CLEINIAS: To what are you referring?
ATHENIAN: Men say that we ought not to enquire into the supreme God and the nature of the universe, nor busy ourselves in searching out the causes of things, and that such enquiries are impious; whereas the very opposite is the truth.
CLEINIAS: What do you mean?
ATHENIAN: Perhaps what I am saying may seem paradoxical, and at variance with the usual language of age. But when any one has any good and true notion which is for the advantage of the state and in every way acceptable to God, he cannot abstain from expressing it.
CLEINIAS: Your words are reasonable enough; but shall we find any good or true notion about the stars?
ATHENIAN: My good friends, at this hour all of us Hellenes tell lies, if I may use such an expression, about those great Gods, the Sun and the Moon.
CLEINIAS: Lies of what nature?
ATHENIAN: We say that they and divers other stars do not keep the same path, and we call them planets or wanderers.
CLEINIAS: Very true, Stranger; and in the course of my life I have often myself seen the morning star and the evening star and divers others not moving in their accustomed course, but wandering out of their path in all manner of ways, and I have seen the sun and moon doing what we all know that they do.
ATHENIAN: Just so, Megillus and Cleinias; and I maintain that our citizens and our youth ought to learn about the nature of the Gods in heaven, so far as to be able to offer sacrifices and pray to them in pious language, and not to blaspheme about them.