Chapter II. That it is Easy for Any Who Will to Prove the Promise of the Oracles to Be the Deceit and Knavery of Human Impostors

Certainly all their oracles which have been free from ambiguity have been uttered not according to foreknowledge of the future but by mere conjecture, and thousands of these, or rather almost all, were often convicted of having failed in their prediction, the issue of the matters having turned out contrary to the answer of the oracle; unless perhaps on rare occasions some one event out of tens of thousands agreed therewith by some course of luck, or according to the conjectural expectation of what would happen, and so was thought to make the oracle speak true.

And of this you would find them most loudly boasting, and carving inscriptions upon columns, and shouting to the ends of the earth, not choosing to remember at all, that so many persons, it might chance, were disappointed, but publishing it high and low that to this one man out of ten thousand something promised by the oracle had turned out right. Just as if, when men were casting lots two at a time out of ten thousand, and it happened perhaps just once that they both fell upon the same numbers, a man should wonder how one and the same number happened to come round to both at once in consequence of divination and foreknowledge.

For such is the case of the one out of myriads upon myriads of oracular answers that on some one occasion happened to turn out true; and on observing this the man who possesses no firmness in the depth of his soul is exceedingly amazed at the oracle, though it were much better for him to cease from his folly by calculating to how many others the aforesaid soothsayers have been the cause of death, and of sedition, and wars, and to consider the histories of the ancients, and observe that they never pointed out any effect of divine power even at that time when the oracles of Greece were flourishing, and those which formerly were celebrated, but now exist no longer, were firmly established, and thought worthy of all care and zeal by their countrymen, who revered and fostered them by ancestral laws and mysterious rites.

And certainly in that period especially they were proved to be impotent in the calamities of war, in which the fine soothsayers being powerless to help were convicted of deceiving those who sought their protection by the ambiguity of their oracles; and this we shall accordingly show at the proper opportunity, by proving how they even goaded on those who consulted them into war with each other, and how they failed to give answers even about serious matters, and how they used to mislead their inquirers, making sport of them by their oracles, and tried to conceal their own ignorance by the darkness of uncertainty.

But observe from your own inquiries how they often promised to the sick strengthening, and life, and health, and then being trusted as though they were gods, exacted large rewards for this inspired traffic; and not very long afterwards it was discovered what sort of persons they were, being proved to be human impostors and no gods, when some unfortunate catastrophe seized upon their deluded victims.

What need to say that these wonderful prophets did not render their assistance even to their own next neighbours, those I mean who dwelt in the same city? But you might there see persons sick, and maimed, and mutilated all over their body, in thousands. Why in the world then did they promise such good hopes to the foreigners, who arrived from a far country, but not also to those who dwelt in the same place with them, to whom before all, as being their own friends and fellow citizens, they ought to have rendered the benefit of the presence of their gods? Was it not that they could more easily deceive the strangers, who knew nothing of their roguery, but not their intimates, as these were not ignorant of their craft, but conscious of the trickery practised upon those who were to be initiated?

Thus then the whole business was not divine nor beyond the pgwer of man’s device; so that in the greatest calamities, I mean those which are suspended from on high over the heads of the ungodly from the all-ruling God, their temples, with votive offerings, statues and all, were subjected to utter destruction and sudden overthrow.

For where will you find the temple that was at Delphi, celebrated from the earliest times among all the Greeks? Where is the Pythian god? Where the Clarian? Where even the god of Dodona? As for the Delphian shrine, the story goes that it was burnt a third time by Thracians, the oracle not having been able to give any help to the knowledge of what was coming, nor the Pythian god himself to guard his own abode. It is recorded also that the Capitol at Rome met the same fate in the times of the Ptolemies, when the temple of Vesta at Rome is also said to have suffered conflagration. And about the time of Julius Caesar it is recorded that the great statue, which was the glory of the Greeks and of Olympia, was struck by lightning from the god at the very time of the Olympic games. On another occasion also, they say, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was burnt, and the Pantheon destroyed by lightning, and the Serapeium at Alexandria burnt down in like manner.

Of these events written testimonies are current among the Greeks themselves; but it would be a long story, if any one meant to enumerate the several particulars, in trying to prove that the wonderful oracle-mongers have been found unable to defend even their own temples; and it is not likely that they who have been of no use to themselves in misfortunes would ever be able to give help to others.

By adding one circumstance to those which have been mentioned, such man would have clearly seen the main sum and substance of the matter, that ere now, many of the most highly inspired even of their chief hierophants, and theologians, and prophets, who were celebrated for this kind of theosophy, not only in former times but also recently in our own day, under cruel tortures before the Roman courts declared that the whole delusion was produced by human frauds, and confessed that it was all an artfully contrived imposture; and they had the whole character of the system and the methods of their evil practices registered in the words uttered by them in public records. Therefore they paid the just penalty of their pernicious deception, and revealed every word, and certified by actual facts the proof of the things which we have mentioned.

But, you ask, what sort of persons were these? Think not that they were any of the outcast and obscure. Some came to them from, this wonderful and noble philosophy, from the tribe who wear the long cloak and otherwise look so supercilious; and some were taken from the magistrates of the city of Antioch, who indeed in the time of our persecution prided themselves especially on their outrages against us. We know also the philosopher and prophet who suffered at Miletus the like punishments to those which we have mentioned.

These arguments then, and yet more than these, one might bring together to assert that the authors of the oracles are not gods nor yet daemons, but the delusion and deceit of human impostors.

And there were among the Greeks themselves whole sects distinguished in philosophy who defended this opinion; as the school of Aristotle, and all the successors of the Peripatetic school; Cynics too and Epicureans, in whom what I most admire is, how, after being brought up in the customs of the Greeks, and been taught even from the cradle, son from father, that those of whom we speak are gods, they have not been easily caught, but proved with all their might that even the renowned oracles, and the seats of divination which were sought after among all, had no truth, and declared that they were useless, nay gather mischievous.

But though there are thousands who have wrought the overthrow of the oracles by many arguments, for me I think it is sufficient at present, for a testimony of what I have stated, to make a single quotation from one of them in answer to the arguments devised by Chrysippus concerning fate from the predictions of the oracles. This author then writes against him to prove that he wrongly derives indications of fate from the oracles, and that the oracles of the Greeks give false answers in most cases, and that rarely from a coincidence some events agree with them, and that their prediction of the future is useless and mischievous. Hear, however, what he says, word for word. [1]