Minucius Felix, Octavius 23

There is no point in running through each name and laying out the whole line of such figures, because mortality was proved in the very first ancestors and then passed down to all the rest by the sheer logic of succession — unless you insist on inventing gods after death. Proculus perjures himself and Romulus becomes a god; the Moors consent and Juba becomes a god; other kings are consecrated not as a testimony to divinity but as an honor to the power they earned. In the end the title is forced on these men against their will: they want to stay human; they dread becoming gods, and even in old age they refuse it. Therefore the dead cannot be gods, since God cannot die; and the born cannot be gods, since everything born must die, whereas the divine is what has neither beginning nor end. If they were born once, why are they not still being born today? Unless Jupiter has grown old and Juno has lost the power of childbirth, and Minerva turned gray before she ever gave birth. Or did that whole generation stop simply because no one any longer believes such fables? Besides, if gods could create they could not perish; we would have more gods than all humanity, so that heaven could not hold them, the air could not contain them, and the earth could not bear them. That makes it clear: those we read were born and know died were simply men. Who then doubts that the crowd worships and publicly venerates the consecrated images of those men? The opinions and minds of the unskilled are deceived by the harmony of the craft, blinded by the flash of gold, dulled by the gleam of silver and the whiteness of ivory. But if anyone brings to mind the torments and the machines by which every image is shaped, he will blush to fear a material that the artisan has tricked into passing for a god. A wooden god — perhaps a piece of a funeral pyre or an unlucky tree — is hung, cut, carved, and planed; a golden or silver god is often melted from a filthy vessel, as was done for the Egyptian king, and hammered and forged on anvils; a stone god is cut, carved, and polished by an impure man. It feels none of the injury of its own making, so it cannot afterward feel the cultivation of your veneration — unless the stone, the wood, or the silver is not yet a god. So when is this god born? Watch: it is melted, fabricated, carved — not yet a god. Watch: it is soldered, assembled, erected — still not a god. Watch: it is adorned, consecrated, prayed to — only then does it finally become a god, because a man willed it and dedicated it.