A Plea for the Christians

To the Emperors Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Aurelius Commodus, conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia, and, above all, philosophers.

Your empire, greatest of sovereigns, has different peoples using different customs and laws, and none of them is prevented by law or fear of punishment from cherishing their ancestral ways, even if they are ridiculous. The man of Troy calls Hector a god and worships Helen, taking her to be Adrasteia; the Lacedaemonian reveres Agamemnon as Zeus, and Phylonoe the daughter of Tyndareus; the man of Tenedos reveres Tennes; the Athenian sacrifices to Erechtheus as Poseidon; and the Athenians perform rites and mysteries for Agraulus and Pandrosus, who were thought guilty of impiety for opening the chest. In a word, among the nations and peoples, people offer whatever sacrifices and hold whatever mysteries they wish. The Egyptians even hold cats, crocodiles, snakes, asps, and dogs to be gods. And to all these both you and the laws give leave, since you consider it impious and unholy to believe in no god at all, but necessary for each to worship as gods whomever he wishes, so that through fear of the divine people may keep from wrongdoing. But why is it that with you (and do not be misled, as the many are, by hearsay) a name is hated? Names do not deserve hatred; it is wrongdoing that deserves penalty and punishment. That is why, admiring your gentleness and mildness and your peaceable and humane attitude toward all, individuals enjoy equal rights, cities share in equal honor according to their rank, and the whole world enjoys deep peace through your wisdom. But we who are called Christians: you have not taken thought for us too, but allow us, who do no wrong and, as the argument will show, are of all people the most piously and justly disposed toward God and toward your rule, to be harassed, plundered, and persecuted, the multitude making war on us for our name alone. So we have ventured to set out our case before you (you will learn from our argument that we suffer without trial and contrary to all law and reason), and we beg you to give some thought to us as well, so that we may at last cease to be slaughtered by informers. For the damage our persecutors do us is not to our property, nor is the disgrace to our civic standing, nor the harm to any other of the lesser things. These we despise, even if the many think them important, since we have learned not only not to strike back at one who strikes us, nor to go to law with those who plunder and rob us, but to those who slap us on the face to turn the other side of the head to be struck too, and to those who take our tunic to give our cloak as well. But when we have given up our property, they plot against our bodies and souls, pouring out a flood of accusations that do not touch us even in suspicion, but belong to the gossips themselves and to people like them.

If anyone can convict us of wrongdoing, small or great, we do not refuse punishment, but think it right to undergo the harshest and most pitiless penalty there is. But if the charge goes no further than a name (to this very day what people say about us is the invention of common and uncritical rumor, and no Christian has been convicted of wrongdoing), then it is now your task, most great, humane, and learned emperors, to remove this abuse from us by law, so that, just as the whole world, individuals and cities alike, has shared in your benefits, we too may be grateful to you, proud that we are no longer the victims of informers. For it does not befit your justice that others, when charged with crimes, are not punished before they are convicted, while in our case the name counts for more than the proofs offered at the trial, the judges not asking whether the accused has done any wrong, but insulting the name as if it were a crime. No name in and of itself is thought either bad or good; names seem bad or good because of the bad or good actions that underlie them. You know this better than anyone, since you proceed from philosophy and every kind of learning. That is why those who are tried before you, even if they face the gravest charges, are confident: they know that you will examine their lives, and will give no weight to names if they are empty, nor to the accusers' charges if they are false; and they accept a verdict of condemnation on the same terms as one of acquittal. We too, then, ask for the treatment given to all: not to be hated and punished because we are called Christians (for what does the name contribute to wickedness?), but to be tried on whatever charges anyone brings against us, and either to be released if we clear ourselves of the accusations, or to be punished if we are found to be wicked; not for the name (for no Christian is wicked, unless he is only playing a part in our profession), but for the crime. This is how we see philosophers tried too. None of them seems to the judge, before the trial, to be good or bad because of his knowledge or art; if he is found to be unjust he is punished, without any charge being brought against philosophy (for the wicked one is he who does not practice philosophy as he should, while the knowledge itself is blameless); and if he refutes the slanders he is released. Let there be equal treatment for us as well: let the life of the accused be examined, and let the name be free of every charge. As I begin my defense of our teaching I must beg you, most great emperors, to be impartial hearers and not to be carried away and prejudiced by common and irrational rumor, but to turn your love of learning and of truth to our teaching as well. For you will not err through ignorance, and we, freed from the uncritical rumors of the many, will cease to be warred against.

Three charges are brought against us: atheism, Thyestean feasts, and Oedipean intercourse. If these are true, spare no class of us; proceed against the crimes; destroy us root and branch, with our wives and children, if indeed any Christian lives like the beasts. And yet even the beasts do not touch their own kind, and they mate by the law of nature, only at one season, for the begetting of offspring, not at will; and they recognize those who do them good. If anyone, then, is more savage than the beasts, what penalty could he suffer for such crimes that would be thought to punish him as he deserves? But if these things are inventions and empty slanders (since by a natural principle vice is opposed to virtue, and opposites war against each other by a divine law), and you yourselves are witnesses that we commit none of these crimes, since you forbid people to inform against us, then it remains for you to examine our life, our teachings, and our loyalty and obedience to you, your house, and your rule, and so at last to grant us no more than you grant to those who persecute us. For we shall overcome them, readily giving even our lives for the truth.

That we are not atheists (I will answer each of the charges in turn, so that it will not be ridiculous for us to leave our accusers unrefuted): The Athenians were right to charge Diagoras with atheism, since he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine and made public the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Heracles to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there is no god at all. But we distinguish God from matter, and show that matter is one thing and God another, and that the gulf between them is great (for the divine is unbegotten and eternal, contemplated by mind and reason alone, while matter is begotten and perishable). Is it not irrational, then, to apply the name of atheism to us? If we thought as Diagoras did, while having so many pledges that move us to piety (the good order, the universal harmony, the size, the color, the shape, and the arrangement of the world), then the reputation for impiety and the reason for our being persecuted might rightly be attached to us. But since our teaching acknowledges one God, the Maker of this universe, who did not himself come into being (for what is does not come into being, but what is not), but made all things through the Word that comes from him, we suffer both things irrationally: we are slandered and we are persecuted.

Poets and philosophers were not thought to be atheists when they turned their minds to God. Euripides, puzzled about those who are ignorantly called gods according to common opinion, says: “If Zeus is in heaven, he ought not to make the same man unhappy.” But concerning the one who is apprehended by knowledge, he teaches as the mind understands it: “Do you see this boundless ether on high, which holds the earth around in its moist embrace? Think this is Zeus; consider this to be God.” For of the former he saw neither real substances underlying them, to which the name is applied (“Zeus, whoever Zeus is, I do not know, except by hearsay”), nor names applied to things that really exist (for where there are no real substances, what more is there than names?). But the other he apprehended from his works, taking the visible things, air, ether, and earth, as a view of what is unseen. So he understood that the one whose works these are, and by whose spirit they are guided, is God. Sophocles agrees with him: “One, in truth, one is God, who made the heaven and the broad earth.” He teaches, with regard to the nature of God, that both heaven and earth are filled with his beauty, and where God must be, and that he must be one.

