Gods Made by Decree

But this custom is not a new one, and it did not begin with the Roman Senate. On the contrary, it existed long before, and was practiced in the past for the devising of idols. For the gods famous among the Greeks from of old, Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hephaestus and Hermes, and among the goddesses Hera, Demeter, Athena and Artemis, were voted the title of gods by order of Theseus, of whom Greek history tells us. So the men who pass such decrees die like men and are mourned, while those in whose favor they are passed are worshiped as gods. What a height of inconsistency and madness! They know who passed the decree, yet they give greater honor to those it was passed about. If only their idolatrous madness had stopped at males, and they had not brought the title of deity down to females too! For even women, whom it is not safe to admit to deliberation about public affairs, they worship and serve with the honor due to God: such as those Theseus commanded, as stated above; and among the Egyptians, Isis, the Maiden and the Younger One; and among others, Aphrodite. The names of the others I do not think it decent even to mention, full as they are of everything grotesque. [a]

For many people, not only in ancient times but in our own as well, having lost those they loved, brothers, relatives and wives, and many women who had lost their husbands, all of whom nature proved to be mortal men, made likenesses of them, devised sacrifices for them and consecrated them. Later generations, moved by the beauty of the figure and the brilliance of the artist, worshiped them as gods, and so fell into contradiction with nature. For their parents had mourned for them, not counting them as gods. Had they known them to be gods, they would not have grieved for them as though they had perished. This was exactly why they portrayed them in an image: because they not only did not think them gods, but did not believe that they existed at all, and they wanted the sight of their form in the image to console them for their being no more. Yet the foolish pray to them as gods and clothe them with the honor of the true God.

For example, in Egypt, even to this day, the dirge for the dead is sung for Osiris, Horus, Typhon and the others. And the cauldrons at Dodona and the Corybantes in Crete prove that Zeus is no god but a man, and a man born of a cannibal father. And strange to say, even Plato, the wise man the Greeks admire, with all his much-praised understanding about God, goes down with Socrates to the Piraeus to worship Artemis, a figment of human art.