Exhortation to the Greeks 7.76

And not Menander alone, but Homer and Euripides and many other poets expose your gods and are not afraid to revile them as much as they like. For example, they call Athena “dog-fly” and Hephaestus “lame in both feet”; and Helen says to Aphrodite, “May you never again turn your feet back to Olympus.” And of Dionysus Homer writes openly: “who once drove the nurses of raving Dionysus down over sacred Nysa; and they all at once threw their wands to the ground under the blows of man-slaying Lycurgus.” Euripides is truly worthy of the Socratic school, looking to the truth and disregarding the spectators. Now he exposes Apollo, “who dwells in the seat at the navel of the earth, dispensing to mortals the clearest speech”: “Obeying him I killed my mother; consider him unholy, and kill him; he sinned, not I,” since Apollo was more ignorant of what is good and just than he; now he brings on Heracles mad, and elsewhere drunk and insatiable. And why not? One who, while feasting on meat, ate green figs besides, “howling unmusically, so that even a barbarian would notice.” And in his play Ion he rolls the gods onto the stage bareheaded: “How then is it just that you, who have written the laws for mortals, should yourselves be guilty of injustice? If (it will not happen, but I will use the argument) you pay the penalty to human beings for your violent marriages, you and Poseidon and Zeus, who rules heaven, will empty your temples to pay for your injustice.”