Oration to the Greeks 1–14

Do not be so very hostile toward the barbarians, men of Greece, and do not begrudge them their teachings. For which of your practices did not take its origin from barbarians? The most eminent of the Telmessians invented divination by dreams; the Carians, foreknowledge by the stars; the Phrygians and the most ancient of the Isaurians, divination by the flight of birds; the Cyprians, divination by sacrifice; the Babylonians, astronomy; the Persians, magic; the Egyptians, geometry; the Phoenicians, instruction by letters. So stop calling imitations inventions. It was Orpheus who taught you to compose poetry and to sing, and the same man taught you to be initiated into mysteries; the Tuscans taught you sculpture; the annals of the Egyptians taught you to write history. You took flute-playing from Marsyas and Olympus, and these two, both Phrygians and rustics, devised the harmony of the panpipe. The Tyrrhenians invented the trumpet; the Cyclopes, metalworking; and letter-writing, the woman who once ruled the Persians, as Hellanicus says: her name was Atossa. So put away this conceit, and do not parade fine words, you who are praised by yourselves and keep your advocates at home. A person of sense ought to wait for the testimony of others, and to be in harmony also in the way he speaks. But as it is, you alone have come to the point of not even speaking alike in ordinary conversation: the Dorians do not use the same diction as those from Attica, and the Aeolians do not speak like the Ionians. And since there is so great a discord where there ought to be none, I am at a loss whom I should call a Greek. And the most absurd thing of all: you have honored modes of expression not native to you, and by sometimes misusing barbarian words you have made your dialect a jumble. For this reason we have renounced your wisdom, even if someone in it was very distinguished. For, as the comic poet says, “These are leavings and chatter, choirs of swallows, spoilers of art.” Those who pursue it bawl, and give out the voice of ravens. You have devised rhetoric for injustice and false accusation, selling for pay the freedom of your speech, and often representing what is just today as not good tomorrow; and poetry, so that you may compose battles and the loves of the gods and the corruption of the soul.

For what noble thing have you produced by your philosophy? And which of your most serious men has been free of boasting? Diogenes, who prided himself on his self-sufficiency with the boast of his tub, was seized with an intestinal blockage from eating a raw octopus and died of his intemperance. Aristippus, walking about in purple, lived a dissolute life, true to his teaching. Plato, philosopher though he was, was sold by Dionysius because of his gluttony. And Aristotle, who ignorantly set a limit to providence and confined happiness to the things he himself liked, flattered Alexander most boorishly, forgetting that he was a mere youth; and Alexander, quite in the Aristotelian manner, shut up his own friend because he would not do obeisance to him, and carried him about like a bear or a leopard. He certainly obeyed his teacher's doctrines, displaying his courage and virtue at banquets, running through with his spear his intimate and very dear friend, and then weeping and starving himself on the pretext of grief, so as not to be hated by his own people. I would laugh too at those who to this day make use of Aristotle's doctrines: they say that the things beneath the moon are without providence, yet they themselves, who are nearer the earth than the moon and below its course, act as providence for what has none; and those who have neither beauty nor wealth nor bodily strength nor noble birth have, according to Aristotle, no happiness. Let such men do the philosophizing!

I would not accept Heraclitus, who said, “I searched out myself,” because he was self-taught and arrogant. Nor would I praise him for hiding his poem in the temple of Artemis, so that it might later be published as a mystery; for those who concern themselves with such things say that Euripides the tragedian went there, read it, and little by little, from memory, carefully passed on the obscurity of Heraclitus. His death exposed his ignorance: seized with dropsy, and practicing medicine as he had practiced philosophy, he plastered himself with cow dung, and when the dung hardened and caused his whole body to contract, he died in convulsions. As for Zeno, who declares that after the conflagration the same people will rise again for the same deeds (I mean Anytus and Meletus to accuse, Busiris to murder strangers, and Heracles again to perform his labors), he must be rejected. In his account of the conflagration he introduces more wicked people than righteous, since there has been one Socrates and one Heracles and a few others like them, and not many; for the bad will be found far more numerous than the good. And on his account God will turn out to be the maker of evils, dwelling in sewers and worms and in those who do unspeakable things. The eruptions of fire in Sicily exposed the boastfulness of Empedocles, who was no god but all but lied that he was one. I laugh also at the old wives' tale of Pherecydes, and at Pythagoras's inheritance of his doctrine, and at Plato's imitation of it, even if some would rather I did not. For who would give his approval to the dog-marriage of Crates, and not rather reject the conceited raving tongue of those like him and turn to seeking what is truly worthwhile? So do not be swept along by the solemn assemblies of philosophers who are no philosophers, who teach doctrines contrary to one another, each saying whatever comes into his head. There are many clashes among them: one hates another, they contradict one another, and in their vanity they pick out the foremost places. They ought not to court kings out of self-interest or flatter those in power, but to wait until the great come to them.

