Exhortation to the Greeks 4.58

The horse stands quiet, the dove is motionless, its wing idle; but the cow of Daedalus, made of wood, caught a wild bull, and art, deceiving the beast, compelled it to mount a woman in love. Such frenzy have the arts, practicing their evil craft, produced in the foolish. The keepers and trainers of monkeys have admired them because none of the wax or clay figures and girls' dolls deceives them; but you will turn out to be worse even than monkeys, devoting yourselves to little statues of stone, wood, gold, and ivory, and to paintings. The makers of such deadly playthings for you are the stonecutters and sculptors, and the painters, carpenters, and poets, who bring in a great crowd of this kind: in the fields Satyrs and Pans, in the woods the mountain Nymphs and the Hamadryads, and indeed around the waters and rivers and springs the Naiads, and around the sea the Nereids. The magi, moreover, boast of daemons as servants of their own impiety, enrolling them as their household slaves, having made them slaves by the compulsion of their incantations. So the marriages, begettings, and childbirths of the gods that are recorded, the adulteries that are sung, the feasts presented in comedy, and the laughter brought in at drinking parties urge me to cry out, even if I wish to keep silent. Alas for such godlessness! You have made heaven a stage, the divine has become a drama for you, and you have made a comedy of what is holy with the masks of daemons, turning true religion into a satyr play through superstition.