Olympic Oration or On Man's First Conception of God

The Olympic Oration or On Man's First Conception of God (Ancient Greek: Ὀλυμπικὸς ἢ περὶ τῆς πρώτης τοῦ θεοῦ ἐννοίας, romanized: Olympikos ē peri tēs protēs tou theou ennoias, Oration 12 in modern corpora) is a speech delivered by Dio Chrysostom at the Olympic games in the 90s or 100s AD.

[3] Dio Chrysostom had been exiled by the Emperor Domitian in AD 82 and, according to his 13th oration, On his Banishment, he then adopted the guise of a Cynic philosopher, travelling through Greece and around the Black Sea.

This oration was delivered shortly after his exile had been rescinded by Nerva,[1] at the Olympic games of AD 97, 101 or 105, in accordance with a vow sworn long before.

As the owl was the bird associated with wisdom, this comparison allows him to identify himself as a philosopher and wise advisor, in contrast to other speakers and sights at Olympia, which have style without substance (7-8).

He says that the miraculous nature of the world and of human ability to describe it through language made it impossible for the original people to remain ignorant of God (28).

The producers of artistic part of a tradition of wise men going back to Daedalus, who sometimes innovate in their depictions, but usually interpret (45) and who are important because they present the divine to the less experienced masses (46).

He emphasises his dependence on earlier ideas and his lack of alternatives to anthropomorphism - sculptures of "sun" and "moon" are not impressive and abstract concepts like "mind" cannot be depicted at all.

Phidias argues that aniconism is not viable; human beings need a physically close image of the divine to worship, as infants reach out for their parents (60-61).

Whereas Homer is extravagant, and able to mix metaphors, and implant feeling directly in listeners' souls (62-67), visual artists are limited by their materials and assistants, and their sculpture can only depict a single posture, which must be the product of years of work (69-72).

B. F. Harris characterises it as having "considerable" literary merit: Dio speaks with persuasive charm... with a feeling for the picturesque phrase and the telling metaphor and with more than a little leavening of Socratic diffidence and ironyHe makes frequent use of analogy for effect and to advance his argument.

[12] B. F. Harris considers the speech as a whole to be "further evidence of that search after an intellectually and emotionally satisfying religious experience which occupied so many cultured men of the period.

"[13] In his view, linking the figure of Zeus with this philosophical idea was important at the beginning of the Second Sophistic, as classical literature and mythology were being emphasised as essential to Greek culture.

[14] Karl Reinhardt argued that Dio's sources of knowledge of God are derived from the theologia tripartita ("three-part theology") attributed by Augustine to Varro.

"[17] Hans Dieter Betz argues that Dio's discussion of divine images reflects an underlying tension in Greco-Roman thought between the admiration of expensive, colossal works of religious art and the rejection of them as wasteful and inappropriately anthropomorphic.

[23][26] Christoph Auffarth argues that Phidias' image of Olympian Zeus became the model for the depiction of Christ Pantokrator in the early fourth century AD, in part under the influence of discourses on the statue, like that of Dio.