Why, men of Greece, do you want to set the governing powers against us, as in a boxing match? And if I do not wish to follow the customs of certain people, why am I hated as though I were utterly abominable? Does the emperor order the payment of taxes? I am ready to pay them. Does my master order me to serve and to wait on him? I acknowledge my servitude. A human being is to be honored in a human way; but God alone is to be feared, who is not visible to human eyes and cannot be grasped by art. Only if I am commanded to deny him will I not obey; I will die rather, so as not to be shown a liar and ungrateful. Our God did not come into being in time: he alone is without beginning, and he himself is the beginning of all things. God is spirit, not pervading matter but the maker of the material spirits and of the forms in matter; he is invisible and impalpable, himself the Father of things perceptible and invisible. We know him through his creation, and we apprehend the invisible nature of his power through the things he has made. I will not worship the creation that he made for our sake. The sun and moon came into being for us; how then shall I worship my own servants? And how shall I declare wood and stones to be gods? For the spirit that pervades matter is lesser than the more divine spirit, and since it is comparable to a soul, it is not to be honored equally with the perfect God. Nor is the nameless God to be bribed with gifts; for he who needs nothing must not be slandered by us as needy. But I will set out our teaching more clearly.

God was in the beginning; and the beginning, we have been taught, is the power of the Word. For the Lord of all things, being himself the ground of the universe, was alone in the sense that creation had not yet come into being; but inasmuch as he was all power, and himself the ground of things visible and invisible, all things were with him. With him, by his rational power, the Word too, who was in him, subsisted. By the will of his simplicity the Word springs forth; and the Word, not proceeding into emptiness, becomes the firstborn work of the Father. Him we know to be the beginning of the world. He came into being by distribution, not by cutting off; for what is cut off is separated from its source, but what is distributed, taking on a share in the ordering of things, has not left the one from whom it was taken lacking. For just as from one torch many fires are lit, and the light of the first torch is not lessened by the lighting of the many, so too the Word, coming forth from the power of the Father, has not left the one who begot him without his Word. For I myself speak and you hear, and surely I who address you am not left empty of speech because my speech passes over to you; rather, by sending forth my voice I intend to set in order the disordered matter in you. And just as the Word, begotten in the beginning, begot in his turn the creation we live in, himself fashioning matter for himself, so I too, born again in imitation of the Word and having come to grasp the truth, am reshaping the confusion of the matter that is akin to me. For matter is not without beginning like God, nor, as if it were without beginning, is it equal in power to God; it was brought into being, and not by anyone else, but was produced by the Maker of all things alone.

And for this reason we believe that there will be a resurrection of bodies after the consummation of all things: not, as the Stoics teach, according to certain periodic cycles, with the same things always coming into being and passing away for no useful purpose, but once for all, when our ages have come to an end, and that human beings alone will be reconstituted, for good, for the sake of judgment. Our judges are not Minos or Rhadamanthys, before whose death, as the myths say, no soul was judged; the examiner is God the Creator himself. Even if you think us utter babblers and chatterers, it is no concern of ours, since we have believed this teaching. For just as I did not exist before I came to be, and did not know who I was, but existed only in the substance of fleshly matter, and then, having come into being, I who formerly was not have believed through my birth that I exist; in the same way I who came into being, and through death exist no longer and am no longer seen, shall exist again, just as formerly I was not and then was born. Even if fire destroys my flesh, the world has received the matter turned to vapor; and even if I am consumed in rivers or in seas, or torn apart by wild beasts, I am laid up in the storehouses of a rich Lord. The poor and godless man does not know what is laid up there; but God, who reigns, will, when he wills, restore to its former state the substance that is visible to him alone.

