A 2nd-century Alexandrian teacher's opening salvo against Greco-Roman religion, cataloguing myths, idols, mystery cults, and philosophers before inviting the reader to be initiated instead into Christ's own "mysteries."
The Protrepticus ("Exhortation to the Greeks") is the first installment of Clement of Alexandria's three-part project -- Protrepticus, Paedagogus, and Stromateis -- meant to lead a convert from persuasion, through moral training, to advanced teaching. It opens by contrasting the legendary singers Amphion, Arion, and Orpheus, whose songs supposedly charmed beasts and stones, with the "new song" of the Logos, which alone can tame the real wild animals in human beings: the light-minded, the deceitful, the wrathful, the pleasure-loving. From there Clement turns prosecutor, walking the reader through oracle shrines gone silent, the Bacchic and Eleusinian mysteries (which he narrates in explicit, deliberately unflattering detail, including the Baubo episode and the initiates' password), the multiplication of Zeuses and Apollos into merely famous dead men, and city after city's outlandish cult epithets for their gods.
The second half of the work shifts from myth to material religion and then to reasoned argument. Clement inventories cult statues -- wooden xoana, the manufactured Sarapis, the deified boy-favorite Antinous -- arguing that idols are simply worked matter, and that their own sculptors (Phidias signing his boyfriend's name on Zeus's finger, Praxiteles modeling Aphrodite on his mistress) expose the fraud. He then surveys the philosophers from Thales to the Stoics and Aristotle, crediting several (Plato, Antisthenes, Xenophon, Cleanthes) with glimpsing the one true God despite themselves, and lets the poets and the Sibyl testify against their own polytheistic tradition. Only after all this demolition does he bring forward "the prophetic scriptures" -- Jeremiah, Isaiah, the Sibyl again -- and finally the Gospel itself, closing with an extended appeal recasting Christian conversion as the truest, most "mystic" initiation of all, and Odysseus's escape from the Sirens as an allegory of fleeing pagan Pleasure.
Historically the Protrepticus matters as a hinge text: it is one of the fullest surviving catalogs of Greco-Roman cult practice, local epithets, and euhemerist critique preserved by a hostile but extremely well-read insider, drawing on now-lost antiquarian sources (Philostephanus, Polemon, Apollodorus, Berossus) that Clement quotes for his case. It also shows an educated Alexandrian Christian consciously appropriating Greek philosophy and mystery-cult language -- torches, hierophants, sealing, initiation -- to reframe Christianity as the fulfillment rather than the enemy of Hellenic culture, a rhetorical strategy that shaped how later Christian apologetics engaged classical paideia.
“But my singer is not of that sort, nor has he come to put an end, after a long delay, to the bitter slavery of the tyrant demons; rather, by leading us over into the gentle and kindly yoke of the fear of God, he calls back again to the heavens those who had been cast down to earth.”
— Protrepticus – Chapter 1
“The Bacchants hold their orgies for raving Dionysus, conducting their sacred madness through the eating of raw flesh, and they perform the dividing-up of the flesh of their slaughtered victims, crowned with snakes, shrieking out 'Euai, Euai' — that name because of which error has followed after them.”
— Protrepticus – Chapter 2
“For an image is in truth dead matter shaped by the hand of a craftsman; but for us, the image is not something perceived by sense out of sensible matter, but something apprehended by the mind. God is an object of thought, not of sense — he alone who is truly God.”
— Protrepticus – Chapter 4
“Locating the Begetter and Craftsman of this whole is hard labor, and once one has located him, making him known to everyone is not achievable.”
— Protrepticus – Chapter 6
“O truly holy mysteries! O pure light! I am torch-borne to behold the heavens and God; I become holy by being initiated.”
— Protrepticus – Chapter 12
It is Clement of Alexandria's opening appeal to educated pagans, arguing that Greek myth, oracle, mystery-cult, and idol-worship are all frauds or errors, that a few philosophers and poets glimpsed the true God despite this, and that conversion to Christ is the real fulfillment of the initiation the mysteries only promised. It is the first of a three-part curriculum Clement designed to move a reader from persuasion to moral training to advanced doctrine.
As a former initiate-class outsider making a hostile case, he treats exposure as argument: printing the passwords, the obscene tokens, and the Baubo episode verbatim is meant to embarrass readers who considered these rites sacred and secret. He states this strategy directly, saying he will 'strip bare' the sorcery hidden within the mysteries for 'the spectators of truth to see.'
No -- he treats it as partially inspired. He quotes Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, and the Stoic Cleanthes approvingly as men who, guided by a 'divine effluence' common to reasoning humanity, arrived near monotheism, even while criticizing Epicurus as impious and the Stoics generally for locating divinity in base matter.
Euhemerism is the theory that gods were originally famous mortals later deified by their communities. Clement deploys it at length, multiplying Zeus, Apollo, and Athena into numerous local, mortal namesakes with recorded tombs, and pointing to contemporaries like the emperor Hadrian's deified favorite Antinous as proof that 'godmaking' is an ongoing human habit, not ancient truth.
Clement pivots fully into an evangelistic appeal, casting Christ as the true 'hierophant' who initiates believers into real mysteries -- torch-lit, sealed, and everlasting -- and allegorizes Odysseus's escape from the Sirens as the reader's own escape from pagan Pleasure and habit, closing with a stark choice between 'judgment or grace.'
Clement (c. 150-215 CE) headed the catechetical school in Alexandria and wrote the Protrepticus as the first of a trilogy alongside the Paedagogus (moral instruction) and the Stromateis (advanced 'miscellanies'), aimed at educated Greco-Roman readers rather than at fellow Christians.
It is valuable but polemical: Clement preserves many otherwise-lost antiquarian citations (Philostephanus, Polemon, Berossus, Apollodorus) on cult statues, local epithets, and myth variants, but he selects and frames every detail to make paganism look absurd or obscene, so his reports need to be checked against less hostile sources where possible.
He argues that the artists who made famous cult statues undercut their own religious authority: Phidias inscribed his boyfriend's name on the Olympian Zeus's finger, and Praxiteles modeled the Aphrodite of Cnidus on his mistress, so that, in Clement's telling, worshippers of these images are really bowing to courtesans and favorites rather than to gods.