Against the Pagans 3

Long since indeed a full, careful, and complete answer has been made to all these charges — or rather revilings, to speak the truth — by men eminent in this field and who have earned the knowledge of this truth; nor has any point of any question been passed over that has not been refuted in a thousand ways and by the most forcible reasonings. It is therefore not necessary to linger longer over this part of the case. For it is not that the matter cannot stand without champions, nor will the Christian religion be proved true on the ground that it has very many who assent to it and has taken its authority from men.

It is content with its own strength and rests upon the foundations of its own truth, nor is it stripped of its power even if it has no defender — nay, even if all tongues were to work against it and strive against it, and conspire with the animosity of a united consent to abrogate belief in it. Now let us return to the order from which we necessarily digressed a little before, lest, our defence being longer interrupted, it be said that we have conceded to our slanderers the palm of a proven charge. For they urge this: "If divine matters are at heart with you, why do you neither worship nor adore other gods together with us, nor share common rites with your peoples, and join in the observances of our religions?" We can meanwhile reply:

For the discharge of the worship due to the Deity, the first God suffices us — the first God, I say, the Father of things and Lord, the Founder and Governor of all — in Him we worship all that must be worshipped, we adore what it is fitting to adore, we do reverence to what claims the homage of veneration. For since we hold fast the very Head of the Godhead, from which the very divinity of all divine beings, whatever they are, is derived, we deem it superfluous to go through each one individually, since we neither know who they are nor what names they have, nor, moreover, can we have any clear, grasped, or ascertained knowledge of their number. And as in earthly kingdoms we are compelled by no necessity

to worship by name, alongside the princes, those set within the royal households; rather, in the worship of the kings themselves, whatever is attached to them is comprehended by a silent deference, as it feels itself to be — on no other principle, whoever these gods are that you set before us as existing, if they are royal offspring and spring from a princely head, even though they receive no worship from us by name, they nevertheless understand that they are honoured in common with their king and are included in the veneration paid to him. And this indeed would be so put forward by us, provided it is clear and established that, besides the king and prince himself, there are other heads of divine powers, which, arranged and set apart by number, form as it were a certain populace of a plebeian multitude.

Nor would you have us regard, in sacred buildings, as gods those effigies and images which you yourselves also understand — and refuse and decline to confess — to be most worthless shapes of clay and childish fabrications of craftsmen. And when we speak with you concerning the divine matter, we demand that you show this: that there are other gods by nature, by power, and by name, not set before us in images, which we see, but in that substance in which it is fitting to reckon that the power of so great a name ought to be estimated. But it is not our intention to linger longer over this part of the case, lest we seem to wish to stir up the greatest quarrels and to join in tumultuous contests.

Let there be, as you proclaim, this populace of divinities; let there be countless tribes of gods; we assent, we acquiesce, we close our eyes, and we do not fasten upon this as anything doubtful or ambiguous in dispute. Yet this we demand and ask to hear from you: whence has it been ascertained by you, or by what reasonings grasped, that the gods you suppose to exist and worship are those that are in heaven, and not some others of an unknown character and name? For it may well be that both those exist whom you do not recall, and those you are confident exist are found in no part of nature.

For you have not at some time flown up to heaven, to the stars, and beheld the faces and countenances of each, and, having remembered that yonder gods are these, established the worship of the same here as of beings known and seen. But again we desire to hear this too: whether these names by which you call them have been imposed by you, or whether they themselves assumed these for themselves on their naming-days. If these are divine and heavenly names, who reported them to you? But if, on the other hand, they have these appellations affixed by you, how were you able to give designations to those whom you never at any time saw, nor had any knowledge of what sort or who they were?

But, as you wish and believe, and as you are persuaded, these are gods; let them be called even by these names by which popular vulgarity leads them to be reckoned by the crowd. Yet whence is it known to you how many names make up their census, or whether there are any unknown to you and never at any time brought into use and notice? For it is not easy to know whether the multitude of their number is defined and fixed, or is without any total of population and is bounded by no reckonings of any computation. For let us suppose that you worship a thousand gods, or rather five thousand: yet in the nature of things it may perchance come to pass that there are a hundred thousand gods, or, it may be, even more than this — nay, as we said a little before, it may be that the sum of the gods is none at all,

and bounded by no numerable limitation. Either, then, you too are impious, who do not perform the duties owed to the rest apart from a few gods; or, if you claim pardon for yourselves in your ignorance of the others, you will procure for us that same pardon, if for a like reason we abstain from the religious rites of those whom we do not know to exist at all. And yet, let no one perversely judge that we are unwilling to undertake the sacred observances of the rest, whatever divinities they are. For we stretch out devoted minds and suppliant hands, and do not scorn to approach wherever you invite us, provided only we learn who these divine beings are that you thrust upon us, and whom it is fitting to join to the veneration of the highest King and Prince.

"Saturn," he says, "and Janus, Minerva, Juno, Apollo, Venus, Triptolemus, Hercules, and the others besides, to whom religious antiquity has consecrated magnificent temples in almost all cities." You might perhaps have been able to invite us to the worship of these divinities, had you not yourselves first, in the foulness of base opinions, feigned such things about them as not only defiled their dignity but proved them, by the qualities attached to them, to be no gods at all. For, in the first place, we cannot be brought to believe this: that that immortal and most excellent nature is divided by sexes, and that one part are males, another part females.

Indeed, men of living heart have long since fully expounded this topic, both in Roman letters and in Greek, and before all Tullius, the most eloquent of the Roman race, fearing no odium of impiety, frankly, steadfastly, and freely showed with the greater piety what he felt about such an opinion; from whom, if you were to take up matters composed with the truth of judgement, and not seek after the brilliancies of words, this case would have been fully argued, nor, as they say, would it demand of us from mere infants a second pleading.

