Clement of Alexandria · a new plain-English translation from the original language
The Greeks suppose that the gods are shaped like men, and that they have the same passions as men. And just as each people paints the gods' forms to resemble themselves — as Xenophanes says, "Ethiopians say their gods are black and snub-nosed, and Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired" — so too they fashion the gods' souls to resemble their own: barbarians at once make them beast-like and savage in character, Greeks make them gentler, yet still subject to passion. It follows reasonably that the wicked must have base conceptions about god, while the good have the best. And for this reason the one who is truly "kingly in soul," the knower, is also god-fearing and free of superstition, persuaded that God alone is honorable, august, magnificent, beneficent, well-doing, the source of all good things and guiltless of evils. Concerning Greek superstition I think I have said enough; in the discourse entitled by us the Protrepticus we set it forth thoroughly, drawing as much on history as the pressing need required. There is no call "to tell again as myth what has already been said plainly."
But it is worth noting a few things out of many, since we are on the subject. It suffices to bring forward these too, as proof of the godlessness of those who liken the divine to the most wicked of men. For either the gods are harmed by men — and are shown thereby to be worse than the men who harm them — or, if not, how can they be provoked over things by which they are not harmed at all? Like a quick-tempered old woman roused to anger, they grow embittered — as they say Artemis was angered against the Aetolians on account of Oeneus. For how, being a goddess, did she not reckon that Oeneus had not scorned her, but had either forgotten her or, having already sacrificed, simply neglected her? Well spoken too is Auge, pleading her case against Athena, who was harsh with her for giving birth within the temple: "You delight to look upon spoils that destroy mortals, and the wreckage of corpses, and these are no defilement to you; but if I gave birth, you think this a terrible thing? And yet the other animals too, giving birth within the temples, do no wrong."
Reasonably, then, growing superstitious about beings so quick to anger, they consider everything that happens to be a sign and a cause of evils: if a mouse burrows through an altar made of clay, or gnaws through a sack though there is nothing else it could have eaten, if a cock kept for food crows in the evening — they take all this as a sign of something.
Menander mocks just such a man in his Superstitious Man: "May something good come to me, O much-honored gods" — while putting on his sandal, for he had torn the strap of his right shoe. "Naturally, you babbler; it was rotten, and you are too stingy to buy new ones."
Charming is the remark of Antiphon: when someone took it as an omen that a sow had eaten her piglets, he saw that she had been wasted by hunger through the stinginess of the man who fed her, and said, "Rejoice at this omen — starving as she was, she still refrained from devouring her own young."
"What is there to wonder at," says Bion, "if the mouse gnawed through the sack, having found nothing else to eat? Now that would have been a wonder — as Arcesilaus proposed in jest — if the sack had eaten the mouse."
Well said too was Diogenes, to the man who marveled that he had found a snake coiled around a pestle: "Do not marvel," he said, "for it would have been far more strange had you seen the pestle coiled upright around the snake."
For even the irrational animals must run and race and fight and give birth and die — things which, being natural to them, could never become unnatural for us; "and many birds range beneath the rays of the sun."
The comic poet Philemon mocks such things too: "Whenever I see," he says, "a man watching closely who sneezed, or who spoke, or who it is passing by, keeping tabs — I sell that fellow off at once in the marketplace. Each of us walks and talks and sneezes for himself, not for the people of the city; things happen as they are made by nature to happen."
Then, while sober, they pray for health, but overfilling themselves and wallowing in drunkenness during the festivals, they bring diseases upon themselves.
Many too are afraid of paintings set up as offerings. Diogenes, very wittily, finding inscribed over the house of some scoundrel, "Glorious Heracles the victor dwells here; let nothing evil enter," said, "And how then will the master of the house get in?"
These same people worship every piece of wood and every stone that is, as the saying goes, greasy with anointing, and they dread crimson wool, chunks of salt, blazing torches, squill, and brimstone, utterly deluded by frauds through certain foul rites of cleansing. But God — who is truly God — knows as holy only the character of the just man, just as the unjust and wicked character is accursed. One can indeed see that the eggs taken from those who have undergone such purifications, if kept warm, still hatch into life; but this would not happen if they had taken on the evils of the one purified.
Wittily too the comic poet Diphilus mocks the charlatans in these lines: "Purifying the daughters of Proetus, and their father Proetus son of Abas, and a fifth besides, an old woman — so many bodies of mortals, for all that — with one torch and one squill, with sulphur and asphalt and the loud-roaring sea drawn from gently-flowing, deep-flowing Ocean. But blessed Air, send this bedbug through the clouds to Anticyra, that I may turn him into a drone."
Menander speaks well too: "If you had some real evil, Phidias, you would need to seek a real remedy for it; but as it is you have none — you have found an empty remedy for an empty complaint; and you imagine it does you some good. Let the women wipe you all around in a circle and run about you; sprinkle yourself with water from three springs, tossing in salt and lentils. Everyone is pure who is conscious of no evil in himself."
At once tragedy says: "Orestes, what sickness destroys you?" "My conscience — because I am conscious of terrible deeds done." For indeed true purity is nothing other than abstaining from sins.
Well too does Epicharmus say: "If you keep your mind pure, your whole body is pure."
At once we too say that souls must first be purified from base and wicked opinions through right reason, and only then turn in this way to the recollection of the chief points already discussed, since even before the mysteries are handed down, custom deems it proper that candidates for initiation first undergo certain rites of cleansing, on the ground that the impious notion must be cast aside before one turns to the true tradition.
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