Exhortation to the Greeks 2.33

He had his fill of women no less than the he-goat of Thmuis had of she-goats. And I have admired your poems, Homer: “He spoke, and the son of Kronos nodded with his dark brows, and the ambrosial locks flowed down from the lord's immortal head, and he made great Olympus quake.” You portray Zeus as majestic, Homer, and give him a revered nod. But only show him the girdle, my friend, and Zeus is exposed and his locks disgraced. To what licentiousness did that Zeus come, who spent so many nights of pleasure with Alcmene! For not even nine nights were long enough for the incontinent god (on the contrary, a whole lifetime was too short for his lust), so that he might father for us the god who wards off evils. Heracles, the son of Zeus, truly Zeus's son, begotten in a long night, toiled a long time over the twelve labors, but corrupted the fifty daughters of Thestius in one night, becoming at once the adulterer and the bridegroom of so many virgins. Not without reason do the poets call him “wretch” and “doer of wicked deeds.” It would take long to tell of his adulteries of every kind and his corruption of boys. For your gods did not keep away even from boys: one loved Hylas, another Hyacinthus, another Pelops, another Chrysippus, another Ganymede. Let your wives worship these gods, and pray that their husbands may be like them, so “self-controlled,” so that they may be like the gods by imitating the same things; let your children get used to revering them, so that they too may grow into men who take the gods as a vivid model of sexual immorality. But perhaps it is only the male gods among them who rush after love affairs; “the goddesses, being female, stayed each at home for shame,” says Homer, being ashamed, [the goddesses,] out of modesty, to see Aphrodite caught in adultery. Yet the goddesses are still more passionately licentious, bound in adultery: Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, the Nereid with Aeacus and Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion and Persephone with Adonis. Aphrodite, disgraced with Ares, went on to Cinyras, married Anchises, lay in wait for Phaethon, and loved Adonis; she competed with the ox-eyed goddess, and the goddesses stripped for an apple and presented themselves naked to the shepherd, to see which of them he would judge beautiful.