But why should I say that grace of words and splendour of speech is to be sought from this man, when I know that there are not a few who turn away from and flee his books on this subject, and are unwilling to admit to their ear a reading that overcomes the presumptions of their own opinions? And when I hear others muttering indignantly and saying that it ought to be decreed by the senate that these writings, by which the Christian religion is proved and the authority of antiquity overwhelmed, should be abolished? Nay rather, if you are confident that you say anything ascertained about your gods, convict Cicero of error, refute, rebut, and prove that he prates rashly and impiously. For to intercept writings and to wish to suppress a published reading is not to defend the gods, but to fear the testimony of truth.

And yet, lest some inconsiderate person raise a calumny against us also — as though we believed the God whom we worship to be male, for this reason forsooth, that when we speak of Him we pronounce it in the masculine gender — let him understand that it is not sex, but that His appellation and designation is brought forth by the usage and familiarity of speech. For God is not male, but His name is of the masculine gender, which you cannot say of your own in your religion. For you are accustomed to say in your prayers, "whether thou art a god or a goddess"; and this qualification of doubt shows that you assign sex to the gods by the very distinction. We cannot therefore be brought to believe that God has a body. For bodies must needs exist, if there are

males and females, distinguished by a differentiation of gender. For who, even of the slightest sense, does not know that the sexes of earthly living creatures were instituted and formed by their Maker for no other reason than that, through the coitus and unions of bodies, this fleeting and slipping thing might endure by the perpetual renewal of continuous succession? What then? Shall we say that gods beget, that gods are born, and that on this account the parts of the generative members have been added to them, that they might be able to supply offspring, and that, as each new brood springs up, a renewing substitution might replace whatever a former age had taken away?

Therefore, if these things are so — that is, if the gods above beget, and if they experience their sexes according to earthly laws, and are immortal and are not made effete by the chills of old age — it follows that all things ought to be full of gods, and that the countless heavens cannot contain their multitude, since they too beget perpetually, and through the offspring of offspring their numberlessness, ever multiplied, is enlarged: or, if the obscenity of coupling is, as is fitting, absent from the gods, what cause or reason will be shown why they are marked with those parts by which sex is wont to recognise itself by the promptings of its own lusts?

For it is not likely that these are had in vain, or that their improvident nature wished to sport with them, so as to heap upon them parts they were not to use. For as the hands, feet, eyes, and the rest of the structure of the members are each appointed to their own certain uses and offices, so it is fitting to believe that these parts have been provided for the discharge of their own function: or it must be confessed that in the bodies of the gods there is something vacant, which has been fabricated in vain and to no purpose. What say you, O holy and unpolluted high priests of the religions? Do the gods, then, have sexes, and do they carry about the foulnesses of generative members, which it is infamous to bring forth from modest mouths by their own names?

What then now remains, but that we should believe them to riot in the frenzies of lust after the manner of unclean quadrupeds, to go with rabid desires into mutual embraces, and at last, their bodies broken and dissolved, to grow faint with the enervation of pleasure? And since certain things are proper to the female sex, it follows that we must believe the goddesses too to discharge their laws with their recurring months, to conceive with squeamish loathing and to carry conceptions, to miscarry, to come to term, and sometimes with too-hasty birth to bring forth seven-month broods. O pure, O holy divinity, set apart and severed from every stain of baseness!

The mind craves and burns to behold, in those great halls and in the palaces of heaven, gods and goddesses with bodies unveiled and naked — Venus with Iacchus, full-breasted, as the Lucretian Muse proclaims; Hellespontine Priapus carrying about, among virgin goddesses and matrons, those parts of his ever ready and prepared for the campaign of his battles. It craves, I say, to see goddesses pregnant, goddesses with young, lingering with the peevishness of the inward burden as their bellies swell day by day, others in labour with long-drawn travail and seeking the hands of midwives, others pierced with heavy darts and the sharp pangs of pains, wailing, tortured, and amid all these imploring the aid of Juno Lucina.

Is it not far more upright to speak evil, to rail, and to heap other reproaches upon the gods, than under a pious pretext to presume such monstrous things about them, with the unworthiness of your opinions? And do you dare to ascribe to us the cause of the gods' offence, when — if judgement be made — it will be found most certainly that this rests with you, and that the affront lies elsewhere than you suppose? For if the gods, as you say, are affected by anger and grow hot with the indignations of their minds, why should we not think that they bear with difficulty, nay most grievously, that sexes are given to them by you, by which dogs and swine are formed, and that, since you believe them so, they are fashioned in no other way and set forth with ignominious display?

Therefore, since these things are so, O you are the cause of all miseries; you drive on the gods, you rouse them to assail the lands with every evil and to contrive daily some new mischief, whereby they may avenge themselves, exasperated by so many injuries and revilings from you — revilings, I say, and injuries, which partly by shameful fables, partly by unbecoming opinions, which your theologians, which your poets, which you yourselves also celebrate in ignominious rites, you will find that they have brought human affairs to ruin and that the gods have thrown down the helm, if indeed the care of ruling mortals and administering their fortunes belongs to them.

