Exhortation to the Greeks (Protrepticus) (chapters 1–3)
Exhortation to the Greeks (Protrepticus)
Clement of Alexandria
c. AD 190–200
An appeal by Clement, a Christian teacher in Alexandria, to educated Greeks. He mocks the myths and mystery cults, shows that the poets and philosophers caught only glimpses of the truth, and invites readers to turn to the Word of God, whom he presents as the new song. Clement is steeped in Greek literature, so the text is full of quotations and allusions to poets and myths.
A note for readers. Clement wrote for educated pagans and uses their own poets and philosophers freely, sometimes treating them as pointing toward Christ. Readers have long debated how far he goes in that. Many of his quotations come second-hand from earlier collections, so some are not exact.
Chapter 1
Exhortation to Abandon the Impious Mysteries of Idolatry for the Adoration of the Divine Word and God the Father.
1a Amphion of Thebes and Arion of Methymna were both singers. Both are the stuff of legend, and the Greeks still sing of them in their choruses. By the art of music, one lured a fish and the other built walls around Thebes. Another master, a Thracian (his story is another Greek legend), tamed wild beasts with song alone, and even moved trees, oaks, and replanted them by his music. I could also tell you of another legend and singer, a brother to these: Eunomus the Locrian and the Pythian cicada. A Greek festival was being held at Pytho over a dead serpent, and Eunomus was singing the reptile’s funeral song. Whether the song was a hymn or a lament for the snake, I cannot say. But there was a contest, and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of the day, when the cicadas, warmed by the sun, were singing among the leaves on the mountains.[1]
1b But they were not singing to the dead Pythian serpent. They were singing to the all-wise God a song bound by no rule but its own, better than the tunes of Eunomus. The Locrian’s string snapped. The cicada flew onto the neck of the lyre and chirped there as if on a branch, and the singer tuned his playing to the cicada’s song and so filled in the missing string. So the cicada was not drawn by the song of Eunomus, as the legend would have it. That legend even had a bronze statue set up at Pytho of Eunomus with his lyre, and with him the Locrian’s partner in the contest. No, the cicada flew there of its own will and sang of its own will, but the Greeks think it was a performer playing along to his music. How, then, have you come to believe empty myths, and suppose that animals are charmed by music? Only the bright face of truth, it seems, looks false to you, and it is met with unbelieving eyes.[2]
1c So Cithaeron and Helicon and the mountains of the Odrysians and Thracians, the sites of rites of error, have been treated as sacred and celebrated in hymns because of the mysteries. For my part, even if these are only myths, I am grieved at so many disasters being played out as tragedy. But for you, even the records of evils have become dramas, and the actors in them a delight to watch. Well, let us crown the dramas and the poets of the wine-press, already thoroughly drunk, with ivy. Let us shut them up, raving wildly in Bacchic ritual with the satyrs and their frenzied band and the rest of the chorus of demons, on Helicon and Cithaeron, now grown old. And let us bring down truth from heaven above, together with the most radiant wisdom, to the holy mountain of God and the holy prophetic chorus. Let her shine her light as far as it can reach, all around on those who wallow in darkness. Let her free people from error, holding out her supreme right hand, which is understanding, for their salvation.[3]
1d Let them lift their heads and look up, leave Helicon and Cithaeron, and live in Zion. “For out of Zion will go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” This is the heavenly Word, the true champion crowned on the stage of the whole world. My Eunomus does not sing the tune of Terpander or of Capion, nor the Phrygian, Lydian or Dorian mode. He sings the eternal tune of the new harmony, which bears the name of God: the new song, the Levitical song, “that banishes pain and anger, and makes us forget all evils.” A sweet and true remedy for sorrow is blended into the song. To my mind, then, that Thracian Orpheus, and the Theban and the Methymnaean, men who were not truly men, were deceivers. Under the pretext of music they ruined human life. Raving with a kind of skilled sorcery, as if possessed by demons, they brought people to ruin. They celebrated outrages in their rites and made sorrows into things divine. They were the first to lead people by the hand to idols, and to build up foolish custom out of stones and wood, that is, statues and painted images. With their songs and incantations they bound in the worst slavery the truly splendid freedom of those who lived as citizens under heaven.[4] [Isaiah 2:3; Micah 4:2]
1e But my singer is not like that. He has come to put a swift end to the bitter slavery under tyrant demons. He leads us away to the gentle, humane yoke of reverence for God, and calls back up to heaven those who were thrown down to earth. He alone of all who have ever lived has tamed the most difficult of all wild beasts, human beings. The birds are the flighty among them, the reptiles the deceivers, the lions the hot-tempered, the swine the pleasure-lovers, and the wolves the greedy. The senseless are stones and wood. Indeed, a person soaked in ignorance is even duller than stones. Let the voice of prophecy stand as our witness, in harmony with the truth, pitying those worn down by ignorance and folly: “For God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones.”[5] [Matthew 3:9; Matthew 11:29] 1f God took pity on the deep ignorance and hardness of heart of those who had been turned to stone against the truth. Out of those very stones, the nations who had trusted in stones, he raised up a seed of godliness that is able to sense virtue. Again, he somewhere calls certain venom-spitting, treacherous hypocrites, who lie in wait to attack righteousness, “offspring of vipers.” Yet even of these serpents, if one willingly repents and follows the Word, he becomes a “man of God.” Others he speaks of in a figure as wolves dressed in sheepskins, hinting at those who are predatory in human form. So the heavenly song itself has changed all these most savage beasts, and all such stones, into gentle men. As the apostolic Scripture says: “For we too were once, yes once, senseless, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various pleasures and desires, spending our lives in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness and love for mankind of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his own mercy.” See how great the power of the new song is! It has made men out of stones and men out of beasts.[6] [Matthew 3:7; Matthew 7:15; Titus 3:3-5]
1g Even those who were otherwise dead, with no share in the life that truly is, came back to life simply by becoming hearers of the song. This song also set the whole universe in tuneful order. It brought the discord of the elements into the order of harmony, so that the whole world might become a harmony for it. It let the sea go free, yet forbade it to overrun the land. The earth, which had been unsettled and adrift, it made firm, and it fixed the earth as the sea’s boundary. It softened the rush of fire with air, as if blending the Dorian mode with the Lydian. It tamed the harsh coldness of air by mixing it with fire, blending these outermost notes of the universe in tune. And so the pure song, the support of the whole and the harmony of all things, stretched from the middle to the ends and from the extremes to the middle, and tuned this universe. It did so not after the manner of Thracian music, which is like Jubal’s, but according to the fatherly will of God, which David eagerly followed.[7] [Genesis 4:21; John 5:25]
1h But the Word of God, who comes from David and was before him, disregarded the lyre and harp, those lifeless instruments. He tuned this universe by the Holy Spirit, and in particular the little universe, man, both soul and body. He makes music to God on this many-voiced instrument, and he sings to the accompaniment of that instrument, man. “For you are a harp and a pipe and a temple for me.” A harp because of its harmony, a pipe because of the Spirit, a temple because of the Word. So the first may sound, the second breathe, and the third receive the Lord. David the king, the harpist we mentioned a little earlier, urged people toward the truth and away from idols. He was far from singing the praises of demons. They were driven away by his true music, and when Saul was under their influence, David healed him just by singing.[8]
1i The Lord made man a beautiful breathing instrument, after his own image. And he himself is also God’s all-harmonious instrument, tuneful and holy: the wisdom that is above the world, the heavenly Word. What, then, does this instrument, the Word of God, the Lord, the new song, want? He wants to open the eyes of the blind, to unstop the ears of the deaf, and to take by the hand those who limp on both feet, or who wander, and lead them to righteousness. He wants to show God to foolish people, to put an end to corruption, to conquer death, and to reconcile disobedient sons to their Father. God’s instrument loves mankind. The Lord pities, trains, urges, warns, saves and guards. Out of his abundance he promises us the kingdom of heaven as the reward for our learning, and the only enjoyment he gets from us is that we are saved. For evil feeds on the ruin of human beings. But truth is like the bee: it harms nothing that exists, and delights only in the salvation of human beings.[9] [Genesis 1:27; Isaiah 35:5]
1j So you have the promise, and you have his love for mankind. Share in his grace. And do not suppose that my song of salvation is new the way a vessel or a house is new. “Before the morning star” it was, and “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Error is old, but truth appears as the new thing. Maybe the Phrygians are the oldest people, as the fabled goats teach. Maybe the Arcadians are, as the poets say who write that they lived before the moon. Maybe the Egyptians are, as those dream who say this land first produced both gods and men. But not one of these existed before this world. We existed before the foundation of the world. Because we were destined to exist in him, we were born to God beforehand. We are the rational creatures of God’s Word, and because of him we can claim great age, because “in the beginning was the Word.” Because the Word was from the first, he was and is the divine beginning of all things. But he has now received the name “Christ,” a name consecrated long ago and worthy of power. That is why I have called him a new song.[10] [John 1:1; Ephesians 1:4]
1k So the Word, the Christ, is the cause both of our being long ago (for he was in God) and of our well-being. Now this same Word has appeared to men. He alone is both, God and man, and he is the cause of all good things for us. Taught by him how to live well, we are sent on our way to eternal life. For, as that inspired apostle of the Lord says, “The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, training us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live soberly, righteously and godly in the present age, while we wait for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.” This is the new song: the appearing, now shining out among us, of the Word who was in the beginning and who existed before. The Savior who existed before has appeared only recently. He who is in the One who truly is has appeared, because the Word who “was with God” has appeared as Teacher. He is the Word through whom all things were made. In the beginning, as Creator, he gave us life when he formed us. Appearing as Teacher, he taught us to live well, so that afterward, as God, he might supply us with life that never ends.[11] [Titus 2:11-13; John 1:1-3]
1l This is not the first time he has pitied us for our error. He has done so from the first, from the very beginning. But now, by appearing, he has fully rescued us when we were already perishing. For the evil, creeping beast still enslaves and torments people with his sorcery. It seems to me he takes a barbarian’s revenge, like those who are said to tie captives to dead bodies until the captives rot together with them. In the same way this wicked tyrant and dragon takes whomever he can claim from birth and fastens them with the miserable chain of superstition to stones, wood, statues and idols of that kind. As the saying goes, he buries them alive, until the people and the idols decay together. There is one deceiver. From the beginning he brought Eve down to death, and now he brings the rest of mankind down as well. For this reason there is also one helper and defender for us, the Lord. From the beginning he foretold it through prophecy, and now he calls us plainly to salvation.
