olympian. At Pytho the Pythian serpent is worshipped, and the festival of the snake is proclaimed as the Pythian games. At the Isthmus the sea cast up a pitiable piece of refuse, and the Isthmian games mourn Melicertes. At Nemea another child, Archemorus, is buried, and the child's funeral rites are called the Nemean games. Pisa, O Panhellenes, is the tomb of a Phrygian charioteer, and the Zeus of Phidias claims for himself the libations to Pelops, the Olympian games."

So much this writer. But you, taking up the account from the beginning, consider how the superstitious error fell away. By nature, then, and by self-taught notions, or rather God-taught ones, the thing signified by the name and being of God was held to be something good and beneficial; for all people had grasped this beforehand by common reasoning, since the creator of all things had sown it in every rational and intellectual soul by natural notions.

Yet they did not use their choice in accordance with reason. Perhaps one here and a second there, or a very few others, whose memory the oracles of the Hebrews preserve, applied the notion of God to none of the things seen, but with undistorted reasoning led it up from the things seen to the creator of the whole world and the great maker of all things, and with the purified eyes of the mind perceived that he alone is God, the Savior of all, and the only giver of good things. But the rest, turned aside by every kind of darkening of the soul, were carried down into the depth of impiety, so that like wild beasts they fixed the beautiful, the advantageous, and the good no higher than bodies and the pleasure of the flesh.

In this way, as was said before, they proclaimed as saviors and gods, as givers of good things, the discoverers of what were considered the goods and useful things of the body, or some rulers and tyrants, or sorcerers and poisoners, men mortal by nature and subject to human misfortunes, transferring the reverent notion naturally present in them to those whom they thought benefactors.

So great a stupor of mind held them that they took no account of the wrongs done by those they called gods, and did not blush at the shameful things reported of them, but admired the men in everything, because of the benefits they provided, or because of the dominions and tyrannies then first being established.

Since, as I said before, laws were not yet in force among men and no punishment hung over wrongdoing, they recorded adulteries and the corruption of males, lawless and unlawful marriages, murders and parricides, slaughters of children and brothers, yes, and wars and seditions, really committed by their own leaders, whom they regarded and called gods, as if they were great deeds and acts of valor, leaving the memory of them to later generations as of noble and brave men.

Such was the ancient theology. Some newcomers, who sprang up only yesterday or the day before and boasted of philosophizing more rationally, changed it and introduced the more physical interpretation of the history of the gods, devising more dignified inventions to add to the myths. They neither entirely escaped the impious offense of their forefathers, nor could they endure the depravity of what was said of the gods, which was plain on the face of it.

Eager nevertheless to remedy their fathers' offense, they turned the myths into physical narratives and theories, boasting, as if it were something more mystical, that the things signified by the myths are the nourishing and growth-giving powers of the nature of bodies.

From there they too went up and proclaimed the elements of the world gods: not only the sun, moon, and stars, but also earth and water, air and fire, and the compounds and products of these; yes, and the seasonable fruits of the earth and the other growths of dry and moist food. These too, as causes of the life of bodies, they deified, calling them Demeter, Kore, Dionysus, and whatever else is like them, introducing a forced and untrue embellishment of the myths.

But these men, late in time, as if ashamed of their forefathers' theologies, added to the myths about the gods such dignified explanations as each invented for himself; for no one dared to disturb the ancestral customs, but they held antiquity and the customary upbringing they had been reared in from childhood in great honor.

Those older than these, on a par with the deification of men, also ordained the deification of irrational animals because of their usefulness, for the reasons given before, and consecrated equal worship to irrational beasts, with libations, sacrifices, mystic rites, hymns, and songs, exalting their honors in the same way as those of deified men. They went so far in evil that through excess of unrestrained luxury they deified with honors equal to the gods the parts of the body that draw to shameful deeds and the licentious passions among men; while the theologians themselves declared that nothing in these things should be dignified with solemn language.

It must be observed, then, that the most ancient people are attested to have known nothing more than the history and to have devoted themselves only to the myths. However, since we have once set out to examine also the dignified and secret doctrines of the noble philosophers, come, let us survey these too, so that we may not seem to be ignorant of their marvelous natural philosophy.

But before setting these out, I think it right to point out first the contradiction of these marvelous philosophers with one another even in this. Some tell their stories at random and declare their own views according to what occurs to each; for they do not agree with one another in their natural explanations. Others, more candidly, do away with the whole thing, and banish from their own commonwealth not only the unseemly stories about the gods but also their interpretations; and sometimes, through fear of the punishment of the laws, they speak indulgently of the myths.

Listen, then, to the Greeks themselves, through one who is the best of them all, who now drives out the myths and now again admits them. Their admirable Plato, when he lays bare his own choice, boldly forbids anyone to think and speak of the gods at all such things as the ancients said, whether they contain some hidden meaning in allegories or are said without any allegory; but when he speaks indulgently to the laws, he says that one must believe the myths about the gods, as having no hidden meaning conveyed by them.

And at one point, having separated his own theology from the ancient myths, and having discussed separately the nature of heaven, sun, moon, and stars, and further of the whole universe and its parts, he goes through again separately and distinctly the gods whose genealogies were told of old, in the Timaeus, in these very words:

"But to speak of the other demons and to know their origin is beyond us; we must believe those who have spoken before, who were offspring of gods, as they said, and surely knew their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve children of gods, even though they speak without probable or necessary proofs; but since they profess to report family matters, we must follow the law and believe them.

So let the origin of these gods be held and told by us according to them: Oceanus and Tethys were children of Earth and Heaven; of these were born Phorcys, Cronus and Rhea, and all that go with them; and of Cronus and Rhea were born Zeus and Hera and all those whom we know are called their brothers and sisters, and further others who are their offspring."

These things Plato says must be believed by those who follow the law, though he admits that they are said without probable or necessary proofs. And it should be noted that he shows the names and genealogies of the gods to contain no secret meaning signified in physical theories.

Again elsewhere the same writer, laying bare his own preference, uses these words: "First of all," I said, "he who told the greatest lie, and about the greatest matters, did not lie well: that Ouranus did what Hesiod says he did, and how Cronus in turn took vengeance on him. As for the deeds of Cronus and his sufferings at the hands of his son, even if they were true, I should not think they ought to be told so lightly to foolish young people, but should rather be kept in silence; or if there were some necessity to tell them, as few as possible should hear them in secret, after sacrificing not a pig but some great and hard-to-get victim, so that as few as possible might happen to hear.

"Yes," he said, "these stories are hard." "And they must not be told, Adeimantus, in our city; nor must a young man hear it said that in committing the worst crimes he would be doing nothing remarkable, nor again in punishing his father for wrongdoing in every way, but would only be doing what the first and greatest of the gods did." "Nor do I myself," he said, "think they are fit to be told."

"Nor indeed at all," I said, "that gods war against gods and plot and fight; for it is not true either, if those who are to guard our city must think it most shameful to quarrel lightly with one another. Far less must battles of giants be told them in myths and embroidered, and many other enmities of every kind of gods and heroes toward their kin and friends. But if we are somehow to persuade them that no citizen ever quarreled with another, and that this is not holy, such things rather must be told to children from the first by old men and old women, and as they grow older; and the poets must be compelled to compose stories close to these.

But the binding of Hera by her son, and the hurling of Hephaestus by his father when he was about to defend his mother from being beaten, and all the battles of the gods that Homer has composed, must not be admitted into the city, whether they are composed with allegorical meanings or without them."

Clearly, then, by these words the philosopher teaches that both the myths of the ancients about the gods and the physical theories supposed to be expressed in the myths in allegories must be rejected; so that it is no longer unreasonable for the teaching of our Savior to announce to us our withdrawal from them, since they have been cast out even by their own people.

Hence it occurs to me to admire the ancient Romans too, how, perceiving that all the Greek physical theories about the gods were absurd and unprofitable, or rather forced and inconsistent, they cut off the myths themselves from their own theology. You may learn this from the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. In the second book, recounting the history of Romulus, the first founder of Rome, he goes through his other achievements and writes about these matters too in this way:

"But he knew that good laws and the emulation of noble pursuits make a city pious and temperate, practiced in justice and good in war; and he took great care of these, beginning with the worship of the gods and divine beings.

Temples, then, and precincts and altars, and the setting up of images, their forms and symbols, and the powers and gifts with which they have benefited our race; festivals of the kind that should be held for each of the gods or divine beings, and sacrifices in which they delight when honored by men; holy truces, public festivals, rests from labor, and all such things he established in the same way as the best customs among the Greeks.

But the myths handed down about them, in which there are some blasphemies or accusations against them, he considered wicked, unprofitable, and indecent, and unworthy not only of gods but even of good men; he rejected them all, and prepared people to speak and think the best things about the gods, attributing to them no pursuit unworthy of their blessed nature.

For among the Romans neither is Ouranus said to have been castrated by his own sons, nor Cronus to have destroyed his own offspring for fear of their attack, nor Zeus to have overthrown the dominion of Cronus and shut up his own father in the prison of Tartarus; nor are there wars, wounds, bonds, and servitude of gods among men.

No festival is held among them in black garments or in mourning, with beating of breasts and lamentations of women for vanished gods, such as are performed among the Greeks over the rape of Persephone and the sufferings of Dionysus and all other such things.

Nor would one see among them, even though their customs are now corrupted, any ecstatic possessions, Corybantic frenzies, Bacchic revels and secret rites, all-night vigils of men with women in the temples of the gods, or any other such monstrosity; but everything said and done concerning the gods is done with reverence, as neither among Greeks nor among barbarians.

And what I have admired most of all: though countless nations have come into the city, who must of necessity worship their ancestral gods by their own customs, the city has never publicly adopted any foreign practice, as has happened to many; and if it has introduced any rites in accordance with oracles, it has adapted them to its own customs, casting out all mythical humbug, as with the rites of the Idaean goddess.

For the praetors perform sacrifices and games for her every year according to the laws of the Romans; but her priest is a Phrygian man and a Phrygian woman, and they carry her around the city begging alms for the Mother, as is their custom, wearing images on their breasts, while their followers play the flute to them in the Mother's songs and they beat their drums.

But of the native Romans none goes through the city begging for the Mother or accompanied by flutes, dressed in a many-colored robe, nor celebrates the goddess's orgies with the Phrygian rites, by law and decree of the senate. So cautious is the city toward customs about the gods that are not native, and so does it regard as ill-omened all pretension that has nothing seemly about it.

And let no one suppose that I am unaware that some of the Greek myths are useful to men: some showing the works of nature through allegory, some composed for consolation in human misfortunes, some removing disturbances of the soul and fears and putting down unhealthy opinions, and some fashioned for some other benefit.

But although I know these things as well as anyone, nevertheless I am cautious toward them, and I rather approve the theology of the Romans, considering that the good to be had from the Greek myths is small and cannot benefit many, but only those who have examined the purposes for which they are made.

And those who have a share of this philosophy are few. The great unphilosophical multitude is apt to take the stories about them in the worse sense, and suffers one of two things: either it despises the gods as wallowing in great misfortune, or it refrains from none of the most shameful and lawless deeds, seeing them attributed to gods.

But let the consideration of these things be left to those who practice only the contemplative part of philosophy; I have thought these matters too worth recording in the history of the constitution established by Romulus." Such, then, were the views of the best of the philosophers and of the first and ancient rulers of Rome about the Greek theology: they in no way accepted physical explanations in the myths about the gods, nor their pompous and sophistical quibbles. But since we have once set out to refute these too, come, let us see what dignified thing worthy of God their interpretations and theories bring, adding nothing of our own but using their own words throughout, so that we may learn their own doctrines from themselves.

Such, then, were the views of the best of the philosophers and of the first and ancient rulers of Rome about the Greek theology: they in no way accepted physical explanations in the myths about the gods, nor their pompous and sophistical quibbles.

But since we have once set out to refute these too, come, let us consider what dignified thing worthy of God their interpretations and theories bring, adding nothing of our own but using their own words throughout, so that we may learn from themselves again their own dignified and secret doctrines.

Countless others who profess to philosophize have spent great labor on these matters, producing various inventions of their own, each insisting that whatever occurred to him and seemed right was the truth. For me it is enough to provide the proofs from those who are most distinguished, known to all philosophers, and who have won no small fame for philosophy among the Greeks.

First of them, take and read the words of Plutarch of Chaeronea on the matters before us, in which, speaking solemnly, he turns the myths aside to what he says are mystical theologies. Unveiling these, he says that Dionysus is drunkenness, no longer the mortal man shown by history in the preceding book, and Hera the married life of husband and wife; then, as if he had forgotten this explanation, he joins on another account next and calls Hera no longer as before but the earth, and Leto forgetfulness and night; and again he says that Hera is the same as Leto; then after this Zeus is brought in by him, allegorized into the power of the ether.

But why should I anticipate these things, when we may hear the man himself, revealing in the work he entitled On the Daedala at Plataea what is hidden from the many of the secret natural philosophy about the gods, somewhat as follows:

"That the ancient natural philosophy, among both Greeks and barbarians, was a physical doctrine hidden in myths, for the most part a secret and mystical theology conveyed through riddles and hidden meanings, in which what is spoken is clearer to the many than what is kept silent, and what is kept silent more suspect than what is spoken, is plain in the Orphic poems and in the Egyptian and Phrygian stories; but most of all the orgies of the initiations and the symbolic actions in the sacred rites show the mind of the ancients.

For example, not to wander far from the matters at hand, they do not think or allow that Hera has any partnership with Dionysus. They take care not to mingle their rites; and the priestesses at Athens, they say, do not speak to each other when they meet, nor is ivy ever brought into the precinct of Hera. This is not because of mythical and nonsensical jealousies, but because the goddess presides over marriage and leads the bride, while drunkenness is unseemly for bridegrooms and most unsuited to marriage, as Plato says. For drinking unmixed wine, he says, causes disturbance in souls and bodies, by which what is sown and conceived takes root badly, shapeless and misdirected. Again, those who sacrifice to Hera do not consecrate the gall but bury it beside the altar, signifying that the life together of wife and husband should be without anger and gall, and pure of all wrath and bitterness."

This symbolic manner is found more in the stories and myths. For example, they relate that Hera, while still a maiden being brought up in Euboea, was stolen away by Zeus, carried across to this place, and hidden there, Cithaeron providing them a shady recess and a natural bridal chamber. When Macris, Hera's nurse, came in search of her and wished to look, Cithaeron would not let her pry or approach the place, saying that Zeus was resting and spending his time there with Leto. When Macris went away, Hera escaped notice for the time; and later, in gratitude to Leto, she gave her a share in her altar and temple, so that sacrifice is offered first to Leto Mychia (of the recess); some say Nychia (of the night). In both names the hidden and secret is signified. Some say that Hera herself, secretly united with Zeus there and escaping notice, was thus called Leto Nychia; and when the marriage became public, and their union was first revealed here at Cithaeron and Plataea, she was called Hera Teleia (fulfilled) and Gamelios (of marriage).

"Those who interpret the myth more physically and fittingly bring Hera together with Leto in this way. Hera is the earth, as has been said, and Leto is night, being a sort of forgetfulness (letho) of those who turn to sleep; and night is nothing else than the shadow of the earth. For when the shadow, drawing near the west, hides the sun, it spreads out and darkens the air; and this is the eclipsing slip of the full moons, when, as the moon goes round, the shadow of the earth touches it and dims its light.

"That Leto is no other than Hera you may learn from this. We call Artemis the daughter of Leto, but we also name her Eileithyia; so Hera and Leto are two names of one goddess. Again, Apollo was born of Leto and Ares of Hera, but both have one power; and he is called Ares as helping (aregon) in the misfortunes of violence and battle, and Apollo as freeing (apallatton) and releasing man from the sicknesses of the body. Therefore, of the most fiery and burning stars, the sun is called Apollo and the fire-colored one is named Ares. Nor is it absurd that the same goddess should be called the goddess of marriage and considered mother of Eileithyia and of the sun. For the end of marriage is birth, and birth is the passage from darkness to the sun and light. And the poet said well: 'But when Eileithyia of the hard labor brought him forth to the light, and he saw the rays of the sun.' The poet did well to compress the compound with the preposition, showing the force of the travail, and to make the end of birth the seeing of the sun. So the same goddess made marriage come together, in order to prepare for birth."

