Exhortation 1 part 3/7

For indeed you are at no loss for names to compound your impieties.

Come then, let us add this too: that your gods are inhuman and man-hating daemons, who not only delight in the madness of men but moreover take pleasure in human slaughter.

Now they provide for themselves occasions of pleasure in the armed contests in the stadiums, now in the countless rivalries of wars, that they may be able to glut themselves to the full and without restraint on human bloodshed.

And ere now, 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, supposing that so many and such hecatombs would yield favourable omens.

Among them was even Theopompus, king of the Lacedaemonians, a noble victim.

And the Tauri, the nation dwelling around the Tauric peninsula, whenever they capture any of the strangers among them—namely those who have been shipwrecked upon their coast—straightway sacrifice them to the Tauric Artemis.

These sacrifices of yours Euripides represents in tragedy upon the stage.

And Monimus relates, in his Collection of Marvels, that at Pella in Thessaly an Achaean man is sacrificed to Peleus and Chiron.

For Anticleides, in his Returns, declares that the Lyctians (these are a Cretan people) used to slay men in sacrifice to Zeus; and Dosidas says that the Lesbians offered a like sacrifice to Dionysus.

And Erechtheus the Athenian and Marius the Roman each sacrificed their own daughters.

Of these the one sacrificed his to Pherephatta (Persephone), as Demaratus says in the first book of his Tragic Themes, and the other, Marius, to the Averting Gods, as Dorotheus records in the fourth book of his Italian History.

How philanthropic, then, the daemons appear from all this!

And how are the superstitious not correspondingly “holy”? The one party being hailed as saviours, the other begging for salvation from those who plot against their salvation.

At any rate, fancying they are offering acceptable sacrifices to them, they have unwittingly been slaughtering human beings.

For the murder does not become a sacred offering by reason of the place; nor, if someone slays a man supposedly to Artemis and Zeus in a sacred spot rather than out of wrath and avarice (to other daemons of like sort), whether upon altars or in the roads, calling the deed a “sacred offering”—even so, such a sacrifice is murder and manslaughter.

Why then, O men, wisest of all the other animals, do we flee from the savage beasts, and if anywhere we chance upon a bear or a lion we turn aside—“as when a man, catching sight of a serpent, starts back in the glens of a mountain, and trembling seizes his limbs, and he draws back again”?

Yet, foreknowing and perceiving that the daemons are destructive and baneful, plotters and man-haters and ruiners, why do you not turn aside from them nor turn away? What truth could the wicked ones ever speak, or whom could they benefit? Indeed, I can at once show you a man better than these gods of yours, these daemons—one better than Apollo the diviner: Cyrus and Solon.

Your Phoebus is a lover of gifts, but no lover of mankind.

He betrayed his friend Croesus, and forgetting the fee (so fond of glory was he), he led Croesus across the Halys to the pyre.

Thus loving, the daemons lead men into the fire.

But, O man more loving and more truthful than Apollo, pity him bound upon the pyre; and you, O Solon, prophesy the truth, and you, O Cyrus, command the fire to be quenched.

Come to your senses at last, O Croesus, taught wisdom by your suffering.

He whom you worship is ungrateful: he takes the fee, and after the gold he lies again.

Look to the end: not the daemon, but the man, tells it to you.

Solon does not prophesy obliquely.

This oracle alone, O barbarian, you will find to be true.

This one you will test upon the pyre.

Hence it comes over me to wonder by what fantasies the first deluded men were led astray, who proclaimed superstition to mankind, legislating the worship of baneful daemons—whether it was that Phoroneus, or Merops, or some other, who set up temples and altars to them, and who, moreover, are fabled to have been the first to institute sacrifices.

For indeed, in later times too, men kept fashioning gods for themselves to worship.

Take Eros, for instance, who is said to be among the most ancient of the gods—yet not a single person honoured him before Charmus took a certain youth as his beloved and set up an altar in the Academy as a thank-offering for the fulfilment of his desire.

And they have called the wantonness of disease “Eros,” deifying unbridled lust.

And the Athenians did not even know who Pan was, until Philippides told them.

