Against the Pagans 6

Now, since we have shown in summary how impious are the infamies of opinion which you have established concerning your gods, it follows that we should speak of temples, and also of images and sacrifices, and of the other series of matters that is attached to these things and joined to them by a neighbouring connection. For in this respect you are accustomed to fasten upon us the greatest charge of impiety: that we neither build sacred edifices for the offices of worship, nor set up any image or form of a god, nor fashion altars nor hearths, nor offer the blood of slain animals, nor incense nor salted grain, nor finally bring wine flowing in the outpourings of libation-bowls.

These things indeed we refrain from building or doing—not because we bear impious and wicked minds, or have conceived some contempt for the gods in reckless despair, but because we judge and believe that they—if indeed they are true gods and endowed with the eminence of this name—either regard these kinds of honour as matter for laughter, if they laugh, or endure them with indignation, if they are exasperated by the movements of wrath.

For that you may know what we think about that name, and what our judgement is: we consider that they—if indeed they are true gods (that the same things may be said again to satiety)—ought to be possessed of all perfect virtues, wise and just (if it be no fault that we heap human praises upon them), strong in inward goods, and not to bind themselves to external aids by which the integrity of their unimpaired blessedness might be completed, being free from all affections and all disturbances...

...free—that they do not boil over with anger, nor are stirred by any desires, inflict calamity on none, take no cruel pleasure from the evils of men, do not terrify with portents nor display prodigious terrors, do not hold men liable and bound by the debts of vows, nor demand expiatory victims with menacing signs, do not bring in pestilences nor diseases by the corruption of the air, do not scorch the crops with droughts, do not take part in the slaughters of wars nor the destructions of cities, do not wish adversity to these nor favour the advantages of those; but—which belongs to great minds—weigh all in an equal balance and show undivided benevolence to all. For it belongs to a perishable kind and to human weakness to act in contrary ways:

And the decrees and pronouncements of the wise define that those whom emotion touches must suffer, grieve, and be diminished, and that it cannot be otherwise but that they are bound by the laws of mortality who are enslaved to any disturbances. Since this is so, how can we be judged to hold the gods in contempt—we who deny that they exist as gods, and cannot be reckoned among the heavenly powers, unless they are upright and praiseworthy by the admiration due to great minds? 'But you build them no temples, nor adore their images, do not slay victims, do not offer incense and wine.'

And what greater honour or dignity can we attribute to them, than that we place them in the same rank as the Head of all things and the Lord and highest King himself, to whom the gods, together with us, owe the fact that they perceive themselves to exist and to be contained in a vital substance? Do we indeed honour Him with shrines or with the building of temples? Do we slay victims to Him? Do we give Him other things which it is not the part of considered reason to pour out lavishly, but of being drawn along by the custom of habit? For it is utter madness to measure by your own needs things more powerful than yourself, and to give to the gods, as givers, what is of use to you, and to reckon that an honour and not an insult.

Temples, then, we ask: for what use of the gods, or for the necessity of what thing, do you say they have been built, or judge that they should be built anew? Do the gods feel the cold of winter, or are they scorched by the summer suns, drenched by rainy clouds; do winds or whirlwinds harass them; are they in danger of suffering the hostile onset of wild beasts or their raging appetites—so that it would rightly befit to shut them within the defences of roofs, or to protect them by the barrier of stones? For what are these temples? If you ask human weakness, they are something huge and vast; if you measure the power of the gods, they are certain small achievements, and—to speak more truly—a most cramped kind of caverns, hung up by the contrivance of a poverty-stricken heart.

If you wish to hear who was their first founder, who their builder, either Phoroneus, or the Egyptian Merops will be pointed out to you, or, as Varro relates in his 'Marvels,' Aeacus, the offspring of Jupiter. But granting that these are either constructed of marble masses, or glitter with golden panelled ceilings, and that here gems shine and pour forth starry gleams with their varied inlay: all these things are earth, and compounded from the lowest dregs of baser material. For even if you value them at dearer prices, it must not be believed that the gods delight in these, nor refuse nor scorn to fence themselves in and be confined, enclosed by their barriers.

