Read more of their follies in Cyprian, the fourth treatise, On the Variety of Idols; Chrysostom, Against the Gentiles; Arnobius, Against the Gentiles; Augustine, The City of God; Theodoret, The Cure of Greek Affections; Clement of Alexandria, Minucius Felix, Eusebius, Lactantius, Stucki, and others.

Lamentable, tragic and fearful are these symptoms: that they should be so terrified of their imaginary gods as to spend their goods, lives, fortunes, precious time and best days in their honour; to sacrifice to them, at incalculable loss, such hecatombs, so many thousands of sheep, oxen with gilded horns, and goats. So Croesus, king of Lydia, Marcus Julianus—nicknamed “the sacrificial slaughterer and bull-burner, for his frequent sacrifices”—and the other Roman emperors regularly did, at such labour and expense.

Nor was this expense borne only by emperors and great men “for the public good,” but by private people for their everyday concerns. Pythagoras offered a hundred oxen on discovering a geometrical proposition. In Lucian’s time it was commonplace to sacrifice a heifer for good health, four oxen for wealth, a hundred for a kingdom, nine bulls for a safe return from Troy to Pylos, and so on.

Almost every god had a particular sacrifice: horses for the Sun, fire for Vulcan, a white hart for Diana, a turtledove for Venus, a pig for Ceres, a black lamb for Proserpina, a bull for Neptune—read more at length in Stucki. Besides these came sheep, cocks, corals and frankincense, to the worshippers’ ruin, as though their gods took pleasure in blood or smoke.

And surely, he says, if anyone merely recounted mortal people’s follies in their sacrifices, feasts and worship of the gods; their rites and ceremonies; what they think about the gods, their food, houses and arrangements; what prayers and vows they make—if anyone merely observed their absurdity and madness, he would burst out laughing and pity their folly.

For what could be more absurd than their ordinary prayers, petitions, requests, sacrifices, oracles and devotions? We get a taste of them in Maximus of Tyre’s discourse 1, Plato’s Second Alcibiades, Persius’s Satire 2 and Juvenal’s Satire 10, where they are likewise exposed to ridicule.

“They slaughter rich, fat victims for a god as though he were hungry, pour out wine as though he were thirsty, and light lamps as though he lived in darkness”—Lactantius, book 2, chapter 6. As though their gods were hungry, thirsty or in the dark, they light candles and offer food and drink.

And what could be more degrading than to reveal their counsels and deliver oracles “from the dung-heaps of entrails”—from the bowels and excretory parts of animals? Varro therefore truly calls them “filthy gods,” and well he might. I say nothing of their magnificent and sumptuous temples, those majestic structures. A thousand oaks did not suffice for the roof of Apollo Didymeus’s temple “at Branchidae,” Strabo writes.

Who can describe the glorious splendour and astonishing magnificence, the sumptuous construction of Diana’s temple at Ephesus, Jupiter Ammon’s in Africa, the Pantheon at Rome, the Capitol, the Serapeum at Alexandria, or Apollo’s temple at Daphne in the suburbs of Antioch? Or the great temple at Mexico, so richly adorned and so spacious that 10,000 people could stand in it at once? Or that beautiful pantheon at Cuzco, described by Acosta in his History of the Indies, which eclipses both Jews and Christians?

Old Jerusalem had 408 synagogues, some writers say; but new Cairo counts 6,800 mosques, if Radziwiłł is to be believed. Fez has 400, of which fifty are magnificent, like St Paul’s in London. Helena built 300 beautiful churches in the Holy Land, but a single pasha has built 400 mosques.

The Muslims have a thousand monks in a monastery. Acosta says the same of the Americans, and Ricci of the Chinese, with houses for men and women, beautifully built, some more richly endowed than Arras in Artois, Fulda in Germany, or our own Bury St Edmunds in England. Who can describe those elaborate and costly statues, idols and images so often mentioned in Pausanias?

I pass over their votive gifts, hanging ornaments, other offerings and presents, dedicated daily to these imaginary gods. Alexander, son of Amyntas and king of Macedonia, sent two statues of pure gold to Apollo at Delphi. Croesus, king of Lydia, dedicated a hundred golden tiles there, along with a golden altar. No one came empty-handed to their shrines.

But these offerings are paltry by comparison: they offered living people themselves. The Leucadians, Strabo writes, sacrificed a man every year, “to avert the anger of the gods”—to pacify their gods. “They threw him from a mountain precipice,” and so on; and people underwent it voluntarily. The Decii likewise sacrificed themselves to the spirits of the dead; Curtius leapt into the chasm.

Were they not all strangely deluded, travelling so far to their oracles and being so cheated by them, in war and peace alike, as Polybius relates—and as their augurs, priests and Vestal Virgins bear witness? So superstitious that they would rather lose their possessions and lives than omit a ceremony or offend their pagan gods! Nicias, that noble and valiant Greek commander, brought the Athenian fleet to ruin through excessive superstition. Because the augurs told him it was an evil omen to sail from Syracuse’s harbour during a lunar eclipse, he delayed until his enemies besieged him, and he and his whole army were defeated.

The ancient Parthians were so foolish in this respect that they would rather lose a victory—indeed, their own lives—than fight at night: it was against their religion. The Jews offered no resistance on the Sabbath when Pompey besieged Jerusalem; and some Jewish Christians in Africa, attacked by the Goths, allowed themselves to be utterly defeated for the same reason.