Reasonably, then, superstition, once it had gotten its start somewhere, became a fountain of senseless wickedness.

Then, not being checked, but coming to increase and flowing on abundantly, it set itself up as the maker of many daemons, sacrificing hecatombs, holding festivals, erecting statues, and building temples—which (for I will not pass even these over in silence, but will refute them too) are euphemistically named “temples,” but have really become tombs (that is, the tombs that have been styled “temples”).

But you—even now, at least—forget your superstition, being ashamed to honour tombs.

At Athens, on the Acropolis, is the tomb of Cecrops, as Antiochus says in the ninth book of his Histories.

And what of Erichthonius? Is he not buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immarus the son of Eumolpus and Daeira—is he not buried within the precinct of the Eleusinion below the Acropolis? And the daughters of Celeus—are they not interred at Eleusis? Why should I recount to you the Hyperborean women? Hyperoche and Laodice they are called; they are buried in the Artemisium at Delos, which is within the sanctuary of the Delian Apollo.

And Leandrius says that Cleochus is buried at Miletus, in the temple of Didyma.

Here it is not right to pass over the monument of Leucophryne, following Zeno of Myndus—she who is buried in the temple of Artemis at Magnesia—nor indeed the altar of Apollo at Telmissus.

For they record that this too is the tomb of Telmisseus the seer.

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

But indeed, were I to go through all the tombs you worship, all time would not suffice me.

And as for you, if no shame creeps over you at the deeds you dare, then being utterly dead yourselves, you go about your lives having truly put your trust in the dead.

“Ah, wretched ones, what evil is this you suffer? Your heads are shrouded in night.”

And if, in addition to all this, I should bring before you the very images themselves to examine, in going over them you will truly find this custom to be sheer nonsense, in that you reverence works of men’s hands that have no feeling.

Of old, then, the Scythians used to worship the dagger, the Arabs the stone, the Persians the river; and other men still more ancient set up conspicuous logs and erected pillars of stone.

These were also called “xoana” (carved images), because they were scraped (apexesthai) from the raw material.

Indeed, on Icarus the image of Artemis was an unworked log, and that of Hera Cithaeronia at Thespiae was a lopped tree-trunk.

And the image of Hera of Samos, as Aethlius says, was at first a plank, but later, under the archon Procles, was made into the form of a statue.

But when the xoana began to be made in the likeness of men, they took the name “bretê” (idols) as a derivative from “brotoi” (mortals).

And at Rome in olden times, the xoanon of Ares was a spear, as Varro the writer says, the craftsmen not having yet rushed into this fair-faced bad artistry.

But when the craft flowered, the error grew.

That, then, they made the stones and the wood—and, in a word, matter—into man-like images, upon which you put on a counterfeit show of piety, slandering the truth, is by now plain of itself.

Nonetheless, since the subject calls for some measure of proof, we must not decline it.

Now, that Pheidias fashioned the Zeus at Olympia and the Polias at Athens out of gold and ivory is surely clear to everyone.

And the xoanon of Hera in Samos was made by Smilis the son of Eucleides, as Olympichus records in his Samian History.

Do not doubt, then, that of the goddesses called the Venerable Ones (Semnai) at Athens, Scopas made two out of the so-called lychneus stone, and Calos the middle one of them.

I can point you to Polemon recording this in the fourth book of his work Against Timaeus.

Nor should you doubt whether Pheidias again fashioned those images of Zeus and Apollo at Patara in Lycia, just as he wrought the lions dedicated alongside them.

But if, as some say, it was the work of Bryaxis, I do not dispute it.

You have this one too as an image-maker.

Inscribe whichever of the two you please.

Moreover, the work of Telesias the Athenian, as Philochorus says, are the nine-cubit statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite that are worshipped on Tenos.

For Demetrius, in the second book of his Argolic History, records concerning the xoanon of Hera in Tiryns both its material—pear-wood—and its maker, Argus.

The Palladium called “fallen from heaven,” which Diomedes and Odysseus are recorded to have stolen from Ilium and deposited with Demophon, was fashioned from the bones of Pelops, just as the Olympian Zeus was made from other bones, those of an Indian beast.

