The gods are a man's earliest, mightiest and most faithful friends, and it therefore becomes thy duty, as a wife, to honor them, and to close thine heart against strange gods and superstitions, as thou wouldst close it against strange lovers." "And," added Croesus, "we will not rob you of your deities; we will only give them to you under other names.

As Truth remains eternally the same, whether called 'maa', as by the Egyptians, or 'Aletheia' as by the Greeks, so the essence of the Deity continues unchanged in all places and times.

Listen, my daughter: I myself, while still king of Lydia, often sacrificed in sincere devotion to the Apollo of the Greeks, without a fear that in so doing I should offend the Lydian sun-god Sandon; the Ionians pay their worship to the Asiatic Cybele, and, now that I have become a Persian, I raise my hands adoringly to Mithras, Ormuzd and the lovely Anahita.

Pythagoras too, whose teaching is not new to you, worships one god only, whom he calls Apollo; because, like the Greek sun-god, he is the source of light and of those harmonies which Pythagoras holds to be higher than all else.

And lastly, Xenophanes of Colophon laughs at the many and divers gods of Homer and sets one single deity on high--the ceaselessly creative might of nature, whose essence consists of thought, reason and eternity.
[A celebrated freethinker, who indulged in bold and independent speculations, and suffered much persecution for his ridicule of the Homeric deities.