Oration to the Greeks

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?

And so we must now seek again what we once had and lost, and join the soul to the Holy Spirit, and pursue the union that is according to God. The human soul has many parts, not one; for it is composite, so that it becomes manifest through the body; the soul itself could never appear without the body, nor does the flesh rise without the soul. A human being is not, as the raven-voiced teach, a rational animal capable of intellect and knowledge; for by their reasoning even irrational animals will be shown capable of intellect and knowledge. But the human being alone is the image and likeness of God; and by “human being” I mean not one who behaves like the animals, but one who has advanced far beyond mere humanity to God himself. We have written about this more precisely in our work On Animals. What we must now say is what the image and likeness of God is. What cannot be compared is nothing other than being itself; and what can be compared is nothing other than what is similar. The perfect God is without flesh, but the human being is flesh. The bond of the flesh is the soul, and the flesh is what holds the soul. If this structure is like a temple, God is willing to dwell in it through the spirit, his envoy; but if the dwelling is not such, the human being surpasses the beasts only in articulate speech, and in everything else his way of life is the same as theirs, since he is not a likeness of God. The demons have no flesh at all; their structure is spiritual, like fire or air. The bodies of the demons are plainly visible only to those guarded by the Spirit of God, and not at all to the rest, I mean the merely natural. For the lesser cannot comprehend the greater. That is why the being of the demons has no room for repentance: they are reflections of matter and of wickedness. Matter wanted to rule over the soul; and by their free will the demons handed on laws of death to human beings. But human beings, after losing immortality, have conquered death by the death that comes through faith, and through repentance a calling has been given them, according to the word that says, “since they were made a little lower than the angels.” And everyone who has been defeated can conquer again, if he rejects the makeup of death. What that is will be plain to those who desire immortality.

The demons who give orders to human beings are not the souls of human beings. For how could souls become active after death? Only if a human being were senseless and powerless while alive, and after becoming a corpse could be believed to acquire more active power. But this is not so, as we have shown elsewhere. And it is hard to suppose that the immortal soul, hindered by the parts of the body, becomes wiser when it has moved out of it. For the demons, raging against human beings in their malice, divert their minds, which are bent downward, by various lying stage-shows, so that they are unable to rise up for the journey to the heavens. But the things of the world have not escaped us, and the divine is easily grasped by us, since the power that makes souls immortal has come to us. The demons are seen even by the merely natural, when they sometimes show themselves to people, either so that they may be thought to be something, or to do some harm, like friends who are ill-disposed toward enemies, or to give those who are like them occasions to honor them. If they could, they would certainly have dragged down heaven too, together with the rest of creation. But as it is they do not do this at all, for they cannot; instead, with the lower matter they make war on matter that is like themselves. Whoever wishes to conquer them, let him reject matter. For armed with the breastplate of the heavenly spirit, he will be able to save everything it encloses. There are diseases and disturbances of the matter within us; but when these occur, the demons ascribe their causes to themselves, coming upon a person whenever sickness seizes him. And sometimes they themselves shake the condition of the body with a storm of their folly; but struck by the word of God's power they depart in fear, and the sick person is healed.

What can we even say about the sympathies and antipathies of Democritus, except that, as the common saying goes, the man from Abdera talks Abderite nonsense? And just as the man who gave the city its name, a friend of Heracles as they say, was devoured by the horses of Diomedes, so too the one who boasts of the magus Ostanes will be handed over on the day of the consummation as food for eternal fire. And you too, unless you stop laughing, will enjoy the same punishments as the sorcerers. So, Greeks, listen to me as I cry out to you as if from on high, and do not by mocking shift your own irrationality onto the herald of the truth. A disease is not destroyed by an antipathy, nor is a madman cured by hanging leather amulets on him. These are visitations of demons; and the sick, the one who says he is in love, the one who hates, and the one who wants revenge take the demons as their helpers. This is how their contrivance works. The shapes of letters and the lines made from them cannot by themselves signify what is composed; human beings have made them signs of their thoughts, knowing from the particular way they are combined how the order of the letters has been fixed. In the same way the varieties of roots and the use of sinews and bones are not effective in themselves, but are the alphabet of the demons' wickedness, who have determined what each of them is good for. When they see that people have taken up the service rendered through these things, they take hold of them and make them their slaves. How can it be good to assist adultery? How can it be right to help someone hate the people he passes by? Or how is it right to credit matter, and not God, with helping the mad? By their art they turn people away from piety, getting them to trust in herbs and roots. If God had made these things to do what people want, he would be the maker of evil things. But he made everything that is in any way good, and it is the profligacy of the demons that has used the things in the world to do evil; the form of the evil is theirs and not the perfect God's. For if while alive I am not at all wicked, how will my remains, when I am dead and doing nothing, a thing that neither moves nor perceives, produce anything perceptible? And how can a man who died a most miserable death serve to avenge someone? If this were so, he would much rather avenge himself on his own enemy; for if he could help others, he would much rather become his own avenger.

