Preparation for the Gospel — Book V

Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

1.1| PREFACE. What has been set out already would have been enough to establish that those honored as gods among the nations, city by city and country by country, were not gods, nor even good demons, but the very opposite. Still, there is no harm in confirming the same thesis further, out of abundance, with more and fuller refutations, since the proof of these things brings to light the freedom from the evils of old that the gospel teaching of our Savior has procured for all men.

1.2| Listen, then, to the Greeks themselves admitting that their oracles have failed, and at no other time in all the ages than after the days of the saving gospel teaching, which made the knowledge of the one God, universal King and Maker of the whole, dawn like light upon all men.

1.3| Indeed, in a moment we shall show that after his appearing deaths of demons were recorded, and the marvelous oracles, so loudly celebrated of old, came to an end.

1.4| It has already been shown earlier that the human sacrifices, once performed so cruelly and pitilessly among all the nations, found an end of their evils at no other time than after the gospel teaching. To this it is well to add, for the present, that from that time not only was the demonic superstition quenched, but also the rule of many rulers among the nations.

1.5| For in ancient times one could see, in almost every city and village, kings and tyrants, local governors and petty lords, rule by tribes and rule by many; and because of these, men were constantly hurling themselves into wars against each other, and forever and without pause were ravaging lands, besieging cities, and enslaving their neighbors and carrying them off captive, goaded into war against one another by their own demons.

1.6| This being so, I put it to you to reflect for yourself in what a confusion of evils and of calamities following one upon another the whole of life was then caught up.

1.7| When, then, all these things together, along with the error of many gods, were removed out of the way all at once, and at no other time than after the sojourn of our Savior among men, how should we not marvel exceedingly at the great mystery of the truly saving gospel demonstration? Through it, all at once, throughout the whole inhabited world of men, houses of prayer and temples consecrated to the universal King and Maker of all things, the only God, have arisen in cities and villages and in the solitudes of barbarian nations; books and readings, and lessons and teachings of every kind containing precepts on the highest virtue and on the way of true piety, are handed on for men, women and children alike to hear; while all the oracles and divinations that came from demons are dead.

1.8| Nor is anyone now so mad, since the divine, gospel power of our Savior shone out upon all like light, as to dare to propitiate the murderous, blood-loving, man-hating and inhuman demons with the murder of his dearest and the slaughters of human sacrifice, as the wise men and kings of old, truly possessed by demons, were glad to do.

1.9| That the base demons no longer have any power or strength since our Savior's passage among men, the very advocate of the demons in our own day bears witness himself, in his contrivance against us, speaking somewhere in this manner:

1.10| “But now they wonder that the sickness has gripped the city for so many years, when Asclepius and the other gods no longer make their visits. For since Jesus has been honored, no one has perceived any public benefit from the gods.”

1.11| These are Porphyry's very words. If, then, by this admission, since Jesus has been honored no one has perceived any public benefit from the gods, and neither Asclepius nor the other gods make their visits any longer, where does the doctrine about gods and heroes come from now?

1.12| For why do the gods and Asclepius not rather prevail over the power of Jesus? If he is a mortal man, as they would say (and perhaps they would add, a deceiver), while they are saviors and gods, why then have they all fled at once, Asclepius and all, turning their backs on the mortal, and handed over the whole of humanity, one after another, into the power of one who, as they themselves would say, no longer exists?

1.13| But he, even after death, is honored day by day among all the nations and lives on forever, plainly showing to those able to perceive it the vivid and divine evidence of life after death.

1.14| But though he is one, and, as one might suppose, alone, he drives out the multitude of gods over the whole inhabited world, and prevails by setting aside their honors, so that the gods no longer exist, nor act, nor appear anywhere, nor visit cities as they used to, because they were not gods but wicked demons; while the honors of him alone and of the God of the whole who sent him increase daily, and advance to a greater height of virtue among all humanity,

1.15| whereas the opposite ought to have happened: the gods, if any of them were truly guardians of those on earth, ought to have removed his error utterly, if it was an error, and themselves to have supplied to all, without grudging, the services and benefits that come from them.

1.16| As it is, this too has often been attempted by them, through the rulers of successive times who made war on the most powerful teaching of our Savior; but they found the end of their attempt fruitless, since the divine power of our Savior always overcomes all, and brings down all the risings of the wicked demons against his teaching, and drives out the demons themselves, who are in truth base, but falsely held to be gods or even good demons.

2.1| These beings, who dwell on the earth and under it, roaming about the heavy and murky air over the earth, and condemned to have the dark and earthy dwelling for reasons we shall give later, haunt the tombs and monuments of the dead and all the polluted and unclean matter, and delight in blood and gore and the bodies of all kinds of animals, and in the exhalation rising from what is burned and vaporized from the earth. And their rulers, who are certain aerial or subterranean powers, when they learned that the human race was crawling somewhere below, making gods of dead men, and laboring with all zeal at sacrifices and savors that most please them, were at hand, lying in wait close by as accomplices of the error, reveling in the evils of men, and easily deceiving the foolish in soul by the movements of the carved images, which in honor of men departed were consecrated by the ancients, and by apparitions in oracles, and by cures of bodies: bodies which they themselves had secretly harmed by their own working, and then, by letting up, set free from their sufferings.

2.2| By these means they carried the superstitious ever more headlong, so that men thought them sometimes heavenly powers and certain true gods, and sometimes the souls of heroes who had been made gods.

2.3| From this point, then, the belief in the error of many gods came to seem greater and more august to the many, as the mind passed from the things seen to the unseen things hidden in the carved images, and ratified the error more strongly.

2.4| Thus at last the demons that dwell around the earth, the world-rulers of the air and the spiritual forces of wickedness, and he who leads them all in evil, were held by all as the greatest of the gods; and the memory of the dead of old was deemed worthy of greater service.

2.5| Of these dead the forms of the bodies were thought to be borne by the types of the images dedicated in the cities, while the souls and the divine and bodiless powers were counterfeited by the base demons through much wonder-working; and their very servants and priests kept leading the vanity of the apparition ever higher, and in great part contrived it with the evil arts of sorcery, the base demons themselves first instructing their worshipers also in these things. These, then, were the causes of the sorcery that is the root of evil for all the life of men, as the account before this has shown.

3.1| Since, then, these wicked demons that dwell around the earth, the spirits of the air and of the underworld, whom the divine writings call world-rulers and spiritual forces of wickedness, rulers and authorities, now pretend to be good demons, now take the shape of heavenly gods, and at other times transform themselves into heroes, and in places show plainly by what they do the proof of their wickedness, it is no wonder that a great error came upon men still more, some saying they were gods, others admitting that they were heroes and demons and not gods, and, of the demons, some proclaiming them good and calling others base, yet saying that even the base must be appeased for the harm they do; so that the whole making of gods fell apart into several kinds.

3.2| First, there is the kind drawn from the luminaries seen in the heavens, which, they say, were the first to be proclaimed gods, both because they "run" (theein, which means to run) and because they are the reason we are able to see what is seen. Second is the kind honored for their benefactions to the common life, as they put it, whom the pagans themselves admit to have been born of men; they bring forward those called heroes, Heracles and the Dioscuri, Dionysus and the like among the barbarians.

3.3| From these they set apart and distinguished the more shameful things recorded about the same figures, and posited a third kind of god-making, which they called the mythical. Being ashamed of it, although it is true and the most ancient, they changed over to what they call the more natural kind, with more figurative allegories, inventing certain "speculations" by clever contrivance.

3.4| But it was not enough for them to stop at this error: they even dragged the venerable and worshipful name of God down to their own passions, and devised a fourth way of god-making, one not even worth refuting, since its shamefulness is plain on the face of it.

3.5| For they proclaimed Eros and Aphrodite and Desire, their own shameful and licentious appetites, to be gods; and having named speech Hermes and reasoning Athena, they have taken these over as well into their own theology, so that they have also fashioned a fifth kind out of the things that happen among human beings.

3.6| For they made idols of the activities of war and of the crafts, and assigned them to gods: the activities of war to Ares and Athena, those of the crafts to Hephaestus and certain others.

3.7| On top of all these, a sixth and seventh kind was introduced among them, the daemonic, which is truly many-sided and many-formed, at one time pretending to be gods and at another the souls of the dead. It contributes nothing to us toward the virtue of the soul, but is always mocking, and by deceitful error carries every superstitious person over the cliffs.

3.8| Although this kind too is bad throughout, they divided it into two, the harmful and the beneficial, and gave its members the names of good and bad.

3.9| Since this is how matters stand, it seems to me necessary to set aside what needs no refutation and to examine the argument that follows concerning daemonic activity. I examined it in part in the previous treatise, and now I shall fill in what was left out.

3.10| Come then, let us at last proceed to the proofs themselves. I shall set first those from the writing of Plutarch, which he composed On the Failure of Oracles, where he writes in the following manner about the oracles and divinations among the nations being the work of evil daemons.

4.1| "Those who say that Plato, by discovering the element that underlies things that come into being with their qualities, which they call matter, freed the philosophers from many great perplexities, speak well enough. But to me those seem to have solved more and greater perplexities who placed the race of daemons between gods and men, and who in a way discovered what draws our fellowship into one and binds it together, whether this doctrine comes from the Magi of Zoroaster's school, or is Thracian from Orpheus, or Egyptian, or Phrygian, as is inferred from the many mortal and mournful elements we see mixed into the rites of both peoples, in the sacred ceremonies celebrated and performed with frenzied rites. Among the Greeks, Homer appears to use both names indifferently, sometimes calling the gods daemons. Hesiod was the first to set out clearly and distinctly four kinds of rational beings: gods, next daemons, then heroes, and finally men. From these he seems to make the transition, the golden race being separated off into many good daemons, and the demigods into heroes."

4.2| Then he says next: "But on these matters there is no need for us to differ with Demetrius. For whether the time in which a daemon's soul changes into a hero's life be longer or shorter, fixed or irregular, the point he intends will none the less be proved, with the testimony of wise and ancient witnesses, that there are certain natures, as it were on the border between gods and men, which receive mortal passions and necessary changes, and that it is right, following our fathers' custom, to regard and name them daemons and to revere them." To this, after other remarks, he adds: "That it is not gods, whom it befits to be released from the affairs of earth, but daemons, the servants of the gods, who preside over the oracles, does not seem to me an unreasonable claim. But to take from the verses of Empedocles, almost for a drachma, the notion of attributing to these daemons sins and delusions and errors sent by the gods, and finally even to suppose them subject to death like men, I consider rather too bold and more barbaric."

