Apsethus the god

Peter J. Leithart
June 24, 2009
Category: Uncategorized

Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out “Apsethus is a god,” and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him.

Then a “clever Greek” caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: “Apsethus, having caged us, compelled us to say Apsethus is a god.”  Betrayed, the Libyans burned Apsethus at the stake.

All you can say is, that’s some parrot.


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