Philolaus too, when he says that all things are enclosed by God as in a guard-house, shows both that God is one and that he is above matter. Of Lysis and Opsimus, the one defines God as an ineffable number, the other as the excess of the greatest number over the one nearest to it. If, according to the Pythagoreans, ten is the greatest number, being the tetractys and containing all the arithmetical and harmonic ratios, and nine lies next to it, then God is a unit, that is, one; for the greatest number exceeds the smaller one nearest to it by one. As for Plato and Aristotle, I do not go through what they said about God as if I were giving a precise account of the philosophers' teachings. For I know that, just as you surpass all people in intelligence and in the power of your rule, so you excel all in the precise mastery of all learning, succeeding in every branch of it better than those who have made a single part of it their own. But since it is impossible to show, without citing names, that we are not the only ones who confine God to a unity, I have turned to their opinions. Plato, then, says: “To find the Maker and Father of this universe is a task, and having found him it is impossible to declare him to all,” thinking of the one uncreated and eternal God. And if he knows of others too, such as the sun, the moon, and the stars, he knows them as created: “Gods of gods, of whom I am the maker and father of works, indissoluble as long as I will it; everything that has been bound can be undone.” If, then, Plato is no atheist when he thinks of the Maker of all things as one uncreated God, neither are we atheists, who know and hold fast as God the one by whose Word all things were made and by whose Spirit, which comes from him, they are held together. Aristotle and his followers, acknowledging one God as a kind of composite living being, say that God consists of soul and body: they take his body to be the ethereal region, the planets and the sphere of the fixed stars, moving in circles, and his soul to be the reason that governs the motion of the body, itself unmoved but the cause of its motion. The Stoics, even if in their names for the divine they multiply it according to the variations of matter, through which they say the spirit of God passes, in reality think that God is one. For if God is a creative fire proceeding methodically toward the generation of the world, containing within itself all the seminal principles by which each thing comes into being according to fate, and his spirit pervades the whole world, then according to them God is one, called Zeus from the seething (ζέον) of matter and Hera from the air (ἀήρ), and given the other names after each part of matter through which he has passed.

Since, then, it is agreed by nearly all, even against their will, when they come to the first principles of things, that the divine is one, and we for our part affirm that the one who ordered this universe is God, what is the reason that others may freely say and write whatever they like about the divine, while a law is laid down against us, who are able to prove by signs and arguments of truth what we understand and rightly believe, that God is one? Poets and philosophers approached this, as they did other matters, by conjecture: each was moved, through the affinity of his own soul with the breath that comes from God, to seek whether he could find and understand the truth. But they were able only to circle around it, not to find it, since they did not think fit to learn about God from God, but each from himself; that is why each of them taught something different about God, matter, forms, and the world. But for what we understand and believe we have the prophets as witnesses, who spoke out by a divine Spirit about God and the things of God. You too, who surpass others in intelligence and in reverence for what is truly divine, would say that it is irrational to give up believing the Spirit from God, who moved the mouths of the prophets like instruments, and to heed human opinions instead.

That there has been from the beginning one God, the Maker of this universe, consider in this way, so that you may also have the reasoning behind our faith. If there were two or more gods from the beginning, either they were in one and the same place, or each of them was on his own. Now they could not be in one and the same. For it does not follow that, being gods, they are alike; rather, because they are uncreated, they are unlike. Things created are like their models, but things uncreated are unlike, having come into being neither from anything nor after the pattern of anything. Or is God one in the way that hand, eye, and foot are parts belonging to one body, together making up one whole? But Socrates, because he is created and perishable, is composite and can be divided into parts; God is uncreated, impassible, and indivisible, and so is not made up of parts. But if each of them is on his own, since the one who made the world is above the things he made and around what he made and set in order, where is the other god, or the rest? For if the world, made in the shape of a sphere, is enclosed within the circles of heaven, and the Maker of the world is above the things he made, controlling it by his providence over them, what place is there for the other god or the rest? He is not in the world, because it belongs to another; nor around the world, for above it is God, the Maker of the world. If he is neither in the world nor around the world (for everything around it is held by the Maker), where is he? Above the world and God? In another world, or around another? But if he is in another world or around another, then he no longer has anything to do with us (for he does not rule our world), nor is he great in power (for he is in a limited place). But if he is neither in another world (for all things are filled by the Maker) nor around another (for all things are held by him), then he does not exist, since there is nothing for him to be in. Or what does he do, if the world belongs to another, and he is above the Maker of the world, and yet is neither in the world nor around it? Is there some other thing, so that he may stand somewhere? But above it is God and the things of God. And what place will there be, when God has filled everything beyond the world? Does he exercise providence, then? But if he does not exercise providence, he has made nothing. If he neither makes anything nor exercises providence, and there is no other place for him to be in, then this is the one and only God from the beginning, the Maker of the world.

If we were content with considerations of this kind, one might think our teaching merely human. But the voices of the prophets confirm our reasonings. I think that you too, being most learned and knowledgeable, are not unacquainted with the writings of Moses, or of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the other prophets, who, lifted out of their own reasonings in ecstasy when the divine Spirit moved them, spoke out what was worked in them, the Spirit using them as a flute-player breathes into a flute. What, then, do they say? “The Lord is our God; no other shall be reckoned beside him.” And again: “I am God, the first and hereafter, and besides me there is no God.” Likewise: “Before me there was no other God, and after me there shall be none; I am God, and there is none besides me.” And concerning his greatness: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is the footstool of my feet. What house will you build for me, or what is the place of my rest?” I leave it to you, when you come to the books themselves, to examine their prophecies more precisely, so that with fitting reasoning you may remove the abuse we suffer.

I have shown sufficiently, then, that we are not atheists, since we acknowledge one God, uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, and infinite, grasped by mind and reason alone, surrounded by light, beauty, spirit, and power beyond description, by whom the universe was made through his Word, and is set in order and held together. For we think also of a Son of God. And let no one think it ridiculous that God should have a Son. For we have not formed our ideas of God the Father or of the Son as the poets make up their myths, in which they show the gods to be no better than human beings. The Son of God is the Word of the Father in idea and in operation; for after his pattern and through him all things were made, the Father and the Son being one. And since the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son, by the unity and power of the Spirit, the Son of God is the mind and Word of the Father. But if, in your surpassing intelligence, it occurs to you to ask what is meant by the Son, I will say briefly that he is the first offspring of the Father: not as having come into being (for from the beginning God, being eternal mind, had the Word in himself, being eternally rational), but as having come forth to be the idea and operation for all material things, which lay like a nature without qualities and an inert earth, the heavier particles mixed with the lighter. The prophetic Spirit also agrees with this account: “The Lord,” it says, “created me as the beginning of his ways, for his works.” And indeed the Holy Spirit himself, who works in those who speak prophetically, we call an effluence of God, flowing from him and returning like a ray of the sun. Who, then, would not be perplexed to hear called atheists those who speak of God the Father and God the Son and the Holy Spirit, and who show both their power in unity and their distinction in order? Nor does our theology stop there: we also speak of a multitude of angels and ministers, whom God, the Maker and Creator of the world, through the Word that comes from him, distributed and appointed to be concerned with the elements, the heavens, the world and what is in it, and their good order.

If I go through our teaching in detail, do not be surprised. I speak precisely so that you may not be carried away by common and irrational opinion but may be able to know the truth; for by means of the very teachings we hold, which are not human but spoken and taught by God, we can persuade you not to regard us as atheists. What, then, are the words on which we are brought up? “I say to you: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” Allow me at this point to raise my voice and speak out boldly, as one making his defense before philosopher-kings. Who among those who analyze syllogisms and resolve ambiguities and explain etymologies, or among those who teach about homonyms and synonyms, predicates and propositions, and what is the subject and what the predicate, and who promise to make their pupils happy by these and similar teachings, have so purified their souls as to love their enemies instead of hating them, and, instead of reviling (to say the least) those who first insulted them, to bless them, and to pray for those who plot against their lives? On the contrary, they are forever wickedly digging out these secrets of their art for themselves, always wanting to do some harm, since they have made their business an art of words and not a display of deeds. But among us you would find uneducated people, craftsmen, and old women, who, if they cannot prove in words the benefit of our teaching, show in deeds the benefit of their choice. They do not recite speeches but show good actions: when struck they do not strike back, when robbed they do not go to court, they give to those who ask, and they love their neighbors as themselves.