And indeed I bring forward as my authority Dionysius, who records this in the fifth part of his Cycle.

And Apellas, in his Delphica, says that there were two Palladia, and that both were fashioned by the hands of men.

But that no one may suppose that I have passed even this over in ignorance, I will adduce that the statue of Dionysus Morychus at Athens was made out of the stone called phellata, and is the work of Sicon the son of Eupalamus, as Polemon says in one of his letters.

There were also two other sculptors, both Cretan I believe (they were named Scyllis and Dipoenus).

These two fashioned the images of the Dioscuri at Argos, and the statue of Heracles at Tiryns, and the xoanon of Artemis Munychia at Sicyon.

And why do I dwell on these things, when I can show you who that great daemon himself really was—the one whom we hear has been pre-eminently deemed worthy of worship by all—whom they have dared to call “not made by human hands,” namely the Egyptian Sarapis? For some record that he was sent as a thank-offering by the people of Sinope to Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of the Egyptians, who, when they were worn out by famine, had restored them by sending for grain from Egypt; and they say this xoanon was an image of Pluto.

He, having received the statue, set it up on the promontory now called Rhacotis, where the sanctuary of Sarapis is also honoured; and the spot adjoins those places.

And when his concubine Blistiche died at Canopus, Ptolemy had her body brought back and buried beneath the aforementioned shrine.

But others say that Sarapis was a Pontic idol, and that it was transferred to Alexandria with festal honour.

Isidorus alone says that the statue was brought from the Seleucians near Antioch, when they too were in a grain-shortage and had been sustained by Ptolemy.

But Athenodorus the son of Sandon, wishing to make Sarapis out to be ancient, somehow tripped himself up, having proved him to be a manufactured image.

For he says that Sesostris the Egyptian king, having subdued most of the nations among the Greeks, on his return to Egypt brought back with him a sufficient number of craftsmen.

He therefore commanded that Osiris, his own forefather, be wrought lavishly; and Bryaxis the craftsman fashioned it—not the Athenian, but another of the same name as that Bryaxis.

He used a mixed and variegated material for the fashioning of it.

For there were in it filings of gold and silver, of bronze and iron and lead, and besides of tin; and of Egyptian stones not one was lacking—fragments of sapphire and haematite and emerald, and of topaz too.

Having ground them all up and mixed them, he tinted them with cyanus (a dark-blue pigment), on account of which the colour of the statue is rather blackish; and kneading it all together with the residue left over from the embalming of Osiris and Apis, he moulded the Sarapis.

And the very name hints at the partnership in burial and the fashioning out of the entombment, being a compound formed from Osiris and Apis: “Osirapis.” ... Yet another, novel god the Roman emperor consecrated almost as reverently in Egypt, and well-nigh among the Greeks too—his beloved, who had become exceedingly beautiful: Antinous, whom he consecrated just as Zeus did Ganymede.

For lust, when it has no fear, is not easily restrained.

And men now worship the sacred nights of Antinous, which the lover who shared his wakefulness knew to be shameful.

Why do you reckon as a god one who was honoured by reason of fornication? Why did you ordain that he be mourned as a son? Why too do you describe his beauty? Beauty withered by outrage is a shameful thing.

Do not outrage the young man in his bloom.

Keep it pure, that it may be beautiful.

Be a king over beauty, not a tyrant.

Then will I recognize your beauty, when you have kept the image pure.

Then will I do reverence to beauty, when it is the true archetype of all that is beautiful.

But by now the tomb of the beloved is a temple—there is a temple of Antinous, and a city too.

And just as, I suppose, temples are admired, so too are tombs—pyramids and mausolea and labyrinths—being, as it were, other temples of the dead, just as those are tombs of the gods.

I will set before you as a teacher the prophetess Sibyl, who is the proclaimer not of a false Phoebus, “whom vain men called a god, and falsely styled a seer, but of the great God, whom no hands of men fashioned in the likeness of speechless, stone-hewn idols.”