For they have no cause to be angry with us, whom they see and perceive neither to worship nor to deride them, as is said, and to esteem far more honourably of the dignity of their name than you do — than to believe it. So much for sex. Now let us come to the appearance and forms in which you believe the gods above to be delineated, nay, in which, once fashioned, you place them in the most spacious seats of temples. And let no one in this place bring against us Jewish and Sadducee fables, as though we too assigned forms to God; for this is thought to be said in their writings, and, as it were, affirmed as a sure thing and upon authority:

which either do not pertain to us at all, nor have anything in common with us in any portion, or, if they are, as is believed, allied to us, you must seek out teachers of a higher understanding, through whom you may learn in what ways it is fitting to unfold the clouds and wrappings of those writings. Our opinion concerning this is such: that all the divine nature, which neither at some time began to be, nor will ever come to a term of life, lacks bodily lineaments and possesses no effigies of forms, by which the outer boundary of members is wont to bring their joinings to an end. For whatever is such, we judge to be mortal and perishable;

nor do we believe that what is confined within extreme bounds, which a necessary extremity encloses, can obtain perpetual duration. But indeed you gods — it is too little that you embrace them with the measurement of forms, with a line, and delimit them by the human standard, and, what is far more unworthy, that you bound them by the outline of earthly bodies. What then shall we say? That the gods carry a head gathered into a smooth roundness, bound to the back by the ties of sinews and to the breast, and, for the necessary bendings of the neck, propped up by the joinings of the little vertebrae and by a bony framework?

But if we shall accept this as true, it follows further that they have ears too, bored through with curving windings; the movable little orbs of the eyes, shaded by the margins of the brows; the overhanging pent of the nostrils, passable for the mucous discharges and for the current of breath; teeth of three kinds for the working over of food, and composed for three offices; hands as ministers of works, tractable by the joints, the fingers, and the mobility of the elbows; feet for sustaining the body, for unfolding the steps and for supplying the forward reaches of their goings.

But if those things which are exposed to view exist, it is consistent that those too be carried which lie beneath the ribs, and which the skins cover beneath their lattice-work, and the little membranes of the caul — the gullets, stomachs, spleens, lungs, little bladders, livers, the winding tracts of the rolling intestines, and the veins of purple blood coursing through all the vitals, coupled with the arteries of breath. Or do the bodies of the heavenly ones lack these foulnesses, and, since they abstain from mortal food, must it be believed that they are toothless after the manner of an infant, and, widowed of all their inward parts, hang like blown-up wineskins in the emptiness of their swollen bodies?

And what of this — that, if these things are so, it will be necessary for you to consider whether all the gods are alike, or are held in a diverse delineation of forms? For if there is to all one and the same species of likeness, it is not absurd to believe that they err and are deceived in the mutual recognition of one another. But if, on the other hand, they bear a distinction in their countenances, it follows that it ought to be understood that dissimilarities were given to them for no other cause than that each might be able to recognise himself by the properties of distinguishing marks.

Therefore it must be said that some among them are big-headed, some little-headed, broad-browed, thick-lipped, others long-chinned, moley, and snub-nosed; these with flat-spread nostrils, those with turned-up; some hollow-cheeked or, from the fullness of their jowls, deep-voiced; dwarfish, tall, middling, lean, fat, gross; these curly with the twistings of their hair, others shaven with baldness and smoothness. Nor do your workshops betray and reveal that we suppose these things falsely, since, when you make and shape the gods, you fashion some as long-haired, others as smooth, old, young, boys, dark, grey-eyed, tawny, half-naked, uncovered, or — lest cold should incommode them — clothed with an overlay of flowing garments.

Is there any of men, touched with any savour of reason, who would believe that hairs and down grow on the bodies of gods, that the distinctions of years are present in them, and that, clothed in various forms of coverings and cloaks, they go about and guard themselves from heats and colds? He who holds this as true must needs accept this also as true: that there are gods who are fullers, gods who are barbers, who either wash out the sacred garments or trim the hair of those wrapped in the fleeces of their forest-like locks.

Is this not base, is it not full of impiety and outrage — to give to the gods the lineaments of a dying and perishable creature, to distinguish them with those parts which no honest man dares to enumerate or to pursue, nor to conceive in the imagination of his mind without a shudder at their utmost foulness? Is this that fastidiousness of yours, this arrogant wisdom, whereby you spit upon us as uncouth and recall that all knowledge of divine things lies open to you? You laugh at the enigmas of the Egyptians, because they have inserted the forms of dumb animals into divine matters, and receive these same forms with much incense and the rest of the apparatus of ceremonies:

you venerate effigies of men as the powers of gods, and are not ashamed to set upon them the face of an earthly animal; you condemn others of error and folly, and are caught in the likeness and vice of the same error. Unless perhaps you will say that the gods have indeed other forms, and that for the sake of honour and endowment you have accommodated to them the appearances of mortals: which is a matter of far greater outrage than to have done something through ignorance of error. For if you confessed that which your suspicion had believed — that you had assigned these to divine shapes — the presumption would have been of less injury, to have sinned in an opinion:

but now, since you believe one thing and feign another, you are both insulting to those to whom you attribute that which you confess is not theirs, and you are shown to be irreligious, since you adore that which you feign, not that which you judge to be in the thing itself and in very truth. If little asses, dogs, and swine had any human understanding and possessed the arts of fashioning, and wished likewise to attend us with some worship and to honour us with the consecration of statues, what flames of wrath, what whirlwinds of indignation would they stir up in us, if they should wish our images to bear and to possess the forms of their own bodies?

What flames of wrath, I say, would they pour forth and kindle, if the founder of the city, Romulus, were to stand in an ass's face, if holy Pompilius in a dog's, if under a swine's shape the name of Cato or of Marcus Cicero were inscribed? Do you then recall that your stupidity is not laughed at by your divinities, if they laugh; or, since you judge them to be affected by anger, that they neither rage nor go mad, nor wish to go and avenge themselves for such injuries and outrages, and to hurl against you those things which grief is wont to hurl and the bitterness of offence to devise? How much more upright would it have been to bestow upon them the forms of elephants, of panthers or tigers, of bulls and horses? For what is there in man

what is beautiful, what, I ask, is admirable or comely, save what some author would have to be common even with the ape-like herd? "But if," they say, "our opinion displeases you, do you show, do you tell, with what form God is endowed." — If you wish to hear a true judgement: either God has no form, or, if He is formed with some, we assuredly do not know what it is. For we likewise deem it no disgrace not to know what we have never seen, nor are we barred by the matter from refuting the opinions of others, because upon this we ourselves put forth no opinion of our own.

