Against Celsus 7.53

After this, then, to which we have replied as well as we could, he says to us: “How much better it would have been for you, since you desired to make some innovation, to have taken up with some other of those who died nobly and could receive a divine myth! Come, if Heracles and Asclepius and those glorified of old did not please you, you had Orpheus, a man admittedly possessed of a holy spirit, who also died a violent death. But perhaps he had already been taken over by others. Well then, Anaxarchus, who, thrown into a mortar and pounded most lawlessly, thoroughly despised the punishment, saying, ‘Pound, pound the bag of Anaxarchus; for him you do not pound’: the voice of a truly divine spirit. But some natural philosophers got in first and followed him too. Well then, Epictetus? When his master was twisting his leg, he said, smiling and unperturbed, ‘You will break it’; and when he had broken it he said, ‘Did I not tell you that you would break it?’ What did your god say like this while he was being punished? And you could with better reason have put forward the Sibyl, whom some of you use, as a child of God; as it is, you are able to interpolate many blasphemous things into her writings at random, and you make a god of one who lived a most infamous life and died a most pitiable death. How much more suitable for you than he would have been Jonah ‘under the gourd,’ or Daniel who came out from the beasts, or others more marvellous still than these?”