The Poets and Their Fables

There are, however, some people so blinded that when they meet with views like these, they are neither converted nor alarmed. They even treat them with contempt and scorn, as though they were listening to made-up fables, applauding, perhaps, the beauty of the eloquence, but loathing the strictness of the commands. And yet they believe the fictions of the poets, and make both the Greek world and foreign lands ring with discredited and false tales. For the poets claim that the judging of souls after death is entrusted to men whose parentage they trace to the gods; they praise their righteousness and impartiality and present them as guardians of the dead. The same poets describe the battles of the gods and certain customs of war among them, and speak of them as subject to the power of fate. Some of these gods they picture as cruel, others as having no care at all for the human race, and others again as hateful in character. They also show them mourning the slaughter of their own children, implying that they are unable to help not strangers only but those dearest to them. They describe them, too, as subject to human passions, and sing of their battles and wounds, their joys and sorrows. [a]

And in all this they seem worthy of belief! For if we suppose that they are moved by a divine impulse to take up the poet’s art, we are bound to believe them and to be persuaded of what they say under this inspiration. They speak, then, of the disasters their gods suffer: disasters which, of course, are perfectly true! But someone will object that poets have the privilege of lying, since the special business of poetry is to charm the spirits of the hearers, while the very essence of truth is that the things told are in reality exactly what they are said to be. Let us grant that it is a mark of poetry to hide the truth at times. But those who tell falsehoods do not do it without a purpose. Either they are moved by a desire for personal gain or advantage, or perhaps, conscious of some wrongdoing, they are led to disguise the truth by fear of the vengeance the laws threaten. But surely, in my judgment, they could have escaped the guilt of falsehood and of ungodliness at once by keeping faithfully to the truth, at least when they spoke of the nature of the Supreme Being.