The Excuse That the Poets Made It Up

But perhaps, against all this, the impious will appeal to the special license of poets. They will say that it is the poet’s way to invent what is not, and to tell made-up stories for the pleasure of their hearers, and that this is why the poets composed the stories about the gods. But this excuse of theirs, even more than any other, will prove shallow in the light of what they themselves think and profess on these matters. For if what the poets say is invented and false, then even the names of Zeus, Cronos, Hera, Ares and the rest must be false. For perhaps, as they say, the names too are invented, and though no such being as Zeus, Cronos or Ares exists, the poets pretend they exist in order to deceive their hearers. But if the poets pretend that beings who are not real exist, how is it that they worship them as though they existed? [a]

Or perhaps they will say once again that the names are not invented, but that the poets attribute invented deeds to them. But this defense is just as shaky. For if they made up the deeds, no doubt they also made up the names to which they attributed the deeds. Or if they tell the truth about the names, it follows that they tell the truth about the deeds too. In particular, those who said in their stories that these are gods surely know how gods ought to act. They would never attribute human thoughts to gods, any more than one would attribute to water the properties of fire; for fire burns, while the nature of water, on the contrary, is cold. So if the deeds are worthy of gods, those who do them must be gods. But if they are the deeds of men, and of disreputable men, such as adultery and the things mentioned above, then those who act that way must be men and not gods. For deeds must match natures, so that the doer may be known at once by his deed, and the deed may be recognized from his nature. Suppose a man were discussing water and fire and describing what they do. He would not say that water burned and fire cooled. Or if a man were speaking about the sun and the earth, he would not say that the earth gave light while the sun was sown with plants and crops; and if he did say so, he would have gone beyond the very height of madness. In the same way, their writers, and especially the most eminent poet of all, would never have clothed Zeus and the others with deeds that show them to be not gods but men, and not even sober men, if they had really known that they were gods.

Or if, being poets, they told falsehoods, and you are slandering them, why did they not also tell falsehoods about the courage of the heroes, inventing weakness in place of courage and courage in place of weakness? In that case they ought, just as with Zeus and Hera, to have falsely accused Achilles of cowardice and celebrated the might of Thersites. They ought to have charged Odysseus with dullness and made Nestor out to be reckless, and told of unmanly deeds by Diomedes and Hector and manly deeds by Hecuba. For the invention and falsehood they attribute to the poets ought to extend to every case. But in fact the poets kept to the truth about their men, while they were not ashamed to tell falsehoods about their so-called gods.

Some of them might argue that the poets are telling falsehoods about the gods’ immoral deeds, but that in their praises, when they speak of Zeus as father of the gods, the highest, the Olympian, the one who reigns in heaven, they are not inventing but telling the truth. But this is a plea that not only I but anyone can refute. For the truth will stand clear against them if we recall what we proved before. Their deeds prove them to be men, while the praises heaped on them go beyond the nature of men. So the two things contradict each other. For it is not the nature of heavenly beings to act in such ways, nor can anyone suppose that persons who act that way are gods.