Hellenes were in bondage to superstitions handed down from times of
utter darkness and a bestial life, do chiefly hold with the heathen
philosophers, even with the writers whom thou, most venerable, didst
confound with thy wisdom and chasten with the scourge of small cords
of thy wit.

Thus, like the heathen, our doctors and teachers maintain that the
gods of the nations were, in the beginning, such pure natural
creatures as the blue sky, the sun, the air, the bright dawn, and
the fire; but, as time went on, men, forgetting the meaning of their
own speech and no longer understanding the tongue of their own
fathers, were misled and beguiled into fashioning all those
lamentable tales: as that Zeus, for love of mortal women, took the
shape of a bull, a ram, a serpent, an ant, an eagle, and sinned in
such wise as it is a shame even to speak of.

Behold, then, most worshipful, how these doctors and learned men
argue, even like the philosophers of the heathen whom thou didst
confound. For they declare the gods to have been natural elements,
sun and sky and storm, even as did thy opponents; and, like them, as
thou saidst, "they are nowise at one with each other in their
explanations." For of old some boasted that Hera was the Air; and
some that she signified the love of woman and man; and some that she
was the waters above the Earth; and others that she was the Earth
beneath the waters; and yet others that she was the Night, for that
Night is the shadow of Earth: as if, forsooth, the men who first
worshipped Hera had understanding of these things! And when Hera
and Zeus quarrel unseemly (as Homer declareth), this meant (said the
learned in thy days) no more than the strife and confusion of the
elements, and was not in the beginning an idle slanderous tale.