The City of God

For the King and Founder of this city we have set out to discuss has revealed, in the Scripture of his people, a pronouncement of divine law: “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Yet this, which belongs to God, the swollen spirit of a proud soul also claims for itself, and it loves to hear in its own praise: “To spare the conquered and to war down the proud.” So I must not pass over in silence the earthly city either. When it seeks to dominate, it is itself dominated by its lust for domination, even though nations serve it. I will say about it whatever the plan of the work I have undertaken requires and my ability allows.note

These same men, ferocious elsewhere and raging as enemies do, came to those places where what the law of war would have allowed elsewhere was forbidden; and there all their savagery in striking was reined in, and their craving to take captives was broken. In this way many escaped who now disparage these Christian times and blame Christ for the evils that city endured. But the good they received, when their lives were spared out of respect for Christ, they credit not to our Christ but to their own fate. If they had any sense, they ought rather to attribute the harsh and cruel things they suffered at the enemy’s hands to divine providence. Providence habitually corrects and crushes the corrupt morals of human beings by wars; it likewise tests the righteous and praiseworthy lives of mortals by such afflictions, and once they are proved, either carries them over to better things or keeps them still on this earth for other purposes.

As for the fact that the savage invaders, contrary to the custom of war, spared them—whether anywhere at all for the sake of Christ’s name, or in the places most devoted to Christ’s name, the largest ones, chosen to hold a multitude so that mercy might reach more widely—this they ought to attribute to Christian times. For this they ought to thank God; for this they ought to run sincerely to his name, so as to escape the punishment of eternal fire. Many of them falsely took that name upon themselves to escape the punishment of immediate destruction.

For among those you see insolently and shamelessly insulting the servants of Christ, there are very many who would not have escaped that slaughter and disaster had they not pretended to be servants of Christ. And now, with ungrateful pride and the most ungodly madness, they resist his name with perverse hearts, to be punished with everlasting darkness—the very name to which they fled, if only with deceitful lips, so as to enjoy the light of this passing life.

Nor did Troy perish because it lost Minerva. For what had Minerva herself lost first, that she should perish? Her guards, perhaps? That is certainly true: once they were killed, she could be carried off. For it was not the men who were protected by the image, but the image by the men. How, then, was she worshiped to guard the homeland and its citizens, when she could not guard her own guards?

But Juno said this like an angry woman, not knowing what she was saying. What about Aeneas himself, so often called “dutiful”? Does he not tell the story like this: “Panthus, son of Othrys, priest of the citadel and of Phoebus, himself drags along the sacred objects, the conquered gods and his little grandson, and runs frantically to my door”? Does he not declare that these very gods, whom he does not hesitate to call conquered, were entrusted to him, rather than he to them, when he is told: “Troy entrusts to you its sacred objects and its household gods”? If, then, Virgil says that such gods were conquered, and that they were entrusted to a man so that, though conquered, they might somehow escape, what madness it is to think that Rome was wisely committed to these guardians, and that it could not have been sacked unless it had lost them! Indeed, to worship conquered gods as protectors and defenders—what is that but to hold on not to good divinities but to bad omens?note

How much wiser it is to believe, not that Rome would never have come to this disaster unless those gods had perished first, but rather that they would long ago have perished had Rome not preserved them as best it could! For who, once he stops to think, does not see how empty the assumption was that Rome could not be conquered under conquered defenders, and that it perished because it lost its guardian gods? The only cause of its perishing could well have been its wish to have guardians that were doomed to perish. So when these things were written and sung about the conquered gods, it was not that the poets enjoyed lying; rather, the truth compelled men of sense to admit it.

But these matters are better treated carefully and at length elsewhere. For now I shall briefly, as best I can, finish what I had begun to say about ungrateful people. They blasphemously blame Christ for the evils they deservedly suffer for the perversity of their morals; but the fact that, even such as they are, they are spared for Christ’s sake, they do not deign to notice. With the madness of sacrilegious perversity they ply their tongues against his name—the same tongues with which they falsely claimed that name in order to live, or which they held in check out of fear in places sacred to him. So, safe and protected there, where for his sake they were unharmed by the enemy, they burst out from there to attack him with an enemy’s curses.

To that place were carried the spoils snatched from burning temples and from the gods, not to be given back to the conquered but to be divided among the conquerors. To these shrines, by contrast, even what was found elsewhere to belong to them was brought back with honor and the most devout respect. There freedom was lost, here it was preserved; there captivity was locked in, here it was forbidden; there people were penned in by domineering enemies to become their property, here they were led by compassionate enemies to be set free. In short, that temple of Juno was chosen by the greed and pride of the fickle Greeks; these basilicas of Christ by the mercy and humility of the invaders, savage as they were. Unless perhaps the Greeks, in that victory of theirs, really did spare the temples of the gods they shared, and did not dare to strike or capture the wretched, conquered Trojans who fled there, and Virgil, as poets do, made it all up? No—he described the custom of enemies who overthrow cities.

He also took care to preserve chastity, even in the enemy. For before he, as victor, ordered the town to be entered, he decreed by edict that no one should violate the body of a free person. Yet the city was overthrown in the usual way of war, and nowhere do we read that so chaste and merciful a commander ordered that anyone who fled to this or that temple should be left unharmed. That would certainly not have been passed over, since neither his weeping nor his edict for the protection of chastity could go unmentioned. Fabius, who destroyed the city of Tarentum, is praised for refraining from plundering its images. When his secretary asked him what he wanted done with the statues of the gods, a great many of which had been captured, he seasoned his restraint with a joke. He asked what they were like, and when he was told that many were not only large but armed, he said: “Let us leave the Tarentines their angry gods.”note

Since, then, the historians of Roman affairs could not keep silent about the one man’s weeping or the other’s laughter, the one’s chaste mercy or the other’s witty restraint, would they ever have passed it over if the Romans had spared some people in honor of one of their gods, by forbidding slaughter or captivity in some temple?

Those most savage and cruel minds were terrified, reined in and wonderfully tempered by him who said through the prophet so long before: “I will punish their iniquities with the rod and their sins with lashes; but I will not take my mercy away from them.”note

For it has pleased divine providence to prepare for the future good things for the just, which the unjust will not enjoy, and evil things for the ungodly, by which the good will not be tormented. But these temporal goods and evils it willed to be common to both, so that good things would not be sought too greedily, since the wicked are seen to have them too, and evil things would not be shamefully shunned, since the good too are often afflicted by them.

This being so, when good and bad alike have been afflicted, they are not themselves indistinguishable just because what they both suffered is indistinguishable. For the difference between the sufferers remains even within the likeness of their sufferings, and though they are under the same torment, virtue and vice are not the same thing. Under one and the same fire gold glows and chaff smokes; under the same threshing sledge the straw is crushed and the grain is cleaned; and the dregs are not mixed with the oil just because both are pressed out by the same weight of the press. In the same way, one and the same force, falling upon them, tests, purifies and refines the good, and condemns, ruins and destroys the wicked. So in the same affliction the wicked curse and blaspheme God, while the good pray and give praise. What matters most, then, is not what kind of things one suffers, but what kind of person suffers them. For stirred by the same motion, filth gives off a horrible stench and perfume a sweet fragrance.

For everyone, however praiseworthy his life, gives way in some things to fleshly desire. He may not give way to monstrous crimes, a whirlpool of depravity and the abomination of ungodliness, but he does give way to some sins, either rare ones or ones that are more frequent the smaller they are. Leaving this aside, then, who is easily found who treats as they should be treated those very people whose horrible pride, luxury and greed, and accursed iniquities and impieties, are the reason God crushes the earth, as he foretold in his threats? Who lives with them as one ought to live with such people?

For very often we wrongly hold back from teaching and warning them, and sometimes also from rebuking and reproving them. Sometimes the effort irks us. Sometimes we shrink from offending them to their face. Sometimes we avoid their enmity, for fear they may hinder and harm us in these temporal things, whether those that our craving still seeks to obtain or those that our weakness fears to lose. So the good are displeased by the life of the wicked, and therefore do not fall with them into the damnation prepared for such people after this life. Yet they spare the damnable sins of the wicked because they fear them where their own sins are concerned, light and pardonable though these may be. For this reason they are rightly scourged with them in time, though they are by no means punished for eternity. And when God afflicts them along with the wicked, they rightly find this life bitter, since out of love for its sweetness they refused to be bitter to the wicked when they sinned.

This is true not only of the weaker ones. These lead married lives, have children or seek to have them, and possess houses and households. The apostle addresses them in the churches, teaching and warning them how they ought to live (wives with husbands and husbands with wives, children with parents and parents with children, slaves with masters and masters with slaves). Such people gladly acquire many temporal and many earthly things and are distressed to lose them, and for the sake of these they do not dare to offend people whose utterly polluted and wicked lives displease them;note

it is also true of those who hold a higher rank of life. They are not entangled in the bonds of marriage and make do with little food and clothing. Yet very often they refrain from reproaching the wicked, because they fear their plots and attacks against their own reputation and safety. They do not fear them so much that they would yield to any of their threats and outrages and commit similar deeds. Still, they are often unwilling to reprove the very things they refuse to commit along with them, when perhaps they could correct some of them by reproving them. They hold back for fear that, if they should fail, their own safety and reputation would be brought into danger and ruin. Nor do they hold back because they see that their reputation and safety are necessary for the benefit of those who need instruction. Rather they hold back from that weakness which delights in a flattering tongue and in human approval, and which dreads the judgment of the crowd and the torment or death of the flesh. That is, they hold back because of certain chains of craving, not because of the duties of love.

Yet a person is not entirely free of this kind of fault either, even if he is not set over others. In those to whom the necessities of this life bind him, he may know of many things that call for warning or reproof, and still neglect them. He avoids giving them offense for the sake of things that he does not use wrongly in this life, but in which he takes more delight than he should. Then the good have another reason for being afflicted with temporal evils, the reason Job had. Through it the human mind is tested and comes to know itself, learning with how much godly virtue it loves God for nothing.note

For the root of all evils is greed, and some who have craved it have wandered from the faith and thrust themselves into many sorrows.”

For it was fitting that those who had so long neglected the teaching of words should also receive the teaching of experience. When the apostle said, “Those who want to become rich fall into temptation,” and so on, he was clearly condemning the craving in riches, not the means themselves. For elsewhere he gave this instruction: “Instruct the rich of this world not to be haughty, nor to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on the living God, who provides us everything abundantly to enjoy. Let them do good, be rich in good works, give readily, share, and store up for themselves a good foundation for the future, so that they may lay hold of true life.” Those who did this with their riches were consoled for light losses by great gains. They rejoiced more over what they kept more safely by giving it readily than they grieved over what they lost more easily by timidly holding on to it. For what could perish on earth was what they had been reluctant to transfer from it.note

Some accepted the counsel of their Lord when he said: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves dig through and steal; but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth corrupts; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” In the time of trouble they proved how wisely they had judged in not despising that most truthful teacher, the most faithful and invincible guardian of their treasure. For many rejoiced that they had kept their riches in a place the enemy happened not to reach. How much more surely and securely, then, could those rejoice who, at the warning of their God, had moved their riches to a place the enemy could not reach at all!note

Hence our friend Paulinus, bishop of Nola, was once a man of the greatest wealth and became by his own choice utterly poor and most richly holy. When the invaders laid waste to Nola itself and he was held captive by them, he prayed in his heart, as we later learned from him: “Lord, let me not be tortured for gold and silver; for you know where all that I have is.” For he kept all that he had where he had been shown to store and treasure it by the one who had foretold that these evils would come upon the world. And so those who had obeyed their Lord when he warned them where and how they ought to store up treasure did not lose even their earthly riches when the invaders overran them. But those who regretted not having obeyed learned what should be done with such things. If wisdom did not teach them beforehand, experience at least taught them afterward.note

I am well aware how much more readily people choose to live long under the fear of so many deaths than to die once and fear none thereafter. But the senses of the flesh, weak and timid, recoil from one thing, and the reason of the mind, carefully worked out, proves another. A death that a good life has preceded should not be thought bad. For nothing makes death bad except what follows death. Those who must die in any case need not care much about what happens to make them die. They should care where they will be forced to go by dying. Christians know that the death of the godly poor man among the licking tongues of the dogs was far better than that of the ungodly rich man in purple and fine linen. What harm, then, did those horrible kinds of death do to the dead who had lived well?note

For it is said that they do something when they kill, because while they are killing there is feeling in the body. Afterward they have nothing they can do, because there is no feeling in a slain body. So the earth did not cover many Christian bodies. But no one separated any of them from heaven and earth. These he fills entirely with his presence, and he knows from where to raise again what he created. It is said, indeed, in a psalm: “They have given the dead bodies of your servants as food to the birds of the sky, the flesh of your saints to the beasts of the earth; they have poured out their blood like water around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them.” But this was said rather to magnify the cruelty of those who did these things, not to show the misfortune of those who suffered them. For although these things seem harsh and dreadful in the sight of human beings, still “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”note

Therefore all these things are more a consolation for the living than a help to the dead: the care of the funeral, the manner of burial and the pomp of the procession. If a costly burial does the ungodly any good, then a cheap one or none at all will harm the godly. A crowd of servants provided a splendid funeral in the sight of human beings for that rich man dressed in purple. But the ministry of angels provided a far more glorious one in the sight of the Lord for that poor man covered with sores. They did not carry him out to a marble tomb, but bore him up into Abraham’s bosom.

The Lord himself, too, who was to rise on the third day, proclaims the good work of a devout woman and directs that it be proclaimed, because she poured precious ointment over his limbs and did this for his burial. And the Gospel mentions with praise those who took his body down from the cross and saw to it that it was carefully and honorably wrapped and buried. These authorities, however, do not teach that corpses have any feeling. Rather, they show that the bodies of the dead also fall within the providence of God, who is pleased even by such acts of devotion, and they do so to support faith in the resurrection. Here we also learn a wholesome lesson: how great the reward can be for the alms we give to those who are alive and can feel, if even what we render in duty and care to the lifeless limbs of human beings is not lost in God’s sight.note

There are also other things that the holy patriarchs said about the burial or removal of their bodies, which they wanted to be understood as spoken by the prophetic spirit. But this is not the place to treat them at length, since what we have said is enough. Consider this, though. When the things needed to sustain the living, such as food and clothing, are lacking, even with severe hardship, they do not break the virtue of endurance and patience in good people, nor do they root devotion out of their souls. Instead, they exercise it and make it more fruitful. How much less, then, when the things customarily provided for funerals and for burying the bodies of the dead are lacking, do they make wretched those who are already at rest in the hidden dwellings of the godly! And so, when these things were lacking for the corpses of Christians in the devastation of that great city, or of other towns as well, it is neither the fault of the living, who could not provide them, nor a punishment for the dead, who cannot feel them.

They shut him in a narrow wooden box where he was forced to stand, studded on every side with very sharp nails, so that he could not lean against any part of it without the most excruciating pain. They killed him by keeping him from sleep as well. The pagans are certainly right to praise a virtue that was greater than such great misfortune. And he had sworn by the gods—the very gods whose worship, now forbidden, is in these people’s view the reason why these disasters are being inflicted on the human race. These gods were worshiped precisely so that they would make this life prosperous. So if they either willed or allowed these punishments to be inflicted on a man who kept his oath, what worse could they have done in their anger to a perjurer? But why should I not rather frame my argument so that it covers both alternatives? He certainly worshiped the gods in such a way that, to keep faith with his oath, he would neither remain in his homeland nor go from there anywhere else he liked, but did not hesitate in the least to return to his bitterest enemies. If he thought this was of benefit for this present life, he was undoubtedly mistaken, since the end of that life he earned was so horrifying.

For he taught by his own example that the gods are of no use to their worshipers for this temporal happiness. Devoted as he was to their worship, he was defeated and carried off as a captive. And because he refused to act otherwise than as he had sworn by them, he was tortured to death by a new, previously unheard-of and utterly horrifying kind of punishment. But if the worship of the gods bestows happiness after this life as a kind of reward, why do they slander Christian times? Why do they say that this calamity befell the City because it stopped worshiping its gods, when even if it had worshiped them most diligently it could have become as unhappy as Regulus was?

Unless perhaps someone is so insane, so remarkably blind, as to struggle against the clearest truth and dare to argue that a whole city that worships the gods cannot be unhappy, while a single man can—on the grounds, no doubt, that the power of their gods is better suited to preserving many people than individuals, even though a multitude is made up of individuals.

And if they do not fear it, let them admit that something like what happened to Regulus could also have happened to a city that worshiped the gods as diligently as he did, and let them stop slandering Christian times. But since the question arose about those Christians who were also taken captive, let those who shamelessly and senselessly mock the most saving religion on this account look at this example and be silent. Their most devoted worshiper, while keeping faith with his oath to the gods, lost his homeland, having no other, and as a captive among the enemy was put to death slowly, by a punishment of novel cruelty. If that brought no disgrace on their gods, then far less should the Christian name be accused because of the captivity of those consecrated to it. For they await their homeland on high with true faith, and know that even in their own homes they are pilgrims.

But not only acts that cause pain but also acts of lust can be perpetrated on another person’s body. So when something of this kind is done, it may not drive out chastity, held fast by a most constant mind, but it does drive in shame—shame that people may believe that what perhaps could not happen without some pleasure of the flesh was also done with the consent of the mind.

We rightly detest what Judas did, and the truth judges that when he hanged himself with a noose he increased rather than expiated the guilt of that wicked betrayal. For in despairing of God’s mercy he repented in a deadly way and left himself no room for a saving repentance. How much more, then, ought someone to refrain from killing himself who has nothing in himself to punish by such a penalty! For when Judas killed himself, he killed a wicked man; and yet he ended this life guilty not only of Christ’s death but of his own, because, though he was killed on account of his crime, he was killed by another crime of his own. But why should a person who has done nothing wrong do wrong to himself? Why should he, by killing himself, kill an innocent human being so as not to suffer a guilty one, and commit a sin of his own against himself so that another’s sin is not committed against him?

If chastity is something of that sort, why do people struggle to keep from losing it even at the risk of their bodies? But if it is a good of the soul, it is not lost even when the body is overpowered. Indeed, when the good of holy continence refuses to yield to the uncleanness of carnal desires, the body itself is also made holy. And so, as long as continence persists with unshaken resolve in not yielding to them, holiness is not lost even from the body, because the will to use the body in holiness persists—and, as far as lies within its power, the ability as well.

Or suppose some woman, her mind corrupted and the vow she had made to God violated, goes off to her seducer to be defiled. As she goes off for this purpose, do we call her holy even in body, when the holiness of soul through which her body was made holy has been lost and destroyed? Far from us be this error! Let us rather learn from this that, just as holiness of body is not lost while holiness of soul remains, even when the body is overpowered, so holiness of body is lost when holiness of soul is violated, even if the body is untouched. Therefore a woman who has been violently overpowered without any consent of her own, and raped through another’s sin, has nothing to punish in herself by a voluntary death—and how much less before it happens! She must not commit a murder that is certain while the crime itself, though another’s, still hangs uncertain.

A certain declaimer, speaking on this subject brilliantly and truthfully, said: “Remarkable to say: there were two, and only one committed adultery.” Splendidly and most truly said. For he saw, in the union of two bodies, the foulest lust of the one and the most chaste will of the other. And attending not to what was done by the joining of bodies but to what was done by the difference of minds, he said: “There were two, and only one committed adultery.”

Certainly you have no way of defending her before the judges of the underworld, even such judges as are celebrated in the songs of your poets. For she is placed, of course, among those “who, guiltless, brought death upon themselves by their own hand and, hating the light, flung away their lives.” She longs to return to the world above, but “divine law stands in the way, and the gloomy marsh with its unlovely water holds her fast.”note

But this case is so hemmed in on both sides that if the murder is played down, the adultery is confirmed, and if the adultery is cleared, the murder is compounded. There is no way out at all when it is said: “If adulterous, why praised? If chaste, why slain?”

She blushed to be thought an accomplice in the deed if she bore patiently what another had shamefully done to her. Christian women did not do this. They have suffered similar things, yet they are still alive. They have not avenged another’s crime on themselves, so as not to add crimes of their own to the crimes of others—as they would if, because the enemy had committed rapes on them out of lust, they committed murders on themselves out of shame. For they have within them the glory of chastity, the testimony of their conscience. They have it in the sight of their God, and they seek nothing further, since there is nothing further they could rightly do—lest they stray from the authority of God’s law by wrongly trying to escape the offense of human suspicion.

Now, someone who confesses something false about himself is no less guilty of false witness than if he did it against his neighbor. This is so even though the commandment that prohibits false witness prohibits it against one’s neighbor, and those who do not understand it rightly might think it is not forbidden to stand as a false witness against oneself. How much more, then, must we understand that it is not lawful for a person to kill himself! For in the words “You shall not kill,” with nothing added afterward, no one is understood to be excepted—not even, of course, the very person to whom the command is given. That is why some try to extend this commandment even to wild animals and livestock, so that on this basis it would be unlawful to kill any of them either. Then why not to plants too, and to whatever is nourished by the soil and fixed in it by roots?

For this kind of thing too, though it has no sensation, is said to live, and so it can also die, and accordingly, when force is applied, it can be killed. Hence the apostle, speaking of seeds of this kind, says, “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies”; and in the psalm it is written, “He killed their vines with hail.” Are we then, on this account, when we hear “You shall not kill,” to regard pulling up a shrub as a sacrilege, and to fall in, like utter madmen, with the error of the Manichaeans?note

So let us set these ravings aside. When we read “You shall not kill,” we do not take this to be said of shrubs, because they have no sensation. Nor do we take it to be said of irrational animals—whatever flies, swims, walks or creeps—because they are not joined to us by any bond of reason, since it was not given to them to have reason in common with us (and so, by the most just ordering of the Creator, both their life and their death are subject to our use). It remains, then, that we understand “You shall not kill” as said of human beings: neither another, therefore, nor yourself. For whoever kills himself kills nothing other than a human being.

and it is rightly asked whether we should regard as done at God’s command Jephthah’s killing of his daughter, who came out to meet her father, when he had vowed to sacrifice to God whatever first came out to meet him as he returned victorious from battle. Nor is Samson excused for crushing himself together with his enemies under the collapse of the house, except on the ground that the Spirit, who worked miracles through him, had secretly commanded it.) With these exceptions, then—those whom either a just law commands in general, or God himself, the source of justice, commands in particular to be killed—anyone who kills a human being, whether himself or anyone else, is caught in the crime of murder.note

So if we must think it is done from greatness of mind when a person inflicts death on himself, then it is rather that Theombrotus in whom we find this greatness of mind. They say that after reading Plato’s book in which he discussed the immortality of the soul, he threw himself headlong from a wall and so departed from this life to the one he believed to be better. For no calamity and no crime, whether real or falsely charged, pressed upon him that he could not bear and so removed himself from; only greatness of mind was present to make him seize death and break the sweet bonds of this life. Yet that this was done greatly rather than well, Plato himself, whom he had read, could have testified to him. Plato would surely have done it himself first and foremost, or even prescribed it, had he not judged, with the same mind with which he saw the immortality of the soul, that it was by no means to be done—indeed, that it was to be forbidden.note

For if Torquatus, to his credit, killed his son who had fought the enemy against orders, even though he was victorious, why did the defeated Cato spare his defeated son, when he did not spare himself? Or was it more shameful to be a victor against orders than to bear a victor against honor? In no way, therefore, did Cato judge it shameful to live under Caesar as victor; otherwise he would have freed his son from this shame with a father’s sword. What then remains, except that as much as he loved his son, whom he both hoped and wished Caesar would spare, so much did he begrudge Caesar the glory of sparing him as well—as Caesar himself is said to have remarked—or, to put it more mildly, he was ashamed?note

And so he kept both his endurance under Carthaginian domination and his constancy in his love for the Romans, removing neither his defeated body from the enemy nor his undefeated mind from his fellow citizens. Nor was his refusal to kill himself due to love of this life. He proved this when, for the sake of his promise and his oath, he returned without any hesitation to those same enemies whom he had offended more gravely by his words in the senate than by his arms in war. So great a despiser of this life, then, who preferred to have it ended by raging enemies through any tortures rather than destroy himself, beyond doubt judged it a great crime for a person to kill himself. Among all their praiseworthy men, distinguished by the marks of virtue, the Romans bring forward none better. Good fortune did not corrupt him, for in so great a victory he remained very poor; nor did misfortune break him, for he returned fearless to so dreadful a death.

These were very brave and illustrious men, defenders of an earthly homeland, worshipers of gods who were false, yet not false worshipers themselves but most true to their oaths. They could have struck down defeated enemies by the custom and law of war, yet when they were defeated by enemies they refused to strike themselves down; and though they had no fear at all of death, they preferred to bear their conquerors as masters rather than inflict death on themselves. If so, how much more will Christians, who worship the true God and long for the heavenly homeland, refrain from this crime, if divine dispensation has for a time subjected them to their enemies, either to test them or to correct them! In that humiliation he does not desert them, he who, though the Most High, came so humbly for their sake. And this is all the more true since no rights of any military authority, or of such service, bind them to strike down even a defeated enemy.

What error so wicked, then, creeps in, that a person kills himself either because an enemy has sinned against him, or to keep an enemy from sinning against him, when he would not dare to kill the enemy himself, whether that enemy has sinned or is about to sin?

Is it not better to commit a disgraceful act that can be healed by repentance than a crime that leaves no room for saving repentance? I have said this because of those men or women who, to avoid not another’s sin but their own—for fear that, subjected to another’s lust, they might consent to their own when it is aroused—think they should do violence to themselves to the point of death. But far be it from a Christian mind, which trusts in its God and, having placed its hope in him, relies on his help—far be it, I say, that such a mind should yield to any pleasures of the flesh so as to consent to what is shameful. And if that disobedience of desire which still dwells in our dying members moves as if by a law of its own, apart from the law of our will, how much more is it free of guilt in the body of one who does not consent, if it is free of guilt in the body of one who is asleep!

For when a soldier, obeying the authority under which he is lawfully placed, kills a human being, he is not guilty of murder under any law of his state; indeed, if he does not do it, he is guilty of desertion and contempt of command. But if he had done it on his own initiative and authority, he would have incurred the crime of shedding human blood. So for the very thing for which he is punished if he does it without orders, he will be punished if he does not do it when ordered. If this is so when a commander gives the order, how much more when the Creator gives it! So let anyone who hears that it is not lawful to kill himself do it, if he has been commanded by the one whose commands it is not lawful to disregard—only let him make sure that the divine command does not waver with any uncertainty. We reach the conscience only through the ear; we do not claim for ourselves the judgment of hidden things. “No one knows what is happening in a person except the spirit of the person, which is in him.”note

This we say, this we affirm, this we prove in every way: that no one ought to inflict a voluntary death on himself as a way of escaping temporal troubles, for fear of falling into eternal ones; no one on account of another’s sins, for fear of beginning to have a very grave sin of his own, when he was not defiled by another’s; no one on account of his own past sins, for which he needs this life all the more, so that they can be healed by repentance; no one out of longing, as it were, for a better life hoped for after death, because the better life after death does not receive those who are guilty of their own death.

Why, then, are so many and such great dangers loved, or at any rate, even if they are not loved, taken on, by someone who stays in this life when he is permitted to leave it? Or does so senseless a perversity overturn the heart and turn it away from considering the truth, that a person thinks this: if he ought to kill himself so as not to collapse into sin under the domination of a single captor, he must nevertheless go on living in order to endure the world itself, which is full at every hour of temptations? These include temptations like the one dreaded under a single master, and countless others, without which this life is not lived.

What reason is there, then, for us to spend our time on those exhortations in which we address the baptized and try to kindle in them a zeal for virginal integrity, or for the continence of widowhood, or for faithfulness in the marriage bed itself? We have better shortcuts, far removed from every danger of sinning. We could persuade anyone we can, immediately after the forgiveness of their sins, to seize death and inflict it on themselves, and so send them to the Lord healthier and purer.

Now, anyone who thinks this should be attempted and urged on people is, I do not say foolish, but insane. With what face, then, can he say to someone, “Kill yourself, so that you do not add a graver sin to your small ones while you live under a master whose foreign ways know no shame”? He cannot, except with the utmost wickedness, say, “Kill yourself now that all your sins are absolved, so that you do not commit such sins again, or even worse ones, while you live in a world all too alluring with so many impure pleasures, so frenzied with so many unspeakable cruelties, so hostile with so many errors and terrors.” Since it is wicked to say this, it is certainly wicked to kill oneself. For if there could be any just cause for doing this voluntarily, there would surely be none more just than this one. But since not even this one is just, there is none.

If you did not consent to those who sinned, divine help came to divine grace, so that it would not be lost. Human disgrace came upon human glory, so that it would not be loved. Take comfort in both, you who are fainthearted: on the one side you were tested, on the other chastised; on the one side justified, on the other corrected. But some women’s hearts, when questioned, answer that they have never been proud of the good of virginity, or widowhood, or marital chastity. Agreeing with the humble, they have rejoiced with trembling in God’s gift. They have envied no one an excellence of holiness and chastity equal to their own. Setting aside human praise, which is usually paid all the more lavishly the rarer the good that calls for it, they have wished rather that their number were larger than that they themselves should stand out more by being few. Even these women, who are like this, must not complain that it was permitted if foreign lust violated some of them too. Nor should they believe that God neglects such things because he permits what no one commits with impunity.

For certain burdens, so to speak, of evil desires are both let loose in the present through God’s hidden judgment and reserved for his open judgment at the last. Perhaps, too, these women, who know well that their hearts were not puffed up with pride over this good of chastity, and who nevertheless suffered the enemy’s violence in their flesh, had some hidden weakness. It could have swelled into arrogant pride if they had escaped this humiliation in that devastation. Just as some were “snatched away by death so that wickedness might not change their understanding,” so something was snatched from these women by force so that prosperity might not change their modesty. Consider both groups: those who were already proud of their flesh because it had suffered no one’s shameful touch, and those who might perhaps have become proud if it had not been handled by the enemy’s violence. For both, chastity was not taken away. Instead, humility was instilled. For the first, help came to a swelling already present. For the second, a swelling about to arise was headed off.note

For the household answers: “My God is present everywhere, wholly everywhere, enclosed nowhere. He can be present unseen and absent without moving. When he harasses me with adversity, he is either examining my merits or chastising my sins, and he keeps an eternal reward for me in return for temporal evils piously endured. But who are you, that it should be worth talking with you even about your gods, much less about my God? He ‘is to be feared above all gods, for the gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens.’”note

But that Scipio, your chief pontiff, judged by the whole senate to be the best of men, feared this calamity for you. So he did not want Carthage, then the rival of Roman rule, to be destroyed, and he opposed Cato when Cato moved that it be destroyed. He feared security as an enemy of weak spirits, and he saw that fear was necessary as a suitable guardian for the citizens, as though they were wards. Nor was he mistaken in his judgment: events themselves proved how truly he spoke.note

For once Carthage was destroyed, and the great terror of the Roman commonwealth had been driven off and extinguished, such great evils born of prosperity followed at once. Concord was corrupted and torn apart, first by savage and bloody seditions. Then, soon after, through a chain of evil causes, it was torn apart by civil wars as well. So much slaughter was wrought, so much blood was shed, and such savagery seethed with greed for proscriptions and plunder, that those Romans who had feared evils from their enemies while their life was more upright now suffered crueler things from their fellow citizens, once that uprightness was lost. And that very lust for domination, which among the other vices of the human race was present in a purer form in the Roman people as a whole, prevailed at last in a few of the more powerful; and then it crushed the rest, worn down and exhausted, under the yoke of slavery as well.

The same reason, and the same most farsighted love of his country, lay behind another act. This same chief pontiff of yours was chosen as the best of men by the senate of that time without a single dissenting vote, a fact that must often be repeated. When the senate set about building a theater, he checked it in this plan and this craving. In a most weighty speech he persuaded them not to let Greek luxury creep into the manly ways of their country, and not to give in to foreign depravity so as to weaken and sap Roman virtue. His authority was so strong that the senate, moved by his words and acting with foresight, forbade from then on even the benches to be set out. These benches were piled up for the occasion at the shows of the games, and the city had already begun to use them. How eagerly he would have removed the theatrical shows themselves from the city of Rome, if he had dared to resist the authority of those he thought were gods! He did not understand that they were harmful demons. Or, if he did understand, he too thought they should be placated rather than despised.

For the teaching from above had not yet been made known to the nations. That teaching, cleansing the heart by faith, would change human affections through humble piety so that they would strive for heavenly and even more-than-heavenly things, and it would free them from the domination of proud demons.

Nor did that plague of the body subside because the effete madness of theatrical shows crept in among a warlike people, previously accustomed only to the games of the circus. Rather, the cunning of the wicked spirits foresaw that the plague was about to cease when its due end came. So it used the occasion to send another plague, far more serious, in which it takes the greatest delight, and it sent this one not on bodies but on morals. This plague blinded the minds of the wretched with such darkness, and disfigured them with such ugliness, that even now something has happened that will perhaps seem incredible when our descendants hear of it. After the city of Rome was devastated, those whom this plague possessed, and who managed to flee from there and reach Carthage, went mad every day in the theaters, competing with one another in their frenzy for the actors.

For in your security you are not seeking a commonwealth at peace, but luxury unpunished. Corrupted by prosperity, you could not be corrected by adversity either. That Scipio wanted you to be frightened by an enemy so that you would not dissolve into luxury. Yet even when crushed by the enemy you did not curb your luxury. You lost the benefit of calamity: you have become most wretched, and you have remained most wicked.

Finally, I will speak against those who, refuted and convicted by the clearest evidence, try to maintain that the gods are to be worshiped not for the benefit of the present life but for the sake of the life that is to come after death. Unless I am mistaken, this question will be much more laborious and will deserve subtler discussion. In it I must argue against philosophers as well, and not just any philosophers. I mean those who are renowned among them for the most outstanding glory and who agree with us on many things: on the immortality of the soul, on the true God having created the world, and on his providence, by which he rules the whole of what he created. But since they too must be refuted on the points where they disagree with us, we must not fail in this duty. Having refuted impious objections with whatever strength God grants, we may then uphold the city of God, true piety, and the worship of God, in which alone eternal happiness is truthfully promised.

So let this be the limit of this book, so that we may take up what comes next in our plan with a new beginning.

And yet what end will there be to debate, what limit to talk, if we think we must always reply to those who reply? For some either cannot understand what is said, or are so hardened by the perversity of their minds that they will not yield even if they do understand. They “reply and speak wickedness,” as it is written, and are tirelessly empty. Suppose we chose to refute their objections every time they resolved, with brazen face, not to think about what they say, so long as they contradict our arguments in any way at all. You see how endless, wearisome and fruitless that would be.note

So, my son Marcellinus, I would not want you, or the others whom this work of mine serves usefully and freely in the love of Christ, to be the kind of judges of my writings who always want a reply whenever they hear something said against what they read. Otherwise they become like those foolish women the apostle mentions, “always learning and never arriving at knowledge of the truth.”note

This question extends to many matters. It commonly troubles many people in the face of all the daily gifts of God and disasters of men, since both often befall those who live well and those who live badly, mixed together and without distinction. To resolve it, as the work I had undertaken required, I dwelt on it for some time. Above all I wished to console the holy and devoutly chaste women on whom the enemy perpetrated something that brought them the pain of shame, though it did not take away the firmness of their purity. They should not be sorry to be alive, since there is no wickedness for them to be sorry for. Then I said a few things against those who, with the most shameless insolence, harass the Christians afflicted by those adversities, and especially mock the shame of women who were humiliated, chaste and holy though they were. These people are utterly wicked and irreverent, far degenerated from those very Romans whose many splendid deeds are praised and celebrated in literature. Indeed, they are vehemently opposed to the glory of those Romans.

For Rome, founded and enlarged by the labors of the ancients, they had made fouler while it still stood than when it fell. In its fall, stones and timbers came down. In their lives, however, all the defenses and adornments fell, not of walls but of morals, since their hearts burned with cravings more deadly than the fires that burned the roofs of that city. With these words I ended the first book. Next, then, I resolved to describe the evils that city has suffered since its origin, whether at home or in the provinces already subject to it. They would blame all of these on the Christian religion if the teaching of the gospel had already been sounding forth then, bearing its free witness against their false and deceitful gods.

Let them recall with us, then, the many and various calamities by which the Roman state was ground down before Christ came in the flesh, and before his name became known to the nations with that glory which they envy in vain. In the face of these calamities, let them defend their gods if they can, if the gods are worshiped so that their worshipers may not suffer such evils. For if their worshipers suffer anything of the kind now, they insist that it must be blamed on us. Why, then, did those gods allow the things I am about to describe to happen to their worshipers, before the proclaimed name of Christ offended them and prohibited their sacrifices?

We too, as young men, used sometimes to go to the spectacles and mockeries of sacrilege. We watched people in frenzies, we listened to the musicians, and we took pleasure in the most shameful shows put on for gods and goddesses. They were held for the Heavenly Virgin and for Berecynthia, mother of all. Before her litter, on the solemn day of her bathing, the most worthless actors sang such things in public as would be unfit for the ears, I do not say of the mother of the gods, but of the mother of any senator whatever or of any respectable man. Indeed, they would be unfit for the ears of the actors’ own mothers. For human modesty has something in it toward parents that not even wickedness itself can take away. The actors would have been ashamed to rehearse at home, in front of their own mothers, the obscene filth of words and deeds that they performed in public before the mother of the gods, while a vast crowd of both sexes watched and listened. If curiosity could lure that crowd to gather around, at least its offended chastity ought to have sent it away abashed.note

What is sacrilege, if those are sacred rites? Or what is pollution, if that is a washing? And these were called “courses,” as though a banquet were being celebrated at which unclean demons fed on their own feast. Who would not perceive what kind of spirits delight in such obscenities? Only someone who either does not know whether there are any unclean spirits at all, deceiving under the name of gods, or who leads the kind of life in which it is these, rather than the true God, whom he both longs to have favorable and dreads to have angry.note

Then again, suppose we asked him whether he would want those obscenities to be celebrated among her divine honors. Would he not cry out that he would rather his mother lay dead and without any feeling than live on as a goddess in order to listen to such things with pleasure? Far be it from us to think it of him. He was a senator of the Roman people, a man of the mind that made him forbid a theater to be built in the city of brave men. Such a man would not want his mother worshiped so that, as a goddess, she would be won over by rites whose words would have offended her as a matron. Nor would he in any way believe that divinity could so turn the modesty of a praiseworthy woman into its opposite that her worshipers would invoke her with such honors. Had insults like these been hurled at anyone in her presence while she lived among men, her relatives, her husband and her children would have blushed for her, unless she had stopped her ears and taken herself away.

So the mother of the gods was such that even the worst of men would be ashamed to have her as a mother. Intending to take possession of Roman minds, she sought out the best man. She did not mean to make him the best by warning and helping him. She meant to mislead and deceive him, like the woman of whom it is written: “But a woman captures the precious souls of men.” Her aim was that this man of great natural gifts, exalted by what seemed a divine testimony and truly thinking himself the best, should not seek true piety and religion. Without these, every talent, however praiseworthy, vanishes in pride and falls. How, then, could that goddess seek the best man except treacherously, when she seeks in her rites the kind of things that the best men shrink from bringing into their own banquets?note

And let them not boast to us of some whisperings or other, breathed into the ears of a very few and handed down as if in secret religion, from which honesty and chastity of life might be learned. Rather, let them point out or name places once consecrated to such gatherings. I do not mean places where games were held with the obscene words and gestures of actors, nor where the Fugalia are celebrated with every license of filth let loose (a festival of flight indeed, but the flight of modesty and decency). I mean places where the peoples might hear what the gods commanded about restraining greed, breaking ambition and curbing luxury, and where the wretched might learn what Persius rebukes them for needing to learn, when he says: “Learn, you wretched ones, and come to know the causes of things: what we are, and for what life we are born; what rank is assigned to us, or where the gentle turn around the post is to be taken, and from what point; what limit there is to money; what it is right to wish for; what use hard coin has; how much it is fitting to bestow on your country and your dear relatives; what God has commanded you to be, and in what place among human affairs you are set.”note

Let them say in what places these precepts of teaching gods used to be read aloud and frequently heard by the peoples who worshiped them. We, for our part, point to churches established for this very purpose wherever the Christian religion spreads.