Pharmacy too, and every form of it, belongs to the same contrivance. For if someone is healed by matter because he trusts in it, he will be healed all the more if he himself relies on the power of God. Just as poisons are material compounds, in the same way remedies are of the same substance. If we reject the baser matter, some people still often try to heal by combining one evil thing with another, and so would use evil things for good. And just as someone who dines with a robber, even if he is not a robber himself, still shares in his punishment because he ate with him, in the same way the one who is not bad, but has mixed with the bad and made use of it for what is thought good, will be punished by God the judge for his partnership in it. Why does one who trusts in the workings of matter not wish to trust in God? And why do you not approach the more powerful Lord, but instead heal yourself as the dog does with grass, the stag with a viper, the pig with river crabs, and the lion with apes? Why do you make gods of the things in the world? And why, when you heal your neighbor, are you called a benefactor? Follow the power of the Word. Demons do not heal; by their art they take human beings captive. The most admirable Justin rightly declared that they are like robbers. For just as robbers are accustomed to take people alive and then restore them to their families for a ransom, so too those who are thought to be gods enter into people's limbs; then by dreams they procure glory for themselves, order such people to come forward in public in the sight of all, and when they have enjoyed the things of the world, they fly away from the sick, bring to an end the disease they had contrived, and restore the people to their former state.

But you, who have no understanding of these things, are learning from us who know them, when you say that you despise death and practice self-sufficiency. For your philosophers are so far from practicing it that some of them receive six hundred gold pieces a year from the Roman emperor for nothing useful, so that they may not even wear their long beards for free. Crescens, who made his nest in the great city, surpassed everyone in pederasty and was wholly given to the love of money. He who counseled contempt of death was himself so afraid of death that he schemed to bring Justin, as he did me also, to death as to an evil, because Justin, in preaching the truth, exposed the philosophers as gluttons and cheats. Whom among the philosophers was he in the habit of persecuting, if not you alone? If you say that one should not fear death, then share our teachings: do not die out of a human craving for fame, like Anaxarchus, but become despisers of death for the sake of the knowledge of God. The structure of the world is good, but the way life is lived in it is bad; and one can see those who do not know God rioting as at a festival. What is divination? Why are you led astray by it? It is a servant of your worldly greed. You want to make war, and you take Apollo as your counselor in murder. You want to carry off a girl, and you choose the demon to help you. You are ill through your own fault, and, like Agamemnon with his ten counselors, you want to have gods on your side. A woman drinks water and goes mad, and is driven out of her senses by incense, and you say that she prophesies. Apollo was a foreknower and a teacher of prophets; in the case of Daphne he deceived himself. Tell me, does an oak prophesy, and do birds foretell the future, and are you inferior to animals and plants? Then it would be good for you to become a prophetic tree and to take on the nature of the birds of the air. The one who makes you greedy for money also prophesies to you about getting rich; the one who stirs up factions and battles also foretells victory in war. If you are above the passions, you will despise all things in the world. Do not loathe us for being such people; rather, reject the demons and follow God alone. All things were made by him, and without him not one thing was made. And if there is poison among the things that grow, this came about because of our sinfulness. I can show you the image of these things; only listen, and the one who believes will understand.

Even if you are healed by drugs (I allow it you as a concession), you must give the credit to God. For the world still drags us down, and in my weakness I seek the help of matter. The perfect spirit is the soul's plumage; having cast it off through sin, the soul fluttered like a fledgling and fell to the ground; and having left its heavenly companionship, it longed to share in lesser things. The demons were made to change their dwelling; the first-formed were banished. The demons were cast down from heaven; the first-formed from an earth, but not from this one: from a better ordering than the one here. And so we must now long for our original state and reject everything that stands in the way. For heaven is not infinite, O man, but bounded and within limits; and beyond it are the better ages, which have no change of seasons, the cause of various diseases, but enjoy a perfectly tempered climate, and have a day that does not end, and a light that people from here cannot approach. Those who labored over geographies described the regions as far as a human being could; but being unable to speak of what lies beyond, because it could not be observed, they spoke of tides, of one sea full of seaweed and another full of mud, and of some regions as fiery and others as cold and frozen. But we have learned what was unknown to us through the prophets, who, being convinced that the soul will gain the heavenly spirit as a garment over its mortality, foretold things that the other souls did not know. Everyone who is naked can obtain this adornment and run back to the ancient kinship.