Indeed, she calls the temples “ruins,” foretelling that the temple of the Ephesian Artemis would be swallowed up by chasms and earthquakes, thus: “Ephesus shall wail prostrate, weeping by the river-banks, and seeking a temple that dwells there no more.”

And she says that the temple of Isis and Sarapis in Egypt will be thrown down and burned with fire.

“Isis, thrice-wretched goddess, you shall remain alone by the streams of the Nile, a speechless maenad upon the sands of Acheron;” and then, going on:

“And you, Sarapis, heaped over with many lifeless stones, shall lie a mighty ruin in thrice-wretched Egypt.”

But if you will not listen to the prophetess, listen at least to your own philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, reproaching the images for their insensibility:

“And they pray to these images, as if one were to chatter to the walls of his house.”

For are they not monstrous, those who supplicate stones, and then, moreover, set them up before their gates as though they were efficacious? They worship Hermes as a god, and set up the Way-god (Agyieus) as a doorkeeper.

For if they insult them as senseless, why do they worship them as gods? And if they suppose them to partake of perception, why do they set them up as doorkeepers? And the Romans, ascribing their greatest successes to Fortune (Tyche) and reckoning her the greatest god, carried her off to the privy and dedicated her there, assigning the latrine as a worthy temple for the goddess.

But indeed, insensible stone and wood and rich gold care for nothing whatever—not for the savour of fat, nor blood, nor smoke, by which, honoured and fumigated, they are blackened.

Nor do they care for honour, nor for insult.

Indeed, these images are even more dishonourable than any living creature.

And as to how senseless things have come to be deified, it comes over me to be at a loss, and to pity those who go astray for their folly, as wretched creatures.

For even if some of the animals do not possess all the senses—as worms and caterpillars, and all such as appear maimed from their very first generation, like moles and the shrew-mouse, which Nicander calls “blind and dreadful”—

yet they are at least better than these xoana and statues, which are utterly deaf.

For they have at least some one sense—say, of hearing, or of touch, or that which corresponds to smell or taste.

But the statues partake of not even one sense.

There are many of the animals which have neither sight nor hearing nor even voice—such as the genus of oysters—yet they at least live and grow, and moreover are affected in sympathy with the moon.

But the statues are idle, inactive, insensible; they are nailed up, fastened together, and fixed in place; they are cast, filed, sawn, scraped all over, and carved.

The image-makers thus outrage the dumb earth, driving it out of its own nature, persuading men by their art to worship it.

And the god-makers worship—not gods and daemons, by my reckoning—but earth and art, which is just what the statues are.

For the statue is, in truth, dead matter shaped by a craftsman’s hand.

But to us the image is not a perceptible thing of perceptible matter, but a thing of the mind.

The image is intelligible, not sensible: it is God, the only God who truly is.

Worshippers of stones, who have learned by experience not to revere senseless matter, being overcome by the very need they were in, perish through superstition.

Yet though they despise the images, not wishing to appear utterly to disdain them, they are convicted by the very gods to whom these images have been ascribed.

For Dionysius the younger, the tyrant, in Sicily stripped off the golden cloak from Zeus and ordered a woollen one to be put on him instead, wittily remarking that this was better than the gold, being cooler in summer and warmer against the cold.

And Antiochus of Cyzicus, being short of money, ordered the golden statue of Zeus, fifteen cubits in size, to be melted down, and a statue resembling that one, gilded with leaf of some other, baser material, to be set up again in its place.

And the swallows and most of the birds fly in and defecate upon the very statues, caring nothing for the Olympian Zeus, nor the Epidaurian Asclepius, nor indeed Athena Polias, nor the Egyptian Sarapis.

Yet not even from these creatures do you learn the insensibility of the statues.

But there are indeed certain evildoers, or enemies launching an attack, who out of base greed have ravaged the sanctuaries, plundered the votive offerings, or even melted down the statues themselves.

And if a Cambyses or a Darius or some other madman attempted such things, and if anyone killed the Egyptian Apis, I laugh that he killed their god, but I am indignant if he transgressed for the sake of gain.

Willingly, then, I shall forget some part of this villainy, reckoning it the work of greed, and not a proof of the impotence of the idols.