For the heavenly Word, having come into being as spirit from the Father and as Word from his rational power, in imitation of the Father who begot him made the human being an image of immortality, so that, just as incorruption belongs to God, in the same way the human being, receiving a share of God, might have immortality too. The Word, then, before the fashioning of human beings, became the maker of angels. Each of these two kinds of creature was made free. They did not have the nature of the good, which again belongs to God alone; human beings bring it to completion by the freedom of their choice, so that the bad person may justly be punished, having become wicked through his own fault, and the righteous person may deservedly be praised for his good deeds, having freely chosen not to transgress the will of God. So it is with angels and human beings. The power of the Word, which had in itself foreknowledge of what would happen, not by fate but by the free decision of those who choose, foretold how future events would turn out; and it restrained wickedness by prohibitions and praised those who remained good. And when people followed one who was more intelligent than the rest because he was the first-created, and declared him a god, though he was rising up against the law of God, then the power of the Word shut out from fellowship with itself both the leader of the madness and those who had followed him. And the one who had been made in the image of God, when the more powerful spirit was separated from him, became mortal; and because of his transgression and ignorance the first-created was shown to be a demon; and those who imitated him, his illusions, became an army of demons, and because of their free will they were handed over to their own folly.

Human beings become the material for their apostasy. For the demons showed them a chart of the positions of the stars and, like dice-players, introduced fate, a thing utterly unjust. For the judge and the judged came to be as they are by fate; murderers and murdered, rich and poor, are the offspring of the same fate; and every birth, as in a theater, has provided entertainment for those among whom, as Homer says, “unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods.” For how can beings who watch gladiators and take sides, one for this man and one for that, who marry and corrupt boys and commit adultery, who laugh and grow angry, who run away and are wounded, not be thought mortal? By the very means through which they have shown people what their nature is, they have urged their hearers on to the same things. And have not the demons themselves, with Zeus their leader, fallen under fate, overcome by the same passions as human beings? And besides, how can one honor beings whose teachings contradict one another so much? Rhea, whom the people of the Phrygian mountains call Cybele, is said to have made castration a law because of her beloved Attis; but Aphrodite delights in the embraces of marriage. Artemis is a sorceress; Apollo heals. And after the beheading of the Gorgon, Poseidon's beloved, from whom sprang the horse Pegasus and Chrysaor, Athena and Asclepius divided the drops of blood between them: he saved lives with them, but she with the same gore became a slayer of men and a maker of war. It seems to me that the Athenians, not wishing to discredit her, attributed to the earth the child born of her union with Hephaestus, so that Athena should not be thought to have lost her maidenly strength through Hephaestus, as Atalanta lost hers through Meleager. For the lame god, it seems, the maker of brooches and curling spirals, beguiled the motherless orphan girl with trinkets. Poseidon goes sailing, Ares delights in wars, Apollo plays the lyre, Dionysus is tyrant of the Thebans, Cronus slays a tyrant. Zeus even lies with his daughter, and the daughter conceives by him. Let Eleusis now be my witness, and the mystic serpent, and Orpheus who says, “Shut the doors, you profane!” Aidoneus carries off Kore, and his deeds have become mysteries; Demeter weeps for her daughter, and some people are deceived because of the Athenians. In the precinct of Leto's son there is something called the Navel, and the Navel is the tomb of Dionysus. I praise you now, Daphne: by overcoming Apollo's lust you exposed his prophetic art, since he did not foresee what would happen with you and so gained nothing from his skill. Let the Far-Shooter tell me now how Zephyrus killed Hyacinthus. Zephyrus beat him; and though the tragic poet calls the breeze “the most honored vehicle of the gods,” Apollo was beaten by a slight breeze and lost his beloved.

