Chapter II—The poets are unfit to be religious teachers. Whom, then, ye men of Greece, do ye call your teachers of religion? The poets? It will do your cause no good to say so to men who know the poets; for they know how very ridicu- lous a theogony they have composed,—as we can learn from Homer, your most distinguished and prince of poets. For he says, first, that the gods were in the beginning generated from water; for he has written thus:744— “Both ocean, the origin of the gods, and their mother Tethys” And then we must also remind you of what he further says of him whom ye consider the first of the gods, and whom he often calls “the father of gods and men;” for he said:745— “Zeus, who is the dispenser of war to men.” Indeed, he says that he was not only the dispenser of war to the army, but also the cause of perjury to the Trojans, by means of his daughter;746 and Homer introduces him in love, and bitterly complaining, and bewailing himself, and plotted against by the other gods, and at one time exclaiming concerning his own son:747— “Alas! he falls, my most beloved of men! Sarpedon, vanquished by Patroclus, falls. So will the fates.” And at another time concerning Hector:748— “Ah! I behold a warrior dear to me Around the walls of Ilium driven, and grieve For Hector.” And what he says of the conspiracy of the other gods against Zeus, they know who read these words:749 “When the other Olympians—Juno, and Neptune, and Minerva —wished 744 Iliad, xiv. 302. 745 Iliad, xix. 224. 746 That is, Venus, who, after Paris had sworn that the war should be decided by single combat between himself and Menelaus, carried him off, and induced him, though defeated, to refuse performance of the articles agreed upon. 747 Iliad, xvi. 433. Sarpedon was a son of Zeus. 748 Iliad, xxii. 168. 749 Iliad, i. 399, etc. Chapter II—The poets are unfit to be religious teachers. 728 Chapter II—The poets are unfit to be religious teachers.