Oration to the Greeks 27

If you hold to their education, why do you fight with me for choosing the teachings I want? How is it not absurd that a robber is not punished because of the name he is charged with until the truth has been carefully established, but that we are hated because of an unexamined prejudice born of slander? Diagoras was an Athenian, but you punished him for divulging the Athenian mysteries; and yet you read his Phrygian discourses and hate us. You possess the memoirs of Leo and are annoyed at our refutations; you keep Apion's opinions about the Egyptian gods among yourselves, and yet you denounce us as utterly godless. A tomb of Olympian Zeus is shown among you, even though someone says the Cretans are liars. The assembly of your many gods is nothing. Even if Epicurus, who despises them, serves as their torchbearer, I will not any the more hide from the rulers the understanding of God that I hold concerning the universe. Why do you advise me to be false to my way of life? And why, while saying that you despise death, do you urge people to escape it by art? I do not have the heart of a deer; but the practices of your speeches are like those of Thersites, who talked without measure. How shall I be persuaded by someone who says that the sun is a red-hot lump and the moon an earth? Such things are a contest of words, not an ordering of the truth. Or how is it not foolish to believe the books of Herodorus on the story of Heracles, which proclaim an earth above, and say that the lion killed by Heracles came down from it? What use would Attic diction be, and heaps of philosophers, and plausible syllogisms, and measurements of the earth, and positions of the stars, and courses of the sun? To be occupied with such inquiries is the work of one who makes up his teachings for himself.