Would we, then, purify ourselves in this way if we did not believe that God presides over the human race? That cannot be said. But since we are persuaded that we shall give an account of our whole life here to God, who made both us and the world, we choose the moderate, humane, and despised way of life. We think that we shall suffer no evil here so great, even if people take our lives, as the good we shall receive there from the great Judge for a gentle, humane, and reasonable life. Plato said that Minos and Rhadamanthys would judge and punish the wicked; but we say that even if someone were Minos or Rhadamanthys or their father, not even he would escape the judgment of God. Are those, then, who think life is “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” and who regard death as a deep sleep and forgetfulness (“sleep and death, twin brothers”), considered pious? While we, who reckon the present life of small and little worth, and are guided by this alone: to know God and the Word that comes from him, what is the oneness of the Son with the Father, what the communion of the Father with the Son, what the Spirit, what is the union of these three and their distinction while united, the Spirit, the Son, the Father; who know that the life we look for is far better than words can tell, if we are brought to it pure from all wrongdoing; and who are so humane that we love not only our friends (“For if you love those who love you and lend to those who lend to you,” he says, “what reward will you have?”): we, being such people and living such a life so as to escape condemnation, are we not believed to be pious? These are small things from great ones, and few from many, so that we may not trouble you further; for those who test honey and whey judge whether the whole is good by a small part of it.

Most of those who charge us with atheism have not even dreamed of what God is; they are ignorant of natural and theological reasoning and have never studied it, and they measure piety by the rule of sacrifices. They accuse us of not offering sacrifice and of not recognizing the same gods as the cities. So consider with me, emperors, both charges, as follows; and first, our not sacrificing. The Creator and Father of this universe needs no blood, nor the smell of burnt fat, nor the fragrance of flowers and incense, since he himself is the perfect fragrance, lacking nothing and needing nothing. The greatest sacrifice to him is that we should know who stretched out and vaulted the heavens and set the earth in place like a center, who gathered the water into seas and divided the light from the darkness, who adorned the sky with stars and made the earth send up every seed, who made the animals and formed the human being. When we hold that God the Creator sustains and oversees all things with the knowledge and art by which he guides them, and lift up holy hands to him, what further need has he of a hecatomb? “With sacrifices and gentle prayers, with libation and the smell of burnt fat, men turn them aside with entreaty, whenever anyone transgresses and sins.” What are whole burnt offerings to me, which God does not need? And yet we must offer a bloodless sacrifice and present our reasonable worship.

The argument about our not coming forward and not recognizing the same gods as the cities is quite silly. Those who charge us with atheism because we do not believe in the gods they know do not agree among themselves about the gods. The Athenians have set up Celeus and Metaneira as gods; the Lacedaemonians, Menelaus, to whom they sacrifice and hold festivals; the people of Ilium cannot bear even to hear his name, and extol Hector instead; the Ceans hold Aristaeus to be the same as Zeus and Apollo; the Thasians worship Theagenes, who even committed a murder at the Olympic games; the Samians, Lysander, despite all his slaughters and all his crimes; Alcman and Hesiod, Medea; the Cilicians, Niobe; the Sicilians, Philip son of Butacides; the people of Amathus, Onesilus; the Carthaginians, Hamilcar. The day would fail me if I listed them all. Since, then, they disagree among themselves about their own gods, why do they accuse us of not agreeing with them? And are not the practices of the Egyptians ridiculous? At their festivals they beat their breasts in the temples as if over the dead, and they sacrifice to the same beings as gods. And no wonder, since they even hold animals to be gods, shave their heads when these die, bury them in temples, and hold public lamentations. If, then, we are impious because we do not practice our piety in common with them, all cities and all nations are impious; for not all recognize the same gods.

But suppose they do recognize the same gods. What then? Because the many, unable to distinguish what is matter and what is God, and how great the gulf between them is, approach idols made of matter, must we too, for their sake, approach and worship the statues? We who distinguish and separate the uncreated and the created, what is and what is not, the intelligible and the perceptible, and give each its proper name? If matter and God are the same, two names for one thing, then we are impious for not considering stones and wood, gold and silver, to be gods. But if they are very far apart from each other, as far as the craftsman is from the material of his craft, why are we accused? For as the potter is to the clay (the clay is the material, the potter the craftsman), so God is the Creator, and matter obeys him to serve his art. And just as the clay by itself cannot become vessels without art, so matter, which receives all things, would not have received distinction, shape, and order without God the Creator. We do not value the pottery more than the one who made it, nor the bowls and gold vessels more than the smith; if there is anything skillful about them we praise the craftsman, and it is he who reaps the glory for the vessels. So too with matter and God: for the arrangement of what has been ordered it is not matter that deserves the glory and honor, but God its Creator. If, then, we were to hold the forms of matter to be gods, we would seem to have no sense of the true God, putting things that can be dissolved and perish on a level with the eternal.

The world is beautiful: it excels in its size, in the arrangement of the stars in the oblique circle and around the Bear, and in its spherical shape. Yet it is not the world but its Artificer who is to be worshiped. When your subjects come to you, they do not neglect to pay court to you, their rulers and masters, from whom they obtain whatever they need, and take refuge in the magnificence of your residence instead. When they come upon the royal residence they admire its fine decoration in passing, but to you they give glory as all in all. You kings furnish your residences for yourselves; but the world did not come into being because God needed it. For God is himself everything to himself: light unapproachable, a perfect world, spirit, power, Word. If, then, the world is a well-tuned instrument moving in rhythm, I worship the one who tuned it, who strikes its notes and sings the harmonious melody, not the instrument; for at the contests the judges do not pass over the lyre-players and crown their lyres. Whether, as Plato says, the world is God's work of art, I admire its beauty and approach the Artificer; or whether it is substance and body, as the Peripatetics say, we do not neglect to worship God, the cause of the body's motion, and fall down before the poor and weak elements, worshiping passive matter instead of what they call the impassive ether; or whether one takes the parts of the world to be powers of God, we do not approach and serve the powers, but their Maker and Lord. I do not ask of matter what it does not have, nor do I pass over God to serve the elements, which can do nothing beyond what they were commanded; for even if they are beautiful to look at through the art of their Creator, in themselves they have the nature of matter. Plato too bears witness to this argument: “What we call heaven and the world,” he says, “has received many blessings from the Father; yet it shares in a body, and so it cannot be free of change.” If, then, while admiring the heavens and the elements for their workmanship, I do not worship them as gods, knowing that the principle of dissolution is in them, how can I call gods the things whose makers I know to be human beings? Consider this with me briefly.

