Exhortation to the Greeks 2.39

I pass over the Argives and Spartans: the Argives worship Aphrodite “the Grave-robber,” and the Spartiates revere Artemis Chelytis (“of the Cough”), since they call coughing chelyttein. Do you think that these things we set before you are brought from some spurious source? You seem not even to know your own historians, whom I call as witnesses against your unbelief; poor wretches, they have filled your whole life, a life truly not worth living, with godless mockery. Is not a Zeus “the Bald” honored in Argos, and another Zeus, “the Avenger,” in Cyprus? Do not the Argives sacrifice to Aphrodite “the Straddler,” the Athenians to Aphrodite “the Courtesan,” and the Syracusans to Aphrodite “of the beautiful buttocks,” whom the poet Nicander somewhere called “fair-bottomed”? I say nothing of Dionysus “the Pig-plucker”: the Sicyonians worship this Dionysus, placing him in charge of women's private parts, revering the author of outrage as overseer of shame. Such are their gods, and such are they themselves, playing with the gods, or rather mocking and insulting themselves. And how much better are the Egyptians, who by villages and cities have honored the irrational animals, than the Greeks who worship such gods! For those, even if they are beasts, are not adulterous nor lewd, and not one of them hunts after pleasure contrary to nature. What the others are like, why need I say any more, when they have been sufficiently refuted? The Egyptians, however, whom I have just mentioned, are divided in their cults: the people of Syene worship the fish called phagrus; those who live on Elephantine, the maeotes (another fish); the people of Oxyrhynchus, likewise, the fish that gives its name to their country; the people of Heracleopolis, the ichneumon; those of Sais and of Thebes, the sheep; those of Lycopolis, the wolf; those of Cynopolis, the dog; the people of Memphis, Apis; those of Mendes, the goat. But you, who are in every way better than the Egyptians (I shrink from saying worse), who never stop laughing at the Egyptians every day, what are you like in regard to irrational animals? The Thessalians among you have honored storks, because they are familiar birds, and the Thebans weasels, because of the birth of Heracles. And what of the Thessalians again? They are said to worship ants, because they have learned that Zeus took the form of an ant and lay with Eurymedusa, the daughter of Cleitor, and fathered Myrmidon. Polemon records that the people living in the Troad worship the local mice, which they call sminthoi, because they gnawed through the bowstrings of their enemies; and from those mice they named Apollo Smintheus. Heraclides, in his Foundations of Temples, says that in Acarnania, where the promontory of Actium is and the temple of Actian Apollo, an ox is sacrificed beforehand to the flies. Nor will I forget the Samians (the Samians worship a sheep, as Euphorion says), nor the Syrians who live in Phoenicia, some of whom revere doves and others fish, as extravagantly as the Eleans revere Zeus.