We are not fools, men of Greece, nor are we talking nonsense, when we proclaim that God was born in human form. You who revile us, compare your myths with our accounts. Athena, as they say, took the form of Deiphobus for Hector's sake; for Admetus's sake Phoebus of the unshorn hair herded the shambling cattle; and the wife of Zeus came to Semele as an old woman. When you study such things, how can you laugh at us? Your Asclepius died; and he who deflowered the fifty maidens at Thespiae in one night gave himself as food to the fire and is gone. Prometheus, fastened to the Caucasus, was punished for his kindness to human beings. According to you Zeus is envious, and hides the dream from people because he wants them to perish. So look at your own records, and accept us at least as telling similar stories. We are not out of our minds; it is your stories that are nonsense. If you speak of the birth of gods, you will show that they are mortal too. Why is Hera not pregnant now? Has she grown old, or has she no one to tell you? Believe me now, men of Greece: do not allegorize your myths and your gods. For if you try to do this, the divinity you believe in is abolished, and by you yourselves: either your demons are such as they are said to be, and then they are base in character; or, turned into something belonging to nature, they are not what they are said to be. I could not be persuaded to worship the substance of the elements, nor could I persuade my neighbor to. Metrodorus of Lampsacus, too, in his work On Homer, argued very foolishly, turning everything into allegory. He says that neither Hera nor Athena nor Zeus is what those who built enclosures and precincts for them think, but manifestations of nature and arrangements of the elements. And you will say, of course, that Hector and Achilles and Agamemnon, and all the Greeks and barbarians together with Helen and Paris, being of the same nature, were introduced for the sake of the plot, and that none of these persons existed. But we have put these things forward only for the sake of argument; for it is not right even to compare our understanding of God with those who wallow in matter and mud.

And what sort of things are your teachings? Who would not mock your public festivals, which are held in honor of wicked demons and bring people into disgrace? I have often seen a man (and seeing him I wondered, and after wondering I despised him) who is one thing inside and outside feigns to be what he is not: utterly effeminate, twisting himself in every direction, now flashing his eyes, now writhing his hands, raving behind a mask of clay, becoming now Aphrodite, now Apollo; a single accuser of all the gods, an epitome of superstition, a slanderer of heroic deeds, an actor of murders, a chronicler of adultery, a storehouse of madness, a teacher of catamites, an instigator of condemnations; and such a man is praised by all. But I have rejected him, liar in everything as he is: his godlessness, his practices, and the man himself. You, though, are carried off captive by these people, and you revile those who do not share in your pursuits. I have no wish to gape at a chorus of singers, and I will not be swept along in sympathy with a man who nods and gesticulates against nature. What wonderful or exceptional thing is done among you? They pipe obscenities through their noses, they make movements they should not, and your daughters and sons watch them teaching on the stage how to commit adultery. Fine indeed are your auditoriums, which proclaim everything wickedly done at night and delight their hearers with shameful words! Fine too are your lying poets, who deceive their hearers with their figures!

I have seen men weighed down by bodily training and carrying about the burden of their flesh, for whom prizes and crowns are set out, the presidents of the games calling them on not to noble deeds but to a contest in violence and strife; and the one who hits harder is crowned. And these are the lesser evils; who would not shrink from telling the greater? Some, having taken up idleness because of their profligacy, sell themselves to be killed; the one in want sells himself, and the rich man buys those who will do the killing. The witnesses take their seats for them, and the fighters fight to the death for nothing, and no one comes down to help. Are such things well done by you? The one who is foremost among you gathers an army of bloody murderers, proclaiming that he keeps robbers; the robbers come forward from his house, and you all flock to the spectacle and become judges, both of the president of this wickedness and of the gladiators themselves. And the one who misses the slaughter is grieved that he was not condemned to be a spectator of wicked, godless, and abominable deeds. You sacrifice animals in order to eat meat, and you buy human beings to supply your soul with cannibalism, feeding it with the most godless bloodshed. The robber kills for the sake of gain, but the rich man buys gladiators for the sake of their being killed.

What good does it do me when someone raves on stage in the manner of Euripides and recites Alcmaeon's murder of his mother, a man who does not even keep his own bearing, who gapes wide, carries a sword about, bursts with shouting, and wears an inhuman costume? Away too with the myths of Acusilaus, and with Menander, the versifier of that kind of speech! Why should I admire the mythical flute-player? Why should I busy myself about Aristoxenus or Antigenides of Thebes? We leave to you what is useless; and you should either be persuaded by our teachings, or likewise give up yours to us.