For as, if the world were said to be of glass, or of silver, or of iron, or heaped up and fabricated out of brittle earthenware, we should not hesitate to contend that it is false, although we know not what its material is; so, when the appearance of God is in question, we prove that it is not what you allege, even though we are less able to explain what it is. "What then," someone will say, "does God not hear, not speak, not see the things set before Him, not behold them?" — In His own manner, perhaps, not in ours. For neither can we know anything true in so great a matter, nor track it down by conjectures, which, it is plain, are with us unstable, slippery, and like the semblances of empty dreams.

For if we shall say that He sees by the same means by which we too see, it follows that it must be understood that He has little membranes spread over His pupils, that He blinks, winks, and discerns by rays or images, or — what is common to all eyes — that without the intermixture of another light He beholds nothing at all. And this same thing must likewise be said concerning hearing, and concerning the form of utterance and the bringing forth of words: if He hears through ears, that these too are bored through with winding passages, by which the voice may creep in to announce the meaning of speech; or, if words are poured forth from His mouth, that He has lips with teeth, by the striking and mobility of which the many-yoked tongue may articulate sounds and shape the voice into words.

But if you do not refuse to hear the judgment of our mind, so far are we from ascribing bodily features to God that we shrink from attributing to so great a Being even the graces of souls and those very virtues in which it has scarcely been granted to a few men to excel. For who would call God brave, steadfast, frugal, wise? Who would call Him upright, who temperate, who indeed would say that He knows anything, that He understands, that He takes forethought, that He directs the decisions of His own actions toward fixed ends of duty? These are human goods, and it is from their opposition to vices that they have earned a praiseworthy esteem. But who is of so dull a heart, so brutish, as to say that God is great by reason of human goods, or that on this account He surpasses in the majesty of His name, because He lacks the foulness of vices?

Whatever you say of God, whatever you conceive in the silent thought of your mind, passes over into a human sense and is corrupted, nor does that which is spoken in our words, framed for human affairs, bear the mark of its proper meaning. There is one most certain understanding a man may have concerning the nature of God: if you know and feel that nothing can be uttered about Him in mortal speech. And this indeed is the first affront to your deities, which you, forsooth the good and religious champions, have established as authors of forms and sexes. But what sort of thing is that which follows, that you bring in for us gods who are, some of them, smiths, some physicians, some wool-workers, sailors, harpists, flute-players, hunters, shepherds, and, to crown all, rustics?

「This one,」 he says, 「is a musical god, and that other is divine.」 — For the rest of the gods, then, are not divine, and they know not how to foretell things to come, being ignorant and lacking knowledge of the future. 「That one is trained in the arts of midwifery, another has been instructed in the disciplines of physicians.」 — Do individuals then prevail each only in his own field, and, when called to aid, cannot they come to the help of others in their departments? 「This one is eloquent in speech and ready in the linking of words」: — for others are dullards, and can utter nothing skilful if a speech must be made. And I ask: 「What reason, what harsh necessity, what cause is there, that the gods above should know these crafts as if they were mean fellows, and hold themselves as bench-workers?」 — For in heaven there is singing and playing:

so that the graceful sisters may join together and modulate the intervals and the nine notes of the voice. There are woodlands amid the starry motions, there are lairs, there are groves: so that Diana, mighty in the chase, may be reckoned foremost in her expeditions. The gods know not what threatens, and they live by lots and are driven by fatal decrees: so that the Latonian prophet may unfold and disclose what tomorrow or what the hour may bring to each. He himself is filled with another god, and is pressed and agitated by the power of a greater deity: so that he may deservedly be called and held divine. The gods are seized with diseases and can be wounded, can be afflicted by some cause: so that, when reason demands it, the Epidaurian may come as helper and give aid. They are in travail, they give birth: so that Juno-Lucina may soothe and take away the hard pangs of childbirth.

They busy themselves with farming or attend to the tasks of war: so that Vulcan, mighty with flames, may forge swords for them or hammer out the iron tools of the field. They have need of a covering of clothing: so that the maiden Tritonia may more carefully spin the thread and, according to the quality of the season, weave triple-woven tunics or lay on garments of silk. They accuse and refute charges: so that the offspring of Atlas, cultivated by studious practice, may carry off the first prizes of eloquence. 「But you err,」 he says, 「and are deceived; for the gods are not themselves craftsmen, but they subject these arts to the talents of men, and, that life may be better furnished, they hand down to mortals the things to be known.」

— But whoever imparts some discipline to one who is unlearned and ignorant, and strives to make him skilled by knowledge of some work, must himself of necessity first know that which he has resolved to teach another. For no one can be the transmitter of any knowledge without having the precepts of what he transmits well known, and holding the method thoroughly grasped by long practice. Therefore the gods are the first craftsmen, whether because they themselves, as you say, implant knowledge in minds, or because, being immortal and unbegotten, they precede by the antiquity of time the whole earthly race. This then is the question: since among the gods above there is no place for these arts nor any use of them, and their nature does not require the knowing of anything ingenious or fit for a bench-worker:

why do you say that some are versed in some perceptions and others in others, and that they possess skills in which they severally excel, being distinguished by the knowledge of different sciences? 「Unless perhaps you say this: that the gods are not craftsmen, but that they preside over these arts, watch over them—nay, that all things which we administer, which we carry on, are placed under their guardianship, and that, that they may turn out well and happily, they are attended to by the gods' foresight.」 — This indeed would seem to be said deservedly and with probability, if the things we undertake, which we carry on, or in which we are imperilled amid human affairs, always proceeded according to our will and purpose.

