Exhortation to the Greeks 4.55

… the postures of the young courtesan. There is nothing to resent, then, even in Hippo, who immortalized his own death. This Hippo ordered the following elegiac couplet to be inscribed on his tomb: “This is the tomb of Hippo, whom Fate made equal to the immortal gods when he had perished.” Well done, Hippo! You show us the error of humankind. For if they did not believe you when you were speaking, let them become the disciples of a dead man. This is Hippo's oracle; let us understand it. Those whom you worship were once men, and then they died; but myth and time have honored them. For somehow what is present tends to be despised through familiarity, while what is past, being removed from immediate testing by the obscurity of time, is honored through fiction; the one is disbelieved, the other even admired. So, for example, the dead of long ago, magnified by the long duration of error, are thought gods by later generations. The proof of this for you is your very mysteries, your festivals, the bonds and wounds and weeping gods: “Ah me, that it is fated for Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, to be overcome by Patroclus son of Menoetius.” The will of Zeus has been overpowered, and your Zeus, defeated, wails for Sarpedon. So you yourselves have rightly called them idols and daemons, since Homer, honoring Athena herself and the other gods with a bad name, called them daemons: “And she went to Olympus, to the house of aegis-bearing Zeus, among the other daemons.”