'This temple,' he says, 'is Mars's, this is Juno's and Venus's, this is Hercules's, Apollo's, Dis's.' What else is this to say than: this house is Mars's, this is Juno's and Venus's, Apollo dwells here, in this one Hercules remains, in that one Summanus? Is it not therefore the first and greatest insult to have the gods confined to dwellings, to give them little huts, to build chambers and cells for them, and to think that things are necessary to them which are so to men, to cats, to little ants and lizards, to fleeing, timid, and tiny mice?

'But we do not,' he says, 'assign temples to the gods for this reason, that we might ward off from them damp rains, winds, showers, or suns, but that we may be able to behold them face to face and close at hand, to address them from nearby, and in a way to mingle the conversations of worship with them as present.' For if they are invoked under the bare vault of heaven and under the ethereal covering, they hear nothing; and unless prayers are brought to them from close at hand, they will stand blocked and motionless, as though nothing were said. But we, on the contrary, judge that every god whatsoever—if indeed he is strong with the power of this name—ought to hear, from whatever part of the world anyone speaks, as though he were present; nay rather, whatever each has conceived...

...under dim and silent perceptions, the god ought to anticipate by foreknowledge; and as the stars, the sun, the moon, when they pass above the earth, are at once present to all who behold them, and everywhere present, so it is likewise fitting that the hearing of the deities be closed to no tongue and be ever present, however voices flow to it from distant regions. For this is the property of the gods: to fill all things with their power, to be nowhere in part but everywhere whole, neither to be present nor absent, not to go off to dine among the Ethiopians and after twice six days return privately to their dwelling. But if it will not be so, all hope of help is taken away, and it will be in doubt whether you are heard by the gods or not, whenever you perform the sacred rites of due ceremonies.

For, that we may understand the matter, let us suppose that there is a temple of some deity among the Canary Islands, another of the same among furthest Thule, another among the Seres, among the swarthy Garamantes, and any others whom seas, mountains, forests, and the four cardinal points cut off from knowledge of one another: if all at one and the same time, having performed the divine rites, make request—each compelled by his own need—and ask of the deity, what hope of a benefit returned will there be for all, if the god does not hear from every side the voice sent to him, and there is any remoteness which the prayer of one asking for help cannot penetrate?

For either he will be present in no place, if he can anywhere at some time not be, or he will be present to some only, since he cannot indivisibly furnish his hearing in common. And thus it comes about that either the god helps none at all, if, occupied with some matter, he cannot fly to hear the voices, or only those alone who are heard go away satisfied, and the rest have accomplished nothing. What of the fact that many of these temples—which are raised on golden domes and lofty pinnacles—are proved by the writings of authors to cover ashes and bones, and to be the burial-places of dead bodies?

Is it not plain and evident that either you worship the dead in place of the immortal gods, or that an inexpiable insult is done to the deities, whose shrines and temples have been raised over the tombs of the dead? In the ninth book of his Histories Antiochus records that at Athens, in the temple of Minerva, Cecrops was committed to the earth; again, in the temple of the same goddess, which is on the citadel of Larisa, Acrisius is written and pointed out to have been buried; Erichthonius in the shrine of Athena Polias; the brothers Daïras and Immaradus in the Eleusinian enclosure that lies beneath the city. What of the daughters of Celeus? Are they not said to have received the office of burial in the temple of Eleusinian Ceres?

Are not Hyperoche and Laodice—who are reported to have been conveyed thither from the Hyperborean regions—buried in the shrine of Diana which is established within that of Delian Apollo? In the Didymaean temple at Miletus, Leandrius says that a certain one had the last rites of a funeral. Myndius declares, and Zeno records, that the monument of Leucophryne is in the shrine of Diana at Magnesia. Is it not indicated by consistent writings that beneath the little altar of Apollo which is seen at the town of Telmessus, the seer Telmessus is buried? Ptolemy, son of Agesarchus, in the first book which he published about Philopator, declares by the authority of writings that Cinyras, king of Paphos, with all his household—nay, with all his lineage—is laid in the temple of Venus.

It would be infinite and immense to describe who is buried in which shrines throughout the whole world, nor does it require exact care to say by which temples those 'common tombs' of Varro are covered, and what masses of superimposed weight they bear upon themselves—although Egypt appointed a penalty for anyone who should publish where Apis lay hidden. But why do I dwell on these trifles? Who among men is there who does not know that in the Capitol of the ruling people there is the tomb of Olus of Vulci? Who is there, I say, who does not know that from the foundation-beds the head of a man was rolled out, not very long ago—either alone, without the rest of the parts (for so some report), or having obtained the offices of burial with all its members?