1m So let us obey the apostolic command and flee “the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience.” Let us run to the Savior, the Lord. Both now and always he has urged people toward salvation. He did so through wonders and signs in Egypt, and in the desert through the bush and through the cloud that followed the Hebrews like a servant, out of his gracious love for mankind. By the fear these things caused he urged the hard-hearted. But through Moses, who was wise in everything, through Isaiah, the lover of truth, and through the whole chorus of the prophets, he turns to the Word, in a more reasoned way, those who have ears. At one point he reproaches, at another he threatens. Over some people he mourns, and to others he sings. He is like a good physician with sick bodies. He applies poultices to some, soothes others, and bathes others. He cuts some with the knife, cauterizes others, and sometimes even saws off a limb, if there is any way to make the man healthy, even at the cost of a part or limb.[12] [Ephesians 2:2]
1n The Savior has many voices and many ways of saving people. By threatening, he warns. By rebuking, he turns people around. By mourning, he shows pity. By singing, he encourages. He speaks through a bush (those people needed signs and wonders), and he frightens people with fire, kindling a flame from a pillar, a sign of grace and of fear together. If you obey, there is light; if you disobey, there is fire. But flesh is more precious than a pillar or a bush, so after those the prophets spoke, with the Lord himself speaking in Isaiah, himself in Elijah, himself through the mouth of the prophets. Perhaps you do not believe the prophets, and you suppose both the men and the fire to be a myth. Then the Lord himself will speak to you. He “being in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be seized, but emptied himself.” He is the God who loves to show compassion, and he longs to save man. Now the Word himself speaks to you plainly and shames your unbelief. Yes, I say it: the Word of God became man, so that you too might learn from a man how a man may become God.[13] [Philippians 2:6-7]
1o Is it not absurd, my friends, that God should always be urging us toward virtue, while we shrink back from the benefit and put off our salvation? Does not John also call us to salvation, and has he not become wholly a voice of exhortation? Then let us question him: “Who are you among men, and where from?” He will not say he is Elijah. He will deny that he is Christ. But he will confess that he is a voice crying in the wilderness. Who then is John? To sketch it in outline, let me say: he is the exhorting voice of the Word, crying in the wilderness. What are you crying, O voice? “Tell us too.” “Make straight the ways of the Lord.” John is the forerunner, and his voice is the forerunner of the Word. It is a voice of encouragement, preparing people for salvation, a voice urging them toward an inheritance in the heavens. Through it the barren woman and the desert are fruitless no more.[14] [John 1:19-23; Isaiah 40:3]
1p This pregnancy, as I see it, was foretold by the voice of an angel. That voice, too, was a forerunner of the Lord, bringing good news to a barren woman, as John did to the wilderness. Because of this voice of the Word, then, the barren woman is blessed with children and the desert bears fruit. The Lord’s two forerunning voices, that of the angel and that of John, hint to me at the salvation laid up for us. When this Word appeared, we were to carry off the fruit of that good childbearing, eternal life. Scripture brings the two voices together and makes it all plain: “Let her who does not bear listen. Let her who is not in labor break out in a cry, because the children of the desert are more numerous than those of the woman who has a husband.” The angel brought good news to us, and John urged us to understand who the farmer is and to seek the husband. For he is one and the same: the husband of the barren woman, the farmer of the desert, who filled both the barren woman and the desert with divine power.[15] [Isaiah 54:1; Galatians 4:27]
1q The children of the noble woman are many. But the Hebrew woman, who from of old had many children, became childless through disobedience. So the barren woman receives the husband and the desert receives the farmer. One then becomes the mother of fruits, the other of believers, and both are mothers through the Word. But for unbelievers she is still left barren and desolate even now. John, the herald of the Word, was in this way urging people to be ready for the coming of God, the Christ. This is what the silence of Zechariah hinted at, as it waited for the fruit that would go before Christ. The Word, the light of truth, was to become the gospel and release the mystic silence of the prophetic riddles. If you long to see God in truth, take part in purifications fit for God. Do not use laurel leaves or headbands decorated with wool and purple. Bind righteousness around your head and put on the leaves of self-control. Search diligently for Christ. “I am the door,” he says somewhere. If we want to understand God, we must learn about this door, so that he may throw the gates of heaven wide open to us all at once. The gates of the Word are rational, and they are opened by the key of faith. “No one has known God except the Son, and the one to whom the Son reveals him.” I know well that the one who opens the door, shut until now, will afterward reveal what is inside. He will show what could not have been known before, except by those who have gone in through Christ, through whom alone God is seen.[16] [Isaiah 54:1; John 10:9; Matthew 11:27; Luke 10:22]
Chapter 2
The Absurdity and Impiety of the Heathen Mysteries and Fables About the Birth and Death of Their Gods.