"Perhaps we should also tell the more simple-minded myth. It is said that Zeus, when Hera quarreled with him and would no longer come to him but hid herself, at a loss and wandering about, met Alalcomenes, a native of the land, and was taught by him that he must deceive Hera by pretending to marry another. With Alalcomenes' help they secretly cut down a fine, very beautiful oak, shaped it, dressed it as a bride, and called it Daedale. Then the wedding song was raised, the Tritonian nymphs brought the bridal bath, and Boeotia provided flutes and revels. While this was going on, Hera could hold out no longer, but came down from Cithaeron, followed by the women of Plataea, and in anger and jealousy ran to Zeus. When the pretense was revealed, she was reconciled, and with joy and laughter herself led the bridal procession. She gave honor to the wooden image and called the festival Daedala, but nevertheless burned it, lifeless though it was, out of jealousy."

"Such is the myth; and its meaning is this. The quarrel and strife of Hera and Zeus is nothing else than the bad mixture and disturbance of the elements, when they no longer keep due measure with one another in order, but irregularity and harshness arise and they fight against each other, dissolve their partnership, and bring about the destruction of all things. If Zeus, that is, the hot and fiery power, gives the cause of the destruction, drought seizes the earth; but if excess or superabundance arises in Hera, that is, the moist and airy nature, a great flood comes, rains pour down, and everything is inundated. Something of this kind happened about those times, and Boeotia especially was submerged; and as soon as the plain emerged and the flood abated, the fair order of the surrounding air out of the calm was called the concord and reconciliation of the gods. And first of the plants of the earth the oak rose up, and men loved it, since it provided the continuance of food, life, and safety; for not only to the pious, as Hesiod says, but also to those left over from the destruction 'the oak bears acorns at its top and bees in its middle.'"

So much Plutarch. And we, from the words he has set out, have learned that even the wonderful and secret natural philosophy of the Greek theology brought with it nothing divine, nothing great, worthy of God, or deserving of such exaltation.

For you have heard Hera now proclaimed the goddess of marriage and signifying the life together of husband and wife, now again the earth named Hera, now the moist substance; Dionysus turned into drunkenness, Leto into night, the sun into Apollo, and Zeus himself into the hot and fiery power.

So, besides the unseemliness of the myths, even the supposedly more dignified explanation and natural philosophy did not lead up to any heavenly, intellectual, and divine powers, nor to rational and incorporeal beings, but itself again turned the parts of the world downward to drunkenness and marriages and human passions, to fire and earth and sun and the other elements of matter, and deified nothing more.

Plato too knows this. At any rate he confesses plainly in the Cratylus that the first men in Greece knew nothing more than the visible parts of the world, and thought that the only gods were the luminaries of heaven and the rest of the phenomena.

He says, word for word: "It seems to me that the first men in Greece held as gods only these, which many of the barbarians hold now: sun and moon and earth and stars and heaven."

Such, then, are the Greek doctrines; let us see also those older than these, the Egyptian. They say that Isis and Osiris are the sun and the moon; that Zeus is the spirit that pervades all things, Hephaestus fire, and that they named the earth Demeter; that the moist element is considered Oceanus among the Egyptians, and their own river the Nile, to which they ascribed the births of the gods; and that they call the air Athena.

These five gods, I mean Air, Water, Fire, Earth, and Spirit, go about the whole inhabited world, taking now one shape and now another, the forms and appearances of men and of all kinds of animals; and among the Egyptians themselves there were mortal men of the same names as these, called Helios, Cronus, and Rhea, and also Zeus, Hera, Hephaestus, and Hestia. Manetho writes about these things more fully, and Diodorus in summary, in the work mentioned before, recording somewhat as follows, word for word:

"These gods, they say, the Sun and the Moon, who are Osiris and Isis among the Egyptians, govern the whole universe, nourishing and increasing all things by the three seasons that complete the cycle in an invisible movement, spring, summer, and winter; and these, though most opposite in nature to one another, complete the year in the best harmony.

These gods contribute most to the generation of all living things, the one of the fiery and spiritual nature, the other of the moist and dry, and both in common of the airy; and through these all things are begotten and nourished. Therefore the whole body of the nature of the universe is completed from the sun and moon, and their parts are the five mentioned before, spirit, fire, the dry, the moist, and lastly the airy; and just as in a man we count head, hands, feet, and the other parts, in the same way the whole body of the world is composed of those mentioned.

Each of these the first men in Egypt to use articulate speech considered a god and gave each its own name according to its nature. Spirit they called Zeus, by translation of the word; regarding him as the cause of the soul in living things, they considered him a kind of father of all.

They say that the most famous of the Greek poets also agrees with them, saying of the god, 'father of men and gods.' Fire, translated, they named Hephaestus, considering him a great god who contributes much to all things for their generation and full growth. The earth, which they regarded as a kind of vessel of growing things, they called Mother; and the Greeks likewise call her Demeter, the word having been slightly changed over time.

For in ancient times she was called Earth Mother, as Orpheus also testifies, saying: 'Earth, mother of all, Demeter giver of wealth.' The moist element, they say, the ancients named Oceanus, which when translated means 'mother of food'; but some of the Greeks have taken it to be Ocean, of which the poet says: 'Oceanus, the origin of the gods, and mother Tethys.'

For the Egyptians consider their own river, the Nile, to be Oceanus, and say that the births of the gods took place beside it. For of the whole inhabited world Egypt alone has many cities founded by the ancient gods, such as those of Zeus, Helios, Hermes, Apollo, Pan, Eileithyia, and many others.

The air, they say, they called Athena, by translation of the word, and considered her the daughter of Zeus, and made her a virgin because the air is by nature incorruptible and occupies the highest place of the whole world; therefore it was said in myth that she was born from the head of Zeus. She was also named Tritogeneia because her nature changes three times a year, in spring, summer, and winter.

She is also called Glaucopis, not, as some of the Greeks supposed, from having grey eyes (for that is silly), but because the air has a bluish appearance. They say that the five gods mentioned go about the whole inhabited world, appearing to men in the forms of sacred animals, and sometimes changing into the appearance of men or of other things.

And this is not mythical, but possible, if these are truly the ones who beget all things. And the poet too, having visited Egypt and shared in such accounts from the priests, set down the above somewhere in his poetry as actually happening: 'And the gods, like strangers from abroad, taking all kinds of shapes, go about the cities, watching the violence and the good order of men.' Such are the things the Egyptians say about the gods in heaven who have had an eternal origin."

"Others, they say, sprang from these and were earthly, being mortal at first but having obtained immortality because of their intelligence and their common benefits to mankind; and some of them were also kings in Egypt. Of these, when translated, some have the same names as the heavenly ones and some have had their own: Helios, Cronus, and Rhea, and Zeus, called Ammon by some, and besides these Hera and Hephaestus, Hestia, and lastly Hermes. And Helios was the first to reign over Egypt, bearing the same name as the star in heaven."

So much the historian cited. And Plutarch too, in his work On Isis, writes this, word for word: "Let us look first, from another starting point, at the simplest of those who seem to say something more philosophical. These are the ones who say that, as the Greeks allegorize Cronus as time (chronos), Hera as the air, and the birth of Hephaestus as the change of air into fire, so among the Egyptians Osiris is the Nile, consorting with Isis, the earth, and Typhon is the sea, into which the Nile falls and disappears."

Having said these and similar things, he again refers the myths about the gods in question to demons, and again explains them otherwise, and yet again allegorizes them in another way.

It would be reasonable to ask of which gods they will say the images preserve the forms carved on them. Of demons? Or of fire, air, earth, and water? Or are they likenesses of men and women, and shapes of irrational animals and beasts?

For since they themselves concede that certain mortal men bore the same names as the sun and the universal elements and were proclaimed gods, whose forms and likenesses would it be reasonable to call the carvings in lifeless images? Those of the universal elements, or, as the plain evidence of sight shows, those of mortals lying among the dead?

But even if they themselves do not say so, the true account cries aloud, all but uttering a voice, bearing witness that those in question were mortal men. And Plutarch, over and above, describes even the character of their bodily appearance, in his work On Isis and the Egyptian Gods, speaking somewhat as follows:

"For the Egyptians relate that Hermes was short-armed in body, Typhon red in complexion, Ares white, and Osiris dark-skinned, as having been men by nature."

So much Plutarch too. All their deification, then, is of the dead, and the natural philosophy is a fiction of theirs. For why should they have made living figures of men and women, when they could have worshipped the sun and moon and the other elements of the world without these?

To which of them, and beginning from what, did they give such names as, for example, Hephaestus and Athena, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hera? Were these first names of the universal elements, given afterward to mortals bearing the same names as the heavenly ones? Or, conversely, did they transfer the names from what men were called to these substances?

And why should they give mortal names to universal natures? And do the mysteries of each god, the hymns, the songs, and the secrets of the rites, carry symbols of the universal elements, or of the mortal men of old who bore the same names as the gods?

But wanderings, drunkenness, love affairs, seductions of women, plots of men, and countless things that are truly mortal, shameful, and undignified, how could anyone ascribe them to the universal elements, when they plainly bear the mark of mortality and human passion?

So from all these considerations this wonderful and noble natural philosophy is convicted of having no hold on truth and of bringing nothing truly divine, but of having a forced and false outward show of dignity. Listen then to what Porphyry too records about these same things in his Letter to Anebo the Egyptian:

"For Chaeremon and the others do not think there is anything prior to the visible worlds, putting the gods of the Egyptians at the head of their account, and no other gods except those called planets, and those that fill up the zodiac, and those that rise alongside them: the divisions into decans, the horoscopes, and the so-called mighty leaders, whose names are given in the almanacs, together with cures of diseases, risings and settings, and signs of the future.

For he saw that those who said the sun was the creator, and the stories of Osiris and Isis, and all the priestly myths, either turned upon the stars and their appearances, disappearances, and risings, or upon the waxing and waning of the moon, or the course of the sun, or the night or day hemisphere, or the river; and that they interpreted everything in terms of natural things and nothing in terms of incorporeal and living beings. Most of them even made our free will depend on the motion of the stars, binding all things, I know not how, with the indissoluble bonds of necessity, which they call fate, and attaching everything to these gods; and these alone they worship as deliverers from fate, in temples and with images and the rest."

Let these extracts from the letter cited stand, declaring plainly that the secret theology of the Egyptians too proclaimed as gods none other than the stars in heaven, both the so-called fixed stars and those named planets, and introduced as creator of the universe no incorporeal being whatever, no creative Word, no God, no gods, no intellectual and invisible powers, but only the visible sun. Therefore they ascribed the cause of the universe to the stars alone, hanging all things on fate and on the motion and course of the stars, as indeed this opinion still prevails among them even now.

If, then, the Egyptians interpreted everything in terms of the visible elements of the world alone and nothing in terms of incorporeal and living beings, and if the elements and all visible bodies are by their own nature lifeless and irrational, flowing and perishable, see into what their theology has fallen once more, deifying lifeless substance and dead, irrational bodies, especially since they referred nothing to incorporeal and intellectual beings, nor to a creative mind and word of the universe.

And since it was agreed earlier that the Greeks received their theology from the Egyptians, it is time to conclude that the Greeks too follow them, give the same natural explanations as the Egyptians, and are convicted of deifying nothing more than lifeless matter. For these were the dignified doctrines of the Egyptians according to the writing of the author mentioned, who again, in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food, goes through such things about the same matters:

"Starting from this discipline and their intimacy with the divine, they recognized that the divine did not pass through man alone, nor did the soul dwell on earth in man alone, but that nearly the same soul passed through all living creatures. Therefore they took every living creature into their deification, and likewise mingled wild beasts and men, and again the bodies of birds and men.

For one figure among them is represented as human up to the neck, but has the face of a bird or a lion or some other animal; and again there is a human head with parts of other animals, in one place below and in another above. By these they show that by the will of the gods these too have fellowship with one another, and that the wild among the beasts are reared with us and tamed not without some divine will.

Hence the lion too is worshipped as a god, and a part of Egypt, which they call a nome, has the name Leontopolite, another Busirite, another Cynopolite. For they worshipped the power over all things through the animals associated with each of the gods, which each god provided.

They revere water and fire, the most beautiful of the elements, as most responsible for our preservation, and display these in the temples; as even now, at the opening of the temple of holy Sarapis, the worship is performed with fire and water, the singer pouring out the water and showing the fire, when he stands on the threshold and awakens the god in the ancestral language of the Egyptians.

These, then, they revere as having a part in the rites, and they have honored most of all those that have the fullest part in the sacrifices. Such are all animals, since they even worship a man at the village of Anabis, where a man is sacrificed to and the sacred offerings are burned on the altars for him;

and a little later he would eat what had been prepared for him as for a man. As, then, we must abstain from man, so also from the other animals.

Further, from their exceeding wisdom and their familiarity with the divine, they perceived that some animals are dearer to some of the gods than men are, as the hawk to the sun, having its whole nature from blood and spirit, pitying man and wailing over a dead body lying unburied, and scattering earth upon it." And a little after he says:

"The beetle an ignorant man, unacquainted with divine things, would loathe; but the Egyptians revered it as a living image of the sun. For every beetle is male, and, discharging its seed in the mud and making it into a ball, it rolls it back with its hind feet, as the sun turns the heaven, and it awaits a lunar period of days.

So too they philosophize somewhat about the ram, and something else about the crocodile, the vulture, and the ibis, and in general about each of the animals; so that it was from wisdom and exceeding divine knowledge that they came to the worship of the animals as well."

Such are the things the author cited has set down about the noble natural philosophy of the wise Egyptians, making clear to us the secrets of the Egyptians: that they revere water and fire, and that among them one substance, not only of bodies but also of soul, has been judged to belong to rational and irrational creatures, so that it seems reasonable to him that the beasts have been proclaimed gods.

And yet how could it be anything but most unreasonable to take irrational and beastlike nature into deification because it shares, as they say, in a soul equal to that of men? They ought rather, if anything, to have regarded these too as men, and given them a share of human esteem and honor.

But they did not do this. The beasts, made irrational by nature itself and having received this name, not even counted worthy of the title of men, they did not think fit to receive even as equal to men; but they took the supreme name of the universal King and of God the creator of all things and brought it down to the nature of beasts, and proclaimed gods those which God himself has not counted worthy even of the name of men.

Besides this you have heard of the mystical divine wisdom for which the admirable Egyptians worshipped wolves, dogs, and lions; you have learned the wonder of the beetle and the virtue of the hawk. Do not laugh at the gods any more, but pity the thrice-wretched human race for its great simplicity and blindness.

And consider, looking all around, what good things the Christ of God has given us, who has redeemed even the souls of the Egyptians, through his gospel teaching, from so great a disease and so long and lasting a blindness, so that most of the people in Egypt have now been freed from this disease too.

Such, then, are the doctrines of the Egyptians, which are recorded as older than all the Greek ones. You have, therefore, besides the mythical theology, the more physical theology of both the Greeks and the Egyptians, who in ancient times established polytheistic superstition; and you have learned that among them nothing of the truly divine incorporeal and intellectual beings was known.

But let it be granted and conceded to these star-gazers that they speak the truth and succeed in their natural philosophy of allegories: let the sun be for them now Apollo, and again Horus, and again the same one Osiris, and countless other things, as many as they wish; and likewise the moon either Isis or Artemis, and as many names as one might wish to count;

for let these not be names of mortal men, but significant names of the heavenly luminaries themselves: then the sun, the moon, the stars, and the other parts of the world must be worshipped as gods.

And in this way the noble philosophy of the Greeks has appeared, as if by stage machinery, raising the promise of its doctrine on high, but turning the minds of the wise round and down toward the sensible and visible creation of God, and deifying nothing more than fire and the hot substance, and the parts of the world through the heavenly luminaries, and, let us grant, also the moist and the dry and the mixture of bodies.

How, then, is not the gospel of our Savior Jesus, the Christ of God, great and wonderful, which teaches every race of men to worship with fitting thoughts the God and Lord of the sun and moon and creator of the whole universe, him who is the most high and beyond all things;

and to hymn not the elements of bodies but the nourisher of life itself and the steward of all good things; to be in no way struck with awe at the visible parts of the world and all that can be grasped by the senses of the flesh, since they are of perishable nature, but to admire only him who is invisible in all of these, the creative Mind of the whole and of the parts; and to proclaim as God that one divine power alone which pervades and orders all things, incorporeal and intellectual by nature, or rather ineffable and incomprehensible, appearing through all things through which it also works, pervading all things incorporeally and without mingling, and displaying through all things, not only heavenly but also earthly, both the universal elements and the particular ones, the sustaining mighty works of the Godhead; presiding over all invisibly and imperceptibly to us, and steering the whole world by the reasons of an inexpressible wisdom.