But if you demand that this be made plain by the testimonies of authors, Sammonicus, Granius, Valerianus, and Fabius will show you whose son Aulus was, of what family and nation, by the hand of what little slave he was despoiled of his life and light, what he deserved of his fellow citizens, that burial in the soil of his native land was denied him. You will also learn—though they pretend to be unwilling to publish this—what was done with the uncovered head, or in what part of the citadel it was enclosed in careful obscurity, so that the perpetuity of the sealed omen might stand, as it were, immovable and fixed.

And though it were fitting that this be suppressed and hidden by the obliteration of age, the formation of the name brought it into the open, and made it proceed, with its causes, through the ages granted to it, by an inextinguishable attestation; nor was the greatest city, worshipper of all the deities, ashamed, when giving a name to the temple, to call it 'Capitolium' from the head (caput) of Olus rather than from the name of Jupiter. Enough, then, as I think, we have shown that temples have either been built in vain for the immortal gods, or fashioned—against the honour and power ascribed to them—by insulting suppositions. It follows that we should say something about the statues and images, which you compose with much art and tend with religious observance.

In this matter, if there is any credence, we can by no considerations settle with ourselves whether you do this seriously and with grave purpose, or whether, in mockery, you sport with the things themselves in childish delusion. For if it is certain among you that the gods exist, whom you revere and believe to dwell in the highest regions of heaven, what cause, what reason is there, that these images should be fashioned by you, when you have the real beings to whom you can pour out prayers and ask help in pressing matters? But if you do not believe, or—to put it mildly—are in doubt, even so, what reason is there to fashion and set up images of doubtful things, and to form by an airy imitation that which you do not believe to exist?

Or do you perchance say that a certain presence of the deities is exhibited to you beneath these images, and that, because it is not granted to see the gods, they are worshipped in a solid form and dutiful services rendered to them? He who says and asserts this does not believe that the gods exist, and is convicted of having no faith in his own religion—he who needs to see what he holds, lest perchance that be empty which, being unseen, is not visible. 'We worship the gods,' you say, 'through images.' What then? If these did not exist, would the gods not know that they were worshipped, and would they think that no honour was imparted to them by you?

So then, by certain byways and, as it were, through certain things committed in trust, do the gods take and receive your acts of worship; and before those to whom that homage is owed perceive it, you first make offering to the images and transmit them to the gods from an external authority, as if certain relics. And what can be done more injurious, more insulting, more harsh, than to acknowledge one god and to supplicate another thing? To hope for help from a deity and to entreat an image that has no sense at all? Is not this, I ask, what is said in the common proverbs: 'To strike the smith when you mean to beat the fuller,' and 'When you seek the counsel of a man, to demand opinions on things to be done from little asses and piglets'?

And how, finally, do you know whether all these images, which you form as vicarious substitutes for the immortal gods, reproduce a likeness and possess a divine resemblance? For it may be that one who is fashioned by you as smooth-faced is bearded in heaven; it may be that one to whom you assign a boyish age is far advanced in old age; it may be that one who in truth has grey-blue eyes is made tawny, and that he whom you make and figure with a hooked nose wears flattened nostrils. For it is not right to call or name a thing an image which does not draw its lines equal to the original face—a thing which can be recognized as plain and certain from manifest facts.

For whereas all we men see, by the indubitable contemplation of its light, that the sun is round, you have given it the face of a man and the features of mortal bodies. The moon is always in motion and receives thrice ten faces in her monthly renewal: under your leadership and shaping she is a woman, and she who is changed through a thousand aspects by daily instability has, with you, a single countenance. We all understand that the winds are a flowing of air that has been struck and stirred by the workings of the world: according to you they are shapes of men, blowing the curved trumpets with inward and native blasts. Among your gods we see a most savage lion's face smeared with pure vermilion and called by the name Frugifer (the Fruit-bearer).

If all these images are likenesses of the gods above, then a god of such a kind must be said to dwell also in heaven, to whose form and appearance the likeness of this image is directed; and clearly, just as this one here, so that one there is a mask without the rest of a body and a face alone—roaring with grim gapings, dreadful in bloody colour, gripping an apple between its teeth, and, like tired dogs at times, ever thrusting its tongue out of its wide-open mouth in perpetuity. But if this is by no means so—as we all judge it is not—what great audacity is it to fashion for yourself whatever form you please, and to say that it is the image of a god whom you cannot prove to exist in any part of nature?