In making a defense I must give more precise arguments both about the names of the gods, to show that they are recent, and about their images, to show that they came into being yesterday or the day before, so to speak. You yourselves know these things better, since you are in every respect conversant with the ancient writers, more than anyone else. I say, then, that Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod are the ones who gave genealogies and names to those they call gods. Herodotus too bears witness: “I think that Hesiod and Homer lived four hundred years before my time, and not more; and it was they who made a theogony for the Greeks, gave the gods their titles, distributed their honors and skills, and described their forms.” As for images, they were not even thought of as long as there was no modeling, painting, or sculpture, until Saurias of Samos, Craton of Sicyon, Cleanthes of Corinth, and the Corinthian girl came along. Shadow-drawing was invented by Saurias, who traced the outline of a horse in the sunlight; painting by Craton, who painted the shadows of a man and a woman on a whitened tablet; and modeling in relief was invented by the girl. She was in love with someone, and traced the outline of his shadow on the wall while he slept; then her father, delighted with the exact likeness (he was a potter), cut out the outline and filled it in with clay; the figure is preserved at Corinth to this day. After these came Daedalus and Theodorus of Miletus, who further invented sculpture and modeling. So short is the time since images and the making of idols began that we can name the craftsman of each god. The Artemis at Ephesus, the Athena (or rather Athela, as those who speak more mystically call her, for such was the ancient statue made from the olive), and the seated Athena were made by Endoeus, a pupil of Daedalus; the Pythian Apollo is the work of Theodorus and Telecles; the Delian Apollo and Artemis are the art of Tectaeus and Angelion; the Hera at Samos and the one at Argos are by the hands of Smilis; the other idols are by Phidias; the Aphrodite at Cnidus is another work of Praxiteles's art; the Asclepius at Epidaurus is the work of Phidias. In short, not one of them escapes having been made by a human being. If, then, they are gods, why did they not exist from the beginning? Why are they younger than those who made them? Why did they need human beings and art in order to come into being? They are earth and stones and matter and elaborate art.

Some say that these are only images, and that the gods are those whom the images represent; that the processions and sacrifices offered to the images are referred to those gods and are made for them; and that there is no other way of approaching the gods (“hard are the gods to see in their true form”); and as proof that this is so they offer the workings of certain idols. Let us, then, examine the power attached to their names. But I must beg you, greatest of emperors, before I speak, to forgive me for offering true arguments. For it is not my purpose to refute the idols, but, clearing away the slanders, to give an account of the way of life we have chosen. You may examine the heavenly kingdom by your own example. For just as all things are subject to you, father and son, who have received your kingdom from above (“for the king's soul is in the hand of God,” says the prophetic Spirit), so all things are subordinated to the one God and to the Word that comes from him, understood as his Son, inseparable from him. Consider this above all. The gods, as they say, did not exist from the beginning; each of them came into being just as we do. And on this they all agree. Homer says: “Ocean, origin of the gods, and mother Tethys.” And Orpheus (who first discovered their names, recounted their births, and told what each of them did, who is believed among them to speak more truly about the gods, and whom Homer follows in most things, especially concerning the gods) also makes their first origin from water: “Ocean, who is the origin of all.” According to him water was the beginning of all things; from water, mud was formed; and from both was born a living creature, a serpent with the head of a lion growing on it, and between them the face of a god, named Heracles and Kronos. This Heracles produced an enormous egg, which, filled by the force of its begetter, broke in two from the friction. The upper part became heaven, and the part that fell down became earth. There came forth also the goddess Earth, with a body; and Heaven, uniting with Earth, begets the females Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, and the males, the hundred-handed Cottus, Gyges, and Briareus, and the Cyclopes Brontes, Steropes, and Argus. These he bound and cast into Tartarus, having learned that he would be deposed from his rule by his children. For this reason Earth in her anger bore the Titans: “Lady Earth bore the sons of Heaven, whom they call Titans, because they took vengeance on great starry Heaven.”

This is how, according to them, the generation of their gods and of the universe began. What follows, then? Each of the beings they have made into gods is thought of as having a beginning. And if they came into being, not having existed before, as those who tell of the gods say, then they are not gods. For a thing is either uncreated and eternal, or created and perishable. And this is not just my view, while the philosophers think otherwise: “What is it that always is and has no becoming, and what is it that comes to be but never is?” Plato, discussing the intelligible and the perceptible, teaches that what always is, the intelligible, is uncreated, while what is not, the perceptible, is created, beginning to be and ceasing to be. In line with this reasoning the Stoics too say that all things will be consumed by fire and will exist again, the world taking another beginning. But according to them there is a twofold cause: one active and initiating, namely providence, the other passive and changeable, namely matter; and it is impossible for the world, even under providence, to remain as it is, since it came into being. If so, how can the constitution of these gods remain, when they do not exist by nature but came into being? And how are the gods better than matter, when they derive their constitution from water? Yet not even according to them is water the beginning of all things. For what could be constituted from simple elements of a single kind? Matter needs a craftsman, and the craftsman needs matter. Or how could figures be shaped without matter or without a craftsman? Nor is it reasonable that matter should be older than God; for the efficient cause must come before the things that come into being.

If the implausibility of their theology went no further than saying that the gods came into being and were formed from water, I would have shown that nothing created is not also dissoluble, and gone on to the remaining charges. But they have described the gods' bodies. They say that Heracles is a god in the form of a coiled serpent; they speak of the hundred-handed ones; and of the daughter whom Zeus fathered by his mother Rhea, or Demeter, they say that she had two eyes in the natural place and two on her forehead, and a second face at the back of her neck, and horns as well, so that Rhea, frightened at the monstrous child, fled and did not give her the breast (θηλή); hence she is called Athela in the mysteries, but commonly Persephone and Kore, and is not the same as Athena, who is named from the pupil of the eye (κόρη). And they have recounted their deeds in detail, as they think: how Kronos cut off his father's genitals and threw him down from his chariot, and how he murdered his children by swallowing the males; how Zeus bound his father and cast him into Tartarus, as Heaven had done to his sons, and fought the Titans for the rule; how he pursued his mother Rhea when she forbade him to marry, and when she became a she-serpent he too changed into a serpent, bound her with the so-called Heraclean knot, and had intercourse with her (the staff of Hermes is the symbol of the form of that union); and then how he violated his daughter Persephone, again in the form of a serpent, and had by her a son, Dionysus. I must say at least this much: what is venerable or good in such a story, that we should believe Kronos, Zeus, Kore, and the rest to be gods? The shapes of their bodies? What man of judgment, trained in contemplation, would believe that a viper was begotten by a god (Orpheus says: “But Phanes brought forth another offspring, terrible, from his holy womb, a viper fearful to behold, whose hair from its head and fair face were lovely to see, but the other parts were those of a dreadful serpent, from the top of the neck down”)? Or who would accept that Phanes himself, a first-born god (for he is the one who was poured out from the egg), had the body or shape of a serpent, or was swallowed by Zeus so that Zeus might become boundless? If they differ in nothing from the lowest beasts (for clearly the divine must differ from earthly things and from what is formed out of matter), they are not gods. Why then should we approach beings whose birth is like that of cattle, and who are themselves beast-shaped and ugly?