Such are the demons; they are the ones who laid down fate. The basis of their system was the animal kingdom. For the creeping things on the earth, the swimming things in the waters, and the four-footed beasts on the mountains, among whom they lived after they were thrown out of their life in heaven, these they deemed worthy of heavenly honor, so that they themselves might be thought to dwell in heaven, and might make the unreasoning life on earth seem reasonable by the arrangement of the stars. So the passionate man and the toiling man, the self-controlled and the unrestrained, the poor and the rich, owe what they are to those who made laws for birth. For the drawing of the zodiac is the work of gods. And when the light of one of them prevails, as they say, it robs the majority of their prize; and the one who is beaten now is apt to prevail another time. The seven planets please them, like people amusing themselves at draughts. But we are above fate, and instead of wandering demons we have learned of one Lord who does not wander; and since we are not led by fate, we have rejected its lawgivers. Tell me, for God's sake: did Triptolemus sow the wheat, and does he benefit the Athenians after the mourning? And why did Demeter not become a benefactor of humankind before her daughter was lost? The dog of Erigone is shown in the sky, and the Scorpion that helped Artemis, and Chiron the Centaur, and the half-ship Argo, and Callisto's Bear. How then, before these did the deeds mentioned, was the sky without its ornaments? And who will not find it ridiculous that the Triangle is set among the stars, according to some because of Sicily, according to others as the first letter of the name of Zeus? Why then are Sardinia and Cyprus not honored in the sky too? And why have figures of letters not been fixed there for the brothers of Zeus, who divided the kingdoms among them? And how is Cronus, who was put in chains and thrown out of his kingdom, appointed steward of fate? And how does one who reigns no longer give kingdoms? So put away this nonsense, and do not break the law by hating us unjustly.

Metamorphosis is told in myths of human beings, but among you the gods too are transformed. Rhea becomes a tree; Zeus a serpent, because of Persephone; the sisters of Phaethon, poplars; and Leto a common bird, because of which the island now called Delos was called Ortygia. Tell me, does a god become a swan, take the form of an eagle, and, using Ganymede as his cupbearer, glory in pederasty? Why should I revere gods who take bribes and are angry if they do not receive them? Let them keep their fate; I will not worship the planets. What is the Lock of Berenice? And where were its stars before that woman died? And how was the dead Antinous installed in the moon as a handsome youth? Who carried him up there, unless someone, just as with the emperors someone perjures himself for pay, mocking the gods, and is believed when he says they have ascended into heaven, likewise made a god of Antinous and was thought worthy of honor and reward? Why have you robbed God? And why do you dishonor his workmanship? You sacrifice a sheep and you worship the same animal; there is a bull in the sky, and you slaughter its image. The Kneeler crushes a noxious creature; and the eagle that devoured Prometheus, the maker of human beings, is honored. The swan is splendid, because it was an adulterer; splendid too are the Dioscuri, who live on alternate days, the ravishers of the daughters of Leucippus. Better still is Helen, who left fair-haired Menelaus and followed Paris with his turban and his gold. Just and self-controlled too is he who moved the woman who played the harlot to the Elysian fields. But not even the daughter of Tyndareus has been made immortal; and Euripides wisely brought in her killing by Orestes.

How then shall I accept birth according to fate, when I see what kind of stewards it has? I do not wish to be a king; I do not want to be rich; I have refused military command; I have come to hate sexual immorality; I do not go to sea out of greed; I do not compete to win crowns; I am free of the craving for fame; I despise death; I rise above every kind of disease; grief does not consume my soul. If I am a slave, I endure slavery; if I am free, I do not pride myself on my good birth. I see that the sun is the same for all, and that death is one for all, whether it comes through pleasure or through want. The rich man sows, and the poor man shares in the same sowing; the very rich die, and beggars have the same span of life. The rich need more, and they get it by trading on their credit and reputation; but the poor man, who desires only what is most modest for his station, gets by more easily. Why do you lie awake for love of money, as fate would have it? Why, as fate would have it, do you so often reach out and so often die? Die to the world, rejecting the madness in it; live to God, rejecting your old birth by coming to know him. We were not made to die; we die through our own fault. Our free will has destroyed us; we who were free have become slaves; we were sold because of sin. Nothing bad was made by God; it was we who brought forth wickedness; but we who brought it forth are able to reject it again.