Still, if the philosophers discovered something that could suffice for leading a good life and attaining a happy one, how much more justly would divine honors be decreed to such men! How much better and more honorable it would be for Plato’s books to be read in a temple of Plato than for Galli to be castrated, eunuch priests consecrated and madmen gashed in the temples of demons! The same goes for whatever else is usually celebrated in the rites of such gods, whether cruel or shameful, or shamefully cruel or cruelly shameful. How much more worthwhile it would be, for training the young in justice, to have the laws of the gods recited publicly than to praise the laws and institutions of the ancestors in vain! For all the worshipers of such gods, as soon as lust drives them on, “dipped in burning poison,” as Persius says, look more at what Jupiter did than at what Plato taught or Cato judged.note

Hence in Terence a dissolute young man looks at a picture painted on a wall. It showed “how Jupiter, they say, once sent a golden shower into Danaë’s lap.” From this great authority he draws a defense for his own depravity, boasting that in doing it he is imitating a god.note

If the poets falsely portrayed Jupiter as an adulterer, then surely the gods, being chaste, ought to have been angry and taken vengeance because such a crime was invented in human shows, not because the shows were neglected. And these are the more tolerable kinds of theatrical show, namely comedies and tragedies. These are poets’ tales composed for performance at spectacles, with much shamefulness in their content but at least, unlike many others, no obscenity in their words. Boys are even made by their elders to read and learn them among the studies called honorable and liberal.

“But Pericles had led his city with the greatest authority for very many years, in peace and in war. That he should be assaulted in verse, and the verses performed on stage, was no more fitting than if our Plautus,” he says, “or Naevius had wanted to abuse Publius and Gnaeus Scipio, or Caecilius Marcus Cato.” Then, a little later, he says: “Our Twelve Tables, by contrast, made very few offenses punishable by death, yet among these they thought this one too should be so punished: if anyone sang a mocking chant or composed a song that brought disgrace or dishonor on another. Excellent. For our lives ought to be exposed to the judgments of magistrates and to lawful trials, not to the wit of poets. Nor should we have to hear a reproach except on condition that we may reply and defend ourselves in court.” I have thought it right to excerpt these passages word for word from the fourth book of Cicero’s On the Commonwealth, though I have left out or slightly changed some things to make them easier to understand.note

For they bear closely on the point I am trying to explain, if I can. He then says other things, and concludes this passage by showing that the ancient Romans disliked having any living person either praised or blamed on stage. But, as I said, the Greeks wanted this to be permitted, more shamelessly but more consistently. They saw that their gods welcomed and enjoyed reproaches in stage plays not only of men but even of the gods themselves. It made no difference whether the poets had invented these reproaches or whether the gods’ real misdeeds were recounted and acted out in the theaters. If only their worshipers had thought those misdeeds worthy of laughter alone, and not of imitation too! For it would have been too arrogant to spare the reputation of the city’s leading men and of its citizens, when the divinities did not want their own reputation spared.

But the evil spirits whom these people take for gods want even crimes they never committed to be told of them, so long as they can wrap human minds in these beliefs as if in nets and drag them along with themselves to the punishment that has been predestined. Perhaps it was men who committed these things, men whom these spirits are glad to have regarded as gods. These spirits are glad of human errors, and by a thousand arts of harm and deceit they put themselves forward in those men’s place to be worshiped. Or perhaps these crimes truly belong to no men at all, and yet these most deceitful spirits gladly accept their being invented about divinities. Either way, the aim is that an authority strong enough to justify wicked and shameful deeds may seem to have been brought down to earth from heaven itself.

Since, then, the Greeks felt themselves to be the slaves of such divinities, amid so many great insults to those divinities on the stage, they thought that the poets should by no means spare them. Either they desired to become like their gods even in this way, or they feared that, by seeking a more honorable reputation for themselves and so ranking themselves above the gods, they would provoke them to anger.

This the Greeks did shamefully, to be sure, but certainly in complete harmony with their gods. They did not dare to shield the lives of citizens from being torn to pieces by the tongues of poets and actors, since they saw these same men carping at the life of the gods with the gods’ own will and pleasure. And the very men who performed these things in the theaters, things the Greeks knew were pleasing to the divinities they served, they thought not only far from contemptible in the city but worthy of the highest honor. What reason could they possibly find for honoring priests, because through them they offered victims acceptable to the gods, while holding actors in disgrace? For it was the gods’ own instruction that had taught them to present this pleasure, or honor, to the gods, who demanded it and grew angry if it was not done.

This is all the more so since Labeo, whom they proclaim the greatest expert in matters of this kind, distinguishes good divinities from evil ones by this very difference in worship. He asserts that evil gods are appeased by slaughter and grim supplications, but good gods by joyful and pleasant services, such as, in his own words, games, banquets, and lectisternia. What all this amounts to we shall discuss more carefully later, God willing.note

As for the present matter, there are two possibilities. Perhaps all these services are offered indiscriminately to all the gods as though all were good (for it is not fitting for gods to be evil, though in fact these, being unclean spirits, are all evil). Or perhaps, by some fixed distinction, as Labeo thought, these services are allotted to some gods and those to others. Either way, the Greeks are entirely consistent in holding both groups in honor: the priests through whom the victims are offered and the actors through whom the shows are presented. Otherwise they might be convicted of wronging either all their gods, if the shows please them all, or, what is more outrageous, those gods they consider good, if the shows are loved by those alone.

Do you really value the reputation of your senate house more than that of the Capitol, indeed of Rome alone more than that of all heaven? Is that why poets were forbidden even by law to use a slanderous tongue against your fellow citizens, while they could hurl such great insults at your gods in safety, with no senator, no censor, no leading man, no pontiff to stop them? It was outrageous, apparently, for Plautus or Naevius to slander Gnaeus Scipio, or for Caecilius to slander Marcus Cato. Yet was it fitting for your Terence to stir up the wickedness of young men by the disgraceful example of Jupiter Best and Greatest?

Likewise the Romans were already oppressed by a harmful superstition, so that they worshiped gods whom they saw wanted theatrical obscenities consecrated to them. Even so, mindful of their own dignity and sense of shame, they by no means honored the actors of such plays as the Greeks did. Instead, as the same Scipio says in Cicero, since they regarded the art of acting and the whole stage as a disgrace, they decided that this class of men should not only be deprived of the honors open to the other citizens but even be removed from their tribe by the censor’s mark. An admirable piece of prudence, certainly, and one to be counted among the Romans’ merits. But I wish it had followed itself and been consistent with itself. For look: quite rightly, any Roman citizen who chose to become an actor was not only given no path to public office, but was not even allowed, under the censor’s mark, to keep his own tribe. O spirit of a city eager for praise, and truly Roman!

But let someone answer me: by what consistent reasoning are actors driven from every honor, while theatrical shows are mixed into the honors of the gods? For a long time Roman virtue knew nothing of those theatrical arts. If they had been sought out to amuse human pleasure, they would have crept in through the corruption of human morals. But it was the gods who demanded that these arts be presented to them. How, then, is the actor cast aside, through whom a god is worshiped? And with what effrontery is the actor of that theatrical obscenity branded, if the god who exacts it is adored? In this dispute let the Greeks and the Romans contend. The Greeks think they are right to honor actors, because they worship gods who demand theatrical shows. The Romans, however, do not allow actors to disgrace even a plebeian tribe, much less the senate house. In this debate the following line of reasoning settles the whole question. The Greeks propose: “If such gods are to be worshiped, then surely such men are also to be honored.” The Romans add: “But such men are by no means to be honored.”

The Christians conclude: “Therefore such gods are by no means to be worshiped.”

Nor did the gods want these things merely performed, but dedicated to them, consecrated to them, solemnly presented to them. To whom, then, would the city more honorably have decreed divine honors? To Plato, who forbade these shameful and abominable things, or to the demons, who delight in this deception of men whom Plato could not persuade of the truth?

For the gods demand theatrical shows in their own honor, while the Romans bar theatrical men from all honors. The gods order the disgraces of the gods to be celebrated for them in poetic fictions, while the Romans restrain the shamelessness of poets from disgracing men. And that demigod Plato both resisted the lust of such gods and showed what ought to be brought to completion, building on the Roman character. He would not allow the poets themselves to live at all in a well-ordered city, whether they lie as they please or set before wretched human beings the gods’ supposed worst deeds for imitation. We, for our part, do not call Plato either a god or a demigod. We do not compare him with any holy angel of the supreme God, or any truthful prophet, or any apostle, or any martyr of Christ, or any Christian person at all. The reason for this view of ours will be explained in its proper place, with God’s help.

But since they themselves will have it that he was a demigod, we judge that he should be preferred, if not to Romulus and Hercules (though no historian or poet has ever said or invented that Plato killed his brother or committed any crime), then certainly to Priapus, or to some Cynocephalus, or finally to Fever. These divinities the Romans partly received from abroad and partly consecrated as their own.note

How, then, could such gods use good precepts and laws either to forbid such great evils of mind and morals when they threatened, or to see that they were rooted out once they had taken hold? These gods actually saw to it that disgraceful deeds were sown and multiplied. They wanted such acts, whether their own or presented as their own, to become known to whole peoples through theatrical festivals, so that the most wicked human lust might be kindled of its own accord, as if by divine authority. In vain does Cicero cry out against this. Speaking of the poets, he says: “When to them is added the shouting and approval of the people, as if of some great and wise teacher, what darkness they draw over us, what fears they bring in, what desires they inflame!”

And so by this honor Romulus was preferred to Neptune and Pluto, the brothers of Jupiter, and even to Saturn, their father. The priesthood they had granted to Jupiter as something great, they granted to Romulus as well, and to Mars as his father, perhaps on Romulus’ account.

For perhaps by some right of war a victor might justly carry off women who had been unjustly refused. But by no right of peace did he seize women who had not been given to him, and he waged an unjust war against their parents, who were justly angry. This much, admittedly, turned out more usefully and happily: though the circus games remained as a memorial of that fraud, the example of the crime found no favor in that city and empire. The Romans more readily went astray by consecrating Romulus as their god after that wrongdoing than by permitting, through any law or custom, his deed to be imitated in the seizing of women. It was by this justice and goodness that, after King Tarquin had been driven out with his children—the king whose son had violently raped Lucretia—the consul Junius Brutus forced his colleague Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, the husband of that same Lucretia, a good and innocent man, to resign his office because of his name and his kinship with the Tarquins, and would not allow him to live in the city.note

Brutus committed this crime with the people favoring or tolerating it, the same people from whom Collatinus, like Brutus himself, had received the consulship. It was by this justice and goodness that Marcus Camillus, an outstanding man of his time, was put on trial. After a ten-year war in which the Roman army had so often fought badly and suffered heavy losses, when Rome itself was already doubting and trembling for its survival, he defeated with great ease the people of Veii, the most dangerous enemies of the Roman people, and captured their very wealthy city. Yet through the envy of those who disparaged his virtue and the insolence of the tribunes of the plebs, he was put on trial. He found the city he had liberated so ungrateful that, quite certain of his condemnation, he went into exile of his own accord, and in his absence he was even fined ten thousand pieces of bronze money—he who was soon to be once more the avenger of his ungrateful country against the Gauls.note

I am weary now of recounting the many foul and unjust things that shook that city, when the powerful tried to subject the common people to themselves and the people refused to be subjected. The champions of each side acted more from partisan zeal and the love of winning than from any thought of what was fair and good.

For he had recorded that the Roman people lived with the best morals and in the greatest harmony between the second and the last Carthaginian wars. He said that the cause of this good was not love of justice but fear of an untrustworthy peace while Carthage still stood. That is why the famous Nasica did not want Carthage destroyed: he wanted to check wickedness and preserve those excellent morals, so that vices might be held in check by fear. Then Sallust immediately added: “But discord, greed, ambition, and the other evils that usually arise in prosperity increased enormously after the destruction of Carthage.” The point is that we should understand that they usually arose and increased even before. He then went on to give the reason for saying this: “For the wrongs done by the more powerful,” he says, “and because of them the secession of the plebs from the patricians, and other dissensions at home, existed right from the beginning. Affairs were conducted with fair and moderate justice only after the kings had been driven out, and only while the fear of Tarquin and the heavy war with Etruria lasted.”

You see how, even in that short time after the kings were driven out (that is, thrown out), affairs were conducted with a measure of fair and moderate justice, and he said the cause was fear. The Romans feared the war that King Tarquin, driven from his kingdom and from the City, was waging against them in alliance with the Etruscans. Now notice what he adds next: “Then the patricians began to treat the plebs as slaves. They disposed of their lives and their backs as the kings had done, drove them from their land, and held power alone, with everyone else shut out. The plebs were crushed by these cruelties and above all by debt, since in continual wars they had to bear both taxes and military service. So they took up arms and occupied the Sacred Mount and the Aventine, and then secured for themselves tribunes of the plebs and other rights. The end of the discord and strife on both sides came with the Second Punic War.”

You see what kind of people the Romans were from that time on, that is, from a short while after the kings were driven out. Yet these are the people of whom he says: “Justice and goodness prevailed among them not more by laws than by nature.”

Sallust then says much more about the vices of Sulla and the rest of the commonwealth’s disgrace, and other writers agree with him on these things, though they are far from his equal in eloquence.note

Let them read ours. Through the prophets and the holy gospel, through the Acts of the Apostles and through the letters, so many precepts against greed and luxury are proclaimed everywhere to peoples gathered for this very purpose. How excellently, how divinely they sound! They do not clatter like the quarrels of philosophers; they thunder as if from oracles and from the clouds of God. And yet these people do not blame their gods for the fact that, before the coming of Christ, luxury and greed and cruel and disgraceful morals made the commonwealth the worst and most shameful. But the commonwealth’s affliction, whatever their pride and pleasures may have suffered in our time, they lay at the door of the Christian religion.

Suppose all these were to hear and heed together its precepts about just and upright living: the kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and young women, the old with the young, every age able to understand and both sexes, and those whom John the Baptist addresses, the tax collectors themselves and the soldiers. Then the commonwealth would adorn the lands of this present life with its happiness, and would ascend to the summit of eternal life, there to reign in perfect happiness.note

But one person hears and another scorns, and more people are friendlier to vices that flatter to their harm than to the useful harshness of the virtues. So the servants of Christ are commanded to endure even the worst and most shameful commonwealth, if they must. This holds whether they are kings or princes or judges, soldiers or provincials, rich or poor, free or slaves, of either sex. By this very endurance they are to win for themselves a most glorious place in that most holy and most august senate of the angels, the heavenly commonwealth, where God’s will is law.

“Let the provinces serve their kings not as guides of morals but as lords of property and providers of their pleasures. Let them not honor their kings sincerely but fear them slavishly. Let the laws attend to the damage a man does to another’s vineyard rather than the damage he does to his own life. Let no one be brought before a judge unless he has been a nuisance or a harm to another’s property, house or safety, or to someone against that person’s will. Otherwise let everyone do as he pleases with his own property, with his own household, or with anyone willing. Let there be plenty of public prostitutes, both for all who care to enjoy them and especially for those who cannot keep private ones. Let huge and lavishly decorated houses be built, and let sumptuous banquets be thronged. Wherever anyone likes and can, let there be gaming and drinking, vomiting and dissipation, day and night. Let dances resound everywhere. Let the theaters seethe with cries of indecent glee and with every kind of pleasure, whether the cruelest or the most shameful.

“Let anyone who dislikes this happiness be a public enemy. Whoever tries to change it or take it away, let the free multitude turn him away from their ears, turn him out of his home, turn him out of the land of the living. Let those be held to be true gods who have secured this happiness for the peoples and preserved it once it was gained. Let them be worshiped as they wish. Let them demand whatever shows they wish, shows they can enjoy with their worshipers or at their worshipers’ expense. Only let them see to it that such happiness has nothing to fear from an enemy, nothing from plague, nothing from any disaster.” What sane person would compare such a commonwealth, I will not say to the Roman Empire, but to the house of Sardanapalus? He was a king long ago, so given over to pleasures that he had it inscribed on his tomb that in death he possessed only what his lust had swallowed up and consumed while he was alive.note

If these people had such a king, one who indulged them in these things and opposed no one in them with any severity, they would dedicate a temple and a flamen to him more gladly than the ancient Romans did to Romulus.

At the end of the second book Scipio had made a comparison. With strings or pipes, and in singing and in voices, a certain harmony must be kept among distinct sounds, and trained ears cannot bear it if that harmony is altered or out of tune. This harmony is produced by the controlled blending of very unlike voices, and yet it is concordant and consistent. In the same way, he said, a city is made up of the highest, the lowest and the middle orders between them, as if they were sounds, and it is harmonious through the agreement of very unlike elements under a controlled proportion. What musicians call harmony in song is concord in a city. That concord is the tightest and best bond of security in any commonwealth, and it cannot possibly exist without justice. He then discussed somewhat more fully and richly how much justice benefits a city and how much harm its absence would do. After that Philus, one of those present at the discussion, took up the matter. He asked that this very question be treated more carefully and that more be said about justice. His reason was a saying then commonly current, that a commonwealth cannot be governed without injustice.note

Scipio agreed that this question should be discussed and untangled. He replied that, in his view, nothing yet said about the commonwealth would let them go any further unless one thing were established. It must be shown not only that the claim “it cannot be governed without injustice” is false, but that this is perfectly true: a commonwealth cannot be governed without the highest justice. The treatment of this question was put off to the following day, and in the third book the matter was fought out in a great contest. For Philus himself took up the case of those who held that a commonwealth cannot be run without injustice. Above all he took care that no one should think he held this view himself. He argued diligently for injustice against justice, trying, as it were, to show by plausible reasons and examples that injustice is useful to a commonwealth and justice useless.

Then, at everyone’s request, Laelius undertook to defend justice. He maintained as strongly as he could that nothing is so hostile to a city as injustice, and that a commonwealth cannot be run, or stand at all, except by great justice.note

But the king may be unjust, and him he called a tyrant, in the Greek fashion. The aristocrats may be unjust, and their combination he called a faction. Or the people itself may be unjust, and for this he found no customary name except to call it, too, a tyrant. In any of these cases the commonwealth is no longer merely flawed, as had been argued the day before. As reasoning drawn from those definitions had shown, there is no commonwealth at all. It would not be the people’s affair when a tyrant or a faction had seized it. Nor would the people itself still be a people if it were unjust, since it would no longer be a multitude united by agreement about what is right and by a partnership in common interest, which was how a people had been defined.

“And so, before our own time, ancestral custom itself brought forward outstanding men, and excellent men preserved the old custom and the institutions of our ancestors. But our age received the commonwealth like a splendid painting fading with age. It not only neglected to restore it with the same colors it once had, but did not even take care to preserve at least its shape and, so to speak, its outlines. For what remains of those ancient ways on which he said the Roman state stood? We see them so worn out by forgetfulness that they are not only no longer practiced but no longer even known. And what am I to say about the men? For the ways themselves have perished through a lack of men. For so great an evil we must not only give an account; in a sense we must plead our case like men on trial for our lives.

“For it is through our own vices, not by some accident, that we keep the commonwealth in name but have long since lost it in reality.”

In its proper place I will try to show that it never was a commonwealth, because there never was true justice in it. I will argue this from Cicero’s own definitions, in which, through Scipio as speaker, he briefly set out what a commonwealth is and what a people is. Many statements in that same discussion, whether his own or those of the speakers he created, also bear witness to this. According to more plausible definitions, though, it was a commonwealth after its own fashion, and the earlier Romans administered it better than the later ones. But true justice exists only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ, if we may call it a commonwealth too, since we cannot deny that it is the people’s affair.note

But this word is used commonly elsewhere in other senses, and it may be rather remote from our usual way of speaking. If so, true justice certainly exists in that city of which holy Scripture says: “Glorious things are said of you, city of God.”note

Or if they did give such rules, let them be produced, displayed, read out. Which laws of the gods given to that city did the Gracchi despise, so as to throw everything into turmoil with their seditions? Which did Marius and Cinna and Carbo despise, so as to go on even to civil wars, undertaken for the most unjust causes, waged cruelly and ended more cruelly still? Which, finally, did Sulla himself despise? Who would not shudder at his life, character and deeds, as Sallust and other historians describe them? Who would not admit that the commonwealth perished then?note

This is how Rome nearly sank into the superstition of the Egyptians, who worship beasts and birds: they used to hold a solemn festival in honor of a goose. But for the moment I am not yet discussing these external evils, which belong to the body rather than the mind and come from enemies or some other disaster. Now I am dealing with the decay of morals. First they faded little by little, then they rushed headlong like a torrent. They brought such ruin on the commonwealth, though its houses and walls stood intact, that their great authors do not hesitate to say it was lost at that time. And the gods would indeed have been right to depart, “leaving their shrines and altars,” and let it be lost, if the city had despised their rules about good living and justice. But as it is, what sort of gods were they, I ask, if they refused to live with the people who worshiped them, when they had not taught that people, living badly, to live well?

For suppose they insisted that the people learn things opposed to the virtues of the mind and integrity of life, whose rewards are to be hoped for after death. Suppose also that even in these passing, temporal goods they neither harm those they hate nor help those they love. Then why are they worshiped? Why are they sought out to be worshiped with such zeal? Why, in hard and gloomy times, is there grumbling that they have departed as if offended? Why is the Christian religion attacked with the most outrageous abuse on their account? But if they do have power in these matters to do good or harm, why did they stand by Marius, the worst of men, and fail Regulus, the best? Does this show that they themselves are most unjust and most wicked? And if people think that for this very reason they should be feared and worshiped all the more, let them not think that either. For Regulus is not found to have worshiped them any less than Marius did.

Nor should anyone conclude that the worst life is the one to choose because the gods are thought to have favored Marius more than Regulus. For Metellus, the most highly praised of the Romans, who had five sons who became consuls, was happy even in temporal things. Catiline, the worst of men, was crushed by poverty and laid low in the war his own crime had started, and was unhappy. And good people who worship God surpass all others in the truest and most certain happiness, which he alone can bestow.note

But, as I said, I pass over this. I do not attribute Marius’s bloodstained good fortune to some Marica or other. Rather, I attribute it to the hidden providence of God, which closes the mouths of these people and frees from error those who do not act out of partisan zeal but consider these things wisely. For even if demons have some power in these matters, they have only as much as the secret decision of the Almighty permits them. This is so that we may not prize earthly happiness highly, since it is often granted even to the wicked, as it was to Marius. Nor, on the other hand, should we think it bad, since we see that many devout and good worshipers of the one true God have enjoyed it in abundance, in spite of the demons. Nor should we suppose that these most unclean spirits must be appeased or feared for the sake of these earthly goods or evils. For just as wicked men on earth cannot do all they want, neither can those spirits, except so far as the ordering of God allows. No one fully comprehends his judgments, and no one justly reprehends them.

And afterward, as Sulla was preparing to return to the City and avenge with citizens’ blood the wrongs done to himself and his friends, the same Jupiter again sent him word, through a soldier of the Sixth Legion. Jupiter said that he had earlier foretold the victory over Mithridates, and now promised to give Sulla the power to recover the commonwealth from his enemies, though not without much bloodshed. Then Sulla asked what form had appeared to the soldier. When the soldier described it, Sulla recognized the form he had earlier heard described by the man who had brought him the message from the same god about the Mithridatic victory. What answer can be given here? Why did the gods take care to announce these supposedly happy events, while not one of them took care to correct Sulla by warning him? Yet Sulla was going to commit such great evils with wicked civil arms that they would not merely disfigure the commonwealth but destroy it altogether.

Clearly, as I have often said, as we know from the sacred writings, and as the facts themselves sufficiently show, the demons are seen to be minding their own business. They want to be taken for gods and worshiped, and to have things offered to them. Those who offer these things become their partners and share with them one and the same very bad case at the judgment of God.

The man cried out in prophecy, “The victory is yours, Sulla.” And so that he would be believed to cry this out by a divine spirit, he also announced something that was about to happen and soon did happen, in a place far from where the man was through whom that spirit spoke. Yet he did not cry, “Hold back from crimes, Sulla”—the crimes so horrible that Sulla committed there as victor, the man to whom a golden crown, the most illustrious sign of that very victory, had appeared in the calf’s liver. If just gods, and not impious demons, were in the habit of giving such signs, they would surely have shown in those entrails the abominable evils to come, gravely harmful to Sulla himself. For that victory did not profit his standing as much as it harmed his cravings. Because of it he gaped after things beyond all measure, and, exalted and thrown headlong by success, he himself perished in his morals more than he destroyed his enemies in their bodies.

These things, truly sad and truly lamentable, those gods did not foretell—not by entrails, not by auguries, not by anyone’s dream or prophecy. For they feared his being corrected more than his being defeated. Indeed, they were busy making sure that this glorious conqueror of his fellow citizens would be conquered and taken captive by abominable vices, and through them bound in far tighter subjection to the demons themselves.

So if divinities really fought one another, human civil wars are now excused. Still, let us consider what malice or what wretchedness such gods must have. But if they only pretended to have fought, what else were they doing but making the Romans, when fighting civil wars, seem to commit no crime, as if following the example of the gods? For civil wars had already begun, and the accursed slaughter of several abominable battles had already taken place. Many had already been moved by the case of a soldier who, while stripping the spoils from a man he had killed, recognized his brother once the corpse was bared. Cursing civil wars, he killed himself on the spot and joined himself to his brother’s body. So, to keep people from being sickened by so great an evil, and instead to make the passion for wicked arms grow more and more, the harmful demons chose to appear to men fighting among themselves. These were the demons whom those people took for gods and thought should be worshiped and revered. Their aim was that civic affection would not shrink from imitating such battles, but that human crime would instead be excused by divine example.

With this same cunning the evil spirits also ordered that the theatrical shows, about which I have already said a great deal, be dedicated and consecrated to them. In these shows the gods’ great outrages were celebrated in theatrical songs and in the staging of stories. As a result, anyone who believed the gods had done such things, and anyone who did not believe it but still saw how gladly they had such things performed for them, could imitate them without a qualm. Someone might have thought that the poets had written insults against the gods rather than anything worthy of them. To prevent this, wherever the poets recorded that the gods had fought among themselves, the gods themselves confirmed the poets’ verses in order to deceive people. They displayed their battles to human eyes not only through actors in the theater but also in person on the open field.

No one, I think, will now dare to say that it perished at that time because “all the gods departed, leaving their shrines and altars,” as though they were friends of virtue offended by human vices. They are proved to have been present by all those signs from entrails, auguries and prophecies, by which they were so eager to boast of themselves and recommend themselves as knowing the future in advance and as helpers in battle. Had they really gone away, the Romans, driven only by their own desires, would have flared up into civil war less fiercely than they did at the gods’ incitement.

For such is the power of uprightness and chastity that all of human nature, or nearly all, is moved by praise of it. Nor is human nature ever so corrupted by vice that it has lost all sense of what is honorable. So the malice of demons does not complete its work of deception unless at some point it “transforms itself into angels of light,” as we know is written in our Scriptures. Outside, then, unclean impiety roars around the crowds with the loudest din; inside, a feigned chastity barely whispers to a few. The shameful is offered in the open, the praiseworthy in secret. Honor lies hidden, and dishonor lies open. The evil that is done summons every spectator; the good that is spoken scarcely finds any listeners. It is as if the honorable were something to blush at and the dishonorable something to boast of. But where does this happen except in the temples of demons? Where but in the lodging houses of deceit? The secret teaching is meant to catch the more honorable, who are few. The public display is meant to keep the many, who are utterly base, from being reformed.note

Yet this was offered openly to be learned in the temple, while people at least sought privacy at home in order to commit it. Human modesty, if there was any there, must have been utterly amazed. People did not commit freely the human outrages that they learned as a religious duty in the presence of the gods. And they knew the gods would be angry with them unless they also took care to stage those outrages. For what other spirit stirs the most wicked minds by a hidden prompting, urges on the commission of adultery and feeds on it once committed? Who else can it be but the one who also delights in such rites? He sets up images of demons in the temples and loves images of vices in the shows. He whispers words of justice in secret to deceive even the few who are good, and he multiplies enticements to wickedness in the open to take possession of the countless who are wicked.

Indeed, to avert the bodily harm feared from the enemy, the gods were won over in a way that vanquished virtue in people’s minds. These gods would not stand as defenders against those attacking the walls unless they first became the attackers of good morals. Consider this appeasement of such deities, utterly wanton, impure, shameless, wicked and unclean. The admirable character of Roman virtue deprived its performers of their civic honor, removed them from their tribe, branded them as base and declared them infamous. Consider, I say, this appeasement of such deities, shameful, and to be shunned and detested by true religion. Consider these seductive and criminal stories about the gods, and these disgraceful acts of the gods, whether wickedly and shamefully done or more wickedly and shamefully invented. All this the whole city learned with its public eyes and ears. It saw that these things, once performed, pleased the deities. It therefore believed that they should not only be displayed for the gods but also imitated by the city itself. It did not learn that supposedly good and honorable something which was spoken to so few and so secretly (if indeed it was spoken at all) that the real fear seemed to be that it might become known, rather than that it might not be practiced.note

For nothing shameful or disgraceful is set before them to watch and imitate in that place. There the commands of the true God are taught, or his miracles told, or his gifts praised, or his benefits asked for.

To that homeland we invite and urge you, so that you may be added to the number of its citizens. Its asylum, in a sense, is the true forgiveness of sins. Do not listen to your degenerate offspring who disparage Christ or Christians and accuse them of bringing bad times. What they seek are times in which life is not peaceful but wickedness is safe. Such times never pleased you, not even for the sake of your earthly homeland. Seize the heavenly one now. For it you will labor very little, and in it you will reign truly and forever. For there neither the hearth of Vesta nor the stone of the Capitol awaits you, but the one true God, who “sets no limits to things nor time, and will grant an empire without end.”note

It is good that you refused of your own accord to open citizenship to actors and stage performers. Now wake up more fully! In no way is the divine majesty appeased by arts that defile human dignity. How, then, can you think that gods who delight in such services are to be counted among the holy heavenly powers? You did not think that the men who perform those same services should be counted among Roman citizens of any sort at all. Incomparably more glorious is the city on high. There victory is truth, dignity is holiness, peace is happiness, and life is eternity. If you were ashamed to admit such men into your community, far less does that city admit such gods into its own. So if you desire to reach the blessed city, shun the company of demons. Gods who are appeased through the base are worshiped unworthily by the honorable. So let Christian cleansing remove these gods from your piety, just as the censors’ mark removed those men from your dignity.

There remain bodily goods, which are the only goods the wicked want to enjoy, and bodily evils, which are the only evils they refuse to endure. These demons do not have the power over such things that they are thought to have. And even if they did have it, we ought rather to despise these things as well than worship the demons for their sake, and by worshiping them be unable to reach the goods they begrudge us. Even in these matters, I say, the demons do not have the power claimed by those who argue that they should be worshiped for these things. This we shall see next, so that this book may end here.

For at various times and in various places before the coming of our Redeemer, the human race was being ground down by countless disasters, some of them even beyond belief. What gods did the world worship then, other than these? The only exceptions were the one Hebrew people and certain individuals outside that people, wherever they were found worthy of divine grace by the most hidden and most just judgment of God. But so as not to go on too long, I will pass over the grievous evils of other nations everywhere. I will speak only of what concerns Rome and the Roman Empire—that is, the City itself in the proper sense, and whatever lands were joined to it by alliance or made subject to it by treaty—and of what they suffered before the coming of Christ, when they already belonged, so to speak, to the body of its commonwealth.

For Homer, who is said to have lived before that city was founded, brings Neptune on stage prophesying something great about the line of Aeneas, from whose descendants Rome came. Neptune even snatched Aeneas away in a cloud, as he himself says, so that he would not be killed by Achilles—although, as he admits in Virgil, he longed “to overturn from their foundations the walls of perjured Troy, built by his own hands.” So these great gods, Neptune and Apollo, not knowing that Laomedon would deny them their wages, built the walls of Troy unpaid and unthanked. Let these people consider whether it is not a graver thing to believe in such gods than to break an oath sworn to them. For not even Homer himself found this easy to believe: he has Neptune fighting against the Trojans but Apollo fighting for them, although the story says that both were offended by that perjury.note

If, then, they believe the myths, let them blush to worship such divinities; if they do not believe the myths, let them not put forward Trojan perjuries as an excuse—or else let them marvel that the gods punished Trojan perjuries but loved Roman ones. For how else did Catiline’s conspiracy, in so great and so corrupt a city, find such an abundant supply of men whose hands and tongues kept them fed by perjury or by the blood of fellow citizens? For what else were the senators doing, so often bribed in the courts, and the people, so often bribed in elections or in whatever cases were handled before them in public assemblies, but sinning by perjury as well? Amid utterly corrupt morals the ancient custom of swearing oaths was kept up, not so that people would be held back from crimes by religious fear, but so that perjuries too might be added to their other crimes.

For the gods, I suppose, are so far from jealous of their wives that they even condescend to share them with human beings. Perhaps I will be thought to be mocking the myths and not treating so weighty a matter seriously. Very well, then: let us not believe, if you like, that Aeneas is the son of Venus. There—I grant it, provided that Romulus is not the son of Mars either. But if the one, why not the other? Or is it right for gods to mingle with human women, but wrong for human men to mingle with goddesses? A harsh condition, or rather an incredible one: that what Venus’s rights in lovemaking allowed to Mars should not be allowed to Venus herself under her own rights. Yet both stories have been confirmed by Roman authority. For the more recent Caesar believed in his ancestress Venus no less than the more ancient Romulus believed in his father Mars.note

Add to this that if the story about Mars is not believed, so that the story about Venus need not be believed either, then the case of Romulus’s mother cannot be defended by any pretext of intercourse with a god. Moreover, she was a priestess of Vesta, and so the gods ought to have avenged that sacrilegious outrage on the Romans rather than Paris’s adultery on the Trojans. For the ancient Romans themselves used to bury alive priestesses of Vesta caught in sexual misconduct, whereas adulterous women, though they punished them with some penalty, they never punished with death. So much more severely did they avenge what they took to be divine sanctuaries than they avenged human marriage beds.

But if that crime had nothing to do with Romulus’s act or command, then, since it certainly ought to have been avenged, the whole city committed it, because the whole city disregarded it; and it killed not just a brother but—what is worse—a father. For both were founders, though one was removed by crime and not allowed to become ruler. There is nothing, I think, that can be said about what evil Troy deserved, that the gods should desert it so that it could be destroyed, or what good Rome deserved, that the gods should take up residence in it so that it could grow—unless it is that, once defeated, they fled from Troy and betook themselves to the Romans, to deceive them in the same way. Or rather, they both stayed there, to deceive in their usual fashion those who would later inhabit those same lands, and here, by practicing those same arts of deceit even more, they gloried in greater honors.

For they had shut their gates against Fimbria in order to keep their city intact for Sulla; that is why he burned them in his anger, or rather wiped them out completely. At that time Sulla was still the leader of the better side in the civil conflict; he was still striving to recover the commonwealth by arms; these good beginnings had not yet produced their evil outcomes. What better, then, could the citizens of that city have done—what more honorable, what more loyal, what more worthy of their kinship with Rome—than to preserve their city for the better cause of the Romans and shut their gates against a parricide of the Roman commonwealth? But let the defenders of the gods take note how utterly this led to their ruin.

Suppose the gods did desert the adulterers and abandon Ilium to the flames of the Greeks so that a more chaste Rome might be born from its ashes. Why, then, did they later also desert that same city, kin to the Romans? It was not rebelling against Rome, its noble daughter; it was keeping the most steadfast and dutiful faith with Rome’s more righteous party. And yet they abandoned it to be destroyed—not by brave Greek warriors, but by the foulest of the Romans. Or if the cause of Sulla’s party displeased the gods—the cause for which the wretched townspeople had shut their gates to preserve their city—why were they promising and foretelling such great good fortune to that same Sulla? Are they not recognized here too as flatterers of the fortunate rather than defenders of the unfortunate? So even then Ilium was not destroyed because they had deserted it. For the demons, ever most watchful for opportunities to deceive, did what they could.

For when all the images had been overthrown and burned along with the town, only the statue of Minerva, as Livy writes, is said to have stood intact amid the vast ruin of her temple. This was not so that it might be said in their praise, “Gods of our fathers, under whose divine power Troy ever stands,” but so that it might not be said in their defense, “All the gods departed, leaving their shrines and altars.” For they were permitted to do this much: not something by which they could be proved powerful, but something by which they could be convicted of having been present.note

For now, though, since the question concerns the gods’ benefits: peace is a great benefit, but it is a benefit of the true God, and often, like the sun, like the rain and the other supports of life, it is bestowed even on the ungrateful and the worthless. But if those gods conferred so great a good on Rome or on Pompilius, why did they never grant it to the Roman Empire afterward, even in its most praiseworthy times? Were the rites more useful when they were being instituted than when, once instituted, they were being celebrated? Yet at that time they did not yet exist, but were being added so that they might exist; later they already existed, and were being maintained so that they might be of benefit.

Why is it, then, that those forty-three years—or, as others would have it, thirty-nine—passed in such long peace under Numa’s reign, while afterward, once the rites had been instituted and the very gods invited by those rites had become the City’s guardians and protectors, scarcely a single year is recorded, as a great marvel, in all the many years from the founding of the City down to Augustus—a year after the First Punic War—in which the Romans were able to close the gates of war?note

Or, for the empire to grow so much, did there have to come about what Virgil deplores when he says: “until, little by little, a worse and tarnished age took its place, and the madness of war, and the love of gain”? But clearly the Romans have a just defense for undertaking and waging such great wars: what compelled them to resist enemies who fell upon them so aggressively was not greed for winning human praise, but the necessity of protecting their safety and freedom. Granted—let it be so. For, as Sallust himself writes, “after their state, enlarged by laws, customs and territory, seemed quite prosperous and quite powerful, envy arose from wealth, as usually happens with human affairs. So neighboring kings and peoples tested them in war; few of their friends came to their aid, for the rest, struck with fear, kept clear of the dangers. But the Romans, alert at home and in the field, made haste, made ready, urged one another on, went out to meet the enemy, and shielded liberty, country and parents with arms.note

“Later, when they had driven off the dangers by their courage, they brought help to allies and friends, and won friendships more by giving favors than by receiving them.” By these arts Rome grew honorably. But in Numa’s reign, so that there could be such a long peace, were the wicked attacking and testing them in war, or was none of this happening, so that the peace could endure? For if even then Rome was being provoked by wars and yet arms were not met with arms, then whatever means were used to pacify the enemies without their being defeated in any battle or terrified by any martial assault—those same means should always have been used, and Rome should always have reigned in peace with the gates of Janus shut. And if this was not in their power, then Rome did not have peace for as long as their gods wished, but for as long as the neighboring peoples all around wished, who did not provoke it with any war—unless, perhaps, such gods will even dare to sell one man what another man has willed or not willed.

It does indeed make a difference—owing to their own vice—how far these demons are permitted to frighten or to stir up wicked minds. But if they always had this power, and if something else were not often brought about against their efforts by a more hidden and higher power, they would always have in their control peace and victory in war, which nearly always come about through the movements of human minds. Yet that these often happen against the demons’ will is admitted not only by the myths, which tell many lies and scarcely indicate or hint at anything true, but even by Roman history itself.

So the songs of the poets, though mythical, are true to life, and it is not altogether inappropriate that they describe the ways of demons. For in Virgil, Diana grieved for Camilla, and Hercules wept for Pallas as he was about to die. Perhaps this is also why Numa Pompilius acted as he did. He had peace in abundance, but he did not know, and did not ask, whose gift it was. At his leisure he pondered to which gods he should entrust the safety and kingdom of Rome. He did not think that the true, almighty, supreme God cared about these earthly things. He also recalled that the Trojan gods whom Aeneas had brought had been unable to preserve for long either the kingdom of Troy or the kingdom of Lavinium, which Aeneas himself had founded. So he thought that other gods should be provided. These he would add to the earlier ones, who had either already crossed over to Rome with Romulus or were going to cross over at some point after Alba was destroyed. The new gods would serve either as guards for fugitives or as helpers for the weak.note

Whether the goddess Fever was also born of her, let Aesculapius, her great-grandson, decide. But wherever Fever was born, the foreign gods will not, I think, dare to call her low-born, a goddess who is a Roman citizen. Rome was placed under the protection of so many gods. Who can count them? There are native and foreign gods, gods of heaven, earth and the underworld, gods of the sea, of springs and of rivers. As Varro says, there are certain gods and uncertain ones, and in every kind of god, as among animals, there are males and females. Under the protection, then, of so many gods, Rome should not have been shaken and afflicted by such great and dreadful disasters as those I shall recount, a few out of many. For with its great smoke, as if a signal had been given, it had gathered far too many gods for its protection. By establishing and providing temples and altars, sacrifices and priests for them, it offended the supreme true God, to whom alone these things are rightly due.note

And indeed Rome lived more happily with fewer gods. But the larger it grew, the more gods it thought it should employ, as a ship needs more sailors. I suppose it despaired that those fewer gods would be enough to help it in its greatness. Yet under them it had lived better, compared with its later and worse life.

