all splendid and admirable actions Manic, because a certain person named Mania who was one of their ancient kings, whom some call Masdes, was a brave and powerful man; and farther still, though Cyrus among the Persians, and Alexander among the Macedonians, proceeded in their victories, almost as far as to the boundaries of the earth, yet they only retain the name of good kings, and are remembered as such, [and not as Gods.]
“But if certain persons, inflated by ostentation, as Plato says, having their soul at one and the same time inflamed with youth and ignorance, have insolently assumed the appellation of Gods, and had temples erected in their honour, yet this opinion of them flourished but for a short time, and afterwards they were charged with vanity and arrogance, in conjunction with impiety and lawless conduct; and thus,
Like smoke they flew away with swift-pac’d fate.
And being dragged from temples and altars like fugitive slaves, they have now nothing left them, but their monuments and tombs. Hence Antigonus the elder said to one Hermodotus, who had celebrated him in his poems as the offspring of the sun and a God, ‘he who empties my close-stool-pan knows no such thing of me.’ Very properly also, did Lysippus the sculptor blame Apelles the painter, for drawing the picture of Alexander with a thunder-bolt in his hand, whereat he had represented him with a spear, the glory of which, as being true and proper, no time would take away.”
In another part of the same work also, he admirably reprobates the impiety of making the Gods to be things inanimate, which was very common with Latin writers of the Augustan age, and of the ages that accompanied the decline and fall of the Roman empire. But what he says on this subject is as follows:
“In the second place, which is of still greater consequence, men should be careful, and very much afraid, lest before they are aware, they tear in pieces and dissolve divine natures, into blasts of wind, streams of water, seminations, earings of land, accidents of the earth, and mutations of the seasons, as those do who make Bacchus to be wine, and Vulcan flame. Cleanthes also somewhere says, that Persephone or Proserpine is the spirit or air that passes through (φερομενον) the fruits of the earth, and is then slain, (φονευομενον.) And a certain poet says of reapers,
Then when the youth the limbs of Ceres cut.
