Exhortation to the Greeks 4.53

And if some Cambyses or Darius or other madman attempted something of the kind, and if someone killed the Egyptian Apis, I laugh because he killed their god, but I am indignant if he did wrong for the sake of gain. So I will willingly pass over this kind of crime, considering it the work of greed and not a proof of the powerlessness of idols. But fire and earthquakes, at least, are not greedy for gain, and they are no more afraid of or abashed by the daemons and the statues than the waves are by the pebbles heaped on the beaches. I know a fire that convicts and heals superstition; if you are willing to cease from your folly, the fire will light your way. This fire burned down the temple at Argos together with its priestess Chrysis, and the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the second time after the Amazons; it has often consumed the Capitol at Rome; nor did it spare the temple of Sarapis in the city of the Alexandrians. At Athens it threw down the temple of Dionysus Eleuthereus; and the temple of Apollo at Delphi was first carried off by a storm and then destroyed by a discerning fire. This is shown to you as a prelude to what the fire promises. And do not the makers of statues shame the sensible among you into despising matter? Phidias the Athenian wrote on the finger of Olympian Zeus, “Pantarkes is beautiful”; for to him it was not Zeus who was beautiful, but his beloved. Praxiteles, as Posidippus makes clear in his book on Cnidus, when he was making the statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite, made her resemble the form of Cratina, his mistress, so that the wretched people might worship Praxiteles's mistress. When Phryne, the courtesan of Thespiae, was in her bloom, all the painters copied their images of Aphrodite from the beauty of Phryne, just as the stonecutters at Athens modeled their Hermes statues on Alcibiades. It remains for your judgment to decide whether you want to worship courtesans too.