So the Romans won. They won so that, with hands bloody from slaughtering their fathers-in-law, they might wring pitiable embraces from those men’s daughters. The women did not dare to weep for their slain fathers, for fear of offending their victorious husbands. While the battle was still going on, they had not known for whom to pray. Such marriages were the gift to the Roman people not of Venus but of Bellona. Or perhaps Allecto, that fury of the underworld, now that Juno favored the Romans, had more license against them than when Juno’s prayers had roused her against Aeneas. Andromache was more fortunate in her captivity than those Roman brides were in their marriages. Though hers was a slave’s union, Pyrrhus killed none of the Trojans after he had embraced her. The Romans, by contrast, were killing in battle the fathers-in-law whose daughters they were already embracing in the bridal chamber. Andromache, subject to the victor, could only grieve for the death of her people, not fear it. These women, joined to the combatants, feared their parents’ deaths when their husbands went out to fight and grieved for them when their husbands came back. Neither their fear nor their grief was free.note

Because of the deaths of their fellow citizens and kin, their brothers and parents, they were either tormented, as devotion required, or they rejoiced, cruelly, at their husbands’ victories. There was more. As wars swing back and forth, some women lost their husbands to their parents’ swords, and some lost both parents and husbands to the swords of both sides. For the Romans, too, faced no small dangers. It even came to a siege of the city, and they defended themselves behind closed gates. When the gates were opened by treachery and the enemy were let within the walls, a wicked and terribly savage battle was fought in the forum itself, between sons-in-law and fathers-in-law. The abductors were even being defeated. Fleeing again and again into their houses, they disgraced their earlier victories still more grievously, though those victories too were shameful and lamentable.

At this point, however, Romulus, now despairing of his own men’s courage, prayed to Jupiter that they might stand firm, and on this occasion Jupiter acquired the name Stator. There would have been no end to so great an evil had not the abducted women rushed out with torn hair, thrown themselves at their parents’ feet, and calmed their most just anger, not with victorious arms but with suppliant devotion. Then Romulus was compelled to accept Tatius, king of the Sabines, as partner in his kingdom, though he could not bear a brother as partner. But how long would he tolerate this man, when he had not endured his own brother, his twin? So after Tatius too was killed, he held the kingdom alone, so as to be the greater god. What are these rights of marriage, these incitements to war, these bonds of brotherhood and kinship, of alliance and divinity? What, finally, is this life of a city under so many guardian gods? You see how much could be said on this subject, and how many things, were it not that my purpose is concerned with what remains and my discourse hastens on to other matters.note

Whose was the loss on both sides, whose the grief, if not that of Aeneas’ stock, of Ascanius’ descendants, of Venus’ offspring, of Jupiter’s grandsons? For this too was a war worse than civil, when the daughter city fought the mother city. And to this last battle of the triplets was added another evil, savage and dreadful. Both peoples had been friends before, since they were neighbors and kin, and the sister of the Horatii had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii. When she saw her betrothed’s spoils on her victorious brother, she wept, and for this that same brother killed her. The feeling of this one woman seems to me more humane than that of the whole Roman people. She was grieving for the man to whom she was already bound by the pledge of betrothal, or perhaps even for her brother himself, who had killed the man to whom he had promised his sister. I do not think she was to blame for weeping. For why else, in Virgil, does dutiful Aeneas grieve, to his credit, for an enemy slain by his own hand?note

Why else did Marcellus weep in pity for Syracuse? He recalled how the city’s height and glory, so recent, had suddenly fallen beneath his hands, and he reflected on the common lot of all. I beg that we obtain this much from human feeling: that a woman may weep without guilt for her betrothed killed by her brother, if men have wept, and been praised for it, even for enemies they themselves defeated. So, at the very time that woman was weeping for the death her brother had inflicted on her betrothed, Rome was rejoicing that it had waged war against its mother city with such slaughter and had won with such an outpouring of kindred blood on both sides.note

This lust for domination harasses the human race with great evils and grinds it down. Conquered by this lust, Rome celebrated a triumph for having conquered Alba, and called the praise of its own crime glory. For, as our Scripture says, “the sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, and the one who does wicked things is blessed.” So let the deceptive coverings and the misleading whitewash be stripped away from things, so that they may be examined honestly. Let no one say to me, “That man was great, and so was that one, because he fought this other man and won.” Gladiators fight too, and they too win, and that cruelty too has its rewards of praise. But I think it better to pay the penalty for any kind of idleness than to seek the glory of such arms. And yet if gladiators came out into the arena to fight each other, one of them the son and the other the father, who would bear such a spectacle? Who would not bar it?note

How then could a contest of arms between a mother city and a daughter city be glorious? Or was it different because there was no arena there? Because broader fields were filled with the corpses not of two gladiators but of many, from two peoples? Because those contests were enclosed not by an amphitheater but by the whole world, and an impious spectacle was offered both to the living of that time and to posterity, as far as this story reaches?

“But before Alba was destroyed,” they say, “its people were transferred to Rome, so that one city might be made of both.” Granted, let it be so. Yet that city, the kingdom of Ascanius and the third home of the Trojan gods, was a mother overthrown by her daughter city. And in order that the remnants of war might make one people out of two, much blood of both was first shed as a pitiful cement. Why should I now go through, one by one, how under the remaining kings the same wars were renewed so often? They seemed to have been ended by victories, and they were finished again and again with great slaughter. Again and again, after treaty and peace, they were resumed between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law and their stock and descendants. It was no small sign of this calamity that none of those kings closed the gates of war. So none of them, under so many protecting gods, reigned in peace.

That this darkening of the sun did not occur through the regular course of the heavenly bodies is shown clearly enough by the fact that it was then the Jewish Passover. For the Passover is solemnly kept at full moon, while a regular eclipse of the sun occurs only at the end of the lunar month. Cicero, too, indicates clearly enough that Romulus’ reception among the gods was imagined rather than real. He does so even while praising him in his books On the Commonwealth, in a speech by Scipio: “He achieved so much,” he says, “that when he suddenly disappeared during an eclipse of the sun, he was thought to have been placed among the gods. No mortal has ever been able to attain such a reputation without extraordinary glory of virtue.” (When he says that Romulus suddenly disappeared, what must surely be understood is either the violence of a storm or a murder and crime done in secret. For other writers of theirs add to the eclipse a sudden storm as well, which surely either gave occasion for the crime or carried Romulus off by itself.)note

Indeed, in the same books the same Cicero speaks of Tullus Hostilius, the third king counting from Romulus, who was likewise consumed by lightning. He says that Tullus too was not believed to have been received among the gods through such a death. Perhaps this was because the Romans did not want to make common, that is, to make cheap, what had been established, that is, believed, in the case of Romulus, by readily granting it to another as well. He also says openly in his invectives: “Romulus, who founded this city, we have raised to the immortal gods by our goodwill and by report.” He thereby shows that it did not really happen, but was put about and spread abroad out of goodwill, because of the merits of Romulus’ virtue. And in the dialogue Hortensius, speaking of regular eclipses of the sun, he says: “so as to produce the same darkness it produced at the death of Romulus, which occurred during an eclipse of the sun.” Here, certainly, he was not in the least afraid to speak of the man’s death, because he was writing as a debater rather than as a eulogist.note

Those gods watched this wicked parricide reigning after murdering his father-in-law. They watched him glorying, moreover, in many wars and victories and building the Capitol from the spoils. They did not withdraw; they stayed and were present. And they allowed their king Jupiter to preside and reign over them in that loftiest temple, that is, in the work of a parricide. For it was not that he built the Capitol while still innocent and was later driven from the City for his misdeeds. Rather, he gained the very throne from which he could build the Capitol by committing a most monstrous crime. As for the Romans later driving him from the throne and shutting him out of the city walls, the sin in question, the rape of Lucretia, was not his but his son’s. It was committed not only without his knowledge but even in his absence.

At that time he was besieging the city of Ardea; he was waging war on behalf of the Roman people. We do not know what he would have done if his son’s outrage had been brought to his attention. And yet, without his judgment being sought or tested, the people took his command from him. They took back the army, which was ordered to desert him, then closed the gates and would not let him enter on his return. He, for his part, waged very heavy wars in which he wore down those same Romans by stirring up their neighbors. But when he was deserted by those on whose help he relied and could not recover his kingdom, he lived quietly as a private citizen for fourteen years, as it is said, in the town of Tusculum near Rome, and grew old with his wife. That was perhaps a more desirable end than his father-in-law’s, who was killed by the crime of his son-in-law, and not, it is reported, without his own daughter’s knowledge. Yet the Romans did not call this Tarquin cruel or wicked, but proud. Perhaps it was because, with a pride of another kind, they could not bear his royal arrogance.

For they made so light of his crime in killing his father-in-law, their excellent king, that they made him their king. I wonder whether, in this, they did not commit a crime graver still, by giving so great a reward for so great a crime. And yet the gods did not “depart, leaving their shrines and altars.” Unless, perhaps, someone defends these gods by saying that they stayed in Rome in order to punish the Romans with penalties rather than help them with benefits, seducing them with empty victories and crushing them with very heavy wars.

For after saying, “And the father will summon to punishment his sons who stir up new wars, for the sake of fair liberty,” he immediately cries out: “Unhappy man, however later ages will take those deeds!” However posterity may take those deeds, he means—that is, however they may hold them up and extol them—the man who killed his sons is unhappy. And as if to console the unhappy man he adds: “Love of country and a boundless craving for praise prevail.” In this Brutus, who both killed his sons and, struck in return by the enemy he struck, Tarquin’s son, could not outlive him—while Tarquin himself outlived Brutus—does not the innocence of his colleague Collatinus seem to have been avenged? For Collatinus, a good citizen, suffered after Tarquin’s expulsion the very thing that the tyrant Tarquin himself suffered. Indeed, this same Brutus is said to have been a blood relative of Tarquin too; but Collatinus, it seems, was weighed down by the likeness of his name, because he too was called Tarquinius.note

So he should have been forced to change his name, not his country; at the very least, this one word could have been dropped from his name, and he could have been called simply L. Collatinus. But he was not allowed to lose what he could have lost without any harm, precisely so that he—the first consul—would be ordered to give up his office, and—a good citizen—his citizenship. Is this too glory, this detestable injustice of Junius Brutus, of no use whatever to the commonwealth? Was it to commit this too that “love of country and a boundless craving for praise prevailed”? After Tarquin the tyrant had been expelled, Lucretia’s husband, L. Tarquinius Collatinus, was certainly elected consul together with Brutus. How justly the people looked to a citizen’s character, not to his name! How impiously Brutus deprived his colleague in that first and new office of both his country and his office, when, if this offended him, he could have deprived him merely of his name!

These evils were done, these misfortunes happened, at the very time when that commonwealth was conducted with fair and moderate justice. Lucretius, too, who had been chosen to replace Brutus, was carried off by illness before that same year was over. So Publius Valerius, who had succeeded Collatinus, and Marcus Horatius, who had been appointed in place of the dead Lucretius, completed that funereal and hellish year, which had five consuls—the year in which the Roman commonwealth inaugurated the new honor and power of the consulship itself.note

How wretched that commonwealth was over so long an age, through so many years up to the Second Punic War, with wars abroad never ceasing to disturb it and with discord and civil strife within, Sallust has briefly indicated. Accordingly, those victories were not the solid joys of the happy but the empty consolations of the wretched, seductive incitements for people anything but at peace to undertake one fruitless evil after another. And let good and sensible Romans not be angry with us for saying this—though on this matter they need neither be asked nor warned, since it is quite certain that they will not be angry at all. For we say nothing more harshly, nor anything harsher, than their own authors, whom we fall far short of in style and in leisure; and yet they themselves labored to learn those authors by heart, and they compel their sons to labor at it too. But those who are angry—how would they put up with me if I said what Sallust says?

“A great many disturbances, seditions and finally civil wars arose, while a powerful few, to whose favor most people had yielded, aimed at domination under the honorable name of senators or of people; and citizens were called good and bad not for their services to the commonwealth, since all were equally corrupt, but whoever was richest and strongest in doing wrong was regarded as good, because he defended the existing state of affairs.” Now, if those writers of history thought it belonged to honest freedom of speech not to keep silent about the evils of their own city—a city they were compelled to praise in many places with great acclaim, since they had no other, truer city into which eternal citizens are to be chosen—what ought we to do? Our freedom must be all the greater as our hope in God is better and more certain, when they blame the present evils on our Christ, so that weaker and less instructed minds may be turned away from that city in which alone life is to be lived unceasingly and happily.

Nor do we say more horrible things against their gods than their own authors say again and again—authors they read and extol. Indeed, we have taken what we say from those very authors, and we are in no way able to say either such things as they do or all of them.

Quinctius, a man decrepit with age, by Quintus Servilius, master of the horse, amid an enormous and most dangerous uproar in the city? Where were they when a very great plague broke out and the people, long and greatly worn out by useless gods, decided that new lectisternia must be offered, something they had never done before? Couches were spread in honor of the gods, and that is how this rite—or rather sacrilege—got its name. Where were they when, through ten consecutive years of fighting badly, the Roman army had suffered frequent and great defeats at Veii, and would have gone on suffering them had help not at last come through Furius Camillus, whom the ungrateful city later condemned? Where were they when the Gauls captured Rome, plundered it, burned it, filled it with slaughter? Where were they when that notorious plague wrought such enormous destruction, in which that same Furius Camillus also died, who had earlier defended the ungrateful commonwealth against the Veientines and later avenged it on the Gauls?note

During this plague they brought in theatrical shows, another new plague—not for the bodies of the Romans but, what is far more destructive, for their morals. Where were they when another grave plague broke out that was believed to come from poisonings by matrons—women many and noble beyond belief, whose conduct was found to be worse than any plague? Or when both consuls with their army, trapped by the Samnites at the Caudine Forks, were forced to make a disgraceful treaty with them, so that six hundred Roman knights were handed over as hostages, and the rest, having lost their arms, stripped of everything else and deprived even of their coverings, were sent under the enemy’s yoke in a single garment each? Or when, while everyone else was suffering from a severe plague, many in the army also died struck by lightning?

Or when, again, because of another unbearable plague, Rome was compelled to summon Aesculapius from Epidaurus as a physician god and put him to work—since Jupiter, the king of all, who had long been seated on the Capitol, had perhaps been kept from learning medicine by the many debaucheries to which he had devoted his youth? Or when, as the Lucanians, Bruttians, Samnites, Etruscans and Senonian Gauls conspired against them at one and the same time, first Roman envoys were killed by them, and then an army was crushed together with its praetor, seven tribunes perishing with him, along with thirteen thousand soldiers?note

Or when, after long and serious seditions at Rome, in which the plebs had finally seceded to the Janiculum in a hostile breach, the calamity of this evil was so dire that because of it a dictator, Hortensius, was appointed—something usually done only in extreme dangers—and he, after bringing the plebs back, died while still in that office, which had happened to no dictator before? And this was a graver charge against those gods, since Aesculapius was by then present.

And amid such great slaughter of wars a grave plague also broke out among women. For pregnant women were dying before they could bring their offspring to term. Here, I suppose, Aesculapius excused himself on the ground that he professed to be a chief physician, not a midwife. Livestock too were dying in the same way, so that it was even believed that animals as a kind would die out. And what of that memorable winter, raging with such incredible severity that snow lay at a horrifying depth for forty days even in the Forum, and the Tiber too was frozen solid with ice? If it had happened in our times, what things, and how many, would these people have said! And what of that equally enormous plague—how many it killed while it raged! When it stretched into another year, far more severe, with Aesculapius present to no purpose, recourse was had to the Sibylline Books. In that kind of oracle, as Cicero records in his books On Divination, people usually rely rather on the interpreters, who conjecture at uncertain meanings as they can or as they wish.note

At that time, then, it was declared that the cause of the plague was that many people were occupying a great many sacred buildings and holding them as private property. In this way, for the time being, Aesculapius was cleared of the serious charge of incompetence or laziness. But why had those buildings been occupied by many people with no one preventing it, unless because prayers to so great a crowd of deities had long been offered in vain, and so the places were gradually deserted by their worshipers, so that, as if empty, they could be claimed without offending anyone, at least for human uses? For if the buildings, carefully reclaimed and restored at that time as if to quell the plague, had not later been neglected and appropriated in the same way and so lain forgotten, Varro would certainly not be credited with great learning for recording so many unknown things when he writes about sacred buildings. But what was secured for the moment was not the driving off of the plague, but an elegant excuse for the gods.

The pontiffs also renewed the sacred games for the powers of the underworld, these too abolished in the better years before. No doubt, then, when they were renewed, the underworld, enriched by such an abundance of the dying, delighted even to play games—while in truth wretched human beings, by those very raging wars and bloody hostilities and deathly victories on this side and that, were putting on great games for the demons and rich banquets for the underworld. Nothing more wretched, indeed, happened in the First Punic War than that the Romans were so badly defeated that even the famous Regulus was captured, whom we mentioned in the first and second books—a truly great man, earlier the victor over and tamer of the Carthaginians, who would even have brought the First Punic War itself to an end had he not, out of excessive greed for praise and glory, imposed on the exhausted Carthaginians harsher terms than they could bear.

If that man’s captivity, so utterly unexpected, his slavery, so utterly undeserved, his oath, so utterly faithful, and his death, so utterly cruel, do not force those gods to blush, then it is true that they are made of bronze and have no blood.note

For the fire did not recognize even him, nor indeed was there any divinity there that would not also have fled, even if there had been one. So a man was able to help Vesta’s sacred objects, rather than they the man. And if they could not drive the fire away from themselves, what help could they give, against those floods and flames, to the city whose safety they were believed to protect? Indeed, the event itself made plain that they could do nothing at all. These things would never be thrown in their faces by us if they said that those rites were instituted not to protect these temporal goods but to signify eternal ones; and that therefore, when it happened that the rites perished because they were bodily and visible, nothing was diminished of the things for which they had been instituted, and they could be restored again for the same purposes. But as it is, with astonishing blindness, they think that through rites which could perish it could be brought about that the earthly safety and temporal happiness of the city could not perish.

Accordingly, since it is shown that even while those rites remained intact, ruin and misfortune broke in upon them all the same, they are ashamed to change an opinion they cannot defend.

From there he sent three modii of gold rings to Carthage, so that they would understand that so much Roman rank had fallen in that battle that it could more easily be grasped by measure than by number; and that from this the slaughter of the rest of the crowd—as much more numerous as it was lower in rank—lying there without rings, should be thought something to be guessed at rather than reported. Then there followed such a shortage of soldiers that the Romans gathered criminals by offering them immunity and granted freedom to slaves, and with these an army to be ashamed of was not so much reinforced as created. So the slaves—or rather, not to do them an injustice, the freedmen they now were—who were to fight for the Roman commonwealth lacked arms. Arms were taken down from the temples, as if the Romans were saying to their gods: “Put down what you have held so long to no purpose; perhaps our slaves can do something useful with what you, our deities, could not.”note

Then too, when the treasury ran out of money to pay the troops, private wealth went to public use, each person contributing what he had to such an extent that, apart from a single ring and a single bulla each—pitiful badges of rank—the senate itself kept no gold for itself, and still less the other orders and tribes. Who could put up with these people if in our times they were reduced to such poverty, when we can hardly put up with them now, when more is lavished on actors for superfluous pleasure than was then contributed to the legions for their very survival?note

Then, exhausted in every way, and so as at least not to fall into Hannibal’s hands as captives, the city built a huge pyre at public expense, and into its flames they all threw themselves and their families, whom they had also struck down with the sword. Here those gluttonous, good-for-nothing gods should have done something—those gods who gape greedily at the fat of sacrifices and deceive people with the fog of their lying divinations. Here they should have done something: come to the aid of the city most friendly to the Roman people, and not let it perish when it was perishing for keeping faith. They themselves, surely, had presided as intermediaries when it was bound to the Roman commonwealth by the treaty made between them. So, while guarding what it had joined by agreement, bound by its word, and tied fast by oath, with those very gods as overseers, it was besieged, crushed and consumed by a faithless enemy. If those same gods later frightened Hannibal with storm and lightning when he was right at the walls of Rome and drove him far away, that was the time when they should first have done something of the kind.

For I dare to say that they could more honorably have raged with a storm on behalf of the friends of the Romans—who were in peril precisely because they would not break faith with the Romans, and who then had no help at all—than on behalf of the Romans themselves, who were fighting for their own sake and were well supplied against Hannibal. If, then, these gods were guardians of Roman happiness and glory, they would have averted from it so grave a reproach as the disaster of Saguntum. As it is, how foolish it is to believe that it was thanks to these gods as defenders that Rome did not perish when Hannibal was victorious—gods who could not help the city of Saguntum, so that it would not perish for its friendship with Rome! If the people of Saguntum had been Christian and had suffered something of this kind for the faith of the gospel—though they would not have destroyed themselves either by sword or by fire—yet if they had suffered destruction for the gospel faith, they would have suffered it in the hope with which they had believed in Christ: a hope not of a reward for the briefest time, but of an eternity without end.

But as for these gods, who are said to be worshiped—and whose worship is demanded—precisely so that happiness in these slipping and passing things may be secure, what will their defenders and apologists answer us about the destruction of the Saguntines, except what they answer about the death of Regulus? The only difference is that he was one man, while this was a whole city; but in both cases the cause of death was keeping faith. For it was because of this that he chose to return to the enemy, and that the city refused to go over to the enemy. Does keeping faith, then, provoke the anger of the gods? Or can not only individual men but even whole cities perish while the gods are favorable? Let them choose which they prefer. If those gods are angry at faith kept, let them look for faithless people to worship them. But if, even when the gods are favorable, men and cities can be afflicted with many heavy torments and perish, then they are worshiped to no profit as far as this happiness is concerned.

So let those who think they have been made unhappy by the loss of their gods’ rites stop being indignant. For even if those gods had not only remained with them but also shown them favor, they could have—not, as now, grumbled about their misery—but, as Regulus and the Saguntines did then, been horribly tortured and utterly destroyed.

For it was then, it is said, that bronze-fitted couches and costly coverlets were first seen; then that female harp-players and other licentious vices were brought into banquets. But my purpose now is to speak of the evils that people suffer against their will, not of those they commit willingly. So what I recalled about Scipio—that, yielding to his enemies, he died outside the fatherland he had liberated—bears more on the present discussion: the Roman divinities, whose temples he had kept Hannibal away from, did not repay him in kind, though they are worshiped only for the sake of this kind of happiness. But because Sallust said that morals at that time were at their best, I thought I should mention this point about Asiatic luxury, so that it may be understood that Sallust too said this by comparison with other times—times in which morals were certainly worse, amid the most grievous discords.

For it was then—that is, between the second and the last Carthaginian war—that the Voconian law too was passed, forbidding anyone to make a woman his heir, not even an only daughter. What could be said or thought more unjust than this law, I do not know. Still, throughout that whole interval between the two Punic wars, unhappiness was more bearable. The army was worn down only by wars abroad, but it was consoled by victories; and at home no discords raged, as they did at other times. But in the last Punic War, in a single onslaught by the other Scipio—who for this reason likewise acquired the surname Africanus—Rome’s rival for empire was destroyed root and branch. After that, the Roman commonwealth was overwhelmed by such mountains of evils that Carthage, by being destroyed so quickly, can be shown to have done more harm than it had earlier done by being an enemy for so long. For from the prosperity and security that followed, morals were thoroughly corrupted, and those evils were heaped up.note

Throughout this whole period up to Caesar Augustus—who seems to have wrested from the Romans, by every means, a liberty that was no longer glorious even in their own opinion, but quarrelsome, ruinous, and by now plainly enervated and feeble; to have brought everything back under a king’s discretion; and, so to speak, to have restored and renewed a commonwealth that had collapsed from diseased old age—throughout that whole period, then, I pass over the military disasters that came again and again from one cause or another. I pass over the treaty of Numantia, stained with horrifying disgrace. The chickens, you see, had flown out of their cage and, as they say, had given the consul Mancinus a bad omen—as if, during all the years in which that small city, though besieged, had battered the Roman army and had already begun to be a terror to the Roman commonwealth itself, the other commanders had marched against it under a different omen.note

Did they have no gods, household or public, to consult when they set out from their homes on that journey from which there was no return? If so, these people have no reason to complain about our times on this score: the Romans long ago despised these vain things. But if they did consult them, let them answer what good these things did, at a time when they were lawful—at least as far as human laws went—and no one forbade them.

Of what great evil was this a sign, if it was a sign—and how great an evil it was in itself, even if it was no sign! Had this happened in our times, we would have to endure these people raging more madly than those Romans endured their animals.

Gracchus’ killer sold his head to the consul for its weight in gold; for that bargain had been struck before the murder. In this slaughter the former consul Marcus Fulvius was also killed, together with his children.note

In the same way, then, a temple ought to have been set up not only to Concord but also to Discord. So the Romans chose to live dangerously with so evil a goddess angry at them, and did not recall that the destruction of Troy had its origin in offending her. For because she had not been invited among the gods, she contrived a quarrel among three goddesses by slipping in a golden apple. Hence the strife of divinities, Venus victorious, Helen carried off, and Troy destroyed. So if perhaps, indignant that she had not been deemed worthy of any temple among the gods in the City, she was already troubling the city with such great riots, how much more fiercely could she be provoked when she saw a temple to her adversary built on the site of that slaughter—that is, on the site of her own handiwork!note

When we laugh at these vanities, those learned and wise men are indignant; and yet the worshipers of good and bad divinities cannot get out of this question of Concord and Discord. Either they neglected the worship of these goddesses and preferred Fever and Bellona, to whom they built ancient shrines; or they worshiped these as well—since, as Concord departed, Discord raged and led them all the way to civil wars.

Now, how the Slave War was started by a very few gladiators—that is, fewer than seventy—what numbers it reached, how fierce and savage it became, which generals of the Roman people that host defeated, which cities and regions it laid waste and how: even those who wrote its history have scarcely been able to set it out adequately. Nor was that the only slave war: bands of slaves had earlier ravaged the province of Macedonia, and then Sicily and the seacoast. And who could describe, as their magnitude deserves, how many and how horrifying were the deeds committed first in the raids and then in the full-scale wars of the pirates?note

In that war of Marius and Sulla, apart from those who fell in battle outside, in the City itself the streets, squares, forums, theaters and temples were filled with corpses, so that it was hard to judge when the victors caused more deaths—before, in order to win, or afterward, because they had won. First, at Marius’ victory, when he restored himself from exile, besides the killings carried out everywhere in every direction, the head of the consul Octavius was displayed on the Rostra; the Caesars were butchered by Fimbria in their own homes; the two Crassi, father and son, were slaughtered in each other’s sight; Baebius and Numitorius were dragged with a hook and died with their entrails strewn about; Catulus drank poison to escape his enemies’ hands; and Merula, the flamen of Jupiter, opened his veins and offered even his own blood in sacrifice to Jupiter. And right before Marius’ own eyes men were cut down on the spot if, when they greeted him, he had refused to hold out his right hand to them.note

Then Sulla entered the City as victor—the man who, in the Villa Publica, with not war but peace itself now raging, had cut down seven thousand men who had surrendered (and who were therefore certainly unarmed), not by fighting but by giving an order. Throughout the City every Sullan struck down whomever he pleased, so that the deaths could not be counted at all, until it was suggested to Sulla that some should be allowed to live, so that the victors would have people to rule. Then that license to cut throats, which had been rushing madly this way and that in every direction, was checked, and the famous list was posted amid great rejoicing: it contained two thousand men of the two distinguished orders—the equestrian and the senatorial—to be killed and proscribed. The number saddened people, but the limit consoled them; and there was not so much grief because so many were falling as there was joy because the rest no longer had to fear.note

But in the case of some of those who were ordered to die, even the security of the rest, cruel as it was, groaned at the refined kinds of death. One man was torn apart without any blade by the hands of those mangling him—human beings tearing a living human being more savagely than wild beasts tear a discarded corpse. Another had his eyes gouged out and his limbs cut off piece by piece, and was forced to live a long time in such torments—or rather to die a long time. Some noble cities too were put up for auction like country estates; and one, as if a single defendant were being sent to execution, was ordered to be slaughtered whole. These things were done in peace after the war, not to hasten the winning of victory, but so that the victory won should not be despised. Peace competed with war in cruelty, and won. For war struck down the armed; peace, the defenseless. War meant that whoever was struck might strike back if he could; peace meant not that whoever had escaped might live, but that he would die without resisting.note

But Sulla, while Marius was still alive, occupied as victor the very Capitol that had been safe from the Gauls, in order to decree killings. And when Marius had slipped away in flight, to return fiercer and bloodier, Sulla on the Capitol, even by a decree of the senate, deprived many of their lives and property. As for the Marian faction, in Sulla’s absence what was sacred to them, what would they spare, when they did not spare Mucius—a citizen, a senator, a pontiff—as he clasped in a pitiful embrace the very altar where, as they say, the destinies of Rome resided? Moreover, Sulla’s last proscription list, to say nothing of countless other deaths, cut the throats of more senators than the Goths were able even to rob.

For Augustus himself also waged civil wars against many, and in them many very distinguished men perished, among them Cicero, that eloquent master of the art of governing the commonwealth. Gaius Caesar, the conqueror of Pompey, who used his victory in the civil war with clemency and granted his opponents their lives and their rank, was cut down in the very senate house, as one who aspired to kingship, by a conspiracy of certain noble senators, supposedly for the liberty of the commonwealth. After that Antony, a man very different in character, defiled and corrupted by every vice, seemed to be reaching for Caesar’s power; and Cicero resisted him vehemently, again for that so-called liberty of the fatherland. Then that other Caesar had come forward, a young man of remarkable gifts, the adopted son of Gaius Caesar, who, as I said, was later called Augustus.

Cicero favored this young Caesar, so that his power might be built up against Antony, hoping that once Antony’s domination had been driven off and crushed, he would restore the liberty of the commonwealth. So blind was Cicero, so unable to foresee the future, that the very young man whose rank and power he was fostering both allowed Antony to kill that same Cicero, as part of a kind of pact of concord, and subjected to his own rule the very liberty of the commonwealth on whose behalf Cicero had cried out so loudly.note

This I know, and anyone who judges without partisanship readily recognizes it with me—to pass over the many things I have already mentioned and the many more that I thought it too long to mention: if the human race had received Christian teaching before the Punic Wars, and such devastation had followed as wore down Europe and Africa in those wars, not one of the sort of people we now have to endure would have attributed those evils to anything but the Christian religion. Still less would their voices be tolerated, as far as the Romans are concerned, if the reception and spread of the Christian religion had been followed by the invasion of the Gauls, or by that devastation by the flooding of the Tiber and by fire, or—what surpasses all evils—by those civil wars. Other evils, too, happened so incredibly that they were counted among prodigies. If these had happened in Christian times, to whom would they impute them as crimes, if not to Christians?

I pass over the things that were more astonishing than harmful: oxen speaking, unborn infants crying out certain words from their mothers’ wombs, serpents flying, women and hens turned into the male sex, and other things of this kind. These, found in their books—books not of fables but of history—whether they are true or false, bring people not destruction but amazement. But when it rained earth, when it rained chalk, when it rained stones (not in the sense that hail is commonly called by that name, but actual stones), these things could certainly do serious harm. We read in their writers that when the fires of Etna ran down from the very summit of the mountain to the nearest shore, the sea boiled so that the rocks were scorched and the pitch of the ships melted. This was surely no slight harm, however incredibly astonishing it was.note

Again, from the same blaze of fire, they wrote that Sicily was filled with so great a mass of ash that it buried, crushed and brought down the houses of the city of Catania; moved by this calamity, the Romans mercifully remitted its tribute for that year. They also recorded that in Africa, when it was already a province of the Roman people, there was a multitude of locusts that was like a prodigy. After consuming the fruits and the leaves of the trees, they say, it was cast into the sea in a huge and immeasurable cloud. When it died and was washed back onto the shores, and the air was corrupted as a result, so great a plague arose that in the kingdom of Masinissa alone eight hundred thousand people are reported to have perished, and many more in the lands nearest the coast. At Utica, they affirm, out of the thirty thousand young men who were there, ten thousand were left. Such folly as we have to endure and are compelled to answer—which of these things would it not attribute to the Christian religion, if it saw them in Christian times?note

And yet they do not attribute these things to their gods, whose worship they demand back precisely so that they may not suffer these things or even lesser ones—when those who worshiped them before endured greater ones.

Among them is also an uneducated crowd, and it is stirred to hate us more fiercely by what passes for the authority of the learned. The unlearned suppose that the unusual things that have happened in their own times did not usually happen in times past. Their opinion is reinforced even by people who know it to be false, who hide what they know so that they may seem to have just grounds for grumbling against us. Therefore it was necessary to show, from the books their own authors committed to memory so that the history of past times might be known, that the case is far otherwise than they think. At the same time it was necessary to teach that the false gods they used to worship openly, or still worship in secret, are the most unclean spirits and the most malignant and deceitful demons. They are so wicked that they delight in their own crimes, whether real or even invented, but still their own, and they wanted these celebrated in their honor at their festivals. As a result, human weakness cannot be held back from committing damnable deeds, since what seems a divine authority is offered for imitating them.

We have proved these things not from our own conjecture. Partly we drew on recent memory, because we ourselves have seen such things performed, and performed for such deities. Partly we drew on the writings of those who left them on record for posterity, not as if to insult their gods but as if to honor them. So it was that Varro, a man among them of the greatest learning and the weightiest authority, wrote separate books on human and on divine matters, assigning some books to human affairs and others to divine according to the dignity of each subject. He placed the theatrical shows not even among human matters but among divine ones. Yet surely, if there were only good and honorable people in the city, theatrical shows ought not to have had a place even among human matters. He certainly did not do this on his own authority. Born and raised at Rome, he found them already among the divine matters.note

At the end of the first book we briefly set out what was to be said next, and in the two following books we have said some of it. We recognize, then, that we owe our readers what remains, since they are expecting it.

And how little I have said about that city alone and its empire! I have not said everything even of that, up to Caesar Augustus. What if I had chosen to recount and dwell on the evils that human beings do not inflict on one another, such as the devastation and destruction caused by warring armies, but that befall earthly things from the elements of the world itself? Apuleius touches on these briefly in one passage of the little book he wrote, On the World, where he says that all earthly things undergo change, upheaval and destruction.note

To use his own words, he says that in immense earthquakes the ground has split open and cities have been swallowed up with their peoples. Whole regions have been washed away by sudden downpours. Lands that were once part of the mainland have been made into islands by waves that came as strangers and newcomers, while others, as the sea grew sluggish and withdrew, have become passable on foot. Cities have been overthrown by winds and storms. Fires have flashed from the clouds, and regions of the East were consumed by them and perished, while in western parts gushing springs and floods have wrought the same havoc. And once, when the craters on Etna’s summit burst open, rivers of flame ran down its slopes like a torrent of heaven-sent fire. Suppose I had wished to gather these and similar events recorded in history, from wherever I could. These are things that happened in those times, before the name of Christ curbed any of these people’s empty practices, which are so ruinous to true salvation. When would I have finished?

I had also promised to show which of their moral qualities the true God, in whose power all kingdoms lie, saw fit to assist in enlarging their empire, and for what reason. I also promised to show how little those they consider gods helped them, and indeed how much harm those gods did them by deceiving and misleading them. This, I see, is what I must now discuss, and especially the growth of the Roman Empire. As for the harmful deceit of the demons they worshiped as gods, and how much evil it brought upon their morals, a good deal has already been said, above all in the second book. Throughout all three completed books, moreover, wherever it seemed appropriate, we have pointed out how much consolation God has granted to good and bad alike, even amid the evils of war, through the name of Christ. The invaders paid that name such honor, contrary to the custom of war. God acted here as the one who “makes his sun rise on the good and the bad, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”note

To make this easier to judge, let us not be tossed about by empty bluster and vanish into thin air. Nor should we blunt the edge of our attention with high-sounding words when we hear of “peoples,” “kingdoms” and “provinces.” Instead, let us take two individuals. Each single person, like a single letter in speech, is in effect an element of a city and of a kingdom, however vast its territory. Let us imagine one of these two as poor, or rather of modest means, and the other as very rich. The rich man is anxious with fears and wasting away with sorrows. He burns with greed, is never secure and always restless, and pants from the endless struggles of his feuds. By these miseries he does increase his estate to an immense degree, but with those increases he also piles up the bitterest cares. The man of modest means, on the other hand, is content with his small and compact household estate. He is dearly loved by his family and enjoys the sweetest peace with relatives, neighbors and friends. He is devout in piety, kindly in mind, sound in body, frugal in life, chaste in conduct and secure in conscience.

I doubt anyone is so foolish as to dare to hesitate over which of them to prefer. The same rule of fairness that holds for these two individuals holds for two families, for two peoples and for two kingdoms. If our attention is corrected by applying that rule carefully, we shall very easily see where emptiness dwells and where happiness does. Therefore, if the true God is worshiped and served with true rites and good morals, it is beneficial for good men to reign far and wide and for a long time. This benefits not so much the rulers themselves as those over whom they reign. For as far as the rulers are concerned, their piety and integrity, which are great gifts of God, are enough for true happiness, by which this life is lived well and eternal life is received afterward.

On this earth, then, the reign of the good is a benefit not so much to the good themselves as to human affairs. The reign of the wicked, however, does more harm to those who reign, since they lay waste their own souls through their greater freedom to commit crimes. Those who are made subject to them as servants are harmed only by their own wickedness. For whatever evils unjust masters inflict on the just are not the punishment of guilt but the testing of virtue. So the good man is free even if he is a slave, while the wicked man is a slave even if he reigns. And he is the slave not of one man but, what is worse, of as many masters as he has vices. Speaking of these vices, divine Scripture says: “For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is also bound as a slave.”note

On that reckoning, then, the gods help no one to reign, since every individual dies quickly. Nor should something be counted as a benefit if it vanishes like vapor within a short time in each person, and so, one by one, in all of them. For what does it matter to those who worshiped the gods under Romulus and died long ago that the Roman Empire grew so great after their death? They are pleading their cases in the underworld. Whether those cases are good or bad is not relevant to the present question. And the same must be understood of everyone who has passed hastily and hurriedly through that empire in the few days of their lives, carrying the burden of their deeds. This is true even though the empire stretches over long ages, as some mortals die and others take their place.

But if even benefits that last only the briefest time are to be credited to the gods’ help, those gladiators were helped not a little. They broke the chains of slavery, fled and escaped. They gathered a great and very strong army. Obeying the plans and orders of their kings, they were greatly feared by the mighty Romans and could not be beaten by several Roman generals. They seized a great deal, won very many victories, enjoyed whatever pleasures they wanted and did whatever lust suggested. In the end, until they were defeated, which was achieved only with the greatest difficulty, they lived on the heights as rulers. But let us come to greater things.

“Having subdued his nearest neighbors, he moved on to others, stronger now through the forces he had added. Each victory became the instrument of the next, and so he subjugated the peoples of the whole East.” Whatever the reliability of what Justin or Trogus wrote—and other, more trustworthy writings show that they told some falsehoods—other writers agree too that King Ninus extended the Assyrian kingdom far and wide. The Assyrian kingdom lasted so long that the Roman Empire has not yet reached its age. As those who have written chronological history report, it endured for twelve hundred and forty years from the first year of Ninus’s reign, until it passed to the Medes. But consider making war on one’s neighbors, advancing from there against others, and crushing and subduing peoples who have done one no harm, out of sheer craving for dominion. What else is this to be called but a great robbery?

If that is so, the gods are faithless, deserting their own people and going over to the enemy. Not even Camillus, a mere man, did that. He conquered and captured a bitterly hostile city, and then found Rome, for whom he had conquered it, ungrateful. Yet afterward, forgetting the injury and remembering his country, he set it free once more, this time from the Gauls. Otherwise, the gods are not as strong as gods ought to be, since human counsel or force can overcome them. Or perhaps, when they wage war among themselves, gods are overcome not by human beings but by other gods, the particular gods of each city. In that case the gods too have feuds among themselves, and each takes up the cause of his own side. So a city should not have worshiped its own gods rather than other gods who could help its own.note

Finally, however we explain this passing over or flight of the gods, this migration or desertion in battle, the name of Christ had not yet been preached in those times and in those parts of the world when those kingdoms were lost and transferred through enormous disasters of war. After twelve hundred years and more, the kingdom was taken from the Assyrians. Suppose the Christian religion had already been there at that time, preaching another, eternal kingdom and forbidding the sacrilegious worship of false gods. What else would the empty-headed people of that nation have said, except that a kingdom preserved for so long could have perished for no other reason than the abandonment of their own religion and the acceptance of this one? In that empty talk, which could well have been heard, let these people look at themselves as in a mirror. And if they have any shame at all, let them blush to make similar complaints.