And yet, if they had only said that the gods were fleshly and had blood and seed and passions of anger and desire, even then one ought to consider such stories nonsense and laughable; for in God there is neither anger, nor desire and appetite, nor seed for begetting children. Let them be fleshly, then, but above wrath and anger, so that Athena may not be seen “angry with father Zeus, and savage wrath seized her,” nor Hera be looked on thus: “Hera's breast could not contain her anger, but she spoke.” Let them be above grief: “Alas, a man dear to me I see with my eyes pursued around the wall; my heart laments.” I call even human beings ignorant and boorish who give way to anger and grief. But when “the father of men and gods” laments his son: “Woe is me, that it is fated for Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, to be slain by Patroclus son of Menoetius!” and for all his lamenting cannot snatch him from danger: “Sarpedon, son of Zeus; but he does not help even his own son”; who would not blame the ignorance of those who, on the strength of such myths, are lovers of the gods, or rather godless? Let them be fleshly, but let not Aphrodite be wounded in body by Diomedes: “The son of Tydeus, high-spirited Diomedes, wounded me,” nor in soul by Ares: “How Zeus's daughter Aphrodite always dishonors me, because I am lame, and loves destructive Ares”; “and he tore her fair skin.” The one who is terrible in war, Zeus's ally against the Titans, shows himself weaker than Diomedes. “He raged like Ares wielding the spear.” Be silent, Homer; a god does not rage. But you describe the god to me as bloodstained and a bane to mortals, “Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, bloodstained,” and you tell of his adultery and his bonds: “The two went to bed and slept, and about them were poured the cunning bonds of wise Hephaestus, and they could not move a limb.” Will they not give up this great and impious nonsense about the gods? Heaven is castrated; Kronos is bound and cast into Tartarus; the Titans revolt; Styx dies in the battle: so they even show that the gods are mortal. They love one another; they love human beings: “Aeneas, whom divine Aphrodite bore to Anchises, the goddess lying with a mortal in the glens of Ida.” Do they not love? Do they not suffer? Surely, if they were gods, desire would not touch them! Even if God takes flesh by a divine dispensation, is he therefore a slave of desire? “For never yet did love of goddess or woman so flood and overpower the heart in my breast: not when I loved the wife of Ixion, nor when I loved Danae of the fair ankles, daughter of Acrisius, nor the daughter of far-famed Phoenix, nor Semele, nor Alcmene in Thebes, nor Demeter, the fair-haired queen, nor glorious Leto, nor you yourself.” He is created, he is perishable, having nothing of God in him. They even serve human beings for hire: “O house of Admetus, in which I endured to accept a menial's table, god though I am”; and they herd cattle: “Coming to this land I tended cattle for my host, and kept this house safe.” So Admetus is superior to the god! O prophet and sage, who foreknows the future for others, you did not foresee the killing of your beloved, but even killed your friend with your own hand. “And I hoped that the divine mouth of Phoebus was free of falsehood, teeming with prophetic art” (so Aeschylus reproaches Apollo as a false prophet); “yet he who sang, he who was present at the feast, he who said these things, he it is who killed my son.”

But perhaps these are errors of the poets, and there is a scientific account of them, such as this: “Shining Zeus” (as Empedocles says) “and life-bringing Hera and Aidoneus, and Nestis, who with her tears moistens the springs of mortals.” If, then, Zeus is fire, Hera earth, Aidoneus air, and Nestis water, and these are elements, fire, water, and air, none of them is a god, neither Zeus nor Hera nor Aidoneus; for their constitution and origin come from matter separated out by God: “Fire and water and earth and the gentle height of air, and love together with them.” Since these cannot remain without love, but are thrown into confusion by strife, how could anyone say that they are gods? According to Empedocles love is the ruling principle and the compounds are ruled, and the ruling principle is master; so that if we suppose that the ruled and the ruler have one and the same power, we shall unwittingly make perishable, fluid, and changeable matter equal in honor to God, who is uncreated, eternal, and always consistent with himself. According to the Stoics, Zeus is the seething (ζέουσα) substance, Hera is the air (ἀήρ), as the name shows if it is joined to itself and pronounced continuously, and Poseidon is drink (πόσις). Others explain nature in other ways: some say that Zeus is air of a double nature, male and female; others that he is the season that turns the weather to mildness, which is why he alone escaped Kronos. But to the Stoics one may say: if you consider the supreme God to be one, uncreated and eternal, and the compounds to be changes of matter, and you say that the spirit of God, pervading matter, takes different names according to its variations, then the forms of matter will be the body of God; and when the elements perish in the conflagration, the names must perish together with the forms, and only the spirit of God will remain. Who, then, would believe that bodies whose material variation is perishable are gods? There are those who say that Kronos is time (χρόνος) and Rhea the earth: she conceives by Kronos and gives birth, and so she is considered the mother of all; he begets and consumes. The castration, they say, is the intercourse of male with female, which cuts off and casts seed into the womb and begets a human being who has desire, that is, Aphrodite, within himself; the madness of Kronos is the turning of the seasons, which destroys things animate and inanimate; and the bonds and Tartarus are time, changed by the seasons and vanishing from sight. To these we say: if Kronos is time, he changes; if a season, he turns; if darkness or frost or moist substance, none of these remains. But the divine is immortal, unmoved, and unchangeable; so neither Kronos nor his image is a god. As for Zeus, if he is air born from Kronos, whose male part is Zeus and female part Hera (which is why she is both his sister and his wife), he is subject to change; if a season, he turns; but the divine neither changes nor falls away. Why should I trouble you by saying more? You know better what each of the natural philosophers has said, what the writers on nature have thought, what they say about Athena, whom they call wisdom pervading all things, about Isis, whom they call the nature of the ages, from whom all things have sprung and through whom all things exist, or about Osiris, who was slain by his brother Typhon, and whose limbs Isis sought with her son Horus, and when she had found them prepared them for burial, a burial still called Osirian to this day. Turning up and down among the forms of matter, they fall away from God, who is contemplated by reason; they deify the elements and their parts, giving them now one name and now another: the sowing of grain they call Osiris (hence, they say, in the mysteries it was said to Isis at the finding of the limbs, or of the crops, “We have found, we rejoice together!”), the fruit of the vine Dionysus, the vine itself Semele, and the heat of the sun the thunderbolt. And yet those who turn the myths into gods do anything but theology, not realizing that by their very defense of the gods they confirm the charges against them. What have Europa and the Bull, the Swan and Leda, to do with earth and air, that Zeus's foul union with them should be the union of earth and air? But falling short of the greatness of God and unable to rise above it by reason (for they have no affinity with the heavenly place), they have melted away into the forms of matter, and in their fall deify the changes of the elements; as if someone were to take the ship in which he sailed for the pilot. But just as a ship, however well equipped, is of no use without its pilot, so the elements, however well ordered, are of no use without the providence of God. For the ship will not sail by itself, and the elements will not move without their Maker.