4.3| And again he adds to what has been said: "For as among men, so among daemons there are differences of virtue; and in some the passible and irrational part is only a weak and dim remnant, like a residue, while in others it is large and hard to quench. Traces and tokens of it are preserved and kept alive, scattered in many places, by sacrifices, rites and myths. As for the mystic rites, in which one may gain the greatest glimpses and intimations of the truth about daemons, let me keep a reverent silence, in Herodotus' phrase. But the festivals and sacrifices, like inauspicious and gloomy days, in which there is eating of raw flesh and tearing to pieces, fasting and beating of the breast, and in many places again foul language at the shrines, and other frenzies stirred up with the wild tossing of heads, these I would say are performed for none of the gods, but as consolations to avert evil daemons. And that the human sacrifices made long ago were demanded or accepted by gods is not credible; nor would kings and generals have undergone them in vain, giving up their own children, consecrating and slaughtering them. Rather they were appeasing the wrath and heavy anger of harsh and ill-tempered beings and satisfying avenging spirits, and in some cases the frenzied passions of beings who could not and would not consort with bodies and through bodies. But just as Heracles besieged Oechalia on account of a maiden, so strong and violent daemons often demand a human soul held in a body, and bring plagues on cities and failures of the land, and stir up wars and civil strife, until they obtain and get the object of their passion."

4.4| By these words the philosopher just mentioned showed plainly that the rites described were performed in every city for evil daemons. And if some among them were, as they say, good by nature, or even gods, why should they have worshiped the bad, when the bad ought to have been driven off by the good?

4.5| For if they really had good protectors, they should surely, trusting in them, have taken no thought for the worse beings, and should have turned aside the opposing powers by sober words and prayers, not by obscene speech.

4.6| But when they did none of this, and instead supplicated the evil daemons with a shameful and licentious life, with unseemly words, with eating of raw flesh, tearings to pieces and human sacrifices, how was it possible for those who did such things and carried out what pleases the bad to be made friends of the God over all, or of the divine powers under him, or of any good beings at all?

4.7| But it is plain to everyone that the man who does what is dear to the bad could never become dear to the good. So those I have described were serving neither gods nor good daemons, but only the bad.

4.8| Plutarch gives still more credit to this account where he says that the mythical stories told as about gods are certain accounts about daemons, and that what the Greeks sing of the Giants and Titans consists of daemonic tales, which suggests a rather novel thought.

4.9| Perhaps, then, such were the things said in the divine Scripture about the giants before the Flood, and about those who begot them, of whom it is said: "And the angels of God, seeing the daughters of men, that they were beautiful, took wives for themselves from all whom they chose; and the giants were born from them, the men of renown from of old."

4.10| For one might say that these are those very beings, and that their spirits were made gods by later men, along with their battles, their quarrels with one another, and their wars; and that these are the things told in myth as about gods. At any rate, Plutarch says in the work he composed, Concerning Isis and the Gods of the Egyptians, in these very words:

5.1| "It is better, then, to hold that the tales told of Typhon, Osiris and Isis are neither the sufferings of gods nor of men, but of great daemons, whom Plato, Pythagoras, Xenocrates and Chrysippus, following the theologians of old, say were stronger than men and far surpassed our nature in power, yet whose divine part is not unmixed or pure, but shares in the nature of a soul and the perception of a body, receiving pleasure and pain and all the passions that follow upon these changes, which trouble some more and some less. For among daemons, as among men, there are differences of virtue and vice. The tales of Giants and Titans sung among the Greeks, many lawless deeds, Python's setting himself against Apollo, the flights of Dionysus and Demeter's wanderings, fall nothing short of the stories of Osiris and Typhon, which anyone may freely hear told in myth among all peoples. And whatever is told in myth in the mystic rites and preserved unspoken and unseen by the gods is of the same kind."

5.2| And he goes on to say next: "Empedocles too says that daemons pay the penalty for whatever sins and offenses they commit: 'For the force of the air drives them to the sea; the sea spits them out onto the surface of the earth, and earth into the rays of the tireless sun; and he casts them into the whirlpools of the air. One receives them from another, and all loathe them,' until, having been punished, they recover again their natural place and order. Of such things, and the like, they say, the tales told of Typhon are kin: that out of envy and ill will he did terrible things, throwing everything into confusion, and filled with evils the whole earth and sea alike, and then paid the penalty."

5.3| After citing this from the work mentioned, and elaborating the argument at greater length, Plutarch relates similar things in the work On the Failure of Oracles, in this manner: "He, then, referred divination to daemons, and he took the greatest account of Delphi, and was not unacquainted with any of the sacred rites said to be performed there concerning Dionysus; but these too, he said, were great sufferings of daemons, and likewise the matters concerning the Pythia. As for the one who killed the serpent, he said that his flight was neither for a period of nine years nor to Tempe, but that, driven out, he went to another world; and that later, when from there he had been made pure by nine cycles of great years, he came back, truly Phoebus, and took over the oracle, which until then Themis had guarded. And the Typhonic and Titanic stories, he said, have this in them: battles of daemons against daemons, then the flights of the defeated, or the penalties inflicted by a god on those who had sinned, such as Typhon is said to have sinned against Osiris and Cronus against Uranus. The honors paid to these among us have grown dim, or have failed altogether, since they have passed away to another world. For I have learned that the Solymi, neighbors of the Lycians, honored Cronus above all; but when he had killed their leaders Arsalus, Arytus and Tosibis, and fled and removed himself somewhere or other (this they cannot say), he was neglected, while Arsalus and his men are called the gloomy gods, and the Lycians make their curses by these, in public and in private." "Many such parallels to these may be taken from the stories told in myth. And if we give certain daemons the customary names of the gods, that is no wonder," said the stranger. "For each is accustomed to be named from that to which he is assigned and whose power he shares. Among ourselves, too, one man is called Dios, another Athenaios, another Apollonios, or Dionysios, or Hermaios. But some were rightly named, as chance would have it; most received names derived from gods that do not suit them at all but have been transferred."

5.4| So much Plutarch, in the work he took pains over, On the Failure of Oracles, where among other things he also shows that daemons die, a point I too shall set out at the proper time.

5.5| For the present, however, let us gather what else the author of the plot against us says again about the power and activity of what he calls good daemons, in the work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles; for I shall use him now, as I have often done, as witness and refuter of the error about those whom they take to be gods, so that they may be put to shame, struck by their own darts and arrows.

5.6| For in this way the proof of what lies before us will become, from the very men who are dear to the gods and regarded as pious and who have searched out the account of their own matters with precision, complete and beyond appeal.

5.7| The author mentioned writes this in the work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles, where he swears that he is not disclosing the secret things of the gods, and himself charges his reader to keep hidden what is about to be said and not to bring it out to the many.

5.8| What were such matters? He says that Pan is an attendant of Dionysus, and that he, as one of the good daemons, once appeared to men working the land in the countryside. What should a good being have provided, or what at all but the presence of something good, for those thought worthy of the appearing of the good?

5.9| Was there, then, any good for those who beheld the good daemon, or did they draw an evil daemon, as they learned from the actual experience? At any rate, this admirable witness says that those thought worthy of this "good" sight suffered death all together, speaking as follows:

6.1| "Already in other cases too some were revealed as attendants of others, as Pan of Dionysus; and Apollo at Branchidae made this clear by these words. For nine men were found dead; and when the dwellers in the countryside inquired the cause, the god prophesied: 'Gold-horned Pan, attendant of grim Dionysus, walking over the wooded mountains, held a staff in his strong hand, and in the other clutched the shrill-sounding hollow pipe, and charmed the heart of the Nymphs. Piping a sharp tune he startled all the woodcutters, and amazement seized those who saw the daemon rushing on, his body chill and frenzied. And he would have seized them all with the end of chill death, had not rustic Artemis, who held a terrible anger in her breast against him, stopped his mighty rage; and you must entreat her, that she be a helper to you.'"

6.2| You have heard, it seems, the form and the deeds of the daemon whom Apollo at Branchidae calls good. Look now at the noble accomplishments of the others, for the sake of which they left their heavenly dwelling and exchanged it for life among men.

6.3| Surely they ought in every way to have set an example of self-control and to have recommended to men what is profitable and beneficial. But they did none of this; hear what he reveals, who has searched the most unspeakable of unspeakable things and was thought worthy of knowledge of the secrets.

6.4| At one time, then, he says some of these good daemons minister to erotic indulgences; at another that others take delight in drums and flutes and the clatter of women; that others again exult in battles and wars; that Artemis delights in hunting, Deo in the fruits of the earth; that Isis even now mourns Osiris and Apollo prophesies. Such are the benefits to men of those they call good daemons. Receive also the proofs of these things.

7.1| "Hecate said nothing vain or unfulfilled among the immortal gods to the wise prophets of the gods; but coming down from her father's all-powerful mind she shines always with truth, and about her a steadfast counsel abides, made firm by unbroken oracles. So invoke me with a binding spell; for you are drawing down a goddess so great that I sufficed to give life to the most exalted cosmos."

7.2| And perhaps this is why she is three-formed, and the soul too is three-parted. Of the soul one part is spirited, another appetitive; which is why she is also invoked for love affairs. Do not suppose these things to be mine; you have heard them from the author mentioned before, of whom these words also are:

7.3| "It greatly troubles me how, when summoned as superiors, they are commanded as inferiors; and how, while they demand that their servant be just, they themselves, when ordered, submit to doing unjust things; and how they would not answer the call of a man not pure from sexual relations, yet themselves do not hesitate to lead ordinary people into unlawful sexual acts."