And yet the Roman Empire has been afflicted rather than changed. This also happened to it at other times, before the name of Christ, and it recovered from that affliction. Such a recovery should not be despaired of in these times either. For who knows the will of God in this matter?

They could not even find a single Segetia to whom they might entrust the crops (segetes) once and for all. Instead, they wanted the goddess Seia in charge of sown grain for as long as it was under the ground. When it was above ground and forming the standing crop, they wanted the goddess Segetia. And when the grain was harvested and stored, they put the goddess Tutilina in charge, so that it might be kept safe (tuto). Who would not think Segetia was enough, for the whole time the crop advanced from its first green shoots to its dry ears? Yet one was not enough for people who loved a multitude of gods; and so the wretched soul prostituted itself to a crowd of demons, scorning the chaste embrace of the one true God.

So they put Proserpina in charge of the sprouting grain. The god Nodutus was over the joints and knots (nodi) of the stalks, and the goddess Volutina over the wrappings (involumenta) of the husks. When the husks open (patescunt) for the ear to come out, the goddess Patelana takes charge. When the crops are leveled off with new ears, the goddess Hostilina takes charge, because the ancients used hostire for “to level.” Over the flowering grain was the goddess Flora, over the grain turning milky (lactescentibus) the god Lacturnus, and over the ripening (maturescentibus) grain the goddess Matuta. When the crops are weeded (runcantur), that is, removed from the earth, the goddess Runcina presides. I do not list them all, because I am sickened by what does not shame them. I have mentioned these very few only to make it clear that they would never dare to say these deities established, enlarged and preserved the Roman Empire. Each was assigned to its own functions in such a way that nothing as a whole was entrusted to any single one. When, then, would Segetia look after the empire, when she was not allowed to care for crops and trees at the same time? When would Cunina think about arms, when her jurisdiction was not permitted to extend beyond the cradles of little children?

When would Nodutus help in war, when he was concerned not even with the husk of the ear but only with the knot of the joint? Each person sets one doorkeeper at his house, and since the doorkeeper is a human being, he is quite enough. These people set three gods there: Forculus for the doors (fores), Cardea for the hinge (cardo) and Limentinus for the threshold (limen). Evidently Forculus could not guard the hinge and the threshold at the same time.

This so displeases Varro himself that, although he was weighed down by the perverse custom of so great a city, he did not hesitate in the least to say and to write that those who set up images for the peoples both took away fear and added error.

For if these things were so, their ancients would have taught that the world has three elements rather than four, so that each pair of divine spouses could be assigned to one element. But in fact they have affirmed in every way that ether is one thing and air another. Water, on the other hand, whether upper or lower, is certainly water. Suppose it is different—is it so different that it is not water? And what can the lower earth be but earth, however great the difference that distinguishes it? Then again, look: the whole bodily world is now complete in these four or three elements. Where will Minerva be? What will she hold? What will she fill? For she was installed on the Capitol together with them, although she is not the daughter of both.note

Or if they say that Minerva holds the upper part of the ether, and that this gave the poets occasion to invent the story that she was born from Jupiter’s head, why then is she not rather reckoned queen of the gods, since she is higher than Jupiter? Is it because it was unfitting to put the daughter above the father? Then why was this same justice not observed in the case of Jupiter himself toward Saturn? Is it because Saturn was defeated? So they fought? Heaven forbid, they say; that is the chatter of fables. Very well: let the fables not be believed, and let better things be thought of the gods. Why then was Jupiter’s father not given a seat of honor that was, if not higher, at least equal? Because, they say, Saturn is the length of time. So those who worship Saturn worship time, and Jupiter, king of the gods, is implied to have been born of time.

For what is unworthy in saying that Jupiter and Juno were born of time, if he is the sky and she the earth, since sky and earth were certainly made? Their learned and wise men have this too in their books. And it was not from poetic fictions but from the books of the philosophers that Virgil said: “Then the almighty father, Ether, came down with fertile showers into the lap of his glad wife”—that is, into the lap of Tellus, or Earth. For here too they want there to be certain distinctions: in the earth itself they think Terra is one thing, Tellus another, Tellumo another, and they hold all these as gods, called by their own names, distinguished by their own functions, venerated with their own altars and rites.note

They also call this same earth the mother of the gods, so that the poets’ fictions now become more tolerable, if, according to their books—not of poetry but of rites—Juno is not only Jupiter’s sister and wife but also his mother. They want this same earth to be Ceres, and Vesta too, although more often they declare that Vesta is nothing but fire, the fire of hearths, without which a city cannot exist; and that virgins customarily serve her for this reason, that just as nothing is born from a virgin, so nothing is born from fire. All this vanity surely had to be abolished and extinguished by him who was born of a virgin. For who could bear it that, although they attributed so much honor and, as it were, chastity to fire, they sometimes do not blush to call Vesta Venus as well, so that the virginity honored in her handmaids vanishes?

For if Vesta is Venus, how could virgins duly serve her by abstaining from the works of Venus? Or are there two Venuses, one a virgin, the other a married woman? Or rather three: one of virgins, who is also Vesta, another of wives, another of prostitutes? It was to this last that the Phoenicians even made a gift from the prostitution of their daughters before they gave them to husbands. Which of them is Vulcan’s wife? Certainly not the virgin, since she has a husband. And heaven forbid it should be the prostitute, lest we seem to wrong the son of Juno and fellow worker of Minerva. So she is understood to belong to the married women—but we would not want them to imitate her in what she did with Mars. “There you go again,” they say, “back to fables.” What justice is this, to be angry with us for saying such things about their gods, and not to be angry with themselves, who most gladly watch these crimes of their gods in the theaters?note

And—what would be unbelievable if it were not proved by the fullest testimony—these very theatrical crimes of the gods were instituted in honor of those same gods.

let him lift (levare) the child from the ground and be called the goddess Levana; let him guard the cradle (cunae) and be called Cunina; let it be no one else but he in those goddesses who sing the fates to the newborn and are called the Carmentes; let him preside over chance events and be called Fortuna; as the goddess Rumina let him put the breast to the infant’s lips, for the ancients called the breast ruma; as the goddess Potina let him give drink (potio); as the goddess Educa let him supply food (esca); let him be named Paventia from the fright (pavor) of infants, Venilia from hope that comes (venit), Volupia from pleasure (voluptas), Agenoria from action (actus); let him be named the goddess Stimula from the goads (stimuli) by which a person is driven to excessive action; let him be the goddess Strenia by making people strenuous, Numeria who teaches them to count (numerare), Camena who teaches them to sing (canere); let him be both the god Consus by giving counsel (consilia) and the goddess Sentia by inspiring opinions (sententiae); let him be the goddess Juventas, who receives the beginnings of youth once the boy’s toga is laid aside; let him also be Bearded Fortune, who clothes grown men with a beard—though they did not care to honor those men enough to give this divinity, whatever it is, at least a male name: either Barbatus, from barba [beard], as Nodutus comes from nodi [knots], or at any rate not Fortuna but, since it has beards, Fortunius. As the god Jugatinus let him join (iungere) spouses; and when the girdle of a virgin bride is loosed, let him be invoked and be called the goddess Virginensis; let him be Mutunus or Tutunus, who among the Greeks is Priapus. If they are not ashamed, let all these I have named, and whatever I have not named (for I did not think everything should be said)—let all these gods and goddesses be the one Jupiter, whether all of them are, as some would have it, his parts, or his powers, as it seems to those who like to think he is the soul of the world, a view held, supposedly, by great and very learned men.note

If these things are so (what that amounts to I do not yet ask for the moment), what would they lose by the wiser shortcut of worshiping the one god? For what of him would be slighted, if he himself were worshiped? But if there was reason to fear that his parts, if passed over or neglected, would be angry, then it is not true, as they claim, that this whole life, which contains all the gods as its powers or members or parts, is the life of a single living being; rather, each part has its own life, separate from the rest, if one can be angry apart from another, and one can be appeased while another is provoked. But if it is said that all of them together—that is, Jupiter himself as a whole—could have been offended if his parts were not also worshiped one by one and in detail, that is a foolish thing to say. For none of them would be passed over, since he himself, the one who contained them all, would be worshiped.

For, to pass over other points, which are innumerable: when they say that all the stars are parts of Jupiter, that they all live and have rational souls and are therefore beyond dispute gods, they do not see how many of them they fail to worship, how many they build no temples for and set up no altars to—though they did think altars should be set up to a very few of the stars and sacrifice offered to them individually. If, then, those not worshiped individually are angry, are they not afraid to live under a whole sky of anger, having appeased only a few? But if they worship all the stars because they are in Jupiter, whom they worship, they could by that shortcut supplicate all of them in him alone—for then no one would be angry, since in him alone no one would be slighted—rather than worship some and so give a just cause for anger to those passed over, who are far more numerous; especially when Priapus, distended in shameful nakedness, was preferred to them as they shine from their seat on high.

And since Jupiter presides over them as king, it is he, I suppose, whom they think established or enlarged the Roman kingdom. For if he did not do it himself, what other god do they believe could have undertaken so great a work, when all are busy with their own functions and works, and none intrudes on another’s? So it was by the king of the gods that the kingdom of men could be extended and increased.

It is a wicked wish to want to have someone to hate or to fear, so that there may be someone to conquer. If, then, by waging wars that were just—not impious, not unjust—the Romans were able to acquire so great an empire, must they also worship the wickedness of others as some kind of goddess? For we see that it contributed greatly to this vastness of empire, by making others into wrongdoers, so that there would be people against whom just wars could be waged and the empire increased. And why should Wickedness—at least that of foreign nations—not be a goddess too, if Fear and Pallor and Fever have earned the right to be Roman gods? By these two, then—that is, the wickedness of others and the goddess Victory—with wickedness stirring up the causes of wars and Victory bringing those same wars to a happy end, the empire grew even while Jupiter was on holiday.note

For what role would Jupiter have here, when the things that might be thought his benefits are held to be gods, called gods, worshiped as gods, and are themselves invoked for their own roles? He too would have some role here, if he himself were called Kingdom, as she is called Victory. Or if kingdom is Jupiter’s gift, why should victory not also be held to be his gift? And it certainly would be, if not a stone on the Capitol but the true King of kings and Lord of lords were known and worshiped.note

Indeed, these people have held such opinions about the gods that, if the poets had invented them and we attacked them, they would answer that these were poets’ fictions, to be laughed at, not to be attributed to true divinities. And yet they did not laugh at themselves when they did not read such ravings in the poets but worshiped them in the temples. They should therefore have asked Jupiter for everything and prayed to him alone. For wherever he sent Victory—if she is a goddess and subject to that king—she could not dare to resist him and do her own will instead.

For since there are also very many others at the same time—that is, at one and the same moment—who have bad fortune, would she, if she were one and the same, be both good and bad at once: one thing to these, another to those? Or is the one who is a goddess always good? Then she is Felicity herself: why are different names used? But this can be tolerated, for one thing is often called by two names. But why different temples, different altars, different rites? There is a reason, they say: happiness is what good people have as a result of prior merits, whereas fortune—the kind called good—befalls people, good and bad alike, fortuitously, without any weighing of merits; hence her very name, Fortune. How then is she good, when she comes without any judgment to good and bad alike?

And why is she worshiped at all, when she is so blind, running into anyone at random, that she often passes by her worshipers and clings to those who despise her? Or if her worshipers do gain something, so that she sees and loves them, then she follows merits and does not come by chance. Where, then, is that definition of Fortune? What becomes of her taking her very name from what is fortuitous? For it is no use worshiping her if she is fortune. But if she distinguishes her worshipers so as to benefit them, she is not fortune. Or does Jupiter send her too wherever he wishes? Then let him alone be worshiped, for Fortune cannot resist him when he commands her and sends her wherever he wishes. Or at any rate let the wicked worship her—those who do not want to have the merits by which the goddess Felicity might be invited.

And surely, if Fortune speaks, it should at least have been not Women’s Fortune but rather Men’s Fortune that spoke, so that the very women who dedicated the image would not be thought to have invented so great a miracle out of female talkativeness.note

For they saw that virtue was to be divided into four kinds: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. And since each of these has its own subdivisions, faith is among the parts of justice, and it holds the highest place among us who know what is meant by “The just shall live by faith.” But I am amazed at these lovers of a multitude of gods: if faith is a goddess, why did they wrong so many other goddesses by passing them over, when they could have dedicated temples and altars to them in the same way? Why did temperance not deserve to be a goddess, when several Roman leaders won no small glory in her name? Why, finally, is courage not a goddess—she who stood by Mucius when he stretched his right hand into the flames; who stood by Curtius when he threw himself headlong into the chasm in the earth for his country; who stood by Decius the father and Decius the son when they vowed themselves to death for the army?note

That is, if true courage was present in all of them—which is not the question now. Why did prudence, why did wisdom earn no place among the divinities? Or is it because they are all worshiped under the general name of virtue itself? In that case the one God too could be worshiped, of whom the other gods are thought to be parts. But in that one virtue are both faith and chastity, which nevertheless earned altars outside it, in temples of their own.

What learning would need to be sought from Mercury or from Minerva, when virtue would bring everything with it? For the ancients defined virtue as the very art of living well and rightly. Hence they thought that the Latins took their word for art, ars, from the Greek word for virtue, ἀρετὴ [aretē]. But if virtue could come only to the talented, what need was there of the god Catius Pater, who made people cati, that is, sharp, when happiness could confer this? For to be born talented is a matter of happiness. So even if the goddess Felicity could not be worshiped by someone not yet born, so that, won over, she might grant him this, she would grant it to his parents, her worshipers, so that talented children would be born to them. What need was there for women in labor to call on Lucina, when, if Felicity were present, they would not only give birth well but give birth to good children?note

What need was there to commend newborns to the goddess Ops, wailing infants to the god Vaticanus, infants lying in the cradle to the goddess Cunina, nursing infants to the goddess Rumina, children standing up to the god Statilinus, children coming toward someone to the goddess Adeona and going away to Abeona; to commend them to the goddess Mens, that they might have a good mind; to the god Volumnus and the goddess Volumna, that they might will good things; to the wedding gods, that they might marry well; to the country gods, that they might reap the richest harvests, and above all to the divine Fructesea herself; to Mars and Bellona, that they might wage war well; to the goddess Victory, that they might win; to the god Honor, that they might be honored; to the goddess Pecunia, that they might be moneyed; to the god Aesculanus and his son Argentinus, that they might have copper and silver money? For they made Aesculanus the father of Argentinus because copper money came into use first and silver later. I am surprised, though, that Argentinus did not beget Aurinus, since gold money followed too.note

If they had that god, they would rank Aurinus above his father Argentinus and his grandfather Aesculanus, just as they ranked Jupiter above Saturn. What need was there, then, to worship and invoke such a crowd of gods for these goods of mind, body, or external circumstance (and I have not mentioned them all, nor could they themselves provide minute individual gods for all human goods, divided up minutely and one by one), when the one goddess Felicity could confer everything by a great and easy shortcut, and no other would be sought, not only for obtaining goods but even for driving away evils? For why should the divine Fessona be invoked for the weary, the divine Pellonia for driving off enemies, and for the sick a physician—Apollo or Aesculapius, or both at once when the danger was great?

Nor would the god Spiniensis need to be asked to root the thorns out of the fields, nor the goddess Rubigo to stay away: with Felicity alone present and protecting, either no evils would arise or they would be driven off with the greatest ease. Finally, since we are dealing with these two goddesses, Virtue and Felicity: if happiness is the reward of virtue, it is not a goddess but a gift of God; but if she is a goddess, why should she not be said to confer virtue as well, since even to attain virtue is a great happiness?note

He confirms this with another comparison too, saying that no one can live well—or indeed live at all—if he does not know who is a smith, who a baker, who a plasterer, from whom he can ask for any useful thing, whom he can take on as a helper, whom as a guide, whom as a teacher. In the same way, he asserts, no one can doubt that knowledge of the gods is useful on this condition: that one knows what force, capacity, and power each god has over each thing. “For from this,” he says, “we shall be able to know which god we ought to call upon and invoke for each purpose, so that we do not do what the mimes do, and ask Liber for water and the Lymphs for wine.” A great benefit indeed! Who would not thank him, if he were showing the truth, and if he taught people to worship the one true God, from whom all good things come?note

Why did Titus Tatius add Saturn, Ops, Sun, Moon, Vulcan, Light, and whatever others he added—among them even the goddess Cloacina—while neglecting Felicity? Why did Numa add so many gods and so many goddesses without her? Or perhaps he could not see her in so great a crowd? King Hostilius, certainly, would not have introduced new gods of his own, Fear and Pallor, to be appeased, if he had known or worshiped this goddess. For with Felicity present, all fear and pallor would not withdraw appeased; they would be driven out and flee.note

So if they think the gods themselves can be consulted through augury or in any other way, they should have been consulted on this question: whether they were willing to give up their place to Felicity, if perhaps the site where a larger and loftier temple was to be built for Felicity was already occupied by the temples or altars of others. Even Jupiter himself would give way, so that Felicity might rather hold the very summit of the Capitoline Hill. For no one would resist Felicity except someone who wanted to be unhappy—which is impossible. Jupiter, if consulted, would by no means at all do what three gods—Mars, Terminus, and Juventas—did to him, when they absolutely refused to yield their place to their superior and king.note

For, as their writings record, when King Tarquin wanted to build the Capitol and saw that the site that seemed to him the worthiest and most suitable was already occupied by other gods, he did not dare to do anything against their will. Believing that they would willingly give way to so great a divinity, their own sovereign—for there were many of them on the spot where the Capitol was built—he asked by augury whether they were willing to yield the place to Jupiter. And all of them were willing to move from there, except those I have mentioned: Mars, Terminus, and Juventas. So the Capitol was built in such a way that these three were also inside it, but with images so obscure that even the most learned people scarcely knew it. Jupiter himself, then, would by no means have scorned Felicity, as he was scorned by Terminus, Mars, and Juventas. But even those who had not given way to Jupiter would surely give way to Felicity, who had made Jupiter their king.

Or if they did not give way, they would not do so out of contempt for her, but because they would rather be obscure in the house of Felicity than stand out in their own places without her.

For, as we read in their own writers, the early Romans worshiped some Summanus or other, to whom they attributed lightning by night, more than Jupiter, to whom lightning by day belonged. But after a splendid and lofty temple was built for Jupiter, the crowd flocked to him because of the temple’s grandeur—so much so that one can hardly find anyone who remembers even having read the name of Summanus, since it can no longer be heard. But if happiness is not a goddess, because—as is the truth—it is a gift of God, then let that God be sought who can give it, and let the harmful multitude of false gods be abandoned, which the empty multitude of foolish people follows, making gods for themselves out of God’s gifts and offending him whose gifts they are by the obstinacy of a proud will.

For whoever worships happiness as a goddess and abandons God, the giver of happiness, can no more escape unhappiness than someone who licks painted bread, and does not ask the man who has real bread for it, can escape hunger.

“So,” they say, “when Felicity is called a goddess, what is meant is not the thing itself that is given, but the divinity by whom happiness is given.”

Let the God who gives happiness, I say, not be enough to worship for anyone for whom happiness itself is not enough to receive. But let anyone for whom it is enough (and a human being has nothing more he ought to wish for) serve the one God who gives happiness. This is not the one they call Jupiter. For if they acknowledged him as the giver of happiness, they would certainly not look for another god or goddess, by whom happiness might be given, under the name of happiness itself. Nor would they think that Jupiter himself should be worshiped amid such insults. He is said to be an adulterer with other men’s wives. He is said to be the shameless lover and abductor of a beautiful boy.note

Titus Latinius, a Roman countryman and head of a household, was told in a dream to report to the senate that the Roman Games should be held over again. The reason was that on their first day a grim order had displeased the divinities, who were evidently looking for merriment from the games: a certain criminal had been ordered to be led to execution while the people looked on. The man warned by the dream did not dare to carry out the command the next day. On the second night the same order was given again, more sternly, and he lost his son because he did not obey. On the third night he was told that a greater punishment threatened him if he did not obey. When even then he did not dare, he fell into an acute and dreadful illness. Then at last, on the advice of his friends, he brought the matter before the magistrates and was carried into the senate on a litter. When he had related the dream, his health was immediately restored, and he walked away well, on his own feet.note

Astounded by so great a miracle, the senate decreed that the games be held again at four times the expense. Who with a sound mind does not see what was happening? People subject to malignant demons, from whose domination nothing frees us but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, were compelled by force to present to such gods things that sound judgment could have recognized as shameful. Certainly the poets’ tales of the divinities’ crimes are constantly performed in those games, and it was those very games that were held again by order of the senate, under compulsion from the divinities. In those games the vilest actors sang of Jupiter, the corrupter of chastity, acted him and won applause. If this was fiction, he should have been angry. But if he delighted in his crimes, even fictional ones, then when he was worshiped, who was being served but the devil? Was this the one to found, extend and preserve the Roman Empire—a god more contemptible than any Roman who disliked such things? Was this the one to give happiness—a god who was worshiped so unhappily, and who, if not worshiped in this way, grew angry more unhappily still?

The pontiff does not want the people to know these things, for he does not think they are false. He therefore considers it expedient for states to be deceived in religion. Varro himself does not hesitate to say the same, even in his books on divine matters. A splendid religion for the weak to flee to for liberation! When he seeks the truth that would set him free, it is thought expedient for him to be deceived.

Why Scaevola rejects the poetic kind of gods is not passed over in silence in the same writings. It is, of course, because the poets so disfigure the gods that they cannot even be compared with good men. They make one god steal and another commit adultery, and likewise have them say or do other base and absurd things of one sort or another. They tell how three goddesses competed with one another for the prize of beauty, and how the two who were defeated by Venus destroyed Troy. They tell how Jupiter himself turned into a bull or a swan to sleep with some woman, how a goddess married a man, how Saturn devoured his children. In short, nothing marvelous or vicious can be imagined that is not found there, however utterly foreign to the nature of the gods. O Scaevola, chief pontiff, abolish the games, if you can! Command the people not to pay such honors to the immortal gods, where they enjoy admiring the crimes of the gods and like to imitate those that can be done.note

But suppose the people answer you: “You pontiffs brought these things in on us.” Then ask the gods themselves, at whose instigation you ordered these things, not to order such things to be presented to them. If these things are evil, and therefore in no way to be believed of the majesty of the gods, the greater is the wrong done to the gods about whom they are invented with impunity. But the gods do not listen to you. They are demons; they teach depravity; they delight in what is shameful. Not only do they not count it a wrong if such things are invented about them. On the contrary, the wrong they cannot bear is for these things not to be performed at their festivals. Now suppose you were to appeal to Jupiter against them, especially since more of his crimes are acted in the theatrical shows than anyone else’s. You call Jupiter the God by whom this whole world is ruled and governed. Even so, are you not doing him the greatest wrong precisely by thinking that he should be worshiped together with these others, and by declaring him their king?

So too, then, they could in no way have had a kingdom against the will of the true God. But if these many false gods had been ignored or despised, and that one God had been known and worshiped with sincere faith and good conduct, they would have had a better kingdom here, whatever its size. And afterward they would have received an everlasting one, whether they had a kingdom here or not.

But before Christ came in the flesh, and indeed before the things we are quoting from their books were written—though still after that omen occurred under King Tarquin—the Roman army was several times routed, that is, put to flight. This proved false the omen by which Juventas had not yielded to Jupiter. The people of Mars was crushed in the City itself when the Gauls overwhelmed it and broke in. And when many cities defected to Hannibal, the boundaries of the empire were squeezed into a narrow space. So the splendor of the omens was emptied out, and what remained was defiance against Jupiter—the defiance not of gods but of demons. For it is one thing not to have yielded, another to have returned to the place from which you had yielded. And later, too, the boundaries of the Roman Empire in the eastern regions were changed by the will of Hadrian.note

For he ceded three noble provinces, Armenia, Mesopotamia and Assyria, to the rule of the Persians. So that god Terminus, who according to them protected the Roman boundaries and by that most splendid omen had not yielded his place to Jupiter, seems to have feared Hadrian, a king of men, more than the king of the gods. The provinces I mentioned were recovered at another time, but almost within our own memory Terminus retreated again. This was when Julian, devoted to the oracles of those gods, with reckless daring ordered the ships carrying the army’s food supply to be burned. The army, deprived of its supplies, and soon after bereft of the emperor himself, who was killed by an enemy wound, was reduced to such want that not one man would have escaped. For the enemy attacked from all sides the soldiers who had been thrown into confusion by the emperor’s death. They were saved only because a peace agreement fixed the empire’s frontiers there, where they remain to this day. The loss was not, indeed, as great as the territory Hadrian had conceded, but the frontiers were still fixed by a compromise halfway between.note

It was therefore an empty augury by which the god Terminus did not yield to Jupiter—the same god who yielded to Hadrian’s will, and yielded also to Julian’s rashness and to Jovian’s necessity. The more intelligent and serious Romans saw this, but they had little power against the custom of the city, which had been bound to demonic rites. For even they, though they felt these things were empty, nevertheless thought that the religious worship owed to God should be offered to the nature of things, which is established under the rule and command of the one true God. They were, as the apostle says, “serving the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.” The help of this true God was needed, so that holy and truly devout men might be sent who would die for the true religion, and so that false religions might be removed from among the living.note

They are even portrayed with troubled minds, for we have heard of the gods’ lusts, sorrows and fits of anger. Nor, as the stories tell it, have the gods been without wars and battles. And this is not only as in Homer, where different gods defended two opposing armies from opposite sides. They have also waged wars of their own, as against the Titans or the Giants. All this is said and believed most foolishly, and it is full of emptiness and utter frivolity.” Look, meanwhile, at what those who defend the gods of the nations admit! Next he says that these things belong to superstition, while what he himself appears to teach along Stoic lines belongs to religion. “For not only the philosophers,” he says, “but our ancestors too separated superstition from religion. Those who prayed and sacrificed all day long that their children might outlive them were called superstitious.”note

Who can fail to see what he is doing? Because he fears the custom of the city, he is trying to praise the religion of the ancestors and wants to separate it from superstition. But he cannot find a way to do it. For if the ancestors called those who prayed and sacrificed all day long superstitious, what of those who established the very things he criticizes? These people set up images of the gods distinguished by different ages and dress, and gave the gods lineages, marriages and kinships. When these things are condemned as superstitious, the blame certainly falls on the ancestors who set up and worshiped such images. It falls on him as well. However much eloquence he strains to wriggle his way into freedom, he was obliged to venerate these things. Nor would he have dared to mutter in a public assembly what he proclaims so eloquently in this debate.

Let us Christians, then, give thanks to the Lord our God—not to heaven and earth, as this man argues, but to him who made heaven and earth. It is he who has overthrown these superstitions, which this Balbus, stammering as his name suggests, barely manages to criticize. He overthrew them through the most exalted humility of Christ and through the preaching of the apostles. He overthrew them through the faith of the martyrs, who died for the truth and live with the truth. He did this not only in religious hearts but even in superstitious temples, by the free servitude of his own people.note

I might have been thought to be guessing at this, if he did not say it plainly himself in another place. There, speaking about religious practices, he says that there are many true things which it is not useful for the common people to know. He adds that there are things which, though false, it is expedient for the people to believe otherwise. That, he says, is why the Greeks shut away their teletae [initiation rites] and mysteries behind silence and walls. Here he has certainly given away the whole policy of the so-called wise men by whom cities and peoples were to be ruled. Yet the evil demons take marvelous delight in this deceit, for they possess deceivers and deceived alike. From their domination nothing sets us free but the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Among others, he calls the Jewish nation as a witness to this opinion of his. He does not hesitate to close the passage by saying that those who first set up images of the gods for the peoples both took away fear from their cities and added error. He wisely judged that the gods could easily be despised in the senselessness of images. He does not say that they “handed down” error, but that they “added” it. By this he certainly means us to understand that there was error already, even without images. So he says that only those grasped what God is who believed him to be the soul governing the world, and he judges that religion is practiced more purely without images. Who, then, does not see how close he came to the truth?

For if he had had any strength to resist the long antiquity of so great an error, he would surely have judged that the one God, by whom he believed the world to be governed, should be worshiped, and worshiped without an image. Having come so close to the truth, he might perhaps easily have been reminded of the changeableness of the soul. He would then have perceived that the true God is rather the unchangeable nature which created the soul itself as well. This being so, whatever mockeries of the many gods such men put into their writings, they were driven by the hidden will of God to confess them rather than trying to win belief for them. So when we bring forward any testimony from these sources, we do so to refute those who refuse to notice how great and how malignant a power of demons we are freed from. We are freed by the unique sacrifice of such holy blood poured out, and by the gift of the Spirit bestowed.

But what weak and unlearned person could escape both deceivers at once, the rulers of the city and the demons?

And this is the mystery of the Old Testament, in which the New lay hidden: there the promises and gifts are earthly. Yet even then spiritual people understood, though they did not yet proclaim it openly, what eternity was signified by those temporal things. They also understood in which gifts of God true happiness lay.

Nor did they consecrate some goddess Mannia when they received manna from heaven. When the rock was struck and poured out water for them in their thirst, they did not worship Nymphs and Lymphs. They waged wars without the frenzied rites of Mars and Bellona. They did not, of course, conquer without victory. Yet they regarded victory not as a goddess but as the gift of their God. Without Segetia they had crops, and without Bubona cattle. They had honey without Mellona and fruit without Pomona. In short, everything for which the Romans thought they had to pray to such great crowds of false gods, these people received far more happily from the one true God. But they sinned against him. They were led astray by impious curiosity, as if by magic arts, and drifted away to foreign gods and idols. Finally, they killed Christ. Had they not done these things, they would have remained in the same kingdom—not a larger one, perhaps, but a happier one.note

And now they are scattered through almost all lands and nations, and this is the providence of that one true God. Everywhere the images, altars, groves and temples of the false gods are being overthrown and sacrifices forbidden. God’s purpose is that their own books may prove how this was prophesied so long before. Otherwise, if it were read only in ours, people might think we had invented it. What follows must now be considered in the next book, and here an end must be put to this lengthy one.

Those who think that the stars, without God’s will, decide what we do, or what goods we have and what evils we suffer, must be denied a hearing by everyone. This applies not only to those who hold the true religion but also to those who want to be worshipers of any gods whatever, even false ones. For what does this opinion accomplish except that no god at all is worshiped or prayed to? But our argument is not directed against these people now. It is directed against those who oppose the Christian religion in defense of the beings they think are gods.

Then there are those who make the position of the stars depend on the will of God, while holding that the stars in some way decide what each person is like and what good or evil befalls him. Suppose they think these same stars have this power handed over to them by his supreme power, so that they decide these things by their own will. In that case they do great injury to heaven. They suppose that in heaven’s most illustrious senate, so to speak, and its most splendid senate house, crimes are decreed to be committed. If any earthly city had decreed such crimes, the verdict of the human race would have required it to be overthrown. And then what judgment over human actions is left to God, if a heavenly necessity is imposed on those actions, when he is the Lord of both stars and human beings? Or suppose they do not say that the stars, though they have received their power from the supreme God, decide these things by their own choice, but that in imposing such necessities they are simply carrying out his commands. Are we then to think of God himself what seemed utterly unworthy to think of the stars’ will?

But suppose it is said that the stars signify these things rather than cause them. Their position would then be a kind of speech that foretells the future without bringing it about, and this was the view of men of no small learning. It is true that astrologers do not usually speak this way. They do not say, for example, “Mars in this position signifies a murderer,” but “makes a murderer.” Still, let us grant that they do not speak as they should, and that they ought to take from the philosophers the rule of speech for announcing what they think they find in the position of the stars. How is it, then, that they have never been able to explain the differences between twins? These differences are often very great: in their lives, their actions, what happens to them, their professions, skills, honors and the other things that belong to human life, and even in their death. As far as these things go, many strangers are more like them than the twins are like each other. Yet twins are separated at birth by a very small interval of time, and at conception they were sown in a single act of intercourse, at a single moment.

In this case the physician’s conjecture is far more acceptable, and more credible because it is closer to hand. The parents, as they were affected in body when they had intercourse, could have affected the first beginnings of the children conceived, so that, having received their earliest growth from the mother’s body, they were born with similar health. Then they were raised in one house on the same food. Medicine testifies that the air, the situation of the place and the quality of the water have great power to dispose a body well or badly. They were also accustomed to the same exercises. So they would have had bodies so similar that they were moved to fall ill in the same way, at one time and from the same causes. But some people want to drag in the configuration of the sky and the stars at the time when the twins were conceived or born to explain this sameness in falling ill. Yet so many things of the most different kinds, with the most different effects and outcomes, could be conceived and born at the same time in the land of one region under the same sky. I do not know what effrontery it takes to argue like that.

We, on the other hand, know of twins who not only have different occupations and travels but also suffer different illnesses. Hippocrates, it seems to me, would give a very easy explanation of this. Different food and exercise, which come not from the body’s constitution but from the will of the mind, could have caused them to have different health. But Posidonius, or any champion of fate-dealing stars, would be hard put to find anything to say here, unless he wants to make fools of untrained minds in matters they know nothing about.

Consider what they try to make of the tiny interval of time between twins at birth, on account of the small portion of the sky where the mark of the hour is placed, which they call the horoscope. Either this interval does not have as much force as the difference found in the twins’ wills, actions, characters and fortunes, or it has even more force than the twins’ birth, whether low or noble, which is the same for both. Yet the astrologers attribute the greatest differences of rank to nothing but the hour at which each is born. So if one twin is born so quickly after the other that the same part of the horoscope remains, I look for everything to be equal, and that cannot be found in any twins. But if the delay of the second changes the horoscope, I look for different parents, and twins cannot have those.note

For suppose there is so great a difference in the sky, one that cannot be captured in birth charts, that one twin receives an inheritance and the other does not. Then how do they dare, after examining the birth charts of other people who are not twins, to pronounce on matters of this kind? Those matters belong to that hidden region which no one can grasp and mark down at the moments of birth. But suppose they say such things in the nativities of others because these things belong to longer stretches of time. The moments of tiny fractions that twins may have between them at birth would then be assigned to the smallest matters, about which astrologers are not usually consulted. After all, who would consult them about when to sit down, when to take a walk, or when or what to eat for lunch? But are these the things we are talking about, when we point out so many differences, and such great ones, in the characters, deeds and fortunes of twins?

If, then, these things belong to those tiny fractions of time that twins have between them, and are not ascribed to the birth charts, why are they stated when the birth charts of other people are examined? But if they are stated because they belong not to imperceptible fractions but to stretches of time that can be observed and recorded, what is that potter’s wheel doing here? Its only use is to send people with hearts of clay spinning in circles, so that the empty chatter of the astrologers may not be exposed.

For if the unequal delay in being born changed the horoscope and brought inequality into everything else, why did their illnesses keep what they had from being conceived at the same time? Or suppose the fates of health are said to lie in conception, while those of other things lie in birth. Then the astrologers ought not to say anything about health after examining birth charts, since they are not given the hour of conception to examine. But suppose they predict illnesses without examining the horoscope of conception because the moments of birth indicate them. How then could they tell either of those twins, from the hour of his birth, when he would fall ill, when the other twin, who did not have the same hour of birth, had to fall ill at the same time?

Next I ask this. Suppose the interval of time at the birth of twins is so great that their birth charts must turn out different because of the different horoscope, and therefore all the cardinal points differ, and the astrologers place so much power in these that the fates too differ because of them. How could this happen, when their conception cannot have taken place at different times? Or if two children conceived at one moment of time could have unequal fates regarding birth, why could not two born at one moment of time have unequal fates regarding life and death? For if the single moment at which both were conceived did not prevent one from being born first and the other later, why, if two are born at one moment, should anything prevent one from dying first and the other later?

If conception at a single moment allows twins to have different fortunes in the womb, why should not birth at a single moment also allow any two people to have different fortunes on earth? In that way all the inventions of this art, or rather this vanity, would be swept away. What does it mean that those conceived at one time, at one moment, under one and the same position of the sky, have different fates that lead them to birth at different hours, while two children born of two mothers at the same moment of time, under one and the same position of the sky, cannot have different fates that lead them to a different necessity of living or dying? Or do those who are conceived not yet have fates, which they cannot have unless they are born? Then what do they mean when they say that if the hour of conception could be found, the astrologers could foretell many things more divinely?

This is also why some people spread the story that a certain wise man chose the hour at which to have intercourse with his wife, so as to beget a wonderful son. This, finally, is the source of the reply that Posidonius, a great astrologer and also a philosopher, used to give about those twins who fell ill together. He said it happened because they had been born at the same time and conceived at the same time. He added conception precisely so that no one could object that they could not have been born at exactly the same time, since they were agreed to have been conceived at exactly the same time. His aim was not to attribute their falling ill in the same way and together to the explanation close at hand, a similar bodily constitution, but to bind that very sameness of health with starry bonds as well. If, then, conception has so much power to make fates equal, the same fates ought not to have been changed by birth.

Or if the fates of twins are changed because they are born at different times, why should we not rather understand that their fates had already been changed, so that they would be born at different times? Does the will of the living, then, not change the fates of birth, when the order of birth changes the fates of conception?

But, it is objected, the force of the horoscope counts for a great deal. I have already discussed enough how it counts for nothing. But whatever its force, they say it operates at birth. Does it also operate at conception? There it is obvious that there was a single act of intercourse. And so great is the power of nature that once a woman has conceived, she cannot conceive another child at all. Hence the moments of conception must be the same for twins. Or perhaps, because they were born under different horoscopes, either he was changed into a male or she into a female while they were being born?

It might not be entirely absurd to say that certain influences from the stars have force over the differences of bodies alone. We see the very seasons of the year vary with the sun’s approach and withdrawal. We see certain kinds of things grow and shrink with the waxing and waning of the moon, such as sea urchins and shellfish and the wonderful tides of the ocean. But it would be absurd to say that the choices of the will are subject to the positions of the stars. Yet these people, by trying to bind even our actions to that source, prompt us to ask why their theory cannot hold good even for bodies themselves. For what belongs so much to the body as the body’s sex? And yet twins of different sex could be conceived under the same position of the stars.

What, then, could be said or believed that is more foolish than this? The position of the stars, which was the same for both at the hour of conception, could not keep her from having a different sex from the brother with whom she shared a constellation. Yet the position of the stars at the hour of their birth could make her differ from him so greatly in the holiness of virginity.

Next, if only human beings are subject to constellations, and not everything under heaven, why do they choose some days as suitable for planting vines or trees or crops, and other days for taming livestock or for putting males to the herds of mares or cows so they will breed, and so on? But if chosen days have power in these matters because the position of the stars governs all earthly bodies, living or not, according to the differences between moments of time, then let them consider how countless are the things that are born, or arise, or begin at a single point of time. These have such different outcomes that they would convince any child that these observations deserve ridicule. For who is so senseless as to dare to say that all trees, all plants, all beasts, snakes, birds, fish and worms each have a different moment of birth?

Yet people often test the skill of astrologers by bringing them the constellations of dumb animals, whose births they carefully observe at home for this very trial. And they prefer to all others those astrologers who examine the constellations and say that it was not a human being who was born but an animal. They even dare to say what kind of animal: whether suited for wool, or for carrying loads, or for the plow, or for guarding the house. They are tested even on the fates of dogs, and they give these answers to loud cries of admiration. People are so foolish as to think that when a human being is born, all other births are held back, so that not even a fly is born under the same region of the sky at the same moment. For if they admit the fly, the reasoning proceeds and leads them step by small step from flies to camels and elephants.

Nor do they want to notice that when a day has been chosen for sowing a field, a great many grains go into the ground together and sprout together, and when the crop comes up they grow green, mature and turn golden together. And yet, of the ears that are the same age as the rest and, if I may put it so, sprouted together with them, some are destroyed by blight, some are ravaged by birds, and some are plucked by people. How will they say that these had different constellations, when they see them meet such different ends? Or will they repent of choosing days for these things and deny that they come under the decree of heaven, and subject only human beings to the stars—the only beings on earth to whom God has given free wills?

When all this is considered, it is not unreasonable to believe that when astrologers give many answers that are astonishingly true, this happens by the hidden prompting of spirits that are not good. Their concern is to plant these false and harmful opinions about astral fate in human minds and to strengthen them. It does not happen by noting and examining a horoscope by some art, for there is no such art.

