The Myths I Left Behind

What follows is a short address to Greek readers by a writer who has broken with Greek worship and Greek custom. It has come down to us under Justin’s name, though it is not now thought to be his.

Do not imagine, Greeks, that I have broken with your customs for no reason and without thinking. I looked into them and found nothing holy in them, nothing that God would accept. The very compositions of your poets are monuments to madness and excess. Anyone who becomes a student of your most celebrated teacher ends up in more trouble than anybody else alive. [b]

Take what they tell us first. Agamemnon backed his brother’s runaway lust — his madness, his unbridled desire — and handed over even his own daughter to be sacrificed, and threw all Greece into turmoil so that he could get back Helen, who had been carried off by the leprous shepherd. Then, when the fighting brought in captives, Agamemnon was himself taken captive by Chryseis, and over Briseis he opened a feud with the son of Thetis. And the son of Peleus himself — the man who crossed the river, who brought Troy down and beat Hector — this hero of yours became the slave of Polyxena and was conquered by a dead Amazon. He took off the armor a god had made, put on a bridegroom’s robe, and became a sacrifice of love in the temple of Apollo. Odysseus of Ithaca made a virtue out of a vice. And the way he sailed past the Sirens proved he had no good sense worth the name, since he could not trust his own good sense to stop his ears. Ajax son of Telamon, who carried the shield of seven ox-hides, went out of his mind when he lost to Odysseus in the contest for that armor. These are not things I want to be taught. This is not the kind of virtue I am greedy for, that I should believe Homer’s myths. For the whole recital, beginning and end, of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, is — a woman.

Next after Homer, Hesiod wrote his Works and Days — and who is going to believe the drivel of his theogony? They say that Kronos, the son of Ouranos, killed his father at the beginning of things and took his rule for himself; then, seized by panic that the same thing would be done to him, he preferred to swallow his own children. Zeus, though, was smuggled away by the trick of the Curetes and kept hidden, and later bound his father in chains and divided up the empire — Zeus taking the air, so the story runs, Poseidon the deep, and Pluto the portion of the dead. Then Pluto carried off Persephone, and Demeter went wandering through the wilderness looking for her child; and that myth was celebrated in the fire at Eleusis. [g]

Poseidon, again, carried off Melanippe while she was drawing water, besides abusing a great many Nereids, whose names would cost us a pile of words to recite. As for Zeus, he was an adulterer in every shape: a satyr with Antiope, gold with Danaë, a bull with Europa; and for Leda he put on wings. His love for Semele proved two things at once, his own unchastity and Semele’s jealousy. And they say he carried off Ganymede the Phrygian to be his cup-bearer. These, then, are the achievements of the sons of Kronos. And that famous son of Leto of yours, who set up as a teller of the future, convicted himself of lying: he chased Daphne and never got her, and he never foretold the death of Hyacinthus, who loved him. I say nothing about how mannish Athena is, or how womanish Dionysus, or how Aphrodite’s whole disposition is toward sexual immorality.

Read Zeus the law against killing your father, Greeks, and the penalty for adultery, and the disgrace of molesting boys. Teach Athena and Artemis the work of women, and Dionysus the work of men. What is decent about a woman strapping on armor, or about a man decking himself out with cymbals and garlands and women’s clothes, with a herd of raving women behind him?

Then there is Heracles, the one they call the child of three nights, sung by the poets for the labors he pulled off, the son of Zeus — who killed the lion and destroyed the many-headed hydra; who put down the fierce, huge boar, and was able to kill the swift man-eating birds, and brought the three-headed dog up out of the land of the dead; who got the dung out of the enormous building of Augeas, and killed the bulls and the stag whose nostrils breathed fire, and picked the golden fruit off the tree, and killed the poisonous serpent — and, for a reason it is not permitted to speak, killed Achelous and Busiris, the murderer of his guests — and crossed the mountains to get water that spoke in words, as the story has it. The man who could do so many great things like that: how like a child he was, delighted to be deafened by the satyrs’ cymbals, beaten by love for a woman, slapped on the hips by a laughing Lyda! And at the end he could not get the tunic of Nessus off, so he lit his own funeral pyre and died on it. Let Hephaestus lay his envy aside and stop being jealous, hated because he is old and club-footed while Ares is loved because he is young and beautiful. [k]

So then, Greeks, since your gods stand convicted of having no self-control and your heroes are soft, as the histories your plays are built on have declared — the curse of Atreus, the bed of Thyestes, the taint in the house of Pelops, Danaus murdering out of hatred and leaving Aegyptus childless in a drunken rage, the banquet of Thyestes spread by the Furies. And to this day Procne is flitting about and wailing, and her sister in Athens shrills with her tongue cut out. What need is there to speak of the goad of Oedipus, and the killing of Laius, and the marriage to his mother, and the mutual slaughter of men who were his brothers and his sons at once?

And your public gatherings I have come to hate. There is gorging without limit, and the coaxing pipes that stir the body to lust, and pointless, extravagant perfumed oils, and crowning yourselves with garlands. With that mass of evils you drive out shame. You fill your minds with them, you are swept away by your own excess, and you make a common practice of wicked and insane sexual immorality. [q]

And here is one more thing I would say to you. Why is it that you, a Greek, are furious with your son when he imitates Zeus and turns on you and robs you of your own wife? Why do you count him your enemy and go on worshiping the one he is copying? And why do you blame your wife for living unchastely while you honor Aphrodite with shrines? If somebody else had reported these things, they would look like slanderous accusations and not the truth. But it is your own poets who sing them, and your own histories that publish them at the top of their voice.

From now on, Greeks, come and take your share of a wisdom that has no equal. Be taught by the divine Word. Get to know the King who does not die. And stop recognizing men who slaughter whole nations as heroes. For he himself, our divine Word, who even now keeps on helping us, does not want strength of body or a fine face, and not the high spirit of earth’s nobility either, but a clean soul, fortified by holiness — and the watchwords of our King, which are holy actions; for it is through the Word that power passes into the soul. [r]

Trumpet of peace to a soul at war! Weapon that puts terrible passions to flight! Teaching that quenches the fire born in the soul! The Word exercises an influence that does not turn out poets. It does not equip philosophers or polished public speakers. By its teaching it makes mortals immortal, mortals gods, and carries them off the earth to the country above Olympus. Come, be taught. Become what I am, because I too was once what you are. These are the things that conquered me: the divinity of the teaching and the power of the Word. A skilled snake-charmer coaxes the dreadful reptile out of its hole and sends it running; in the same way the Word drives the frightening passions of our bodily nature out of the deepest recesses of the soul. First it drives out craving, which is what every evil is born from — hatreds, quarreling, envy, rivalry, anger, and the rest. Once craving is banished, the soul turns calm and clear. Set free from the evils it was sunk in up to the neck, it goes back to the one who made it. For it is only right that it be put back where it came from, the place every soul was, or is.