Exhortation to the Greeks 5.64

Let us run through, if you like, the opinions of the philosophers too, which they boast of concerning the gods, to see whether we may find philosophy itself, out of vainglory, making an idol of matter, or whether we can show in passing that, while deifying certain daemons, it dreams of the truth. Some left us the elements as first principles and sang their praises: Thales of Miletus, water; Anaximenes, also of Miletus, air, and Diogenes of Apollonia later followed him. Parmenides of Elea introduced fire and earth as gods; Hippasus of Metapontum and Heraclitus of Ephesus took only one of the two, fire, to be god; and Empedocles of Acragas, falling into multiplicity, counts strife and love besides these four elements. These too are atheists, who worshiped matter with a wisdom that is no wisdom; they did not honor stones or wood, but they deified the earth, the mother of these; they did not fashion a Poseidon, but they pray to water itself. For what else is Poseidon but a liquid substance, named from drinking (posis)? Just as, of course, warlike Ares is named from lifting up (arsis) and destroying; for which reason, it seems to me, many simply fix a sword in the ground and sacrifice to it as to Ares. This is a custom of the Scythians, as Eudoxus says in the second book of his Circuit of the Earth; and among the Scythians the Sauromatae, as Hicesius says in his book on the mysteries, worship a dagger.