“Here I am, eager. Suppose I am unwilling: I shall follow groaning, and suffer as a bad man what I could have done as a good one. The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling.” Plainly, in this last line he has given the name “fates” to what he had called above the will of the supreme father. He says he is ready to obey that will, so as to be led willingly and not dragged unwillingly—since, of course, “the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling.” The lines of Homer that Cicero translated into Latin also support this view: “The minds of men are like the light with which father Jupiter himself has lit up the earth.”note

A poet’s opinion would carry no authority on this question. But Cicero says that the Stoics, when asserting the power of fate, were in the habit of using these lines of Homer. So the question concerns not the opinion of that poet but the opinion of those philosophers. Through these lines, which they bring into their discussion of fate, it is made perfectly plain what they think fate is, since they name Jupiter, whom they hold to be the supreme god, and say that the connection of the fates depends on him.

He saw this himself, and so he even attempted what is written: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’”—but not in his own person. For he saw how odious and offensive it would be. So in his books On the Nature of the Gods he made Cotta argue on this subject against the Stoics, and he preferred to cast his vote for Lucilius Balbus, to whom he gave the task of defending the Stoic position, rather than for Cotta, who argues that there is no divine nature. In his books On Divination, on the other hand, he attacks foreknowledge of the future quite openly and in his own person. He seems to do all this to avoid admitting fate and losing free will. For he thinks that once knowledge of the future is granted, fate follows so inevitably that it cannot be denied at all.note

But however matters stand with the tangled debates and disputes of the philosophers, we, just as we confess the supreme and true God, so also confess his will, his supreme power and his foreknowledge. Nor are we afraid that what we do by our will we do not do by our will, because he whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foreknew that we would do it. This is what Cicero feared, so that he attacked foreknowledge; and what the Stoics feared, so that they said not everything happens by necessity, although they maintained that everything happens by fate. What, then, did Cicero fear in foreknowledge of the future, that he strove to undermine it with so detestable an argument?

Clearly this: if all future things are foreknown, they will come about in the order in which they were foreknown to come about. If they come about in that order, the order of events is fixed for God who foreknows it. If the order of events is fixed, the order of causes is fixed, for nothing can happen without being preceded by some efficient cause. But if the order of causes by which everything that happens happens is fixed, then, he says, everything that happens happens by fate. If that is so, nothing is in our power and there is no choice of the will. And if we grant that, he says, all human life is overturned: laws are made in vain, rebukes and praises, blame and encouragement are used in vain, and there is no justice at all in the rewards appointed for the good and the punishments for the wicked.

So, to keep these unworthy and absurd consequences, so ruinous to human affairs, from following, he will not have foreknowledge of the future. And he forces the religious mind into this tight corner, so that it must choose one of two things: either that something is in our will, or that there is foreknowledge of the future. For he thinks both cannot be true, but that if one is affirmed the other is abolished. If we choose foreknowledge of the future, the choice of the will is abolished; if we choose the choice of the will, foreknowledge of the future is abolished. And so he, as a great and learned man who took the greatest and most expert thought for human life, chose of these two the free choice of the will. To establish it, he denied foreknowledge of the future, and so, in his wish to make men free, he made them sacrilegious. The religious mind, however, chooses both, confesses both, and affirms both by the faith of piety. “How can that be?”

he asks. For if there is foreknowledge of the future, all those linked consequences will follow, until we arrive at the point where nothing is in our will. Again, if anything is in our will, we arrive by retracing the same steps at the point where there is no foreknowledge of the future. For we go back through them all like this: if there is choice of the will, not everything happens by fate; if not everything happens by fate, there is no fixed order of all causes; if there is no fixed order of causes, neither is there a fixed order of events for God who foreknows them, since events cannot happen unless causes precede and produce them; if the order of events is not fixed for God who foreknows them, not everything comes about as he foreknew it would come about; and further, if not everything comes about as he foreknew it would, then, he says, there is not in God foreknowledge of all future things.

When it says “he has spoken once,” this is understood to mean that he spoke immovably, that is, unchangeably, just as he knows unchangeably all things that will happen and that he himself will do. On this reasoning, then, we could call it fate from “speaking,” were it not that this name is already customarily understood of something else, toward which we do not want people’s hearts to be inclined. But it does not follow that, if the order of all causes is fixed for God, nothing is therefore in the choice of our will. For our wills themselves are in the order of causes, which is fixed for God and contained in his foreknowledge, since human wills too are the causes of human actions. And so he who foreknew all the causes of things certainly could not, among those causes, have been ignorant of our wills, which he foreknew to be the causes of our actions.

Voluntary causes, moreover, belong either to God, or to angels, or to human beings, or to animals of whatever kind—if indeed we should call “wills” those movements of souls lacking reason by which they do things according to their nature when they seek or avoid something. By the wills of angels I mean those of good angels, whom we call angels of God, and of evil angels, whom we call angels of the devil or even demons; and likewise of human beings, both good and wicked. From this it follows that there are no efficient causes of all that happens except voluntary causes, that is, causes belonging to that nature which is the spirit of life. For this air, or wind, is also called spiritus [breath, spirit]; but since it is a body, it is not the spirit of life. The spirit of life, then, which gives life to all things and is the creator of every body and of every created spirit, is God himself, a spirit who is certainly uncreated.

In his will is supreme power, which helps the good wills of created spirits, judges the evil ones, orders them all, and grants powers to some and not to others. For just as he is the creator of all natures, so he is the giver of all powers—but not of wills. Evil wills do not come from him, since they are contrary to nature, which does come from him. Bodies, then, are rather subject to wills: some to ours, that is, to those of all mortal living things, and more to those of human beings than of beasts; others to the wills of angels. But all are subject above all to the will of God, to whom all wills too are subject, since they have no power except what he grants. God, then, is the cause of things that makes and is not made. Other causes both make and are made, as all created spirits are, especially rational ones.

Bodily causes, however, which are made rather than make, are not to be counted among efficient causes, since they can do only what the wills of spirits do through them. How, then, does the order of causes, which is fixed for God who foreknows it, bring it about that nothing is in our will, when our wills have a large place in that very order of causes? Let Cicero contend, then, with those who say that this order of causes is fated, or rather call it by the name of fate. We shrink from that name, chiefly because of the word itself, which is customarily understood of something unreal. But in denying that the order of all causes is utterly fixed and fully known to God’s foreknowledge, we detest him more than we do the Stoics.

For either he denies that God exists—which he tried to do, speaking through another character, in his books On the Nature of the Gods—or, if he admits that God exists while denying that he foreknows the future, even so he is saying nothing other than what that fool said in his heart: “There is no God.” For one who does not foreknow all future things is certainly not God. Therefore our wills too have just as much power as God willed and foreknew that they would have. And so whatever power they have, they have it with complete certainty, and what they are going to do, they themselves are entirely going to do, because he whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foreknew that they would have that power and would do it.

So if I chose to apply the name “fate” to anything, I would rather say that the fate of the weaker is the will of the stronger, who has the weaker in his power, than that the choice of our will is taken away by that order of causes which the Stoics call fate—not in the ordinary sense, but in their own peculiar way.

But suppose necessity is defined as that by which we say it is necessary that something be so or happen so. Then I do not see why we should fear that it will take away the freedom of our will. For we do not place God’s life or God’s foreknowledge under necessity when we say it is necessary that God always live and foreknow all things. Nor is his power diminished when it is said that he cannot die or be deceived. His inability here is of such a kind that, if he could do these things, he would surely have less power. He is rightly called almighty, even though he cannot die or be deceived. For he is called almighty because he does what he wills, not because he suffers what he does not will. If that happened to him, he would by no means be almighty. So there are some things he cannot do precisely because he is almighty.

So too, when we say it is necessary that, when we will, we will by free choice, we undoubtedly speak the truth. Yet we do not thereby subject free choice itself to the necessity that takes away freedom. Our wills, then, are our own. They themselves do whatever we do by willing, and it would not be done if we did not want it. And whatever anyone suffers against his will through the will of other people, even then it is will that prevails. It may not be his will, but it is still a human will. The power, however, is God’s. For if there were only a will that could not do what it willed, it would be thwarted by a more powerful will. Even so, the will would be nothing other than a will. It would belong not to someone else but to the one who willed, even if he could not carry out what he willed. Hence whatever a person suffers against his will, he should not attribute to the wills of human beings, or of angels, or of any created spirit. He should attribute it rather to the will of him who gives power to those who will.

Laws, then, are not in vain, nor are reproofs, exhortations, praise and blame. For he foreknew that these too would exist, and they have great power, as much power as he foreknew they would have. Prayers too are effective in obtaining what he foreknew he would grant to those who pray. And rewards have justly been appointed for good deeds, and punishments for sins. For a person does not sin because God foreknew that he would sin. On the contrary, there is no doubt that it is he himself who sins when he sins. This is precisely because he whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foreknew that the one who would sin was not fate, not fortune, not anything else, but the man himself. If he does not want to sin, he certainly does not sin. But if he chooses not to sin, God foreknew that too.

from him come the seeds of forms, the forms of seeds, and the motions of seeds and forms. He gave the flesh its origin, beauty and health, its fruitfulness in reproduction, the arrangement of its limbs, and the well-being that comes from their harmony. To the irrational soul he gave memory, sense and appetite, and to the rational soul, in addition, mind, intelligence and will. He has left nothing without a harmony of its parts and a kind of peace: not heaven and earth, not angel and man, and not even the inner organs of a tiny and insignificant creature, a bird’s little feather, a plant’s little flower or a tree’s leaf. It is in no way to be believed that this God willed the kingdoms of men, with their dominions and their subjections, to lie outside the laws of his providence.

The ancient and earliest Romans, then, so far as their history teaches and commends them, worshiped false gods like other nations, with the sole exception of the Hebrew people, and sacrificed victims not to God but to demons. Nevertheless, they were “greedy for praise and generous with money; they wanted immense glory and honest wealth.” This glory they loved most ardently. For it they wanted to live, and for it they did not hesitate to die. All their other cravings they suppressed by their immense craving for this one thing. Finally, since it seemed inglorious for their country to serve and glorious for it to rule and command, they desired with all their zeal that it should first be free, and then be mistress.note

Hence it was that, unable to bear royal domination, “they made for themselves annual commands and two commanders.” These were called consuls, from consulere, “to take counsel,” not kings or lords, from regnare and dominari, “to reign” and “to dominate.” Kings (reges), to be sure, seem to take their name better from regere, “to rule,” just as kingdom (regnum) comes from kings, and kings, as I said, from ruling. But royal arrogance was regarded not as the discipline of one who rules or the goodwill of one who takes counsel, but as the pride of one who dominates. So once King Tarquin had been expelled and consuls instituted, there followed what the same author set down in praise of the Romans: “Once it had gained its liberty, it is incredible to recall how much the city grew in a short time, so great a desire for glory had come over it.” It was this eagerness for praise and this desire for glory, then, that accomplished those many marvelous deeds, deeds praiseworthy and glorious, that is, by human estimation.note

Their famous poet also bears witness to both these things. On the first he says: “Porsenna too was ordering them to take back the banished Tarquin, and was pressing the city with a mighty siege; the sons of Aeneas were rushing upon the sword for liberty.” At that time, then, it was a great thing to them either to die bravely or to live free. But once liberty was gained, so great a desire for glory had come over them that liberty alone was too little unless domination too was sought. For they set great store by what the same poet says, putting the words in Jupiter’s mouth: “Indeed, harsh Juno, who now wearies sea and lands and sky with fear, will change her counsels for the better and with me will cherish the Romans, lords of the world, the toga-clad race. So it is decreed. An age will come, as the five-year cycles glide by, when the house of Assaracus will crush Phthia and famed Mycenae in slavery and lord it over conquered Argos.”note

Virgil, in presenting Jupiter as if foretelling these things as future, was himself recalling things already done and looking at things present. But I wanted to mention them to show that, after liberty, the Romans prized domination so highly that it was counted among their great glories. Hence also that passage of the same poet in which he sets above the arts of other nations those arts proper to the Romans: ruling, commanding, subjugating and subduing peoples. He says: “Others will hammer out breathing bronze more softly, I grant it, and draw living faces from marble. They will plead cases better, trace the movements of the heavens with the rod and tell of the rising stars. You, Roman, remember to rule the peoples with your command (these will be your arts), to impose the ways of peace, to spare the subjected and to subdue the proud in war.”note

They practiced these arts the more skillfully, the less they gave themselves over to pleasures. They did not yet enfeeble mind and body by craving and piling up riches, corrupt their morals through those riches, rob wretched citizens or lavish gifts on shameless stage performers. By the time Sallust was writing and Virgil was singing these things, men of that kind already surpassed others in moral decay and abounded in it. They sought honors and glory not by those arts but by tricks and deceits. Hence the same author says: “But at first it was ambition rather than avarice that drove men’s minds, a vice that was nevertheless closer to virtue. For the good man and the worthless man alike desire glory, honor and command for themselves; but the former,” he says, “strives by the true way, while the latter, because he lacks good arts, contends by tricks and deceits.”note

These are the good arts: to arrive at honor, glory and command through virtue, that is, not through deceitful ambition. Yet these are things that the good man and the worthless man alike desire for themselves; but the former, that is, the good man, strives by the true way. The way is virtue, by which he strives as toward the goal he means to possess, namely glory, honor and command. That the Romans had this ingrained in them is shown also by the temples of their gods, those of Virtue and Honor, which they built closely joined together, treating as gods things that are given by God. From this we can understand what end they wanted virtue to serve and to what those who were good referred it, namely, to honor. For the wicked did not even have virtue, though they longed to have honor and tried to obtain it by bad arts, that is, by tricks and deceits.note

So the honors Cato sought, he ought not to have sought. Rather, the city should have given them to him for his virtue without his asking. But since, within that memory, there were two Romans great in virtue, Caesar and Cato, the virtue of Cato seems to have been far closer to the truth than Caesar’s. So let us see what the city was like at that time, and what it had been before, from Cato’s own speech: “Do not think,” he says, “that our ancestors made the commonwealth great from small by arms. If that were so, we would have it far more splendid. For we have a greater supply of allies and citizens, and of arms and horses besides, than they did. But there were other things that made them great, and we have none of them: industry at home, just rule abroad, and a mind free in deliberation, enslaved neither to wrongdoing nor to passion.”note

“In their place we have luxury and greed, public poverty and private wealth. We praise riches and pursue idleness. Between good and bad there is no distinction; ambition possesses all the rewards of virtue. And no wonder: when each of you makes his plans separately for himself, when at home you are slaves to pleasures and here to money or influence, the result is that an attack is made on a commonwealth left defenseless.”

Yet great things were accomplished through a few men who were good after their own fashion. Once those evils were tolerated and tempered, the state grew through the foresight of a few good men. The same historian says as much. As he read and heard of the many glorious deeds the Roman people had done at home and in war, by sea and by land, he was moved to consider what above all had sustained such great undertakings. For he knew that the Romans had often fought with a small band against great legions of enemies, and he had learned that they had waged wars with slender forces against wealthy kings. After much reflection, he says, it became clear to him that the outstanding virtue of a few citizens had accomplished everything. This was how poverty overcame riches and the few overcame the many. “But after the city was corrupted by luxury and sloth,” he says, “the commonwealth in its turn, by its own greatness, sustained the vices of its generals and magistrates.”note

So it was the virtue of the few, who strove for glory, honor and command by the true way, that is, by virtue itself, that Cato too praised. This was the source of the industry at home that Cato mentioned, so that the treasury was rich while private means were slender. Hence, when morals were corrupted, he set down the opposite vice: public poverty, private wealth.

And in a lyric poem, to curb the lust for domination, the same poet sang: “You would rule a wider realm by taming a greedy spirit than if you joined Libya to distant Gades, and the Carthaginians of both shores served you alone.” Yet some people do not restrain their baser lusts by the faith of godliness, having received the Holy Spirit, and by love of intelligible beauty. For them it is at least better to be restrained by the craving for human praise and glory. They are not holy as a result, but they are less base. Even Cicero could not conceal this in those same books he wrote On the Commonwealth. There he speaks of educating the leading man of the state, who, he says, must be nourished on glory, and he goes on to recall that his ancestors did many wonderful and splendid things out of a craving for glory. So far from resisting this vice, then, they actually thought it should be roused and kindled, believing it useful to the commonwealth.note

Indeed, even in his philosophical books Cicero does not disguise this plague; there he admits it, clearer than daylight. When he was speaking of studies that should certainly be pursued for the sake of the end of true good, not out of the vanity of human praise, he brought in this universal, general maxim: “Honor nourishes the arts; all are fired to study by glory; and those pursuits always lie neglected which are frowned upon by people.”note

Likewise, of certain people who had believed in him but were afraid to confess it openly, the evangelist says: “They loved human glory more than the glory of God.” This the holy apostles did not do. They preached the name of Christ in places where it was not only frowned upon (as that writer says, “those pursuits always lie neglected which are frowned upon by people”) but actually regarded with the utmost loathing. They held fast to what they had heard from their good master, who was also the physician of minds: “Whoever denies me before people, I will deny him before my Father who is in heaven,” or “before the angels of God.” And so, amid curses and reproaches, amid the most severe persecutions and cruel punishments, they were not deterred from preaching human salvation, though human offense raged against it so loudly.note

As they did and spoke divine things and lived divine lives, hard hearts were in a way conquered and the peace of justice was brought in, and great glory followed them in the Church of Christ. Yet they did not rest in that glory as though it were the goal of their virtue. Instead, they referred this glory too to the glory of God, by whose grace they were what they were; and with this kindling as well they fired those they cared for with love of him by whom they too might become such. For their master had taught them not to be good for the sake of human glory, saying: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before people in order to be seen by them; otherwise you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.”note

But again, so that they would not misunderstand this, become afraid of pleasing people, and do less good by hiding the fact that they were good, he showed them for what purpose they should make themselves known: “Let your works shine before people,” he said, “so that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” Not, then, “in order to be seen by them”—that is, with the intention of wanting them to turn to you, since you are nothing of yourselves—but “so that they may glorify your Father who is in heaven,” so that, turning to him, they may become what you are. The martyrs followed the apostles, and they surpassed the Scaevolas, the Curtiuses and the Deciuses—not by inflicting suffering on themselves but by bearing the suffering inflicted on them—both by true virtue, because by true godliness, and by their countless numbers.note

But those Romans belonged to the earthly city. The end set before them in all their duties toward it was its safety, and a kingdom not in heaven but on earth—not in eternal life, but in the passing away of the dying and the succession of those who would die in their turn. What else were they to love, then, but glory, by which they wished to live on, as it were, even after death, on the lips of those who praised them?

So these men too disregarded their private wealth for the sake of the common wealth—that is, the commonwealth—and its treasury. They resisted greed. They took counsel for their country with free deliberation, enslaved neither to wrongdoing, by their own laws, nor to passion. By all these arts, as by the true way, they strove for honors, power and glory. They were honored among almost all nations; they imposed the laws of their rule on many nations; and to this day they are celebrated in literature and history among nearly all nations. They have no grounds to complain of the justice of the supreme and true God: “they have received their reward.”note

Accordingly, the Roman Empire was expanded to human glory not only so that such men might receive such a reward, but also so that the citizens of that eternal city, as long as they are pilgrims here, might look carefully and soberly at those examples. Then they will see how much love is owed to the heavenly homeland for the sake of eternal life, if the earthly homeland was so loved by its citizens for the sake of human glory.

All the more so if what was later done, most graciously and humanely, had been done at once: that all who belonged to the Roman Empire received the fellowship of citizenship and became Roman citizens, so that what had once belonged to a few belonged to all. The only difference would have been that the common people who had no land of their own would live at public expense; and this provision for them would have been supplied more pleasantly by good administrators of the commonwealth from people living in harmony than if it were extorted from the conquered.note

But let us make use of the kindness of the Lord our God even in these things. Let us consider how much they despised, what they endured, what desires they subdued for the sake of human glory—these men who earned that glory as the reward of such virtues. And let this too serve us to crush our pride. That city in which we are promised to reign is as far from this one as heaven is from earth, eternal life from temporal joy, solid glory from empty praise, the fellowship of angels from the fellowship of mortals, the light of him who made the sun and moon from the light of the sun and moon. So the citizens of so great a homeland should not think they have done anything great if, to obtain it, they have done some good work or endured some evils, when those men did so much and suffered so much for this earthly homeland, which they already possessed. This is all the more true because the forgiveness of sins, which gathers citizens into the eternal homeland, has something to which that asylum of Romulus bore a kind of shadowy likeness: there impunity for crimes of every kind gathered the multitude by which that city was to be founded.note

For he says: “The father, for the sake of fair liberty, will summon to punishment his sons who stir up new wars—unhappy man, however later generations judge those deeds.” But in the next line he consoled the unhappy man: “Love of country prevails, and the boundless craving for praise.” These are the two things—liberty and the craving for human praise—that drove the Romans to wondrous deeds. If, then, for the liberty of people who were going to die, and out of a craving for praise sought from mortals, a father could kill his sons, what great thing is it if we act for the true liberty that makes us free from the domination of iniquity, death and the devil? We act not out of a craving for human praise but out of love for setting people free—not from King Tarquin, but from demons and the prince of demons. And sons are not killed; rather, Christ’s poor are counted among one’s sons.note

Furius Camillus had thrown off from his country’s neck the yoke of its fiercest enemies, the people of Veii, and had then been condemned by his rivals; yet he freed that ungrateful country a second time, from the Gauls, because he had no better one where he could live more gloriously. If so, why should anyone be extolled as if he had done something great who, having perhaps suffered in the Church the grievous injury of disgrace at the hands of carnal enemies, did not go over to her enemies the heretics or found some heresy against her himself, but rather defended her as best he could from the ruinous perversity of the heretics? For there is no other Church—not one in which to live in human glory, but one in which to gain eternal life.note

King Porsenna was pressing the Romans hard in a very grievous war. Mucius, in order to bring about peace with him, had tried to kill Porsenna himself but failed, and by mistake killed another man in his place. He then stretched out his right hand into a burning altar before the king’s eyes, telling him that many men like the one he saw had sworn together to destroy him. Porsenna, shuddering at his courage and at a conspiracy of such men, without any hesitation made peace and withdrew from that war. If so, who will present his merits as a claim on the kingdom of heaven if, for its sake, he gives up not one hand, and does not do it to himself of his own accord, but, under persecution, suffers his whole body to be given over to the flames?note

Curtius, in full armor, spurred his horse and flung himself headlong into a sheer chasm in the earth, obeying the oracles of his gods. They had ordered that the best thing the Romans had should be thrown in there, and the Romans could understand this only to mean that they excelled in men and arms. Hence, evidently, an armed man had to be hurled into that death at the gods’ command. If so, what great thing will anyone say he has done for the eternal homeland who has suffered some enemy of his faith and died—not by throwing himself into such a death of his own accord, but by being sent to it by that enemy? After all, he has received from his Lord, who is also the king of his homeland, a surer oracle: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”note

The Decii devoted themselves to death, consecrating themselves, as it were, with set words, so that by their falling and appeasing the wrath of the gods with their blood the Roman army might be saved. If so, the holy martyrs will by no means grow proud, as though they had done something worthy of a share in that homeland where happiness is eternal and true. For they contended even to the shedding of their own blood, loving—as they were commanded—not only their brothers, for whom it was shed, but also their very enemies, by whom it was shed, with the faith of love and the love of faith.note

When Marcus Pulvillus was dedicating the temple of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, jealous rivals falsely reported to him that his son had died, so that he would be upset by the news and withdraw, and his colleague would win the glory of the dedication. But he so disregarded it that he even ordered the body to be thrown out unburied—so completely had the craving for glory overcome in his heart the grief of losing a child. If so, what great thing will anyone claim to have done for the preaching of the holy gospel, by which the citizens of the heavenly homeland are set free from their various errors and gathered together? For the Lord said to one who was anxious about his father’s burial: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”note

Marcus Regulus, so as not to break the oath he had sworn to his most cruel enemies, returned to them from Rome itself. As he is said to have answered the Romans who wanted to keep him, after being a slave of the Africans he could not hold the standing of an honorable citizen there. And the Carthaginians, because he had argued against them in the Roman senate, put him to death with the most severe tortures. If so, what tortures are not to be despised for faith toward that homeland to whose happiness faith itself leads? Or what “shall be repaid to the Lord for all that he has repaid,” if a man suffers for the faith he owes to him such things as Regulus suffered for the faith he owed to his deadliest enemies?note

How will a Christian dare to pride himself on voluntary poverty, embraced so that on the pilgrimage of this life he may walk more unencumbered on the way that leads to the homeland where God himself is the true wealth? He hears or reads that Lucius Valerius, who died during his consulship, was so poor that his funeral was paid for with money collected by the people. He hears or reads that Quintius Cincinnatus, who owned four iugera of land and farmed them with his own hands, was brought from the plow to be made dictator—an office surely greater in honor than consul—and that after defeating the enemy and winning immense glory he remained in the same poverty.note

Or what great thing will anyone boast of having done if no reward of this world has lured him away from the fellowship of that eternal homeland? He has learned that Fabricius could not be torn away from the Roman state by all the great gifts of Pyrrhus, king of the Epirotes—even with the promise of a quarter of his kingdom—and that he preferred to remain there in his poverty as a private citizen.note

Then there is this. They possessed a commonwealth—that is, the people’s wealth, the country’s wealth, the common wealth—that was most opulent and rich, yet they themselves were so poor in their own homes that one of them, who had already been consul twice, was expelled from that senate of poor men by the censor’s mark because he was found to own ten pounds of silver plate. So poor were the very men whose triumphs enriched the public treasury. Christians, with a more excellent purpose, make their wealth common property, in keeping with what is written in the Acts of the Apostles: that distribution was made to each as each had need, and no one called anything his own, but they had everything in common. Do they not all understand, then, that they ought not to be puffed up with any boasting on this account, since they do this to gain the fellowship of angels, when those men did almost the same thing to preserve the glory of the Romans?note

Hence the Jews too, who killed Christ, were most justly given over to the glory of these Romans. For the New Testament revealed what had been veiled in the Old: that the one true God is to be worshiped not for earthly and temporal benefits, which divine providence grants to good and bad alike, but for eternal life, for everlasting gifts, and for fellowship in the heavenly city itself. So it was right that those who sought and gained earthly glory by virtues of whatever kind should conquer those who, with great vices, killed and rejected the giver of true glory and of the eternal city.

And so, for one who has the virtues, it is a great virtue to despise glory, because his contempt for it is seen by God but is not laid open to human judgment. Whatever he does before people’s eyes to show that he despises glory, if he is believed to be doing it for greater praise, that is, for greater glory, he has no way of proving to the minds of those who suspect him that he is other than they suspect.

But one who despises the judgments of those who praise him also despises the rashness of those who suspect him. Yet if he is truly good, he does not despise their salvation. For one who has his virtues from the Spirit of God is so just that he loves even his enemies. He loves them in such a way that he wants those who hate or disparage him to be corrected and to become his companions, not in the earthly homeland but in the one above. As for those who praise him, he sets little value on their praising him, but he does not set little value on their loving him. Nor does he want to mislead them when they praise him, lest he deceive those who love him. And so he presses ardently for the praise to go instead to the one from whom a man has whatever is rightly praised in him. But one who despises glory yet is greedy for domination outdoes the beasts in the vices of cruelty or of self-indulgence. Some Romans were like this. They had lost all concern for their reputation, but they were not without the craving for domination.

History records that there were many such men. But the summit, the citadel as it were, of this vice was first held by the emperor Nero. His self-indulgence was so great that no one would have thought there was anything manly in him to fear. His cruelty was so great that, had his self-indulgence not been known, he would have been thought to have nothing soft in him at all. Yet even to such men the power to rule is given only by the providence of the supreme God, when he judges that human affairs deserve such masters. The divine voice is clear on this point, where the Wisdom of God says: “By me kings reign, and through me tyrants hold the land.” Someone might think that “tyrants” here means not the worst and most wicked kings but, in the old sense of the word, strong men. Hence Virgil says: “It will be part of the peace for me to have touched the tyrant’s right hand.” But lest anyone think so, another passage says of God quite plainly: “For he makes a hypocrite reign because of the perversity of the people.”note

Therefore I have explained, as well as I could, why the one true and just God helped the Romans, who were good by a certain standard of the earthly city, to attain the glory of so great an empire. Yet there may also be another, more hidden reason, owing to the varied merits of the human race, better known to God than to us. Only let this be agreed among all who are truly devout: that no one can have true virtue without true piety, that is, without the true worship of the true God; and that virtue is not true when it serves human glory. Even so, those who are not citizens of the eternal city, which our sacred Scriptures call the city of God, are more useful to the earthly city when they have at least that sort of virtue than if they had not even that.

But if those who live good lives, endowed with true piety, have the skill of governing peoples, nothing is happier for human affairs than that they should hold power by God’s mercy. Such men attribute their virtues, however great these can be in this life, to nothing but the grace of God, because he gave them these virtues when they willed, believed and asked. At the same time they understand how far they fall short of the perfection of righteousness found in the fellowship of the holy angels, for which they strive to make themselves fit. However much the virtue that serves human glory without true piety may be praised and proclaimed, it can in no way be compared with even the slight beginnings of the saints, whose hope is placed in the grace and mercy of the true God.

So the virtues, with all the glory of their dignity, will be slaves to Pleasure, as if she were some imperious and disreputable little woman. They say that nothing is more disgraceful and ugly than this picture, nothing the eyes of good men could less bear; and they speak the truth. But I do not think the picture would be decent enough either if another were drawn in which the virtues serve human glory. For although Glory herself is not a pampered woman, she is puffed up and full of emptiness. So it is not fitting for the solidity and firmness of the virtues to serve her, with Prudence providing for nothing, Justice distributing nothing, Courage enduring nothing, Temperance moderating nothing, except what will please people and serve windy glory. Nor can they clear themselves of this ugliness who scorn others’ judgments as though they despised glory, but seem wise to themselves and are pleased with themselves.

For their virtue, if it is virtue at all, is subjected to human praise in another way, since the man who pleases himself is still a human being. But one who believes and hopes in God, whom he loves, with true piety, pays more attention to the things in himself that displease him than to those, if there are any, that please not so much himself as the truth. And whatever now enables him to please, he attributes only to the mercy of the one he fears to displease, giving thanks for what has been healed and pouring out prayers for what is yet to be healed.

So that one true God, who never abandons the human race either in judgment or in help, gave kingdom to the Romans when he willed and as far as he willed. He gave it to the Assyrians, and to the Persians too, who, as our opponents’ own writings record, worship only two gods, one good and the other evil. I say nothing of the Hebrew people, of whom I have already said as much as seemed enough, who worshiped none but the one God even when they had a kingdom. He gave the Persians crops without the worship of the goddess Segetia. He gave them the other gifts of the earth without the worship of all those gods whom these people set, one each over individual things, or even several over each. So he too, and no other, gave them kingdom without the worship of those gods through whose worship these people believed they had reigned.note

It is the same with individual men. He who gave power to Marius gave it to Gaius Caesar. He who gave it to Augustus gave it also to Nero. He who gave it to the Vespasians, father and son, most agreeable emperors, gave it also to the most cruel Domitian. And not to go through them one by one: he who gave it to Constantine the Christian gave it also to Julian the Apostate. Julian’s fine natural gifts were led astray, through his love of domination, by a sacrilegious and detestable curiosity. He was devoted to its empty oracles when, confident of victory, he burned the ships that carried the provisions his army needed. Then, pressing on hotly in reckless ventures, he was soon killed in enemy territory, as his rashness deserved, and left his army destitute. It could not escape from there except by moving the boundaries of the Roman Empire, contrary to that omen of the god Terminus of which we spoke in the previous book. For the god Terminus yielded to necessity, though he had not yielded to Jupiter.note

Plainly the one true God rules and governs these things as he pleases. And if his reasons are hidden, does that make them unjust?

The Picentes, Marsi and Paeligni, peoples not foreign but Italian, after long and most devoted servitude under the Roman yoke, tried to raise their heads toward freedom. By then many nations had already been subjected to Roman rule, and Carthage had been destroyed. In this Italian war the Romans were very often defeated, and two consuls and other senators of the highest nobility perished. Yet this evil was not drawn out for long, for the fifth year ended it. But the Second Punic War, with very great losses and calamity for the commonwealth, wore down Roman strength for eighteen years and almost used it up; in two battles nearly seventy thousand Romans fell. The First Punic War was waged for twenty-three years, the Mithridatic war for forty.note

And lest anyone think that the Romans in their early days, those earlier times so highly praised for every virtue, were more vigorous in finishing wars quickly: the Samnite war dragged on for nearly fifty years. In that war the Romans were so badly beaten that they were even sent under the yoke. But because they did not love glory for the sake of justice, but seemed to love justice for the sake of glory, they broke the peace and the treaty that had been made. I mention these things because many people who are ignorant of the past, and some who also conceal what they know, see some war in Christian times dragged out a little longer and at once leap most insolently upon our religion. They cry out that if it did not exist, and the deities were worshiped in the old way, then by that Roman courage which, with the help of Mars and Bellona, finished such great wars so quickly, this war too would be ended very quickly.note

Let those who have read history recall, then, how long the wars waged by the Romans of old were, how varied in outcome, how grievous in their disasters. For the world, like a most storm-tossed sea, is regularly buffeted by a shifting tempest of such evils. Let them at last admit what they do not want to admit, and stop destroying themselves with tongues raving against God and deceiving the unlearned.

And what cries these people would have raised for their gods! How insultingly they would have boasted that he had conquered and been so powerful because he appeased and invited the gods with daily sacrifices, which the Christian religion would not let the Romans do! For when he was already approaching the region where he was crushed at the nod of the supreme Majesty, and reports of him were spreading everywhere, we were told at Carthage that the pagans believed, spread and boasted that, with the gods as his friends protecting and helping him (for he was said to sacrifice to them every day), he could not possibly be defeated by those who performed no such rites to the Roman gods and allowed no one else to perform them.

And the wretches do not give thanks for such great mercy from God. He had resolved to chastise, by a foreign invasion, the morals of men who deserved to suffer worse. Yet he tempered his indignation with such gentleness that first he caused that king to be wonderfully defeated, lest glory be given to the demons he was known to pray to, and the minds of the weak be overthrown. Then he caused Rome to be taken by these invaders, who, contrary to every custom of earlier wars, protected out of reverence for the Christian religion those who fled to the holy places. As Christians they so opposed the demons themselves and the rites of ungodly sacrifice on which that other king had relied, that they seemed to be waging a far fiercer war on them than on men. Thus the true Lord and Governor of all things both scourged the Romans with mercy and, by the incredible defeat of those who prayed to demons, showed that those sacrifices were not necessary even for safety in present things. So those who do not stubbornly contend but wisely attend may not abandon true religion because of present needs, but may hold to it all the more in most faithful expectation of eternal life.note

But we call them happy if they rule justly; if, amid the tongues of those who honor them loftily and the fawning of those who greet them too humbly, they are not puffed up but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of his majesty, to spread his worship as widely as possible; if they fear, love and worship God; if they love more that kingdom where they are not afraid to have partners; if they are slow to punish and quick to pardon; if they use punishment out of the need to govern and defend the commonwealth, not to glut the hatred of their enmities; if they grant pardon not so that wrongdoing may go unpunished but in the hope of correction; if, when they are often compelled to decree something harsh, they offset it with the gentleness of mercy and the generosity of benefits; if their self-indulgence is the more restrained the freer it could be; if they would rather rule their evil desires than any nations whatever; and if they do all these things not out of ardor for empty glory but out of love of eternal happiness; if they do not neglect to offer to their true God, for their sins, the sacrifice of humility, compassion and prayer.

Such Christian emperors we call happy—for now in hope, and afterward in reality, when what we are waiting for has come.

But again, God did not want any emperor to become a Christian in order to earn the happiness of Constantine, since everyone ought to be a Christian for the sake of eternal life. So he took Jovian away much sooner than Julian. He allowed Gratian to be cut down by a usurper’s sword, though far more gently than the great Pompey, who worshiped what passed for the Roman gods. For Pompey could not be avenged by Cato, whom he had left as a kind of heir to the civil war. Gratian, though pious souls do not seek such consolations, was avenged by Theodosius. Gratian had made Theodosius a partner in his rule even though he had a little brother of his own, for he was more eager for a faithful partnership than for excessive power.note

Soon, having destroyed the usurper Maximus, he restored the boy Valentinian, with the most compassionate respect, to the parts of the empire from which he had been driven. Shortly afterward Valentinian died, whether through treachery or by some other means or accident. Theodosius then received another prophetic answer and, sure in his faith, crushed a second usurper, Eugenius, who had been set up illegitimately in that emperor’s place. Against Eugenius’ very powerful army he fought more by praying than by striking. Soldiers who were there have told us that whatever they hurled was wrenched from their hands. A violent wind was blowing from Theodosius’ side against the enemy. It not only snatched away with tremendous force everything thrown at them, but even turned the enemy’s own missiles back against their bodies. That is why even the poet Claudian, though a stranger to the name of Christ, said in praise of Theodosius: “O you whom God loves exceedingly, for whom the sky goes to war, and the winds, sworn allies, come at the trumpet’s call!”note

As victor, just as he had believed and foretold, he threw down the statues of Jupiter that had been set up against him in the Alps, consecrated by who knows what rites. Their thunderbolts were made of gold, so he gave them away cheerfully and kindly to his couriers. They joked, as the joy of the moment allowed, that they would gladly be struck by such thunderbolts. His enemies had been swept away by the onrush of battle, not by his own command, and their sons, though not yet Christians, fled to the church. He wanted them to become Christians on this occasion, and he loved them with Christian love. He did not strip them of their property, and he even advanced them in honors. After the victory he allowed no private grudge to prevail against anyone. Cinna, Marius, Sulla and others like them would not end civil wars even when the wars were over. Theodosius was different: he grieved more that civil wars had broken out than he wished to harm anyone once they had ended.note

Amid all this, from the very beginning of his reign he never ceased to help the Church in its struggle against the impious, through laws that were both just and merciful. Valens, a heretic who favored the Arians, had afflicted the Church severely. Theodosius rejoiced more to be a member of this Church than to reign on earth. He ordered the images of the pagans to be overthrown everywhere, for he understood well that even earthly gifts lie in the power not of demons but of the true God. And what was more wonderful than his religious humility? The people of Thessalonica had committed a very grave crime, and at the bishops’ intercession he had already promised them pardon. Yet he was driven by the clamor of some of his close associates to punish it. Then, constrained by the discipline of the Church, he did penance in such a way that the people praying for him wept more at the sight of the imperial majesty laid low than they had feared its anger when they sinned.note

These good works, and others like them that would take too long to recount, he took with him out of that passing vapor of human power and eminence, however lofty. The reward of such works is eternal happiness, and God gives it only to the truly pious. But the other things of this life, whether its heights or its supports, he bestows on good and bad alike. These include the world itself, light and air, lands, waters and crops, and a human being’s own soul and body, senses, mind and life. Among them too is any greatness of empire, which he dispenses according to his governance of the ages.note

Or what is more talkative than empty folly? Yet it cannot do what truth can just because, if it wants, it can shout even louder than truth. But let them consider everything carefully. If, judging without partisanship, they happen to see that these arguments can be jeered at but not overthrown by the most shameless chatter and the flippancy of satire or farce, let them restrain their trifling and choose to be corrected by the wise rather than praised by the shameless. For if they are waiting for an opportunity not for freedom to speak the truth but for license to speak abuse, God forbid that what Cicero said of a certain man should happen to them. That man was called happy because he had license to sin, and Cicero said: “O wretched man, who was permitted to sin!”

So whoever thinks himself happy because he has license to speak abuse will be much happier if he is not permitted it at all. For he could lay aside his empty boasting and, even in these times, raise whatever objection he likes, as if seeking advice. Then, in friendly discussion, he would hear from those he consults, as far as they are able to give it, what he ought to hear—honorably, seriously and freely.

But some readers weigh what they read after understanding and considering it, and cling to their old error either not at all or not with great and excessive obstinacy. These will more readily judge that in these five finished volumes we have discussed more than the question itself required, rather than less. Nor will they be able to doubt that the whole odium the ignorant try to stir up against the Christian religion over the disasters of this life and the ruin and upheaval of earthly things is utterly empty of right thinking and reason. It is full of the most frivolous rashness and the most destructive animosity. And the learned, possessed by a mad impiety, not only pretend not to notice it but even encourage it, against their own conscience.

These men have testified that they disapprove of such things. They did so not by proclaiming it freely, but at least by muttering it somehow in their discussions. With them it is not so very unfitting to take up this question: for the sake of the life that is to come after death, ought we to worship not the one God who made every creature, spiritual and bodily, but many gods? Some of these same philosophers, more excellent and noble than the rest, held that these gods were made by that one God and placed on high.