What great and wonderful thing do your philosophers achieve? They leave one of their shoulders bare, wear their hair long, grow beards, carry the claws of wild beasts about with them, and, while saying they need nothing, they need, like Proteus, a tanner for their wallet, a weaver for their cloak, a woodcutter for their staff, and, because of their gluttony, the rich and a cook. You who emulate the dog, you do not know God, and you have taken to imitating an irrational animal. Shouting in public with an air of authority, you make yourself your own avenger; if you do not get something, you hurl abuse, and philosophy becomes your way of making money. You follow Plato's teachings, and a sophist of Epicurus's school opposes you at the top of his voice. Next you want to be an Aristotelian, and a follower of Democritus abuses you. Pythagoras says he was once Euphorbus, and he is heir to the teaching of Pherecydes; but Aristotle impugns the immortality of the soul. You who have inherited your teachings in factious successions disagree with one another, and you fight against those who are in agreement among themselves. One man says that God is a body; I say he is incorporeal. That the world is indestructible; I say that it will be dissolved. That the conflagration comes at intervals; I say that it comes once for all. That the judges are Minos and Rhadamanthys; I say it is God himself. That the soul alone is made immortal; I say that the flesh with it is too. What harm do we do you, men of Greece? Why do you hate those who follow the word of God as if they were utterly abominable? There is no cannibalism among us; you, the educated, have become false witnesses. It is among you that Pelops becomes a dinner for the gods, though he was Poseidon's beloved, and Cronus devours his sons, and Zeus swallows Metis.

Stop parading words that are not your own and decking yourselves, like the jackdaw, in feathers that are not yours. If each city takes back from you its own dialect, your clever arguments will lose their force. You seek who God is, but you do not know what is within you; gaping at the heavens, you fall into pits. Your collections of books are like labyrinths, and those who read them like the jar of the Danaids. Why do you divide time, saying that one part of it is past, another present, and another future? How can the future pass by if the present exists? Just as people sailing on a moving ship think in their ignorance that the mountains are running past, so you do not realize that it is you who are running past, while the age stands still until its Maker wills it to exist no longer. Why am I accused for speaking my own mind, while you hurry to overthrow everything of mine? Were you not born in the same way as we, sharing in the same governance of the world? Why do you claim that wisdom is found among you alone, when you have no other sun, no different risings of the stars, no more distinguished birth, and no death exceptional compared with other people? The grammarians have been the beginning of your babble. You who divide wisdom up have cut yourselves off from true wisdom, and you have given the names of the parts to men; you do not know God, and in fighting among yourselves you destroy one another. And for this reason you are all nothing: you appropriate other people's words, and you talk like a blind man to a deaf one. Why do you hold carpenters' tools when you do not know how to build? Why do you take up words while staying far away from deeds, puffed up in good repute and humbled in misfortune? You misuse your philosophers' dress against all reason: you parade in public, but hide your words in corners. Having come to know you for what you are, we have left you, and we no longer touch what is yours, but follow the word of God. Why, man, do you stir up a war over letters? Why do you clash their sounds together, as in a boxing match, with Athenian lisps, when you ought to speak more naturally? If you speak Attic though you are not an Athenian, tell me why you do not speak Doric. How is it that one seems to you more barbarous, and the other more pleasant for conversation?

If you hold to their education, why do you fight with me for choosing the teachings I want? How is it not absurd that a robber is not punished because of the name he is charged with until the truth has been carefully established, but that we are hated because of an unexamined prejudice born of slander? Diagoras was an Athenian, but you punished him for divulging the Athenian mysteries; and yet you read his Phrygian discourses and hate us. You possess the memoirs of Leo and are annoyed at our refutations; you keep Apion's opinions about the Egyptian gods among yourselves, and yet you denounce us as utterly godless. A tomb of Olympian Zeus is shown among you, even though someone says the Cretans are liars. The assembly of your many gods is nothing. Even if Epicurus, who despises them, serves as their torchbearer, I will not any the more hide from the rulers the understanding of God that I hold concerning the universe. Why do you advise me to be false to my way of life? And why, while saying that you despise death, do you urge people to escape it by art? I do not have the heart of a deer; but the practices of your speeches are like those of Thersites, who talked without measure. How shall I be persuaded by someone who says that the sun is a red-hot lump and the moon an earth? Such things are a contest of words, not an ordering of the truth. Or how is it not foolish to believe the books of Herodorus on the story of Heracles, which proclaim an earth above, and say that the lion killed by Heracles came down from it? What use would Attic diction be, and heaps of philosophers, and plausible syllogisms, and measurements of the earth, and positions of the stars, and courses of the sun? To be occupied with such inquiries is the work of one who makes up his teachings for himself.

