Murder Called Sacrifice

Come then, let us add this as well: that these gods of yours are demons, inhuman and hating the human race. They are not content to enjoy the sight of people out of their minds; they feed on human slaughter too. Sometimes it is the armed contests in the stadiums, sometimes the countless rivalries of war — they keep themselves supplied with occasions for pleasure, so that they can gorge without restraint on human blood. And by now they have fallen on whole cities and nations like plagues, and have demanded savage libations. Aristomenes the Messenian, for one, cut the throats of three hundred people for Zeus of Ithome, supposing that hecatombs of that number and of that quality, offered all at once, would make the omens come out well. Among them was Theopompus, king of the Spartans — a nobly bred animal for the altar. [a]

The Taurians, the people who live around the Tauric Chersonese, take whatever foreigners they can lay hands on — men wrecked on their coast — and sacrifice them on the spot to Tauric Artemis. Euripides puts these sacrifices of yours on the stage as tragedy. Monimus records in his Collection of Marvels that at Pella in Thessaly a man from Achaia was sacrificed to Peleus and Chiron. Anticlides in his Homecomings shows that the Lyctians, a Cretan people, cut men’s throats for Zeus, and Dosidas says the Lesbians brought Dionysus the same kind of sacrifice. As for the Phocaeans — I am not going to pass over them either — Pythocles reports in the third book of his On Harmony that they burn a man whole for Artemis Tauropolos.

Erechtheus of Attica and Marius the Roman each sacrificed their own daughters: Erechtheus to Pherephatta, as Demaratus says in the first book of his Tragic Themes, and Marius to the Averters of Evil, as Dorotheus records in the fourth book of his Italian History. On this evidence the demons are plainly friends of the human race — and how could the people who fear them not be holy in the same proportion? The one side are hailed with the fine name of saviors; the other side beg for rescue from the very powers who plot against their rescue. They suppose they are sacrificing with good omens, and they never notice that it is human beings they are butchering. A murder does not turn into an offering because of where it is done. If a man cuts another man’s throat for Artemis or for Zeus, in what is supposedly a sacred place rather than out of anger or love of money — which are only more demons of the same kind — whether at an altar or on a road, and then pronounces the word “offering” over it, that changes nothing: a sacrifice like this is murder and the slaughter of men. So why is it, you human beings, wisest of all the other animals, that we run from the savage beasts, and turn aside if we happen on a bear or a lion?

But when you see in advance and understand that the demons are deadly and vicious, plotters and haters of the human race and ruiners of it, why do you not turn aside? Why do you not turn away? What truth could the wicked ever tell? What good could they ever do anyone?

In fact I can show you, right now, a human being who is better than these gods of yours, these demons: I can set Cyrus and Solon against Apollo the giver of oracles. Your Phoebus loves gifts, but he does not love people. He betrayed his friend Croesus, and, forgetting the fee he had taken — that is how much he cared for his own reputation — he led Croesus across the Halys and up onto the pyre. That is how the demons love: they guide you into the fire.

But you, man, who love your own kind better than Apollo does and tell the truth better than he does — pity the one who is bound on the pyre. Solon, you give the true oracle. Cyrus, you give the order to put the fire out. And you, Croesus, come to your senses at last, taught by what you have suffered. The one you bow down to has no gratitude in him. He takes his fee, and once the gold is his he lies again. So it is the man, not the divinity, who tells you your end. Solon gives no slanting oracles. This, barbarian, is the only oracle you will find to be true, and this is the one you will put to the test on the pyre.

Which makes me wonder what visions could have carried the first men so far astray that they announced superstition to the human race and laid it down as law that vicious demons were to be worshipped — whether it was that Phoroneus, or Merops, or someone else who raised temples and altars to them and, so the story goes, were the first to bring them sacrifices. And in later ages, of course, people went on inventing gods for themselves to bow down to. Take this Eros, who is said to be among the oldest of the gods. Not one person honored him until Charmus won a boy and set up an altar to him in the Academy as a thank-offering for a craving that had been satisfied. So they gave the name Eros to the shamelessness of a sickness, and made a god out of craving with no restraint. As for the Athenians, they did not even know who Pan was until Philippides told them.

So superstition, once it had taken its start from somewhere, naturally became a spring of mindless wickedness. Nothing cut it off afterward. It grew instead, and ran on in full flood, and set itself up as the maker of a whole crowd of demons — sacrificing hecatombs, holding festivals, putting up statues, building temples. And those temples I am not going to keep quiet about either; I mean to expose them. They are called temples, which is a decent-sounding name, but what they turned out to be is tombs. You, at least, could give up your superstition even now, and be ashamed to pay religious honor to graves.

In the temple of Athena at Larissa, on the acropolis, is the grave of Acrisius; at Athens, on the Acropolis, the grave of Cecrops, as Antiochus says in the ninth book of his Histories. What about Erichthonius? Was he not buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immaradus, son of Eumolpus and Daira — was he not buried inside the precinct of the Eleusinium, below the Acropolis? And the daughters of Celeus, were they not buried at Eleusis? Why should I list the women from the Hyperboreans for you? Their names were Hyperoche and Laodice, and the two of them were buried in the Artemisium on Delos, which stands inside the sanctuary of Delian Apollo. Leandrius says Cleochus was buried at Miletus, in the Didymaeum. And here, following Zeno of Myndus, it would be wrong to pass over the tomb of Leucophryne, who was buried in the temple of Artemis at Magnesia, or the altar of Apollo at Telmessus, which they record to be the memorial of Telmessus the seer. Ptolemy son of Agesarchus, in the first book of his work on Philopator, says that at Paphos, in the temple of Aphrodite, Cinyras and Cinyras’ descendants were buried. But all the time there is would not be enough for me if I went through the graves you bow down to. And if no shame at all creeps over you for the things you dare, then you are walking around completely dead, dead men who have put their trust in the dead.