You who surpass everyone in understanding might say: “Why, then, do some of the idols work, if those for whom we set up the statues are not gods? It is not likely that lifeless and motionless images have power by themselves, without something to move them.” That in certain places, cities, and nations some effects are produced in the name of idols, we too do not deny. But if some people have been helped and others harmed, we will not for that reason consider gods those who produced the effects in either case. We have examined precisely both why you think the idols have power, and who they are that produce the effects, trading on the idols' names. As I am about to show who works through the idols, and that they are not gods, I must call on some witnesses from philosophy as well. Thales first divides beings, as those who have studied him closely record, into God, demons, and heroes. By God he means the mind of the world; by demons he understands beings of the nature of soul; and by heroes the separated souls of human beings, the good heroes being good souls and the bad ones evil souls. Plato, suspending judgment on other matters, also divides them into the uncreated God, those made by the uncreated God to adorn the heaven, namely the planets and the fixed stars, and demons. About these demons he himself declines to speak, but thinks it right to heed those who have spoken of them: “To speak about the other demons and to know their origin is beyond us; but we must believe those who have spoken before, who were, as they said, offspring of the gods, and who surely knew their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the children of gods, even if they speak without plausible or necessary proofs; since they claim to be reporting family matters, we must follow custom and believe them. So, then, according to them, let the origin of these gods be held and told as follows: of Earth and Heaven were born Ocean and Tethys; of these Phorcys, Kronos, and Rhea, and those with them; of Kronos and Rhea, Zeus and Hera and all those whom we know to be called their brothers and sisters, and further others, their descendants.” Now Plato conceived of the eternal Mind and of God grasped by reason, and declared his attributes: true being, the single nature, the good flowing from him, which is truth; he spoke of the first power, and said that “all things are about the King of all, and all things are for his sake, and he is the cause of all,” and of the second and the third: “the second about the second things, and the third about the third.” Did such a man think it beyond him to learn the truth about beings said to have come from perceptible things, earth and heaven? It cannot be said. But because he thought it impossible for gods to beget and be born, since an end follows whatever comes into being, and, what is even more impossible, to change the minds of the many, who accept the myths without examining them, for these reasons he said that it was beyond him to know and to speak of the origin of the other demons, since he could neither learn nor declare that gods are begotten. And his saying, “The great leader in heaven, Zeus, driving a winged chariot, goes first, ordering all things and caring for them, and there follows him a host of gods and demons,” does not refer to the Zeus said to be born of Kronos. Here the name belongs to the Maker of all things. Plato himself makes this clear: having no other name to signify him, he used the popular name, not as proper to God but for the sake of clarity, since it is not possible to present God to everyone as he really is; and he added the word “great” to distinguish the heavenly from the earthly, the uncreated from the created, who is younger than heaven and earth, and younger than the Cretans, who stole him away so that he would not be killed by his father.

Why need I mention the poets, or examine other opinions, before you who have explored every branch of learning? It is enough to say this much. If the poets and philosophers did not acknowledge that God is one, and did not think of these other beings, some as demons, some as matter, and some as having been human beings, then we might with reason be driven out, since we use a reasoning that distinguishes God from matter and from their substances. For just as we say that there is God, and the Son, his Word, and the Holy Spirit, united in power, the Father, the Son, the Spirit, because the Son is the mind, word, and wisdom of the Father, and the Spirit an effluence, as light from fire; so we have come to understand that there are also other powers, which are concerned with matter and act through it. One of these is hostile to God: not because there is anything that stands opposed to God as strife opposes love in Empedocles, or as night opposes day in the visible world (for if anything had set itself against God, it would have ceased to exist, its constitution dissolved by the power and might of God), but because the spirit that is concerned with matter is opposed to the goodness of God. That goodness is an attribute of God and coexists with him, as color with a body, without which the body does not exist (not as though it were a part of him, but as a property that necessarily accompanies him, united and blended with him, as yellow belongs to fire and blue to the sky). This spirit was made by God, just as the other angels were made by him, and was entrusted with the governance of matter and of the forms of matter. For this is why the angels were constituted: they were made by God to exercise providence over the things he had ordered, so that God might have the universal and general providence over all things, and the angels appointed over particular things the providence over them. With human beings, virtue and vice are a matter of free choice (for you would neither honor the good nor punish the wicked unless vice and virtue were in their own power; and some are found diligent in the tasks you entrust to them, others unfaithful); and it is the same with the angels. Some, being free, as God had made them, remained in the tasks for which God made and appointed them; but others outraged both the constitution of their nature and their office. Among these were this ruler of matter and of the forms in it, and others of those placed around this first firmament (you know that we say nothing without witnesses, but declare what the prophets have spoken). These others fell into desire for virgins and were found weaker than the flesh; and he became negligent and wicked in the governance of what had been entrusted to him. From those who went after the virgins were born the so-called giants. And if the poets too tell a partial story about the giants, do not be surprised. Worldly wisdom and divine wisdom differ as truth differs from plausibility, the one being heavenly and the other earthly; and, as the ruler of matter puts it, “We know how to tell many lies that resemble the truth.”

These angels, then, who fell from heaven and haunt the air and the earth, no longer able to rise to the realms above the heavens, together with the souls of the giants, are the demons who wander about the world. Both produce similar movements: the demons according to the natures they received, the angels according to the desires they conceived. The ruler of matter, as one can see from what happens, directs and administers things contrary to the goodness of God. “Often has this care come over my mind: whether chance or a divinity rules the affairs of mortals, bringing some, against hope and against justice, falling from their homes without a livelihood, and others to prosperity.” That people fare well or badly against hope and justice left Euripides at a loss to know whose is this administration of earthly things, under which one might say: “How, then, seeing these things, can we say that there is a race of gods, or live by laws?” This also made Aristotle say that the things below heaven are not under providence, although the eternal providence of God remains over us equally (“The earth, by necessity, whether it will or not, grows grass and fattens my cattle”), while his particular providence goes, in truth and not in appearance, to the worthy, and all the rest are provided for in common by the law of reason governing their constitution. But the demonic movements and operations that come from the adverse spirit produce these disorderly assaults, moving people from within and from without, one in one way and another in another, as individuals and as nations, separately and in common, according to the reason of matter and their affinity with divine things. For this reason some whose reputation is not small have thought that this universe was not constituted by any order, but is driven and carried about by irrational chance. They do not know that in the constitution of the whole world nothing is disorderly or neglected, but each thing has come into being by reason, and so they do not transgress the order appointed for them. The human being too, as far as his Maker is concerned, is well ordered: in the nature of his birth, which has one common principle; in the disposition of his formation, which does not transgress the law set for it; and in the end of his life, which remains the same and common to all. But according to his own individual reason, and the operation of the ruler who holds sway and of the demons who attend him, each is carried and moved in a different direction, though all have within them a common power of reasoning.

Those who draw people to the idols are the demons I have mentioned, who cling to the blood of the sacrificial victims and lick it up; while the gods who please the many and whose names are given to the images were, as one can learn from the accounts about them, human beings. That it is the demons who usurp the names is proved by what each of them does. Some castrate themselves: those devoted to Rhea. Others cut and gash themselves: those devoted to Artemis; and the Artemis among the Taurians murders strangers. I pass over those who torture themselves with knives and knucklebones, and all the kinds of demons; for it is not God's part to move people to things contrary to nature. “When the demon prepares evils for a man, he first harms his mind.” But God, being perfectly good, is eternally doing good. The greatest proof that those who produce the effects are different from those for whom the images are set up is Troas and Parium. Troas has statues of Neryllinus, a man of our own time, and Parium has statues of Alexander and of Proteus; the tomb and statue of Alexander are still in the marketplace. The other statues of Neryllinus are a public ornament, if indeed a city is adorned by such things; but one of them is thought to give oracles and to heal the sick, and for this the people of Troas sacrifice to the statue, gild it, and crown it. As for the statues of Alexander and of Proteus (you know that Proteus threw himself into the fire near Olympia), the statue of Proteus too is said to give oracles, and to that of Alexander [“Evil Paris, fairest in form, mad for women”] public sacrifices and feasts are held, as to a god who hears prayers. Is it Neryllinus, Proteus, and Alexander who produce these effects around the statues, or the constitution of the matter? But the matter is bronze. What can bronze do by itself, when it can be made over into another shape, as Amasis did with the footbath in Herodotus? And what more can Neryllinus, Proteus, and Alexander do for the sick? For what the image is now said to do, it was doing while Neryllinus was still alive and ill.