Since we have shown so much in refutation of the inconsistent wisdom or theology, both the so-called more mythical and the loftier and more physical one, which the ancient Greeks and Egyptians have been shown to glorify, it is time to look at the ornaments of the newcomers who profess to philosophize in our own time. These, attempting to weave into the theology of the ancients the doctrines about a creative Mind of the universe and about incorporeal ideas and intellectual and rational powers, which were discovered by Plato's school long ages afterward and conceived by right reasoning, have exalted their profession about the myths with greater pretension. Listen, then, to their natural philosophy too, with what boastfulness it has been put forth by Porphyry:

"'I speak to those for whom it is lawful; close the doors, you profane,' showing the thoughts of a theological wisdom, by which men have made known God and the powers of God through images akin to sense, sketching invisible things in visible forms, for those who have learned to read in the statues, as in books, what is written about the gods. It is no wonder that the most ignorant think the images are wood and stones, just as those who do not know letters see the pillars as stones, the tablets as wood, and books as woven papyrus."

Having adorned his preface in this way, listen to what he writes next as he proceeds, word for word: "Since the divine is of the nature of light and dwells in a surrounding of ethereal fire, and is invisible to sense busied with mortal life, by means of transparent material, such as crystal or Parian marble or ivory, he led men to the notion of its light; and by gold to the conception of its fire, and of its undefiled nature, since gold is not defiled.

Many again showed the invisibility of its substance by black stone; and they represented the gods in human form because the divine is rational, and beautiful because in them there is pure beauty; in various shapes and ages, sitting and standing and clothed, some male and some female, maidens and youths, or those who have experienced marriage, to represent their differences.

Hence they assigned everything white to the heavenly gods, and the sphere and all spherical things particularly to the cosmos, the sun, and the moon, and sometimes also to Fortune and Hope; the circle and circular things to eternity and to the motion of the heaven and its zones and circles; segments of circles to the phases of the moon; pyramids and obelisks to the substance of fire, and therefore to the Olympian gods; as again the cone to the sun, the cylinder to the earth, the phallus to sowing and generation, and the triangular figure because of the female part."

So says the admirable philosopher. What could be more unseemly than his solemn language about shameful things, and what more forced than to say that lifeless materials, gold and stone and the like, bear images of the light of the gods and are signs of their heavenly and ethereal nature? That these are sophistries of the newcomers, which never came into the minds of the ancients even in a dream, you would know on learning that images of gold and of the material thought more costly were rejected by the earlier men. At any rate Plutarch says, word for word, somewhat as follows:

"The making of images seems to be something ancient and old, if the first statue sent to Delos by Erysichthon for Apollo on the sacred embassies was of wood, and of wood too the image of Polias set up by the original inhabitants, which the Athenians preserve to this day. The Samians too had a wooden seat of Hera, as Callimachus says: 'Not yet the work of Scelmis, well carved, but after the ancient custom you were a plank untouched by chisels. For so they set up gods then; for Danaus too placed a stone as the seat of Athena in Lindus.' Peiras, they say, who first founded the temple of Argive Hera and made his own daughter Callithyia priestess, cut down a fine pear tree from the trees around Tiryns and shaped an image of Hera. For they did not wish to cut stone into the image of a god, as hard, difficult to work, and lifeless; and they thought that gold and silver were diseased colors and stains of barren and corrupted earth breaking out, like bruises from the strokes of fire. Ivory they sometimes used in play, as an ornament of luxury."

So says Plutarch. And Plato, long before him, knowing well that there is nothing dignified or resembling the divine nature in gold, stones, ivory, and things made of lifeless matter, listen to what he ordains in the Laws: "The earth, then, and the hearth of every dwelling are sacred to all the gods; let no one, then, consecrate sacred objects to the gods a second time. Gold and silver, in other cities, both privately and in temples, are an invidious possession; ivory, from a body that has left its soul, is not a pure offering; iron and bronze are instruments of war." I think these words contain a clear refutation of the natural philosophy set out before. Come, let us examine the rest of it too. Listen, then, to what he says:

"See the wisdom of the Greeks by examining it in this way. Taking Zeus to be the mind of the world, which created the things in it, holding the world within itself, those who composed the Orphic verses have handed down this about him in their theologies:

'Zeus was first, Zeus last, lord of the bright lightning; Zeus the head, Zeus the middle, and from Zeus all things were made. Zeus became male, Zeus was an immortal bride. Zeus is the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven. Zeus is king, Zeus himself the first begetter of all. One power, one deity he became, great ruler of all; one royal body, in which all these things revolve: fire and water and earth and ether, night and day, and Metis, first begetter, and delightful Eros. For all these things lie in the great body of Zeus. His head and fair face, to look upon, are the shining heaven, around which his golden locks, the beautiful glittering stars, float in the air; on either side two golden bull's horns, the rising and the setting, the paths of the heavenly gods; his eyes the sun and the moon that faces it. His mind is the unerring, royal, imperishable ether, by which he moves and considers all things; nor is there any voice, nor cry, nor sound, nor rumor, that escapes the ear of the mighty son of Cronus. So he has an immortal head and thought. His body is radiant, boundless, unshaken, mighty, strong-limbed, of surpassing power, made thus: the shoulders, chest, and broad back of the god are the wide-ruling air, and wings grew from him, with which he flies over all things; his holy belly is the earth, mother of all, and the lofty peaks of the mountains; his middle girdle the swell of the deep-roaring sea and the main; the lowest base, the roots within the earth, the dank Tartarus and the farthest bounds of the earth. And having hidden all things, he was again to bring them forth from his heart into the gladsome light, working wonders.'

Zeus, then, is the whole world, living being from living beings and god from gods; but Zeus as mind, from which he brings forth all things and creates by his thoughts.

When the theologians had explained the things about God in this way, it was neither possible to make an image such as the account indicated, nor, if anyone had devised one, would it have shown by a sphere the living, intelligent, and provident nature.

So they have made the image of Zeus in human form, because he was mind, by which he created and completed all things by seminal reasons. He is seated, hinting at the steadfastness of his power; he has his upper parts bare, because he is manifest in the intellectual and heavenly parts of the world; his front parts are covered, because he is invisible to things hidden below. He holds the scepter in his left hand, on the side where the heart, the most commanding and most intelligent of the organs of the body, dwells; for the creative mind is king of the world. In his right hand he holds out either an eagle, because he rules the gods who travel through the air, as the eagle rules the birds on high, or a Victory, because he himself has conquered all things."

Such is what Porphyry offers you. Since they have been given in the way described, it is well to examine quietly and at leisure whom the verses say Zeus is. I think he is none other than the visible world, composed of all kinds of parts: those in heaven and the ether, and the stars that appear in them, set first as in the head of a great body, and those in the air, the earth, the sea, and the like.

Earth, mountains, and hills are parts of the world, and the sea winds round in the midst of them like a girdle; fire and water, night and day, would be parts of the same nature of the world. These, unless I am mistaken, plainly indicate the visible world, and teach that the whole is composed of parts.

At any rate he says: 'For all these things lie in the great body of Zeus.' And he makes clear what 'all things' are: 'fire and water and earth and ether, night and day.' 'His head and fair face, to look upon, are the shining heaven, around which his golden locks, the beautiful glittering stars, float in the air,'

and what follows. In these he adds that the mind of Zeus is the ether and nothing else, in agreement with the Stoics, who say that the fiery and hot substance is the ruling part of the world, that God is a body, and that the creator himself is nothing other than the power of fire. For in the same sense, I think, it is said in the verses: 'His mind is the unerring, royal, imperishable ether, by which he moves and considers all things.'

By these words, assuming without disguise that the world is a great living being, and calling it Zeus, he declared its mind to be the ether and its body the other parts of the world.

Such is the Zeus sketched in the verses. And the interpreter of the verses, beginning in agreement with them, says: 'Zeus, then, is the whole world, living being from living beings, god from gods,' clearly interpreting the Zeus proclaimed as god in the verses to be nothing other than the visible and perceptible world.

This is the doctrine of the Egyptians, from whom Orpheus received his theology and thought that the world was God, composed of many gods, its parts (for it was shown earlier that they deified the parts of the world); and the words of the verses quoted made nothing more than this clear.

But after the first interpretation he adds a second of his own, saying that the god proclaimed is the creative mind, the maker of the universe.

But how could the poet of the verses, whether Orpheus the Thracian or someone else, have proclaimed as god one whom he did not know at all? If his theology came to him from the Egyptians or from the first Greeks, they have been shown to know nothing intelligible, nothing contained in an invisible and incorporeal being, if Plato is a sufficient authority for anyone, when he admits in the Cratylus that the first men in Greece held as gods only those which many barbarians hold now: sun and moon and earth and stars and heaven.

And Chaeremon too testified a little earlier that the Egyptians believed in nothing prior to the visible world, nor in any gods except the planets and the other stars, interpreting everything in terms of the visible parts of the world and nothing in terms of incorporeal and living beings.

From where, then, or how, or from whom did the poet who started from these sources receive, and set down in his verses, the God who is beyond the world, the creator of the sun and moon and stars, of heaven itself and the whole universe? Where did he get the knowledge of an incorporeal being?

But in fact he knew none of these things. For the creative mind of the universe is not composed of many parts, nor could heaven be its head, nor fire, water, and earth its body, nor the sun and moon its eyes. How could the wide-ruling air, the earth, and the lofty peaks of the mountains be the shoulders, chest, back, and belly of God the creator of all things? Or how could the ether ever be conceived as the mind of the maker of the universe, or of the creative mind?

That these things have been sophistically contrived by the interpreter of the verses, there is no need to add. But I say that the one who says that the parts of the world are parts of God commits the utmost impiety, and still more the one who declares God to be the same as the world, and besides these the one who thinks the mind of the world is the creator of the universe.

For it is pious to declare him the maker and savior of the world, being other than what he has made; but it would no longer be holy to call him the mind of the world, united throughout with it like the soul of a living creature and clothed with the whole.

And yet our sacred oracles teach that he is present to the whole and exercises providence over the world, speaking of God worthily and as befits God, where it says: "Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord"; and again: "For God is in heaven above and on the earth below"; and again: "For in him we live and move and have our being." But not as in a part of the world, nor as in its soul and mind.

But if we must use an illustration, the sacred word has spoken more worthily of God and more fittingly to the truth, saying: "Heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet."

For if one must personify at all in more human language, see the difference in the theology. The one who called heaven a throne set God, the universal King, beyond the throne and above all things, without separating the earth from his providence; for he teaches that the provident powers of his Godhead come down also to things here. Therefore he says: "and the earth the footstool of my feet."

But neither the footstool nor the throne is the body of the one seated, nor could they ever be called his parts. But the one who called heaven and the things in it the head of God, the ether his mind, and the other parts of the world his limbs and body, is shown to know neither the creator nor God.

For he could not create himself; nor could one whose mind was the ether still be called mind. What kind of god would he be whose parts are the earth and the mountains on the earth, irrational masses of bodies? And how is it reasonable to proclaim as god one who is brother and kin of fire, air, and water, the offspring of irrational and perishable matter?

And if the mind of Zeus was nothing other than the ether described, and ether is the highest and fiery air, having received this name, as they say, from aithesthai, that is, to burn, and both air and ether are bodies, see where the mind of your Zeus has fallen.

And who among the sensible would still call him a god whose mind was mindless and irrational, if such is the nature of every body? Therefore in our theology we must take everything opposite to what has been said: that God is not heaven, nor ether, nor sun, nor moon, nor the whole choir of the stars, nor the whole world all together; but these are works of his hands, still small and slight when compared with the incorporeal and intellectual powers. For every body is perishable and irrational, and such is the nature of visible things; but the things beyond, among the invisible, are rational and immortal, living through the ages together with the blessed life of God the universal King, and would be far better than all visible things.

Rightly, then, the divine oracles teach about the visible parts of the world somewhat as follows: "I shall see the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and stars, which you have established"; and again: "You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands"; and again: "Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has shown forth all these things."

Let this be said, then, about the first interpretation of the verses; come, let us examine what follows. Since it was not possible, he says, to make an image such as the account indicated, therefore they made the image of Zeus in human form, because he was mind, by which he created and completed all things by seminal reasons.

And how so? If it was not possible to make an image such as the account indicated, and the account indicated the parts of the apparent and visible world, heaven and the things in heaven, air and earth and the things in them; if, then, it was not possible to make an image of the visible parts of the world, how could anyone fashion his image insofar as God was mind?

What likeness could a human body have to the mind of God? I do not think it has any even to the human mind; for the mind is incorporeal, uncompounded, and without parts, while the statue is the work of craftsmen, imitating the nature of a mortal body, and has portrayed in lifeless and dead matter a dumb and voiceless image of living flesh.

The rational and immortal soul and the impassible mind in human nature may well be said, I think, to preserve the image and likeness of God, insofar as it is immaterial and incorporeal, intellectual and rational in substance, and capable of virtue and wisdom.

If anyone could fashion a statue and form of the soul in an image, he might also make one of the higher beings. But if the human mind is formless, shapeless, and without figure, neither visible to sight nor comprehensible in its substance by reason and hearing, who would be so mad as to declare that a man-shaped image bears the form and likeness of the most high God?

The nature of God is conceived apart from all mortal matter, contemplated by souls purified by clear thought and silence; but the figure of the visible Zeus in the statue would be the image of a man mortal by nature, imitating not even the whole man but a certain part of him, the worse part, since it carries no trace of life and soul.

How, then, could the God over all and the mind that created the universe be the same as the Zeus in bronze or dead ivory? And how could the creative mind of the universe itself have been that Zeus who was the father of Heracles by Alcmene and of the other men said in myth to be sons of Zeus, who ended their mortal life like all other men and left to later generations indelible memorials of their own nature?

The first theologians of the Phoenicians, as we showed in the first book, recorded Zeus as the son of Cronus, a mortal born of a mortal, a Phoenician man by race; and the Egyptians, claiming the man as their own, again confessed him mortal, agreeing in this at least with the Phoenicians.

And the Cretans, who show a tomb of Zeus among themselves, would be a third witness to the same; and the Atlantians and all those mentioned before, each claiming Zeus according to their own history, all alike declared him mortal, recording his deeds as mortal and human, not dignified or philosophical, but full of every shameful act and licentiousness.

But for those who profess to turn the myths to more dignified meanings, Zeus was at one time a hot and fiery power, at another the spirit; and now, I know not how, he has appeared to them as the creative mind of the universe.

We must ask them, then, whom they would call his father and his father's forefather; since according to all the theologians Zeus is admitted to be the son of Cronus (and the verses of Orpheus quoted above mentioned 'the mighty son of Cronus'), and Cronus the son of Ouranus.

Let it be granted them, then, that Zeus is the God over all and the mind that created all things. Who, then, is his father? Cronus. And who his forefather? Ouranus. But if Zeus is first, as the creator of all things, those made by him should surely be listed second and after him.

For whether Cronus is time (chronos), born as offspring of Ouranus, or time came into being together with heaven, and Ouranus is himself the father of Cronus and time comes after him, still before these is God, the cause of the universe and creator of both heaven and time. If so, Zeus could not be third from Ouranus.

How, then, is the creative mind of the universe given a genealogy by all the Egyptians and Phoenicians, Greeks and philosophers, as third from Ouranus? The philosopher's fabrication has been detected, and will be detected still more from what he adds, saying this:

"They have made Hera the consort of Zeus, calling the ethereal and airy power Hera; for the ether is the finest air.

Above, the verses showed that the mind of Zeus is the ether; now the account defines what the ether is, saying that it is the finest air. But air is a body, and the ether far more so.

So the mind of Zeus has been proved to be a body, even if the finest of all. And how could body and mind, which are diametrically opposed in nature, be conceived as the same?

Then, I know not how, he has forgotten the verses which said plainly: 'His mind is the unerring, royal, imperishable ether, by which he moves and considers all things; nor is there any voice, nor cry, nor sound, nor rumor, that escapes the ear of the mighty son of Cronus.' By these the ether has clearly been declared to be the mind of Zeus.

But he says again that Hera is the ethereal and airy power. Then, making distinctions, he adds: "The power of the whole air is Hera, named from the air (aer); and of the air beneath the moon, which is lit and darkened, Leto is the symbol; for she is forgetfulness (letho), because of the insensibility of sleep, and because forgetfulness of the divine accompanies souls that come to be beneath the moon. For this reason too she is the mother of Apollo and Artemis, the causes of light by night."

And here he says that the air beneath the moon is the mother of the sun and moon, for this is Leto. But how could the air be the mother of the causes of light, when it is rather affected by them than acting? For the sun and moon change the air in different ways at different times.

