Miscellanies 7.4.26

Many also fear the inscriptions set up on houses. Diogenes, very wittily, finding written on the house of some scoundrel, “Heracles, the glorious victor, lives here; let no evil enter,” said, “Then how will the master of the house get in?” These same people, who worship every piece of wood and every stone, “the anointed ones,” as the saying goes, are afraid of red wool, grains of salt, torches, squill, and sulfur, bewitched by sorcerers in certain impure purifications. But God, the true God, recognizes as holy only the character of the righteous, just as he recognizes as accursed what is unjust and wicked. One can see, at any rate, that eggs used in purifying people hatch if they are kept warm; this would not happen if they took on the evils of the person purified. Charmingly, then, the comic poet Diphilus mocks the sorcerers in these words: “Purifying the daughters of Proetus and their father Proetus, son of Abas, and an old woman as a fifth besides, with one torch and one squill, so many human bodies, with sulfur and asphalt and the loud-roaring sea, from gently flowing, deep-flowing Ocean. But, blessed Air, send Anticyra down through the clouds, so that I may turn this bug into a drone.”