To Autolycus 2.8

And why should I go on listing the multitude of such names and genealogies? In every way, then, all the writers and the so-called poets and philosophers are deluded, and so are those who pay attention to them. For they composed myths and follies about their gods: they showed them to be not gods but men, some drunkards, others fornicators and murderers. And about the origin of the world, too, they said things that are base and contradict one another. First, some declared that the world is uncreated, as we showed above; and those who said it is uncreated and an eternal nature spoke inconsistently with those who taught that it was created. For they spoke by guesswork and human thinking, not according to the truth. Others again said that there is providence, and so undid the teachings of the former. Aratus says: “Let us begin from Zeus, whom we men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are all the streets, all the marketplaces of men; full are the sea and the harbors; everywhere we all have need of Zeus. For we are also his offspring; and he, kindly to men, gives favorable signs, and rouses the peoples to work, reminding them of their livelihood. He tells when the soil is best for oxen and mattocks, and tells when the seasons are right both for digging around the plants and for sowing all kinds of seed.” Whom, then, shall we believe, Aratus, or Sophocles, who says, “There is no [clear] providence of anything; it is best to live at random, as best one can”? Homer, again, does not agree with him, for he says, “Zeus increases and diminishes men's valor.” And Simonides: “No one without the gods has won valor, neither city nor mortal. God is all-wise; nothing among them is free of woe.” Likewise Euripides: “Nothing comes to men apart from God.” And Menander: “No one cares for us, then, but God alone.” And again Euripides: “For when God wills to save, he gives many occasions for rescue.” And [Thestius]: “If God wills, you are saved, even if you sail on a mat.” They said ten thousand such things, and contradicted themselves. Sophocles, for one, who elsewhere speaks of there being no providence, says: “No mortal escapes the stroke of God.” They also brought in a multitude of gods, or else spoke of one sovereign God; and to those who said there is no providence they said the opposite. So Euripides admits it, saying: “We strive after many things in hope, laboring in vain, knowing nothing.” Against their will they confess that they do not know the truth. Inspired by demons and puffed up by them, what they said they said through the demons. For the poets, Homer and Hesiod, inspired, as they say, by the Muses, spoke by fantasy and error, not by a pure spirit but by a deceiving one. This is clearly shown from the fact that even to this day those possessed by demons are sometimes exorcised in the name of the true God, and the deceiving spirits themselves confess that they are demons, the same ones who worked in those poets then. Yet sometimes some of the poets, coming to their senses in soul and departing from the demons, said things that agree with the prophets, as a testimony both to themselves and to all people, about the sole sovereignty of God, the judgment, and the other things they spoke of.