X. Hence it comes upon me as a surprise when men say that [Sidenote: F] atheism is impiety, but that superstition is not. Yet Anaxagoras had to answer a charge of impiety for saying that the sun is a stone, whereas no one has called the Cimmerians impious for thinking that there is no sun at all. What do you say? Is the man who recognizes no Gods a profane person, and does not he, who takes them for such beings as the superstitious think, hold a far more profane creed? I know that I would rather men said about me that there is not, and never has come [Sidenote: 170] into existence, a Plutarch, than that there is a man Plutarch unstable, shifty, readily provoked, revengeful over accidents, aggrieved at trifles; who, if you leave him out of your supper party, if you are busy and do not come to the door, if you pass him without a greeting, will cling to your flesh like a leech and gnaw it, or will catch your child, and thrash him to pieces, or will turn some beast, if he keep one, into your crops, and ruin the harvest. When Timotheus was singing of Artemis at Athens in the words: _Wanderer, frenzied one, wild and inebriate!_ [Sidenote: B] Cinesias the composer rose from his place with ‘Such a daughter be thine!’ Yet the like of this, and worse things too, do the superstitious hold about Artemis: _She would burn a hanging woman, She a mother in her pangs; She would bring pollution to you From the chamber of a corpse. In the crossways swoop upon you, Fix on you a murderer’s shame._[290] Nor will their views about Apollo, or Hera, or Aphrodite be a whit more decent, they fear and tremble at them all. Yet what was there in Niobe’s blasphemy about Latona, compared to what [Sidenote: C] superstition has persuaded fools to believe about that goddess, how she felt herself insulted and actually shot down the poor woman’s _Six daughters, beauteous all, six blooming sons_,[291] so greedy of calamities for another woman, so implacable! For if the Goddess had really been full of wrath and resentment of wickedness, and felt aggrieved at insults to herself, disposed to resent, rather than to smile at human folly and ignorance, why then she ought to have shot down those who lyingly imputed to her such savage bitterness, in speech or books. Certainly we denounce the bitterness of Hecuba as savage and beastly: [Sidenote: D] _In whose mid-liver I my teeth would set, And cling and gnaw._[292] But of the Syrian Goddess superstitious men believe that if one eats sprats or anchovies, she munches his shins, fills his body with sores, and rots his liver.[293]