Proceeding again, he next says: "The ruling part of the earthly power is called Hestia, whose image, a maiden, is set up on a hearth of fire; but insofar as the power is fruitful, they represent her in the form of a woman with prominent breasts. Rhea they called the power of rocky and mountainous earth, and Demeter that of level and fruitful earth. Demeter in other respects is the same as Rhea, but differs in that she conceives Kore by Zeus, that is, the sprout (koros) from the seeds of the plants. Therefore her statue is crowned with ears of grain, and poppies around her are a symbol of fertility."

Here again see how he has brought Rhea, who is called mother of the gods and of Zeus himself, down somewhere to rocks and earth, and, confusing everything, says that she is the same as Demeter, except that she differs because, he says, Demeter conceives Kore by Zeus, as the level ground brings forth the sprout from the seeds of plants. See, Zeus has again been changed for you into the seeds of plants!

Next to this he adds, saying: "And since there was also a power in the seeds cast into the earth, which the sun, going round the lower hemisphere, draws down at the winter solstice, Kore is the seed-bearing power, and Pluto the sun going under the earth and traveling round the invisible world at the winter solstice; he is said to carry off Kore, whom Demeter longs for while she is hidden under the earth.

The power of tree fruits and of plants in general is named Dionysus. See their images too: Kore bears symbols of the putting forth of the shoots of the crops above the earth; Dionysus has horns in common with Kore, but is of female form, indicating the male-female power in the generation of tree fruits.

Pluto, the ravisher of Kore, has a helmet as a symbol of the invisible pole, and the shortened scepter as a sign of his kingdom below; and his dog shows the conception (kyesis) of the crops divided into three: the sowing, the receiving, and the springing up. For he is called dog (kyon) not because he has the fates of death (keres) for food, which means the souls, but from conceiving (kyein), of which Pluto is the provider when he carries off Kore.

Attis and Adonis belong to the analogy of the crops. Attis is the symbol of the flowers that appear in spring and fall before they bear seed (hence they also ascribed to him the cutting off of his private parts, since the fruits did not reach seminal completion); and Adonis is the symbol of the cutting of the ripe fruits.

Silenus is a symbol of the motion of the wind (pneuma), which contributes not a little to the universe. His symbols are the bald and shining head, for the revolution of heaven, and the hair around the lower parts, an emblem of the thickness of the air near the earth.

And since there was also a power partaking of prophecy, the power is called Themis, from telling what is laid down (tethheimena) and appointed for each.

"Through all these, then, the earthly power, once explained, is worshipped: as maiden and Hestia, she who holds the center; as mother, the nurse; as Rhea, she who makes rocks and mountains; as Demeter, she who bears green crops; as Themis, she who utters oracles; while the seminal reason that descends into her is represented in Priapus. Of this, the part concerned with dry fruits is called Kore, and that concerned with moist fruits and tree fruits Dionysus. Kore is carried off at sowing time by Pluto, the sun going under the earth; the sufferings of Dionysus signify the power that is young and fertile under the earth and begins to sprout; the power in the flower, which is open to attack, has Attis as its symbol, and the cutting off at maturity has Adonis;

the power of the wind through all things is represented as Silenus, the drawing out from them into ecstasy as the Bacchante, as again the impulse that stirs to sexual pleasures is represented through the Satyrs. Through these symbols the earthly power is revealed."

So much for this too, which I have necessarily abridged and set out, so that we may not be ignorant of the dignified doctrines of the philosophers. Thus, according to what has been explained, Kore is the power of the sown crops, Dionysus that of tree fruits; Attis is the symbol of spring flowers and Adonis of ripe fruits.

Why, then, should we deify these things, made by the God of the universe as food for the bodies of living creatures on earth? And why is it fitting for us to worship the earthly power, we who have from the universal King, God of all, a heavenly, rational, and immortal nature of soul, able to contemplate with the purified eyes of the mind?

And hearing that Silenus is the motion of the wind and the power that pervades all things, displaying now the heavenly revolution by his head and now the thickness of the air by the shaggy hair of his beard, how could one bear to see him counted worthy of no reverent honor, when he should have been deified before all, while Adonis and Dionysus, that is, the crops and tree fruits, are deified?

And who could endure hearing Satyrs and Bacchantes, the shameful and licentious passions among men, spoken of solemnly, if the Satyrs signified the impulses that stir to sexual pleasures, and the Bacchantes the transports into ecstasy that accompany them?

But why should I refute each thing in detail, when we should run over them, so that none of the secrets escapes us, and abridge the natural philosophy that follows, which the author mentioned has set out, going through it in this way:

"The whole power that produces water they called Oceanus, naming its symbol Tethys. Of the whole, the power that makes drinkable waters is called by them Achelous, and that of the sea waters Poseidon, while Amphitrite is the power that makes the sea, insofar as it is generative. And the particular powers of sweet waters are called Nymphs, and those of sea waters Nereids.

Calling the power of fire Hephaestus, they made his statue in human form, and put a blue cap on him as a symbol of the heavenly revolution, where fire is most primal and purest. The fire brought down from heaven to earth is weaker and needs the support and base of matter; therefore he is lame, needing matter for support.

Taking such a power to belong to the sun, they called it Apollo, from the quivering (palsis) of its rays. The nine Muses who sing to him are the sublunary sphere, the seven of the planets, and one of the fixed stars. They put the laurel around him, partly because the plant is full of fire and therefore hateful to demons, and partly because it crackles when burned, to represent the god's prophesying.

Insofar as the sun wards off evils from earthly things, they called him Heracles, from his being broken (klasthai) against the air as he goes from east to west. They told in myth that he toiled through twelve labors, giving this as the symbol of the division of the signs of the zodiac in heaven; and they gave him a club and a lion's skin, the one indicating the unevenness, the other showing his strength in the sign of the zodiac.

Of his saving power Asclepius is the symbol. To him they have given the staff, for the support and rest of the sick, and the serpent coils around it, bearing the sign of the preservation of body and soul (and indeed the natural philosophers who explain the world to us have attributed the creatures that crawl about the earth to the thickest and earthiest substance); for the creature is most full of spirit and puts off the weakness of its body. It seems also to be most skilled in healing; for it discovered the remedy for keen sight, and is said in myth to know a certain herb of revival.

Of the dancing and circling motion by which the power of fire ripens the crops, Dionysus is named in another sense than as the power of the moist fruits, either from whirling round (peridinein) or from the sun's accomplishing (dianyein) its revolution in heaven. And insofar as the sun goes round the seasons (horai) of the world and is the maker of times and seasons, he is called Horus.

Of his agricultural power, by which the gifts of wealth (ploutos) come, Pluto is the symbol. But he has likewise the power of destruction; therefore they set Sarapis beside Pluto, making the purple robe the symbol of the light that has sunk beneath the earth, the docked scepter the symbol of the power below, and the position of the hand the symbol of departure into the invisible.

Cerberus is three-headed because the positions of the sun above the earth are three: rising, midday, and setting.

The moon, taking the name from its brightness (selas), they called Artemis, as it were 'air-cutter' (aerotemis); and Artemis, though a virgin, presides over childbirth, because the power of the new moon is helpful for giving birth.

What Apollo is in the sun, Athena is in the moon; for she is the symbol of wisdom, being a kind of Athrena.

The moon again is Hecate, the symbol of its changing phases and of its power according to its phases. Therefore her power is three-formed: that of the new moon bears the white robe, the golden sandals, and the lighted torches; the basket she carries on high is the symbol of the cultivation of the crops, which she nourishes as her light increases; and the bronze sandal is the symbol of the full moon.

Or from the laurel branch one might understand her fiery nature, from the poppy her fertility and the multitude of souls that dwell in her as in a city, since the poppy is a symbol of a city. She bears a bow like Artemis because of the sharpness of birth pains.

Again the Fates are referred to her powers: Clotho to the generative, Lachesis to the nourishing, and Atropos to the inexorable decree of God.

They also associate with her the power that generates the crops, which is Demeter, as a power producing in her; and the moon contains Kore. They also associate Dionysus with her, both because of the growth of horns and because of the region of the clouds lying beneath the lower parts.

They saw that the power of Cronus is sluggish, slow, and cold, and therefore ascribed to him the power of time; and they represent him standing and grey-haired, to show that time grows old.

The Curetes are symbols of the seasons, tending time like a herd, because time passes through the seasons.

Of the Horae, the Olympian ones belong to the sun and open the gates of the air; the earthly ones belong to Demeter and have baskets, one of flowers, the symbol of spring, the other of ears of grain, of summer.

Perceiving the power of Ares to be fiery, they made him the maker of wars and of bloodshed, able both to harm and to help.

Observing the star of Aphrodite to be productive of generation and the cause of desire and offspring, they fashioned her as a woman because of generation, and beautiful because she is also Hesperus, 'the fairest star that stands in heaven.'

And they set Eros beside her because of desire. She covers her breasts and her private part, because the power is the cause of birth and nurture. She comes from the sea, a moist and hot element, much agitated and foaming from the commotion, hinting at the seminal nature.

Of the reason (logos) that makes and interprets all things, Hermes is the representative. The erect Hermes shows vigor, and indicates also the seminal reason that pervades all things.

Further, reason is compound: in the sun it is Hermes, in the moon Hecate, and in the universe Hermopan; for the seminal and creative reason is in all things. Compound too, and as it were half-Greek, is the Hermanubis among the Egyptians. And since reason also belonged to the power of love, Eros represents this. Therefore Eros is the son of Hermes, and an infant because of the sudden onsets of desire.

Of the universe (to pan) they made Pan the symbol, giving the horns as symbols of the sun and moon, and the fawnskin as that of the stars in heaven, or of the variety of the universe."

Such are the Greek doctrines; and those of the Egyptians, he says, have symbols like these: "The creator, whom the Egyptians call Kneph, is in human form, of a dark blue color, holding a girdle and a scepter, with a royal feather on his head, because the reason is hard to find, hidden and not visible, because it gives life, because it is king, and because it moves intellectually; therefore the feather's nature is placed on the head.

This god, they say, brings forth from his mouth an egg, from which is born the god whom they call Phtha and the Greeks Hephaestus; and the egg signifies the world. To this god a sheep is consecrated because the ancients drank milk.

Of the world itself they fashioned an image like this: it is a statue in human form with its feet joined together, clothed from top to feet in a many-colored robe; on its head it has a golden sphere, because it does not move from its place, because of the varied nature of the stars, and because the world is spherical.

They sometimes signify the sun by a man embarked on a ship, the ship resting on a crocodile. The ship shows motion in a moist element, and the crocodile drinkable water, in which the sun is carried. So the sun was signified as making its circuit through moist and sweet air.

The power of the heavenly and the earthly earth they called Isis because of equality (isotes), from which justice comes; by the heavenly earth they mean the moon, and by the earthly the fruitful earth on which we dwell.

Demeter among the Greeks and Isis among the Egyptians mean the same, and again Kore and Dionysus among the Greeks, and Isis and Osiris among the Egyptians. She nourishes and takes away the things on earth; and Osiris among the Egyptians represents the fruit-bearing power, which they propitiate with lamentations as it disappears into the earth in sowing and is consumed by us for food.

He is also taken for the river power of the Nile. When they signify the earthly earth, Osiris is taken as the fruit-bearing power; when the heavenly, Osiris is the Nile, which they think comes down from heaven; and they mourn him too, propitiating the power as it fails and is used up. The Isis who in the myths unites with Osiris is the land of Egypt, which is made equal and conceives and produces the crops; therefore Osiris has been handed down as the husband, brother, and son of Isis."

"At the city of Elephantine an image is honored, fashioned in the shape of a man and seated, blue in color, with a ram's head, and wearing a royal crown with goat's horns, on which is a disk-shaped circle. It sits beside an earthen vessel, on which it is shaping a man. From having the face of a ram and the horns of a goat it signifies the conjunction of the sun and moon in the Ram; and the blue color, that the moon in conjunction brings rain.

The second phase of the moon is consecrated in the city of Apollo; and its symbol is a man with a hawk's face subduing with a spear Typhon, represented as a hippopotamus. The image is white in color, the whiteness representing the moon's being lit, and the hawk's face its being lit and receiving breath from the sun. For they dedicate the hawk to the sun, and the hawk is for them a symbol of light and breath because of its swiftness and its soaring up on high, where the light is. The hippopotamus signifies the western pole, because it swallows up those that travel round into itself.

The god honored in this city is Horus. The city of Eileithyia worships the third phase; its image is shaped as a flying vulture, whose plumage is made of precious stones. Its vulture shape signifies the moon as productive of winds; for they think the vulture conceives from the wind, declaring that all vultures are female.

In the mysteries at Eleusis the hierophant is dressed to represent the creator, the torchbearer the sun, the priest at the altar the moon, and the sacred herald Hermes.

Among the Egyptians a man too has been taken into the temples. For Anabis is a village of Egypt in which a man is worshipped; sacrifice is offered to him and the victims are burned on the altars; and a little later he would eat what had been prepared for him as for a man.

That they do not consider the animals gods, but made them images and symbols of gods, is shown by the fact that in many places they sacrifice oxen dedicated to gods on the holy days and in the worship of the gods. For they consecrated oxen to the sun and moon.

"The one dedicated to the sun in Heliopolis, called Mnevis, is the largest of oxen, very black, chiefly because the sun in its strength blackens human bodies. Unlike other oxen it has its tail and its whole body with hair growing backward, as the sun makes its course opposite to the pole; and very large testicles, since sexual desire arises from heat, and the sun is said to impregnate nature.

To the moon they dedicated a bull whom they call Apis, also blacker than the others, bearing signs of the sun and moon, because the moon's light comes from the sun. The sign of the sun is the blackness of the body and the beetle under the tongue; the symbol of the moon is the half-shaped and gibbous mark."

Let these extracts from the writing of the man mentioned suffice, so that none of the secrets of the Greek and Egyptian theology may escape us, from which we confess ourselves deserters and fugitives, having rejected these things too with judgment and sober reasoning.

For the boastful voice will not dismay me that says, 'I speak to those for whom it is lawful; close the doors, you profane.' It is not we who are profane, but those who have declared that such shameful and unseemly myths about beetles and irrational beasts are the thoughts of theological wisdom, who, according to the admirable apostle, "professing to be wise became fools," because they "changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things."

But since they referred the whole secret and more mystical account of these things metaphorically to incorporeal powers, so that their deification seems no longer to extend to the visible parts of the world but to certain invisible and incorporeal powers, let us consider whether even so we must not admire one divine power, and not suppose there are many.

For though many shapes, parts, and limbs have been fashioned in one body, we should not think we have as many souls, nor suppose there are as many makers and creators of the body; but one soul moves the whole body, and one creative power has fashioned the whole living creature.

So too with the whole world: since it is one and composed of one bodily matter, though divided into very many parts, and shows one natural sympathy of the whole, a blending and mingling of the elements in it, and their alterations and changes into one another, and displays the whole and all as one world and one harmony, we should not suppose many creative powers, but proclaim as God only the true power of God and the wisdom of God.

But he, most wise as he is, has not noticed that he again transfers the Egyptian mythologies to incorporeal powers. For you heard above how he admitted that Chaeremon and many others thought there was nothing prior to the visible worlds, and that they put the Egyptians at the head of their account; for these interpreted everything in terms of natural things and nothing in terms of incorporeal and living beings.

If, then, by your own admission it was the way of the Egyptians to refer nothing to incorporeal and living beings, but to transfer all the myths about the gods to the natural parts of the world, why do you, inventing from the beginning, ascribe to the Egyptians what in no way belongs to them, saying that they refer their theology to incorporeal powers? This, then, is the general charge.

In the particulars too, I think, the refutation of their forced interpretation needs no long rebuttal. For if one passes over the Egyptian nonsense and their great and garrulous trifling and turns to the natural philosophy of the wise Greeks, who among the sensible would not at once find fault with those who try to give such false explanations?

For let Zeus no longer be the fiery and ethereal substance, as the ancients thought according to Plutarch, but the supreme mind itself, the creator of the universe, who gives life to all things. How then will Cronus, who they say is time, be his father, and Rhea his mother, whom the interpreter said is the rocky and mountainous power? And Hera, whom, I know not how, he called the air and also the ether, he says is the sister and also the wife of the mind that made the world and gives life to all.

And let Leto again be called a kind of forgetfulness (letho), because of the insensibility of sleep, as they say, and because forgetfulness accompanies souls born beneath the moon. How then could forgetfulness be the mother of the sun and moon, if Apollo and Artemis, the children of Leto, are transferred to the sun and moon?

Why should Rhea or Demeter be worshipped as a goddess, if the one was said to bear the symbols of rocky and mountainous earth and the other of the plain? And Kore, whom they allegorize as the sprout, on what principle do they think she too should be honored with the reverend name?