2a So do not pry into godless inner sanctuaries. Leave alone the mouths of chasms full of monstrous trickery, the Thesprotian cauldron, the Cirrhaean tripod, and the bronze of Dodona. Leave the ancient oak honored in the desert sands, and the oracle there that withered along with the oak itself, to myths that have grown old. The spring of Castalia is silent, and so is the other spring at Colophon. The rest of the prophetic waters are dead in the same way. Emptied of their vanity, they have at last been exposed, late though it is, as having run dry together with their own myths. Tell us also about the other kind of divination, or rather madness, and its useless oracles: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, those of Amphiaraus, of Apollo, and of Amphilochus. If you like, consecrate along with them the readers of portents, the watchers of birds, and the interpreters of dreams. Bring the flour-diviners and barley-diviners and stand them beside the Pythian, along with the ventriloquists, who are still honored by many people. And let the secret shrines of the Egyptians and the necromancies of the Etruscans be handed over to darkness.[17]
2b These are truly mad things: workshops of trickery for unbelieving men, and gambling dens of unmixed delusion. Partners in this sorcery are goats trained for divination, and crows taught by men to give oracles to men. What if I were to go through the mysteries for you? I will not mimic them in dance and so give them away, as they say Alcibiades did. Instead I will strip bare, by the word of truth, the sorcery hidden in them. And I will wheel out your so-called gods themselves, whose mystic rites these are, as on the stage of life, before an audience of the truth. The Bacchants hold their orgies for the raving Dionysus. They celebrate their sacred madness by eating raw flesh, and they perform the apportioning of the butchered meat with snakes wound around their heads. They cry out “Euan!” and so call on Eva, that Eve through whom error followed. The sign of the Bacchic orgies is a consecrated snake. Indeed, in the exact speech of the Hebrews, the name Hevia, pronounced with the aspirate, is interpreted “female serpent.” Deo and Kore have become a mystic drama, and Eleusis lights the torches for their wandering, the abduction, and their grief.[18]
2c It seems to me that we should trace the words “orgies” and “mysteries” to their sources. Orgies come from the anger (orgē) of Deo against Zeus, and mysteries from the pollution (mysos) that befell Dionysus. If they come instead from a certain Myus of Attica, who Apollodorus says was killed while hunting, I do not object. Then your mysteries have been glorified with the kind of honor paid at a tomb. You can also understand “mysteries” as “myth-hunts,” since the letters correspond. For if anything hunts down the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most foolish of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks, myths like these certainly do. So let him perish, whoever first began this deception among men. It may have been Dardanus, who showed people the mysteries of the Mother of the gods. It may have been Eetion, who established the orgies and rites of the Samothracians. It may have been that Phrygian Midas, who learned from Odrysus and then passed on the skillful deceit to his subjects.[19]
2d For Cinyras, the islander from Cyprus, could never persuade me. He dared to bring the lewd orgies of Aphrodite out of the night and into the day, in his eagerness to make a goddess of a prostitute from his own city. Others say that Melampus, son of Amythaon, carried the festivals of Deo from Egypt to Greece, with her grief sung in hymns. I would call these men the originators of evil and the fathers of godless myths and deadly superstition. They planted the mysteries in human life as a seed of wickedness and corruption. Now, since the time has come, I will prove that your rites are full of deceit and charlatanry. If you have been initiated, you will laugh all the more at these myths of yours that are held in honor. I will speak openly of what is hidden. I am not ashamed to tell what you are not ashamed to worship. There is, then, the “foam-born” and “Cyprus-born” goddess, the friend of Cinyras. I mean Aphrodite, “the lover of genitals, because she appeared from the genitals.” These were the lustful parts cut off from Uranus, which after the cutting forced themselves upon the waves. A fruit worthy of such shameless parts is born to you in Aphrodite. In the rites of this sea-born pleasure, as a token of her birth, a grain of salt and a phallus are given to those being initiated into the craft of adultery. The initiates bring a coin to her, as lovers do to a courtesan.[20]
2e The mysteries of Deo involve Zeus’s sexual union with his mother Demeter, and the rage of Deo. (I do not know what to call her now, mother or wife.) Because of this rage she is said to have been named Brimo. They also include the pleading of Zeus, a drink of bile, the tearing out of hearts, and unspeakable rites. The Phrygians perform the same rites for Attis, Cybele and the Corybantes. They have gone on and on with a story that Zeus tore the testicles from a ram and threw them into Deo’s lap. This was supposedly a penalty for his violent union with her, as though he had castrated himself. The tokens of this initiation, which I set out here as something extra, will make you laugh, I know, even though the exposure leaves you in no mood for it. “I ate from the drum. I drank from the cymbal. I carried the sacred vessel. I slipped into the bridal chamber.” Are these tokens anything but an outrage?[21]
2f Are these mysteries not a mockery? What if I add the rest? Demeter becomes pregnant, and Kore is brought up. Then Zeus, who fathered her, unites with Pherephatta, his own daughter, after having done so with her mother Deo. He has forgotten his earlier pollution. Zeus is both the father and the corrupter of the girl. He unites with her as a serpent, and so is exposed for what he was. In the Sabazian mysteries, at any rate, the token for the initiated is “the god through the bosom.” This god is a serpent drawn through the bosom of those being initiated, which proves the lack of self-control in Zeus. Pherephatta also bears a child in the shape of a bull. As one poet of the idols says: “The bull is the serpent’s father, and the serpent the bull’s father; on the mountain, the herdsman’s hidden goad.” By “herdsman’s goad,” I suppose, he means the fennel stalk that the bacchants wreathe.[22]
2g Do you want me to tell you about Pherephatta’s flower-gathering, the basket, her abduction by Aidoneus, the opening of the earth, and the pigs of Eubouleus that were swallowed up along with the two goddesses? This is the reason why, at the Thesmophoria, they throw pigs into the sacred pits. The women celebrate this myth in different ways from city to city, in the Thesmophoria, the Skirophoria and the Arrhetophoria. In many forms they act out the tragedy of Pherephatta’s abduction. The mysteries of Dionysus are utterly inhuman. He was still a child, and the Kouretes were dancing around him with armed movements. The Titans crept in by treachery and deceived him with childish toys. Then these Titans tore him apart while he was still an infant, as Orpheus the Thracian, the poet of the Initiation, says: “Cone and bull-roarer, and jointed dolls, and beautiful golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides.” It will also help to condemn this rite if I set out its worthless tokens for you: knucklebone, ball, spinning top, apples, bull-roarer, mirror, tuft of wool.[23]
2h Athena took the heart of Dionysus, and was named Pallas from the throbbing (pallein) of the heart. The Titans, who had torn him apart, put a cauldron on a tripod and threw in the limbs of Dionysus. First they boiled them, then they skewered them on spits and “held them over Hephaestus.” Later Zeus appeared. If he was a god, perhaps he got a share of the savor of the roasting meat, which your gods admit is the “portion they have received.” He struck the Titans with a thunderbolt and handed the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo to bury. Apollo did not disobey Zeus. He carried the torn corpse to Parnassus and laid it there. If you want to look on the rites of the Corybantes too, here they are. Two of them killed their third brother and covered the head of the corpse with a purple cloth. They crowned it, carried it on a bronze shield, and buried it at the foot of Olympus.[24]
2i In short, these mysteries are murders and burials. Their priests are called “Lords of the Rite” (Anaktotelestai) by those who care to call them that. They add to the marvel of the tragedy by forbidding anyone to put celery on the table with its root. For they believe the celery grew from the blood that flowed from the Corybant. In the same way the women celebrating the Thesmophoria take care not to eat pomegranate seeds that have fallen on the ground. They suppose that pomegranates sprang from the drops of Dionysus’s blood. They also call the Corybantes “Cabeiri,” and proclaim a Cabeiric rite. For these same two brother-killers took the chest in which the genitals of Dionysus lay, and carried it to Tyrrhenia, merchants of a glorious cargo! They lived there as exiles. They offered the Tyrrhenians this much-prized teaching of piety, genitals and a chest, for them to worship.[25]
2j For this reason some say, not unreasonably, that Dionysus is called Attis, because he was deprived of his private parts. And why be surprised that the barbarian Etruscans are initiated into such shameful sufferings, when among the Athenians and the rest of Greece the story of Deo is full of shame? I am ashamed even to tell it. Deo wandered about Eleusis looking for her daughter Kore (Eleusis is a place in Attica). She grew weary and sat down by a well, grieving. Even now this is forbidden to the initiates, so that those who have been initiated may not seem to imitate the mourning goddess. At that time the earth-born people lived at Eleusis. Their names were Baubo, Dysaules and Triptolemus, and also Eumolpus and Eubouleus. Triptolemus was a cowherd, Eumolpus a shepherd, and Eubouleus a swineherd. From them sprang the Eumolpidae and the Kerykes (“Heralds”), the priestly clans that flourished at Athens.[26]
