Exhortation to the Greeks 2.26

But ideas that went astray and turned aside from the straight path, truly deadly ideas, turned the heavenly plant, the human being, away from his heavenly way of life and stretched him out on the ground, persuading him to cling to earthly figments. Some, deceived at once by the sight of the heavens and trusting in sight alone, watched the movements of the stars, admired them and made gods of them, calling the stars gods (θεοί) from their running (θεῖν); and they worshiped the sun, as the Indians do, and the moon, as the Phrygians do. Others, gathering the cultivated fruits of what grows from the earth, called the grain Demeter, as the Athenians do, and the vine Dionysus, as the Thebans do. Others, observing the requitals of wickedness, make gods of retributions and worship calamities. Hence the poets of the stage have invented the Erinyes and the Eumenides, the Avengers of blood and the Avengers of suppliants, and also the Alastores. Some of the philosophers too, following the poets, make idols of the forms of your passions, Fear and Love and Joy and Hope; just as old Epimenides set up altars at Athens to Insolence and Shamelessness. Others, starting from actual things, are made gods for human beings and fashioned in bodily form: a certain Justice, and Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, and Fate, and Auxo and Thallo of Attica. A sixth way of introducing deceit and producing gods is the one by which they count the twelve gods; Hesiod sings their theogony in his own way, and Homer tells what he tells about the gods. The last remains (for there are seven ways in all): the one that starts from the divine benefits bestowed on human beings. For not understanding the God who is their benefactor, they invented certain saviors, the Dioscuri, Heracles the averter of evils, and Asclepius the physician.