Why should one worship as gods the seed-bearing power and the generation of tree fruits, or the symbols of the spring flowers that fall before bearing seed, or of the cutting of ripe fruits, naming them Dionysus, Attis, and Adonis, and not rather prefer to all these the human race, for whose use and food the God who created the universe made them?

Passing on from these, you will refute the rest of the noble natural philosophy in the same way, rightly blaming the shamelessness of those who declare that the sun, if you please, is Apollo, and again Heracles, and again Dionysus, and likewise Asclepius.

For how could the same be both father and son, Asclepius and Apollo together? And how could he be transferred to Heracles, if they admit that Heracles was born of a mortal woman, Alcmene? And how could the sun go mad and slaughter his own children, since this too is recorded of Heracles?

But Heracles performing the twelve labors, they say, bears the symbol of the division in heaven of the zodiac, around which the sun travels. Who, then, would be the Eurystheus who ordered the sun, as he did Heracles, to perform the labors? And how could the fifty daughters of Thestius and the crowd of the other captive women be referred to the sun, with whom the story says Heracles had intercourse, and from whom mortal children were born to him who extended the succession of their families very far? And who would be the Centaur, with whose blood Deianeira stained the tunic and could involve the sun, as Heracles, in the calamity described?

But let the sun be for them no longer Heracles, but Dionysus. 'And what has this to do with Dionysus?' one might well say. For who was his mother, whether she is called Semele or Persephone? How could Dionysus be at once the sun and the power that makes moist fruits and tree fruits sprout? What would become of the crowd of women who campaigned with him? Who would be the sun's Ariadne, as she was Dionysus'? And why would Dionysus, transferred to the sun, be the provider of wine rather than of grain and pulse and all the fruits of the earth?

And if Asclepius again is the sun for them, how is he struck by Zeus with a thunderbolt for sordid love of gain, according to the Boeotian lyric poet Pindar, who says: 'Even he was turned aside by a lordly fee, gold shown in his hand ... and the son of Cronus, hurling with his hands through both, swiftly took the breath from their breasts, and the blazing thunderbolt struck down death.'

And who are the Asclepiads descended from the sun, preserved for a long time and producing a birth of mortal men like all other men? But again, as if by stage machinery, as they flee the shameful and mythical stories about the gods, the account would run back for them to the sun, moon, and other parts of the world.

If Hephaestus for them was fire and the hot power, Poseidon the moist substance, Hera the air; and the earth again, the mountainous and rocky part Rhea, the plain and fruitful part Demeter; Kore the seed-bearing power and Dionysus the power that plants tree fruits; the sun Apollo with those listed, and the moon now Artemis, now Athena, and again Hecate and Eileithyia, then they are again convicted of proclaiming as gods the creation instead of the Creator, and the work of the universe but not its creator, very dangerously and perilously, and to the ruin of their own heads.

But if they say they do not deify the visible bodies of the sun, moon, and stars, nor the perceptible parts of the world, but the invisible powers in them of the God over all himself (for, being one God, he fills all things with all kinds of powers, pervades all, and presides over all, being in all incorporeally and invisibly and pervading all, and him, they say, they rightly worship through the things described), why then do they not reject as lawless and impious the shameful and unseemly myths about the gods, and do away with the very books about them as containing impious and licentious things, and hymn the one and only and invisible God plainly and purely, without any shameful entanglement?

For this is what those who have recognized the truth ought to have done: not to drag down and degrade the reverend name of God to shameful and passionate unspeakable tales; nor to shut themselves up in little houses and recesses of darkness and buildings made by men, as if they would find God inside; nor to think they honor the divine powers in images made of lifeless matter; nor to suppose that they please God with earthly fumes of blood and gore and the blood of dead animals.

Released from all these as from bonds of error, the wise and the star-gazers ought surely to have shared their natural theory freely with all men, all but proclaiming openly to all that they should admire not the visible things but only the invisible creator of the visible, and worship his invisible and incorporeal powers invisibly and incorporeally; not lighting fires, nor sacrificing ram and bull, nor thinking to honor the divine with garlands, images, and buildings of temples, but doing this with purified reasonings and right and true doctrines, in tranquility of soul and in likeness to him, as far as possible, through virtue.

But no one ever, neither barbarian nor Greek, began to teach this truth to all men except our Savior alone. He proclaimed to all the nations escape from the ancient error, and freely found for all the turning to the true and only God of the universe and piety toward him. But those vainly wise, who boasted of the highest philosophy of life, as the divine apostle says, "knowing God, did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever."

So after their long and copious philosophy and their solemn talk about the heavens and nature, falling as it were from a very lofty mountain-top, they were swept down with the multitude and mingled with the polytheistic error of the ancients, pretending to hold the same opinions as the many by sacrificing and falling down before images, and increasing and strengthening still more the popular belief in the mythical stories about the gods.

How, then, would they not be plain to all, speaking solemnly in their natural philosophy and dressing up shameful things in words by turning the truth aside, but in their deeds supporting the mythical error and the popular superstition? And this is not yet surprising, since they record their gods themselves as agreeing with the myths about them.

Listen, then, how Apollo himself teaches about himself in a hymn he gave out concerning himself, confessing that he was born of Leto on the island of Delos; and again Asclepius at Tricca; and Hermes too confessing that he was born of Maia.

Porphyry writes this too in the work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles, where he records the oracles, which run somewhat as follows: "O great joy to all mortals, leaping forth from the holy birth-pangs of a pure mother."

To which he adds: "But when holy travail seized Leto wholly, as the twin births were stirring within the shrines, the earth stood still, the air stood still, the island grew firm, the wave grew firm; and you leapt forth, prophet Lycoreus, archer Phoebus, king of the oracle-speaking tripods."

And Asclepius again about himself: "From holy Tricca I come, a god, whom once my mother, bedded with Phoebus, bore as king of wisdom, Asclepius, skilled in healing. But what do you ask?"

And Hermes says: "Here I am, whom you call, son of Zeus and Maia, Hermes; I have come forth, leaving the starry king."

And they even describe their own bodily form, as Pan himself says in oracles about himself, teaching this: "I, born a mortal, pray to Pan, the god akin to me, two-horned, two-footed, goat-legged, wanton."

These things the man mentioned has set down among the secrets of his Philosophy from Oracles. So Pan was no longer the symbol of the universe (to pan), but would be a demon of the kind described, who gave out the oracle; for surely it was not the universe and the whole world that uttered the words quoted. It was of this demon, then, and not of the universe, that men made the image, imitating the form described.

And how could Hermes be understood as the reason that makes and interprets all things, when he confesses that he had Maia the daughter of Atlas for his mother, thus approving the mythology told about him and not the natural philosophy?

So too, how could Asclepius be transferred to the sun, when he names Tricca as his fatherland and confesses that he was born of a mortal mother? And how could he, being the sun, be shown in turn to be the son of the sun? For they explained his father Phoebus as being none other than the sun.

And to say that he was born of the sun and a mortal woman, how is it not the most ridiculous of all? Since how is it likely that his father the sun himself, whom they say is Apollo, was born on the island of Delos of a mortal mother again, Leto?

Here note for me how many gods the Greeks proclaimed as born of women, for comparison, in case they ever try to mock the birth of our Savior; and note that these words are not those of poets, but the statements quoted are from the gods themselves.

If, then, as they say, the poets invent myths about the gods and the philosophers give natural explanations, we should surely despise the former and admire the latter as philosophers, and accept the plausible accounts of the better men rather than the poets' nonsense. But when the gods in turn enter into competition with the philosophers, the gods teaching exactly in their oracles the facts about themselves, as those who know better, and the philosophers turning their conjectures about what they do not know into inconsistent and unproved inventions, whom does reason choose to believe? Or is this not even worth asking?

If, then, the gods speak the truth in confirming the human passions ascribed to them, those who reject them would be false; but if the natural explanations of the philosophers are true, the testimonies of the gods would be false.

But Apollo himself, someone might say, said somewhere in oracles, when asked about himself who he was: "Helios, Horus, Osiris, lord, son of Zeus, Apollo, steward of seasons and times, of winds and rains, guiding the reins of dawn and of starry night, king of the blazing stars and immortal fire."

So the same gods agree both with the myths of the poets and with the conjectures of the philosophers, siding with parties at war with each other. For if they ascribe to themselves mortal mothers and acknowledge earthly fatherlands, how could they be such as the philosophers explain them?

For let Apollo be the sun (for again their argument, running up and down to the same points, will be caught). How then could Delos, the island still seen in the sea today, be the fatherland of the sun, and Leto his mother? For his own oracles just now confirmed these things as true. And how could the sun be the father of Asclepius, a man mortal by nature, having begotten him by a mortal woman? But let these things pass.

The falsehood of the oracle can be refuted in another way too. For surely the sun did not come down from heaven to them, fill the receiver, and then utter the oracle; since it is neither possible nor lawful for so great a luminary to be subjected to the compulsions of men. Nor would it be, if they should say it was the divine and intellectual power in it, since a human soul could never receive even this.

The same argument would hold for the moon. For if they say that she is Hecate herself, and is somehow drawn down by the compulsions of men, gives oracles through the receiver, and is employed in shameful and erotic services as ruler of the wicked demons, would it be fitting for Hecate to do these things? Yet the same author admits it, as we shall show at the proper time.

And how could Pluto and Sarapis be explained as the sun, when the same author again declares that Sarapis, the same as Pluto, is the ruler of the wicked demons? And when he records oracles of Sarapis, how could he say they are the sun's?

From all these it remains to admit that the natural explanations described carry nothing true, but are sophistries and inventions of sophists.

In truth one must say that the ministers of the oracles are wicked demons, playing both parts to deceive men: at one time agreeing with the more mythical beliefs about them, to promote the popular error, and at another confirming the sorcery of the philosophers, to their ruin and puffing up; so that from every side they are caught telling no truth.

Having said so much, it is now time to pass on and go through the third kind of Greek theology, which they say is the civic and legal one. For this above all is thought able to astonish the many, because of the much-talked-of oracles, the cures and healings of afflicted bodies given through oracles, and the punishments inflicted on certain people.

Claiming to have experienced these, they have thoroughly persuaded themselves that they do right in being pious toward the gods, and that we commit the greatest impiety in not honoring with fitting worship powers so manifest and beneficent. Let us meet these claims, then, taking up another beginning of our argument.

The third kind of polytheistic error, from which we have been set free by the power and kindness of our Redeemer and Savior, the time calls us to refute in this fourth book of the Preparation for the Gospel.

For since they divide the whole form of their theology generally into three: the mythical, dramatized by the poets; the physical, invented by the philosophers; and that maintained by the laws and preserved in each city and country; and since two of these parts have already been unfolded by us in the preceding books, the historical, which they call mythical, and that which rises above the myths, which they call physical or theoretical or whatever else they like to call it, it is time now to go through the third. This is the one established in cities and countries, called by them civic, which is above all maintained by the laws, as being at once ancient and ancestral and as displaying at once the excellence of the power of the beings it proclaims as gods.

For oracles and prophecies are noised abroad among them, healings and cures of all kinds of afflictions, and punishments of the impious. Claiming to have experienced these, they have thoroughly persuaded themselves that they do right in honoring the divine, and that we commit the greatest impiety in holding of no account powers so manifest and beneficent, and that we plainly break the law, since each one should reverence his ancestral religion, not move what is immovable, but walk in and follow the piety of his forefathers, and not meddle out of love of novelty. Thus, they say, death too has rightly been fixed by the laws as the penalty for offenders.

The first kind of theology, the historical and mythical, let anyone, they say, assign to the poets as he likes, as also the second to the philosophers, since it is set forth through the more physical allegory of the myths. But the third, which the rulers have enacted must be honored and preserved as both ancient and civic, let no poet or philosopher disturb; but let everyone, in fields and cities, abide by and walk in the ordinances that have prevailed from of old, obeying the ancestral laws.

Against this, then, it is time to give our account and render the reason for the gospel work of our Savior, which proclaims the contrary to what has been said and legislates against the laws of all the nations.

That the lifeless images are not gods is evident even to themselves; that their mythical theology bears no dignified account worthy of God has been shown in the first book, as in the second and third that the more physical and philosophical interpretation of the myths contains no explanation free from force.

Come, then, let us consider the third point: what we should think of the powers lurking in the images, whether they are of a refined character, good and truly divine, or the opposite of all these.

Another, perhaps, going through the account of these things, might suppose that the whole is deceit and the tricks and knavery of sorcerers, rejecting the belief entirely, so as to think that the things noised abroad about them belong not only not to a god but not even to a wicked demon. For, he would say, the verses and compositions of the oracles are fictions of men not without talent but well equipped for deceit, composed in a middle and ambiguous way, and cleverly fitted to either of the outcomes expected; and the wonders that deceive the many by marvels depend on natural causes.

For, he would say, there are in the nature of the universe many kinds of roots, herbs, plants, fruits, and stones, and powers of all kinds of other matter, dry and moist: some repelling and driving certain things away, others naturally gathering and drawing them; some able to separate and scatter, to condense and contract, others to loosen, moisten, and rarefy; some again preserving and others killing, changing things entirely, altering what is present, transforming it now this way and now that; some doing this for a longer time, others for a short time; some again effective on a multitude, others only on a few; some leading in these things, others following, some running together with others, increasing and perishing together; yes, and some productive of health, not far from the science of medicine, and others causing disease and deadly. Some things happen by natural necessity, increasing and waning with the moon; there are countless antipathies of animals, plants, and roots, and many fumigations that stupefy and cause sleep, and others that produce visions. The places and spots where the rites are performed contribute not least; and there are instruments and apparatus skillfully prepared for them long beforehand. Many accomplices in the trickery are employed from outside, who inquire about those who arrive, the needs of each, and what each has come to ask. Many things too are hidden in the inner shrines and in the recesses of the temples inaccessible to the many; and darkness contributes no little to their purpose; and not least the preconceived belief and the superstition of those who approach them as gods, and the opinion inherited from their ancestors that has taken hold of them.

Let there be added the foolishness of the mind of the many, the weakness and want of critical reasoning of the multitude, and on the other hand the cleverness and malice of those busy with this evil art, and the deceitfulness and knavery of the sorcerers' ways: now promising each what will please him beforehand and soothing the present with good hopes, now guessing at the future and prophesying at random, and darkening the meaning of the oracles with ambiguous and obscure words, so that no one understands what was given in the oracle, and they escape refutation by the obscurity of what was said.

Many things too come about by other deceits and marvel-mongering, with certain incantations employed in the proceedings together with some unintelligible and barbarous utterance, so that what in no way comes about through them may seem to be effected by them. Above all, the many, and even those thought to start from education, are dazzled by the verses of the oracles themselves, finely adorned in the composition of words, finely puffed up with the bulk of grandiloquence, fashioned with much pompous elevation and pretended conceit of inspiration, and deceiving almost the whole people by their ambiguous utterance.

Of the oracles that have escaped ambiguity, given out not from foreknowledge of the future but by some conjecture, countless ones, or rather almost all, have often been convicted of falling short of the prediction, the outcome of events turning out contrary to what the oracle said; unless perhaps, rarely, one in ten thousand, happening by some chance course or in line with a guessed expectation of the future, was thought to make the oracle come true.

This you would see them noising abroad above all, engraving it on pillars and shouting it everywhere on earth; how many times, it may be, they failed they will never mention at all, but that something of what was foretold happened to one man out of ten thousand they carry up and down. It is as if someone, when two people casting lots out of ten thousand happened once to fall on the same number, should marvel as though it came about by divination and foreknowledge that the same number fell to both.

For such, he would say, is the case of an oracle that once happens to come true by chance out of countless thousands given. A man with nothing solid in the depth of his soul, observing this, is overwhelmed with wonder at the oracle; when it would be far better for him not to be foolish, but to reckon how many others the oracles have caused to die in sedition and war, to examine the histories of the ancients, and to see that even at the time when Greek affairs flourished, and the oracles once so famous, but now no longer existing, stood firm, receiving all care and zeal from the natives who revered and served them with ancestral laws and mysteries, they showed no divine work of virtue.

And then most of all they were proved powerless in the calamities of war, in which the noble givers of oracles, unable to help, were caught deceiving those who fled to them for refuge by the ambiguity of their oracles. This we shall show at the proper time, setting out how they even provoked those who consulted them to war against one another, how they did not give their answers about serious matters, how they misled the inquirers in sport through their oracles, and how they hid their own ignorance in the darkness of obscurity.