But since things daily turn out to the contrary, and the outcomes of our actions do not answer to the purpose of our will, it is the part of a jester to say that the gods stand over us as guardians—gods whom our suspicion has fashioned, not whom explored truth has apprehended. 「Over the seas Matuta grants the safest voyages to travellers」: — and why has the raging sea so often set forth the ruins of cruel shipwrecks? 「Consus supplies saving and trusty counsels to our thoughts」: — and why is there constantly turned upon us the unlooked-for reversal of our resolves into contrary outcomes? 「Pales and Inuus preside as guardians over the herds and flocks of cattle」: — and why do they not care to ward off with hostile inactivity the savage contagions and pestilent diseases from the summer pastures? 「That Flora, the mother」:

— and by the sacred obscenity of games she takes good care that the fields may flourish: and why does the most harmful frost daily scorch and kill the little buds and the sprouting herbs? 「Juno is set over childbirths and aids mothers in labour」: — and why do thousands of mothers daily perish, slain by their murderous throes? 「Fire is under Vulcan's protection, and its substance is set under his governance」: — and why does he most frequently suffer sacred temples and portions of cities to collapse into ashes by the voracity of flames? 「The Pythian bestows the science of divination on soothsayers」: — and why does he oftener give and furnish responses that are oblique, doubtful, sunk in the obscurities of murk?

「Aesculapius presides over the offices and arts of healing」: — and why can so many kinds of diseases and sicknesses not be brought back to health and soundness—nay, why do they grow more dreadful under the very hands of those who heal? 「Mercury attends to the wrestling-schools, and presides over boxing and wrestling」: — and why does he not render invincible all those over whom he presides? Why, in the discharge of a single presidency, does he make these masters of victory, but suffers others to be mocked with an ignominious weakness? 「No one,」 he says, 「supplicates the tutelary gods, and therefore they severally fail in their familiar offices and aids.」

— For unless they receive incense and salted grain, the gods cannot do good; and unless they behold their little altars smeared with the blood of cattle, do they desert and cast off their guardianships? But I supposed a little while ago that the kindnesses of the deities were spontaneous, and that unlooked-for gifts of benevolence flowed of their own accord from them. For is the King of heaven besought with any libation or victim, that he may lavish upon the nations of mortals all those advantages by which they live? Does not the god of the sun supply the generative heat, the seasons of night, the winds, rains, and crops, equally to all—to good and bad, to the unjust, to slaves, to the poor, to the rich? For this is the property of the god who is powerful and true, to bestow unentreated benefits upon the weary and the feeble,

and to things ever hedged about with manifold hardship. For to grant that which you ask when sacrifices have been offered is not to succour the petitioners, but to sell as merchandise the bounty of one's own kindness. We men make sport and wanton in so great a matter, and, forgetting who God is, and what the magnificence of that name is, whatever mean or base thing we have been able by suspicious credulity to imagine, we arrogate to the tutelary gods. 「Unxia,」 he says, 「is set over anointings, Cinxia over the fastening of girdles; the most holy Victa and Potua provide for eating and drinking.」 — O excellent and singular interpretation of the deities and their powers:

unless the doorposts were smeared by brides with fatty ointment, unless the already ardent and impending husbands loosed the maidenly bonds, unless men drank and chewed, the gods would have no names? What of this, that, not content with having subjected and entangled the gods in such unseemly cares, you also assign to them natures wild, savage, monstrous, ever rejoicing in evils and in the devastation of the human race? We shall not mention here the goddess Laverna of thieves; we pass over in the silence of taciturnity the Bellonas, Discords, Furies, and those sinister deities you establish. We shall set in the midst Mars himself, and that beautiful mother of the Cupids, of whom you set one in charge of battles, the other of loves and the ardour of desire.

「Mars,」 he says, 「has power over wars.」 — Is it that he may check them when stirred up, or that he may set in motion things at rest and quiet? For if he is a queller of martial madness, why are wars not lacking daily? But if he is the inciter of them, then we shall be saying that a god, for the sweetness of his own pleasure, dashes

the whole world together, sows the causes of discord and conflict among nations separated by the remoteness of lands, brings together from opposite quarters so many thousands of mortals, and, within the space of a single word's delay, heaps the fields with corpses, hurls down torrents of blood, destroys the most firmly-founded empires, levels cities to the ground, abolishes freedom for the freeborn and imposes the condition of slavery, rejoices in civil dissensions, in the parricidal slaughter of brothers dying together, and, at the last, in the parricidal horror of the encounter of sons and fathers. This same thing it will be permitted, by like and identical reasoning, to transfer to Venus.

For if she, as you allege and believe, subjects the flames of love to human thoughts, it follows that it ought to be understood that whatever of ruin and crime proceeds from such madness ought to be imputed to the wounds of Venus.

Is it then by the goddess's compulsion that even noble women often betray their dignity to whores of the vilest name, that the bonds of steadfast marriages are unstitched, that kinship of blood blazes up into incestuous lusts, that mothers rage against their own children, that fathers turn upon themselves the vows of their own maiden daughters, that old men, against the honour of their age, groan over obscene appetites amid youthful cares, that wise and brave men undo the decrees of steadfastness when the vigour of manhood is softened, that nooses are knotted about necks, that burning pyres are mounted, and that men everywhere cast themselves down in voluntary leaps over vast and lofty crags?