You laugh that in ancient times the Persians worshipped rivers—as memorial writings indicate—the Arabs a shapeless stone, the Scythian nations a scimitar, the Thespians a branch in place of Cinxia, the Icarians an unhewn log in place of Diana, the people of Pessinus a flint in place of the Mother of the Gods, the Romans a spear in place of Mars (as the Muses of Varro indicate), and, as Aethlius records, before the use and craft of image-makers, the Samians a board in place of Juno: and yet you refrain from laughter, when in place of the immortal gods you supplicate little figurines of men and human forms? Nay rather, you judge that these very statuettes are gods, and believe that, apart from these, nothing possesses divine power.

What do you say? O you, do the heavenly gods then have ears and temples, necks, back of the head, spine, loins, sides, hams, buttocks, hocks, ankles, and all the other members of which we are constructed, and which were spoken of a little more fully in an earlier part and set forth in fuller writing? Would that it were permitted to look into your minds and the very recesses of your thought, in which you turn over and enter upon various most obscure cogitations: we should find that you yourselves feel the same as we, and hold no other opinions about the shaping of the deities. But what can we do against stubborn zeal, against those who brandish swords and devise new punishments?

Threatening, you—most knowing—maintain a bad cause, and what you once did without reason, you defend, lest you should ever seem to have been ignorant, and you think it better not to be overcome than to yield to and assent to acknowledged truth. From causes of this kind it has also followed, with your connivance, that upon the bodies of the gods the wantonness of craftsmen has sported, and has given them forms which could be a mockery to any solemn person.

And so Ammon is now formed and fashioned with ram's horns; Saturn with a curved sickle, a guardian of the fields, like some pruner of luxuriant branches; the son of Maia with a broad-brimmed hat, as though he were preparing to set out upon the roads and turn aside from sun and dust; Liber with soft limbs and utterly relaxed with womanish looseness; Venus naked and exposed, as though you should say she prostitutes and sells the form of a hireling body; Vulcan with a cap and hammer, his right hand free but girt for the smith's task; the Delian with plectrum and lyre, keeping the gestures of a citharist about to sing an actor's ditties; the king of the sea with a trident, as though he had to enter the fight of a gladiatorial contest:

nor is any image of any deity to be found which does not bear certain attributes bestowed by the generosity of craftsmen. Behold, if some witty and cunning king, without your knowing or being aware, should take the Sun from his doors and transfer him to Mercury's seat, and again seize Mercury and make him migrate into the shrine of the Sun—for each is fashioned by you as beardless and with a smooth face—and should give the one rays, and set upon the Sun's head a little broad-brimmed hat: by what means will you be able to distinguish whether that is the Sun or this is Mercury, since with you it is the attributes, not the peculiarity of the face, that is wont to indicate the gods?

Again, by a similar transference, if he should take the horns off the bare head of Jupiter and fix them on Mars's temples, strip Mars of his arms and gird Ammon with these in turn: what distinction of the several ones will be possible, when he who was Jupiter can be reckoned to be Mars, and he who was Mavors can slip into the appearance of Jupiter or of Ammon? To such a degree is it a game to fabricate these images, to dedicate names to them as though proper, when, if you take away their attributes, the recognition of each is destroyed, one god is believed in place of another, one seems in place of another—nay, either can be reckoned in place of both. But why do I laugh at the sickles and tridents given to the gods, why the horns,

the mallets and caps, when I know that certain images bear the forms of particular men and the features of infamous prostitutes? For who is there who does not know that those famous Athenian Hermae were fashioned to the likeness of Alcibiades's body? Who does not know—if he reads Posidippus—that Praxiteles, by a contest of his skills, forced the face of the Cnidian Venus into the form of the prostitute Cratina, whom the unhappy man loved to distraction? But is this the only Venus whose borrowed beauty was augmented from the face of a harlot?

That famous Phryne of Thespiae—as those relate who have written of Thespian affairs—when she was at the very height of beauty, charm, and bloom, is reported to have been the model of all the Venuses that are in repute, whether throughout the Greek cities, or wherever this love and desire for such statues has flowed. And so all the artists who lived in those very times—to whom the truth of reproducing likenesses gave the first rank—strove with all care and zeal to transfer the lineaments of a prostitute's head into images of Cytherea; the ordinances of the craftsmen were aflame, and each sought to outdo the other in contentious rivalry, not that Venus might be made more august, but that Phryne might stand in place of Venus.