Unless they were trying to deceive like demons, would those goddesses not burst out laughing (for they are usually quick to laugh) and answer the suppliant: “Man, do you think we have life in our power, when you hear that we do not even have the vine?” It is therefore the most shameless folly to ask or hope for eternal life from such gods. They are said to protect the individual little parts of this most wretched and most brief life, and whatever serves to support and prop it up. Yet they do so in such a way that if what lies under the guardianship and power of one is asked of another, it is so incongruous and absurd that it looks very like the buffoonery of a mime. When mimes do this knowing what they are doing, they are deservedly laughed at in the theater; but when fools do it without knowing, they are more deservedly laughed to scorn in the world.note

So, as far as concerns the gods whom the cities established, the learned have ingeniously worked out and recorded which god or goddess should be supplicated for what. They set down what should be asked of Liber, for example, what of the Lymphs, what of Vulcan, and so on with the rest. Some of these I mentioned in the fourth book; others I thought should be passed over. Further, if it is an error to ask wine of Ceres, bread of Liber, water of Vulcan, or fire of the Lymphs, how much greater a madness must it be thought to supplicate any of them for eternal life!

And so, as the matters treated in the two preceding books have taught, no god from that crowd, whether from the commoners among the gods, so to speak, or from their nobility, is fit to give mortal kingdoms to mortals. How much less can any of them make immortals out of mortals!

This being so, suppose that those who worshiped the goddess Juventas flourished more remarkably in their youth, while those who scorned her either died within the years of youth or grew cold in it, as if numbed by old age. Suppose that Bearded Fortune clothed the cheeks of her worshipers more handsomely and gracefully, while we saw those who spurned her beardless or poorly bearded. Even then we would be quite right to say that each of these goddesses has power only this far, limited as it were to her own function. We would conclude that eternal life ought not to be asked of Juventas, who could not give a beard. Nor should anything good after this life be hoped for from Bearded Fortune, who in this life would have no power to grant even the age at which the beard appears.note

But in fact their worship is not necessary even for the very things thought to be subject to them. Many who worshiped the goddess Juventas did not thrive at all at that age, and many who do not worship her rejoice in the vigor of youth. Likewise, many who prayed to Bearded Fortune managed to grow no beard at all, or an ugly one, and anyone who venerates her to obtain a beard is laughed at by bearded men who scorn her. Is the human heart so foolish, then? It recognizes that the worship of these gods is empty and ridiculous for the very temporal and quickly passing gifts over which each is said to preside. Will it still believe that this worship bears fruit for eternal life? Not even those who assigned the gods these temporal tasks dared to say they could give eternal life. They wanted the gods to be worshiped by unwise peoples, and because they thought the gods were very many, they divided these tasks into tiny pieces so that none of them would sit idle.

Clearly he was so certain on this point that he dropped the doubt he habitually applies to everything. It was as if, on this one matter, though about to argue for the doubt of the Academics, he had forgotten that he was an Academic. In the first book, praising the literary works of this same Varro, he says: “We were wandering and straying in our own city like strangers, and your books brought us home, as it were, so that at last we could recognize who and where we were. You have revealed the age of our country and the divisions of its chronology. You have revealed the laws of its rites and of its priests, its domestic and public institutions, and the location of its regions and places. You have revealed the names, kinds, functions, and causes of all things divine and human.”

Terentianus, in a most elegant little verse, sums up this man of such distinguished and outstanding expertise: “Varro, a man most learned in every field.” He read so much that we wonder he had time to write anything. He wrote so much that we can hardly believe anyone could have read it all. Suppose this man, I say, so great in talent and so great in learning, had been an opponent and destroyer of the so-called divine things he writes about. Suppose he had said they belonged not to religion but to superstition. Even then, I do not know whether he would have recorded so many things in them that deserve to be laughed at, despised, and detested.note

But in fact he so worshiped these same gods, and held that they should be worshiped, that in this very work he says he fears they may perish, not from enemy attack but from the neglect of the citizens. He says he is rescuing them from this neglect as if from a collapse. Through books of this kind he is storing them away and preserving them in the memory of good men. He claims that his care is more useful than that of Metellus, who is celebrated for rescuing the sacred objects of Vesta from the fire, or of Aeneas, who rescued the household gods from the destruction of Troy. And yet he hands down for the ages to read things that the wise and the unwise alike would rightly judge must be rejected as most hostile to the truth of religion. What should we think, then? This most acute and learned man was not set free by the Holy Spirit, and so he was oppressed by the custom and laws of his city. Yet, under the pretext of commending religion, he was unwilling to keep silent about the things that troubled him.note

He covered these four things I have mentioned in three books each. He wrote the first three about people, the next three about places, the third set about times, and the fourth about rites. Here too, with the most subtle distinction, he set out who offers, where they offer, when they offer, and what they offer. But he also had to say, and this was most expected, to whom they offer. So he wrote the last three about the gods themselves, which made five times three, or fifteen. Yet there are sixteen in all, as we said, because at the start of these too he placed a single separate book that would first speak about all of them.

Having finished this, he went on to subdivide that fivefold arrangement. The first three books, which concern people, he divided so that the first is on the pontiffs, the second on the augurs, and the third on the Board of Fifteen for sacred rites. The second three, which concern places, he arranged so that one deals with shrines, another with sacred temples, and the third with religious places. The three that follow concern times, that is, feast days. Of these he made one on holidays, another on the circus games, and the third on theatrical shows. Of the fourth three, which concern rites, he gave one to consecrations, another to private rites, and the last to public ones. In the three that remain, the gods themselves come last, following this procession of observances, as it were, for all this worship was offered to them. The first deals with the certain gods, the second with the uncertain gods, and the third and last of all with the principal and select gods.note

But the true religion was not instituted by some earthly city. On the contrary, it is the true religion that instituted the heavenly city. And it is the true God, the giver of eternal life, who inspires it in his true worshipers and teaches it to them.

What, then, does he mean when he says: “If we were writing about the whole nature of gods and men, we would have finished with the divine before touching on the human”? He writes about the whole nature of the gods, or about some of it, or about none at all. If he writes about the whole, it must certainly be placed before human matters. If about some, why should that part not also precede human matters? Or is some part of the gods unworthy to be preferred even to the entire nature of human beings? And if it is too much for some divine part to be placed before all human matters, at least it is worthy to be placed before Roman ones.

For he wrote his books on human matters as they concern Rome alone, not the whole world. Yet he said he had rightly placed them before the books on divine matters in the order of writing, as the painter comes before the painted panel and the builder before the building. In this he most openly admits that these divine matters too were instituted by human beings, like a painting or a structure. It remains, then, to conclude that he wrote about no nature of the gods at all. He did not wish to say this openly but left it for those who understand. For “not the whole” is usually understood to mean “some,” but it can also mean “none.” After all, what is none is neither the whole nor some.

As he himself says, if it were the whole nature of the gods he was writing about, it would have to come before human matters in the order of writing. And as truth cries out even though he is silent, it would certainly have to come before Roman matters even if it were not the whole but at least some of it. But it is rightly placed after them; therefore it is none. So he did not wish to put human things before divine things; rather, he refused to put false things before true ones. In what he wrote about human matters he followed the history of actual events. But in what he wrote about the matters he calls divine, what did he follow but opinions about empty things? This, no doubt, is what he wished to show by a subtle hint. He not only wrote about the one after the other but also gave the reason why he did so. Had he kept silent about that reason, others might perhaps have defended what he did in some other way.

But in the very reason he gave, he left others nothing to conjecture as they pleased. He showed clearly enough that what he placed first was human beings ahead of human institutions, not human nature ahead of the nature of the gods. He thus admitted that he wrote his books on divine matters about the falsehood that belongs to error, not about the truth that belongs to nature. He said this more openly elsewhere, as I mentioned in the fourth book. There he said he would have written according to the pattern of nature if he were founding a new city himself. But since he had found an old one already in place, he could only follow its custom.

For in it we find that one god was born from a head, another from a thigh, another from drops of blood. In it we find that gods stole, committed adultery and were slaves to a human being. In short, in it everything is attributed to the gods that can happen not only to a human being but even to the most despised human being.” Here at least, where he could, where he dared, where he thought he could do it with impunity, he stated without the fog of any ambiguity how great a wrong was done to the nature of the gods by utterly lying fables. For he was speaking not of natural theology, nor of civil theology, but of mythical theology, which he thought he was free to criticize.note

But that first kind, utterly lying and utterly shameful, he did not remove from the cities. Oh, the religious ears of the populace—the Roman ones among them! What the philosophers argue about the immortal gods they cannot bear. But what the poets sing and the actors perform—things that are fictions contrary to the dignity and nature of the immortals, things that can happen not only to a human being but even to the most despised human being—these they not only bear but even listen to gladly. And not only that: they also decree that these things please the gods themselves, and that it is by these things that the gods must be appeased.

“The third kind,” he says, “is the one that citizens in cities, and above all priests, ought to know and administer. It covers which gods are to be worshiped publicly, and which rites and sacrifices it is proper for each person to perform.” Let us also attend to what follows. “The first theology,” he says, “is especially suited to the theater, the second to the world, the third to the city.” Who does not see to which he has given the palm? To the second, of course, which he said above belongs to the philosophers. For he testifies that it pertains to the world, and these people think that nothing in existence is more excellent than the world. But those two theologies, the first and the third—that is, of the theater and of the city—did he distinguish them or join them?

For we see that what belongs to the city cannot automatically pertain to the world as well, even though we see that cities are in the world. It can happen, after all, that in a city, following false opinions, things are worshiped and believed whose nature exists nowhere, either in the world or outside it. But where is the theater, if not in the city? Who established the theater, if not the city? For what purpose did it establish it, if not for theatrical shows? And where do theatrical shows belong, if not among the divine things about which these books are written with such great skill?

For you say that the mythical gods are suited to the theater, the natural to the world, the civil to the city. Yet the world is a divine work, while cities and theaters are human works. And the gods laughed at in the theaters are no other than those adored in the temples, and you put on games for no other gods than those to whom you sacrifice victims. How much more freely and more subtly you would have divided these things if you had said that some gods are natural and others established by human beings! You could have added that, concerning the established gods, the writings of the poets say one thing and those of the priests another, yet both are so friendly with each other in their partnership in falsehood that both are pleasing to the demons, to whom the teaching of truth is hostile. Setting aside for a little, then, the theology they call natural, which must be discussed later, do we really accept that eternal life is to be sought or hoped for from the gods of poetry and theater, of games and the stage? Far from it! Rather, may the true God avert such monstrous and sacrilegious madness. What?

Is eternal life to be asked of those gods whom these things please and whom these things appease, when their crimes are rehearsed there again and again? No one, I think, is so insane as to plunge to such a precipice of raving impiety. So neither by mythical nor by civil theology does anyone attain everlasting life. For the one sows by inventing shameful things about the gods; the other reaps by approving them. The one scatters lies; the other gathers them up. The one assails divine things with false crimes; the other embraces the shows of those crimes among its divine things. The one makes human songs ring with wicked fictions about the gods; the other consecrates those fictions in the festivals of the gods themselves. The one sings the crimes and outrages of the deities; the other loves them. The one reveals or invents them; the other either bears witness to them if true or takes delight in them even if false. Both are shameful and both are damnable. But the theatrical one openly professes public shamefulness, while the urban one decks itself out with the other’s shamefulness.

Is eternal life to be hoped for from the very source that pollutes this brief and temporal life? Or does association with wicked men pollute our life if they worm their way into our affections and our assent, while fellowship with demons, who are worshiped with their own crimes, does not pollute it? If the crimes are real, how bad the demons! If invented, how badly they are worshiped!

For he says that what the poets write is less than the peoples ought to follow, while what the philosophers write is more than it is expedient for the common people to investigate. “These are so much at odds,” he says, “that nevertheless not a few things have been taken from both kinds into civil doctrine. Therefore we shall write about what they have in common together with what is properly civil; and in this our fellowship ought to be greater with the philosophers than with the poets.” So there is to be none with the poets. And yet elsewhere he says that, as regards the generations of the gods, the peoples have been more inclined toward the poets than toward the natural philosophers. Here he said what ought to happen; there, what does happen. He said that the natural philosophers wrote for the sake of usefulness, the poets for the sake of delight. Consequently, what the poets have written and the peoples ought not to follow are the crimes of the gods—which nevertheless delight both the peoples and the gods.

For the poets write, as he says, for the sake of delight, not of usefulness; yet what they write is what the gods demand and the peoples put on.

Why are Forculus, who presides over doors (fores), and Limentinus, who presides over the threshold (limen), male gods, while between them Cardea, who guards the hinge (cardo), is female? Are not these things, which serious poets judged unworthy of their verses, found in the books on divine things? Does the Diana of the theater carry weapons, while the Diana of the city is simply a virgin? Is the Apollo of the stage a lyre player, while the Apollo of Delphi has nothing to do with that art? But these things are respectable compared with the more shameful ones. What did they think of Jupiter himself, those who set up his nurse on the Capitol? Did they not bear witness in favor of Euhemerus, who wrote, not with the chatter of fable but with the diligence of history, that all such gods had been human beings and mortals? And those who placed gods at Jupiter’s table as banqueters (epulones), his hangers-on (parasiti)—what else did they intend than that the rites be a farce? For if a mime had said that Jupiter’s hangers-on were invited to his banquet, he would certainly seem to have been angling for a laugh. Varro said it!note

And he said it not when mocking the gods but when commending them. The books on divine, not human, things testify that he wrote this, and not where he was describing theatrical shows, but where he was setting out the laws of the Capitol. In short, he is overcome by such facts and admits that, just as they made the gods in human form, so they believed that the gods took delight in human pleasures.

So as she was leaving, the first to meet her was a very rich young man, Tarutius. He fell in love with her and kept her with him for a long time, and when he died he left her as his heir. Having come into a very large fortune, she did not want to seem ungrateful for the divine payment. So she did what she thought would be most acceptable to the deities: she in turn made the Roman people her heir. When she disappeared, the will was found. For these services, they say, she even earned divine honors.

There are the rites of Juno, and these used to be celebrated on her beloved island of Samos, where she was given in marriage to Jupiter. There are the rites of Ceres, in which Proserpina, carried off by Pluto, is searched for. There are the rites of Venus, in which her lover Adonis, a most beautiful young man killed by a boar’s tusk, is mourned. There are the rites of the Mother of the gods, in which Attis, a handsome youth whom she loved and castrated out of a woman’s jealousy, is lamented—even through the misery of castrated men, whom they call Galli. Since these things are more hideous than any foulness of the stage, why do they strive to separate the poets’ fictions about the gods, which supposedly belong to the theater, from civil theology, which they would have belong to the city—as though separating the unworthy and shameful from the honorable and worthy? There is rather reason to be grateful to the actors, who have spared people’s eyes and have not laid bare in their shows everything that is hidden within the walls of the sacred buildings.note

What good is to be thought of their rites that are covered in darkness, when those brought out into the light are so detestable? Certainly, what they do in secret through the castrated priests is their own affair. But these same men, wretchedly and shamefully unmanned and corrupted, they have been quite unable to hide. Let them persuade whom they can that they do something holy through such men, who, as they cannot deny, are counted among their holy things and move among them. We do not know what they do, but we know through whom they do it. For we know what is done on the stage, where no castrated priest has ever entered, not even in a chorus of prostitutes. And yet even those things are performed by shameful and disreputable people—for they ought not to be performed by respectable ones. What, then, are those rites, for whose performance holiness has chosen men such as not even the obscenity of the stage has admitted?

Yet however they may interpret her rites and refer them to the nature of things, for men to be used sexually as women is not according to nature but against nature. This disease, this crime, this disgrace is openly professed among those rites, whereas among the vicious morals of mankind it is scarcely confessed even under torture. Again, these rites are proved to be fouler than the shameful things of the stage. If they are excused and purified on the ground that they have their own interpretations, which show that they signify the nature of things, why should not the poets’ works likewise be excused and purified?

For many have interpreted these too in the same way. They go so far that what is called the most monstrous and unspeakable thing in the poets—that Saturn devoured his own children—some interpret to mean that the length of time, which is signified by the name of Saturn, consumes whatever it itself begets; or, as the same Varro thinks, that Saturn pertains to seeds, which fall back again into the earth from which they spring. Others interpret it in other ways, and so likewise with the rest.

For the civil and the mythical are both mythical and both civil. Anyone who wisely examines the vanities and obscenities of both will find both mythical. Anyone who notices that the theatrical shows belonging to the mythical kind are part of the festivals of the civil gods and of the divine things of the cities will find both civil. How, then, can the power to give eternal life be attributed to any of these gods, when their own images and rites prove them most like the mythical gods, who are so openly rejected—in forms, ages, sex and dress, in marriages, generations and rituals? In all of these it is evident either that they were human beings, and that rites and solemnities were established for them according to each one’s life or death, with demons insinuating and confirming this error; or at any rate that the most unclean spirits crept in, seizing on any opportunity, to deceive human minds.

That is how the Bacchanalia used to be celebrated, with the utmost madness. Varro himself admits that the Bacchants could not have done such things unless their minds were deranged. Later, however, these rites displeased a saner Senate, and it ordered them abolished. Here at least, perhaps, they finally perceived what unclean spirits can do in human minds while they are taken for gods. Such things certainly would not happen in the theaters. There, after all, people play; they do not rave. Yet to have gods who are delighted even by such plays is itself something like madness.note

So the guardianship of the good gods would not prevail against the savagery of a harmful god unless they were many against one. They had to resist him, rough, frightful and uncultivated as a woodland god is, with signs of cultivation, which are his opposites. Is this, then, the innocence of the gods? Is this their harmony? Are these the health-giving deities of cities, more laughable than the farces of the theaters?

If the husband laboring at that task really had to be helped by the gods, would not some one god or one goddess be enough? Would Venus alone be too little? She is even said to be named for this very thing, that without force a woman does not cease to be a virgin. Human beings have some sense of shame, even if the deities have none. So when a married couple believe that so many gods of both sexes are present and intent on this task, are they not so overcome with shame that he is less aroused and she resists more? And certainly the goddess Virginensis is there to untie the virgin’s girdle. The god Subigus is there so that she may be subdued to her husband. The goddess Prema is there so that, once subdued, she may be held down and not move. What, then, is the goddess Pertunda doing there? Let her blush and go outside. Let the husband do something too. It is utterly indecent for anyone but him to accomplish what her name means.note

But perhaps she is tolerated because she is said to be a goddess and not a god. For if she were believed to be male and called Pertundus, the husband would demand more help against him, for the sake of his wife’s chastity, than the new mother needs against Silvanus. But why do I say this, when Priapus too is there, all too male? The new bride was required to sit on his monstrous and most obscene phallus, according to the most decent and most religious custom of matrons!

That is why they have even compelled their worshipers by terrifying commands to dedicate the filth of mythical theology to them, to put it into their festivals, and to count it among divine matters. In this way they have shown more plainly that they themselves are utterly unclean spirits. And they have made that theatrical theology, cast off and rejected as it is, a member and part of this urban theology, chosen and approved as that supposedly is. So, though the whole is shameful and false and contains fictitious gods, one part of it is in the books of the priests and the other in the songs of the poets. Whether it has other parts as well is another question. For now, following Varro’s division, I have shown sufficiently, I think, that both the urban and the theatrical theology belong to a single civil theology. Both, then, are alike in shamefulness and absurdity, in indignity and falsehood. Far be it from the truly religious, therefore, to hope for eternal life from either the one or the other.

Who, then, could be so slow as not to understand what this man is doing? He sets out and lays bare civil theology so carefully. He shows that it is like that unworthy and disgraceful mythical theology. And he teaches quite plainly that the mythical is itself a part of it. All this is meant to make room in people’s minds only for the natural theology, which he says belongs to the philosophers. He goes about it with such subtlety that he censures the mythical but does not dare to censure the civil, though by exposing it he shows it to be censurable. In this way both are rejected by the judgment of those who understand rightly, and the natural alone remains to be chosen. That must be discussed more carefully in its proper place, with the help of the true God.

Then, a little later, after setting out the opinions of certain philosophers in commending natural theology, he raises an objection against himself and says: “At this point someone says: ‘Am I to believe that the sky and the earth are gods, and that some are above the moon and others below it? Am I to put up with either Plato or the Peripatetic Strato, one of whom made God without a body, the other without a mind?’” And replying to this he says: “Well then, do the dreams of Titus Tatius or Romulus or Tullus Hostilius seem truer to you? Tatius dedicated the goddess Cloacina. Romulus dedicated Picus and Tiberinus. Hostilius dedicated Fear and Pallor, the most hideous of human feelings. One of these is an agitation of a frightened mind; the other is not even a disease of the body, but a color. Will you rather believe in these deities and receive them into heaven?” And how freely he wrote about the rites themselves, cruel and shameful as they are! “One man,” he says, “cuts off his male parts; another slashes his arms.note

“What do they fear from the gods when they are angry, if this is how they win their favor? Gods ought not to be worshiped in any way at all if this is what they want. So great is the frenzy of a mind disturbed and driven from its seat that gods are appeased in a way in which not even the most hideous men rage, men whose cruelty has passed into legend. Tyrants have torn the limbs of some people; they have ordered no one to tear his own. Some have been castrated for the pleasure of a king’s lust. But no one, at a master’s command, has laid hands on himself to stop being a man. These people butcher themselves in temples; they make their supplications with their own wounds and blood. If anyone has leisure to look at what they do and what they suffer, he will find things so unseemly for honorable people, so unworthy of the free, so unlike the sane, that no one would have doubted they were mad if they were mad in smaller numbers. As it is, the crowd of the insane is the defense of their sanity.”

“There are women who arrange the hair of Juno and Minerva: standing far from the temple, let alone the statue, they move their fingers like hairdressers. There are women who hold a mirror. There are men who summon the gods to stand by them at their court appearances, and men who present them with petitions and instruct them in their case. A learned leading mime, by now a decrepit old man, used to perform a mime on the Capitol every day, as if the gods enjoyed watching someone whom men had stopped watching. Every kind of craftsman sits there idle, working for the immortal gods.” And a little later: “Yet these people,” he says, “though they offer the god a superfluous service, do not offer a shameful or disgraceful one. There are women who sit on the Capitol and think they are loved by Jupiter. They are not even frightened by the thought of Juno, who, if you choose to believe the poets, is very quick to anger.”

“All this ignoble crowd of gods, which a long superstition has piled up over long ages, we shall worship,” he says, “in such a way as to remember that their worship has more to do with custom than with reality.” So neither those laws nor custom established anything in civil theology that pleased the gods or had to do with reality. Yet this man, whom philosophers had made free, so to speak, was an illustrious senator of the Roman people. Because of this he worshiped what he censured, did what he condemned, and adored what he blamed. Philosophy, evidently, had taught him something great: not to be superstitious in the world, but, for the sake of the citizens’ laws and human customs, to play the actor. He was not to play a feigning actor in the theater; he was to imitate one in a temple. This was all the more damnable because the things he did falsely he did in such a way that the people thought he was doing them genuinely. The actor, by contrast, gives delight by playing rather than deceiving by trickery.

For he says: “They, at least, know the reasons for their rite; but the greater part of the people do what they do without knowing why.” As for the Jewish rites, there are several questions: why they were instituted by divine authority, and to what extent, and how afterward, at the appropriate time, the same authority removed them from the people of God, to whom the mystery of eternal life has been revealed. We have spoken of this elsewhere, especially when arguing against the Manichaeans, and it will be discussed in a more suitable place in this work.note

These gods are worshiped with such shamefulness, and unless they are worshiped so, they grow angry still more shamefully. By this they confess themselves to be utterly unclean spirits. From what has been said, I think, no one ought to doubt that none of them is the giver of happiness. Further, how could one who does not give happiness give eternal life? For we call that life eternal in which there is happiness without end. If the soul lives in eternal punishments, with which the unclean spirits themselves will also be tormented, that is eternal death rather than life. Indeed, there is no greater or worse death than where death does not die. But the nature of the soul, being created immortal, cannot exist without some kind of life. Its ultimate death, therefore, is alienation from the life of God in an eternity of punishment.

Eternal life, then—that is, life happy without any end—is given only by the one who gives true happiness. Those whom this civil theology worships have been proven unable to give it. Therefore they are not to be worshiped. That holds not only for the sake of these temporal and earthly things, as we showed in the five preceding books. It holds much more for the sake of eternal life, which will come after death, and this is what we have argued in this single book, with the earlier books contributing as well. But the force of inveterate habit has its roots very deep. So if anyone thinks I have argued too little for rejecting and avoiding this civil theology, let him turn his attention to another volume, which, with God’s help, is to be joined to this one.

On this point I do not repeat what Tertullian said, perhaps more wittily than truly: “If gods are selected like onions, then surely the rest are judged rejects.” I do not say this, because I see that even from among the select, some are selected for something greater and more excellent. So in the army, when recruits have been chosen, some of them are chosen again for some greater feat of arms. And when men are chosen in the Church to become its leaders, the rest are certainly not rejected, since all good believers are rightly called the elect. In a building, cornerstones are chosen, but the other stones, which are assigned to other parts of the structure, are not rejected. Grapes are chosen for eating, and the others, which we leave for drinking, are not rejected. There is no need to run through many examples, since the point is plain.note

So the mere fact that certain gods were selected from among many is no reason to fault the man who wrote about them, or their worshipers, or the gods themselves. We should rather notice who these gods are, and for what purpose they appear to have been selected.

Saturn is there too, because of the seed itself. Liber is there, who “liberates” the male by the release of seed. Libera is there, whom they also identify with Venus, and who confers the same benefit on the female, so that she too is freed by the emission of seed. All of these are among those called select. But the goddess Mena is there too, who presides over menstrual flow. She is a daughter of Jupiter, yet she is of no account. And in his book on the select gods, the same author assigns this province of menstrual flow to Juno herself, who is queen even among the select gods. Here, as Juno Lucina, she presides over that same blood together with Mena, her stepdaughter. Two very obscure gods are there too, whoever they may be, Vitumnus and Sentinus. One of them bestows life on the unborn child, the other the senses. And surely these two, the lowliest of all, provide far more than all those grandees, the select.note

For without life and sensation, what is all that is carried in a woman’s womb but some utterly worthless thing, comparable to mud and dust?

Beings that reason and understand are certainly superior to those that live and feel without intellect and reason, as cattle do. In the same way, things endowed with life and sensation are rightly ranked above things that neither live nor feel. So Vitumnus the life-giver and Sentinus the sense-giver ought to have been counted among the select gods. They have a better claim than Janus the admitter of seed, Saturn the giver or sower of seed, and Liber and Libera the movers or emitters of seed. Those seeds are not even worth thinking about unless they come to life and sensation. Yet these select gifts are given not by the select gods, but by certain unknown gods who are neglected in comparison with the dignity of the others.

Suppose the answer is this. Janus has power over all beginnings, and so the opening for conception is fittingly attributed to him. Saturn has power over all seeds, and so the sowing of a human being cannot be separated from his work either. Liber and Libera have power over the emission of all seeds, and so they also preside over what concerns the replacement of one human generation by the next. Juno has power over all purifications and all births, and so she is present at women’s purgations and at the births of human beings. Then let them find an answer about Vitumnus and Sentinus. Do they want these two also to have power over all things that live and feel? If they grant this, let them notice how much higher they will be placing them. For to be born from seeds happens on the earth and from the earth, while to live and to feel, they believe, belongs even to the gods of the stars.

But suppose they say that only the things which come alive in the flesh and are sustained by the senses are attributed to Vitumnus and Sentinus. Then why does the god who makes all things live and feel not also give life and sensation to the flesh, bestowing this gift on unborn children too by his universal operation? And what need is there of Vitumnus and Sentinus? Perhaps these fleshly matters, as the farthest and lowest, were entrusted to them as household servants by the one who presides over life and sensation universally. In that case, are those select gods so short of servants that they could not find anyone to whom they too might entrust these tasks? For all the nobility that seemed to qualify them for selection, were they forced to work alongside the lowly? Juno is select, she is queen, and she is both sister and wife of Jupiter. Yet she is Iterduca, the guide of children on their way, and she works alongside the lowliest goddesses, Abeona and Adeona.note

There they also placed the goddess Mind, who gives children a good mind. She is not placed among the select, as though anything greater could be given to a human being. But Juno is placed there, because she is Iterduca and Domiduca, the one who guides on the way and the one who leads home. As if there were any use in making a journey and being led home when the mind is not good! These selectors by no means placed the goddess of that gift among the select deities. She surely ought to have been ranked above Minerva too, to whom, among these petty tasks, they assigned children’s memory. Who would doubt that it is far better to have a good mind than any memory, however vast? No one who has a good mind is wicked. But some of the very worst people have an amazing memory, and they are all the worse because they are less able to forget the evil they plan. And yet Minerva is among the select gods, while the goddess Mind lies buried in the worthless crowd. What shall I say of Virtue? What of Felicity?

I have already said a good deal about them in the fourth book. Though they held these two to be goddesses, they chose to give them no place among the select gods. Yet they gave a place there to Mars and Orcus, the one the maker of deaths, the other their receiver.

She should have held the top place among the select gods, for it is in them above all that she showed what she could do. We see that they were selected not for outstanding virtue, nor by a happiness grounded in reason, but by the random power of Fortune, as her worshipers think of her. That most eloquent man Sallust perhaps had the gods themselves in view when he said: “But surely fortune rules in everything; it makes all things famous or obscure according to whim rather than truth.” For they cannot find a reason why Venus was made famous and Virtue left obscure, since they consecrated both as deities and their merits do not bear comparison. Or suppose fame was earned by whatever more people seek, and more people seek Venus than Virtue. Then why was the goddess Minerva made famous and the goddess Money left obscure?note

After all, greed attracts more of humankind than skill does. Even among the skilled, you will rarely find anyone who does not offer his art for sale at a price in money. And the thing for which something is done is always valued more highly than what is done for the sake of something else. So if this selection of gods was made by the judgment of the foolish multitude, why was the goddess Money not ranked above Minerva, since many people are craftsmen for the sake of money? But if this distinction was made by the wise few, why was Virtue not ranked above Venus, when reason ranks her far above?

At the very least, as I said, Fortune herself should have had the chief place among the select. Those who credit her most believe that she “rules in everything” and “makes all things famous or obscure according to whim rather than truth.” If she had so much power even over the gods that by her random judgment she made famous whom she pleased and obscure whom she pleased, she should have held that chief place, since she has such supreme power over the gods themselves. Or are we to suppose that she could not be there for no other reason than that Fortune herself had bad fortune? Then she was her own adversary, for she made others eminent and did not become eminent herself.

Yet hardly one of the unselected gods is found who has brought infamy on his name by some crime. On the other hand, hardly one of the select has not been branded with some notable disgrace. The select came down to the humble tasks of the lowly, but the lowly did not rise to the lofty crimes of the select. About Janus, indeed, nothing that amounts to a scandal readily comes to my mind. Perhaps he really was like that, and lived more innocently and further removed from crimes and vices. He kindly received Saturn when Saturn was in flight, and he shared his kingdom with his guest, so that each even founded his own city: Janus the Janiculum, Saturn Saturnia. But in worshiping the gods these people hungered for every kind of disgrace. So, finding his life less shameful than the others’, they disfigured him with the monstrous ugliness of his statue. They made him now two-faced, now even four-faced, as though he were a double.note

Or perhaps they wanted this: since most of the select gods had lost face by committing shameful deeds, the more innocent Janus was, the more faces he should show?note

These are the mysteries of doctrine which this most learned man had penetrated, so that he could bring these things out into the light. But, you most acute of men, did you lose in these mysteries of doctrine that good sense by which you soberly judged two things? You judged that those who first set up images for the peoples both took away fear from their fellow citizens and added error. You also judged that the ancient Romans worshiped the gods more purely without images. It was those ancient Romans who gave you the authority to dare to say this against the later Romans. For if those most ancient Romans had also worshiped images, perhaps you would have suppressed in fearful silence that whole view about not setting up images, true as it was. And you would have proclaimed these mysteries of doctrine, embodied in such pernicious and empty fictions, all the more loquaciously and loftily.note

Yet your soul, so learned and so gifted, could by no means reach its God through these mysteries of doctrine, and for this we grieve for you greatly. That God is the one by whom your soul was made, not with whom it was made. Your soul is not a portion of him, but his creation. He is not the soul of all things, but the one who made every soul. By his illumination alone the soul becomes happy, if it is not ungrateful for his grace. What kind of mysteries of doctrine these are, and how highly they should be valued, what follows will show. Meanwhile, this most learned man admits that the soul of the world and its parts are the true gods. From this we understand that his whole theology could extend only as far as the nature of the rational soul. This includes the natural theology itself, to which he attributes the most.

For he says very little about natural theology, by way of preface, in this last book, the one he wrote on the select gods. In it we shall see whether, through interpretations drawn from natural philosophy, he can trace civil theology back to this natural theology. If he can, it will be wholly natural, and then what need was there to separate civil theology from it with such careful distinction? But suppose it was rightly kept separate. Even this natural theology that he favors is not true, for it reaches as far as the soul, not as far as the true God who made the soul too. How much more abject and false, then, is this civil theology, which is mostly occupied with the nature of bodies! Its own interpretations will show this, though they have sought them out and explained them with such great diligence. I must mention some of these interpretations, as is necessary.

From the highest circuit of the heaven down to the circle of the moon, the souls of the ether are the constellations and the stars. These heavenly gods are not only understood to exist but can actually be seen. Between the moon’s orbit and the tops of the clouds and winds are the souls of the air. These are seen with the mind, not with the eyes, and they are called heroes, Lares and Genii. This, then, is the natural theology briefly set out in that preface. It pleased not only Varro but many philosophers. It will have to be discussed more thoroughly once I have finished, with the help of the true God, what remains to be said about civil theology as it concerns the select gods.note

Would they not interpret this two-faced god far more elegantly if they said he was both Janus and Terminus, and gave one face to beginnings and the other to ends? For whoever is at work must keep both in view. In every movement of his activity, the one who does not look back to the beginning does not look ahead to the end. So the intention that looks forward must be linked to the memory that looks back, for someone who has forgotten what he began will not find a way to finish it. Now if they thought that the happy life begins in this world and is completed beyond it, and for that reason assigned to Janus, that is, to the world, only the power over beginnings, then surely they would rank Terminus above him and would not shut him out of the select gods. And yet even as things are, with the beginnings and ends of temporal things handled by these two gods, more honor ought to have been given to Terminus.

For there is greater joy when anything is completed, whereas undertakings are full of anxiety until they are brought to their end. That end is what anyone who begins something most seeks and aims at, awaits and longs for, and he does not rejoice over something begun unless it is finished.

Besides, what could be more absurd than this? In the world itself they find no two doors set opposite each other through which it might let anything in or send anything out. Yet from our mouth and throat, which the world does not resemble, they want to make up an image of the world in Janus, and all for the sake of the palate alone, which Janus does not resemble either. And when they make him four-faced and call him Janus Geminus, “Twin Janus,” they interpret this as referring to the four quarters of the world, as if the world looked out at something the way Janus does with all his faces.note

Then again, if Janus is the world and the world consists of four parts, the image of two-faced Janus is false. Or if it is true because the whole world is commonly meant by the names East and West, then when we name the other two parts, North and South, will anyone call the world “twin,” as they call the four-faced Janus “Twin”? They have nothing at all by which to interpret four doors, open to those going in and out, as a likeness of the world, in the way that for the two-faced image they found at least something to say in the human mouth. Unless perhaps Neptune comes to the rescue and offers them a fish, which besides the opening of mouth and throat also has gills opening on the right and the left! And yet from this folly, with all its doors, no soul escapes except the one that hears the Truth saying, “I am the door.”note

But the causes assigned to Jupiter are causes that produce, not things produced, and there is no way they can be preceded in time by the things made or by the beginnings of the things made. For the thing that makes is always prior to the thing that is made. So if the beginnings of things made belong to Janus, they are not for that reason prior to the efficient causes they attribute to Jupiter. For just as nothing is made, so nothing is even begun in order to be made, unless an efficient cause has gone before it. Now this god holds in his power all the causes of all natures that have been made and of all natural things. If the peoples call him Jupiter and worship him with such insults and such wicked accusations, they bind themselves with a fouler sacrilege than if they thought there was no god at all.

It would therefore be better for them to give the name of Jupiter to some other being, one worthy of shameful and disgraceful honors. They could substitute an empty fiction for them to blaspheme instead, just as a stone is said to have been substituted for Saturn to swallow in place of his son. That would be better than calling this god both the Thunderer and an adulterer, both the ruler of the whole world and one dissipated in so many debaucheries, both the holder of the supreme causes of all natures and natural things and one who has no good cause of his own.note

So the body of the world alone is not god. Either its soul alone is god, or body and mind together, but in such a way that it is god because of the mind, not the body. If, then, Janus is the world and Janus is a god, will they say that Jupiter, in order to be a god at all, is some part of Janus? On the contrary, they usually attribute the whole universe to Jupiter, which is where the saying comes from, “All things are full of Jove.” So if Jupiter is to be a god, and above all the king of the gods, they can think of him as nothing other than the world, so that, on their view, he reigns over the other gods as his own parts. In support of this view the same Varro also explains some lines of Valerius Soranus, in a book he wrote on the worship of the gods, separate from these. The lines are these: “Almighty Jupiter, of kings and things and gods the begetter, and the mother of the gods, god one and all.”note

In the same book they are explained as follows. They held that the male is the one who emits seed and the female the one who receives it, and that Jupiter is the world, emitting all seeds from himself and receiving them back into himself. So, Varro says, Soranus had good reason to write “Jupiter begetter and mother,” and no less reason to say that one and all are the same, for the world is one, and in that one are all things.

If they think this is right, let them also say that Jupiter himself is as many gods as the surnames they have given him for his many powers. For all the things from which those surnames were drawn are many and diverse. I mention a few of them.

I think the causes of things and their first beginnings, for whose sake they wanted the one world to be two gods, Jupiter and Janus, are closer to each other than holding the world together and giving the breast to animals. Yet they did not feel compelled to have two gods for these two works, so far apart in power and dignity. Instead the one Jupiter was called Tigillus for the first and Ruminus for the second. I will not say that offering the breast to suckling animals might have suited Juno better than Jupiter, especially since there was also a goddess Rumina to lend him her help or service in this work. For I suspect the reply could be that Juno herself is nothing other than Jupiter, according to those lines of Valerius Soranus where it is said: “Almighty Jupiter, of kings and things and gods the begetter, and the mother of the gods.”

Why, then, was he also called Ruminus, when perhaps, for those who look into it more carefully, he will turn out to be that goddess Rumina as well? For if it rightly seemed unworthy of the majesty of the gods that, in a single ear of grain, one god should look after the joint of the stalk and a goddess after the husk, how much more unworthy is it that one very lowly matter, the feeding of animals at the breast, should be looked after by the power of two gods! One of them is Jupiter, the king of all himself, and he does this not even with his own wife but with some obscure Rumina or other, unless he himself is also Rumina herself: Ruminus, perhaps, for suckling males and Rumina for females! I would indeed say that they did not want to give Jupiter a feminine name, were he not called “begetter and mother” in those lines, and did I not read that among his other surnames he was also called Pecunia [Money], a goddess we found among those petty deities and mentioned in the fourth book.note

But since both men and women have money, why he was not called both Pecunia and Pecunius, like Rumina and Ruminus, is their business.

For we call the wise, the just and the good rich, even when they have no money or very little, since they are richer in virtues, and through these, even in the necessities of the body, what they have is enough for them. The greedy, on the other hand, we call poor, always gaping after more and always in need. They can possess sums of money however great, but in any abundance of it, however large, they cannot help being in need. And we rightly call the true God himself rich, not in money, however, but in omnipotence. So those with money are called rich, but they are inwardly needy if they are greedy; likewise those without money are called poor, but they are inwardly rich if they are wise. What, then, should a wise man think of this theology, in which the king of the gods has taken the name of a thing that no wise man has ever craved?

If anything that pertained to eternal life were being learned to good effect from this teaching, how much more readily would they have called the god who rules the world not Money but Wisdom, the love of which cleanses us from the filth of avarice, that is, from the love of money!

Whom else do they believe has this power but the world, to which it was said: “Jupiter, begetter and mother”? And in another passage he says that a genius is each person’s rational soul, and that therefore each individual has his own, but that such a soul of the world is god. In saying this he certainly brings us back to the same point: that the soul of the world itself is to be believed to be the universal genius, so to speak. This, then, is the one they call Jupiter. For if every genius is a god, and every man’s soul is a genius, it follows that every man’s soul is a god. And if sheer absurdity forces even them to recoil from this, it remains that they call him uniquely and preeminently the god Genius whom they call the soul of the world, and therefore Jupiter.