Is there any human being endowed with the first beginnings of any reason who would pollute or defile the constancy of divinity with such foul characters? Who would assign to the gods such natures as human gentleness has often soothed and softened even in wild beasts? Where, I ask, is that principle that the gods are far removed from every emotion of disturbance, that they are gentle, placid, mild, that in a virtue united in kind they retain the very summit of perfection and the loftiness of wisdom itself? Or why do we pray to them to drive away from us adverse and hostile things, if they themselves are found to be the authors to us of all the evils by which we are daily plucked?

However much you call us impious, irreligious, or atheists, you will never make us believe that there are gods of loves, gods of wars, gods who sow discords, who disquiet minds with furious goads. For either they are most truly gods, and do not do those things which you have recounted; or, if they do those things which you say, they are, without any doubt, not gods. And yet we could somehow accept from you these minds full of impious fictions, if you did not compel the assent of the mind to endure many things about the gods themselves so contradictory and self-destroying as you utter.

For while you severally strive to surpass one another in the praise of deeper knowledge, you both do away with the very gods you suppose to exist, and set up in their place others who manifestly do not exist, and you say different things about the same matters, and you enroll as many those whom human agreement has ever received as single ones. Let us begin, then, formally, with Janus, our father too, whom some of you have declared to be the world, others the year, some the sun. But if we shall accept this as true, it follows that it ought to be understood that there was never any Janus, whom they report to have been begotten of Heaven and Hecate, to have reigned first in Italy,

the founder of the town of the Janiculum, father of Fons, son-in-law of Volturnus, husband of Juturna; and thus through you the name of the god is erased—the god whom you set before all others in your prayers and believe to open for you the way to the hearing of the gods. But again, if Janus is the Year, he cannot even so be a god. For who does not know that a year is a fixed limitation of time, and that that which is bounded by the reckoning of months and the numbering of days has not the power of a deity? The same thing it will be permitted to transfer, by no dissimilar reasoning, to Saturn. For if by this name time is signified, as the Greek interpreters maintain, so that Kronos may be held to be Chronos, then there is no Saturnian deity.

For who is so mad as to say that time is a god, seeing that it is the measure of a certain space enclosed in the continuous series of perpetuity? And thus in order that one too will be removed from the number of the heavenly ones, whom ancient antiquity declared to have been born of Caelus as father, to be the begetter of the great gods, the planter of the vine and bearer of the sickle, and handed him down to the younger age. For what shall we say of Jove himself, whom the wise have repeatedly asserted to be the sun, driving winged chariots with a throng of gods following, and some the aether blazing with fiery force and with the unquenchable vastness of heat?

But if this is clear and established, then there is, on your own authority, no Jupiter at all—he who, begotten of his father Saturn and his mother Ops, in order to escape his begetter's fury, is recorded to have been hidden in the territory of the Aretes. And now, does not a similar opinion likewise remove Juno from the census of the gods? For if she is air, as you Greeks are wont to jest and repeatedly assert, going back to the inverted order of the Greek name, then no sister and consort of the almighty Jove will be found, no Fluvionia, no Pomana, no Ossipagina, no Februtis, Populonia, Cinxia, Caprotina; and thus the fiction of that name will be found utterly empty, spread abroad by the celebrity of a hollow opinion.

Aristotle, as Granius records—a man most powerful in genius and pre-eminent in learning—explains by probable arguments that Minerva is the Moon, and demonstrates it by lettered authority. Others said that this same one is the ethereal summit and the very topmost point of the height; some, that she is memory, whence the very name Minerva was formed, as it were a kind of Meminerva. But if the matter gains credence, then there is no daughter Metis, no Victory, none born from the brain of Jove, no inventress of the olive, none instructed in the mastery of the arts and the varieties of disciplines. 「Because water covers the earth,」 they say, 「he was named and surnamed Neptune.」

— If, then, the covering of liquid is signified by the appellation of this name, there is no god Neptune at all; and thus there is removed and taken out of the midst the brother of Stygian Jove and the sibling of the Olympian, armed with the three-pronged iron, lord of sea-monsters and of shad, king of the salt whirlpools and shaker of the trembling ground. Mercury too was so called as a kind of Medicurrius, and because speech runs midway and passes back and forth between two speakers, the quality of this name was contrived. Therefore, if these things are so, Mercury is not the name of a god but of reciprocating speech and voice; and thus, in this way, that Cyllenian herald is abolished and extinguished—he who was poured out on Mount Algidus, the deviser of words

and names, the exchanger of market-days, wares, and commerce. Some of you have said that the Earth, because she supplies sustenance to all living things, is the Great Mother; others say that this same one, because she bears the fruit of health-giving seeds, is Ceres; while some say she is Vesta, because in the world she alone stands still, the other parts of it being established in perpetual mobility. But if this is set forth and asserted with sure reasoning, then, by your own interpreters, three deities alike are none at all:

neither the airs, nor Vesta shall be reckoned among the gods in the calendars, nor, finally, shall the very Mother of the Gods—whom Nigidius asserts to have held Saturn in marriage—rightly be able to be called a goddess, seeing that all these are names of the one Earth, and by these predications alone she is denoted. We here pass over, to avoid satiety, Vulcan, whom you all with equal consent of voices pronounce to be fire; and Venus, because she comes to all; and her who was surnamed Proserpina because the crops creep forth into the light:

in which part again you do away with the heads of three deities, seeing that the first is the name of an element, not the designation of a perceiving power; the second, of lust diffused through all living creatures; and the third signifies the germinations lifting themselves up and the motions of the sprouting crops. What of it, when you contend that Liber, Apollo, and the Sun are one deity amplified by three names? Is not, by your own opinions, the census of the gods diminished, and the proclaimed opinion falling apart? For if it is true that the same Sun is Liber and the same is Apollo, it follows that in the nature of things there is neither any Apollo nor any Liber; and thus, through you yourselves,