And so the matter was brought to such a point that, in place of the immortal gods, sacred rites were performed to prostitutes, and unhappy religion was deceived by the fabrication of statues. Among the image-makers, the famous Phidias is foremost: when he had raised up the form of Olympian Jupiter with the effort of an immense work, upon the god's finger he inscribed 'PANTARCES IS BEAUTIFUL'—and this was the name of a boy loved by him and cherished with obscene desire—nor was he moved by any fear or religious scruple to name the god by the title of a catamite; nay rather, to consecrate the divinity and image of Jupiter to a boy prostitute.

To such a degree is it a game and a childish inclination to fashion those little images, to come forth and adore them, to heap divine sanctities upon them, when we see the very craftsmen playing while they shape these things and consecrating the monuments of their own lusts. For what is there, if you ask, why Phidias should hesitate to play and to be wanton, when a little while before he knew that the very Jupiter which he had made had been gold, and stones and shapeless bones, disparate and confused, and that he himself was the gatherer and binder of all these; that the forms given to them were fabricated by his own hand in the likeness of limbs; and — what is foremost of all — that it was the benefit of his own gift that the god had itself been born and was adored among human affairs?

It pleases me in this place, as if all the nations from the world's circle were present, to convene one assembly and to bring forth into the ears of all these things to be heard in common. 'What is this, O men, that in matters so ready and so clear you of your own accord deceive yourselves and hem yourselves in with a voluntary blindness? Shake off at last the darkness, and, returning to the light of the mind, look more closely and see of what sort is this that is being done — if only you still retain your own right and dwell within the bounds of the reason and judgment that were given you.'

Those images which terrify you, and which you adore, prostrate and humbled, in all the temples, are bones, stones, bronze — silver, gold, earthenware, wood taken from a tree or glue mingled with gypsum — heaped together perhaps from harlots' ornaments or from a woman's finery, from camel bones or from the tooth of an Indian beast, from little pots and jars, from candelabra and lamps, or from other more obscene little vessels; melted down, they have been drawn into these shapes and have come forth into the forms you behold: baked in potters' furnaces, born from anvils and hammers, scraped with gravers, filed with files, cut with saws, gimlets and adzes, hewn, dug out, hollowed by the whirling of drills, and smoothed by the flat blades of planes.

Is this then not an error — not, to speak properly, a madness — to believe that to be a god which you yourself have fashioned; to supplicate, trembling, the thing manufactured by you; and, though you know and are certain that it is your own work and the offspring of your fingers, to fall prone upon your face, to beg help as a suppliant, and in adverse circumstances and harsh times to hope to be succored by the favor of a propitious deity?' Behold, if someone should set in the midst raw bronze cast into no work, masses of untamed silver and unwrought gold, wood, stones and bones and the other remaining things —

from which the accustomed signs and the images of divinities are wont to be composed — nay, if someone should set in the midst the faces of shattered gods, images broken and diminished, and should bid you to slaughter victims to these same fragments and pieces and to impart sacred rites and divine offices to the shapeless masses: we demand to hear from you whether you would do this, or, on the contrary, would refuse what is commanded. Perhaps you will say: 'For what reason?' — Because there is no one in human affairs so stupidly blind as to reckon silver, bronze, gold, gypsum, ivory, or clay into the number of the gods and to say that they of themselves possess and hold divine power.

What then is the reasoning, that if all these bodies remain untouched and unwrought they lack the power of divinity and heavenly authority, but if they receive the forms of men — if they receive little ears, noses, cheeks, lips, eyes, eyelids — they straightway become gods and are enrolled in the rank and census of the celestials? Does the fashioning add some novelty to these bodies, so that by that very addition you are compelled to believe that something of divinity and majesty has been conferred upon them? Does it change them into gold or bronze, or force the cheapness of the potsherd to degenerate into silver substance? Does it make what a little before was insensible to be alive and moved by a spiritual stirring?

If, once set up in the bodies of the images, they retain all the natures which they had before on the outside, how great is the stupidity — for I forbear to say blindness — of thinking that the natures of things are changed by the quality of forms, and of supposing that a thing receives divinity from its shape which in its primal body was inert and brute and deprived of the mobility of sense.