What, then, is the explanation? First, the irrational and fanciful movements of the soul in forming opinions produce different images at different times: some they draw from matter, others they shape and conceive for themselves. The soul suffers this especially when it takes on the material spirit and is blended with it, looking not up to heavenly things and their Maker but down to earthly things, wholly toward the earth, becoming mere blood and flesh and no longer pure spirit. These irrational and fanciful movements of the soul, then, give birth to fantasies mad for idols. And when a tender and impressionable soul, which has never heard sound teaching and has no experience of it, which has never contemplated the truth or considered the Father and Maker of all things, has false opinions about him stamped upon it, the demons who hover about matter, greedy for the smell of burnt fat and the blood of victims, and deceivers of human beings, seize on these deluded movements of the souls of the many. Usurping their thoughts, they make fantasies flow into them as if from the idols and statues; and whenever the soul, being immortal, moves rationally by its own power, either foretelling the future or healing present ills, the demons reap the glory for it.

Perhaps it is necessary, in view of what has been said, to say a little about the names of the gods. Herodotus, and Alexander son of Philip in his letter to his mother (both are said to have conversed with the priests at Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes), say that they learned from the priests that the gods had been human beings. Herodotus says: “They showed that those whose statues these were had been men of this kind, far removed from gods. Before these men, however, gods had been the rulers in Egypt, dwelling together with human beings, and one of them was always supreme; the last to reign over it was Horus son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo; he put down Typhon and was the last king of Egypt. Osiris is Dionysus in the Greek language.” So the others, and last of all Horus, were kings of Egypt. From them the names of the gods passed to the Greeks. Apollo is the son of Dionysus and Isis, as Herodotus again says: “They say that Apollo and Artemis are children of Dionysus and Isis, and that Leto became their nurse and preserver.” These, as if they had come from heaven, they had as their first kings; partly from ignorance of true piety toward the divine, partly out of gratitude for their rule, they held them to be gods together with their wives. “All Egyptians sacrifice pure bulls and bull calves, but they may not sacrifice cows, for these are sacred to Isis; for the statue of Isis is a woman with a cow's horns, as the Greeks portray Io.” Who would be more believable in saying these things than those who inherit, son from father, the priesthood and the history together? For it is not likely that the temple-keepers, who make the idols venerable, would falsely say that they were human beings. If Herodotus alone had said that the Egyptians tell of the gods as of human beings, since he also says, “The divine parts of the accounts I heard I am not eager to relate, except only their names,” one might have had to disbelieve him as a teller of myths. But since Alexander, and Hermes called Trismegistus, who joined their own lineage to the gods, and countless others (not to list them one by one) say the same, there is no room left to doubt that they were kings who came to be regarded as gods. That they were human beings is shown by the most learned of the Egyptians, who, while calling the ether, the earth, the sun, and the moon gods, regard the others as mortal human beings and their tombs as temples; Apollodorus shows it too in his work On the Gods. Herodotus even calls their sufferings mysteries: “How they celebrate the festival of Isis in the city of Busiris I have described before. For after the sacrifice all of them, men and women, a great many thousands of people, beat their breasts; but for whom they beat them it is not holy for me to say.” If they are gods, they are also immortal; but if people beat their breasts for them, and their sufferings are mysteries, they are human beings. So Herodotus himself says: “There are also at Sais, in the temple of Athena, behind the shrine and along the whole wall of Athena's temple, the burial places of one whose name I think it unholy to reveal in such a matter. There is a lake beside it, adorned all around with a stone rim, in size, it seems to me, as large as the one at Delos called the Wheel. On this lake the Egyptians enact by night the representations of his sufferings, which they call mysteries.” And not only is the tomb of Osiris shown, but also his embalming: “When a corpse is brought to them, they show those who bring it wooden models of corpses, painted to look lifelike; and they say that the most elaborate of these is the model of one whose name I think it unholy to name in such a matter.”

The wise men of the Greeks in poetry and history also speak in the same way. Of Heracles: “Wretch, he respected neither the watchful eye of the gods nor the table he had set before his guest; and then he killed him too.” Being such a man, it is natural that he went mad, and natural that he lit a pyre and burned himself. Of Asclepius Hesiod says: “The father of men and gods was angry, and hurling a smoky thunderbolt from Olympus he killed Leto's dear son, stirring up his wrath.” And Pindar: “But even wisdom is bound by gain. Gold appearing in his hand turned him too, with a lordly fee. Then the son of Kronos, hurling with his hands through both of them, swiftly took the breath from their breasts, and the blazing thunderbolt struck them dead.” Either, then, they were gods and had no desire for gold (“O gold, fairest welcome for mortals, for neither a mother nor children give such delights”; for the divine lacks nothing and is above desire), and they did not die; or they were human beings, wicked through ignorance and slaves to money. Why should I say more, mentioning Castor or Polydeuces or Amphiaraus, who, so to speak, were human beings born of human beings only yesterday or the day before, and are considered gods, when people even think that Ino became a goddess after her madness and all she suffered in it: “Those who wander the sea will call her Leucothea,” and her son: “Holy Palaemon he will be called by sailors”?

For if even those who were detestable and hated by the gods gained the reputation of being gods; if Semiramis, the daughter of Derceto, a lustful and bloodthirsty woman, was thought a Syrian goddess, and because of Derceto the Syrians worship doves and Semiramis (for the woman, impossible as it is, was changed into a dove; the myth is in Ctesias): what wonder is it that some were called gods by their subjects because of their rule and sovereignty (the Sibyl, whom Plato also mentions, says: “And then it was the tenth generation of mortal men since the flood came upon the men of old; and Kronos reigned, and Titan, and Iapetus, the noblest children of Earth and Heaven, whom men called by these names, giving them the names of Earth and Heaven, because they were the first of mortal men”), others because of their strength, like Heracles and Perseus, and others because of their art, like Asclepius? Those to whom either their subjects or the rulers themselves gave honor came to share the name, some out of fear, others out of reverence. Antinous too, through the kindness of your ancestors toward their subjects, came to be considered a god. And those who came afterward accepted it without examination. “The Cretans are always liars; for the Cretans, O lord, built a tomb for you; but you did not die.” You believe, Callimachus, in the birth of Zeus, yet disbelieve in his tomb; and thinking to obscure the truth, you proclaim even to those who do not know it that he is dead. If you look at the cave, you are reminded of Rhea's childbearing; if you see the coffin, you cast a shadow over the dead man; not knowing that the uncreated God alone is eternal. For either the myths told by the many and by the poets about the gods are not to be believed, and piety toward them is superfluous (for beings about whom the stories are false do not exist); or, if their births, loves, murders, thefts, castrations, and thunderbolts are true, they no longer exist, having ceased to be, since they came into being from not being. For what reason is there to believe some of the stories and disbelieve others, when the poets wrote their histories to glorify them? Those who made them venerable by their histories, and through whom they came to be considered gods, would not have invented their sufferings. That we are not atheists, then, since we acknowledge as God the Maker of this universe and the Word that comes from him, has been proved as far as I am able, even if not as the subject deserves.

