To the Nations 2.14

But since they hold that some were received into divinity separately from among men, and that a distinction should be made between gods born and gods made, according to Dionysius the Stoic, I will add something on this class too. The sum of my answer will concern Hercules himself: whether he was worthy of heaven and divinity; for so they assign divinity to merits at their pleasure. If for his valor, because he steadfastly slew wild beasts, what is so memorable in that? Do not criminals condemned to the gladiatorial school, or even men of the cheap sort given to the arena for a show, slay very many beasts at once, and fiercer ones at that? If for traveling over the world, how many rich men has sweet leisure, or philosophers a servile beggary, enabled to do the same? Do they not remember that Asclepiades the Cynic, with a single little cow, on whose back he rode and from whose udder he was sometimes fed, brought the whole world under his eyes? If Hercules also went down to the underworld, who does not know that the road to the underworld lies open to all? If you deified him for his many slaughters and battles, the great Pompey produced a much greater number, the conqueror of the pirates who had not even left Ostia safe; and how many thousands, pray, were cut down by Scipio right into one corner of the Byrsa of Carthage? So Scipio should more rightly be counted worthy of divinity than Hercules. Add rather to Hercules' titles his seductions of girls and wives, and the swaddling-bands of Omphale, and the expedition of the Argonauts shamefully deserted over the loss of a comely boy. Add to his glory, after the mark of disgrace, his fits of madness too; adore the arrows that killed his sons and his wife. He who would then more fittingly have put himself on the pyre in grief for the killing of his own, who, entrapped by poison through his wife's wantonness, rather deserved to die a dishonorable death: him you raised from the pyre to heaven, with the same ease as you raised another, destroyed by fire from the divine power, who, having devised a few ingenious experiments, was said to have restored the dead to life. He was the son of Apollo, as much a man as he was a grandson of Jupiter and great-grandson of Saturn (or rather illegitimate, being of uncertain father, as Socrates of Argos reported: exposed, found, and, more shamefully than Jupiter, reared, on a dog's udder no less); deservedly, as no one can deny, he was consumed by the thunderbolt. Here again your Jupiter “Best” is bad: impious toward his grandson, envious of the craftsman. But Pindar did not hide what he deserved: he says that his greed and avarice for gain were punished, by which he brought the living to death, not the dead to life, through the malpractice of a venal medicine. His mother too is said to have died by the same stroke, and rightly, since she who had borne so dangerous a beast into the world burst into heaven by the same ladder, as it were. And yet the Athenians know how to sacrifice to such gods: for they offer funeral rites to Aesculapius and his mother among the dead. As if they did not also adore their Theseus, a god deservedly! Why not? Since he abandoned his rescuer on a foreign shore, with the same forgetfulness, or rather madness, which caused his father's death.