the ventriloquists. His scorn culminates in an attack on the quackery which he sees behind the pronouncements: And it seems to me that you are no better than the so-called marvel-mongers, nay not even than the rest of the quacks and sophists. At them, however, I do not wonder, that they abandon men for pay; but I do wonder at you, the god, and at mankind, that they pay to be abandoned. Naturally, not everyone in the Roman world was impressed Oenomaus' thoughts; the Emperor Julian accused him of impiety: Let not the Cynic be shameless or impudent after the fashion of Oenomaus, a scorner of all things divine and human: rather let him be, like Diogenes, reverent towards the divine. Oenomaus, like most Cynics, was not an atheist, but he did view the gods as being unconcerned with human affairs. One of his targets was the Stoics who held that Fate governs everything and yet admitted human liberty in how we respond to Fate: For surely the most ridiculous of all things is this, the mixture and combination of the two notions, that there is something in men's own power, and that there is nevertheless a fixed chain of causation. This apparent contradiction was at the heart of Oenomaus's attack on oracles, since Apollo at Delphi, far from being able to do his own will, would be compelled by Fate to make his pronouncements. More importantly, oracular pronouncements, according to Oenomaus, if true, remove free-will from human beings. Notes 2nd-century philosophers Roman-era Cynic philosophers Pagans Cynicism