7.4| You will find these things also in the same author's Letter to Anebo the Egyptian. In the treatise mentioned before, On the Philosophy from Oracles, he adds to what has been said, speaking as follows: "And what has been assigned to each, they themselves have declared, as Didymaeus does in these words; the question was whether one should swear to the person who administers the oath:"

7.5| "The mother of the blessed ones, Titan Rhea, takes care for flutes and the clatter of drums and the women's throng; Pallas of the fine helmet for tumult and the strife of Enyo; the daughter of Leto for chasing with her dappled hounds the mountain-ranging beasts over the deep-cliffed ridges; Hera of the sweet voice for the soft pouring of moist air; Deo for tending the grain-rich fields that nourish the ear; and Pharian Isis, beside the fruitful floods of the Nile, for seeking in frenzy her tender husband Osiris."

7.6| If, then, "flutes and the clatter of drums and the women's throng" are the concern of the Mother of the gods, we must practice these things and let go of all virtue, since the goddess mentioned cares nothing for self-control or any other deed dear to God, just as Athena cares for tumult and battles and wars, not for peace and the affairs of peace. And let the dappled hounds be the concern of the daughter of Leto, Artemis, since as a hunter in the fields she makes war on beasts, and likewise the things listed for the others. What, then, do these things contribute to a life beloved of God and blessed? Consider whether the next words seem to you to belong to a divine nature, or to a base and thoroughly wretched one.

8.1| "Pythagoras of Rhodes also declared this rightly, that the gods who are called upon at sacrifices do not take pleasure in them, but are drawn to come by some necessity of sequence, some more and some less.

8.2| Some, having made their coming a kind of habit, attend more easily, especially if they happen to be good by nature; others, even if they are in the habit of coming, are eager to do some harm, especially if someone seems to conduct himself rather carelessly in these matters.

8.3| Since Pythagoras said this, I observed from the oracles that what was said is true. For all say they have come under compulsion, and not simply, but, if one may put it so, under a persuasive compulsion.

8.4| And the words of Hecate quoted earlier, in which she says she appears: 'After the boundless, star-filled, pure light of the air, I left the great house of God and come down upon the life-nourishing earth, at your suggestions and by the persuasion of unspeakable words, with which a mortal man has learned to delight the minds of the immortals.'

8.5| And again: 'I have come, hearing your wise prayer, which the nature of mortals discovered by the suggestions of the gods.'

8.6| And still more plainly: 'Why have you called me, the goddess Hecate, from the ever-rushing aether, in such need, by god-subduing compulsions?' And next: drawing some by secret spells from the bright air easily and unwilling to the divine earth, and others, who stand midway upon the middle blasts, away from the divine fire, you insert into mortals like all-prophetic dreams, doing unseemly things to daemons.

8.7| And again: 'But those Uranians on high, hovering aloft, are borne in haste on light Harpies; and quickly bowing to god-subduing compulsions, they rush to the earth of Deo, hastening to be interpreters to mortals of things to come.' And again another, compelled, said: 'Hear me, though I am unwilling, since you have bound me with compulsion.'"

8.8| After this the author says again: "They even give out constraining formulas against themselves, as the constraining formula that Apollo issued concerning himself will show.

8.9| It is spoken thus: 'This is the name of Necessity, mighty and still heavy.' And he added:

8.10| 'Come in haste to these words, which I draw up from my heart with sacred impressions, pressed from pure fire. And the nature of your offspring, immortal Paean, dares to bring these things to light.'

8.11| And again Apollo: 'The stream of Phoebus' brightness, bending down from on high, covered by the shrill breath of pure air, charmed by songs and unspeakable words, fell around the head of the faultless receptacle of fine membranes, and filled the soft tunic, surging up again through the belly in successive waves; and from a mortal reed it begot its own voice.'"

8.12| To these the author adds: "Nothing could be clearer than these words, nor more divine and more in accord with nature. For the spirit that descends, an outflow from the heavenly power entering a living, instrument-like body, using the soul as its base, gives forth a voice through the mouth as through an instrument."

8.13| That they are compelled, these passages suffice to show. That they also ask to be released, as though their departure did not rest with themselves, you may learn from the following.

9.1| "That the gods who are called are in haste to depart, such words will show, when they say: 'Release now the lord; a mortal no longer holds a god.'

9.2| And again: 'Why, in your need, do you torment a mortal so long?'

9.3| And again: 'Go, and come quickly, having saved this man.'

9.4| And how one must release them he himself will teach, saying: 'Cease now willingly from our converse, and give the man rest, loosing from the buckthorn twigs the gray form, and lifting from his limbs the Nile linen with strong hands.'

9.5| And the release he described: 'Lift the high-prowed foot; hold back the utterance from the depths,'

9.6| and what follows these. To which he adds that, when they are slow to release him, he says: 'Spread out the linen cloths, and loose the cloud and the receptacle.' And at another time he gave out this release:

9.7| 'Naiad Nymphs, Muses, sing the great Phoebus, as many of you as sing of Apollo who strikes from afar.'

9.8| And again at another time he says: 'Loose my garlands, sprinkle my feet with white water, and wipe out the lines, and I will come. Take the laurel branch from my right hand, rub both eyes and the nostrils of the face; companions, raise the man up from the ground.'"

9.9| To which the author adds: "He therefore commands them to wipe out the lines, in order that he may depart; for these hold him fast, and so does the rest of the apparel, because it bears images of the gods who have been summoned."

9.10| I think it has been clearly shown by these passages that there is nothing at all fitting to a god, nothing great or truly divine, in spirits fallen to such a depth of lowliness that they are dragged down and pulled along by ordinary men, not through any attainment of virtue and wisdom, but if only they pursue and carry out the practices of meddling sorcery.

9.11| So neither Pythagoras of Rhodes, nor the one who gave him this testimony, nor any man at all could reasonably call them gods, nor even good daemons, since they are dragged along by mortal men, and sorcerers at that, not by their own will but by force and compulsion, and do not even have the power to release themselves from their bonds.

9.12| For if the divine is unforced, not subject to compulsion, superior to all things, impassible by nature and free, how could they be gods, who are charmed by spells that work through such figures and lines and impressions, by garlands and flowers from the earth, and by certain other meaningless and barbarous sounds and cries, and are handled by ordinary men and enslaved as if by chains, so that they cannot even keep a power of their own to act freely and by choice?

9.13| And how could they be called good daemons, when they are dragged down by force and necessity? What is the reason why they give themselves unwillingly, and not freely, to those who need help?

9.14| For if they make their appearance for a good end, being good, and if the soul had any benefit from them, they surely should have embraced the good by their own choice, going ahead of those in need with their kind deeds, and not waiting for compulsion.

9.15| But if what was done was neither good nor beneficial, which is why it did not happen by their own will, how could they be good, doing what is neither good nor profitable?

9.16| And how are they worthy of admiration and of being honored with the services due to gods, when they are enslaved to any chance sorcerers of utterly ruined character and are forced against their will to do what is neither good nor profitable, being led and dragged down, not by the acceptance of self-control among men, nor for the sake of virtue or any part of philosophy, but by the forbidden methods of sorcerers? These the same author again sets out in the letter to the Egyptian mentioned, communicating the truth and secrets to him as to a prophet, and asking to be taught by him the reasons according to which they bring these things about. At any rate, he inquires, in perplexity, somewhat as follows:

10.1| "It greatly troubles me how, when summoned as superiors, they are commanded as inferiors, and how, while they demand that their servant be just, they themselves, when ordered, submit to doing unjust things; and how they would not answer the call of a man not pure from sexual relations, yet themselves do not hesitate to lead ordinary people into unlawful sexual acts.

10.2| And they order the interpreters to abstain from animate creatures, so as not to be defiled by the vapors from bodies, yet are themselves most lured by the vapors from sacrifices; and they say the observer must not touch a corpse, yet the invocations of the gods are for the most part carried out through the dead bodies of animals.

10.3| And far more irrational than these is that a man, subject to any chance person, should frighten with threats not a daemon, say, or the soul of a dead man, but the king Sun himself, or the Moon, or one of the heavenly bodies, lying so that they may speak the truth.

10.4| For to say that he will smash the heaven, reveal the secrets of Isis, show the unspeakable thing at Abydos, stop the sacred barque, and scatter the limbs of Osiris to Typhon: what excess of madness does this leave to the one who threatens things he neither knows nor is able to do, and what abjectness to those who fear such empty fear and fabrications, like utterly foolish children?

10.5| Yet the sacred scribe Chaeremon records these things as commonly repeated among the Egyptians, and says that these and the like are the most compelling.

10.6| And what sense do the prayers themselves have, which speak of one who appeared out of the mud, and sits on the lotus, and sails on a boat, and changes his forms with each hour, and is transformed according to each sign of the zodiac? For they say he is seen so face to face, not knowing that they are attaching to him the particular affection of their own imagination."

10.7| "And if these things are said symbolically, being symbols of that god's powers, let them give the explanation of the symbols; for it is plain that if the affection were the Sun's, as in eclipses, it would be seen by all who look at him in the same way.

10.8| And what is the purpose of the meaningless names, and of the meaningless barbarian ones preferred to those proper to each? For if the hearer looks to what is signified, the same meaning remaining would suffice to make it clear, whatever the name might be.

10.9| For surely the man called the Egyptian was not Egyptian by race; and even if he was Egyptian, he did not use the Egyptian tongue, nor indeed any human speech at all. Either all these things are the contrivances and cover-ups of sorcerers, by attributing to the divine the affections that occur in ourselves, or we have unwittingly held notions about the divine contrary to how it really is."

10.10| Having said this, he is again at a loss and says to the Egyptian: "If some are impassible and others passible, for whom they say phalluses are set up and obscene speech is made on these occasions, then the callings of gods will be vain, which announce their summonings, the appeasements of wrath, and the expiations, and still more the so-called compulsions of gods. For the impassible cannot be charmed, forced or compelled."

10.11| And again he adds next: "In vain their wisdom is exercised about finding a runaway, or the purchase of land, or, as it may be, a marriage or trade, if they trouble the divine mind with these. And if it is not neglected, yet those who consort with it speak most truly about other matters but nothing secure or reliable about happiness, then those beings were neither gods nor good daemons, but that so-called deceiver."

10.12| Let this much, then, from this writing of Porphyry be set before us. And indeed these noble gods were themselves the first teachers of the evil art of sorcery. For from where could men have learned these things, except from the daemons themselves declaring what concerns them and proclaiming the binding spells against one another?

