14. What say you, O races
and nations, given up to such beliefs? When these things are
brought forward, are you not ashamed and confounded to say things so
indecent? We wish to hear or learn from you something befitting
the gods; but you, on the contrary, bring forward to us the cutting off
of breasts, the lopping off of men’s members, ragings, blood,
frenzies, the self-destruction of maidens, and flowers and trees
begotten from the blood of the dead. Say, again, did the mother
of the gods, then, with careful diligence herself gather in her grief
the scattered genitals with the shed blood?
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With her own sacred, her own
divine
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hands, did
she touch and lift up the instruments of a disgraceful and indecent
office? Did she also commit them to the earth to be hid from
sight; and lest in this case they should, being uncovered, be dispersed
in the bosom of the earth, did she indeed wash and anoint them with
fragrant gums before wrapping and covering them with his dress?
For whence could the violet’s sweet scent have come had not the
addition of those ointments modified the putrefying smell of the
member? Pray, when you read such tales, do you not seem to
yourselves to hear either girls at the loom wiling away their tedious
working hours, or old women seeking diversions for credulous
children,
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and to be
declaring manifold fictions under the guise of truth? Acdestis
appealed to
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Jupiter to
restore life to his paramour: Jupiter would not consent, because
he was hindered by the fates more powerful
than himself
; and
that he might not be in every respect very hard-hearted, he granted one
favour—that the body should not decay through any corruption;
that the hair should always grow; that the least of his fingers alone
in his body should live, alone keep always in motion. Would any
one grant this, or support it with an unhesitating assent, that hair
grows on a dead body,—that part
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perished, and that the
rest of
his
mortal body, free from the law of corruption, remains even
still?
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Lit., “flows.”
4368
Lit., “herself with sacred, herself with divine.”
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[
γραώδεις
μύθους,
1 Tim. iv. 7
. Compare Ignatius, vol. i.
p. 62, note 3. But even the old wives’ tales among Hebrews
were clean in contrast with the horrible amusements here imputed even
to the girls at the loom, and
children
, among the
Gentiles.]
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Lit., “spoke with.”
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i.e., the part cut off and buried separately.