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

although implicated in disputations and dialogisms. That Jove was nowhere buried, but is mortal, that the poets' figments about him are to be referred to nature and explained from nature: although, I say, implicated in disputations, as if concerning the mode of worship: (r) is it proper, or symbolic? or terminative, or (s) relative? Is the image of Jove that thing in which the worship terminates, or is it a symbol through which the invisible Divinity in the Heavens is understood? (t) Do the Diothyta sacrifices to Zeus or meats offered to Jove have a true and real communion with the Divinity, or only a symbolic one? Do such things snatch the initiate into the society of Jove, or is the persuasion of society vain? Jewish philosophy was added.

(r) See Vossius, book 1, de idololatria, ch. 5. Lactantius, in the place cited: "Sallust," he says, "rejects the whole origin, as if feigned by the poets, and wished to interpret ingeniously why the Curetes are said to have been the foster-fathers of Jove. Compare Augustine, book 6, de civitate Dei, ch. 8."

(s) For that not all worshiped logs, stones, or metals by themselves is clear from the famous place of Arnobius, which exists in book 6, adversus gentes against the gentiles: "But you err," they said, accusing the Christians of idolatry, "and you stumble. For we do not decree that altars, or materials of gold and silver, nor other things from which they make statues, are religious divinities BY THEMSELVES; but we worship and venerate those in them whom sacred dedication brings in and makes to inhabit the images made by craftsmen." Whence also the same Athenaeus, book 9, is author that swine were in veneration among the Cretans: "This animal is sacred among the Cretans." And then: "Therefore all consider this animal worthy of the highest veneration." But did all worship the swine themselves terminatively, and not rather symbolically, the more refined ones?

(t) The same Cretans professed communion with Jove when, in their syssitia common meals, they spread a table on the right for Jove Xenios, or the Hospitable, as Athenaeus is the author, book 4, dipnosophistae, p. 14, where who would dare deny that the coarser ones differed in opinion from the subtler ones, the mob from the Dialecticians? It is likely that these differences of opinion also obtained in Corinth, so that some would eat with idol-offerings, believing they had entered into the society of the gods by this contagion of the feast; others, more refined, although they were fellow-initiates and fellow-mystics, thought they were affected by no contagion of the gods, for the reason that an Idol is nothing, and that Jupiter, Apollo, and Venus Leucothea were men, long ago deceased. That controversy was lighter among the Athenians, which Phidias moved: whether Minerva should be made from marble or ivory? among Valerius Maximus, book 1, ch. 1. example.