10.13| And do not suppose this account to be ours either; for we admit that we neither understand nor wish to know any of these things. But for the refutation of the absurdity concerning them, and at the same time for our own defense in withdrawing from them, let their own witness be brought forward for us, one who was wise among his associates and who knew and set out accurately all that belongs to them. The same man, then, in the collection of oracles mentioned, says this word for word:

11.1| "Not only have they themselves revealed their own way of life and the other matters mentioned, but they have also dictated in what they delight and by what they are mastered, and by what they are forced, and what one must sacrifice, and from which days one must turn away, and what sort of form the images must be given, and in what forms they themselves appear, and in what places they spend their time; and in short there is nothing which men did not learn from them before honoring them as they do. Since there are many things that demonstrate this, we shall set out a few of the many, so that the account may not be left without witness. 12. That they themselves also laid down how the images should be made and from what material, the words of Hecate will show, which run in this way:

12.1| 'But complete a purified image, as I shall teach you: make bundles of wild rue, and adorn it with small household creatures, lizards; grind together myrrh, storax and frankincense, with these creatures, and complete it in the open air under a waxing moon, praying yourself this prayer.'

12.2| Then she gave out the prayer, and taught how many lizards are to be taken: 'As many as my forms, so many creatures I bid you take, and do this very carefully; make for me a dwelling for my house from self-grown laurel; and praying much to that image, in your sleep you will see such a vision.' And again at another time she gave out such an image of herself."

13.1| "And they have themselves revealed in what forms they appear, from which the images were set up just as they are. Sarapis, at any rate, having seen Pan, says of himself: 'A radiant gleam shines through the house of the god; for he has come, he has met me, the great god. He saw my irresistible strength, my flame-ruling brilliance, the lock of hair from the crown of my head, about my bright-eyed brow, gleaming on both sides with the sacred curls of my beard.'

13.2| And Pan taught a hymn about himself, which runs thus: 'I pray, being mortal, to Pan, the god of one nature with me, two-horned, two-footed, goat-legged, delighting in luxury.' And what follows.

13.3| And Hecate says this of herself: 'Now do everything for me. In the image itself my form is that of Demeter of the shining fruits, in robes of pure white, golden-sandaled about the feet; and around her girdle long serpents, creeping with untainted tread, hang from her head down to the tips of her feet, coiling in spirals all about her in order. 4. And the material, she says, is either Parian stone or well-polished ivory.'"

14.1| "In many places the gods show in what they say, by foretelling, that since they know the makeup of each person's birth, they are, if one may put it so, supreme magicians and supreme casters of nativities. And again in oracles he said that Apollo said: 'Invoke Hermes and the Sun likewise, on the day of the Sun, and the Moon when this day belongs to her, and Cronus and Rhea, and next Aphrodite, with unspeakable invocations, which the best of magicians found, the king of the seven-toned, whom all know.' When they said, 'You mean Ostanes,' he added: 'and above all call on each god seven times.'"

14.2| The same author also sets this beside it: "The symbols of Hecate are a three-colored wax, made of white, black and red, bearing the form of Hecate holding a whip, a torch and a sword, with a serpent coiled about her; and sea stars of the sky are to be nailed before the doors. For the gods themselves have revealed these things by these words. And Pan says: 'Drive these on, setting wax in the strength of fire, of mottled hue: let it be white and black, and the fire bright of a blazing coal, the terror of the hounds of the underworld, the dread carving of Hecate. Let there be a torch at the hands, and the avenging sword, and a serpent girded up, holding the maiden with knots, set terribly about the head, and a dappled key together, and the might of the daemons, the loud crack of the whip.'"

14.3| By these words and the like, this noble Greek philosopher, this admirable theologian, this initiate of the unspeakable, shows that the philosophy from oracles contains secret oracles of the gods, openly proclaiming the plots against men of the evil and truly daemonic power. For what benefit to human life could there be from the evil art of sorcery?

14.4| What could the elaborate fuss over lifeless images have that is dear to God? What likeness of a divine power could the molding of such figures be? Why was it not better to advise philosophizing than practicing magic and pursuing forbidden things, when the way of life that follows virtue and philosophy is of itself enough for a life happy and blessed? And he, heightening the refutation he himself gives, adds the following to what has been said:

15.1| "That Hecate loves the symbols of the engraved marks, comparing them to what men love, she has revealed by these words: 'What mortal has not longed to acquire coins of bronze and gold and gleaming silver? And who does not love them, standing over all else, gathering together in one the many-sharing of men, I say?'

15.2| And she showed not only that the marks are dear, but that, as we said, the gods are themselves circumscribed, and are as if in a sacred place in the image set beneath them. For they were not able to be carried upon the earth, but only upon sacred ground; and sacred is that which bears the image of the god, and when it is removed the divine hold upon the earth is loosed."

15.3| By all this I think it has been plainly demonstrated that their gods turned out to be certain earthbound daemons, fond of passions; and so I think that it was with sound reasoning that I made my turning away from them.

15.4| You see, at any rate, that, as they say, the figures of magic and such marks hold them in certain places of the earth, whereas if there were anything truly divine, it ought not to set foot anywhere else than in the mind of the soul alone, and that cleansed of all filth and every stain, adorned with self-control and justice and the other virtues.

15.5| For with these laid down beforehand in the soul of a man, as in a truly sacred place, the presence of the divine Spirit might fittingly come; and there would be no further need of the evil art of sorcery for souls prepared by virtuous and God-loving conduct to receive the divine.

15.6| So it is expressly proved from all this that certain earthbound daemons are caught, fond of passions and fond of bodies, of whom we were speaking just now. But next, hear what the same author sets down in the same work about the failure of their celebrated oracles, in this manner:

16.1| "'Concerning Pytho and Claros, the oracles of Phoebus, our utterance will speak to you with lawful pronouncements. Countless divine oracles bubbled forth upon the back of the earth, springs and swirling vapors; and some the earth herself, opening, took back into her hollows, and others countless ages destroyed. Only for the sun, who gives light to mortals, do there still exist in the valleys of Didyma the inspired water of Mycale, and at the foot of Pytho beneath the Parnassian crag, and rugged Claros, the harsh mouth of the Phoebus-voice.' And to the people of Nicaea he prophesied: 'It is not possible to restore the speaking voice of Pytho; for already, dimmed by long ages, it has been thrown under the bars of an oracle-less silence. Offer the prophetic sacrifices to Phoebus as is customary.'

16.2| To this it is fitting here, in due course, to add also the words of Plutarch from the work he composed, On the Failure of Oracles: 'When Ammonius had stopped, I said, "Rather, Cleombrotus, tell us about the oracle; for the ancient reputation of the divinity there is great, but now it seems to be fading."

16.3| As Cleombrotus remained silent and looked down, Demetrius said there was no need to inquire or be puzzled about the oracles there, when we see here the dimming of the oracles, or, better, the failure of all but one or two, but that we should consider together for what reason it has so weakened.

16.4| For why speak of the rest, when Boeotia, which in former times was full of voices on account of its oracles, has now failed altogether, like streams, and a great drought of prophecy has overtaken the country. For nowhere else now but around Lebadea does Boeotia offer those who wish a drink of prophecy; of the others, some are held by silence and some by complete desolation.' Still further, the same author says this about the death of their daemons:

17.1| 'That it is not gods, whom it befits to be released from the affairs of earth, but daemons, servants of the gods, who preside over the oracles,' he said, 'does not seem to me an unreasonable claim. But to take from the verses of Empedocles, almost for a drachma, the notion of attributing to these daemons sins and delusions and errors sent by the gods, and finally even to suppose them subject to death like men, I consider rather too bold and more barbaric.

17.2| Cleombrotus then questioned Philip about who the young man was and where he came from. Learning his name and city, he said, 'We ourselves do not fail to notice, Heracleon, that we have fallen into strange arguments; but it is not possible, on matters of great importance, to advance to a plausible opinion without making use of great first principles.

17.3| You have not noticed that you are taking away what you grant. For you admit that there are daemons, but by claiming that they are not base and not mortal, you no longer keep them as daemons. How are they different from the gods, if they possess both the imperishable in essence and the impassible and sinless in virtue?'

17.4| To this, while Heracleon was silently thinking something over, Philip said: 'Not only Empedocles, Heracleon, left base daemons, but also Plato, Xenocrates and Chrysippus; and Democritus too, praying to meet with fortunate images, clearly knew that there are others that are hard to handle and have wicked inclinations and impulses.

17.5| Concerning the death of such beings, I once heard an account from a man neither foolish nor boastful. He was the father of Aemilianus the orator, whom some of us have heard, Epitherses, my fellow citizen and my teacher in grammar.

17.6| He said that once, sailing to Italy, he boarded a ship carrying merchant goods and many passengers; that in the evening, near the Echinades islands, the wind died down and the ship, drifting, came close to Paxi; that the majority were still awake and drinking, since they had dined; and that suddenly, from the island of Paxi, a voice was heard calling out loudly for Thamus, so that they were astonished; for Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name to many of the passengers. Twice, then, he was called and kept silent, but the third time he answered the caller, and the other, raising his voice, said, "When you come opposite Palodes, announce that great Pan is dead."

17.7| Epitherses said that all who heard this were astounded, and debated among themselves whether it was better to do what was ordered or not to meddle but let it be. In this way Thamus decided: if there was a breeze he would sail past in silence, but if there was calm and stillness about the place he would announce what he had heard.

17.8| 'So when he came opposite Palodes, with neither wind nor swell, Thamus, looking from the stern toward the land, said, just as he had heard, that great Pan is dead; and before he had finished there came a great groan, the groan of many rather than of one, mixed with wonder.

17.9| And since many people were on board, the report quickly got about in Rome, and Tiberius Caesar summoned Thamus. Tiberius so believed the story that he inquired and searched about Pan; and the many scholars around him conjectured that it was the son born of Hermes and Penelope.'

17.10| Philip, then, had some of those present as witnesses, who had heard it from the old man Aemilianus. And Demetrius said that among the islands around Britain there are many scattered deserted ones, some of which are named after daemons and heroes; that he himself had sailed, for the sake of inquiry and sightseeing, with the emperor's escort to the nearest of the deserted islands, which had not many inhabitants, but all of them held sacred and inviolate by the Britons.