Consider too, on inquiry, how they often promised the sick strength, life, and recovery, and then, having been believed as gods and having exacted great fees for this inspired trade, were not long after detected for what they were, shown to be sorcerers and not gods, when no happy end overtook those they had deceived.

Why need I say that the wonderful prophets did not give their help even to their own fellow residents living in the same city, but you would see countless people there sick, maimed, and disfigured in their whole body? Why, then, did they hold out good hopes to those coming from outside and far off from foreign lands, but not to their fellow residents, to whom above all, as their own friends and fellow citizens, they should have given the benefit of the presence of the gods? Was it not because they could more easily deceive strangers who did not know their trickery, but not their familiar neighbors, who were not unacquainted with the art and were privy to the game played in the rites?

So the whole thing was not divine, nor superior to human contrivance; so that in the greatest calamities, those that hung over the impious from above, from God the universal King, the temples themselves with their offerings and images suffered utter destruction and sudden collapse.

For where is the temple at Delphi, celebrated among all the Greeks from all time? Where is the Pythian? The Clarian? Where the Dodonaean? The Delphic oracle, the story goes, was burned three times by the Thracians, the oracle being of no avail for knowledge of the future, nor able to protect the Pythian's own property. The Capitol at Rome is recorded to have suffered the same in the times of the Ptolemies, when the temple of Vesta at Rome is also said to have been burned. About the time of Julius Caesar they record that the great Olympian statue of the Greeks, at Olympia itself, was struck by the god with a thunderbolt. At another time, they say, the temple of Capitoline Zeus was burned, the Pantheon destroyed by lightning, and the temple at Alexandria likewise burned down.

Of these things testimonies are recorded among the Greeks themselves. It would be a long account if one were to number each, trying to show that the wonderful oracle-givers have been caught unable to defend even their own temples. And those who were of no use to themselves in calamities could hardly ever help others.

But adding one thing to what has been said, one would have seen the greatest point of all: that already many of the extremely inspired, the very chief hierophants, theologians, and prophets among them, celebrated for this divine wisdom, not only long ago but also lately in our own time, under torture before the Roman tribunals revealed that the whole error was produced by the deceits of men, confessing that the whole thing was a contrived sorcery; and they recorded the whole manner of the contrivance and the methods of the evil art in their words taken down in the court records.

So, having paid the just penalty for their destructive error, they revealed the whole matter, confirming the proof of what has been said by the deeds themselves. And who were these? Do not think they were outcasts or obscure people. Some of them came from this wonderful and noble philosophy, of those who wear the cloak and have raised their eyebrows high; others were caught from among the magistrates of the city of Antioch, the very men who were especially distinguished for their outrages against us in the persecution of our time. And we know too that the philosopher and prophet at Miletus suffered things like those described.

Gathering these and still more things, one might say that the causes of the oracles in the cities are neither gods nor even demons, but the error and deceit of sorcerers.

And among the Greeks themselves there were whole schools, distinguished in philosophy, that championed this opinion, such as the followers of Aristotle and all the Peripatetics after them, the Cynics, and the Epicureans. These I have admired most of all: how, brought up in Greek ways from their swaddling clothes and having received from father to son the belief that these are gods, they were not caught by either side, but mightily refuted the celebrated oracles and the divinations sought by all as bearing nothing true, and declared them useless and rather harmful.

Though there are countless writers who have overthrown divination at greater length, I think it enough for the present, to bear witness to what has been said, to set out one passage of one of them, which answers the arguments constructed by Chrysippus about fate from the prediction of oracles. The writer, then, addressing him, refutes him, showing that he wrongly infers fate from the oracles, that the oracles of the Greeks are false in most things, that they rarely come true by chance, and that their prediction is useless and harmful. Listen, then, to what he says word for word:

"He brings another proof too in the book mentioned, of this kind. He says the predictions of the seers could not be true unless all things were encompassed by fate. This too is full of great simplicity. For he argues as if it were evident that all the predictions of the so-called seers come true, or as if this would be granted by anyone more readily than that all things happen by fate, and as if it were not equally false itself; since evidence shows the opposite, I mean that not all the things foretold come true, but rather that most do not.

So Chrysippus has given us his proof, establishing each of the two by the other. He wants to show that all things happen by fate from the existence of divination, but he could not prove that divination exists otherwise than by first assuming that all things happen by fate.

What method of proof could be worse than this? For that some of what the seers predict evidently comes true would be a sign not that divination is a science, but that outcomes by chance coincide with the predictions; which shows us no science.

For we would not call an archer skilled who once hit the target but often missed, nor a physician one who kills most of those he treats but was once able to save one; nor do we call anything at all a science which does not succeed in all, or at least most, of its proper works.

That the so-called seers fail for the most part the whole of human life would testify, and these very men who profess the art of divination, who do not help themselves by it in the needs of life, but sometimes use their own judgment and the counsel and help of those thought to have experience in each matter.

But that what we have agreed to call divination does not exist, we shall show more fully elsewhere, setting out Epicurus's views on this. For now we shall add this much to what has been said: first, that the so-called seers' sometimes speaking the truth in their predictions would be the work not of science but of a chance cause (for we who have distinguished the clear notions assigned to each name have agreed to call the work of chance not what never hits the mark, but what does not hit it always, nor for the most part, nor by science, when someone does sometimes hit it); and then, even if it were true by hypothesis that divination observes and foretells all future things, it would follow that all things are by fate, but its usefulness and benefit to life would never be shown; which is the chief reason Chrysippus seems to praise divination.

For what use would it be to us to learn beforehand misfortunes that will certainly come, which we could not even guard against? For how could anyone guard against what happens by fate? So divination would be of no use to us, but rather it would turn to some harm, causing men to grieve in vain beforehand over the misfortunes foretold, which must of necessity come.

No one will say that the prediction of future good things gives equal joy in return, since man is not so made as to rejoice over expected goods as much as he is pained by evils. Besides, we do not much expect misfortunes to befall ourselves before we hear of them, but we all, so to speak, rather expect good things, because of our natural affinity to them; for most people even hope for more than is possible.

So it happens that the prediction of good things does not much increase joy, because each person even without prediction expects better things of himself, or increases it only a little by the apparent certainty, and often even diminishes the joy, when less than was hoped is heard; but the prediction of evils greatly disturbs, both because they are by nature to be shunned and because they are sometimes foretold contrary to expectation.

But even if this did not happen, it would be plain to everyone that prediction would be useless. For if anyone says that the usefulness of divination will be preserved because a misfortune certain to come is foretold unless we guard against it, he will no longer show that all things will happen by fate, since it will be in our power to guard or not to guard against it.

And if anyone says that this too has been necessitated, so that fate extends to everything that exists, the usefulness of divination is again destroyed; for we shall guard against it if it is fated, and evidently we shall not guard against it if it is not fated, even if all the seers foretell the future to us.

At any rate Chrysippus himself says that the parents of Oedipus and of Alexander son of Priam devised many ways of killing them, in order to guard against the evil foretold from them, and could not.

So, he says, there was no benefit even to them from the prediction of evils, because of the causation of fate. Let this be said over and above, to show that divination is not only unreal but also useless."

So says the philosopher. But consider for yourself how, being Greeks and having acquired from youth the Greek education with which they were raised, and knowing their ancestral beliefs about the gods better than anyone, all the Aristotelians, the Cynics and Epicureans, and all who thought like them, laughed at the oracles celebrated among the Greeks themselves.

And yet, if the reports about the marvels of the oracles were true, it is likely that these men too would have been astonished, being Greeks, knowing their ancestral customs exactly, and putting nothing worth knowing in second place.

There would be a great abundance of these and similar things to collect for the overthrow of the case for the oracles. But I do not think the present argument should proceed this way, but as we began: granting that those who stand up for them speak the truth, let us learn, from what they themselves admit, when they say that the oracles are true and the responses given at Pytho divine, the exact disclosure of what they reveal.

I think it plain to everyone that the refutation of these matters will contain no small part, but the greatest and most necessary, of the gospel subject. For if all those everywhere before the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, Greeks and barbarians, should be shown not to have known the true God, but either to have held as existing things that do not exist, or to have been led about here and there like the blind by certain wicked spirits fighting against God and evil and unclean demons, and dragged down by them into a depth of wickedness (for what else is this than to be possessed by demons?), how would not the great mystery of the gospel dispensation be seen to be all the greater? For all people everywhere have been called back by the voice of our Savior from the inherited error of the tyranny of demons, and those living to the ends of the earth have been redeemed from the deceit that held all life from of old; so that from then until now the ancient foundations of the error of all nations, with their temples and images, have been dissolved and pulled down, and truly holy temples and schools of piety to the universal King and creator of all things have been raised up in the midst of cities and villages throughout the whole world by the power and virtue of our Savior; and sacrifices worthy of God, the prayers of the holy, with a disposition purified from all vice, in tranquility of soul and the taking up of every virtue according to the divine and saving teachings, are offered day by day continually from all the nations, the only sacrifices pleasing and acceptable to the God over all.

This being so, would we not have shown at the same time that we became apostates from our inherited superstition with sober reasoning and not by giving ourselves up to unreason, loving the better by a just and true judgment and becoming lovers of the inspired and true piety? But enough of this; we must now take up the matters before us.

Those who have studied Greek theology exactly divide the whole account, in another way than the methods we have mentioned, into four classes. First of all they distinguish the first God, saying they know that he is the first over all and the father and king of all the gods; after him the race of gods is second; next that of demons; and fourth that of heroes. All these, sharing in the form of the better, in one way lead and in another are led, and everything of this kind is called light by participation in light. But of the worse substance, they say, evil is the leader; this is the race of wicked demons, which has no friendship with the good but holds the first power in the nature of the opposites, as God does among the better; and everything of this kind is called darkness.

Having made these distinctions in this way, they say that heaven and the ether as far as the moon are assigned to the gods, the regions about the moon and the air to demons, and the regions about the earth and under the earth to souls. Using this division, they say that first of all one must worship the heavenly and ethereal gods; second the good demons; third the souls of heroes; and fourth one must propitiate the bad and wicked demons.

But while dividing these things in word, in deed they confound everything, worshipping instead of all those mentioned only the wicked powers and being wholly enslaved to them, as the argument will prove as it proceeds. You may, then, consider from what is to be set out what kind of powers working through the images one must declare them to be, whether gods or demons, and whether evil or good.

Our divine oracles call no demon at all good, but say that all who have received this lot and this name are wicked, just as they call no other truly and properly God but the one cause of all things. The refined and good powers, since they are begotten by nature and fall far short of the unbegotten God who made them, and are moreover separated from the wicked race of demons, the Scriptures do not see fit to call either gods or demons; but, as being between God and demons, they are accustomed to name them by an apt and middle title: angels of God and ministering spirits, divine powers and archangels, and by some other names suited to their functions. And the demons, if we should give their etymology too, are aptly so named not, as the Greeks think, from being knowing (daemones) and skilled, but from fearing (deimainein), that is, being afraid and terrifying.

The divine and good powers, they say, are foreign to the demonic name as they are to the demonic character; since it would be the most unreasonable thing of all to count worthy of one and the same name beings unlike both in choice and in the nature of their character.

Come, then, let us examine what the nature of their oracles is, so that we may learn to what kind of power one must assign them, and whether we were right to depart from them or not. If I were to bring forward the refutations of these things from myself, I know well that I should not offer an argument beyond reproach to the fault-finders. Therefore, saying nothing of my own, I shall again use the testimonies of outsiders.

Of the countless prose writers and philosophers among the Greeks, I choose before all as suited to the matters at hand that very friend of demons who in our own time has won renown by his falsehoods against us. For he, more than any philosopher of our time, seems to have consorted with demons and with those he calls gods, to have championed them, and much more to have investigated what concerns them more exactly.

In the work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles he made a collection of oracles of Apollo and of the other gods and good demons, choosing those he thought most sufficient both to prove the excellence of those proclaimed as gods and to exhort to what he likes to call divine wisdom.

From these very oracles, then, that he selected and thought worth recording, it is good to judge the oracle-givers and consider of what power they are. First let us see how the man mentioned, at the beginning of his writing, swears to us that he tells the truth, speaking thus:

"Firm and steadfast is he who draws his hopes of salvation from here, as from the only firm source; to whom you shall impart these things, withholding nothing. For I call the gods themselves to witness that I have neither added nor taken away anything of the thoughts of the oracles, except where I have corrected an erroneous expression, or changed it for greater clearness, or filled out a defective meter, or struck out something not bearing on the purpose; but I have kept the sense of what was said pure, guarding against the impiety of such a thing more than against the avenging justice that follows sacrilege.

The present collection will contain a record of many philosophical doctrines, as the gods declared the truth to be; and we shall touch briefly also on the practice of oracles, which will help both contemplation and the whole purification of life. What benefit the collection has will be known best by those who, in travail for the truth, have prayed that they might obtain a manifestation from the gods and find rest from their perplexity through the trustworthy teaching of the speakers." Having used such a preface, he solemnly charges and announces beforehand that what is to be said must not be disclosed to the many, speaking thus:

"Do you, if anything, try not to publish these things, nor to throw them even to the profane, for the sake of glory or gain or some other impure flattery. For there is danger not only to you if you transgress these commands, but also to me, who too easily trusted one unable to keep benefits to himself. They must be given to those who have ordered their life for the salvation of the soul."

And after other matters he adds: "Hide these things as more secret than secrets; for not even the gods declared the things about themselves openly, but through riddles."

Since, then, the account has raised such expectations, come, let us consider through the inspired and Pythian oracles of what kind we should reckon the invisible powers proclaimed as gods; for a man too may be refuted by his own words and practices.

The man mentioned, in the very work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles, sets down oracles of Apollo commanding animal sacrifices to be performed, and to sacrifice animals not only to demons, nor only to the earthly powers, but also to the ethereal and heavenly ones.

But elsewhere the same writer, admitting that all those to whom the Greeks performed sacrifices with blood and the slaughter of irrational animals are demons and not gods, says that it is neither necessary nor holy to sacrifice animals to gods.

Listen, then, to his first words, in which, collecting the material on the philosophy from oracles, he shows how Apollo teaches that the gods must be served. He sets it out, writing thus:

"Next, after what has been said about piety, we may record what they declared in oracles about their worship, part of which we have already set out in the books On Piety. The oracle of Apollo, which also contains a division of the order of the gods, is this:

'Work, friend, having come upon this god-given path, and do not forget the blessed ones, slaying sacrifices, now to the gods of the earth, now to the heavenly, now to the kings of the ether themselves and of the watery air, and to those of the sea and to all those beneath the earth; for all things are bound in the fullness of the nature of these. I will sing how it is lawful to perform the offerings of animals (and engrave my oracle on tablets): some to the earthly, some to the heavenly gods; bright ones to the heavenly, and to those of the earth like them in color. Divide the sacrifices of the earthly gods in three as you slay them; bury those for the gods below, and pour the blood into a pit, and pour honey, the nymphs, and the gifts of Dionysus. For those who ever fly about the earth, fill the altar everywhere full of fire with blood, cast into the fire the body of a winged creature you have sacrificed, and knead honey with Deo's barley meal and put it in, and throw on fumes of frankincense and sacred grains. When you go by the sands, pour grey brine on the head and sacrifice, and cast the whole animal into the deep wave of the sea. Having finished all these, go to the broad chorus of the airy gods of heaven. Then for the starry and ethereal gods over all, let the blood from the throats pool around the offerings in streams, and the limbs be prepared for the gods in a feast; give the extremities to Hephaestus, and eat the rest, filling all the flowing air with sweet fumes; and send up prayers to the gods.'

And a little later he explains the oracle, interpreting it thus: "The sacrifices are of this kind, assigned according to the division of the gods mentioned before. For since there are gods under the earth and on the earth, the former called subterranean and infernal, the latter terrestrial and earthly, he commands in common to sacrifice black four-footed victims to these; but he varies the manner of the sacrifice. For he commands to slaughter them on altars for the gods on the earth, and over pits for those under the earth, and moreover, having sacrificed, to bury the bodies for these.

For that four-footed victims are common to these he himself added when asked: 'These are common to the earthly and the subterranean alone: four-footed creatures for the earthly, the fresh-formed limbs of lambs.' To the gods of the air he commands to sacrifice birds, burning them whole and carrying the blood round the altars; to those of the sea, birds too, but to release them alive into the waves, being black in color. For he says: 'To the gods the winged creatures, and to those of the sea the black ones,'

meaning winged creatures for all the gods except the earthly, and black ones only for those of the sea, so white for the others. To the heavenly and ethereal gods one must dedicate the extremities of the victims, which are white, and eat the other parts; for of these alone you may eat, but not of the others. Those he called heavenly in the division he here calls starry.