For this reason I also condemned your legislation. There ought to be one common polity for all; but as it is, there are as many codes of law as there are kinds of cities, so that what is shameful among some is honorable among others. The Greeks, for instance, think intercourse with one's mother is to be shunned, but among the Persian magi that practice is thought most honorable. Pederasty is prosecuted by the barbarians, but the Romans have granted it privileges, and they try to gather herds of boys like grazing horses.

Having seen these things, and having also taken part in mysteries and examined the religious rites of all peoples, performed by effeminates and hermaphrodites; having found that among the Romans their Latiarian Zeus delights in human gore and the blood of slaughtered men, and that Artemis, not far from the great city, has taken up the same kind of practices, and that one demon here and another there contrives outbreaks of evil; I withdrew into myself and sought how I might be able to discover the truth. While I was pondering what was worthwhile, I happened to come upon certain barbarian writings, too old to be compared with the teachings of the Greeks, too divine to be compared with their error. And I came to be persuaded by them because of the unpretentiousness of their language, the artlessness of their writers, the easy intelligibility of their account of how all things were made, their foreknowledge of the future, the excellence of their precepts, and their teaching that one rules over all things. My soul being taught by God, I understood that the pagan writings lead to condemnation, but that these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue us from many rulers and ten thousand tyrants; and they give us, not what we had never received, but what we had received and were prevented by error from keeping.

Having been initiated into these things and having come to understand them, I wish to strip them off, like infants putting off their childish things. For we know that wickedness is constituted like the tiniest of seeds: it grew strong from a small beginning, but it will be dissolved again if we obey the words of God and do not scatter ourselves. For it gained mastery over what is ours by means of a hidden treasure: digging for it, we were filled with dust, and so we give wickedness the occasion to establish itself. For whoever takes up that whole possession has taken hold of the more precious wealth. Let this be said to our own people. To you Greeks, what else should I say than that you should not revile those who are better than you, nor, if they are called barbarians, take this as an occasion for mockery? For if you wish, you will be able to find out the reason why all people cannot understand one another's language; and to those who wish to examine our teachings I will make the account easy and ungrudging.

Now I think it proper to show that our philosophy is older than the pursuits of the Greeks. Moses and Homer will serve as our landmarks, since each of them is very ancient, the one the oldest of poets and historians, the other the founder of all barbarian wisdom. Let us now take them for comparison; for we shall find that our teachings are older not only than the culture of the Greeks, but even than the invention of letters. I will not take witnesses from among our own people, but will rather use Greeks as my helpers. The former would be unreasonable, since you would not accept them; but the latter would be a remarkable proof, when I fight you with your own weapons and obtain from you evidence that is beyond suspicion. The oldest writers have inquired into the poetry of Homer, his family, and the time in which he flourished: Theagenes of Rhegium, who lived in the time of Cambyses, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, Antimachus of Colophon, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and Dionysius of Olynthus; after them Ephorus of Cyme and Philochorus of Athens, and the Peripatetics Megaclides and Chamaeleon; then the grammarians Zenodotus, Aristophanes, Callimachus, Crates, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, and Apollodorus. Of these, Crates and his school say that Homer flourished before the return of the Heraclids, within eighty years after the Trojan War; Eratosthenes and his school, after the hundredth year from the capture of Troy; Aristarchus and his school, at the time of the Ionian migration, which was 140 years after the Trojan War; Philochorus, after the Ionian migration, when Archippus was archon at Athens, 180 years after the Trojan War; Apollodorus and his school, 100 years after the Ionian migration, which would be 240 years after the Trojan War. Some have said that he lived 90 years before the Olympiads, that is, 317 years after the capture of Troy; others brought the date lower, saying that Homer lived at the same time as Archilochus; and Archilochus flourished about the twenty-third Olympiad, in the time of Gyges the Lydian, 500 years after the Trojan War. Concerning the date of that poet, I mean Homer, his origin, and the disagreement among those who have written about him, let this summary suffice for those able to examine the matter precisely. For it is possible to show that the opinions about his poems are also false: where the record of dates is inconsistent, the historical accounts cannot be true either. For what is the cause of error in writing, if not setting down what is untrue?