17.11| 'Soon after his arrival there was great disturbance in the air and many portents, winds burst forth and fiery storm-clouds fell. When it subsided, the islanders said that the passing of one of the mighty ones had occurred. For as a lamp when lit, they said, does no harm, but when it is put out is distressing to many, so great souls have kindly and painless kindlings, but their extinctions and destructions often, as now, nourish winds and hail, and often poison the air with pestilential afflictions.

17.12| There, however, is one island in which Cronus is imprisoned, guarded by Briareus as he sleeps; for sleep has been contrived as his bond; and many daemons are about him as attendants and servants.'"

17.13| So much Plutarch. It is worth noting the time at which he says the daemon's death took place. This was the reign of Tiberius, in which our Savior, spending his time among men, is recorded to have driven every kind of daemon out of human life, so that some of the daemons even knelt before him and begged not to be handed over to the Tartarus that awaited them.

17.14| You have, then, the time of the overthrow of the daemons, which is recorded as having happened at no other time from the beginning of the ages, just as the abolition of human sacrifice among the nations came about at no other time than after the proclamation of the teaching of the Gospel went out to all men. Let this, then, be our demonstration from the more recent history.

18.1| But since what has been said is not familiar to everyone, it seems good to me to pass from here to what is plain to all lovers of learning, and to examine the oracles most ancient in date, sung on the lips of all the Greeks and handed on in the lessons of every city to those who attend school.

18.2| Taking up, then, the old histories from the beginning, consider what the Pythian replies to the Athenians when they were afflicted by plague on account of the death of Androgeos. All the Athenians were stricken with plague through the death of one man, and asked to obtain help from the gods.

18.3| What, then, does their savior and god advise them? Perhaps someone will suppose that he told them to take care in future of justice and humanity and the rest of virtue, or to repent of the offense and perform something holy and pious, so that the gods might be propitiated by it. But it was none of these.

18.4| For what concern were these things to those marvelous gods, or rather to the thoroughly wicked daemons? So again they speak what is akin and proper to themselves, what is pitiless, savage and inhuman: plague upon plague and deaths upon deaths.

18.5| Apollo, at any rate, orders them to send each year seven youths of their own children, in the flower of age, and the same number of maidens, fourteen innocent and harmless persons in exchange for one, every year and not once only, to be sacrificed in Crete at the court of Minos. So even until Socrates' time, over five hundred years later, this dreadful and most inhuman tribute kept its memory among the Athenians. This, then, was the reason why Socrates' death too was postponed.

18.6| At any rate, a certain one of the moderns, with a manly reasoning, sets down and at the same time refutes the oracle, in his own treatise, The Detection of Sorcerers. Hear his words and not mine, as he addresses the giver of oracles somewhat as follows:

19.1| "Well then, did the Athenians, after killing Androgeos and being stricken with plague for it, not say that they were sorry? Or, if they did not say so, was it not proper for you to say, 'Repent rather'? Instead you say: 'The end of plague and famine will come, if you apportion by lot your own bodies, male and female, to Minos, sending them over the divine sea, as recompense for your unjust deeds; so the god will be gracious.'

19.2| I pass over the fact that you were indignant when Androgeos died at Athens, yet sleep through so many such deaths everywhere and always. And yet you knew that Minos then ruled the sea and had great power, that all Greece courted him, and that for this reason he was most just and a good lawgiver, that Homer thought him a companion of great Zeus, and that after death he is a judge in Hades; and it was for this reason that you exacted these penalties on his behalf.

19.3| But I do not at all overlook this either: that you let the murderers go, and commanded the entirely innocent to be sent to die, and that toward a man whom you were going to proclaim as a common judge of mankind, who did not even know how to judge this very case. And yet how many, you gods, are you in justice bound to dispatch to the Athenians in place of those maidens, whom you unjustly killed for Androgeos?"

19.4| This same author, taking up the story of the Heraclidae, calls to account Apollo, to show how many he caused to die by the ambiguity of his oracles, speaking as follows:

20.1| "Since I have somehow made mention of this, come, let me go through in due order the story of the Heraclidae. For when they set out to invade the Peloponnese at the Isthmus, they failed. Aristomachus, then, son of Aridaeus (for Aridaeus had died in the invasion), came to hear from you about the route; he was eager, just like his father.

20.2| And you say to him: 'The gods show you victory by the road of the narrows.' And he set out to attempt it at the Isthmus and died in battle. His son Temenus, ill-fated, came third in line from the ill-fated; and you give him the same charge as to Aristomachus his father; and he said, 'But that man too died in the invasion, obeying you.'

20.3| And you said, 'I do not mean by the narrow land, but by the broad-bellied one,' since it was hard to say 'by the sea'; yet he went by sea, making it appear that he was going in by land, and encamped between Naupactus and Typaeum; and he brought down with a javelin Carnus, the Aetolian horseman, son of Phylander, doing well, as it seems to me. And when a plague struck nearby and Aristodemus died, they withdrew again, and Temenus came and complained of the failure, and heard that he had paid the penalty for the divine messenger, and about the prayer to Apollo Carneius, the verse spoken through the oracle: 'You killed our messenger and paid the penalty.'

20.4| What then does Temenus say? What must I do? And how might I appease you? 'Pray to Apollo Carneius to render him reverence.' O most polluted and shameless seer! Did you not know that the man who heard 'narrows' would miss the narrows? Yet, knowing it all the same, you gave the oracle, and then look on while he fails.

20.5| But the 'narrows' is ambiguous, so that if he wins you may seem the cause of the victory, but if he is defeated you are not the cause of the defeat, and you can escape to 'the broad-bellied.' But the man did come by the broad-bellied route, and did not succeed. Again an escape is found: Carnus the messenger, who died.

20.6| And yet how, most excellent one, when you cared so for Carnus, did you bid him be god-possessed for others but not for yourself? And when you ought to have saved the one man Carnus, you both looked on while he died and cast a Homeric plague upon the host when he had died, and prescribed prayers for the plague?

20.7| And if he accomplished nothing by praying, you would find some other remedy by your sophistry, and you would never have ceased, they asking and you quibbling, so that you would be unconvicted in your mischief, whether they won or lost. For their suffering and desire are enough to beguile them, so that even if they were slaughtered a thousand times they would not disbelieve you."

20.8| It is worth adding to these the account of Croesus. He was king of Lydia, having received the rule that came down to him from ancient times; then, hoping to do better than his ancestors, he determined to honor the gods, and having put all to the test he preferred Apollo at Delphi, and, adorning the shrine with golden bowls and ingots and an innumerable multitude of offerings, in a short time made it the richest on earth, not omitting in his magnanimity as much as sufficed for sacrifices.

20.9| Since, then, he had lent so much beforehand to the god, the Lydian, naturally emboldened by these great works of piety, resolved to march against the Persians, planning to enlarge his empire greatly with the god's alliance.

20.10| What, then, does the marvelous giver of oracles do? That very one at Delphi, the Pythian, the "friendly," prepares for the suppliant, the pious man, the one who sought refuge with him, not that he should win another's realm but that he should lose his own. Not willingly, it seems to me, but rather in ignorance of the outcome (for since the god did not know what was to come, not being a god nor any power superior to man, he fitted the oracle in a sophistic way to either side); and, in effect saying, "Croesus, having crossed the Halys, will destroy a great empire," he overthrows the long-lasting great empire of Lydia, which had come down by succession from his ancestors to the pious man, paying back this god-loving man with this fruit of his excessive zeal for him. Over this the author, not without reason, is indignant; hear him:

21.1| "You seem truly to know what is worth a grain of sand, but nothing noble. At any rate, the smell of a tortoise boiling, with its strong hide, reaching your mind, is knowledge worth a grain of sand, and not even true knowledge, but befitting a boastful and shameless one who lifts his brow over empty bits of knowledge and persuades the Lydian slave Croesus not to despise him.

21.2| Who a little later was going to ask you, on the test, whether he should march against the Persians, making you adviser for his own madness and greed. To him you did not hesitate to say that 'having crossed the Halys, he will destroy a great empire.'

21.3| This much was well done, that you cared nothing about whether he would suffer something terrible from an ambiguous oracle after being lifted up to attack another's realm, nor whether some bitter people, who should have praised you for tripping up a madman, would also accuse you of not having uttered a balanced word, so that the Lydian might hesitate and take counsel; but 'destroy' can be understood by the Greeks in this way, not as losing one's own empire but as acquiring another's.

21.4| For Cyrus, half Mede or half Persian, a mule in the riddle as being from a royal line on his mother's side and a private one on his father's, shows indeed the swollen muse, but also a prophecy without prophetic knowledge, if the seer did not know that he would fail to understand the riddle.

21.5| And if it was not from ignorance but from luxury and wickedness that he was playing, my, what divine playthings! And if not even that, but because it had to happen so, this is a most unholy kind of sophistic argument. But why, if it had to happen so, do you, wretch, sit at Delphi singing empty and vain things? What use are you to us? Why are we mad, hurrying to you from all parts of the earth? And why do you sniff for the savor of sacrifice?"

21.6| Such is the frankness of Oenomaus in his Detection of Sorcerers, not free of Cynic bitterness. For he does not even want the oracles admired among all the Greeks to be those of a daemon, let alone of a god, but the deceptions and sophistries of sorcerers, rigged up to deceive the many. Since we have once mentioned them, nothing will prevent us from hearing other refutations too, and first the one in which the same man says he was himself deceived by Clarian Apollo, writing as follows:

22.1| "But surely we too had to share in the comedy, and not be proud as if we had not fallen into the common madness, and to tell of the trade in wisdom that we ourselves carried on, from Asia, O Clarian, with you: 'There is in the land of Trachis a garden of Heracles, with everything blooming, plucked by all the whole day long and never lessened, but heavy continually with waters.'

22.2| Then I, the fool, hearing this, was puffed up by Heracles too, and with the garden of Heracles blooming I dreamed of some Hesiodic sweat on account of Trachis, and of an easy life afterward thanks to the blooming garden.