Will it be necessary, then, to explain the symbols of the sacrifices, which are plain to the intelligent? Four-footed and land animals to the earthly gods, for like rejoices in like. The sheep is earthly and therefore dear to Demeter, and with the sun in heaven it brings to birth the appearing of the fruits out of the earth. They are black, for such is the earth, dark by nature. And three, for three is the symbol of the bodily and earthy.

To the gods on the earth one must sacrifice above, on altars, for they dwell on the earth; to those under the earth in a pit and with burial, where they spend their time. Winged creatures to the others, because all things move. For the water of the sea too is ever-moving, but black; therefore such victims are suitable. To the gods of the air white ones, for the air too is lit up, being of transparent nature. To the heavenly and ethereal gods the lighter parts of the animals, that is, the extremities, of which one must share in the sacrifice. For these are givers of good things, while the others are averters of evils." Such are the extracts from the Philosophy from Oracles of the wonderful divine sage.

Come, let us compare with these the contrary words of the same writer, which he has set down in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food. There, moved by right reasoning, he first of all admits that one must not burn incense or sacrifice anything at all to the God over all, nor even to the divine and heavenly powers after him.

Then, going on, he refutes the beliefs of the many, saying that one must not suppose those who delight in animal sacrifices to be gods. For he says that to sacrifice animals is the most unjust of all things, unholy, abominable, and harmful, and therefore not pleasing to gods. In saying this he would plainly refute his own god; for he said just now that the oracle commanded animal sacrifice not only to the subterranean and earthly gods, but also to those of the air, heaven, and ether.

So says Apollo; but Porphyry, calling Theophrastus to witness, says that animal sacrifice befits not gods but demons only. So, according to his and Theophrastus's account, Apollo is a demon and not a god, and so are all those considered gods among all the nations, to whom all, rulers and ruled alike, in cities and countries, perform animal sacrifices; for according to the writers mentioned these must be thought nothing other than demons.

But if they say they are good, how, if sacrifice by blood was unholy, abominable, and harmful, could those who delight in such things be good? And if they should appear to delight not only in such sacrifices, but, through excess of cruelty and inhumanity, in the slaughter and sacrifice of men, how would they not plainly be bloodthirsty, akin to all cruelty and inhumanity, and nothing else than wicked demons?

When we have received the proof of these things, I think the reasonableness of our withdrawal from the beings described will have been shown. For it is neither holy nor pious to bring down the reverend name of God and the highest honor to wicked spirits; it would not even be so to confer on robbers and housebreakers the title of one invested with royal dignity among men.

Therefore we, taught to worship only the God over all and to honor fittingly the God-loving and blessed powers around him, bring nothing earthly and dead, no gore and blood, nothing of perishable and material substance; but with a mind purified of all vice, and a body clothed with the adornment of purity and self-control, brighter than any robe, with right doctrines worthy of God, and above all with a genuine disposition, we pray to keep even to death the piety handed down by our Savior.

But having set out these things first, it is time to proceed to the proofs of what has been said. First of all it is reasonable to go through the passages in which the writer mentioned, in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food, says that one must neither burn incense nor sacrifice anything earthly to the God over all or to the divine powers after him; for such things are foreign to fitting piety.

"To the God over all, as a wise man said, we neither burn nor name anything perceptible; for there is nothing material that is not at once impure to the immaterial. Therefore not even speech uttered by the voice is fitting for him, nor inner speech when it is defiled by passion of the soul; but we worship him in pure silence and with pure thoughts about him. We must, then, united with him and made like him, offer our own elevation as a holy sacrifice to God, which is also our hymn and our salvation. This sacrifice, then, is performed in the impassibility of the soul and in the contemplation of God."

"To his offspring, the intelligible gods, we must now add hymns in words. For the sacrifice is a first-fruit of what each has given, through which he nourishes our being and holds it in existence. As a farmer offers first-fruits of his sheaves and tree fruits, so let us offer to them first-fruits of good thoughts about them, giving thanks for the contemplation they have given us, and because they truly nourish us by the sight of themselves, being with us, appearing, and shining on our salvation." So says this writer. And akin to him are the words about the first and great God that Apollonius of Tyana himself, celebrated by the many, is said to write in his work On Sacrifices, as follows:

"In this way, I think, one would best pay fitting attention to the divine and obtain its favor and kindness above all other men: if to God, whom we called first, who is one and separate from all, after whom the others must be recognized, he should sacrifice nothing at all, nor kindle fire, nor name anything perceptible at all (for he needs nothing even from those greater than we are, and there is no plant that the earth sends up, nor animal that it or the air nourishes, which has not some defilement); but should always use toward him only the higher speech, I mean that which does not pass through the mouth, and should ask good things from the most beautiful of beings through the most beautiful thing in us, which is mind, needing no instrument. So according to this no sacrifice must be offered to the great God over all." This being so, see now what the former writer records about animal sacrifice, calling Theophrastus as witness to the account:

"But as men advanced far from the first-fruits in sacrifices into lawlessness, the adoption of the most dreadful offerings, full of cruelty, was brought in, so that the curses spoken of before against us seem now to have been fulfilled, when men slaughtered victims and bloodied the altars, from the time when, having experienced famines and wars, they touched blood. Therefore the divine power, as Theophrastus says, indignant at both, seems to have inflicted the fitting punishment; so that some men have become atheists, and others might justly be called evil-minded rather than worshippers of evil gods, because they think the gods are wicked by nature and no better than we are. Thus some appear to have become men who offer no sacrifice, and others men who sacrifice wrongly and touch unlawful victims."

Again the same writer adds this: "These things being so, Theophrastus rightly forbids those who wish to be truly pious to sacrifice living creatures, using also such other reasons as these."

And he adds: "We must sacrifice those things by sacrificing which we shall harm no one; for nothing ought to be so harmless as a sacrifice. But if someone says that God has given us animals for our use no less than fruits, yet in sacrificing animals one does them some harm, since they are deprived of their soul. These, then, must not be sacrificed. For sacrifice (thysia) is, as the name shows, something holy (hosia); and no one is holy who repays favors out of what belongs to others, whether he takes fruits or plants without the owner's will. For how is it holy when those deprived are wronged? And if one who takes another's fruits does not sacrifice holily, it is altogether unholy to sacrifice things more precious than these, taking them from someone; for so the outrage becomes greater. And the soul is far more precious than what grows from the earth, and it is not fitting to take it away by sacrificing animals."

And he adds: "We must, then, abstain from animals in sacrifices." And again he says: "What is unholy, then, or costly, must not be sacrificed." And next:

"So, even if we must offer first-fruits of animals, we must sacrifice them to the gods for one of these reasons; for we sacrifice for one of these reasons. Would anyone think, then, that God receives honor from us when we are seen to do wrong in our first-fruits, or rather that he would consider such an act a dishonor? In this very thing, by killing in sacrifice animals that do no wrong, we admit that we do wrong; so for the sake of honor none of the other animals must be sacrificed. Nor indeed in repaying benefits to them; for one who repays a just return for a benefit and the worth of a kindness ought not to provide it from wronging others. He will seem no more to repay a favor than if someone should seize his neighbor's goods and crown others with them, as if repaying a favor and honor.

Nor for the sake of some good things. For he who hunts for good treatment by an unjust act is suspected of being ungrateful even when he is well treated. So animals must not be sacrificed to the gods even in hope of benefit. For one might perhaps escape the notice of men in doing this, but it is impossible to escape the notice of God. If, then, one must sacrifice for one of these reasons, but none of them should lead us to do it, it is plain that animals must not be sacrificed to the gods at all."

And again he adds: "For with these [the first offerings] both nature and every sense of the human soul were pleased: 'And the altar was not drenched with the unmixed blood of bulls, but this was the greatest abomination among men, to tear out the life and eat the goodly limbs.'" And after other matters:

"When a young man learns that the gods delight in extravagance and, as they say, in feasts of oxen and other animals, when would he willingly be sober? And thinking that he sacrifices things pleasing to the gods, how will he not think himself free to do wrong, since he will buy off his sin through sacrifices? But if he is persuaded that the gods have no need of these things, but look to the character of those who approach them, receiving as the greatest sacrifice right understanding about themselves and about things, how will he not be self-controlled, just, and holy?

To the gods the best first-fruit is a pure mind and a soul free from passion; but it is fitting also to offer moderate first-fruits of other things, not carelessly but with all eagerness. For honors should be like the seats of precedence, the rising up and making room for good men, not like the payment of taxes."

Clearly, then, it has been admitted by these words, according to the Greeks and their philosophers, that no living thing could reasonably be sacrificed to the gods; for the thing is unholy, unjust, harmful, and not free from pollution. So he was no god, nor any truthful and good demon, the oracle-giver who a little before was exacting libations of blood and savor of fat; nor were all those to whom the oracle commanded animals to be sacrificed. We must, then, call the one who lied a deceiver, a cheat, and plainly a wicked demon, who proclaimed as gods beings that are not, and commanded animal sacrifice not only to the earthly and subterranean but also to the heavenly, ethereal, and starry gods. Whom, then, if not gods, one should take all those mentioned to be, the writer himself will relate in the following:

"He who cares for piety knows that no living thing is sacrificed to gods, but to demons, either good or bad; and he knows whose part it is to sacrifice to these, and to what extent they need it."

And next again he says: "That those who understood the powers in the universe offered sacrifices of blood not to gods but to demons has been confirmed by the theologians themselves; and also that of these some are evil-doers, while the good will not trouble us."

So says the writer mentioned. And since he said that of the demons alone some are good and some bad, come, let us see how all those considered gods by them are convicted of being not good demons but bad ones. You may take the proof of this as follows.

The good benefits, and its opposite harms. If, then, those proclaimed everywhere, whether gods or demons, the very ones celebrated by all and worshipped by all the nations, Cronus and Zeus, Hera and Athena and the like, and the invisible powers and demons working through the images, should be shown to delight not only in the slaughter and sacrifice of irrational animals but also in the killing and sacrifice of men, and in this way to ruin the souls of wretched men, what harm could you conceive worse than this?

For if the sacrifice of irrational animals was called by the philosophers accursed and wrongly offered, abominable, unjust, unholy, and not harmless to those who sacrifice, and for all these reasons unworthy of gods, what should one think of sacrifice by the slaughter of men? Would not this be the most impious and unholy of all? How, then, could it reasonably be called dear to good demons, and not to utterly abominable and destructive spirits?

Come, then, let us prove and show how great a hold the ruin of polytheistic error had on human life before the gospel teaching of our Savior. For, as will be shown, it was dissolved and overthrown not at any other time than in the times of Hadrian, when the teaching of Christ was already shining out like light in every place.

To these things, not we, but the words of those who do not share our views will again plainly testify, accusing the times before this of such wickedness that the superstitious went beyond even the bounds of nature, maddened and plainly possessed by the destructive spirits, so as to think that the bloodthirsty powers were appeased by the blood of those dearest to them and by countless other human sacrifices.

A father would sacrifice his only son, and a mother her beloved daughter, to the demon; those dearest slaughtered their kin as if they were irrational animals belonging to others; and they sacrificed to their so-called gods, in cities and countries, their neighbors and fellow citizens, whetting their humane and compassionate nature to mercilessness and inhumanity, and showing a truly mad and demonic character.

You would find, if you examined all Greek and barbarian history, how some consecrated sons, others daughters, and others even themselves in sacrifices to the demons. I bring before you as witness of these things the same writer as before, in the same work in which he forbade the sacrifice of irrational animals as unholy and most unjust, saying this word for word:

"And that we say these things not lightly, since history is full of them, these examples will be enough to show. In Rhodes, in the month Metageitnion, on the sixth day of the month, a man was sacrificed to Cronus. This custom, after prevailing a long time, was changed: they kept one of those publicly condemned to death until the Cronia, and when the festival came, they led the man outside the gates, opposite the shrine of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink, and slaughtered him.

In what is now Salamis, formerly called Coronea, in the month called Aphrodisius among the Cyprians, a man was sacrificed to Agraulus, daughter of Cecrops and of the nymph Agraulis. The custom continued until the time of Diomedes; then it changed, so that the man was sacrificed to Diomedes. The temple of Athena and that of Agraulus and Diomedes are in one enclosure. The victim, led by the young men, ran three times round the altar; then the priest struck him with a spear in the throat, and so they burned him whole on the heaped pyre.

This ordinance Diphilus, king of Cyprus, abolished in the time of Seleucus the theologian, changing the custom to the sacrifice of an ox; and the demon accepted the ox instead of the man.

So equivalent is the act. At Heliopolis in Egypt too Amosis abolished the law of human sacrifice, as Manetho testifies in his work On Ancient Customs and Piety. They were sacrificed to Hera, and were examined like the pure calves that are sought out and sealed. Three were sacrificed each day; in their place Amosis ordered the same number of wax figures to be offered.

In Chios too they sacrificed a man to Dionysus Omadius (the Raw-eater), tearing him apart, and in Tenedos, as Euelpis of Carystus says; and Apollodorus says that the Lacedaemonians sacrificed a man to Ares.

The Phoenicians, in great calamities of war, plague, or drought, sacrificed one of their dearest, chosen by vote, to Cronus; and the Phoenician history is full of those who sacrificed, which Sanchuniathon wrote in the Phoenician language and Philo of Byblos translated into Greek in eight books.

Ister, in his Collection of Cretan Sacrifices, says that the Curetes in ancient times sacrificed children to Cronus. And Pallas, who made the best collection about the mysteries of Mithras, says that human sacrifices were abolished almost everywhere under the emperor Hadrian. For in Laodicea in Syria a virgin was sacrificed to Athena every year, but now a deer.

And indeed the Carthaginians in Libya performed this sacrifice, which Iphicrates stopped. And the Dumatenes of Arabia sacrificed a boy every year and buried him under the altar, which they use as an image.

Phylarchus records that all the Greeks in common killed a man before going out against their enemies. And I pass over the Thracians and Scythians, and how the Athenians put to death the daughter of Erechtheus and Praxithea. But even now who does not know that in the great city a man is slaughtered at the feast of Jupiter Latiaris?

And again he says: "From that time until now, not only in Arcadia at the Lycaea, nor in Carthage to Cronus, do all in common offer human sacrifices, but periodically, in memory of the custom, they sprinkle the altars with the blood of their own kin."

Let these extracts from the work mentioned be set down. From the first book of Philo's Phoenician History I shall set out this: "It was the custom of the ancients, in great calamities of danger, that instead of the destruction of all, the rulers of the city or nation gave up the most beloved of their children to be slaughtered as a ransom to the avenging demons; and those given up were slaughtered with mystic rites. Cronus, then, whom the Phoenicians call El, who was king of the country and afterward, at the end of his life, was deified as the star of Cronus, having an only-begotten son by a nymph of the country called Anobret, whom they called Ieoud for this reason (the only-begotten is still so called among the Phoenicians), when very great dangers from war had seized the country, adorned his son with royal attire, prepared an altar, and sacrificed him."

This is how these things were. Rightly, then, the admirable Clement in his Exhortation to the Greeks, blaming these very things, himself laments the error of men, saying: "Come, then, let us add this too: that your gods are inhuman and man-hating demons, who not only rejoice in the madness of men but also enjoy the murder of men; providing themselves occasions of pleasure, now in the armed contests in the stadiums, now in the countless rivalries for glory in wars, so that they may be able to glut themselves to the full with human blood. And already, falling upon cities and nations like plagues, they have demanded savage libations. Aristomenes the Messenian, at any rate, slaughtered three hundred men to Zeus of Ithome, thinking he was offering so many and such fine hecatombs; among them was Theopompus, king of the Lacedaemonians, a noble victim. The Tauri, the people who live around the Tauric Chersonese, at once sacrifice to the Tauric Artemis any strangers they catch among them, those shipwrecked at sea. These sacrifices of yours Euripides represents on the 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 (they are a people of Crete) slaughter men to Zeus; and Dosiadas says the Lesbians offer the like sacrifice to Dionysus. As for the Phocaeans (for I will not pass them by), Pythocles in the third book On Concord records that they burn a man whole to Artemis Tauropolus. Erechtheus of Attica and Marius the Roman sacrificed their own daughters, the one to Pherephatta, as Demaratus says in the first book of his Tragic Subjects, the other, Marius, to the averting gods, as Dorotheus records in the fourth book of his Italian History. How humane the demons are shown to be from this! And how are not the superstitious correspondingly unholy, the demons being acclaimed as saviors, and the people asking salvation from those who plot against salvation? Supposing they offer fair sacrifices to them, they have not noticed that they are slaughtering men. For murder does not become a sacrifice because of the place; not even if someone slaughters a man to Artemis and Zeus in a supposedly sacred place rather than to anger and love of money, other demons like them, on altars or on roads, calling it a sacred victim; such a sacrifice is murder and manslaughter.