2k Next (for I will not hold back from telling it), Baubo took Deo in as a guest and offered her a drink of barley-mixture. Deo refused to take it and would not drink, for she was in mourning. Baubo was deeply hurt, as if she had been scorned. So she pulled up her clothes and showed her private parts to the goddess. Deo was pleased at the sight, and at last, delighted with the spectacle, accepted the drink. These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians. Orpheus also records them. I will set out Orpheus’ own verses for you, so that you may have the guide of the mysteries himself as a witness to their shamelessness: “When she had spoken, she drew up her robes and showed all of her body, a shape not fit to be seen. The child Iacchus was there, and laughing he kept tossing it with his hand under Baubo’s breast. Then the goddess smiled, and smiled in her heart, and took the shimmering cup in which the barley-drink was placed.”[27]
2l This is the password of the Eleusinian mysteries: “I fasted, I drank the barley-drink, I took from the chest, and having done the work, I put it in the basket, and from the basket into the chest.” Fine sights indeed, and fitting for a goddess! These rites are worthy of night and fire, and of the “great-hearted” (or rather empty-minded) people of the sons of Erechtheus, and of the other Greeks too, for whom, “when they have died, there awaits what they do not even hope for.” For whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? “Night-wanderers, magi, bacchants, maenads, initiates.” He threatens these with what follows death; for these he foretells fire. “For the mysteries customary among men are entered into in an unholy way.” So the mysteries are only custom and empty opinion. They are a deceit of the serpent that people treat as worship, for with counterfeit piety they turn to initiations that are really no initiations, and to rites that are no true rites. And what are the mystic chests like? For I must strip bare their holy things and speak out what may not be spoken.[28]
2m Are they not sesame cakes, pyramid-shaped cakes, balls of wool, many-knobbed cakes, lumps of salt, and a serpent, the sacred emblem of Dionysus Bassareus? Besides these, are there not pomegranates, fig branches, fennel-wands and ivy, and also round cakes and poppies? These are their holy things. In addition there are the secret symbols of Earth-Themis: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, and a woman’s comb, which is (to put it politely and in mystic language) a woman’s private part. What open shamelessness! Once, for self-controlled people, night was kept silent and was a cover for pleasure. Now, for the initiates, night is talked about and becomes a test of their lack of self-control, and the fire of the torches exposes their passions. Put out the fire, hierophant! Show respect for the torches, torch-bearer! The light exposes your Iacchus. Allow night to hide the mysteries. Let the rites be honored with darkness. Fire does not pretend.[29]
2n Fire is commanded to expose and to punish. These are the mysteries of the godless. I call them godless with good reason, because they have not known the God who truly exists. Instead they shamelessly worship a child being torn apart by the Titans, a grieving woman, and private parts that truly cannot be named for shame. They are caught in a double godlessness. The first is that they do not know God and do not recognize the God who truly is. The second is this further error: they think that those who do not exist do exist, and they call gods those who do not truly exist, or rather do not exist at all and have only the name. For this reason the apostle also exposes us when he says, “You were strangers to the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Many good things be to the king of the Scythians, whoever he was.[30] [Ephesians 2:12]
2o This king shot his own countryman with an arrow. The man was imitating among the Scythians the rite of the Mother of the gods as it is practiced at Cyzicus. He beat a drum, clashed a cymbal, and had an image of a begging priest of the goddess hanging from his neck. The king shot him because he had become unmanly among the Greeks and was teaching the other Scythians the female disease. For this reason (for I must not hide it) I wonder how Euhemerus of Acragas, Nicanor of Cyprus, the two Melians Diagoras and Hippo, the Cyrenian Theodorus, and many others came to be called atheists. These men lived sober lives and saw the error about these gods more sharply than other people. They may not have grasped the truth itself, but they at least suspected the error. That suspicion springs up as no small seed, a spark of understanding that leads toward the truth. One of them urges the Egyptians: “If you think they are gods, do not mourn for them or beat your breasts. But if you grieve for them, stop considering them gods.” Another took a wooden Heracles (he happened to be cooking something at home, as one might expect) and said, “Come now, Heracles. Now is your time to serve us as you served Eurystheus, and perform this thirteenth labor by preparing Diagoras’ dinner.” Then he put it on the fire like a piece of wood. So atheism and superstition are the extremes of ignorance, and we must work hard to stay clear of both.[31]
2p Do you not see Moses, the hierophant of the truth, commanding that a man with crushed or cut-off genitals must not enter the assembly, nor the son of a prostitute either? Through the first two he hints at the godless way of life, which lacks divine and fruitful power. Through the third he points to the person who claims many falsely named gods in place of the one God who truly exists. In the same way the son of a prostitute claims many fathers, because he does not know his real father. There was once an inborn, ancient fellowship between human beings and heaven. Ignorance darkened it, yet now and then it suddenly leaps out of the darkness and shines. This is what someone has said: “Do you see this boundless sky on high, which holds the earth all around in its moist arms?” And again: “O you who uphold the earth and have your seat upon the earth, whoever you are, so hard to guess at and to see,” and all the other things the sons of the poets sing.[32] [Deuteronomy 23:1-2]
2q But mistaken ideas, led away from the straight path and truly deadly, turned man, the heavenly plant, away from a heavenly way of life and stretched him out on the earth. They persuaded him to devote himself to images molded from earth. Some people were deceived at once by the sight of the heavens. They trusted their eyes alone and watched the movements of the stars. They admired them and made gods of them, calling the stars *theoi* (“gods”) from *thein*, “to run.” They worshiped the sun, as the Indians do, and the moon, as the Phrygians do. Others gathered the cultivated fruits that grow from the earth. They called grain Deo, as the Athenians do, and the vine Dionysus, as the Thebans do. Others looked at the payments that wickedness brings and made gods of those repayments, worshiping retributions and disasters. From this come the Erinyes and the Eumenides, the Palamnaioi and Prostropaioi, and also the Alastors, which the poets of the stage have invented.[33]
2r Some philosophers also, following the poets, make idols out of the shapes of the passions within you: Fear, Love, Joy and Hope. So, for example, the ancient Epimenides set up altars at Athens to Insolence and Shamelessness. Other gods arise from events and things themselves, and people make gods of them and give them bodily form: a certain Justice, Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, Fate, and the Attic goddesses Auxo and Thallo. There is a sixth way of deception, which produces gods: the one by which they count up the twelve gods. Hesiod sings the genealogy of these gods in his own way, and Homer says much about them in his talk of the gods. The last way remains, for there are seven ways in all. It starts from the divine kindness shown to human beings.[34] 2s They did not understand that it is God who does us good. So they invented saviors: the Dioscuri, Heracles the averter of evil, and Asclepius the healer. These are slippery and harmful departures from the truth. They drag man down from heaven and tip him into a pit. I want to show you these gods up close, to show what sort they are and whether they are anything at all. Then you may finally give up your error and run back again to heaven. “For we too were once children of wrath, like the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, made us alive together with Christ, when we were already dead in our trespasses.” For the Word is living, and the one who was buried with Christ is exalted together with God. Those who are still unbelieving are called “children of wrath,” nourished on wrath. But we are no longer wrath’s nurslings, since we have been torn away from error and are rushing toward the truth.[35] [Ephesians 2:3-5; Colossians 2:12]
2t In this way we, who were once sons of lawlessness, have now become sons of God, through the Word’s love for humankind. Your own poet, Empedocles of Acragas, steps in and speaks to you: “Therefore, distraught amid grievous evils, you will never ease your heart of its wretched sorrows.” Most of what is told about your gods is myth and invention. The rest, what is supposed to have really happened, is written about shameful men who lived licentious lives. “You walk in pride and madness. You have left the straight, right path and gone off by the one through thorns and stakes. Why do you wander, mortals? Stop, you fools. Leave the darkness of night and take hold of the light.” The Sibyl, prophetic and poetic, urges this on us. Truth urges it too. She strips the crowd of gods of these terrifying, stunning masks, and she exposes the opinions people have built up about them by pointing out how they share the same names.[36]
2u For instance, some writers list three Zeuses. One is the son of Aether, in Arcadia. The other two are sons of Cronus, one in Crete and the other again in Arcadia. Some also suppose five Athenas. The first is the daughter of Hephaestus, the Athenian. The second is the daughter of Nilus, the Egyptian. The third is the daughter of Cronus, the inventor of war. The fourth is the daughter of Zeus, whom the Messenians call Koryphasia after her mother. Last is the daughter of Pallas and of Titanis, daughter of Oceanus. She impiously sacrificed her father and adorned herself with his skin, like a fleece. Then there is Apollo. Aristotle names as the first the son of Hephaestus and Athena (so here Athena is no longer a virgin). The second is the Cretan, the son of Cyrbas. The third is the son of Zeus. The fourth is the Arcadian, the son of Silenus, called Nomios among the Arcadians. After these he lists the Libyan, the son of Ammon. Didymus the grammarian adds a sixth, the son of Magnes.
