inveterate error; and that we may clearly and manifestly show that we ourselves follow the religion of our forefathers according to God.
Chap. ii.—The poets are unfit to be religious teachers.
Whom, then, ye men of Greece, do ye call your teachers of religion? The poets? It will do your cause no good to say so to men who know the poets; for they know how very ridiculous a theogony they have composed,—as we can learn from Homer, your most distinguished and prince of poets. For he says, first, that the gods were in the beginning generated from water; for he has written thus:[1]
"Both ocean, the origin of the gods, and their mother Tethys."
And then we must also remind you of what he further says of him whom ye consider the first of the gods, and whom he often calls "the father of gods and men;" for he said:[2]
"Zeus, who is the dispenser of war to men."
Indeed, he says that he was not only the dispenser of war to the army, but also the cause of perjury to the Trojans, by means of his daughter;[3] and Homer introduces him in love, and bitterly complaining, and bewailing himself, and plotted against by the other gods, and at one time exclaiming concerning his own son:[4]
"Alas! he falls, my most beloved of men!
Sarpedon, vanquished by Patroclus, falls!
So will the fates."
And at another time concerning Hector:[5]
"Ah! I behold a warrior dear to me
Around the walls of Ilium driven, and grieve
For Hector."
- ↑ Iliad, xiv. 302.
- ↑ Iliad, xix. 224.
- ↑ That is, Venus, who, after Paris had sworn that the war should be decided by single combat between himself and Menelaus, carried him off, and induced him, though defeated, to refuse performance of the articles agreed upon.
- ↑ Iliad, xvi. 433. Sarpedon was a son of Zeus.
- ↑ Iliad, xxii. 168.