Among us there is no longing for vainglory, and we do not deal in a variety of opinions. For having separated ourselves from common and earthly reasoning, obeying the commands of God and following the law of the Father of incorruption, we reject everything that rests on human opinion. Not only the rich among us pursue philosophy; the poor too enjoy our teaching free of charge, for what comes from God surpasses any recompense in worldly gifts. So we admit all who wish to listen, even if they are old women or youths; in short, every age is honored among us, while all licentiousness is kept far away. And when we speak we do not lie. As for your persistence in unbelief, it would be well if it came to an end; but if not, let our teachings stand confirmed by the judgment of God. You laugh, but you will weep. For how is it not absurd that you admire Nestor, who was slow to cut the traces of his horses because of the weakness and sluggishness of his age, for trying to fight on equal terms with the young, while those among us who wrestle with old age and busy themselves with the things of God are laughed at? And who would not laugh when you say that there were Amazons, and Semiramis, and certain other warlike women, while you revile our virgins? Achilles was a youth, and he is believed to have been very noble; Neoptolemus was younger still, but strong; Philoctetes was sick, but the divine power needed him against Troy. What sort of man was Thersites? Yet he was a commander; and if his unbridled tongue had not come from his ignorance, he would not have been mocked as pointy-headed and bald. All of us who wish to pursue philosophy do not judge by appearances, nor do we judge those who come to us by their looks; for we reckon that strength of mind can be found in all, even if they are weak in body. But your ways are full of envy and great stupidity.

This is why I was eager to show, from what you yourselves hold in honor, that our ways are sober-minded, while your customs are possessed by great madness. You who say that we talk nonsense among women and youths, virgins and old women, and who mock us for not being with you, hear the nonsense of Greek affairs. The practices of your gods are all the more foolish for being so famous, and you disgrace yourselves through your women's quarters. Lysippus cast in bronze Praxilla, who said nothing useful in her poems; Menestratus cast Learchis; Silanion, Sappho the courtesan; Naucydes, Erinna of Lesbos; Boiscus, Myrtis; Cephisodotus, Myro of Byzantium; Gomphus, Praxigoris; and Amphistratus, Cleito. Why should I speak of Anyte, Telesilla, and Mystis? The makers of the first were Euthycrates and Cephisodotus, of the second Niceratus, of the third Aristodotus. Euthycrates made Mnesiarchis of Ephesus; Silanion, Corinna; Euthycrates, Thalarchis of Argos. I was eager to mention these women so that you will not think that anything strange is done among us, and so that, comparing the practices before your eyes, you will not mock the women among us who pursue philosophy. Sappho was a lewd, love-crazed woman who sings of her own licentiousness; but all our women are chaste, and our virgins at their distaffs speak of the things of God more earnestly than that girl of yours. Be ashamed, then, you who turn out to be disciples of women, yet mock the women who live among us and the assembly they belong to. What noble thing did Glaucippe introduce to you, who gave birth to a monster, as her statue shows, cast in bronze by Niceratus son of Euctemon, an Athenian by birth? If she conceived an elephant, why should Glaucippe enjoy public honor? Praxiteles and Herodotus made Phryne the courtesan for you, and Euthycrates cast in bronze Panteuchis, who conceived by a seducer. Deinomenes by his art saw to it that Besantis, queen of the Paeonians, would be remembered because she bore a black child. I condemn Pythagoras too, who set up Europa on the bull, and you, who have honored the accuser of Zeus because of his art. I laugh too at the skill of Myron, who made a heifer and on it a Victory, because by carrying off Agenor's daughter he won the prize for adultery and lust. Herodotus of Olynthus made Glycera the courtesan and Argeia the harpist. Bryaxis set up Pasiphae, and by commemorating her licentiousness you all but choose that the women of today should be like her. There was a wise woman called Melanippe; for this reason Lysistratus made her statue. And yet you refuse to believe that there are wise women among us!