Suppose speech itself is said to be Mercury, as their interpretations of him show. For they say that he is called Mercury as if medius currens [running in the middle], because speech runs between people as a go-between; that he is called Ἑρμῆς [Hermes] in Greek because speech, or interpretation, which certainly belongs to speech, is called ἑρμηνεία [interpretation]; that he also presides over goods (merces) because speech becomes the go-between for sellers and buyers; that his wings on his head and feet signify that speech is borne through the air like a bird; that he is called the messenger (nuntius) because through speech all our thoughts are announced (enuntiantur). If, then, Mercury is speech itself, he is not a god, even by their own admission. But when they make into gods for themselves beings who are not even demons, then by praying to unclean spirits they are possessed by those who are not gods but demons.

Likewise, since they could not find for Mars either any element or part of the world where he might perform works of nature of any kind, they said he was the god of war—which is a work of human beings, and not a desirable one. So if Felicity granted perpetual peace, Mars would have nothing to do. But if Mars is war itself, as Mercury is speech, then I wish that, just as it is plain that he is not a god, so there were no war either, to be called a god even falsely.

And who would not laugh when they call Jupiter the king of all, since his star is so far outshone by the star of Venus? It ought to have been as much brighter than the others as he himself is more powerful. They reply that it only seems so because the one thought dimmer is higher and much farther removed from the earth. If, then, greater dignity has earned the higher place, why is Saturn higher than Jupiter up there? Or could the emptiness of the myth that makes Jupiter king not reach as far as the stars? Was Saturn allowed to hold at least in heaven what he could not hold in his own kingdom or on the Capitol? And why did Janus not receive any star? If it is because he is the world and all things are in him—Jupiter too is the world, and yet he has one.

Or did Janus settle his case as best he could, and in return for the one star he lacks among the heavenly bodies, receive so many faces on earth? Next, they consider Mercury and Mars parts of the world only because of their stars, so that they can have them as gods, since speech and war are certainly not parts of the world but human activities. If so, why have they made no altars, no rites, no temples for the Ram, the Bull, the Crab, the Scorpion and the rest of this kind, which they count as heavenly signs? These consist not of single stars, but each of many, and they say they are set higher than those others, in the highest heaven, where a steadier motion gives the stars an unwandering course. Why have they not held them to be gods—I do not say among these select gods, but not even among those plebeian ones, so to speak?

Indeed, they also want the Great Mother to be the same as Ceres, whom they say is nothing other than the earth, and they declare that she is Juno too; and so they assign to her the secondary causes of things—although it was to Jupiter that “begetter and mother of the gods” was said, since according to them the whole world itself is Jupiter. Minerva, too, they set over human arts, and because they could not find even a star in which to place her, they said that she was either the highest ether or else the moon. Vesta herself they thought the greatest of the goddesses for the reason that she is the earth, although they believed that the gentler fire of the world, which serves the easy uses of human life, should be assigned to her—not the more violent kind, such as belongs to Vulcan.note

And so they want all these select gods to be this world—some of them the whole, some its parts: the whole, as Jupiter; its parts, as Genius, as the Great Mother, as the Sun, as the Moon, or rather Apollo and Diana. Sometimes they make one god many things, sometimes one thing many gods. For one god is many things, as Jupiter himself is: the whole world is held and called Jupiter, and the sky alone is Jupiter, and a single star is Jupiter. Likewise Juno is mistress of secondary causes, and Juno is the air, and Juno is the earth, and, if she could beat Venus, Juno would be a star.

Similarly Minerva is the highest ether, and Minerva again is the moon, which they think lies at the lowest boundary of the ether. And they make one thing many gods in this way: Janus is the world, and so is Jupiter; Juno, too, is the earth, and so are the Great Mother and Ceres.

Then in the third of these, on the select gods, he first set out by way of preface what he thought needed to be said beforehand from natural theology. He was about to enter on the follies and lying madness of this civil theology, where not only did the truth of things fail to guide him, but the authority of the ancestors also weighed upon him. There he says: “In this book I shall write about the public gods of the Roman people, to whom they have dedicated temples and whom they have marked out with many images; but, as Xenophanes of Colophon writes, I shall set down what I think, not what I would maintain. For it belongs to man to have opinions about these things, to god to know.” So, as he is about to speak of what was instituted by human beings, he nervously promises an account of things not grasped and not firmly believed, but matters of opinion and doubt.note

For he knew that the world exists, that heaven and earth exist, heaven shining with stars and earth fertile with seeds, and other things of this kind; and he believed with steady conviction of mind that this whole mass and nature is ruled and governed by some invisible and all-powerful force. But he could not in the same way affirm of Janus that he was the world itself, or discover about Saturn how he could be both Jupiter’s father and made subject to Jupiter’s reign, and other things of that sort.

But when they try to honor utterly empty myths or the deeds of men with what pass for interpretations drawn from nature, even the sharpest men get into such straits that we cannot help grieving over their emptiness too.

Then, on this view Jupiter is the seed, not the cause of the seed, as was said a little earlier. But what are people to do who, when they interpret foolish things, cannot find anything wise to say? “He has a sickle,” he says, “because of agriculture.” Surely there was no agriculture yet while he reigned, and that is why his times are called the earlier ones—as the same man interprets the little myths—because the first humans lived on the seeds the earth produced of its own accord. Or did he take up the sickle when he lost his scepter, so that he who in the earliest times had been a king at leisure became a toiling laborer under his son’s reign? Next he says that some peoples used to sacrifice children to him, as the Carthaginians did, and some even adults, as the Gauls did, because of all seeds the best is the human race. What need is there to say more about this most cruel folly?

Let us rather notice and hold on to this: these interpretations do not refer to the true God—a living, incorporeal and unchangeable nature—from whom the life that is happy forever is to be sought; rather, their ends lie in things bodily, temporal, changeable and mortal. “The fact that Saturn is said in the myths to have castrated his father Heaven,” he says, “means that the divine seed is in Saturn’s keeping, not Heaven’s.” This is so, as far as one can understand, because nothing in heaven is born from seeds. But look: if Saturn is the son of Heaven, he is the son of Jupiter. For they affirm countless times and insistently that Heaven is Jupiter. So these things, which do not come from the truth, generally overturn themselves even with no one pushing them. He says Saturn is called Chronos, a Greek word meaning a span of time, without which, he says, seed cannot be fruitful.note

These and many other things are said about Saturn, and all of them are referred to seed. But surely Saturn, with such great power, would at least be enough for seeds. Why are other gods required for this—especially Liber and Libera, that is, Ceres? About them, in turn, he says so much concerning seed that you would think he had said nothing about Saturn.

In the town of Lavinium a whole month was given to Liber alone, and during its days everyone used the most shameful language, until that member had been carried across the forum and come to rest in its place. On this disreputable member a most reputable matron was required to place a garland in public. So, it seems, the god Liber had to be appeased for the success of the seeds; so the evil eye had to be driven from the fields—by forcing a married woman to do in public what not even a prostitute should have been allowed to do in a theater if married women were watching. This is why Saturn alone was not believed to be enough for the seeds: so that the unclean soul might find occasions for multiplying gods. Deservedly abandoned by the one true God for its uncleanness, and prostituted to many false gods by its greed for greater uncleanness, it called these sacrileges sacred rites, and offered itself to be violated and polluted by crowds of filthy demons.note

I beg you, Varro—or you who have read such writings of such learned men and boast that you have learned something great—interpret this. I will not say, in terms of that eternal and unchangeable nature which alone is God, but at least in terms of the world soul and its parts, which you consider to be true gods. That you have made Neptune a god for yourselves out of the part of the world soul that pervades the sea is, after a fashion, a more tolerable error. But are the wave coming to the shore and the wave returning to the open sea two parts of the world, or two parts of the world soul? Who among you is so foolish as to find wisdom in that? Why then did they make two goddesses for you? Was it not because your wise ancestors provided, not that more gods should rule you, but that more demons—the kind that delight in such follies and falsehoods—should possess you?

And why, by this interpretation, has Salacia lost the lower part of the sea, where she lay beneath her husband? For just now, by declaring her to be the ebbing wave, you have put her on the surface. Or was she angry because he took Venilia as a mistress, and so shut her husband out of the upper sea?

And certainly this same Varro, in the same book on the select gods, asserts that there are three grades of soul in all nature as a whole. The first passes through all the living parts of the body and has no sensation, only the strength to live. In our body, he says, this power flows into the bones, nails and hair—just as in the world trees are nourished and grow without sensation and live in a manner of their own. The second grade of soul is the one in which there is sensation; this power reaches the eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth and touch. The third grade of soul is the highest, called mind (animus), in which intelligence predominates; all mortal beings except man lack it. This part of the world soul, he says, is called god, while in us it is called the genius.note

In the world, he says, there are stones and the earth that we see, into which sensation does not flow; these are, as it were, god’s bones and nails. The sun, moon and stars, which we perceive and through which he himself perceives, are his senses; and the ether is his mind. Its power, reaching the stars, also makes them gods; what flows through them into the earth is the goddess Tellus; and what flows from there into the sea and the ocean is the god Neptune.

For it may be that, although he seems to have wanted to raise his head a little into what one might call the freedom of natural theology, he was still turning over this book and thinking himself engaged in it, and so looked back at it even from there. He may have said this so that his ancestors, or other cities, should not be thought to have worshiped Tellus and Neptune in vain. But this is what I say: since the earth is one, why did the part of the world mind that pervades the earth not also make one goddess, the one he says is Tellus? And if it did, where will Orcus be, the brother of Jupiter and Neptune, whom they call Father Dis? Where will his wife Proserpina be, who, according to another opinion set down in the same books, is said to be not the fertility of the earth but its lower part?note

But if they say that the part of the world mind, when it pervades the upper part of the earth, makes the god Father Dis, and when it pervades the lower part, the goddess Proserpina, what will Tellus be? For the whole of what she was has been so divided into these two parts and gods that she herself, the third, cannot be found—neither what she is nor where she is. Unless, that is, someone says that these gods, Orcus and Proserpina, together are the one goddess Tellus, and that they are no longer three, but either one or two. And yet they are called three, considered three, worshiped as three, with their own altars, their own shrines, rites, images and priests—and through these also with their own deceitful demons, who violate the prostituted soul. Let them answer this as well: what part of the earth does the part of the world mind pervade so as to make the god Tellumo?note

“No,” he says, “but one and the same earth has a twofold power: masculine, in that it produces seeds, and feminine, in that it receives and nourishes them. Hence from the feminine power it is called Tellus, from the masculine Tellumo.” Why then do the pontiffs, as he himself points out, add two others and offer sacrifice to four gods—Tellus, Tellumo, Altor and Rusor? About Tellus and Tellumo enough has been said. Why to Altor? “Because,” he says, “all things that are born are nourished (aluntur) from the earth.” Why to Rusor? “Because,” he says, “all things return back (rursus) to the same place.”note

That they made the Galli serve this goddess signifies that those who lack seed should follow the earth, since everything is to be found in it. That they fling themselves about before her teaches, he says, that those who cultivate the earth should not sit still, for there is always something for them to do. The sound of the cymbals signifies the clatter of iron tools being wielded, and of hands, and of all that noise made in tilling a field; they are of bronze because the ancients tilled the earth with bronze before iron was discovered. A lion, he says, is added, unbound and tame, to show that there is no kind of land so remote and so fiercely wild that it should not be subdued and cultivated. Then he goes on to say that because they named Mother Tellus with several names and surnames, she was thought to be a number of gods.note

They think, he says, that Tellus is Ops, because she is made better by work (opus); Mother, because she bears very many things; Great, because she bears food; Proserpina, because crops creep forth (proserpere) from her; Vesta, because she is clothed (uestiri) with grass. In this way, he says, they not unreasonably refer other goddesses back to her. If, then, she is one goddess—though, if truth is consulted, she is not even that—why meanwhile go off into many? Let these be many names of one goddess: not so much many goddesses as many names. But the authority of his erring ancestors weighs him down and forces this same Varro to waver after this statement. For he goes on to say: “With which the opinion of our ancestors about these goddesses, who thought them to be several, does not conflict.” How does it not conflict, when it is one thing for one goddess to have many names and quite another for there to be many goddesses?

“But it can happen,” he says, “that the same thing is one, and yet that there are several things in it.” I grant that there are several things in one man; does that make him several men as well? So there are several things in one goddess; does that make her several goddesses as well? But let them do as they please: divide and fuse, multiply, fold back and tangle up.

If the earth were not a goddess, men would lay hands on it in labor, to obtain seeds through it, and would not lay savage hands on themselves, to lose their seed for its sake. If she were not a goddess, she would become fertile through the hands of others, and would not force a man to become sterile by his own hands. As for the rites of Liber, in which a respectable matron garlanded the male genitals while a crowd looked on—where perhaps her husband too stood by, blushing and sweating, if there is any shame left in human faces—and the custom at weddings by which the new bride was ordered to sit on the shaft of Priapus: these are far more contemptible and trivial compared with this most cruel obscenity, or most obscene cruelty, in which by demonic rites both sexes are so mocked that neither perishes by its own wound. There the bewitchment of the fields is feared; here the cutting off of members is not feared.note

There the new bride’s modesty is dishonored in such a way that neither her fertility nor even her virginity is taken away; here manhood is cut off in such a way that the man is neither turned into a woman nor left a man.

Or, by laboring at these things in vain and finding nothing, do they persuade us that we should rather believe what rumor spread about a castrated man and what was committed to writing? Our Varro rightly turned away from this and did not want to speak of it; for it did not escape so learned a man.

Perhaps in this kind of utterly shameful cruelty we could compare Saturn with her, or even rank him above her, since he is said to have castrated his father. But in Saturn’s rites men could be killed by the hands of others; they were not mutilated by their own. He devoured his sons, as the poets say, and the natural philosophers interpret this however they please; but as history reports, he killed them. Yet the Romans did not adopt the Carthaginian practice of sacrificing their sons to him. This Great Mother of the gods, however, brought eunuchs even into Roman temples and kept up this savage custom, believed to strengthen the manly might of the Romans by cutting away the manhood of men. Compared with this evil, what are the thefts of Mercury, the wantonness of Venus, the sexual crimes and obscenities of the rest? We would cite them from books if they were not sung and danced every day in the theaters. But what are these beside so great an evil, whose greatness befitted only the Great Mother?

This is all the more so because those other stories are said to have been invented by the poets—as if the poets had also invented the fact that such things are pleasing and acceptable to the gods. Granted, then, that their being sung or written down is due to the boldness or impudence of the poets. But their being added to sacred rites and honors at the command and insistence of those very deities—what is that but a crime of the gods, or rather a confession of demons and a deception of the wretched? This, however—that the Mother of the gods earned her worship by the consecration of castrated men—was not invented by the poets; they preferred to shudder at it rather than sing of it. Is anyone to be consecrated to these select gods in order to live happily after death, when, once consecrated to them, he cannot live decently before death, subjected to such foul superstitions and bound over to unclean demons? “But all these things,” he says, “refer to the world.” Let him see whether they do not rather refer to the unclean. And what cannot be referred to the world, when it is shown to exist in the world?note

We, however, are looking for a mind that, trusting in true religion, does not worship the world as its god, but praises the world as the work of God, for God’s sake, and, cleansed of the world’s filth, comes clean to God, who founded the world.

So if some element of the world, or some created spirit—even one that is not unclean and evil—is worshiped with temple, priest and sacrifice, which are owed to the true God, this is wrong not because the means by which it is worshiped are evil, but because they are the kind of means by which he alone should be worshiped to whom such worship and service are due. If, on the other hand, anyone claims to worship the one true God, the creator of every soul and body, with stupid or monstrous images, with sacrifices that are murders, with the crowning of male private parts, with the wages of prostitution, with the cutting of limbs, the severing of genitals, the consecration of eunuch priests, and festivals of impure and obscene shows, he sins not because the one he worships ought not to be worshiped, but because he worships the one who ought to be worshiped in a way he ought not to be worshiped.

But whoever worships with such things—shameful and criminal things—and worships not the true God, the maker of soul and body, but a creature, even one that is not corrupt, whether it be a soul or a body or a soul and body together, sins twice against God. He worships in God’s place what is not God, and he worships with things by which neither God nor anything that is not God should be worshiped. Now how these people worshiped—that is, how shamefully and wickedly—is plain to see. But what or whom they worshiped would be obscure, were it not that their history testifies that the very things they admit to be foul and shameful were rendered at the terrifying demand of the deities. From this it is clear, all evasions set aside, that wicked demons and utterly unclean spirits were invited by this whole civil theology to haunt senseless images and, through them, to take possession of foolish hearts as well.

For he is led by a plausible line of reasoning: that heaven is what acts and earth what is acted upon. So he attributes masculine power to the one and feminine power to the other, and he does not notice that the one who does these things is rather he who made both. On this basis he also interprets, in an earlier book, the famous mysteries of Samothrace, and promises, as if with the utmost religious devotion, that he will set out in writing and send to the Samothracians things not known even to them. He says that he gathered there from many indications that among the images one signifies heaven, another earth, and another the patterns of things, which Plato calls Ideas. He wants Jupiter to be understood as heaven, Juno as earth, Minerva as the Ideas: heaven as that by which something is made, earth as that from which it is made, the pattern as that according to which it is made. Here I pass over the fact that Plato says these Ideas have such power that it was not heaven that made anything according to them; rather, heaven itself was made according to them.note

What I do say is this: in this book on the select gods he has lost track of that scheme of three gods in which he had, so to speak, embraced everything. For he assigns the male gods to heaven and the female to earth, and among the latter he has placed Minerva, whom he had earlier placed above heaven itself. Then Neptune, a male god, is in the sea, which belongs to earth rather than to heaven. Finally, Father Dis, called Πλούτων [Ploutōn, Pluto] in Greek, himself male and brother of both, is said to be an earthly god, holding the upper earth, while his wife Proserpina holds the lower. How, then, do they try to refer the gods to heaven and the goddesses to earth? What is there in this argument that is solid or consistent, sober or precise? And this Tellus, the beginning of the goddesses, is of course the Great Mother, around whom resounds the frenzied disgrace of eunuch priests, of castrated men, of men who cut themselves and fling themselves about.

What does it mean, then, to say that Janus is the head of the gods and Tellus the head of the goddesses? There error does not make a single head, nor here does madness make a sane one. Why do they struggle in vain to refer these things to the world? Even if they could, no devout person worships the world in place of the true God; and yet plain truth proves that they cannot even do this. Let them refer these things rather to dead human beings and to the worst of demons, and no question will remain.

who is creator and governor of all the waters; who made the sun, the brightest of bodily lights, and gave it suitable power and motion; who does not withdraw his dominion and power even from the underworld; who has provided for mortals seeds and foods, both dry and liquid, assigned to the natures fitted for them; who grounds the earth and makes it fruitful; who lavishes its fruits on animals and human beings; who knows and orders not only first causes but also those that follow from them; who set for the moon its measure; who provides paths in heaven and on earth for movement from place to place; who also granted to the human minds he created knowledge of the various arts, to aid life and nature; who instituted the union of male and female as an aid to the propagation of offspring; who granted to human communities the gift of earthly fire, to use on their hearths and in their lamps for the most convenient purposes.

These, surely, are the things that Varro, a most acute and learned man, labored to distribute among the select gods through some sort of natural interpretations, whether he took them from elsewhere or guessed at them himself. But it is the one true God who makes and does these things—and he does them as God: wholly present everywhere, enclosed by no places, bound by no chains, divisible into no parts, changeable in no part, filling heaven and earth with his present power, not with a nature in need of anything. He governs all that he has created in such a way that he also lets them put forth and carry out their own movements. For although they can be nothing without him, they are not what he is. He also does many things through angels; but he makes the angels happy only from himself. So, although for certain reasons he sends angels to human beings, he makes human beings happy not from angels but from himself, just as he does the angels.

From this one true God we hope for eternal life.

For it was not only all the prophecies expressed in words, and not only the rules of life that shape conduct and devotion and are contained in those writings, but also the rites, the priesthoods, the tabernacle or temple, the altars, the sacrifices, the ceremonies, the feast days and whatever else belongs to the service that is due to God—properly called in Greek latreia [service due to God alone]—that signified and foretold the things which, for the sake of the eternal life of the faithful in Christ, we believe have been fulfilled, see being fulfilled, and trust will be fulfilled.

When Varro tries to refer their rites to natural explanations, seeking to make shameful things respectable, he cannot find a way to make the explanations fit and agree with the rites, because these are not the real causes of those rites, which he thinks they are—or rather wants them to be thought. For if these were the causes, or any others of this kind, then, although they would have nothing to do with the true God and eternal life, which is what religion must seek, they would still somewhat soften, by giving some sort of account drawn from the nature of things, the offense caused by some apparent shamefulness or absurdity in the rites that was not understood. That is what he tried to do with certain theatrical stories and temple mysteries. There he did not acquit the theaters by their likeness to the temples; rather, he condemned the temples by their likeness to the theaters. Still, he tried in whatever way he could to soothe the sensibilities offended by horrible things by giving an account of supposed natural causes.

There, when the leading senators had read some of the causes explaining why each thing in the rites had been instituted, the senate sided with the dead Numa, and the senators, religious men that they were, decreed that the praetor should burn the books. Let everyone believe what he thinks; or rather, let any distinguished defender of such great impiety say whatever his mad contentiousness suggests to him. It is enough for me to point out that the causes of the rites, written down by King Pompilius, the founder of the Roman rites, were not supposed to become known to the people, or to the senate, or even to the priests themselves. Numa Pompilius himself, through unlawful curiosity, came upon those secrets of the demons, and he did write them down so as to have something to read as a reminder. Yet although he was a king who had no reason to fear anyone, he dared neither to teach them to anyone nor to destroy them by erasing them or doing away with them in any other way.

So what he wanted no one to know, lest he teach people wicked things, but was afraid to destroy, lest he anger the demons, he buried where he thought it would be safe, not believing that a plow could come near his tomb. The senate, for its part, was afraid to condemn the religious practices of their ancestors and so was forced to agree with Numa. Yet it judged those books so harmful that it did not order them to be buried again, lest human curiosity seek out all the more eagerly a matter already brought to light; instead it ordered those abominable records to be destroyed by fire. Since they thought it was by now necessary to perform those rites, it would be more bearable to err in ignorance of their causes than for the city to be thrown into turmoil by knowing them.

It was by these arts, at any rate, that Pompilius learned those rites. He made public what was done in them but buried their causes (so afraid was he himself of what he had learned), and when the books containing those causes came to light, the senate burned them. Why, then, does Varro offer me some other supposedly natural causes for those rites? If those books had contained causes of that sort, they would certainly not have been burned—or else the senators would likewise have burned these books of Varro’s, written and published for Caesar as pontiff. It is because Numa Pompilius “carried out” water (egesserit), that is, brought it out, to perform hydromancy, that he is said to have had the nymph Egeria as his wife, as is explained in the book of Varro mentioned above. This is how actual events are commonly turned into myths by a sprinkling of lies. So it was in that hydromancy that this most curious Roman king learned both the rites, which the pontiffs were to keep in their books, and their causes, which he wanted no one but himself to know.note

And so he wrote them down separately and made them die with him, in a sense, when he saw to it that they were withdrawn from human knowledge and buried in this way. Either, then, the cravings of the demons recorded there were so filthy and harmful that they would have made that whole civil theology appear detestable even to men like these, who had accepted so many shameful things in the rites themselves; or else all those gods were exposed as nothing but dead men, whom almost all the peoples of the nations had come to believe, over so long a stretch of time, were immortal gods. Meanwhile those same demons took delight in such rites, slipping themselves in as objects of worship in place of the dead whom they had caused to be thought gods, backed by the testimony of certain deceptive miracles.

But by the hidden providence of the true God it came about that the demons, won over by the arts through which hydromancy could be performed, were allowed to confess all these things to Pompilius, their friend, and yet were not allowed to warn him to burn them rather than bury them before he died. Nor could they keep them from becoming known by standing in the way of the plow that turned them up, or of the pen of Varro, through which the events surrounding this matter have come down to our memory. For they cannot accomplish what they are not permitted to; and they are permitted by the deep and just judgment of the supreme God, according to the deserts of those whom it is just for them merely to afflict, or even to subjugate and deceive. How harmful those writings were judged to be, and how foreign to the worship of the true divinity, can be understood from this: the senate preferred to burn what Pompilius had hidden rather than fear what he feared, he who could not bring himself to dare this.

Let anyone, then, who does not want to lead a devout life even now, seek eternal life through such rites. But let anyone who does not want fellowship with evil demons not be terrified of the harmful superstition by which they are worshiped, but acknowledge the true religion by which they are exposed and conquered.

But the reality that this name stands for is not found in everyone who glories in the name, for not everyone called a philosopher is thereby a lover of true wisdom. So from all those whose views we have been able to learn from their writings, we must choose those with whom this question can be discussed in a way worthy of it. In this work I have not undertaken to refute all the empty opinions of all the philosophers. I take on only those that concern theology, a Greek word which we understand to mean reasoning or discourse about the divine. Nor do I take on the opinions of all of them on this, but only of those who agree that divinity exists and cares for human affairs. Even so, they think that the worship of the one unchangeable God is not enough to attain a life that is happy even after death. In their view many gods, created and appointed by that one God, must be worshiped for that purpose.

These philosophers already surpass even Varro’s view by coming closer to the truth. He could extend natural theology as a whole only as far as this world or its soul. They, however, acknowledge a God above every kind of soul. This God made not only this visible world, often called by the name “heaven and earth,” but absolutely every soul as well. He also makes the rational and intellectual soul, the kind of soul the human soul is, happy by participation in his own unchangeable and incorporeal light. No one who has heard even a little about these things is unaware that these philosophers are called Platonists, a name derived from their teacher Plato. I shall therefore touch briefly on what I judge necessary about Plato for the present question. First I shall recall those who came before him in time in the same field of writing.note

But the other six were distinguished by their way of life and by certain precepts suited to living well. This Thales, however, wanted to leave successors as well. So he investigated the nature of things and committed his arguments to writing, and in this way he stood out. He was especially admired because he had mastered the calculations of astronomy and could even predict eclipses of the sun and moon. Yet he held that water is the first principle of things. From it, he thought, come all the elements of the world, the world itself and whatever is produced in it. Over this work, which we behold with such wonder when we consider the world, he set nothing from a divine mind. He was succeeded by Anaximander, his pupil, who changed the view about the nature of things. Anaximander did not think that all things are born from one thing, as Thales thought they came from moisture. He thought instead that each thing is born from its own particular principles.note

He believed that these principles of individual things are infinite in number, and that they generate innumerable worlds and whatever arises in them. He thought that these worlds are now dissolved, now generated again, each lasting as long as its own lifespan allows. He too attributed nothing in these works of nature to a divine mind. He left as his pupil and successor Anaximenes, who assigned all the causes of things to infinite air. Anaximenes did not deny the gods or pass over them in silence. But he believed that the gods did not make the air; rather, they themselves arose from air. Anaxagoras, his pupil, held that the maker of all the things we see is a divine mind. He said that there is an infinite matter, made up of particles of all things, unlike one another. From this matter each thing is made out of the particles similar and proper to it, but it is a divine mind that does the making.note

Diogenes too, another pupil of Anaximenes, said that air is the matter from which all things are made. But he said it possesses divine reason, without which nothing could be made from it. Anaxagoras was succeeded by his pupil Archelaus. He too thought that all things consist of particles similar to one another, from which each individual thing is made. But he also said that a mind is present in them, which accomplishes everything by joining and separating the eternal bodies, that is, those particles. Socrates is said to have been his disciple. Socrates was the teacher of Plato, and it is for Plato’s sake that I have briefly gone over all this.note

For he saw that they were inquiring into the causes of things, and he believed that the first and highest causes lay only in the will of the one supreme God. So he thought these causes could be grasped only by a cleansed mind. Therefore he held that one must press on with purifying one’s life by good conduct. Then the mind, freed from the lusts that weigh it down, might raise itself by its natural vigor to eternal things. With the purity of understanding it might behold the nature of the incorporeal and unchangeable light, where the causes of all created natures live in unchanging stability. It is agreed, however, that even in the moral questions to which he seemed to devote his whole mind, he harassed the folly of ignorant people who thought they knew something, and turned it this way and that. He did this either by confessing his own ignorance or by concealing his knowledge, with wonderful charm in argument and the keenest wit. As a result enmities were stirred up against him, and he was condemned on a slanderous charge and punished with death.

But afterward the very city of Athens that had publicly condemned him publicly mourned him. The people’s anger turned so fiercely against his two accusers that one of them was overwhelmed by the violence of the crowd and died. The other escaped a similar penalty only by going into voluntary and permanent exile. With so glorious a reputation in life and death, Socrates left behind a great many followers of his philosophy. They competed with one another in devoting themselves to the debate of moral questions, where the issue is the supreme good, by which a human being can become happy. This did not clearly appear in Socrates’ discussions, since he raised, asserted and demolished everything. So each of them took from those discussions what pleased him, and each set the end of good where he saw fit. Now “the end of good” is the name for that which makes a person happy once he has reached it.note

The Socratics held such different views about this end that it is scarcely believable that followers of a single master could have done so. Some said the supreme good is pleasure, as Aristippus did; others said it is virtue, as Antisthenes did. In this way one held one opinion and another held another, and it would take too long to list them all.note

The pursuit of wisdom is concerned with action and contemplation, and so one part of it can be called active and the other contemplative. The active part concerns the conduct of life, that is, the forming of character. The contemplative part concerns the study of the causes of nature and of the purest truth. Socrates is recorded as having excelled in the active part. Pythagoras, on the other hand, applied himself more to the contemplative, with all the powers of understanding he had. Plato is therefore praised for having perfected philosophy by joining the two. He divided it into three parts. The first is moral, which is concerned chiefly with action. The second is natural, which is assigned to contemplation. The third is rational, by which the true is distinguished from the false. This third part is necessary to both action and contemplation, yet it is above all contemplation that claims insight into the truth for itself. So this threefold division does not contradict the distinction by which all pursuit of wisdom is understood to consist in action and contemplation.note

But what did Plato think in or about each of these parts? Where did he know or believe the end of all actions, the cause of all natures and the light of all reasonings to be? I think it would take a long time to set this out in full, and I do not think it should be asserted rashly. Plato aims to keep the well-known habit of his teacher Socrates, whom he makes the speaker in his books, of concealing his own knowledge or opinion. He keeps it because that habit pleased him too. As a result, even Plato’s own views on great matters cannot easily be discerned.

Still, we should recall some of what we read in him and include it in this work. This includes both what he said himself and what he reported and wrote down as said by others, when it seemed to meet with his approval. We should do so where he supports the true religion, which our faith embraces and defends, and also where he seems opposed to it. We confine ourselves to the question of the one God and many gods, as it bears on the life after death that will be truly happy. Plato has been ranked far above the other philosophers of the nations, and rightly so. Perhaps those who are praised more widely for having understood and followed him more acutely and more truly hold some such view of God as this: that in him are found the cause of existing, the reason of understanding and the order of living. Of these three, the first is understood to belong to the natural part, the second to the rational part and the third to the moral part.

Suppose man was created so that, through what is most excellent in him, he might attain to what excels all things. That is the one, true, supremely good God, without whom no nature subsists, no teaching instructs and no practice profits. If so, then let him be sought, in whom all things have weight for us. Let him be discerned, in whom all things are certain for us. Let him be loved, in whom all things are right for us.

and even if they did signify those things, the rational soul still ought not to worship as its god things placed beneath it in the order of nature. Nor should it have ranked above itself, as gods, things that the true God ranked below it.) Let this also give way: the writings that Numa Pompilius had buried with him to keep them hidden, which really did concern rites of this kind, and which the senate ordered to be burned when the plow turned them up.note

(To take a more lenient view of Numa, the same sort of thing is found in what Alexander of Macedon writes to his mother, which he says was revealed to him by a certain Leo, a great high priest of the Egyptian rites. That letter discloses that certain gods were human beings. These include Picus, Faunus, Aeneas and Romulus, and even Hercules, Aesculapius, Liber son of Semele, the twin sons of Tyndareus and any other mortals they regard as gods. But they also include the gods of the greater clans themselves, whom Cicero seems to touch on in the Tusculan Disputations without naming them. These are Jupiter, Juno, Saturn, Vulcan, Vesta and very many others, whom Varro tries to transfer to the parts or elements of the world. Leo too was afraid, as though the mysteries had been betrayed. So he urged Alexander, once he had made these things known to his mother in writing, to order the letter burned.)note

So let not only the contents of the two theologies, mythical and civil, give way to the Platonist philosophers, who have said that the true God is the author of things, the illuminator of truth and the giver of happiness. Let the other philosophers also give way to these great men, who knew so great a God. These others, with minds given over to the body, supposed that the first principles of nature are bodily. Thales placed that principle in moisture, Anaximenes in air, the Stoics in fire, and Epicurus in atoms, that is, extremely tiny particles that can neither be divided nor perceived. Any others there may be, whom there is no need to list at length, likewise said that bodies are the cause and first principle of things, whether those bodies are simple or compound, lifeless or living, but bodies all the same.note

Some of them believed that living things could come from non-living things, as the Epicureans did. Others believed that both living and non-living things come from something living, but still bodies from a body. The Stoics, for instance, thought that fire is both living and wise, and that it is the maker of the world itself and of everything in it. This fire is one body, one of the four elements of which this visible world consists, and they held that this fire was in fact god. These philosophers, and others like them, could think only what their hearts, bound fast to the senses of the flesh, made up as stories for them. For they had within themselves something they did not see. They pictured inwardly what they had seen outside, even when they were not seeing it but only thinking of it.

But what appears before such thought is no longer a body; it is the likeness of a body. That by which this likeness of a body is seen in the mind is neither a body nor the likeness of a body. And that by which it is seen and judged to be beautiful or ugly is surely better than the thing it judges. This is the human mind, the nature of the rational soul. It is certainly not a body, since even the likeness of a body is not itself a body when it is seen and judged in the mind of the one who thinks. So it is not earth or water, air or fire. These are the four bodies, called the four elements, of which we see the bodily world composed. Furthermore, if our mind is not a body, how can God, the creator of the mind, be a body?

So, as has been said, let these too give way to the Platonists. Let those also give way who were indeed ashamed to say that God is a body, yet thought that our souls are of the same nature as he is. They were not troubled by the great changeability of the soul, though it is an impiety to attribute changeability to the nature of God. But they say: “The nature of the soul is changed by the body; in itself it is unchangeable.” They might as well say: “Flesh is wounded by some body; in itself it cannot be wounded.” Quite simply, what cannot be changed cannot be changed by anything. So what can be changed by a body can be changed by something, and therefore it cannot rightly be called unchangeable.

And so they saw that two things could exist only from him who simply is. The first is the body of the whole world, with its shapes, its qualities, its ordered motion, the elements arranged from heaven down to earth, and whatever bodies are in them. The second is every kind of life: the life that nourishes and holds together, as in trees; the life that has this and also senses, as in animals; the life that has these and also understands, as in human beings; and the life that needs no help from nourishment but only holds together, senses and understands, as in angels. For in him, to be is not one thing and to live another, as though he could be without living. Nor is to live one thing and to understand another, as though he could live without understanding. Nor is to understand one thing and to be happy another, as though he could understand without being happy. Rather, for him, to live, to understand and to be happy is simply to be.

Because of this unchangeableness and simplicity, they understood that he made all these things and that he himself could not have been made by anyone. For they considered that whatever exists is either body or life. They saw that life is something better than body, and that the form of body is perceptible to the senses, while the form of life is intelligible. Accordingly they ranked intelligible form above sensible form. We call sensible the things that can be perceived by the body’s sight and touch, and intelligible the things that can be understood by the gaze of the mind. For there is no bodily beauty on which the mind does not pass judgment, whether it lies in a body at rest, such as a shape, or in motion, such as a melody. And the mind certainly could not do this unless this form existed in it in a better way: without the swelling of bulk, without the noise of sound, without extension in either space or time.

But even there, if this form were not changeable, one person would not judge sensible form better than another. Yet the more gifted judge it better than the slower, the more skilled better than the less skilled, the more practiced better than the less practiced, and one and the same person, as he makes progress, certainly judges it better later than before. Now whatever admits of more and less is without doubt changeable. Hence gifted and learned men, practiced in these matters, easily concluded that the primary form is not in those things where it is shown to be changeable. In their view, then, both body and mind possessed form to a greater or lesser degree, and if they could lack all form, they would be nothing at all. So they saw that there is something in which the primary form exists unchangeably, and therefore beyond comparison. And there, most rightly, they believed the first principle of things to be: something that was not made, and from which all things were made.

Thus what can be known of God he himself made plain to them, when they understood and perceived his invisible attributes through the things that have been made, and also his eternal power and divinity. By him, too, all things visible and temporal were created. Let this suffice concerning the part they call physica, that is, natural philosophy.note

But those whom we rightly rank above the rest distinguished what is perceived by the mind from what is reached by the senses. They neither took from the senses what the senses can do, nor granted them more than they can do. And they said that the light of minds, by which all things are learned, is that very same God by whom all things were made.

Hence some are said to have added a third kind of goods, called external, such as honor, glory, wealth and anything of the sort. But they did not add it as something final, that is, to be sought for its own sake, but as something sought for the sake of something else. They held that this kind of good is good for the good and bad for the bad. Thus those who sought the human good from the soul, or from the body, or from both, thought it was to be sought from nothing other than the human being. Those who sought it from the body sought it from the inferior part of a human being; those who sought it from the soul, from the better part; and those who sought it from both, from the whole human being. Whether from some part, then, or from the whole, they sought it only from the human being.

These distinctions are three in number, yet they produced not just three but many disagreements and schools among philosophers. Different people held different opinions about the good of the body, the good of the soul and the good of both. Let all of them, then, yield to those philosophers who said that a human being is happy not in enjoying the body, nor in enjoying the soul, but in enjoying God. And this is not the way the soul enjoys the body or itself, or a friend enjoys a friend, but the way the eye enjoys light, if some likeness may be drawn from these things to those. What sort of likeness that is will become clear elsewhere, as far as I am able, if God himself helps me.

For now it is enough to recall what Plato determined. The end of good, he said, is to live according to virtue, and this can happen only to one who has knowledge of God and imitates him; there is no other reason for being happy. And so he does not hesitate to say that to philosophize is to love God, whose nature is incorporeal. From this it surely follows that the lover of wisdom (for that is what a philosopher is) will be happy when he has begun to enjoy God. A person who enjoys what he loves is not automatically happy, for many are miserable because they love what ought not to be loved, and more miserable when they enjoy it. Still, no one is happy who does not enjoy what he loves. Even those who love things that ought not to be loved think themselves happy not in loving them but in enjoying them. Suppose, then, that someone enjoys what he loves, and loves the true and supreme good. Who but the most miserable of men would deny that he is happy?

Now Plato says that this true and supreme good is God. That is why he wants the philosopher to be a lover of God. Since philosophy aims at the happy life, the one who has loved God will be happy in enjoying God.

For his invisible attributes, from the creation of the world, are understood and seen through the things that have been made—his eternal power also and divinity.” The Christian hears him also when he speaks to the Athenians. There the apostle said something great about God, something few can understand: that “in him we live and move and have our being.” And then he added, “as some of your own have also said.” Yet the Christian knows well to be wary of these philosophers too, in the points where they go wrong. For the passage that says God made his invisible attributes plain to them, to be seen by the understanding through the things that have been made, also says that they did not worship God himself rightly. They paid the divine honors due to him alone to other things as well, to which they should not have been paid: “For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened.note

For claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed animals and serpents.” Here the apostle gives us to understand that he means the Romans, the Greeks and the Egyptians, who prided themselves on the name of wisdom. But we will argue with them about this later. They agree with us, however, about the one God, the author of this universe, who is not only incorporeal and above all bodies, but also incorruptible and above all souls—our origin, our light, our good. In this respect we rank them above the rest.

A Christian who does not know their writings may not use in debate words he has not learned. He may not call “natural” in Latin, or “physical” in Greek, the part that deals with the investigation of nature. He may not call “rational” or “logical” the part that asks how truth can be grasped. And he may not call “moral” or “ethical” the part that deals with conduct and with the ends of good to be pursued and of evil to be avoided. But it does not follow that he does not know that we have all three from the one true and supremely good God: the nature by which we were made in his image, the teaching by which we know him and ourselves, and the grace by which we are happy in clinging to him.