But fire and earthquakes, surely, are not gain-seeking; nor do they fear or stand in awe of the daemons or the statues, any more than the waves do of the pebbles heaped up along the shores.

I know a fire that is convicting and curative of superstition.

If you are willing to cease from your folly, the fire will lead you to the light.

This fire also consumed the temple in Argos along with its priestess Chrysis; and the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the second after the one in the time of the Amazons; and it has repeatedly fed upon the Capitol in Rome.

Nor did it spare even the sanctuary of Sarapis in the city of the Alexandrians.

For at Athens it cast down the temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus, and the temple of Apollo at Delphi a tempest first seized, and then a chastening fire made it vanish away.

This is shown to you as a foretaste of what the fire promises.

And do not the makers of the statues shame those of you who are sensible into despising matter? The Athenian Pheidias inscribed on the finger of the Olympian Zeus: “Pantarces is fair.”

For it was not Zeus that was fair to him, but his beloved.

And Praxiteles, as Posidippus makes clear in his work On Cnidus, when fashioning the statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, made her closely resemble the form of his beloved Cratine, so that the wretched might have Praxiteles’ mistress to worship.

And when Phryne the Thespian courtesan was in her bloom, all the painters used to copy the beauty of Phryne for their images of Aphrodite, just as, again, the sculptors fashioned the Hermae at Athens after the likeness of Alcibiades.

It remains for your judgement to draw the conclusion, whether you are willing to worship even the courtesans.

Moved by this, I suppose, the kings of old, despising these myths, recklessly—because there was no danger of it from men—proclaimed themselves gods, thereby teaching that those former ones too had been immortalized on account of their fame.

Ceyx the son of Aeolus was addressed as Zeus by his wife Alcyone, and Alcyone in turn was called Hera by her husband.

And Ptolemy the Fourth was called Dionysus.

And Mithridates of Pontus was himself also called Dionysus.

And Alexander too wished to be thought the son of Ammon, and to be modelled with horns by the sculptors, eager to outrage the fair face of man with a horn.

And even private men dignified themselves with divine titles, as Menecrates the physician, who was nicknamed Zeus.

Why need I recount Alexarchus (a man who became a grammarian by profession, as Aristus of Salamis records, and who styled himself as Helios)? Why need I mention Nicagoras (he was a Zeleian by birth, who lived in the times of Alexander;

Nicagoras was styled Hermes and used the dress of Hermes, as he himself testifies)—when whole nations and entire cities, men and all, slinking into flattery, debase the myths about the gods, men fashioning themselves as the equals of gods, puffed up by vainglory, voting themselves extravagant honours? At one time they legislated that the Macedonian Philip from Pella, the son of Amyntas, be worshipped in the Cynosarges—the man with the broken collarbone and the maimed leg, who had had his eye knocked out;

and at another time, proclaiming Demetrius too a god.

And where he dismounted from his horse on entering Athens, there is a sanctuary of Demetrius the “Descender,” and altars everywhere.

And a marriage to Athena was being arranged for him by the Athenians.

But he scorned the goddess, being unable to marry the statue.

Instead, taking Lamia the courtesan with him, he went up to the Acropolis and defiled the bridal chamber of Athena, displaying to the ancient virgin the postures of the new courtesan.

There is no cause for indignation, then, even at Hippo for immortalizing his own death.

This Hippo ordered the following elegiac couplet to be inscribed upon his own tomb:

“This is the tomb of Hippo, whom Fate made equal to the immortal gods in his death.”

Well done, Hippo, you display to us the human error.

For if they did not believe you while you spoke, let them become the disciples of a dead man.

This is the oracle of Hippo.

Those who are worshipped among you were once men, and then, of course, they died.

But myth and time have honoured them.

For somehow present things tend, through familiarity, to be despised, while things past, being removed from immediate scrutiny by the obscurity of the ages, come to be honoured by fiction—so that some are disbelieved, and others even marvelled at.

At any rate, the ancient dead, exalted by the long span of the delusion, are reckoned gods by later generations.

