This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[242]
And justly have the wisest men thought these notions deserved severe
rebukes; they also laugh at them for determining that we ought to believe
some of the gods to be beardless and young, and others of them to be old,
and to have beards accordingly; that some are set to trades; that one god
is a smith, and another goddess is a weaver; that one god is a warrior,
and fights with men; that some of them are harpers, or delight in archery;
and besides, that mutual seditions arise among them, and that they quarrel
about men, and this so far, that they not only lay hands upon one another,
but that they are wounded by men, and lament, and take on for such their
afflictions. But what is the grossest of all in point of lasciviousness,
are those unbounded lusts ascribed to almost all of them, and their amours;
which how can it be other than a most absurd supposal, especially when
it reaches to the male gods, and to the female goddesses also? Moreover,
the chief of all their gods, and their first father himself, overlooks
those goddesses whom he hath deluded and begotten with child, and suffers
them to be kept in prison, or drowned in the sea. He is also so bound up
by fate, that he cannot save his own offspring, nor can he bear their deaths
without shedding of tears. These are fine things indeed! as are the rest
that follow. Adulteries truly are so impudently looked on in heaven by
the gods, that some of them have confessed they envied those that were
found in the very act. And why should they not do so, when the eldest of
them, who is their king also, hath not been able to restrain himself in
the violence of his lust, from lying with his wife, so long as they might
get into their bedchamber? Now some of the gods are servants to men, and
will sometimes be builders for a reward, and sometimes will be shepherds;
while others of them, like malefactors, are bound in a prison of brass.
And what sober person is there who would not be provoked at such stories,
and rebuke those that forged them, and condemn the great silliness of those
that admit them for true? Nay, others there are that have advanced a certain
timorousness and fear, as also madness and fraud, and any other of the
vilest passions, into the nature and form of gods, and have persuaded whole
cities to offer sacrifices to the better sort of them; on which account
they have been absolutely forced to esteem some gods as the givers of good
things, and to call others of them averters of evil. They also endeavor
to move them, as they would the vilest of men, by gifts and presents, as
looking for nothing else than to receive some great mischief from them,
unless they pay them such wages.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.