And so, unmindful and forgetful of what the substance and origin of the images is, you men — rational by soul and endowed with the gift of wisdom and counsel — succumb to baked potsherds, adore plates of bronze, ask secondary health from elephants' tusks, [beg for] the commands of magistracies, powers, victories, acquisitions, gains, the best harvests and most fruitful vintages; and though it is manifest and clear that words are exchanged with brute things, you dream that you are heard, and of your own accord you betray yourselves by the deception of an empty credulity? O that it were permitted to enter into the inmost

recesses of some image — nay, would that it were permitted to draw those Olympian and Capitoline Jupiters apart, resolved into their limbs, and to behold, separate and single, all those parts by which the whole of a body is enclosed: long ago you would see that those gods, whom the outer smoothness dignifies with the allurement of brilliance, are lattices of pitiable plates, joinings of deformed little particles, held together against the chances of collapse and the fear of dissolution by wedges and chains, hooks and little clasps; and that throughout all the folds and joints of the seams runs poured lead, lending salutary supports to the long duration of the statues.

You would see, I say, long ago faces alone without backs of heads, hands without arms and half-filled, bellies halved with the sides, imperfect traces of soles, and — what most provokes laughter — [statues] drawn together in an unequal construction of bodies, wooden on one part but stony on the other. And if these things could by no means be perceived because of the art of concealment, at least the things set before your very eyes ought to teach and warn you that you accomplish nothing and expend the vanities of your services upon empty things.

For do you thus not see these 'breathing' statues — whose soles and knees you touch and handle in prayer — now slipping away by the falls of drippings, now loosening by the rot of decay, so that, smoked and discolored by fumes and smoke, they grow black; how by the neglect of a longer age they lose their appearance through mildew and are wounded, eaten away by rust? Thus, I say, do you not see beneath any of these images lizards, shrews, mice and light-shunning cockroaches placing their nests and dwelling, and bringing hither all filth and other things fitted to their uses — the hardnesses of half-gnawed bread, bones dragged in hope [of food], rags, wool, little scraps of paper, gathered anxiously for the softness of their nests, the warm bedding of their wretched chicks?

Do not spiders sometimes begin their nets and treacherous snares in the mouth of an image, that they may entangle the flights of the whirring and shameless flies? Do not swallows, finally, flying around within the very domes of the buildings, cast down [droppings] full of dung and now paint the very faces, now the mouths of the divinities — the beard, eyes, nose and all the other parts — into whatever place the discharge of the emptied hindpart carries itself? Blush, therefore, even if late, and from dumb animals receive ways and reasons; and let these same creatures teach you that there is no divinity present in the images, into which they neither fear nor avoid to cast their filth, following their own laws and prompted by the truth of nature. 'But you err,' he says, 'and are deceived:

for we do not decree that the bronze, nor the materials of gold and silver, nor the others from which the statues are made, are of themselves gods and religious divinities; but in these we worship, and we venerate, those whom the sacred dedication brings in and causes to inhabit the fashioned images.' — Not an improbable nor a contemptible reasoning, by which anyone dull, and even the most prudent, might believe that the gods, having left their proper seats — that is, heaven — do not refuse nor flee to enter earthly dwellings, but rather, impelled by the right of dedication, coalesce with the binding of the images. In gypsum, then, and in potsherds do your gods abide — nay, are the minds, spirits, and souls of potsherds and gypsum themselves gods?

And in order that the cheapest things may be able to become more august, do they suffer themselves to be shut up and to lurk in the confinement of an obscure seat? Therefore, on this point first, we desire and demand to hear from you: 'Do they do this unwilling — that is, dragged by the right of dedication do they enter the dwellings of the images — or willing and compliant and with no necessities imposed?' 'Do they do this unwilling?' — And how can it come about that they should be forced into any necessity, their majesty being diminished? 'By the assent of voluntary obedience?' — And what do the gods seek in potsherds, that they should prefer them to their starry seats? that they should be as it were bound in fetters, ennobling potsherds and the other materials from which statues are made? What then?

