Note 8 — Lecture I. INTRODUCTORY.
Reading edition
These conceptions are found in Xenophon’s account of Socrates, who quotes more than once the Delphic oracle, ἥ τε γὰρ Πυθία νόμῳ πόλεως ἀναιρεῖ ποιοῦντας εὐσεβῶς ἂν ποιεῖν, Xen. Mem. 1. 3. 1, and again 4. 3. 16: in Epictet. Ench. 31, σπένδειν δὲ καὶ θύειν καὶ ἀπάρχεσθαι κατὰ τὰ πάτρια ἑκάστοις προσήκει: repeatedly in Plutarch, e.g. de Defect. Orac. 12, p. 416, de Comm. Notit. 31. 1, p. 1074: in the Aureum Carmen of the later Pythagoreans, ἀθανάτους μὲν πρῶτα θεούς νόμῳ ὡς διάκεινται, τίμα (Frag. Philos. Græc. i. p. 193): and in the Neoplatonist Porphyry (ad Marcell. 18, p. 286, ed. Nauck), οὗτος γὰρ μέγιστος καρπὸς εὐσεβείας τιμᾶν τὸ θεῖον κατὰ τὰ πάτρια. The intellectual opponents of Christianity laid stress upon its desertion of the ancestral religion; e.g. Cæcilius in Minucius Felix, Octav. 5, “quanto venerabilius ac melius....majorum excipere disciplinam, religiones traditas colere;” and Celsus in Origen, c. Cels. 5. 25, 35; 8. 57.