2v How many Apollos are there even now? They are countless: mortal, perishable men who have been given the same name, just like those already mentioned. What if I told you about the many Asclepiuses, or the Hermeses on the lists, or the Hephaestuses of the myths? Would I not seem excessive, flooding your ears with so many names? But their homelands, their crafts, their lives, and even their tombs prove that they were men. Take Ares, whom even the poets honor as highly as they can: “Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, blood-stained wall-batterer.” This fickle, hostile god was a Spartan, according to Epicharmus. Sophocles knows him as a Thracian, and others say he was an Arcadian. Homer says he was kept in chains for thirteen months: “Ares endured it, when Otus and mighty Ephialtes, the sons of Aloeus, bound him in a strong bond. He was bound in a bronze jar for thirteen months.”[37]
2w May the Carians fare well, who sacrifice dogs to him! And let the Scythians never stop sacrificing donkeys, as Apollodorus and Callimachus say: “Phoebus comes to the Hyperboreans’ sacrifices of donkeys.” The same poet says elsewhere: “Rich donkey-slaughterings delight Phoebus.” Then there is Hephaestus, whom Zeus threw from Olympus, “from the divine threshold.” He fell on Lemnos and worked as a smith, crippled in both feet: “and his thin legs moved quickly beneath him.” So among the gods you have not only a smith but also a physician. And the physician loved money. His name was Asclepius. I will bring in your own poet as witness, Pindar of Boeotia: “Him too gold, shown in his hands, turned aside for a lordly fee. Then the son of Cronus hurled his bolt from his hands right through the two of them and quickly took the breath from their chests. The blazing thunderbolt brought down their doom.” Euripides says as well: “For Zeus is to blame for killing my son Asclepius, striking flame into his chest.”[38]
2x So Asclepius lies there, struck by lightning, in the territory of Cynosuris. Philochorus says that Poseidon is honored as a physician in Tenos, and that Sicily lies on top of Cronus, who is buried there. Patrocles of Thurii and Sophocles the younger tell the story of the Dioscuri in some of their tragedies. These two Dioscuri were mortal men, subject to death, if Homer is reliable enough to confirm what was said: “But them the life-giving earth already held, there in Lacedaemon, in their own dear native land.” Let the writer of the Cyprian poems come forward too: “Castor is mortal, and the fate of death is appointed for him; but Polydeuces is immortal, a scion of Ares.” That was a poet’s lie. Homer is more trustworthy than he is. Homer spoke this way of both Dioscuri, and he also exposed Heracles as a mere shade of the dead, for he calls him “the man Heracles, who had a hand in great deeds.”[39]
2y So Homer himself knows Heracles as a mortal man. The philosopher Hieronymus even describes the build of his body: small, bristly-haired, strong. Dicaearchus describes him as lean, sinewy, dark, hook-nosed, with rather bright eyes and straight hair. This Heracles lived fifty-two years. He ended his life and was given his funeral on the pyre on Mount Oeta. Then there are the Muses. Alcman gives them as the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and the other poets and prose writers deify and worship them. Whole cities even set apart sacred precincts, “museums,” for them. Yet they were Mysian servant girls, bought by Megaclo, the daughter of Macar. Macar was king of the Lesbians and was always quarreling with his wife. Megaclo was angry on her mother’s behalf, and why would she not be? So she bought these Mysian servant girls, the same number as the Muses, and in the Aeolic dialect called them Moisai, “Muses.”[40]
2z She taught them to sing and to play the lyre, setting the deeds of old to music. By playing constantly and singing sweetly, they charmed Macar and put a stop to his anger. For this reason Megaclo set up bronze figures of them as a thank-offering on her mother’s behalf, and ordered that they be honored in all the temples. That is the story of the Muses, and it comes from Myrsilus of Lesbos. Now listen to the loves of the gods you worship. Hear the strange tales of their lack of self-control, their wounds and chains, their laughter and fights, their slavery as well, their drinking parties, their embraces, tears and sufferings, and their lewd pleasures. Call Poseidon for me, and the chorus of women ruined by him: Amphitrite, Amymone, Alope, Melanippe, Alcyone, Hippothoe, Chione, and countless others. Even with so many, your Poseidon’s passions still felt cramped.[41] 2aa Call Apollo for me too. This is Phoebus, a pure prophet and a good counselor. But Sterope does not say so, nor Aethusa, nor Arsinoe, nor Zeuxippe, nor Prothoe, nor Marpessa, nor Hypsipyle. Only Daphne escaped both the prophet and the ruin he brought. And let Zeus himself come last of all, the “father of men and gods,” as you call him. He poured himself out so far into sexual pleasure that he desired every woman and carried out his desire on every one. At any rate, he was filled with women no less than the Thmuite goat was with she-goats. And I have marveled at your poems, Homer: “He spoke, and the son of Cronus nodded with his dark brows. The ambrosial locks of the lord waved from his immortal head, and he shook great Olympus.”[42]
2ab You make Zeus a majestic figure, Homer, and you give him a nod worthy of honor. But if you only show the girdle, man, Zeus is exposed and his hair is disgraced. To what lengths of licentiousness did that Zeus go, who took his pleasure with Alcmene for so many nights! Nine nights were not long for that unrestrained god. On the contrary, a whole lifetime was too short for his lack of self-control. All this so that he might sow for us the god who wards off evil! Heracles, the son of Zeus, truly the son of Zeus, was born of that long night. He labored through the twelve labors over a long time, yet in a single night he ruined the fifty daughters of Thestius, becoming at once adulterer and bridegroom of so many virgins. It is no surprise, then, that the poets call him “cruel” and “a doer of wicked deeds.” It would take too long to tell of his adulteries of every kind and his ruining of boys.[43]
2ac Your gods did not even keep away from boys. One loved Hylas, another Hyacinthus, another Pelops, another Chrysippus, another Ganymede. Let your wives worship such gods, then. Let them pray that their own husbands will be like these gods, so self-controlled! That way the men will be like the gods, having eagerly copied the same behavior. Let your sons be trained to revere these gods too, so that when they grow up they will have taken the gods as a vivid picture of fornication. But perhaps only the male gods rush about after sexual pleasure. Homer says, “the goddesses stayed each at home, for shame.” In his story the goddesses were too modest to look at Aphrodite caught in adultery. Yet some goddesses indulged themselves with even more passion, bound up in adultery: Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, a Nereid with Aeacus, Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion, and Pherephatta with Adonis.[44]
2ad Aphrodite, put to shame over Ares, went off to Cinyras. She married Anchises, lay in wait for Phaethon, and loved Adonis. She also quarreled with the ox-eyed goddess. For the sake of an apple the goddesses stripped and stood naked before the shepherd, to see whether any of them would seem beautiful to him. Come now, let us go briefly around the games and put an end to these festivals held at tombs: the Isthmian, Nemean and Pythian, and the Olympian after them. At Pytho the Pythian dragon is worshipped, and the festival of the serpent is announced as the Pythia. At the Isthmus the sea spat out a piece of pitiful refuse, and the Isthmia mourn Melicertes. At Nemea another child, Archemorus, was buried, and the funeral rite for the child is called the Nemea. And Pisa, you Greeks of every land, is the grave of a Phrygian charioteer. The Olympia are the funeral offerings for Pelops, and Pheidias’ Zeus claims them for himself.[45]
2ae So it seems the contests held over dead men were mysteries, just as the oracles were, and both have been made public property. The mysteries at Agrae and at Halimus in Attica are confined to Athens. But the contests and the phalluses paraded for Dionysus are by now a disgrace to the whole world, and they have spread wickedly through all of life. The story goes like this. Dionysus was eager to go down to Hades but did not know the way. A man named Prosymnus promised to tell him, but not for free. The price was not honorable, though it seemed honorable to Dionysus. The favor was sexual, and the payment Prosymnus asked for was Dionysus himself. The god was glad to grant the request. He promised to give himself if he came back, and he confirmed his promise with an oath. Having learned the way, he left. Then he returned, but he did not find Prosymnus, for he had died. To discharge his obligation to his lover, Dionysus rushed to the tomb, burning with desire to play the passive part.[46]
2af He cut a branch from a fig tree that happened to be at hand and shaped it like a male organ. Then he sat down on the branch, and so fulfilled his promise to the dead man. As a mystic reminder of this experience, phalluses are set up for Dionysus in city after city. Heraclitus says: “If it were not for Dionysus that they held the procession and sang the hymn to the shameful parts, their deeds would be most shameless. But Hades and Dionysus are the same, the one for whom they rave and celebrate the Lenaia.” They do this, I think, not so much because of bodily drunkenness as because of the disgraceful sacred rite of licentiousness. It is no surprise, then, that gods like yours are slaves, since they have become slaves to their passions. Even before the so-called Helots among the Spartans, Apollo came under the yoke of slavery to Admetus in Pherae, and Heracles to Omphale in Sardis. Poseidon and Apollo worked as hired laborers for Laomedon. Apollo was like a worthless house slave, unable even to win his freedom from his former master. At that time the two of them also built the walls of Troy for the Phrygian.[47]