We know two different kinds of spirit, one of which is called the soul, while the other is greater than the soul, being the image and likeness of God. Both were present in the first human beings, so that in one respect they were material and in the other above matter. It is like this. One can see that the whole structure of the world, and all creation, came into being from matter, and that matter itself was brought forth by God; so that one may think of it as, in one state, rough and formless before it was separated out, and in the other as ordered and well arranged after the division within it. In it, then, are the heaven, made from matter, and the stars in it; and the earth and everything thought of as coming from it has the same constitution, so that all things have a common origin. This being so, there are certain differences among the things made from matter, so that one thing is more beautiful, and another is beautiful in itself but surpassed by something better. Consider the body: its constitution forms a single ordered whole, and the cause of its coming into being lies within it; yet there are differences of rank within it, and one part is an eye, another an ear, another the arrangement of the hair and the ordering of the entrails and the framework of marrow and bones and sinews; and though each part differs from the other, there is a harmony, an ordered concord. In the same way the world too, which by the power of its maker has some things more brilliant and others unlike them, has by the will of the Creator received a share of material spirit. The details can be understood by anyone who does not in his conceit scornfully dismiss the most divine interpretations, which, set down in writing over the course of time, have made those who attend to them very dear to God. The demons, then, as you call them, having received a structure made from matter and acquired the spirit that comes from it, have become profligate and greedy; some of them turned to what is purer, while others chose the inferior part of matter and conduct themselves in keeping with it. These, men of Greece, are the ones you worship, beings that came from matter but were found far from good order. For those I have mentioned, turning in their folly to vainglory and throwing off the reins, were eager to become robbers of divinity; but the Lord of all things has let them run riot until the world comes to its end and is dissolved, and the Judge comes, and all human beings who, despite the rebellion of the demons, strive for knowledge of the perfect God receive through their struggles a more perfect testimony on the day of judgment. There is, then, a spirit in the stars, a spirit in angels, a spirit in plants and waters, a spirit in human beings, a spirit in animals; and though it is one and the same, it has differences within itself. We say these things not from the tongue, nor from plausible notions and sophistic composition, but using the words of a more divine utterance; so you who wish to learn, make haste. And you who do not scornfully dismiss Anacharsis the Scythian, do not think it beneath you now to be taught by those who follow a barbarian law. Make use of our teachings, even if only as you would of the Babylonians' art of prediction; listen to us when we speak, even if only as to a prophesying oak. The teachings mentioned before are the counterfeit wisdom of frenzied demons; but those of our instruction are above worldly understanding.

The soul in itself, men of Greece, is not immortal, but mortal. Yet the same soul is also able not to die. If it does not know the truth, it dies and is dissolved with the body, and later, at the consummation of the world, rises again with the body, receiving death by punishment in immortality. But if it has gained the knowledge of God, it does not die, even if it is dissolved for a time. For in itself it is darkness, and there is nothing luminous in it. And this, then, is the saying, “The darkness does not comprehend the light.” For it was not the soul that saved the spirit; the soul was saved by it, and the light comprehended the darkness. The Word is the light of God, and the soul without knowledge is darkness. For this reason, if the soul lives alone, it bends downward toward matter and dies together with the flesh; but if it has gained union with the divine spirit, it is not without help, but rises to the regions where the spirit leads it; for the spirit's dwelling is above, but the soul's origin is below. The spirit, then, was at first the soul's companion; but the spirit left it when it was unwilling to follow. The soul kept as it were a spark of the spirit's power, but because of the separation it could not see perfect things, and in seeking God it went astray and fashioned many gods, following the demons with their counterfeit wisdom. The Spirit of God is not with all people; but taking up its dwelling with some who lived justly and being intertwined with their souls, it proclaimed hidden things to the other souls by predictions. And the souls that obeyed wisdom drew to themselves the kindred spirit; but those that did not obey, and rejected the minister of the God who suffered, showed themselves to be fighters against God rather than worshipers of God.

You too, Greeks, are like this: glib in words but with a strange way of thinking. You have practiced the rule of many rather than monarchy, supposing that you are following powerful demons. For just as a robber, inhuman as he is, usually overpowers those like himself by his daring, so the demons, having run aground on great wickedness, have deceived the souls among you that are left alone, through ignorance and illusions. They do not die easily, for they have no share in flesh; but while they live they practice the works of death, dying themselves as often as they train their followers in sins. So what they now have as an advantage, not dying as human beings do, will still be theirs when they come to be punished: they will not share in eternal life, but will receive instead death in immortality. And just as we, for whom dying now comes easily, will afterwards receive either immortality with enjoyment or suffering with immortality, so the demons, who use their present life for wrongdoing and are dying continually even while they live, will hereafter have the same immortality as during the time they lived, but in its nature like that of the human beings who willingly did what the demons prescribed for them during their lifetime. And is it not the case that fewer kinds of sin blossom among human beings because they do not live long, while the demons' wrongdoing has grown greater because their life has no end?