the son of Semele, the Pythian, is abolished and erased—the one the giver of dreggy mirth, the other the bane of the Sminthian mice. Men not unlearned among you, nor prattling from whim, pronounce that Diana, Ceres, and the Moon are the head of one god by a commonplace kinship; nor, as there are three unlikenesses of names, are there three discordances of persons: they are all called by the Moon, and into her name the series of the remaining surnames has been heaped up. But if this is ascertained, if it is fixed, and if the truth of the matter shows that it is so, then again the name of Ceres is void, void that of Diana; and thus the matter is brought to this, that both that inventress of the crops (as you allege), under your leadership and authorship, is none, and Apollo is stripped of a sister

—the sister whom once, as she was washing the filth of her limbs in pure fountains, that horned hunter beheld and found the punishment of his curiosity. Men eminent in the study of philosophy, and exalted to the very pinnacle of that name by you their praisers, define with probable assertion that this whole mass of the world—in whose embraces we are all encompassed, covered, and sustained—is one living being, wise, rational, and provident:

and if this is their true, fixed, and certain opinion, then those too will forthwith cease to be gods whom, a little before, you were establishing in its portions under changed names. For as one man cannot, while the integrity of his own body remains, be split into many men, nor again can many men, the difference of their disjunction being preserved, be melted together into the simplicity of one sense, so, if the world is one living being and is moved by the agitation of one mind, it can neither be scattered into many deities, nor, if its particles are gods, be forced and turned into the consciousness of one living being. Moon, sun, earth, aether, stars are limbs and parts of the world: but if they are parts and limbs, they are surely not living beings of their own name:

for parts cannot in any respect be the very thing which the whole is, nor be wise for themselves, nor feel for themselves, since without the assent of the whole living being it is affected by no motions of its own. Which being established and laid down, the whole sum comes back to this, that neither the sun is a god, nor the moon, nor the aether, the earth, and the rest. For they are parts of the world, not special names of deities; and thus it is brought about that, while you confound and mingle all divine things, in the nature of things one god is established, the world, all the rest being hooted off the stage—nay, rather set up emptily, hollowly, and without any substance.

If we were to overthrow belief in your gods by just as many methods and just as many opinions, no one would doubt but that, roused by wrath and frenzy, you would demand fires, wild beasts, swords, and other kinds of tortures against us, with which you are wont to slake your thirst by the craving for our blood. But when through your very selves almost the whole race of the deities is done away with under the display of talents and learning, you dare to maintain that, on account of our name, human affairs are being pressed by the gods—when indeed, if it is true that they exist anywhere and grow hot with the flames of anger, they have nothing more just on account of which to rage against you than that you deny them to subsist or to exist in any part of nature.

Mnaseas is the author that the Muses are daughters of Earth and Heaven; the rest proclaim them to be Jove's, by his wife Memory or Mind; some write that these were virgins, others that they were mothers. For it now pleases me to touch briefly upon those parts also in which you are shown, by the diversity of opinions, to say each a different thing about the same matter. Ephorus, then, sets them forth as being three in number; Mnaseas, whom we have mentioned, four; Myrtilus brings in seven; Crates asserts eight; and, at the last, Hesiod puts forth nine with their names, enriching heaven and the stars with goddesses. Unless we are mistaken, this disagreement of men who know nothing true does not descend from the truth of the matter.

For if it were clearly known what the matter is, there would be one voice of all, and the assent of all would proceed toward and agree upon the end of the same opinion. In what way, then, can you make whole the full force of religion, when you err concerning the very gods, or invite us to venerable worship, when you teach us nothing certain about the comprehension of the deities themselves?

For, to be silent about the intermediate authors, either that first one erases and slays six divine Muses, if it is established that they are nine; or that last and final one adds six that are none, only three standing firm in truth, so that it can neither be known nor comprehended which ought to be added, which taken away, and the very undertaking of religion is brought into peril—either worshipping that which is not, or perhaps passing by that which perhaps is. Piso believes that the Novensiles are nine gods, established among the Sabines at Trebia.

Granius thinks these are the Muses, accommodating his agreement to Aelius. Varro hands down that it is the number nine, because it is always held most powerful and greatest in the moving of affairs. Cornificius makes them presidents of new things, because by their care all things are renewed and hold firm in newness. Manilius makes them nine gods, to whom alone Jupiter has granted the power of hurling his thunderbolt. Cincius declares that they are foreign deities, named from that very newness; for the Romans were wont, of the religions of conquered cities, partly to scatter them privately among families, partly to consecrate them publicly, and, lest any of the gods should be passed over through the multitude or through ignorance, for brevity's and convenience's sake they all alike were invoked together under the one name of Novensiles.

There are, moreover, some who proclaim that men made into gods are signified by this appellation, as are Hercules, Romulus, Aesculapius, Liber, Aeneas. These opinions, as is evident, are all diverse, and it cannot happen through the nature of things that those who differ in opinions should be held authors of one truth. For if Piso's opinion is true, Aelius and Uranius lie; if what is said by these is certain, the most learned Varro errs, who, for things established in substance, substitutes the emptiest and most hollow things. If the number nine leads to the surname of Novensiles, Cornificius is convicted of bleating, who gives to gods presiding over newness the force of another's power.

