Conscience is a God to all mortals.

Menander (c. 342–291 BCE), the leading poet of Athenian New Comedy, wrote for a civic culture in which traditional Olympian religion coexisted with increasingly “internal” ethical reflection. Many of his plays survive only in fragments and later quotations, and moral maxims attributed to him circulated widely in antiquity as gnomai (sententious sayings) excerpted from dramatic dialogue. “Conscience is a God to all mortals” fits this gnomic afterlife: it presents an inward moral faculty as a universal divine witness, a theme congenial to Hellenistic-era moralizing and later reception by rhetoricians and anthologists who mined Menander for portable ethical wisdom.

The line equates conscience with a god—not in the sense of a personal deity, but as an ever-present authority that judges human actions from within. Its force lies in universality (“to all mortals”): even where external law, reputation, or religious observance fails, the inner sense of right and wrong remains a compelling power. The aphorism also implies moral accountability without needing external surveillance; conscience functions as an internalized sacred tribunal. In a dramatic context, such a maxim can sharpen irony: characters may evade others, but cannot evade themselves. The saying anticipates later ethical traditions that treat conscience as the most intimate and inescapable moral guide.

1) "Conscience is a god to all men." 2) "Conscience is a god for all mortals."