Sigalion in the Shield of Croesiades or Apologetic Dialogue for the Mystery of Detected Syncretism

whether from civil or religious causes: whether because fortune raised this one or that one to the pinnacle, the rest were torn apart; or because the lights of glory detected in a few were offensive to many; or because the power of one burned everyone; or because desperation ignited crimes; or because contempt irritated; or because "mine and thine" in the island celebrated for commerce supplied arms; or because amidst the very (i) stasis sedition/discord, the apple of Eris was thrown; or, which is most likely, because religion made the parts into sects, and (k) stasis sedition. Whatever that might have been, yet with a common and external enemy imminent, on one hand, by the dissolution of those conspiring in sedition, and on the other, by the union of those dissolved (whether the other party ceded from its own right and forgave the injury inflicted for the public good; or reserved for itself its own right, and tolerated the contrary injury until the storm subsided; or, as far as religious dissensions are concerned, it was agreed upon some common token regarding establishing divine matters

(i) Concerning which see Aristotle, book 2, Politics, ch. 10; Strabo, book 10, Geography, p. 1331.
(k) Stasis concerning sedition from religion is read in Acts 15:2. Just as Crete was as if a potter's clay of the Gods and a mother of religions, so without doubt it was also an arena of sects contending among themselves. Diodorus Siculus, book 5, Bibliotheca, p. 333, writes: "They mythologize that most of the gods were born among them, who obtained honors of the immortals through common benefits." And ibid., p. 343: "Furthermore, that they may prove that honors of God and sacrifices and rites of mysteries, or initiations, came from them to other mortals: they bring this forward as the greatest and most certain (as they are persuaded) argument of confirmation. The initiation, they say, by the rite of the Athenian Eleusinians, almost the most noble of all, and likewise the Samothracian, and those which in Thrace are customary among the Cicones (whence Orpheus was the institutor of these) are traditionally handed down mystically. But in the Cretan city of Gnosus, it was sanctioned from antiquity that they be handed down in the open: and those things which are administered in secret by others, those things, no one among them, who only studies to know them, is kept ignorant. For most Gods went forth from Crete. Minos, King of the Cretans (so Valerius Maximus, book 1, ch. 2, p. 30), used to secede every ninth year into a certain very deep cave, consecrated by ancient religion, and having remained in it, he used to put forth laws handed down to him as if from Jupiter, from whom he claimed to be born."
(l) See Acts 5:36. Systasis and dialysis are opposed in Isocrates, Ad Philippum. Edited by Henricus Stephanus, vol. 2, p. 754. "Those who conspired with Catiline" in Plutarch. See the same, Stephanus, vol. 1, p. 1794.