Why, then, O wisest of all living creatures, men, do we flee from savage beasts, and if we meet a bear or a lion somewhere, turn aside, 'as when a man, seeing a serpent in the mountain glens, starts back, and trembling seizes his limbs beneath, and he retreats again'; but when you perceive and understand that demons are destructive and accursed, plotting against men, hating them, and ruining them, do you not turn away or flee from them?"

So much Clement. I can also produce for you another witness of the bloodguiltiness of the godless and inhuman demons, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a man who set out the whole of Roman history accurately. He too writes that Zeus and Apollo once demanded human sacrifices, and that those of whom they were demanded offered to the gods the portion of all their fruits and cattle, but, because they did not sacrifice men too, fell into all kinds of calamities. There is nothing like hearing the historian himself relating it thus:

"Few remained in Italy through the foresight of the Aborigines. First, then, the ruin of their homes seemed to begin for the cities when the land was afflicted by drought, when no fruit remained ripe on the trees, but fell off unripe; nor did the seeds that sent up shoots and flowered fulfill their natural time to the ripeness of the ear; nor did enough grass grow for the cattle; and of the springs some were no longer good to drink, some failed in summer, and some dried up altogether. Things akin to these happened to the births of cattle and of women: either the embryos miscarried, or perished in birth, sometimes destroying the mothers as well; and if any escaped the danger of birth maimed or imperfect or harmed by some other mischance, it was of no use to rear it. Then the rest of the population too, those in their prime, were afflicted with diseases and deaths beyond the usual number. When they consulted the oracle, asking which of the gods or demons they had offended to suffer these things, and what they must do to hope for relief from their troubles, the god answered that, having obtained what they wished, they had not paid what they vowed, but still owed what was of most value. For the Pelasgians, when a dearth of all goods had come upon their land, had vowed to Zeus, Apollo, and the Cabiri to sacrifice tithes of all that should accrue to them; and when the prayer was fulfilled, they set aside the portion of all their fruits and cattle and sacrificed it to the gods, as if they had vowed these alone. This Myrsilus of Lesbos has recorded, writing almost in the same words as I do now, except that he calls the people not Pelasgians but Tyrrhenians; the reason I shall give a little later."

"When they learned the oracle that was brought back, they could not understand what was said. In their perplexity one of the elders, interpreting the oracle, said that they were wholly mistaken if they thought the gods accused them unjustly; for the first-fruits of their goods had all been paid rightly and justly, but the portion of human offspring, the thing above all most precious to the gods, was still owed; and if the gods received their just share of these too, the oracle would be fulfilled. Some thought this rightly said, others that the account had been concocted by design. When someone proposed asking the god whether it pleased him to receive tithes of men, they sent envoys a second time, and the god answered that they should do so.

From this, strife seized them about the manner of the tithing; and first the leaders of the cities fell into confusion among themselves, then the rest of the people came to suspect those in authority. The expulsions took place in no order, but, as was natural, of men driven out by frenzy and divine madness; and many whole households were wiped out when part of them was removed, since the kinsmen did not think it right to be left behind by those who were departing, their dearest ones, and to remain among their worst enemies. These, then, were the first to leave Italy, and they wandered over much of Greece and of the barbarian land. After the first, others suffered the same, and this went on for years. For the rulers in the cities did not cease taking the first-fruits of the youth as they came to manhood, thinking it right to render the gods their due and fearing seditions from those who escaped notice. Many too were driven out by their adversaries out of enmity under a fair pretext; so that there were many expulsions, and the Pelasgian race was scattered over most of the earth."

And a little later he says: "They say too that the ancients performed the sacrifices to Cronus, as was done at Carthage as long as the city lasted and is done among the Celts to this day, and among some other western nations they kill men; and that Heracles, wishing to put an end to the custom of this sacrifice, set up the altar on the Saturnian hill and began sacrifices of pure victims consecrated on a pure fire. And so that men should have no scruple, as having neglected ancestral sacrifices, he taught the natives to appease the god's wrath by making images in the likeness of men, adorned in the same way as the men they used to bind hand and foot and throw into the stream of the Tiber, and casting these into the river instead of the men, so that whatever ominous fear remained in the souls of all might be removed, while images of the ancient practice were still preserved. This the Romans continued to do even to my time, a little after the spring equinox, in the month of May, on the so-called Ides, meaning this to be the day of the full moon. On it, after offering beforehand the victims prescribed by the laws, the so-called pontiffs, the most distinguished of the priests, and with them the virgins who guard the undying fire, the praetors, and those of the other citizens who may lawfully be present at the rites, throw from the sacred bridge into the stream of the Tiber images made in the forms of men, thirty in number, calling them Argei."

So much for these things. Diodorus too records things like these in the twentieth book of his Historical Library, after the death of Alexander of Macedon, under the first Ptolemy, about the Carthaginians when they were besieged by Agathocles, tyrant of Sicily, writing this word for word: "They also blamed Cronus for opposing them, inasmuch as in former times they had sacrificed to this god the best of their sons, but later bought children secretly, reared them, and sent them to the sacrifice; and when an inquiry was made, some of those sacrificed were found to have been substituted. Taking these things to heart and seeing the enemy encamped before their walls, they were filled with superstitious fear, as having abolished the ancestral honors of the gods. Eager to correct their errors, they selected two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly; and others who were under suspicion gave themselves up voluntarily, not fewer than three hundred. There was among them a bronze statue of Cronus, stretching out its hands palm upward and sloping toward the ground, so that the child placed on them rolled off and fell into a pit full of fire."

Such things this writer too has handed down through his history. Rightly, then, the Scripture of the Hebrews also blames those of the circumcision who imitated such things, saying: "And they sacrificed their sons and their daughters to demons; and the land was polluted with blood, and was defiled by their works." But I think it has been clearly proved by these things that the most ancient and first setting up of images was demonic, and all the idolatrous deification of the nations was the work of demons, not good but altogether most wicked and evil; so that the oracle spoken in the prophecies is fulfilled: "All the gods of the nations are demons"; and the apostolic word, in which it says that "what they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God."

Or if there were anything good in them, so as on this account to share the title of the good, it would be beneficent and a savior of all, a friend of justice and protective of men. Being such, how could it delight in the slaughter of men? And how did it not prevent the human race by oracles from doing such things? Surely it was worse and baser than men, who by the penalties of the laws brought the bloodthirsty to their senses. For it was no god but a man who put an end to the long and lasting disease of human sacrifice.

That these things belonged to bad and wicked demons would be still plainer to you if you considered the infamous and licentious prostitution practiced in their honor even now at Heliopolis in Phoenicia and among very many other peoples. For they say that adulteries, seductions, and other unlawful unions must be performed in honor of the gods, as a debt owed, and that first-fruits of the act of adultery and prostitution must be offered to the gods, dedicating to them the gains of this inglorious and indecent traffic as some good thank-offering. For these things are like the human sacrifices.

If, then, it is not fitting even for a self-controlled man to delight in murders, foul talk, and unlawful unions with women who sell their youth for hire, far less can it be said that it belongs to gods or good demons to accept such things. And if anyone should say that these things admittedly belong to bad demons, but that the good ones are others, whom they especially worship as saviors, we must ask where their good saviors were, if they worshipped these too, that they did not keep the wicked from doing such things against those who fled to them for refuge? Where were the good demons, that they did not drive away the harmful ones and fight for their worshippers? Why did they disregard, overlooking it, the rational and God-loving race of men worn down by the cruelty of the bad demons, and not proclaim plainly to all to flee without turning back and to reject every so-called god, as being no god but a bad demon, to whom cruel, inhuman, lawless, and shameful things are dear?

And if formerly at Rhodes there was a so-called god who delighted in human sacrifices, the true God, if there were one, would have stopped the practice and proclaimed to all that this was not a god but a bad demon; and if at Salamis, formerly called Coronea, where in the month called Aphrodisius by the Cyprians a man was sacrificed, the true God would have declared this one too to be an accursed demon, stopping the practice as impious and unholy.

And if at Heliopolis in Egypt Amosis abolished the law of human sacrifice, the true God would have taught that the man had been far better than the god; for it was no god, but again a demon, that led the human sacrifice. Nor would the true God have failed to ordain that Hera's demon be regarded as abominable, to whom, as the history shows, three men were sacrificed every day.

And what could be more truly demonic than the so-called Dionysus Omadius, to whom they say they sacrificed a man in Chios, tearing him limb from limb, or the one in Tenedos likewise, whom they too appeased with human sacrifice? The true God would have forbidden sacrificing a man to Ares, the man-destroying and war-loving demon, and would have ordained that no one slaughter for him the dearest of his own or of others.

And if a virgin, as they say, was sacrificed every year to Athena at Laodicea in Syria, the true God would not have hesitated to call her too a wicked demon; as also the one in Libya who delighted in the like, and the one in Arabia, to whom they sacrificed a boy every year and buried him under the altar.

All these, and those who delighted in foul speech and the unlawful corruption of women and in the rest of the madness listed before, the true and good god, or demon, would have warned people beforehand by no means to regard as gods. But no one of all who ever were is recorded to have done this, except only the God honored among the Hebrews, as the only and true God.

For he alone, through Moses the prophet and theologian, proclaimed to all not to worship the bad demons as good, but on the contrary to turn away from them and drive them off as being evil spirits; and he legislated, moreover, to pull down their temples and their unholy and profane rites, and to wipe out entirely from among men the memory of them as gods and the honor paid to them. For it was not holy for those cared for by the good to propitiate the bad.

Whether it is Phylarchus or anyone else who records that all the Greeks killed a man before going out to war, do not hesitate to take him too as a witness of the demonic seizure of the Greeks; nor fail to declare that those in Africa, and the Thracians and Scythians who do the like, have been led into the same madness of the demons; as also the Athenians and those in the Great City, if indeed they too slaughtered men at the festivals of great Jupiter.

But gathering together the list of all those mentioned, you would find, one may almost say, that all the deification of the nations was dedicated to these very murderous spirits and wicked demons. For if at Rhodes and Salamis and the other islands, at Heliopolis in Egypt, at Chios and Tenedos, Sparta and Arcadia, Phoenicia and Libya, and besides all these in Syria and Arabia, and among all the Greeks and their foremost, the Athenians, at Carthage and in Africa, and among Thracians and Scythians, the demonic killing of men has been shown to have been practiced in ancient times and to have lasted until our Savior, how could you not reasonably say that all were then enslaved to the wicked demons, and that there was no rest from such great evils for human life before the teaching of our Savior shone forth? For the account of the history showed that these things lasted until the times of Hadrian and were abolished from then on; and this was above all the time when the saving teaching was flourishing among all men.

Nor can they say that these were offered to the wicked demons; for the history showed that human sacrifices were performed above all to the greatest gods themselves. For it said they were sacrificed to Hera, Athena, Cronus, Ares, and Dionysus, to Zeus himself who is over all, and to Phoebus, the most revered and wisest of all, Apollo; and these and no others they proclaim the greatest gods, good and saviors.

So these themselves would be the wicked demons. For if they delighted in such human sacrifices and killings, how could you not reasonably count them among the bloodguilty wicked spirits, whether they are said to delight in such things themselves or to permit and overlook them when done by others?

For why should they allow men at all to propitiate the wicked spirits? Why should they go so astray as to serve and flatter the bad? Why be enslaved to the wicked, when, being good and gods, they ought to drive away as far as possible from the haunts of men everything bad and wicked by a stronger and more divine power?

A good father would not allow his own son to be ruined by wicked men; a sober master will not overlook his servant being carried off by enemies; a general in war, when he can save his own men, will not give them up as captives to the enemy; nor a shepherd his flock to the wolves. Will gods and good demons, then, give up the human race to the wicked and bad?

And will the thirty thousand guardians of mortal men, the shepherds and saviors, kings, fathers, and lords, hand over their dearest so pitilessly and cruelly to be harried by enemies, foes, and wild beasts, and not fight in front of them, shielding those who flee to them; driving the hostile and wicked demons far from the flock of men like savage and flesh-eating beasts; and teaching every man, trusting in the multitude of countless gods and good demons that are his kin, and consecrated to gods not only stronger but more numerous and greatest, to care little, or rather not at all, for the weakness of the wicked demons?

But since they did not do this, but on the contrary themselves worked with the wicked, sending up through their oracles the human sacrifices described and delighting in all foul speech and the deeds that follow it, it is plain in fact, as they say, that they too differed in no way in nature from bad demons, or rather were of one and the same choice and mind; and still more, that there was no god at all, nor any good demon, among those worshipped of old by all the nations in cities and countries.

For how could the bad ever be dear to the good, unless one should say that light and darkness can be mixed into one? And how much better is human reasoning than the reputed gods, bidding men not to sacrifice even to bad demons! The writer mentioned before, where he said one must not sacrifice animals, says that one must not sacrifice even to bad demons, in this way:

"Therefore a wise and sober man will beware of using such sacrifices, through which he will draw such beings to himself, and will be eager to purify his soul in every way; for they do not attack a pure soul, because it is unlike them. And if it is necessary for cities to propitiate these too, that is nothing to us; for in cities wealth and external and bodily things are thought to be goods, and their opposites evils, and care for the soul is very rare in them." Next to this he adds, saying:

"But we, as far as we can, shall not need what these provide, but make every effort, both from the soul and from external things, to become like God and those around him (which happens through freedom from passion and through a clear understanding of what truly is, and a life directed toward it and in accordance with it), and to become unlike wicked men and demons and everything in general that delights in the mortal and material.

"The philosopher we describe, who stands apart from external things, will reasonably, we say, not trouble demons, nor need seers, nor the entrails of animals. For he has practiced withdrawing from the things for whose sake divinations exist. He does not engage in marriage, so as to trouble the seer about marriage; nor in commerce, nor about a servant, nor about theft and the other vainglory among men. And about what he seeks, no seer nor the entrails of animals will show the truth; but he himself through himself, as we say, approaching God, who is established in his true inward parts, will receive counsels about eternal life, having flowed wholly there."

Very clearly, then, the account has shown by these words to whom one must ascribe the oracles, inquiries by sacrifice, and the foreknowledge of hidden things admired by the many. For he calls all these vainglory and rejects them as worked by wicked demons.

At any rate, going through the account of bad demons, and saying that the wise and sober man will never give himself up to them nor draw them to himself by sacrifices, he next adds that the philosopher will not need oracles, nor entrails of animals, nor the like, since these belong to the evil art of demons.

If, then, according to this, the wise and sober man must beware of using such sacrifices as draw the demons to himself (and these were the sacrifices by shedding of blood and slaughter of irrational animals), none of those of old who sacrificed animals to the demons, and much less those who sacrificed men, could justly be called sober and wise.

And almost all the nations everywhere, before our Savior was shown to men, were caught propitiating the bad demons with human sacrifices performed in every place. So none of them was wise and sober.

Common human reasoning, then, following right reason, plainly proclaims to every wise and sober man not to use sacrifices in the service of wicked demons, but to be eager to purify the soul in every way; for they do not attack a pure soul, because it is unlike them.

But their god Apollo (for he must again be compared with men, and it must be shown how far he falls short of right reasoning) commands sacrifice to the wicked demon, plainly as being his friend; for like is dear to the bad. The witness of this is the same writer as before, in the work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles, recording thus word for word:

"At any rate, when the prophet was eager and pressing to see the divine with his own eyes, Apollo said that such a thing was impossible before giving ransoms to the wicked demon. He says thus: 'Give ransoms to the dread dweller of your native land: first libations, then a pyre, and the dark blood of black wine, and the white streams of sheep together.' And he spoke more clearly about the same things: 'Cast wine and milk and the bright form of water, and fruit-bearing wood of Zeus-born oaks; and laying down the entrails, pour libations with rich streams.' And when asked with what prayer, he began but did not finish, saying thus: 'Demon, who have received the crown of sinful souls, beneath the recesses of the air and above those of the earth.'"

So says the wonderful god, or rather the much-erring demon. But the teachings of natural reasoning command the opposite: to purify the soul, and not to draw the wicked demons by sacrifices; for they do not attack a pure soul, because it is unlike them. And if the man who is cautious and does not sacrifice to demons has rightly been judged wise and sober, I leave you to consider whom, and of what kind, one should reasonably think the one who advises through the oracle to sacrifice to the wicked.