The proof of these things is your own mysteries—the festivals, the bonds and wounds, and the weeping gods.

“Woe is me, that it is fated for Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, to be slain by Patroclus the son of Menoetius.”

The will of Zeus is overcome, and Zeus, vanquished, wails to you over Sarpedon.

It is reasonable, then, that you yourselves have called them “idols” (eidola) and “daemons,” since even Homer, honouring Athena herself and the other gods with a name of reproach, called them daemons:

“And she went off to Olympus, to the house of aegis-bearing Zeus, among the other daemons.”

How, then, can the idols and the daemons still be gods—being in truth abominable and unclean spirits, by all confessed to be earthbound and filthy, weighed down toward the depths, hovering about the tombs and graves, around which they faintly appear as shadowy phantoms? ... Such are your gods, the idols, the shades, and besides these those lame and wrinkled ones, the squint-eyed Litai (Prayers), daughters rather of Thersites than of Zeus; so that Bion, it seems to me, spoke wittily, asking how men could justly beg of Zeus the blessing of fair children, which he had not had the power to bestow even on himself. Alas for the godlessness!

As far as in you lies, you bury the undefiled essence, and you have heaped upon the tombs that pure and holy One, robbing the divine of its truly real essence.

Are not all these things which you see offspring of the earth? Why then, O vain and empty-minded ones (for I will resume once more), having blasphemed the supra-heavenly realm, have you dragged piety down to the ground, fashioning for yourselves earthbound gods, and, by pursuing these created things rather than the uncreated God, fallen into a deeper darkness? Fair is the Parian marble, yet it is not yet Poseidon.

Fair is the ivory, yet it is not yet the Olympian.

Matter is always in need of art, but God is in need of nothing.

Art came forward, matter was clothed with form; and the richness of the substance, while marketable for gain, becomes an object of reverence only by reason of its form.

Your statue is gold, it is wood, it is stone, it is earth, which, if you consider it from above, has received its form from the craftsman.

But I have learned to tread the earth, not to worship it.

For it is not lawful for me ever to entrust the hopes of my soul to soulless things.

We must, then, approach as nearly as possible to the statues, so that their error may be exposed even from their very appearance.

For the forms of the statues have been imprinted, very plainly indeed, with the disposition of the daemons.

If anyone, going about and gazing upon the paintings and statues, were to look, he will at once recognize your gods from their shameful attitudes—Dionysus from his robe, Hephaestus from his craft, Demeter (Deo) from her affliction, Ino from her veil, Poseidon from his trident, Zeus from the swan;

and the pyre points out Heracles; and if anyone sees a naked woman depicted, he understands her to be the golden Aphrodite.

Thus that famous Cyprian, Pygmalion, fell in love with an ivory statue.

The statue was of Aphrodite, and it was naked.

The Cyprian is overcome by its form and unites himself with the statue—and this Philostephanus records.

And another Aphrodite at Cnidus was of stone, and it was beautiful; another man fell in love with this one and had intercourse with the stone.

Posidippus records it—the former case in his work On Cyprus, the latter in his work On Cnidus.

So great was the power of art to deceive, becoming for amorous men a pander into the pit of ruin.

Effective indeed is the craftsman’s art, but it is not such as can deceive a rational being, nor indeed those who have lived according to reason.

For doves flew toward painted pigeons because of the likeness of the shaded drawing, and horses neighed at well-painted mares.

They say that a maiden fell in love with a portrait, and a handsome youth with the Cnidian statue—but the eyes of these spectators had been deceived by art.

For no one in his right mind would have embraced a goddess, nor been buried with a corpse, nor fallen in love with a daemon and a stone.

But art deceives you with another kind of sorcery, even if it does not lead you to love, yet it leads you to honour and worship both the statues and the paintings.

Let art be praised, but let it not deceive man as though it were truth.

The horse stands still in quietness, the dove unmoving, the wing idle; but the cow of Daedalus, the one made of wood, lured a wild bull and constrained the beast—art, having deluded it, compelled it to mount the woman who lusted.

So great a frenzy did the arts, by their evil artistry, breed in the foolish.