Very venerable too is the tyrant Phalaris, who feasted on babies at the breast, yet is displayed to this day, through the work of Polystratus of Ambracia, as if he were an admirable man! The people of Acragas dreaded to look at that face of his because of his cannibalism, but those who care about culture boast that they can gaze on him in a statue. How is it not grievous that fratricide is honored among you, who look at the figures of Polynices and Eteocles and do not throw them into a pit along with their maker Pythagoras? Destroy these memorials of wickedness! Why should I think the statue by Periclymenus, of a woman who bore thirty children, a wonder and study it? She who carried off the prize for great incontinence ought to have been loathed, likened to the sow of the Romans, which itself, for the same reason, has been thought worthy, they say, of a rather mystic worship. Ares committed adultery with Aphrodite, and Andron made for you Harmonia, their daughter. Sophron, who handed down trifles and nonsense in his writings, is more famous because of his bronze statue, which exists to this day. And the lying Aesop was made ever-memorable not only by his fables but also by the sculpture of Aristodemus, which made him much sought after. How then are you not ashamed, when you have so many poetesses of no use, and countless prostitutes and wicked men, to slander the modesty of our women? What is the value to me of learning that Euanthe gave birth in the Peripatos, of gaping at the art of Callistratus, or of fixing my eyes on the Neaera of Calliades? She was a courtesan. Lais was a prostitute, and Turnus made her a memorial of her prostitution. Why are you not ashamed of Hephaestion's sexual immorality, even if Philo portrays him with great skill? And why have you honored the effeminate Ganymede, through Leochares, as if you had a precious possession? Praxiteles made a sculpture of a woman being defiled. You ought to reject everything of this kind and seek what is truly worthwhile, and not, while laying claim to the unspeakable inventions of Philaenis and Elephantis, loathe our way of life.

I have set out these things not from hearsay but from what I learned myself, having traveled over much of the earth. I taught your learning as a sophist, I came across many arts and ideas, and finally I stayed in the city of the Romans and studied the many kinds of statues brought there from your lands. For I do not try, as many do, to strengthen my own views with other people's opinions; I wish to set down a record of what I have myself come to understand about everything I am going to reject. So, having said goodbye both to the arrogance of the Romans and to the frigid talk of the Athenians, incoherent teachings as they are, I laid hold of our barbarian philosophy. I had begun to write how it is older than your pursuits, but put this aside because of the more urgent explanation; now that the time has come, I will try to speak about its teachings. Do not be annoyed at our instruction, and do not work up a rebuttal against us full of nonsense and buffoonery, saying, “Tatian, setting himself above the Greeks and above the countless multitude of philosophers, is bringing in the novel teachings of barbarians.” For what is so hard about people who have shown themselves ignorant being refuted now by a man with the same nature as theirs? And what is absurd, as your own sage says, about growing old while always learning everything?

But let it be granted that Homer was not later than the Trojan War; let him be supposed to have lived at the very time of the war, and even to have served in the army with Agamemnon, and, if anyone wishes, to have lived before the invention of letters. For the Moses I spoke of will be shown to be older by very many years than the capture of Troy itself, and far more ancient than the founding of Troy and than Tros and Dardanus. For proof I will use as witnesses Chaldeans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians. And why should I say more? One who undertakes to persuade must give his hearers rather brief accounts of the facts. Berossus, a Babylonian, priest of their god Bel, who lived in the time of Alexander, composed for Antiochus, the third after him, the history of the Chaldeans in three books; and in setting out the history of the kings he tells of one of them named Nebuchadnezzar, who made war on the Phoenicians and the Jews. We know that these events were proclaimed by our prophets; they happened much later than the age of Moses, seventy years before the rule of the Persians. Berossus is a most reliable man; proof of this is Juba, who, writing On the Assyrians, says that he learned the history from Berossus. He has two books On the Assyrians.

After the Chaldeans, the Phoenician evidence is as follows. There were among them three men, Theodotus, Hypsicrates, and Mochus; their books were translated into Greek by Chaetus, who also wrote a careful account of the lives of the philosophers. The histories of these men show that the rape of Europa took place under one of the kings, and also the arrival of Menelaus in Phoenicia, and the story of Hiram, who gave his daughter in marriage to Solomon, king of the Jews, and presented him with timber of every kind for building the temple. Menander of Pergamum also wrote an account of the same things. The time of Hiram comes somewhere near the Trojan War; and Solomon, Hiram's contemporary, is much later than the age of Moses.

The Egyptians have accurate chronicles; and the interpreter of their history is Ptolemy, not the king, but a priest of Mendes. Setting out the deeds of the kings, he says that the Jews made their journey out of Egypt, to the regions they went to, under the leadership of Moses, in the time of Amosis, king of Egypt. He speaks thus: “Amosis lived in the time of King Inachus.” After him Apion the grammarian, a most highly esteemed man, in the fourth book of his Egyptian History (he wrote five books), says, among much else, that “Amosis destroyed Avaris, living in the time of Inachus of Argos, as Ptolemy of Mendes wrote in his Chronicles.” The time from Inachus to the capture of Troy fills twenty generations. And that is how the proof stands.