22.3| Then, when I asked whether the gods were helping me, one of the crowd said, swearing by the very gods who help, that he had heard from you this very thing given to Callistratus, a merchant of Pontus."

22.4| So when I heard this, how indignant do you think I was, as if I were being robbed of virtue by him? Yet, though vexed, I looked over the merchant to see whether he too had been warmed by Heracles; and indeed he too plainly toiled at some labor, aimed at profit, and expected some sweet life from the profit.

22.5| And when the merchant was seen to be put on a level with me, I no longer accepted the oracle, nor Heracles, but disdained to share in the same things, looking to their present toils and the mangers they hoped for.

22.6| Nor did the robber appear to be without a share in the oracle, nor the soldier, nor the man in love, nor the woman in love, nor the flatterer, nor the orator, nor the informer. For to each, according to his desire, toil leads the way, and cheer is what is expected."

22.7| After setting this out, he immediately adds that, having asked a second and a third time, he recognized that these marvelous beings knew nothing, and covered their ignorance only with the darkness of obscurity. He says, then:

23.1| "When my trade was already on the road, but I needed a man to guide me to wisdom, and such a man seemed hard to find, I asked you to point him out as well: 'Among the well-appointed and the Achaeans he will place a need, and what is guessed will hold not even a little.'

23.2| What do you say? If I had wanted to become a sculptor or a painter and sought teachers, would it have been enough for me to hear 'among the well-appointed', and would I not have called the speaker mad?

23.3| But perhaps you are not able to conceive this, for human ways have much obscurity; but where it would be better for me to travel from Colophon, it is no longer so unclear to the god: 'A man, sending a stone from a well-twisted sling, kills geese, huge grass-eaters.' Who will tell me what the huge grass-eating geese mean? Or who the well-twisted sling? Amphilochus, or the Dodonaean, or you at Delphi, if I were to come there: would you not go off and hang yourself with the well-twisted sling, along with your unintelligible poem?"

23.4| But now that these have been refuted in this way, it is time to see again, from the start, how the same man refutes the most ancient oracles at Delphi, those most admired in the Greek histories.

23.5| "The Persian army was numerous and armed against the Athenians, and they had no other hope of safety but the god alone; and not knowing who he was, they called upon the helper of their fathers. This was Apollo at Delphi.

23.6| What, then, did this marvelous being do? Did he fight for his own people? Did he remember the libation and the savor, and the hecatombs they were accustomed to offer him in sacrifice? Not at all. But what does he say? To flee, and to flee after providing themselves a wooden wall, meaning by this the fleet, through which alone, he says, they would be saved when the city was burned.

23.7| Oh, the great help of a god! Then he pretends to predict a siege, not merely of the rest of the city's buildings, but even of those dedicated to the gods. But this, even without an oracle, everyone could expect from the enemy's advance." The author, reasonably enough, mocks again the Greek deception, refuting it in these words:

24.1| "But such things, perhaps, belong to some willfully malicious person; those to the Athenians must rather be brought to judgment. Let what was said to the Athenians be told: 'O wretched ones, why do you sit? Flee to the ends of the earth, leaving your city. For neither the head stays firm nor the body, neither the hands nor the feet at the bottom; but fire will bring it down, and sharp Ares, driving his Syrian-born chariot. He will destroy many towers here and ruin them; and many temples of the immortals he will give to devouring fire. Even now, perhaps, they stand streaming with sweat, trembling with fear.'

24.2| Behold the oracle to the Athenians. Is there anything prophetic in it? One might say, 'By Zeus, you were confident enough in it.' But if you add what is said when they begged for help, it will be understood. Let it be added, then: 'Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus, though she implores him with many words . . . but to you I will say this word again, making it firm as adamant: when all else is taken . . . far-seeing Zeus gives Tritogeneia a wooden wall to remain alone unsacked, which will help you and your children. Do not wait for cavalry and infantry coming, turning your back; yet some day you will face them. O divine Salamis, you will destroy the children of women, whether Demeter is scattered or gathered.'

24.3| Your Zeus is worthy of Zeus, O son of Zeus; and your Athena of Athena, O brother of Athena. This zeal and counter-zeal befit father and daughter, or rather the gods. This Olympian, unable to destroy this one city unless he brought against it that limitless army from Susa, must have been truly great, holding the sovereignty of the universe, and persuasive too, moving so many nations out of Asia into Europe, yet unable in Europe to overturn one city.

24.4| And you, at once bold and reckless for nothing, do you not groan? Men would say it, on whose behalf Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus. Or was Zeus not angry at the men, but at the stones and the timbers? And then you saved the men, while he burned the buildings with imported fire? For he had no thunderbolt at that time.

24.5| Or are we not rather the bold and reckless ones, in not allowing you to babble in this way? And how, O seer, did you know that divine Salamis would destroy the children of women, yet did not know whether Demeter would be scattered or gathered? And how did you not know this, that one could say the children of women are one's own, and could as well say the enemy's, once one perceives the trick?

24.6| One must wait for what turns out; for one of these things must turn out. Indeed 'divine Salamis' would not have been out of place even if they had been defeated, since it is addressed in so pitiful a tone; and the coming battle of the ships, 'whether Demeter be scattered or gathered,' is plastered over with poetic solemnity, so that it may become an oracle undetectable by its sophistry, and so that it should not at once be clear that no naval battle takes place in winter.

24.7| Already, too, the tragedy is not hidden, nor the gods brought in on the stage, the one pleading, the other not moved: useful for the future and for the unforeseen turn of the war, the one for those who are saved, the other for those who are lost. For if they were saved, behold, the entreaties of Pallas were foretold, being enough to bend the wrath of Zeus; and if not, that too was not unprepared by the seer: 'Pallas cannot appease Zeus.' The craftsman mixed the oracle for half-evil fortunes, as though Zeus fulfilled his own purpose in one respect and did not scorn his daughter's petition in the other.

24.8| And that many towers would be destroyed, if they came with fennel stalks and not with iron and fire, would perhaps have been false, since even with fennel stalks so many men would surely have accomplished something. 'But I,' he says, 'discovered the wooden wall, the only one unsacked.' That is advice, not prophecy, and not unlike 'flee, do not stay, and do not be ashamed to be a coward.'

24.9| The man who solved that riddle was no worse than you at seeing that the Athenians' city was the Persian's pretext for the expedition, and that the whole advance was made upon it first and foremost, since I myself, though no seer, perceiving this, would have told the Athenian too, and not only the Lydian, to flee, turning his back. 'For some day you will face them'; for a great cavalry and infantry come on.

24.10| And that it was by ships and not by land: for it would have been ridiculous for people who had a fleet and lived by the sea not to pack up everyone, take all the food they had, and be saved, handing over the land to whoever wanted it."

24.11| So much for what was said to the Athenians; the answers to the Lacedaemonians are very weak and laughable. For, he says, either the whole city will be besieged, or it will mourn a king who has perished. And it was likely in every way that anyone could guess that either this or that would happen.

24.12| But surely it was not the prophecy of a god to be ambiguous in such a way through ignorance of what was to come, when he ought to have helped and shown himself in due season as savior of the Greeks, and above all to secure for the Greeks, as his own friends, victory over their enemies and the barbarians; or if he could not do this, at least to see that they neither suffered nor were taken. But he does not do even this, and does not even know how the matter of their defeat will turn out. Hear, therefore, what the refutation says on these points:

25.1| "'But the same advice need not be given to the Lacedaemonians,' you will say. True. For you did not know, sophist, where the affairs of Sparta would go, as you did of Attica. You feared lest you tell them to flee, and then they flee, and the enemy do not come.

25.2| Since, then, you had to say something, you spoke to the Lacedaemonians thus: 'To you, dwellers of broad Sparta, either the great and glorious city will be sacked by the sons of Perseus, or, if not, the land of Lacedaemon will mourn a dead king of the line of Heracles.'

25.3| Again, the most unprophetic of connectives. But let us leave it, lest by attacking you twice over the same point we seem both tiresome and at a loss, and let us examine the rest.

25.4| All looked to you in so great a danger, and you were for them both the announcer of the future and the adviser of what was to be done. They trusted you, and you were persuaded that they were simpletons, and that the present moment was enough to lead and trip up the simple not only to the sophist-shops of Delphi and Dodona, but already to bird-divinations, meal-divinations and ventriloquists.

25.5| And not only the gods were trusted at that time, but weasels, crows and stumbles in sleep; so it is not unclear that they would not have accepted both rather than one, nor the greater in place of the lesser, and it was lesser that one man, the king, should fall in place of all.

25.6| With the city falling, he too would have no way to escape; but if he were stationed elsewhere, perhaps something unexpected might happen. It remains that those who reasoned thus should send the king to fight, and themselves stay at home outside danger and wait.

25.7| For the man who stands opposite the countless host with a few men there is plain destruction, while Sparta had respite from fear and unexpected hopes. And the sophistry would be equally undetectable whether the city escaped or was taken.

25.8| Why so? Because it was not said, by Zeus, 'if the king dies, the city will be saved,' but that either he alone will perish or the whole city; and this is blameless in either case, whether he alone perishes or not alone. This is the fruit of conceit and folly." So much for that. But it is not right to pass over what he again prophesied to the Cnidians when they prayed and asked for the god's alliance:

26.1| "The Cnidians too suffered something like this when Harpagus marched against them. For when they attempted to dig through the isthmus there and make an island of their city, they set about the first part of the work, but when the labor was against them, they were already giving up, and consulted the oracle.

26.2| And you said to them: 'Do not fortify the isthmus nor dig it; for Zeus would have made it an island, if he had wished.' And the fools were persuaded, turned back, and delivered themselves to Harpagus. The trick: since escape was not certain if they dug, you stopped that; and so that you should not, by bidding them keep at the work, be promising escape.

26.3| In this you did not add that it was better not to dig, but that it did not seem good to Zeus that it be an island. So in the dissuasion both outcomes were evenly balanced, while in exhortation escape would have been the prominent promise; so it was safe for the sophist to turn them away from it. Thus, having said nothing of what they had come for, you sent them away thinking they had heard something."

26.4| I think this sufficiently refutes the feebleness both of those who give the oracles and of those who consult them, and shows that nothing true or inspired is to be found in the oracles described.