2ag Homer is not ashamed to show Athena lighting the way for Odysseus, “holding a golden lamp” in her hands. And we have read that Aphrodite, like some loose little serving-girl, brought a chair and set it for Helen face to face with her adulterer, so that she might draw him into intercourse. Besides these, Panyasis records very many other gods who served men. He writes something like this: “Demeter endured, the famous Lame One endured, Poseidon endured, and silver-bowed Apollo endured it, to work as a hired servant beside a mortal man for a year. Fierce-hearted Ares endured it too, under his father’s compulsion,” and so on. It follows naturally, then, that I should present these lustful and passionate gods of yours as having human feelings in every way. “For surely their skin is mortal.” Homer proves it. He shows Aphrodite, very precisely, crying out sharply and loudly at her wound. And he tells how Ares himself, the most warlike of all, was stabbed in the flank by Diomedes.[48]
2ah Polemon says that Athena was wounded by Ornytus. Homer says that Aidoneus (Hades) was shot with an arrow by Heracles, and Panyasis tells the same of the Sun. This same Panyasis also reports that Hera, the goddess of marriage, was wounded by this same Heracles “in sandy Pylos.” Sosibius says that Heracles himself was wounded in the hand by the sons of Hippocoon. But if there are wounds, there is blood. And the poets’ “ichor” is even more revolting than blood, since ichor is understood to be blood gone rotten. So they must also be given medical care and food, since they need these things. Hence the tables, the drinking, the laughter and the sex. If the gods were immortal, lacking nothing and never aging, they would not have human sexual relations, or father children, or even sleep.[49] 2ai Zeus himself also shared a meal at a human table among the Ethiopians. But at the house of Lycaon the Arcadian he was served an inhuman and forbidden meal. There he gorged himself on human flesh, though not willingly. The god did not know that his host Lycaon the Arcadian had slaughtered his own son (his name was Nyctimus) and set him before Zeus as a dish. A fine Zeus indeed: the prophetic, the god of guests, the god of suppliants, the gracious, the giver of every omen, the god to whom the guilty turn! Or rather he is the unjust, the lawless, the wicked, the impious, the inhuman, the violent, the corrupter, the adulterer, the lover. But that was when he was like this, when he was a man. Now, it seems to me, even your myths have grown old. Zeus is no longer a serpent, no longer a swan or an eagle or a man in love. The god does not fly, does not chase boys, does not kiss, does not use force. Yet there are still many beautiful women today, more comely than Leda and more in their prime than Semele. And there are youths more handsome and better mannered than the Phrygian herdsman.[50]
2aj Where now is that eagle? Where is the swan? Where is Zeus himself? He has grown old, feathers and all. It cannot be that he has repented of his love affairs or been taught self-control. The myth is stripped bare before you. Leda is dead, the swan is dead, the eagle is dead. Look for your Zeus, but do not search heaven; investigate the earth. The Cretan, in whose land he lies buried, will tell you. Callimachus says in his Hymns: “For a tomb, O lord, the Cretans built for you.” For Zeus is dead (do not be upset), just like Leda, the swan, the eagle, the man in love, and the serpent. Even the superstitious themselves now show that, unwillingly but still plainly, they see the error about the gods. For the gods “are not from an ancient oak or from a rock, but are a race of men.” And a little later they will be found to be oaks and rocks after all.[51]
2ak Staphylus reports that a certain Zeus Agamemnon is honored in Sparta. Phanocles, in his work “Loves, or the Beautiful Boys,” says that Agamemnon, king of the Greeks, set up a temple of Aphrodite of Argynnus in honor of Argynnus, his beloved. The Arcadians worship an Artemis called the Hanged Woman, as Callimachus says in his Origins. At Methymna another Artemis is honored, called Condylitis. There is also a shrine of yet another Artemis, Artemis Podagra (Gout), in Laconia, as Sosibius says. Polemon knows of a statue of Apollo the Gaper, and of another Apollo, the Glutton, honored in Elis. There the Eleans sacrifice to Zeus the Fly-Averter. The Romans sacrifice to Heracles the Fly-Averter, and also to Fever and Fear, whom they list among Heracles’ companions. I say nothing of the Argives and Spartans. The Argives worship Aphrodite the Grave-Robber, and the Spartans revere Artemis Chelytis (the Cougher), since they use the word “chelyttein” for coughing.[52]
2al Do you suppose that the things we set before you are quoted from some spurious source? You do not seem to know even your own writers, whom I call as witnesses against your unbelief. You poor wretches, it is these writers who have filled your whole life, a life truly not worth living, with godless mockery! Is not a bald Zeus honored in Argos, and another Zeus, an avenger, in Cyprus? Do not the Argives sacrifice to Aphrodite Peribasō, the Athenians to Aphrodite the Courtesan, and the Syracusans to Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks, whom the poet Nicander somewhere calls “kalliglouton”? I will say nothing now of Dionysus Choiropsalas. The people of Sicyon worship him. They put Dionysus in charge of women’s private parts, and so revere the founder of outrage as overseer of shame. Such are their gods, and such are they themselves, who make sport of their gods, or rather mock and insult themselves. How much better the Egyptians are, who honor irrational animals village by village and city by city, than the Greeks who worship such gods as these![53]
2am For even if the Egyptians’ animals are beasts, they are not adulterous or lustful, and not one of them hunts for pleasure against nature. As for what your gods are like, why say more, when they have been exposed enough already? Now the Egyptians I just mentioned are divided among themselves in their forms of worship. The people of Syene worship the phagros fish. Those who live at Elephantine worship the maiotes, which is another fish. The people of Oxyrhynchus likewise worship the fish that gives their country its name. The people of Heracleopolis worship the ichneumon. The people of Sais and Thebes worship the sheep. The people of Lycopolis worship the wolf, and those of Cynopolis the dog. The people of Memphis worship Apis, and those of Mendes the goat. But you, who are better than the Egyptians in every way (I hesitate to say worse), and who never stop laughing at the Egyptians day after day, what are you like when it comes to irrational animals?[54]
2an Among you, the Thessalians honor storks because of their familiarity with them, and the Thebans honor weasels because of the birth of Heracles. And what of the Thessalians again? They are said to worship ants, because they have learned that Zeus took the form of an ant, slept with Eurymedusa the daughter of Cletor, and fathered Myrmidon. Polemon reports that the people living around the Troad worship the native mice, which they call “sminthoi,” because the mice gnawed through their enemies’ bowstrings. They also named Apollo “Sminthian” after those mice. Heraclides, in his Foundings of Temples, says that in Acarnania, where the promontory of Actium and the temple of Apollo of Actium are, an ox is first sacrificed to the flies. I will not forget the Samians either, for the Samians worship the sheep, as Euphorion says. Nor will I forget the Syrians living in Phoenicia. Some of them worship doves and others fish, as extravagantly as the Eleans worship Zeus.[55]
2ao Very well. Since the ones you worship are not gods, I think we should look again at whether they are really daimons, ranked, as you say, in this second order. For if they are daimons, they are greedy and unclean. In fact you can openly find local daimons, city by city, who receive honors. The Cythnians have Menedemus, the Tenians Callistagoras, the Delians Anius, and the Spartans Astrabacus. At Phalerum a hero is honored “at the stern.” The Pythian priestess also ordered the Plataeans to sacrifice to Androcrates, Democrates, Cyclaeus and Leucon when the Persian wars were at their height. Anyone who can look around even a little can see a great many other daimons. For “thrice ten thousand are there on the all-nourishing earth, immortal daimons, guardians of mortal men.” Who are these guardians, Boeotian? Do not begrudge us the answer.[56] 2ap Clearly these guardians are the ones just named, and those held in higher honor than they, the great daimons: Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Demeter, Kore, Pluto, Heracles, and Zeus himself. But surely they do not guard us against running away, Ascraean. Perhaps they guard us against sinning, though they have no experience of sins themselves! Here the proverb fits: “A father who has never been corrected corrects his child.” But if these really are guardians, they are not moved by any goodwill toward us. They are intent on your ruin, and like flatterers they cling to your life, lured by smoke. The daimons themselves somewhere confess their gluttony when they say: “of libation and the savor of fat, for this is the honor we have received as our portion.” And if the gods of the Egyptians, such as cats and weasels, were given a voice, what other voice would they use than the Homeric, poetic one, which loves the savor of fat and the art of cooking? Such are the daimons and gods among you, and the so-called demigods too, named the way mules are called “half-asses.” You have no shortage of names for compounding your impieties.[57]
Chapter 3
The Cruelty of the Sacrifices to the Gods.