The kings of Argos were these: Inachus, Phoroneus, Apis, Criasus, Triopas, Argeius, Phorbas, Crotopas, Sthenelaus, Danaus, Lynceus, Proetus, Abas, Acrisius, Perseus, Sthenelaus, Eurystheus, Atreus, Thyestes, and Agamemnon, in the eighteenth year of whose reign Troy was taken. A sensible person must understand with all precision that, according to the Greeks' own tradition, they had no written record of history at all. For Cadmus, who handed down the letters to them, came to Boeotia many generations later. After Inachus, under Phoroneus, the savage and nomadic way of life barely came to an end, and people were given a new order. So if Moses has been shown to have lived in the time of Inachus, he is four hundred years older than the Trojan War. This is shown to be so from the succession of the Attic kings [and of the Macedonian and Ptolemaic, and also the Antiochene]. Hence, if the more notable deeds among the Greeks were recorded and are known only after Inachus, it is clear that they also come after Moses. In the time of Phoroneus, who came after Inachus, Ogyges is remembered among the Athenians, in whose time came the first flood; in the time of Phorbas, Actaeus, from whom Attica was called Actaea; in the time of Triopas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Atlas, Cecrops of the double form, and Io; in the time of Crotopas, the burning in the days of Phaethon and the deluge in the days of Deucalion; in the time of Sthenelus, the reign of Amphictyon, the coming of Danaus to the Peloponnese, the founding of Dardania by Dardanus, and the carrying off of Europa from Phoenicia to Crete; in the time of Lynceus, the rape of Kore, the founding of the precinct at Eleusis, the farming of Triptolemus, the coming of Cadmus to Thebes, and the reign of Minos; in the time of Proetus, the war of Eumolpus against the Athenians; in the time of Acrisius, the crossing of Pelops from Phrygia, the arrival of Ion at Athens, the second Cecrops, the deeds of Perseus and Dionysus, and Musaeus the disciple of Orpheus; and in the reign of Agamemnon Troy was taken.

So Moses has been shown, from what has been said, to be older than the ancient heroes, wars, and demons. And we ought to believe the one who has the precedence in age, rather than the Greeks, who drew his teachings from the source without understanding them. For many of their sophists, in their meddling curiosity, tried to counterfeit whatever they learned from Moses and from those who philosophized as he did: first, so that they might be thought to be saying something original; second, so that by veiling what they did not understand with a fabricated rhetoric they might pass off the truth as mythology. Concerning our way of life, the history according to our laws, what the learned among the Greeks have said about it, and how many and who they are that have mentioned it, will be shown in my work Against Those Who Have Discoursed on Divine Things.

But the main point must be made clear with all precision: that Moses is older not only than Homer but also than the writers before him: Linus, Philammon, Thamyris, Amphion, Musaeus, Orpheus, Demodocus, Phemius, the Sibyl, Epimenides of Crete who came to Sparta, Aristeas of Proconnesus who wrote the Arimaspea, Asbolus the Centaur, Isatis, Drymon, Euclus of Cyprus, Horus of Samos, and Pronapides of Athens. Linus was the teacher of Heracles, and Heracles is shown to have lived one generation before the Trojan War; this is clear from his son Tlepolemus, who fought against Troy. Orpheus lived at the same time as Heracles; moreover, they say that the works attributed to him were composed by Onomacritus of Athens, who lived under the rule of the Pisistratids, about the fiftieth Olympiad. Musaeus was a disciple of Orpheus. Amphion, who lived two generations before the Trojan War, spares us from writing more for those who love learning. Demodocus and Phemius lived at the time of the Trojan War itself, for the one lived among the suitors and the other among the Phaeacians. Thamyris and Philammon are not much older than these. So concerning the works of each, and their dates and records, we have written for you, I think, with all precision. But to fill in what is still missing, I will also give the proof concerning those considered wise. Minos, who was thought to excel in every kind of wisdom, shrewdness, and lawgiving, lived in the time of Lynceus, who reigned after Danaus, in the eleventh generation after Inachus. Lycurgus, born long after the capture of Troy, gave laws to the Lacedaemonians one hundred years before the Olympiads. Draco is found to have lived about the thirty-ninth Olympiad; Solon about the forty-sixth; Pythagoras about the sixty-second. We have shown that the Olympiads began 407 years after the Trojan War. With these things proved, let us write briefly about the age of the seven sages too. Since Thales, the oldest of them, lived about the fiftieth Olympiad, what concerns those after him has also, more or less, been briefly told you.

These things, men of Greece, I, Tatian, who pursue philosophy in the manner of the barbarians, have composed for you. I was born in the land of the Assyrians, and was educated first in your learning, and afterwards in what I now profess to proclaim. Knowing now who God is and what his creation is, I present myself to you ready to be examined on my teachings, while my way of life according to God remains one I will never deny.