They also invent godless feasts and unions against us, so that they may seem to have reason for hating us, and they think that by frightening us they will either draw us away from our way of life or make the rulers harsh and implacable by the enormity of the charges. But they are trifling with people who know that from of old, and not in our case only, it has been the rule, by a kind of divine law and reason, that vice makes war on virtue. So Pythagoras was burned with three hundred others; Heraclitus and Democritus were driven out, the one from the city of the Ephesians, the other from that of the Abderites, who charged him with madness; and the Athenians condemned Socrates to death. But just as they were no worse in point of virtue because of the opinion of the many, so the indiscriminate slander of some casts no shadow on the uprightness of our life; for we are in good repute with God. Nevertheless I will answer these charges too. To you, I know well, I have already made my defense by what I have said. For you, who surpass everyone in understanding, know that those whose life is ruled by God as by a measuring line, so that each of us may be blameless and irreproachable before him, will never even entertain the thought of the slightest sin. If we were convinced that we would live only this present life, one might suspect us of sinning, as slaves to flesh and blood or overcome by gain or desire. But we know that God watches over what we think and what we say, night and day, and that, being wholly light, he sees even what is in our hearts. So we are convinced that when we are released from this life we shall live another life, better than the one here, heavenly and not earthly (for we shall abide with God and in God's company, steadfast and free from passion in soul, not as flesh, even though we have flesh, but as heavenly spirit); or else, if we fall with the rest, a worse life, in fire. For God did not make us like sheep or beasts of burden, as a by-product, only to perish and be destroyed. In view of this, it is not likely that we would choose to do wrong and hand ourselves over to the great Judge to be punished.

It is no wonder that they invent about us the stories they tell about their own gods; they even exhibit the gods' sufferings as mysteries. But if they were going to judge free and indiscriminate intercourse a terrible thing, they ought to have hated Zeus, who had children by his mother Rhea and his daughter Kore, and took his own sister as wife; or Orpheus, the author of these stories, for making Zeus more unholy and abominable than Thyestes. For Thyestes lay with his daughter in obedience to an oracle, wanting to gain the kingdom and be avenged. But we are so far from indiscriminate intercourse that we are not even allowed to look with desire. “He who looks at a woman,” it says, “to desire her has already committed adultery in his heart.” We may not use our eyes for anything more than what God made them for, to be a light to us; for us, to look with pleasure is adultery, since the eyes were made for other purposes; and we shall be judged even for our thoughts. How then could such people be disbelieved when they say they are chaste? For our account is not with human laws, which a wicked man might even escape (I assured you at the beginning, sovereigns, that our teaching is taught by God), but we have a law that makes the measure of righteousness to treat our neighbors as ourselves. That is why, according to their age, we think of some as sons and daughters, regard others as brothers and sisters, and give to the older the honor due to fathers and mothers. Those, then, whom we think of as brothers and sisters and by the other names of kinship, we take great care that their bodies remain unviolated and undefiled. For the Word says to us again, “If anyone kisses a second time because it gave him pleasure …”; and adds, “So the kiss, or rather the greeting of reverence, must be given with the greatest care, since if it is clouded even a little by an impure thought, it shuts us out of eternal life.”

Having, then, the hope of eternal life, we despise the things of this life, even the pleasures of the soul. Each of us regards as his wife the woman he has married according to the laws laid down among us, and that only for the purpose of having children. For as the farmer casts his seed into the ground and waits for the harvest, and does not sow more on top of it, so for us the begetting of children is the limit of desire. You would find many among us, both men and women, growing old unmarried in the hope of being closer to God. If remaining a virgin and a eunuch brings one nearer to God, while even a thought or a desire leads one away, then, since we flee the thoughts, much more do we reject the deeds. For our concern is not with practicing speeches but with showing and teaching by deeds that a person should either remain as he was born or be content with one marriage; for a second marriage is a respectable adultery. “For whoever puts away his wife,” it says, “and marries another, commits adultery”; so he permits neither putting away her whose virginity one has ended, nor marrying again. For he who deprives himself of his first wife, even if she has died, is a covert adulterer: he transgresses the hand of God, because in the beginning God formed one man and one woman, and he dissolves the joining of flesh to flesh in unity for the fellowship of the race.

But such people (how shall I speak of things unspeakable?) make us hear the proverb, “The harlot reproaches the chaste woman.” They have set up a market for prostitution and established lawless haunts for the young, for every kind of shameful pleasure, and they do not spare even males: males with males commit shocking deeds, outraging in every way all the noblest and most comely bodies, and dishonoring the beautiful work of God (for beauty on earth is not self-made, but sent by the hand and will of God). These people, who know what they themselves do, and ascribe the same things to their own gods, boasting of them as noble and worthy of the gods, revile us for these very things: adulterers and pederasts insult the celibate and the once-married. They live like fish, which swallow whatever falls in their way, the stronger chasing the weaker. This is what it is to feed on human flesh: to do violence, against the very laws that you and your ancestors laid down after examining them for all justice, to such a degree that not even the provincial governors you send out are enough to try the cases, and to do it to people who are not allowed, when struck, to refuse to offer themselves, nor, when reviled, to refuse to bless. For it is not enough for us to be just (justice is to return like for like); we are required to be good and to bear wrong patiently.

Who in his right mind, then, would say that we, being such people, are murderers? For one cannot eat human flesh without first killing someone. Their first charge is a lie; as for the second, if anyone asks them whether they have seen what they describe, no one is so shameless as to say that he has. And yet we have slaves, some of us more and some fewer, from whom nothing can be hidden; but not one of them has ever told such lies about us. For who could accuse of murder or cannibalism people who, as they know, cannot bear to watch even a man being justly put to death? Who does not eagerly attend the contests of gladiators and of wild beasts, especially those you put on? But we, considering that to watch a man being put to death is close to killing him, have renounced such spectacles. How then can we commit murder, when we will not even watch, lest we bring guilt and pollution on ourselves? We say that women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder and will have to give account to God for the abortion; on what principle, then, would we commit murder? For it is not consistent to regard even the fetus in the womb as a living being, and therefore an object of God's care, and then to kill it once it has come into life; nor to refuse to expose a newborn child, on the ground that those who expose children are child-murderers, and then to do away with a child that has been reared. No, we are in all things always alike and consistent, being servants of reason and not its masters.

Who, believing in a resurrection, would offer himself as a tomb for bodies that are going to rise? For it is not consistent both to be convinced that our bodies will rise and to eat them as though they will not rise, and to believe that the earth will give back its own dead, but that those whom one has buried inside oneself will not be demanded back. On the contrary, it is likely that those who think they will give no account of their present life, whether bad or good, and that there is no resurrection, and reckon that the soul perishes with the body and is, as it were, extinguished with it, will stop at no outrage. But those who are convinced that nothing will go unexamined before God, and that the body which served the irrational impulses and desires of the soul will be punished together with it, have no reason to commit even the slightest sin. If it seems to anyone utter nonsense that the body which has rotted, been dissolved, and vanished should be put together again, we could not reasonably, on account of those who do not believe, be thought wicked, but only simple; for by the arguments with which we deceive ourselves, if we do, we wrong no one. That bodies will rise, not only according to us but also according to many of the philosophers, it would be superfluous to show at present, lest we seem to bring in arguments foreign to the matter at hand, speaking of intelligible and perceptible things and their constitution, or of how incorporeal things are older than bodies and intelligible things precede perceptible ones, even though we come upon perceptible things first, bodies being constituted from incorporeal things by the combination of intelligibles, and perceptible things from intelligible ones. For according to Pythagoras and Plato nothing prevents bodies, once they have been dissolved, from being put together again from the same elements from which they were constituted in the first place. But let the discussion of the resurrection be deferred.

And you, who are in every way, by nature and by education, good, moderate, humane, and worthy of your rule: now that I have refuted the charges and shown that we are godly, gentle, and disciplined in soul, bow your royal heads in assent. For who are more deserving to obtain what they ask than we, who pray for your rule, that you may, son from father, as is most just, succeed to the kingdom, and that your empire may grow and increase as all things are brought under your hand? This is also to our advantage, that we may lead a quiet and peaceful life, and may ourselves readily do all that is commanded.