3a Let us add this as well: your gods are inhuman daimons who hate humanity. They are not only glad at people’s madness, but they also enjoy the killing of human beings. Sometimes they take their occasions of pleasure from armed contests in the stadiums, sometimes from the countless ambitions of wars. In this way they may glut themselves as much as possible on human bloodshed without restraint. And in cities and nations they have descended like plagues and demanded savage offerings. So Aristomenes the Messenian cut the throats of three hundred men for Ithomaean Zeus. He thought it a favorable sacrifice to offer so many hecatombs at once, and of such quality. Among them was Theopompus, king of the Spartans, a noble victim. The Taurians, who live on the Tauric Chersonese, immediately sacrifice to the Tauric Artemis any strangers they catch among them who have come to grief at sea. These sacrifices of yours Euripides sets out in tragedy on the stage.[58]
3b Monimus records in his *Collection of Marvels* that at Pella in Thessaly an Achaean man is sacrificed to Peleus and Chiron. Anticleides, in his *Homeward Journeys*, shows that the Lyctians, a Cretan people, slaughter men to Zeus. Dosidas says that the Lesbians offer the same sacrifice to Dionysus. The Phocaeans I will not pass over either. Pythocles, in the third book of his *On Concord*, records that they burn a man whole to Artemis Tauropolos. Erechtheus of Attica and Marius the Roman both sacrificed their own daughters. Erechtheus offered his to Persephone, as Demaratus reports in the first book of his *Subjects of Tragedy*. Marius offered his to the Averting Powers, as Dorotheus reports in the fourth book of his *Italian History*. These examples show how kind the daimons are to humanity! And how could those who fear the daimons fail to be holy in proportion?[59] 3c The daimons are hailed as “saviors,” and their worshippers ask for safety from the very ones who plot against their safety. Supposing they are offering favorable sacrifices to these powers, they do not notice that they are slaughtering their own kind, human beings. A killing does not become a sacrifice because of where it happens. Someone may slaughter a man to Artemis and Zeus at an altar in a supposedly holy place, instead of to anger and greed on the road, though anger and greed are daimons of the same kind. He may call his victim “sacred.” But such a sacrifice is still murder and manslaughter. So why is it, you human beings, wisest of all living creatures, that we run from wild beasts? If we happen on a bear or a lion, we turn aside. “As when a man sees a snake in a mountain glen and springs back from it, and trembling seizes his limbs, and he draws back.” Yet daimons are destructive and accursed, plotters, haters of mankind, and ruinous. You sense this beforehand and understand it. Why do you not turn aside and turn away from them?[60]
3d What truth could the wicked ever tell, or whom could they ever help? Right now I can show you that a human being is better than these gods of yours, the demons: Cyrus and Solon were better than Apollo the prophet. Your Phoebus loves gifts, but he does not love people. He betrayed his friend Croesus. Forgetting the payment he had received (so fond of glory was he), he led Croesus across the Halys to the pyre. This is how the demons love: they lead people into the fire. But you, O man, more loving toward people and more truthful than Apollo, pity the one who lies bound on the pyre. You, Solon, prophesy the truth. You, Cyrus, order the pyre put out. And you, Croesus, be sensible at last, now that you have learned better through suffering. The one you worship is ungrateful. He takes his payment, and after taking the gold he lies again.[61]
3e So it is not the demon but the man who tells you to look to the end. Solon does not give crooked prophecies. This is the only oracle you will find true, barbarian, and you will test it on the pyre. This makes me wonder what fancies carried away those who first went astray, so that they proclaimed superstition to mankind and laid down laws to worship accursed demons. Whether it was Phoroneus, or Merops, or someone else, they set up temples and altars for these demons, and the myths say they were also the first to offer sacrifices. Later, as time went on, people kept molding new gods for themselves to worship. Take Eros, who is said to be among the oldest of the gods. No one honored him at all until Charmus seduced a certain youth and set up an altar in the Academy, as a thank-offering because his desire had been satisfied. So people have given the name Eros to the lewdness of that sickness, making a god out of unrestrained desire.[62]
3f The Athenians did not even know who Pan was until Philippides told them. It is no surprise, then, that superstition, once it began somewhere, became a fountain of senseless evil. It was not checked. It grew and flowed out in a great flood, and became the maker of many demons. It offered sacrifices of a hundred oxen, held festivals, set up statues and built temples. These are the ones (for I will not be silent about them either, but will expose them too) that are politely called temples but are really tombs. In other words, the tombs have been given the name of temples. But you, now at least, forget your superstition, and be ashamed to honor tombs. In the temple of Athena at Larissa, on the acropolis, is the tomb of Acrisius. At Athens, on the acropolis, is the tomb of Cecrops, as Antiochus says in the ninth book of his *Histories*.[63]
3g What of Erichthonius? Is he not buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immarados, the son of Eumolpus and Daeira, is he not buried within the enclosure of the Eleusinion below the Acropolis? Are the daughters of Celeus not buried at Eleusis? Why should I list for you the women who came from the Hyperboreans? They were called Hyperoche and Laodice, and they are buried in the Artemision on Delos, which lies within the sanctuary of the Delian Apollo. Leandrius says that Cleochus is buried at Miletus, in the Didymaion. At this point, following Zeno of Myndus, we should not pass over the tomb of Leucophryne, who is buried in the temple of Artemis in Magnesia. Nor should we pass over the altar of Apollo at Telmessus, which they report to be the tomb of Telmessus the seer. Ptolemy, the son of Agesarchus, says in the first book of his work on Philopator that Cinyras and the descendants of Cinyras are buried in the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos.[64]
3h But if I went through the tombs that you worship, all of time would not be enough for me. And if no shame at what you dare to do creeps over you, then you are completely dead and walk about trusting in the dead. “Ah, wretches, what is this evil you are suffering? Night wraps your heads in darkness.”[65]
Notes
[1] “Pythian” refers to Pytho (Delphi), where Apollo was said to have killed the serpent.
[2] Clement plays on the Greek word nomos, which means both “law” and a kind of melody, and on the name Eunomus (“good nomos”). The cicada’s song is autonomos, a “law (or tune) unto itself,” and better than the nomoi of Eunomus.
[3] “Poets of the wine-press” renders a word linked to the Lenaea, an Athenian festival of Dionysus at which plays were performed.
[4] Terpander was a famous early Greek musician from Lesbos.
[5] The quotation is John the Baptist’s saying in Matthew 3:9 (also Luke 3:8), which Clement calls the voice of prophecy.
[6] The quotation is from Titus 3:3–5.
[7] “Thracian music” points to Orpheus, the legendary Thracian singer whom Clement mocked at the start of the work. Jubal appears in Genesis 4:21 as the father of all who play the lyre and pipe.
[8] The story of Saul is in 1 Samuel 16:14–23. There David drives off the evil spirit by playing the lyre; Clement says he healed Saul by singing.
[9] “After his own image” recalls Genesis 1:26–27. The opening of the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf, and the healing of the lame, echo Isaiah 35:5–6.
[10] Where the older English says “pre-existed in the eye of God,” the Greek says simply “were born to God beforehand.”
[11] The apostle is Paul (Titus 2:11-13).
[12] The last clause means the physician will, if necessary, sacrifice “a part or limb” to restore the whole person to health.
[13] Clement quotes Philippians 2:6-7; the Greek verb ekenōsen means “emptied himself.”
[14] Clement’s wording, “Make straight the ways of the Lord,” differs slightly from the Gospels’ wording of Isaiah 40:3.