26.5| And the malice of their character, whether of evil daemons or of the men who play the part of the oracles, you may see if you learn that they also stirred up those who consulted them to war against one another, when they should have been arbiters of peace and friendship.

26.6| At one time, then, the god at Delphi stirs the Lacedaemonians, as his own kin and friends, against the Messenians; at another he gives oracles to the Messenians against the Lacedaemonians, on condition that they in their turn propitiate the daemons with human sacrifice. Hear also what is said about these matters:

27.1| "Wisdom, when present with the art of divination, will judge such things, and will not allow it to speak at random, since she has fastened the cables of all things and laid claim to the first rank; nor will she allow the vain Pythian to give oracles either to these men or to the Lacedaemonians concerning the Messenians and the land that the Messenians held, having defeated the Lacedaemonians by trickery: 'Phoebus bids you pursue not only the works of battle with your hand; by trickery the people holds the Messenian land, and by the same arts as began it, a man will be taken.'

27.2| Wisdom bids them rather remember peace, and frugality, and self-sufficiency. But they, adorned by the laws of Lycurgus, came to inquire out of insatiable greed and empty glory, so as not to seem inferior to the Messenians in battle, supposing themselves bred under laws of endurance.

27.3| But if they had really been bred under laws of endurance, they would have endured with little, and would have been in no need of battle, nor of arms, nor of the rest of that senselessness.

27.4| This to the Lacedaemonians against the Messenians; and again this to the Messenians against the Lacedaemonians. For you give oracles to the Messenians against the Lacedaemonians too, and not merely to the Lacedaemonians against the Messenians: 'The lot calls a maiden of the line of Aepytus; whomever you give to the daemons below, you may save Ithome.'

27.5| For I do not accept the excuses, that the victim was not purely of the race of Aepytus, so that the rites were left unfulfilled for the Messenians. Such you are, a creature for confusing things." Such is the ancient history. But countless things like these may be seen in our own time too, from ancient times down to ourselves, as the rulers of the day were at one time driven into fruitless wars by the counsel of oracles, at another failed through the obscurity of what was prophesied, and at another were led astray by the deception of the oracles themselves.

27.6| Why speak of how, in the greatest calamities, whether in battles against enemies or in the dangers of bodily sicknesses, they gained nothing from the help or healing of the reputed gods?

27.7| Such are the results that oracles always and throughout produce for them, as the ancient history establishes.

27.8| But since one of the most talked-of oracles of the Pythian among the Greeks was that to Lycurgus, to whom as he approached the Pythia cried out those famous lines: "You have come, Lycurgus, to my rich temple, dear to Zeus and to all who hold Olympian homes. I am in doubt whether to pronounce you a god or a man; but still more I expect you are a god. O Lycurgus, you come seeking good government; but I will give you," and what is added to this: come, let us look at what the refutation mentioned before perceived in these. He writes thus:

28.1| "But you said that Tyrtaeus, as guide and scout, once came to you from hollow Lacedaemon, 'dear to Zeus and to all who hold Olympian homes,' and that you were in doubt whether to pronounce him a god or a man, but still more a god, because he came to ask for good government.

28.2| And how, if he was a god, did the friend of Zeus and of all the Olympians not know a civil law? But since perhaps such things are not found apart from a god, which were revealed by the god's voice to this most godlike of men, come, let us look at the divine voice, and what you taught Lycurgus: 'You come seeking good government; but I will give you . . .'

28.3| 'Give!' I would say; for you have promised no such gift to anyone yet. 'That you may give pledges and oaths and justice to one another and to foreigners by oracles, honoring your elders purely and cleanly, and respecting the sons of Tyndareus, and Menelaus and the other immortal heroes who are in divine Lacedaemon, thus far-seeing Zeus will spare you.'

28.4| O Apollo, what teaching and divine charge! And the journey for these things is not long, whether from the Peloponnese to Delphi, or even to the Hyperboreans, from whom they say there came, by an oracle, the dwellers of another Asteria, prophetess of fragrant Delos, and its priests.

28.5| It seems to me that this Lycurgus had no nurse, and never sat beside his elders, from whom and from her he could have heard things finer and wiser than these.

28.6| Perhaps you will add something, if Lycurgus begs you to say something clear. 'If some lead well and others follow,' I shall no longer say that this belongs to that same session of elders, and I shall ask Lycurgus not to weary in trying whether he can carry off from you some civil teaching to take back to Sparta.

28.7| 'There are two roads, farthest apart from each other: the one leads to freedom, to an honored house; the other to slavery, a house men flee. The one may be crossed by manliness and sacred concord, which you must lead for your peoples as a path; the other, through hateful strife and cowardly ruin, they reach . . . ; and that one must be guarded against.'

28.8| You bid them be above all brave: this we have often heard even from cowards; and also like-minded: this not only from the wise but even from the very rebels. So we release you from this charge.

28.9| And yet, though a seer, did you not know that we have often received it from many, without having eaten laurel or drunk the water of Castalia, or ever raised our brow over wisdom?

28.10| Speak, then, about courage; speak about freedom; speak about like-mindedness, in what way these come to be in a city; and do not order us who do not know to lead the peoples on this road, but lead yourself. For it is beautiful, but impassable to us and fearful." To this he adds:

29.1| And you are ready to speak about marriage too: "Take a foal of horse-breeding Argos, dark-maned."

29.2| And about children, to Eetion: "No one honors you, though you are much honored; Labda is with child, and will bear a rolling stone."

29.3| And about colonies: "Set out against the golden men, a people of many nations, bearing bronze on your shoulders and iron in your hands."

29.4| And about empty glory: "Of all the earth the Pelasgian plain is best; Thracian horses, Lacedaemonian women, and men who drink the water of fair Arethusa."

29.5| And you seem to me no better than the so-called portent-readers, nor than the other beggar-priests and sophists. But I should not at all wonder that they trip people up for pay; I do wonder at you, the god, and at men, if they pay to be tripped up.

29.6| Then that famous Socrates, asked whether he should marry or not, answered neither one, but that he would repent either way; and to a man who wished for children he said he would not do well, since he made no account of how he might make the best use of them if children were born to him, but looked only at how he might get them.

29.7| And to another, who had decided to go abroad because things were going badly for him at home, he said he was not deliberating rightly: for he would leave his country behind, but take his ignorance with him, which would make him discontented with those there as with those here. And he did this not only when asked, but also going of his own accord to such meetings.

30.1| "'Twenty days before the Dog Star and twenty after, use Dionysus as a physician in a shady house.' This is a medical prescription for Athenians troubled by the heat, not a prophecy.

30.2| 'Erginus, son of Clymenus, son of Presbon, you have come late seeking offspring; yet all the same fit a new tip to the old plough-beam.' That a young wife should live with an old man, if he desires children, is not a seer's knowledge either, but that of one who knows nature. But desire drives fools out of their wits."

31.1| Therefore I also advise you to take a rod to them, if you cannot persuade them to learn, instead of their despicable questions, something worthy of the divine school; or else, why say to Antiochus of Paros, who had lost his property in political nonsense and came to you grieving: "Antiochus, go to Thasos, and dwell on the renowned island." He would have profited far more by hearing: "Antiochus, come to your senses, and do not lament in poverty."

31.2| Or to the Cretans who came: "You dwellers of Phaestus and Tarra, and of Dium of many streams, I bid you perform the Pythian purification of Phoebus, being holy, that you may dwell in Crete, prosperity not by your fathers' laws, and worshiping Zeus."

31.3| They would have done better to hear this: "Dwellers in nonsense and madness and great conceit, I bid you perform the purification of your own nonsense, being holy, that you may dwell in wisdom, prosperity not by your fathers' laws but by worshiping the divine." As though you yourself did not need purification more than Crete, you who dream up some Orphic or Epimenidean purifications.

32.1| Why, most wise one, do you say to Charilaus and Archelaus, the kings of the Lacedaemonians, "If they share half of the acquired portion with Apollo, it will be much better for them"? And to what other Apollo do you speak? Surely not to yourself, shameless seer, lest someone reproach you for sharing so badly with the robbers.

32.2| So let that stand. Now let us add to these the passages in which Apollo again admires Archilochus, who in his poems used every kind of foul and unspeakable abuse against women, which no sober man could bear even to hear; and Euripides, who was cast out of the company and philosophy of Socrates, and is still now acted in tragedy on the stage; and, besides these, Homer, whom the noble Plato expels from his commonwealth as useful in nothing, but rather as the poet of tales that corrupt the young to the utmost. On these matters the author mentioned before mocks the oracle-giving god somewhat as follows:

33.1| "'An immortal and renowned son shall be yours, Telesicles, among men.' And the son was Archilochus.

33.2| 'You shall have a son, Mnesarchides, whom all men will honor, and he will leap to noble fame, and win the sweet grace of sacred garlands.'

33.3| And the son was Euripides. And to Homer: 'Your life has two portions, one of two dim suns, the other equal to the immortals, living and dead.' And for this he was told: 'Blessed and ill-fated, for you were born for both.'

33.4| It is not a man who speaks, but one who once insisted that he, being a god, need not care for wretched mortals. Come then, O god, do not overlook us either. For we too desire, unless we are doing some wrong, some of us noble fame, some sacred garlands, some a portion equal to the gods, and some immortality itself.

33.5| What was it, then, that made Archilochus seem to you worthy of heaven? Do not begrudge, most humane of the gods, the road above to other men as well. What do you command us to do? Plainly the deeds of Archilochus, if we are to appear worthy of your hearth:

33.6| to revile bitterly the women who will not marry us, and to lay into the perverts as well, since they are far worse than other bad men; and not without meter, for that is the speech of gods too, as of divine men such as Archilochus.

33.7| And perhaps this is nothing to wonder at. For through excellence in these things a household is well managed, a private life is well ordered, and cities and nations stand together in concord and good government.

33.8| It was not unreasonably, then, that he seemed to you a servant of the Muses, and that his killer seemed unworthy of entering among you gods or of hearing your voice, having killed a man who could speak.

33.9| So the threat against Archias was not unjust, nor was the Pythia out of season in avenging Archilochus, long dead, and ordering the polluted man out of the temple: 'For you killed a servant of the Muses.'