This, then, is the reason we prefer these philosophers to the rest. Other philosophers have worn out their minds and their efforts in searching for the causes of things and for the right way of learning and living. These philosophers, by knowing God, found where lies the cause of the universe’s constitution, the light by which truth is perceived and the fountain from which happiness is drunk. So whether these Platonists or any other philosophers of any nation hold these views about God, they agree with us. But I have chosen to argue this case chiefly with the Platonists because their writings are better known. For the Greeks, whose language is preeminent among the nations, have celebrated these writings with great acclaim. And the Latins, moved by either their excellence or their fame, have studied them more readily than others, and by translating them into our language have made them more renowned and more illustrious.

So on that journey Plato could not have seen Jeremiah, who had died so long before. Nor could he have read those Scriptures, which had not yet been translated into Greek, the language in which he excelled. Unless perhaps, since he was a man of the keenest curiosity, he learned them through an interpreter, as he did the Egyptian writings. He would not have done so in order to translate them in writing. Ptolemy is said to have obtained that as an immense favor, though as king he could even have made himself feared. Plato would have done so to learn in conversation what they contained, as far as he could grasp it. Certain indications seem to support this view. The book of Genesis begins thus: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth. But the earth was invisible and without form, and darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was borne above the water.” And in the Timaeus, the book he wrote on the formation of the world, Plato says that in that work God first joined earth and fire.note

Now it is clear that he assigns to fire the place of heaven. So this statement bears some resemblance to the words, “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” Next he says that the two middle elements, placed between these extremes so that they might be joined to each other, are water and air. Hence he is thought to have understood in this way what is written: “the Spirit of God was borne above the water.”

For he paid little attention to how that Scripture usually uses the term “spirit of God,” and since air too is called spirit, he may seem to have supposed that the four elements are mentioned in that passage. Then there is Plato’s statement that the philosopher is a lover of God, and nothing glows so brightly in those sacred writings. Above all there is the following, which more than anything leads me almost to agree that Plato was not unacquainted with those books. The words of God were conveyed to holy Moses through an angel. Moses asked the name of the one who was commanding him to go and set the Hebrew people free from Egypt. And the answer was: “I am who I am; and you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘He who is has sent me to you.’” It is as though, in comparison with him who truly is because he is unchangeable, the things that were made changeable do not exist. Plato held this firmly and commended it most diligently.note

And I do not know whether this is found anywhere in the books of those who lived before Plato, except where it was said: “I am who I am; and you shall say to them, ‘He who is has sent me to you.’”

I chose these above all because the better their understanding of the one God who made heaven and earth, the more glorious and illustrious they are held to be than the rest. Later generations have ranked them so far above the others that the most distinguished recent philosophers who chose to follow Plato did not want to be called Peripatetics or Academics, but Platonists. They chose this even though Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, a man of outstanding intellect, Plato’s inferior in eloquence but easily the superior of many, had founded the Peripatetic school, so called because he was in the habit of debating while walking about. His brilliant reputation had also gathered a great many disciples into his own sect while his teacher was still alive. And after Plato’s death, Speusippus, his sister’s son, and Xenocrates, his beloved disciple, had succeeded him in his school, which was called the Academy, so that both they and their successors were called Academics.note

Among these, the Greeks Plotinus, Iamblichus and Porphyry are especially renowned, and in both languages, Greek and Latin, Apuleius the African stood out as a renowned Platonist. But all of these, and others of the same kind, and Plato himself, thought that sacred rites should be performed for many gods.note

Who, then, are those who love theatrical shows and demand that they be joined to divine worship and performed in their honor? Their power shows that they are not nonexistent, but this taste of theirs surely shows that they are bad. What Plato thought about theatrical shows is well known: he holds that the poets themselves should be banished from the city for composing poems so unworthy of the majesty and goodness of the gods. Who, then, are these gods who contend with Plato himself over theatrical shows? He will not allow the gods to be defamed with false accusations; they command that their honors be celebrated with those very accusations.

In the end, when they ordered these same shows to be restored, they not only demanded what was shameful but also did what was malicious. They took away Titus Latinius’s son and struck him with a disease because he had refused their command, and then withdrew the disease once he had carried out their orders. Plato, however, did not think them worth fearing, bad as they were. Holding to his judgment with unwavering firmness, he does not hesitate to remove from a well-ordered people all the sacrilegious trifles of the poets, in which those gods delight because they share in their filth. Yet this same Plato, as I mentioned in the second book, is placed by Labeo among the demigods. And this Labeo thinks that evil deities are appeased by bloody victims and supplications of that kind, but good ones by shows and similar things that belong, so to speak, to merriment. Why is it, then, that the demigod Plato so steadfastly dares to take away those amusements, because he judges them shameful, not from demigods but from gods, and good gods at that?note

These gods, in fact, refute Labeo’s opinion, for in the case of Latinius they showed themselves not only wanton and playful but also cruel and terrifying. So let the Platonists explain this to us, since, following the view of their founder, they hold that all the gods are good and honorable and partners with the wise in virtue, and consider it impious to think otherwise of any of the gods. “We will explain it,” they say. Then let us listen attentively.

From this it follows that when Plato detested and prohibited the poets’ fictions, it was not the gods, who are all good and exalted, but the demons whom he deprived of the pleasure of theatrical shows.

For if Plato acted most honorably in censuring and prohibiting these things, the demons certainly acted most shamefully in demanding and commanding them. So either Apuleius is mistaken, and Socrates’ friend did not belong to this class of divine beings; or Plato contradicts himself, now honoring demons, now removing their delights from a well-governed city; or Socrates is not to be congratulated on the friendship of a demon. Apuleius himself was so ashamed of that friendship that he titled his book On the God of Socrates. Yet by his own argument, in which he distinguishes gods from demons so carefully and at such length, he ought to have called it not On the God but On the Demon of Socrates. But he preferred to put this in the argument itself rather than in the title of the book.

For thanks to the sound teaching that has shone upon human affairs, all people, or nearly all, so shudder at the name of demons that anyone who read the title On the Demon of Socrates before reading Apuleius’s argument commending the dignity of demons would think that man was not in his right mind at all. And what did even Apuleius himself find to praise in demons, apart from the fineness and durability of their bodies and the higher place where they dwell? For about their character, when he spoke of them all in general, he said not only nothing good but a great deal that was bad. In short, after reading that book, no one at all is surprised that they wanted even the shamefulness of the stage to be part of divine worship; that, though they wish to be thought gods, they could take delight in the crimes of the gods; and that whatever in their rites provokes laughter or horror, through obscene ceremony or shameful cruelty, suits their passions.

This is why divine providence also gave certain superior bodily gifts to those beings we are known to surpass: so that this too might teach us that the faculty by which we are set above them must be cultivated with much greater care than the body, and so that we might learn to despise the bodily excellence we know demons possess, compared with the goodness of life by which we are ranked above them. For we too shall have immortal bodies—not an immortality racked by eternal punishment, but one preceded by purity of soul.

Birds of the air are not only not ranked above us earth-dwellers, but are even subject to us, because of the dignity of the rational soul within us. In the same way, demons, though more airy than we are, are not better than us earth-dwellers just because air is higher than earth. Rather, humans must be ranked above them, since their despair is in no way to be compared with the hope of godly people. Indeed, Plato’s theory itself sufficiently warns us not to judge the merits of living beings by the ranks of the elements. By that theory he links and orders the four elements in proportion, inserting the two middle ones, air and water, between the two extremes, fire, the most mobile, and earth, the immobile, so that, as air is higher than water and fire than air, so water is higher than earth.

And indeed Apuleius himself, with the rest, calls the human being a land animal, and yet humans are ranked far above water creatures, even though Plato ranks water itself above earth. Let them understand from this that the order to be kept when it is a question of the merits of souls is not the same as the order that appears to hold among the ranks of bodies. It is possible for a better soul to inhabit a lower body, and a worse soul a higher one.

For he says that the gods too are living beings. Assigning to each kind its own element, he placed us among the land animals, along with the other creatures that live and feel on earth; among the water animals, fish and other swimming creatures; among the creatures of the air, demons; among those of the ether, the gods. So being living beings by kind is something demons share not only with humans but also with the gods and the beasts; being rational in mind, with gods and humans; being eternal in duration, with the gods alone; being subject to passion in soul, with humans alone; being made of air in body is theirs alone. Accordingly, being living beings by kind is no great thing, since beasts are that too. Being rational in mind does not raise them above us, since we are that too. Being eternal in duration—what good is that, if they are not happy? For temporal happiness is better than eternal misery.

Being subject to passion in soul—how does that raise them above us, when we are that too, and would not be if we were not miserable? Being made of air in body—how highly should that be valued, when the nature of any soul whatever is ranked above every body, and therefore the worship of religion, which is owed from the soul, is by no means owed to anything inferior to the soul? Moreover, if among the attributes he says belong to demons he had counted virtue, wisdom and happiness, and said that they have these eternally and in common with the gods, he would surely be saying something to be desired and highly valued. Even then we ought not to worship them as God on that account, but rather him from whom we knew they had received these things. How much less, as things are, do these living beings of the air deserve divine honor—rational so that they can be miserable, subject to passion so that they are miserable, eternal so that they cannot end their misery!

In humans, however, it is folly or misery that brings about these disturbances, for we are not yet happy in that perfection of wisdom which is promised to us at the end, when we have been freed from this mortality. The gods, they say, do not suffer these disturbances because they are not only eternal but also happy. For they claim that the gods too have the same rational souls, but utterly pure of every stain and plague. So if the gods are not disturbed because they are living beings that are happy, not miserable, and beasts are not disturbed because they are living beings that can be neither happy nor miserable, it remains that demons, like humans, are disturbed because they are living beings that are not happy but miserable.

Finally, every agitation of the heart, every tossing of the mind, all the squalls and storms of the soul, in which he says demons seethe and surge, true religion bids us put away. What reason can there be, then, other than folly and astonishing error, for you to humble yourself in veneration before one you would wish to be unlike in the way you live, and to worship in religion one you would not want to imitate, when the sum of religion is to imitate the one you worship?

So if chastity and innocence wish to obtain anything from the gods, they cannot do so by their own merits, but only through the intervention of their own enemies. There is no reason for this man to try to justify the fictions of the poets and the mockeries of the theater. Against these things we have their own master, Plato, whose authority among them is so great. We need him if human modesty does itself such a disservice that it not only loves what is shameful but even thinks it pleasing to the divine.

Finally, was Apuleius himself accused of practicing the magic arts before Christian judges? If he knew that the arts with which he was charged were divine and holy, and in keeping with the works of divine powers, he ought not only to have admitted them but even to have professed them openly. He should have blamed instead the laws by which such things were forbidden and judged worthy of condemnation, when they ought to be held worthy of wonder and veneration.

For in that way he would either have won the judges over to his opinion, or else, if they followed the unjust laws and punished him with death for proclaiming and praising such things, the demons would have repaid his soul with gifts worthy of it, since he would not have feared to lose his human life for proclaiming their divine works. Our martyrs did exactly that. When the Christian religion was charged against them as a crime, the religion by which they knew they would be saved and made most glorious forever, they did not choose to escape temporal punishment by denying it. Instead they confessed it, professed it and proclaimed it. They endured everything for its sake faithfully and bravely, and they died with holy confidence. In this way they compelled the laws that forbade it to blush with shame, and caused them to be changed. Yet there survives a very full and very eloquent speech by this Platonist philosopher, in which he defends himself against the charge of practicing the magic arts. He does not wish to appear innocent in any other way than by denying the very things that an innocent man cannot commit.note

Yet all the wonders of the magicians, whom he rightly thinks should be condemned, are performed through the teachings and works of demons. Why he thinks these demons should be honored is his own affair. He claims they are necessary for carrying our prayers to the gods, when in fact we ought to avoid their works if we want our prayers to reach the true God. Next I ask: what kind of human prayers does he think are presented to the good gods through demons, magical or lawful? If magical, the gods do not want such prayers; if lawful, they do not want them through such agents. And if a repentant sinner pours out prayers, especially if he has committed some act of magic, does he really receive pardon through the intercession of the very beings at whose urging or with whose encouragement, as he laments, he fell into sin? Or do the demons themselves first do penance for having deceived the penitents, so that they can obtain forgiveness for them?

No one has ever said this of demons. If it were so, beings who longed to attain the grace of pardon by repenting would never dare to claim divine honors for themselves. In the one case there is a pride to be detested; in the other, a humility deserving of mercy.

What a splendid holiness, then, in a god! He does not mingle with a human being who prays to him, yet he mingles with an arrogant demon. He does not mingle with a human being who repents, yet he mingles with a demon who deceives. He does not mingle with a human being who takes refuge in the divine, yet he mingles with a demon who feigns divinity. He does not mingle with a human being who asks for pardon, yet he mingles with a demon who urges wickedness. He does not mingle with a human being who, in books of philosophy, banishes the poets from a well-ordered city, yet he mingles with a demon who demands the mockeries of the poets from the city’s leaders and pontiffs through theatrical shows. He does not mingle with a human being who forbids the invention of crimes of the gods, yet he mingles with a demon who delights in false crimes of the gods. He does not mingle with a human being who punishes the crimes of magicians by just laws, yet he mingles with a demon who teaches and practices the magic arts. He does not mingle with a human being who shuns imitating a demon, yet he mingles with a demon who lies in wait to deceive a human being.note

If this is so, a demon is better known to these good gods through the nearness of its body than a human being is through the goodness of his mind. What a lamentable necessity! Or rather, what a ridiculous or detestable vanity, devised so that divinity should not be in vain! For if the gods, with a mind free from the obstacle of the body, can see our mind, they do not need demons as messengers for this. But suppose the ethereal gods perceive the bodily signs of minds, such as speech, facial expression and movement, through their own bodies, and from these gather what the demons too report. Then they can also be deceived by the demons’ lies. Again, if the divinity of the gods cannot be deceived by demons, then neither can what we do remain unknown to that same divinity.

For if they choose the first, they will have to confess that the good gods were not permitted to dwell with the good Plato, when he was forbidding the injuries done to them, but did dwell with the evil demons, when these were exulting in those injuries. For the good gods knew the good man, placed far from them, only through the evil demons, while they could not know the demons themselves, near as they were. But if they choose the second, and say that both things were concealed by the demons, so that the gods knew nothing at all either of Plato’s most reverent law or of the demons’ sacrilegious delight, what can the gods usefully know of human affairs through demons as go-betweens? They do not know even the measures decreed by the religion of good men in honor of the good gods against the lust of evil demons.

If, however, they choose the third, they will reply that through these same demons as messengers the gods were informed both of Plato’s opinion forbidding injuries to the gods and of the demons’ wickedness exulting in those injuries. But is this reporting, or insulting? And do the gods hear both and know both in such a way that they not only fail to keep these malignant demons from their presence, who desire and do things contrary to the gods’ dignity and to Plato’s reverence, but even send gifts to the good Plato, far away, through those wicked neighbors? For a kind of chain of the elements has bound them in such a way that they can be joined to those who slander them, but not to the one who defends them. They know both, yet they cannot shift the weight of air and earth. Now, as for what remains: if they choose the fourth, it is worse than the others.

For who could bear the following? The demons reported to the gods the poets’ slanderous fictions about the immortal gods, the shameful mockeries of the theaters, and their own most ardent craving and sweetest pleasure in all these things. But they kept silent about the fact that Plato, with philosophical seriousness, judged that all these things should be removed from the best commonwealth. So the good gods are compelled to learn, through such messengers, the evils of the very worst beings, and these are not someone else’s evils but those of the messengers themselves. Yet they are not allowed to learn the opposite goods of the philosophers, though the former are an injury, and the latter an honor, to the gods themselves.

But they plainly rule, as over captives and subjects, many who are unworthy of sharing in the true religion. The greater part of these they have persuaded that they are gods, by wondrous and deceptive signs, whether deeds or predictions. Some people, however, examined their vices somewhat more attentively and carefully, and these the demons could not persuade that they are gods. So they pretended to be go-betweens between gods and human beings, and obtainers of benefits. Unless, indeed, it was these people themselves who thought that this honor, at least, should be paid to them. They did not believe the demons to be gods, because they saw that they were evil, and they wanted all gods to be good. Yet they did not dare to call them altogether unworthy of divine honor, chiefly so as not to offend the peoples, who, as they saw, served the demons with so many rites and temples out of long-ingrained superstition.

So, by a certain art, human beings join these invisible spirits to visible things of bodily matter, so that the images dedicated and subjected to these spirits become, as it were, animated bodies. This, he says, is making gods, and human beings have received this great and wonderful power of making gods. I will set down this Egyptian’s words as they have been translated into our language. “And since,” he says, “we are called upon to speak of the kinship and fellowship of human beings and gods, learn, Asclepius, the power and strength of man. Just as the Lord and Father,” he says, “or God, the highest, is the maker of the heavenly gods, so man is the fashioner of the gods who dwell in temples, content to be near to human beings.”note

And a little later: “So humanity,” he says, “ever mindful of its nature and origin, persists in that imitation of divinity. Just as the Father and Lord made the gods eternal, so that they might be like him, so humanity fashioned its own gods in the likeness of its own features.” Here Asclepius, to whom he was chiefly speaking, answered him and said, “Do you mean statues, Trismegistus?” Then Hermes said: “Statues, Asclepius? See how far even you lack faith! I mean statues alive with sense and full of spirit, which do such great and such marvelous things. I mean statues that foreknow the future and predict it by lot, by a seer, by dreams and by many other means. They cause illnesses in human beings and cure them, and they bring sorrow and joy according to what people deserve. Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven? Or, to speak more truly, it is a transfer or descent of everything that is governed and carried out in heaven.

And if it must be said more truly still, our land is the temple of the whole world. And yet, since a wise man ought to know all things in advance, it is not right for you to be ignorant of this: a time is coming when it will be seen that the Egyptians kept up the worship of the divine with devout minds and diligent religion, and all in vain.”

For he was one of those of whom the apostle says that, “although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened. For claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man,” and the rest, which would take too long to recount.

For he says many things about the one true God, maker of the world, which agree with the truth. Yet somehow, through that darkening of the heart, he slides into these errors. He wants human beings always to be subject to gods that he admits are made by human beings, and he laments that these will be taken away at a future time. It is as if anything could be more unhappy than a human being ruled by his own fictions. In fact, it is easier for a man who worships as gods the things he has made to cease to be a man himself than for the things man has made to become gods through his worship. For it happens more quickly that “man, placed in honor, without understanding, is compared to the beasts” than that the work of man should be preferred to the work of God made in his image, that is, to man himself. So man rightly falls away from the one who made him when he places over himself what he himself has made.note

Of this kind too were those who rejoiced that what they knew was coming had come. Simeon and Anna were such people, for they recognized Jesus as soon as he was born. So was Elizabeth, who recognized him in the Spirit when he had only been conceived. So was Peter, who said, by the Father’s revelation, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” But to this Egyptian the times of their destruction had been revealed by those spirits who trembled before the Lord when he was present in the flesh and said: “Why have you come before the time to destroy us?”note

They said this either because it came on them suddenly, since they thought it would indeed happen, but later, or because they called this very thing their destruction: that once they were recognized, they would be despised. And this was “before the time,” that is, before the time of judgment, when they are to be punished with eternal damnation together with all the human beings who are held fast in their fellowship. So speaks religion, which neither deceives nor is deceived. This man does not speak so. Blown about this way and that by every wind of doctrine, and mixing the true with the false, he laments as a religion about to perish what he later confesses to be error.note

“To this discovery they joined a power drawn from the nature of the world and suited to it. Mixing this in, since they could not make souls, they called up the souls of demons or of angels and placed them in sacred images and divine mysteries, so that through these souls the idols might have the power both to do good and to do harm.” I do not know whether the demons themselves, if they were adjured, would confess as much as he has confessed. “Since,” he says, “our forefathers were greatly in error about the nature of the gods, unbelieving and paying no attention to worship and divine religion, they discovered an art by which to make gods.” Did he say that they erred only moderately when they discovered this art of making gods? Or was he content to say “They were in error,” without adding “They were greatly in error”? So it was this great error, and the unbelief of people paying no attention to worship and divine religion, that discovered the art by which to make gods.

And yet this was discovered by great error and unbelief and the mind’s turning away from worship and divine religion: that man should make gods by art. This is what the wise man laments, as though divine religion were going to be taken away at a fixed time to come. See whether he is not compelled by divine power to reveal the past error of his ancestors, and by diabolical power to lament the future punishment of the demons. Suppose their forefathers, by erring greatly about the nature of the gods, through unbelief and the mind’s turning away from worship and divine religion, discovered an art by which to make gods. Then what wonder is it if whatever this detestable art produced, in its turning away from divine religion, is taken away by divine religion? For truth corrects error, faith refutes unbelief, and turning back sets right the turning away.

But the facts are these. This same man admires the power of this art in man above all else, the power by which man has been granted to make gods. He laments that a time will come when all these fictitious gods set up by human beings will even be ordered by law to be removed. Yet he confesses and states plainly the causes that led to all this. He says that his forefathers discovered this art of making gods through great error and unbelief, and by paying no attention to worship and divine religion. What, then, ought we to say? Or rather, what ought we to do, except give all the thanks we can to the Lord our God, who has removed these things by causes contrary to those by which they were established?

What the abundance of error established, the way of truth removed. What unbelief established, faith removed. What the turning away from the worship of divine religion established, the turning toward the one true and holy God removed. And this happened not only in Egypt, the only land that the spirit of demons laments through him, but in all the earth, which sings to the Lord a new song. So the truly sacred and truly prophetic writings foretold, where it is written: “Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.” Indeed the title of this psalm is: “When the house was being built after the captivity.” For a house is being built for the Lord in all the earth: the city of God, which is the holy Church. It is built after that captivity in which demons held captive and possessed the very people of whom, as they believe in God, the house is built as of living stones.note

For it was not the case that the man who made the gods was not himself possessed by them, simply because he had made them. By worshiping them he was drawn into fellowship with them: fellowship, I mean, not with stupid idols but with cunning demons. For what are idols but what the same Scripture says: “They have eyes, and they will not see”? Whatever else of that kind had to be said of materials which, however skillfully shaped, still lack life and sensation. But the unclean spirits, bound to those same images by that wicked art, had wretchedly taken captive the souls of their worshipers by drawing them into fellowship with themselves. Hence the apostle says: “We know that an idol is nothing; but what the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God. I do not want you to become partners with demons.”note

So it is after this captivity, in which human beings were held by evil demons, that the house of God is being built in all the earth. That is where the psalm got its title, the psalm in which it is said: “Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name; proclaim the good news of his salvation day after day. Announce his glory among the nations, his wonders among all peoples. For the Lord is great and exceedingly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens.”

He calls them gods. Yet he says they were made by the kind of people we certainly ought not to be. In saying so he shows, whether he likes it or not, that they are not to be worshiped by those who are unlike the people who made them, that is, by the prudent, the faithful and the religious. At the same time he also shows that the very people who made them brought it on themselves to have as gods beings that were not gods. For that prophetic saying is true: “If man makes gods, look, they are not gods.”note

So Hermes called such gods, the gods of such people, made by art by such people, gods made by human beings. That is, he gave that name to demons bound to idols, by some art or other, with the chains of their own cravings. Yet he did not grant them what the Platonist Apuleius granted. We have already said enough about him and shown how unfitting and absurd his view is. Apuleius made them interpreters and intercessors between the gods whom God made and the human beings whom the same God made, carrying prayers from one side and bringing back gifts from the other. It is utterly foolish to believe that gods whom human beings made have more influence with the gods whom God made than human beings themselves have, whom the same God made. A demon bound to an image by an impious art has indeed been made a god by a man, but a god for such a man, not for every man.

What sort of god, then, is this, whom no man would make unless he were in error, unbelieving and turned away from the true God? Consider the demons worshiped in temples. By some art or other they were placed in images, that is, in visible statues, by the people who made gods by this art when they had strayed and turned away from worship and divine religion. Suppose these demons are not messengers or interpreters between human beings and gods. There are two reasons for this. One is their wicked and utterly shameful character. The other is that human beings, even in error, unbelieving and turned away from worship and divine religion, are without doubt better than those whom they themselves made gods by art. Then it remains that whatever power they have, they have as demons. They may do more harm by seeming to bestow benefits, because they deceive more. Or they may do harm openly. Yet they can do neither of these except when permitted by the deep and secret providence of God. But they do not have great influence with human beings as intermediaries between human beings and gods through friendship with the gods.

For they cannot possibly be friends of the good gods. These we call holy angels, rational creatures of the holy heavenly dwelling, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. The demons are as far from them in the disposition of their minds as vices are from virtues and malice from goodness.note

For impious people are so blind that they stumble, as it were, over mountains, and refuse to see things that strike their very eyes. They do not notice that in all the literature of the pagans there are either no gods, or hardly any, who were not once human beings and were given divine honors after death. I pass over Varro’s statement that they regard all the dead as gods, the Manes. He proves it from the rites performed for nearly all the dead. There he also mentions funeral games, as though this were the strongest proof of divinity, since games are usually celebrated only for deities.note

Then he goes on, as though he meant to prove this with examples, and says: “For your grandfather, Asclepius, the first discoverer of medicine, has a temple consecrated to him on a mountain of Libya near the shore of the crocodiles. In it lies his worldly man, that is, his body. The rest of him, or rather the whole of him, if the whole man consists in the consciousness of life, has returned to heaven in a better state. Even now, by his own divine power, he gives sick people all the help that the art of medicine usually provides.” See, he has said that a dead man is worshiped as a god in the place where he had his tomb. In saying that he returned to heaven, he is deceived and deceiving. Then he adds another: “Hermes,” he says, “whose name I bear from my grandfather, dwells in the native city that bears his name. Does he not help and preserve all mortals who come to him from every side?”note

This elder Hermes, that is, Mercury, whom he says was his grandfather, is said to reside at Hermopolis, that is, in the city named after him. See, he says that two gods were human beings: Aesculapius and Mercury. About Aesculapius, the Greeks and the Latins think the same. But many do not believe that Mercury was a mortal, and yet this man testifies that Mercury was his grandfather. “But that one is one person and this is another,” they say, “though they are called by the same name.” I will not argue much. Let that one be one person and this another. Still, this one too, like Aesculapius, became a god from a man. So testifies a man of great standing among his own people: this Trismegistus, his grandson.note

“Hence it came about,” he says, “that these were called sacred animals by the Egyptians. Throughout their various cities the souls of those men are worshiped to whom these animals were consecrated while they were alive. So the cities live under their laws and are called by their names.”) Where now is that mournful complaint, as it were, that the land of Egypt, the most holy seat of shrines and temples, would be completely full of tombs and of the dead? Clearly the deceitful spirit, at whose prompting Hermes said these things, was forced through Hermes himself to confess something. Even then that land was completely full of tombs and of the dead whom they worshiped as gods. But it was the grief of the demons that spoke through him. They mourned the punishments awaiting them at the memorial shrines of the holy martyrs. For in many such places they are tortured and confess and are cast out of the human bodies they have possessed.

Who among the faithful has ever heard a priest standing at the altar say in his prayers, “I offer you sacrifice, Peter, or Paul, or Cyprian”? This holds even for an altar built over the holy body of a martyr for the honor and worship of God. At their memorials sacrifice is offered to God, who made them both human beings and martyrs and joined them in heavenly honor with his holy angels. By that celebration we give thanks to the true God for their victories. And by renewing their memory, calling on that same God for help, we urge ourselves on to imitate such crowns and palms. So whatever acts of devotion religious people perform at the martyrs’ places are adornments of their memorials. They are not rites or sacrifices offered to the dead as to gods.note

There are also those who bring their own meals there. The better Christians do not do this, and in most parts of the world there is no such custom. Yet whoever do so set the food down, pray, and then take it away, either to eat it or to give some of it to the needy as well. They want it sanctified for them through the merits of the martyrs, in the name of the Lord of the martyrs. But these are not sacrifices to the martyrs, as anyone knows who knows the one sacrifice of Christians, which is offered there too.

Far be it from them to dare to compare these, though they hold them to be gods, in any respect with our holy martyrs, whom nevertheless we do not hold to be gods. We do not appoint priests or offer sacrifices to our martyrs, because that is unfitting, undue and unlawful, and is owed to the one God alone. In the same way we do not entertain them with their own crimes or with the most shameful games. In these games such people celebrate either the misdeeds of their gods, if they committed such things when they were human, or the made-up delights of harmful demons, if they were never human. Socrates would not have had a god from this kind of demon, if he had a god at all. But perhaps those who wished to excel in that same art imposed such a god on a man who had nothing to do with the art of making gods and was innocent of it. Why say more? No one even moderately sensible doubts that these spirits are not to be worshiped for the sake of the happy life that is to come after death.

But perhaps they will say that the gods are all good, while among the demons some are bad and some good. They will then hold that the demons through whom we may reach the life that is happy forever should be worshiped, namely those they consider good. What that amounts to must be examined in the next book.

Those, however, who assert that all the gods are good, and far superior to the human beings who are reckoned good, are rightly troubled by the deeds of demons, which they cannot deny. Since they judge that such deeds could in no way be committed by the gods, all of whom they hold to be good, they are forced to draw a distinction between gods and demons. Whatever rightly displeases them in the depraved works or emotions by which hidden spirits display their power, they believe belongs to the demons, not to the gods.

But they think that these same demons are placed midway between humans and gods, as though no god had dealings with a human being. On this view the demons carry up our requests from one side and bring back from the other what has been granted. This is the view of the Platonists, the foremost and most distinguished of the philosophers. Because they are the most excellent, I chose to examine with them the question whether the worship of many gods helps us attain the happy life that is to come after death. So in the previous book I asked how the demons could win the friendship of the good gods for good people, as though they were nearer to the gods and on friendlier terms with them. These demons delight in what good and wise people turn away from and condemn. They delight in the sacrilegious, shameful and criminal fictions of the poets, told not about just any human being but about the gods themselves, and in the wicked and punishable violence of the magic arts. We found that the demons can in no way do this.

For many people commonly speak of some demons as good and others as evil. Whether this is also the opinion of the Platonists or of anyone else, it must by no means go unexamined. Otherwise someone might think he ought to follow supposedly good demons. Through them, as intermediaries, he aims and strives to be reconciled to the gods, all of whom he believes to be good, so that he may be with them, as it were, after death. Meanwhile he may be ensnared and deceived by the trickery of evil spirits and stray far from the true God. It is with him alone, in him alone and from him alone that the human soul, that is, the rational and intellectual soul, is happy.

His words on this subject are these: “It is from roughly this class of demons,” he says, “that the poets, not at all far from the truth, are accustomed to invent gods who hate and love certain people. These they prosper and advance; those, on the contrary, they oppose and afflict. So they feel pity and indignation, anguish and joy, and undergo every aspect of the human mind. With a like agitation of heart and a swell of mind they are tossed upon all the surging tides of thought. All these turmoils and storms are banished far from the tranquillity of the heavenly gods.” Can there be any doubt in these words? He said that it is not some lower parts of their souls but the very minds of the demons, by which they are rational beings, that are churned by a storm of passions like a stormy sea.

So they are not even to be compared with wise human beings. Human weakness is not immune from disturbances of the soul of this kind. Yet even when the wise suffer them under the conditions of this life, they resist them with an undisturbed mind. They do not yield to them so as to approve or do anything that strays from the path of wisdom and the law of justice. The demons are like foolish and unjust mortals, not in body but in character. I will not say they are worse, inasmuch as they are older and made incurable by deserved punishment. They too are tossed on the swell of the mind itself, as Apuleius called it. In no part of their soul do they stand firm in the truth and virtue by which turbulent and depraved emotions are resisted.

Cicero, in his books On the Ends of Good and Evil, proves that the Stoics contend against the Platonists or Peripatetics in words rather than in substance. The Stoics refuse to call bodily and external things goods; they call them advantages. This is because they hold that there is no good for a human being except virtue, as the art of living well, which exists only in the soul. The others call these things goods, simply and in keeping with ordinary usage, but small and slight in comparison with virtue, by which one lives rightly. The result is that, whatever each side calls them, goods or advantages, both weigh them at equal value. In this question the Stoics take pleasure in nothing but novel terminology.note

It seems to me, then, that in this question too their dispute is about words rather than things. The question is whether passions of the soul befall the wise man, or whether he is wholly free of them. I judge that on this point the Stoics think nothing different from the Platonists and Peripatetics, as far as the substance of things is concerned and not the sound of the terms.

The philosopher answered with the reply of Aristippus the Socratic. In a similar situation Aristippus had heard the same words from a similar man. He replied that the other had rightly not been anxious for the soul of a worthless good-for-nothing, but that he himself had good reason to fear for the soul of Aristippus. When the rich man had been rebuffed by this reply, Aulus Gellius afterward asked the philosopher what the reason for his fear had been. He asked not to provoke him but to learn. To instruct a man so keenly fired with the desire to know, the philosopher at once brought out of his little bag a book by the Stoic Epictetus. It contained writings in agreement with the doctrines of Zeno and Chrysippus, who, as we know, were the leading Stoics. In that book, Aulusnote

Gellius says he read that the Stoics held the following view. The mind’s impressions, which they call phantasiai, strike the mind, and it is not in our power whether or when they do so. When they arise from terrible and fearsome things, they necessarily move even the wise man’s mind. For a little while it trembles with fear or is contracted by sorrow, as though these passions got ahead of the work of mind and reason. Yet this does not mean that an opinion of evil forms in the mind, or that these impressions are approved or consented to. This, they hold, is in our power. They judge that this is the difference between the mind of the wise man and that of the fool. The fool’s mind yields to these passions and adapts the mind’s assent to them. The wise undergo them of necessity, but with an unshaken mind they still keep a true and steady judgment about what they ought rationally to seek or to shun. I have set this out as best I could, not indeed more elegantly than Aulus

Gellius, but certainly more briefly and, I think, more plainly. This is what he records reading in Epictetus’s book, as what Epictetus said and held on the basis of the doctrines of the Stoics.

Yet he could both suffer that agitation and keep a judgment fixed in his mind. He could hold that life and bodily safety, whose loss the savage storm threatened, are not goods that make those who possess them good, as justice does. As for their saying that these things should not even be called goods but advantages, that must be put down to a contest over words, not an examination of things. What does it matter whether they are more aptly called goods or advantages, so long as the Stoic trembles and turns pale at the prospect of losing them no less than the Peripatetic? They do not call them by the same name, but they value them equally. Suppose both were pressed toward some shameful act or crime by threats to these goods or advantages, so that they could not keep them otherwise. Both, certainly, say that they would rather lose the things by which the body’s nature is kept safe and sound than commit the deeds by which justice is violated.

Thus a mind in which this judgment is fixed allows no disturbances to prevail within it against reason, even if they occur in the lower parts of the soul. On the contrary, the mind itself rules over them. By not consenting to them and rather resisting them, it exercises the reign of virtue. Virgil too describes Aeneas in this way when he says: “His mind stays unmoved; the tears roll down in vain.”note

Cicero spoke far better, more humanely and more in keeping with the feelings of the devout in his praise of Caesar, when he said: “Of all your virtues none is more admirable or more pleasing than your mercy.” What is mercy but a kind of fellow-feeling in our heart for another’s misery, which compels us to help if we can? This emotion serves reason when mercy is shown in such a way that justice is preserved, whether something is given to the needy or the penitent is pardoned. Cicero, that outstanding speaker, did not hesitate to call mercy a virtue. The Stoics are not ashamed to count it among the vices. Yet the Stoics, as the book of Epictetus, a most distinguished Stoic, has shown on the basis of the doctrines of Zeno and Chrysippus, the leaders of this school, admit passions of this kind into the soul of the wise man. And they hold that the wise man is free of all vices.note

It follows that they do not regard these passions as vices when they befall the wise man in such a way that they have no power against the virtue and reason of his mind. It follows too that the opinion of the Peripatetics, or even of the Platonists, and that of the Stoics themselves is one and the same. But, as Cicero says, a dispute over a word has long tormented these Greeks, who are keener on contention than on truth. Still, it may rightly be asked whether undergoing emotions of this kind, even in the performance of good duties, belongs to the weakness of the present life. Perhaps the holy angels punish without anger those whom the eternal law of God hands over to them for punishment. Perhaps they help the miserable without sharing their misery, and come to the aid of those they love in danger without fear. The names of these passions would still be applied to them by the custom of human speech, because of a certain likeness in their works, not because of any weakness in their feelings. In the same way God himself, according to the Scriptures, is angry, and yet is not disturbed by any passion.

For the word is used of the effect of his vengeance, not of any turbulent feeling in him.

What part of them, then, is free and in possession of wisdom, so that they might please the gods and counsel human beings toward good conduct like their own? Their mind is subjugated and oppressed by the vices of passion. Whatever reason it naturally has, it bends all the more keenly to deceiving and misleading, the more it is possessed by the craving to do harm.

This, then, is the fiction of the poets: they call gods those who are not gods, and show them, under the names of gods, fighting among themselves over human beings whom they love or hate out of partisan zeal. But he says this fiction is not far from the truth. The demons are called by the names of gods when they are not gods, but they are nonetheless described just as they are. Finally, he says that this is the origin of Homer’s Minerva, who intervened in the midst of the assembled Greeks to restrain Achilles.note

So he wants it to be a poetic invention that this was Minerva, because he thinks Minerva a goddess. He places her among the gods, all of whom he believes to be good and happy, in a lofty ethereal abode, far from contact with mortals. But he admitted that the poets spoke not far from the truth in another respect. There was some demon who favored the Greeks and opposed the Trojans, just as there was another who helped the Trojans against the Greeks, whom the same poet mentions by the name of Venus or Mars. Apuleius places these gods in the heavenly dwellings, where they do no such things. And these demons fought among themselves for those they loved against those they hated.

For the poets said these things about beings who, as he testifies, are tossed like humans “with a like agitation of heart and a swell of mind upon all the surging tides of thought.” So they can exercise their loves and hatreds, not for the sake of justice, but for some against others according to their partisan enthusiasms. In this they are like the populace, which resembles them in its devotion to the hunters of the arena and the charioteers. The Platonist philosopher seems to have taken care that, when the poets sang of these things, people should not believe they were done by the gods themselves, whose names the poets assign in their fictions, rather than by the intermediate demons.

He gave a somewhat fuller description that took in human beings themselves. He spoke of them in their proper place as the lowest and earthly beings, after first speaking of the heavenly gods, so that, having set out the two extreme parts, the highest and the lowest, he could speak in third place of the demons in between. “Humans, then,” he says, “distinguished by reason, powerful in speech, with immortal souls and dying limbs, fickle and anxious minds, dull and vulnerable bodies; unlike in character, alike in error; stubborn in daring, persistent in hope, futile in toil, frail in fortune; mortal one by one, yet everlasting all together as a race, changing in turn as offspring take their place; their time fleeting, their wisdom slow, their death swift, their life a lament—humans inhabit the earth.” He said so many things here that apply to most people. Did he keep silent even about what he knew belonged to few, when he says “their wisdom slow”?

Had he left that out, he would by no means have defined the human race correctly with the careful precision of this description. When he extolled the excellence of the gods, he declared that happiness itself, which humans want to reach through wisdom, is preeminent in them. Accordingly, if he had wanted some demons to be understood as good, he would also have put something into their description from which they might be thought to share either some part of happiness with the gods or some kind of wisdom with humans. As it is, he mentioned no good of theirs by which the good are distinguished from the bad.

He refrained from expressing their wickedness more freely. He did so not so much to avoid offending the demons themselves as to avoid offending their worshipers, to whom he was speaking. Even so, he showed the discerning what they ought to think of them. He completely separated the gods, whom he wanted everyone to believe good and happy, from the passions and, as he himself puts it, the “turmoils” of the demons. He linked the two only by the eternity of their bodies, while making it perfectly plain that in soul demons are like not the gods but humans. And that likeness lay not in the good of wisdom, in which humans too can share, but in the disturbance of the passions. That disturbance dominates the foolish and the wicked. The wise and the good govern it in such a way that they would rather not have it than have to overcome it.

For if he had wanted us to understand that demons share with the gods the eternity not of bodies but of souls, he would certainly not have excluded humans from a share in this, since, as a Platonist, he undoubtedly holds that humans too have eternal souls. That is why, when he described this kind of living being, he said that humans have “immortal souls and dying limbs.” And so, if humans do not share eternity with the gods because they are mortal in body, then demons do share it because they are immortal in body.

A living being, that is, an animal, consists of soul and body. Of these two the soul is certainly the better. Even when it is vicious and weak, it is surely better than even the healthiest and strongest body, because its nature is more excellent and is not ranked below the body even by the stain of vices. In the same way, gold, even when tarnished, is valued more highly than silver or lead, however pure. Yet these mediators between gods and humans, whose intervention is supposed to join human things to divine, have an eternal body in common with the gods and a vicious soul in common with humans. It is as if the religion by which they want humans to be joined to the gods through demons were located in the body, not in the soul.