Against Celsus 5.36

And what sort of god is Herodotus's Ammon, whose words Celsus has adopted as proof that each should keep his ancestral customs? For their Ammon does not allow the people of the city of Marea and of Apis, who live in the parts bordering on Libya, to be indifferent about eating cows; a thing that is not only indifferent by its own nature, but also does not prevent anyone from being noble and good. And if their Ammon had forbidden the eating of cows because the animal is useful for farming, and moreover because their kind increases chiefly through the females, perhaps the argument would have had some plausibility; but as it is, he simply wants them, because they drink from the Nile, to keep the laws of the Egyptians about cows. And in this Celsus, mocking the angels among the Jews who convey the will of God, said that "Ammon is no worse at conveying the will of the divine powers than the angels of the Jews"; but he did not examine their words and appearances, and what they mean. For he would have seen that "it is not for oxen that God cares," even where he seems to legislate about oxen or irrational animals, but that what was written for the sake of human beings contains, under the guise of laws about irrational animals, a certain teaching about nature. Celsus, then, says that no one does anything unjust in wishing to practise his own customs; and it follows on his view that the Scythians do nothing unjust when they feast on human beings according to their ancestral customs. And those Indians who eat their fathers think they act piously, and according to Celsus they at least do nothing unjust. At any rate, he sets out a passage of Herodotus arguing that each rightly uses his ancestral customs, and he seems to approve the Indians called Callatiae in the time of Darius, who ate their parents, since, when Darius asked for what price they would be willing to give up this custom, they cried out loudly and bade him speak no evil.