But if Cornificius's opinion is true, Cincius is found imprudent, who endows the gods of conquered cities with the power of the Novensile deities. But if these are the ones whom Cincius proclaims, Manilius will be found to speak falsely, who under the appellation of this name includes the hurlers of another's thunderbolt. But if that which Manilius asserts is ascertained and true, those are in the greatest error who reckon that mortals advanced by divine honours and consecrated are named from the newness of the honour. But if the Novensiles are those who have deserved to be lifted up to the stars, after they have discharged the mortality of life, then there are absolutely no Novensile gods. For just as slaves, soldiers, and masters are not names of the persons

underlying, but of offices, conditions, and functions, so, when we say Novensiles, if that is the name of those who from men have deserved to be gods, it is manifest and plain that not persons specially defined, but newness itself, is denoted by the surname of Novensiles. Nigidius handed down that the Penates gods are Neptune and Apollo, who once, on an appointed condition, girdled Ilium with immortal walls. The same author again, in his sixth and tenth books, following the Etruscan disciplines, sets forth that there are four kinds of Penates, and that of these some are of Jove, others of Neptune, a third of the infernal ones, a fourth of mortal men—saying I know not what inexplicable thing.

Caesius, likewise following this view, reckons them to be Fortune and Ceres, the Jovial Genius and Pales — yet not that female whom common opinion accepts, but some minister and bailiff of Jupiter of the masculine gender. Varro holds that the gods of whom we speak exist within, in the innermost recesses of heaven, and that neither their number nor their names can be known. These the Etruscans call and name the Consentes and Complices, because they rise together and set together, six males and as many females, with names unknown and of the most sparing mercy; but they are believed to be the counsellors and princes of highest Jupiter.

Nor have there been lacking those who wrote that Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva are the Penates gods, without whom we cannot live or be wise, and who govern us inwardly by reason, warmth, and breath. As you see, here too nothing consistent is said, nothing is settled by a single pronouncement, nor is there anything trustworthy on which the mind may rest, conjecturing by a surmise closest to its own truth. For thus the opinions waver, and one view is torn away by another, so that either nothing of them all is true, or, if it is stated by someone, it remains unknown amid so many diversities of things. We can, if it seems good, say something briefly about the Lares too, whom the crowd reckons to be gods of the streets and roads, from the fact that Greece names streets 'laurai'.

In various writings Nigidius says they are now guardians of roofs and houses, now the Curetes, who are said to have once concealed the wailing of the infant Jupiter amid the clashing of bronze, now the Samothracian Fingers, whom the Greeks indicate are called the five Idaean Dactyls. Varro, similarly hesitating, now declares them to be the Manes — and that Mania was therefore surnamed the mother of the Lares — now again that they are called aerial gods and heroes, now, following the opinions of the ancients, says the Lares are Larvae, as it were certain spirits and the souls of the departed dead.

It would be endless and immense to go through the individual kinds and to make plain from your very books that there is no god either supposed or believed by you, about whom you have not put forth ambiguous and discordant opinions in a thousand varieties of views. But for the sake of brevity and to avoid tedium it is enough to have said what has been said; and it is too laborious to heap many things into one, since from one instance and another it becomes manifest and plain that you hesitate, waver, and say nothing certain about these matters which you assert — unless perhaps you will say: 'Even if we do not personally know who the Lares are, who the Novensiles, who the Penates, yet the very consensus of authorities vindicates their existence, and among the ranks of the heaven-dwellers

they hold a form of their own kind.' And how will it be possible to know whether some god exists, if it will be unknown and not known what he is? Or how will the very request for benefits avail, if it is not ascertained, not certain, who ought to be summoned for each consultation? For everyone who seeks to obtain the answer of some deity must necessarily know to whom he prays, whom he implores, from whom he demands aids for human affairs and necessities — especially since you yourselves report both that not all the gods can grant all things, and that the minds of individual gods are appeased, and their offenses placated, by most dissimilar rites.

For indeed, if this god desires a black hide and that one a white; if to this one sacrifice must be made with head veiled, to that one bare-headed; if that one is consulted about marriages while this one provides remedies for troubles — it cannot be of no consequence whether it is this Novensilis or that one, since ignorance of the facts and confusion of persons both offends the gods and necessarily compels an expiation to be incurred. For imagine that I myself, for the sake of some misfortune and to avert a danger, pray to one of these deities, saying: 'Be present, be present, ye Penates gods, thou Apollo and thou Neptune, and by the clemency of your divinity turn aside all these evils by which I am burned, terrified, and vexed':

— will there be any hope of aid being brought by these, if it is Ceres, Pales, Fortune, the Jovial one or the Genius, and not Neptune and Apollo, who are the Penates gods? Or if I invoke the Curetes in place of the Lares — whom part of your authorities affirm to be the Samothracian Fingers — how shall I be able to have these as helpers and favorable ones, when I shall have imposed on the ones their own surnames, and on the others names not their own? To such a degree does the matter require that the gods be known properly, and that one neither be uncertain nor doubt about the power and name of each, lest, if they be invoked with rites and appellations belonging to others, they keep their ears stopped and hold us bound by inexpiable expiations.

Wherefore, if it is clear to you that this multitude of gods which you enumerate dwells and abides in the lofty palaces of heaven, it befits you to stand within the bounds of a single statement, and not, torn apart by various and conflicting opinions, to withdraw credibility from the very things you are constructing. If it is Janus, let it be Janus; if it is Liber, let it be Liber; if Summanus, let it be Summanus: for this is to be confident, this is to hold firm, to be fixed in the knowledge of an ascertained matter, and not, after the manner of the blind and the wandering, to say:

'The Novensiles are the Muses; nay rather they are the Trebian gods; nay, they are the number nine; nay rather the presiding deities of overthrown cities' — and thereby to bring matters so great into this danger, that, while you remove some and put others in their place, it may rightly be doubted concerning all of them whether they exist in any respect at all.