[15] The quotation is Isaiah 54:1, given in Clement’s wording (also quoted in Galatians 4:27). The Greek word erēmos means both “desolate” and “desert,” which allows Clement’s pairing of the barren woman with the desert.
[16] “Is seen” renders a verb that was also used of the highest stage of initiation in the Greek mystery religions.
[17] “Ventriloquists” translates engastrimythoi, “belly-talkers.” These were diviners whose oracles seemed to speak from inside them.
[18] Clement links the Bacchic cry “Euan” to Eve (Genesis 3); Aramaic has a word like ḥewya meaning “serpent,” and a similar wordplay on Eve’s name appears in later Jewish interpretation (Genesis Rabbah 20.11).
[19] “Odrysus” may instead mean “the Odrysian,” a member of a Thracian people.
[20] The phrases come from Hesiod’s Theogony (lines 188–200), which tells of Aphrodite’s birth from the foam around the severed genitals of Uranus (Heaven); there she is called philommeidēs (“laughter-loving”) “because she appeared from the genitals (mēdea),” a pun Hesiod makes himself, and Clement gives the word as philomēdea (“genital-loving”) to bring out the crude meaning.
[21] The “sacred vessel” is the kernos, a ritual vessel used in cults of Demeter.
[22] Deo is another name for Demeter. Pherephatta is a form of the name Persephone, the same goddess as Kore (“the Maiden”).
[23] “Bull-roarer” translates rhombos, a toy or ritual object that was whirled or spun. It may also mean a kind of spinning top, and the older translation gave “top.” That translation gave “hoop” for strobilos, which can mean a spinning top or a pine cone. The exact toys are uncertain.
[24] “Held them over Hephaestus” quotes Homer (Iliad 2.426), where sacrificial meat is held over the fire. Hephaestus, the fire-god, stands for the fire itself. The “portion they have received” also echoes Homer, where Zeus says that the savor of sacrifice is the honor the gods receive (Iliad 4.49; 24.70).
[25] The Greek word selinon can mean celery or parsley, and the older translation has “parsley.” Tyrrhenia is the Greek name for Etruria in central Italy.
[26] The Eumolpidae and the Kerykes were the two Athenian families that supplied the chief priests of the Eleusinian mysteries.
[27] The Greek of these lines is obscure and may be corrupt, so the meaning of “tossing it with his hand” is uncertain.
[28] The Greek says that the mysteries themselves are a deceit of the serpent; Clement probably means the devil, the ancient serpent, with a glance at the snake used in these rites (see the next section).
[29] “Balls of wool” may instead mean round cakes. The Greek word can mean either.
[30] Editors usually bracket the name Anacharsis as a later addition; in Herodotus (4.76) Anacharsis was the man killed by a Scythian king, not the king himself.
[31] Other ancient sources usually call Euhemerus a man of Messene rather than of Acragas.
[32] Both quotations are from Euripides. The first is from a lost play (fragment 941), and the second is from “The Trojan Women” (lines 884–885).
[33] The Erinyes (“Furies”) were the avenging spirits of Greek myth, and “Eumenides” (“the Kindly Ones”) was a softening name for the same beings. Palamnaioi, Prostropaioi and Alastors are names for spirits that avenge bloodshed and other crimes.
[34] Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos are the three Fates of Greek myth. Auxo and Thallo, whose names mean roughly “Growth” and “Blooming,” were goddesses honored at Athens.
[35] The Greek here more naturally means that the Word is living and that the person buried with Christ is exalted with God, not that the Word himself was buried with Christ.
[36] “Share the same names”: in what follows, Clement points out that there were several gods called Zeus, Athena and so on, to show that these figures are human inventions. The Greek word translated “opinions” means opinions that people have made up.
[37] The two Homer quotations are from the Iliad (5.31 and 5.385–387). “Fickle” echoes another Homeric description of Ares as one who changes sides.
[38] The line about Hephaestus’s legs is from Homer, Iliad 18.411. The Greek says his thin legs moved quickly beneath him.
[39] The Homer lines on the Dioscuri are Iliad 3.243–244. The line on Heracles is from Odyssey 21.26. In Odyssey 11 Odysseus sees the “shade” (eidolon) of Heracles among the dead, which is probably what Clement has in mind.
[40] The Greek says Megaclo bought (ἐώνηται) Mysian servant girls; “Moisai” is the Aeolic form of “Muses.”
[41] The Greek says only that the figures were “bronze.” In the last sentence, ἐστενοχωρεῖτο means “felt cramped” or “lacked room,” not simply “was not satisfied.”
[42] The quotation is from Homer, Iliad 1.528–530.
[43] Most other ancient accounts name the father of the fifty daughters Thespius rather than Thestius.
[44] “Pherephatta” is a form of Persephone’s name.
[45] “The ox-eyed goddess” is Hera; the “shepherd” is Paris, who judged the contest of the three goddesses.
[46] The Greek verb (paschētiaō) means to desire the passive role in sex. The act itself is described in the next section.
[47] “Before the Helots” follows the Greek (pro tōn Heilōtōn). The Helots were the state-owned serfs of Sparta.
[48] The Homer passages are Odyssey 19.33–34 (Athena with the lamp), Iliad 3.424–425 (Aphrodite sets the chair for Helen), Iliad 5.335–343 (Aphrodite wounded), and Iliad 5.855–857 (Ares wounded by Diomedes).
[49] The older English makes “men” the subject of the last sentence. In the Greek, the subject is the gods: it is they who would not have sex, beget children or sleep if they were truly immortal and lacked nothing.
[50] The “Phrygian herdsman” is Ganymede, the Trojan youth whom Zeus carried off.
[51] The oak-and-rock phrase adapts Homer’s Odyssey 19.163, where Penelope tells the disguised Odysseus that he is not sprung “from an oak of old story or from a rock.” In the last sentence Clement turns the phrase around: the gods’ statues are in fact made of wood and stone.
[52] Older translation: it gives Phanocles’ title as “Brave and Fair.” The Greek title is “Erotes or Kaloi,” meaning “Loves, or Beautiful Boys.”
[53] “Peribasō” is a cult title of uncertain meaning, perhaps from a verb meaning “to straddle” or “walk around,” and often taken in a crude sense. “Choiropsalas” is an obscene title (choiros was slang for the female parts), so it is left untranslated.
[54] The fish phagros cannot be identified with certainty. The name is used elsewhere for a kind of sea bream.
[55] The Greek word for the reason the Thessalians honor storks (synētheia) can mean either “custom” or “familiarity.”
[56] The verse is from Hesiod, Works and Days 252–253. Clement’s wording differs slightly from the standard text of Hesiod. The Boeotian addressed here is Hesiod, whom Clement calls “Ascraean” in the next section.
[57] The daimons’ words quote a line of Homer (Iliad 4.49, repeated at 24.70), where Zeus speaks of the libation and savor of fat that are the gods’ portion.
[58] A “hecatomb” was properly a sacrifice of a hundred oxen, so three hundred men made three hecatombs. Euripides’ play is Iphigenia among the Taurians.
[59] Clement is making a pun. The Greek word for these worshippers, deisidaimones, normally means “superstitious,” but literally it means “those who fear the daimons.”
[60] The verse is from Homer (Iliad 3.33–35). In Homer the next words are “and pallor seized his cheeks,” which Clement does not quote.
[61] Clement draws on Herodotus (Histories 1.46–91). Croesus of Lydia sent rich gifts to Delphi and was told that if he made war on Persia he would destroy a great empire. The empire he destroyed was his own, for Cyrus defeated him. On the pyre he called out the name of Solon, who had once warned him. Cyrus ordered the fire put out, but in Herodotus the flames were quenched only by a rainstorm after Croesus prayed to Apollo.
[62] “The end” recalls Solon’s famous advice to Croesus to call no one happy until he has seen the end of his life (Herodotus 1.32). “Crooked” (loxa) is a pun on Apollo’s title Loxias, which the Greeks connected with his ambiguous oracles.
[63] The clause “that is, the tombs have been given the name of temples” is bracketed by editors as a probable later explanatory addition to the Greek.
[64] Herodotus (4.33–35) tells of Hyperboreans who came to Delos from the far north; he names Hyperoche and Laodice as maidens who brought offerings and died there, and places their tomb in the Artemision (4.34).
[65] The last line is from Homer’s Odyssey (20.351), where the seer Theoclymenus warns the suitors of their coming death.