33.10| I did not at all find you unseemly in defending the poet; for I recalled the other poet too, and the sacred garlands of Euripides, though I was at a loss, and wished to hear, not that he was garlanded, but how these garlands were sacred; not that his fame leaped up, but how this was noble.

33.11| For he was clapped by the crowds, I know, and pleased tyrants, this I also know; and he practiced a craft by which not only the lover himself was admired but also the city of the Athenians, because it alone produced tragedians.

33.12| If, then, applause is a sufficient judge, and so is a table in the acropolis, I say no more, seeing Euripides dining in the acropolis and the people of the Athenians and of the Macedonians alike clapping; but if apart from these there is also a vote of the gods, and that trustworthy and no less so than that of tyrants or crowds, come now, tell us on account of which of his noble qualities you gods cast your vote for Euripides, so that we may hasten and pursue heaven at the heels of your praises.

33.13| For surely there are even now men ready to be made the subject of comedy, Sabaeans and Lycambeses; and as for tragedy, neither Thyestes nor Oedipus nor that famous Phineus would even now stand in the way, nor, I think, would they begrudge anyone who desires the friendship of the gods. Indeed these men themselves, it seems to me, if they had perceived that there would be some Euripides who would become dear to the gods for fitting them out, would have cared for those wretched ills, and turned not to thinking better thoughts but to making verses.

33.14| And if they had heard the names of the men of former times, so full of pomp, they would have used them for the journey to heaven, so that on arriving they might sit in Olympus with the boxers in the court of Zeus; for this is the saying of the poet of Delphi.

33.15| Come, let us look also at the question of blessed Homer, which he asks the god. For surely it was a heavenly one, and enough to call the god out; for otherwise the god would not so easily have called him blessed, and after "blessed" assigned him a speech: "You seek your fatherland; but you have a motherland, not a fatherland; and from the land of Minos, neither near nor far, is where it is your fate to end your life, when you fail to understand, from the lips of children, the song, unintelligible, spoken in many words."

33.16| For it is a terrible thing, wisest of men, or better, of gods, if a blessed man should not know either where on earth he leaped from his mother, or where he will lie when he closes his eyes. And I thought that Homer, in coming to the god about such matters, stood on equal ground with a dung beetle, and that the god would no more explain such unknown things to Homer than to a beetle.

33.17| Suppose a beetle, born and not living or growing old in that dung heap, met with an unfriendly wind and a hard beetle-daemon, which lifted it by force into the air and carried it off to some other land and other dung, and then it came to Delphi and asked what its ancestral dung heap was and what land would receive it when it died. So much, then, about the poets.

34.1| But since this marvelous god, through his own oracles, has deified not only poets but also boxers and athletes, it seems to me that the author mentioned refutes these things as well, in these words:

34.2| "'You who know the count of the sand and the measures of the sea, who understand the deaf and hear the one who does not speak.' Would that you had been ignorant of all such things, and known this instead, that boxing is no different from kicking, so that you must either make asses immortal too, or not Cleomedes the boxer of Astypalaea either, when you say: 'Last of the heroes is Cleomedes of Astypalaea; honor him with sacrifices, as no longer mortal.'

34.3| Why, O ancestral interpreter of the Greeks, as Plato calls you, did you deify this man? Was it because at Olympia he struck his opponent with a single blow, opened his side, plunged his hand in and seized his lung?

34.4| Apollo, what a deed worthy of a god! Or was it not only this, but because, fined four talents for it, he would not bear it, and in vexation and heavy anger drove his rage against the children in the schoolhouse, pulling out the pillar that held up the roof? Is it for this, god-maker, that Cleomedes is to be honored by you?

34.5| Or will you add that other proof of his courage and at the same time his favor with the gods, that, having gotten into a sacred chest and pulled the lid shut over him, he could not be taken by his pursuers who tried to drag him out? O Cleomedes, a hero no longer mortal, what contrivances you devised for immortality!

34.6| At once, then, the gods perceived your good service and snatched you up, as in Homer they did Ganymede; but him for his beauty, and you for your strength and the good use of your strength.

34.7| Would that you, seer, as I said, had let sand and brine alone and learned instead what boxing is worth, so that you would also have reckoned boxing asses as gods, and wild asses the best of the gods; and a fitting oracle would have existed for a wild ass that had died, rather than for your boxer: 'Preeminent among the immortals is the wild ass, not Cleomedes, whom you honor with sacrifices as no longer mortal.'

34.8| Do not be surprised if even a wild ass lays claim to immortality, being sufficiently equipped for divine things; and hearing this he would not endure it, but would threaten to strike Cleomedes himself and throw him into the pit, and would not let him go up into heaven.

34.9| For he is more worthy than Cleomedes of the divine gifts themselves, being ready to fight not him alone, even if he used iron straps, but both him and the Thasian boxer together, over whose statue the gods grew angry and made barren the land of the Thasians.

34.10| And we trust in this matter, too, not a man but that same god. From this I perceived quite well that boxing was a divine pursuit after all; but the many, even those who think themselves wise, did not notice it, or else they would have left off being gentlemen and practiced the ways of the Thasian boxer, to whom the gods gave no immortality, as they did to Cleomedes, but whom they loved greatly.

34.11| So even his bronze statue showed something beyond the images of other men, when it fell upon the enemy who was flogging it, by some daemonic providence, as it seems.

34.12| But the foolish Thasians, with no experience of divine things, were indignant and charged the statue with pollution, exacted a penalty, and dared to sink it in the sea.

34.13| Yet the Thasians did not escape; the gods showed what a great evil had been dared by them, sending famine, the servant of divine justice, which taught them only with difficulty the counsels of the gods; and you, most humane of the gods, in your usual manner sent them help, saying: "Bringing the exiles back to their fatherland, you will reap the grain of Demeter."

34.14| But the simpleminded again thought that they had to call back the men who were in flight, knowing nothing right. For what do the most inhumane gods care about men being called back, as much as about statues? Indeed, the land gained nothing from this that would stop its sickness, until one of the wise and understanding grasped the divine mind, that the exile was the statue sunk in the sea. And so it proved. For as soon as it was set up again, the land at once flourished, and they harvested Demeter's grain thereafter.

34.15| How, then, are these not clear proofs of the god-befitting nature of athletics, that it is honored by the gods? For the gods were angered also at the outraged statue of a pentathlete, and the Locrians went hungry because of this, like the Thasians, until an oracle of yours cured them, saying this: "Having him in honor whom you then held without honor, you will plough your land again."

34.16| For the Locrians did not perceive the divine mind before you became their guide in this. They had thrown Euthycles the pentathlete into prison, accusing him of taking bribes against his fatherland; and not only this, but when he died they insulted his images too, until the gods, not enduring what was done, sent upon them the mightiest famine; and they would have perished from the famine if help had not come from you, saying that they should honor men fattened up, whom the gods love no less than the oxen the meal-makers fatten, through whom men at times persuade you when they sacrifice; perhaps no less, but much more than fat oxen, fat men delight you, so much that sometimes you rage against a whole city and a whole nation when one or two people have wronged these fatlings of yours.

34.17| Would that you, seer, had become a trainer for us instead of a seer, or both seer and trainer, so that there might be a Delphic gymnasium as there is a Delphic oracle. For it would not have been foreign to the Pythian contest for the gymnasium also to be Pythian." To these I shall join what he says in refuting how those he speaks of are accustomed to flatter tyrants.

35.1| "'This man who is entering my house is Cypselus the Aeacid, king of famous Corinth.' So tyrants too, and not only the plotters against tyrants: 'Cypselus, who will cause many woes for Corinth,' and Melanippus, who did many good things for the city of the Geloans.

35.2| How, if Cypselus was happy, wretch, was not Phalaris happy too, being of the same character as Cypselus? So it would have been better for you to put it this way: 'Happy were Phalaris and Melanippus, leaders among men of divine discord.'

35.3| I have also heard from you an oracle about Phalaris, given in prose, which praises and honors him because, when he caught men plotting against him, he tortured them, but then, admiring their endurance, set them free: "Loxias and father Zeus have voted Phalaris a postponement of death, because he dealt gently with Chariton and Melanippus." Well done! At last, and with great effort, you have shown us the truth concerning death and life: that life is something very fine. To all of this let the following be added as well:

36.1| "But it will be far better for the dwellers in Methymna to honor the Phallen head of Dionysus." For cities offer sacrifices and celebrate rites not only to Phallen heads of Dionysus but also to those of stone and bronze and gold; and not only to Phallen ones but to the Dionysuses themselves and to a great many other gods out of Hesiod.

36.2| For truly "thrice ten thousand are they upon the much-nourishing earth", not immortals, but masters of men made of stone and wood. If they kept watch over the insolence and the lawfulness of men, such nonsense would never have been stirred up as to let the evil spread by now even down to your own day, and to cross over even onto Olympus, "where," they say, "the seat of the gods stands ever secure."

36.3| And yet if it were secure, nonsense could not set foot on it, nor would a single one of the Olympians have come to such a pitch of madness as to "make a god of an olive trunk" which the men of Methymna hauled up when it was tangled in the meshes of their seine: men who netted it in the same spot twice, if you like, and three times and more, and who after that ran aground on the Libyan coast without ever throwing it out onto land; for otherwise, by Dionysus, it would not have kept getting tangled in their nets.

36.4| "But the trunk is shaped like a head at the top (Apollo, what a strange piece of workmanship!). What, then, was it doing in the sea? One might well be at a loss. What else, by Zeus, but sitting there waiting until men out of their minds (for I will not say gods as well) should come upon it, reckon it dropped not from Zeus but from Poseidon, then lead it off to the city in all haste like some piece of good fortune, though in truth it was a bad one: not fortune at all, but a fog of folly? Or was it not enough for them that this folly was ruining them from within their own walls, so that the extra dose summoned from Delphi had to strengthen it and stretch it further into what one might call god-struck frenzy?"

36.5| So much from Oenomaus too. But after what has been said, turn once more to the "Philosophy from Oracles" of the man who put together the attack against us, and read from the oracles of the Pythian god on fate, and see whether you too will not find the account of these much-vaunted oracles still more foreign to divine power.

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