In such materials do the gods always abide and go nowhere, even if the greatest matter should require it, or do they have free goings, when it pleases them to depart anywhere and to withdraw from their own seats and images? If they suffer the necessity of remaining, what could be more wretched than these, or what more unhappy, than that fetters and leaden bindings so hold them on their bases? But let us grant that they prefer these to heaven and the starry seats: they will have lost the power of their divinity. But if, when they wish, they fly out and have the absolute right to leave the empty images, then at some time the statues will cease to be gods, and it will stand in doubt when sacred rites ought to be rendered, and when it is fitting and proper to abstain from them.

Very often we see these statues made by craftsmen now tiny and contracted to a palm's littleness, now raised to immensity and lifted to an admirable magnitude. By this reasoning, then, it follows that we ought to understand that the gods contract themselves in tiny little images and are constrained to the likeness of an alien body, but truly in vast ones extend themselves further and are drawn out into the greatest size. Therefore, if this is so, it must be said that in sitting statues the god sits, and in standing ones stands, in running ones runs, hurls weapons in throwing ones, forms and fits himself to their faces, and lends himself to the likeness of the remaining postures of the figured body. 'In the images the gods dwell.'

— Is each one whole in each single image, or partitioned and divided into limbs? For neither can one god be present at one time in several images, nor again, once divided into parts by the intervention of a cutting. For let us suppose that there are ten thousand images of Vulcan in the whole world: can one, as I have said, be in all ten thousand at one time? Not, I think. For what cause? Because things that are private and singular by nature cannot become many while the integrity of their simplicity is preserved; and this the less can they do if the gods have the forms of men, as your opinion declares.

For neither can a hand separated from the head, nor a foot divided from the body, furnish the sum of the whole; nor must it be said that the portions can do the same as the whole, since the whole cannot subsist unless it be composed by the gathering together of its parts. But if it be said that the same one is entire in all of them, then all reason and the integrity of truth perishes, if this be granted — that one can remain in all at one time. Or else each of the gods must be said thus to divide his very self from himself, so that he is both himself and another, separated by no distinction, but himself the same and yet another.

And since nature refuses and rejects and spurns this, either it must be said and confessed that there are innumerable Vulcans, if we wish him to dwell and be present in all the images, or he will be in none, because nature forbids him to be divided among many. 'And yet, O you men, if it is open and clear to you that in the innards of the statues the heavenly gods live and dwell, why do you guard, preserve, and keep them shut up under the strongest keys and huge bars, under bolts, latches, and other such things, and, lest perchance some thief or nocturnal robber creep in, do you protect them with a thousand temple-keepers and a thousand watchmen?' Why do you feed dogs in the Capitols?

Why do you furnish food and sustenance to geese? Nay rather, if you trust that the gods are there and depart nowhere from the signs and images, entrust to them the care of themselves; let the shrines always stand unbarred and open, and if anything be filched by anyone with rash fraud, let them display the power of their divinity and, under the very name of the theft and the deed, transfix the sacrilegious with fitting punishments. For it is an unworthy thing, and one that destroys their power and authority, to entrust the guardianship of the highest divinities to the anxieties of dogs; and, when you seek some terror for warding off thieves, not to ask it of the gods themselves but to place and set it in the cacklings of geese.

They say that Antiochus Cyzicenus carried off from a shrine a golden Jupiter of ten cubits and put in its place a counterfeit one gilded with little leaves of bronze. If the gods are present in their images and dwell in them, with what businesses, with what cares had Jupiter been entangled, that he did not pursue his private injuries and avenge himself, replaced as he was in a baser material? That Dionysius — the younger one — when he despoiled Jupiter of his golden robe and substituted a woolen one in its place, jesting even with facetious witticisms, saying that the former was chilly in the frosts and this one warm, that the former was burdensome in the summers and this one, again, airy under the heats:

where then was the king of the sky, that he might prove himself present by some terror and recall the witty buffoon to seriousness by tortures? For why should I recount that the gravity of Aesculapius was mocked by him? — who, when he despoiled him of his most ample beard of goodly weight and philosophical thickness, said it was an unworthy deed that a son begotten of Apollo — a father smooth and hairless and most like a beardless youth — should be fashioned so bearded that it be left in doubt which of them is father and which son, nay, whether they are even of one race and kindred.

When all these things were done and the plunderer spoke with sacrilegious mockeries, if there was a divinity in the statue consecrated to his name and majesty, why did he not pursue with just and merited vengeance the outrage done to his smoothed mouth and dishonored face, and prove by this deed both that he was present and that he guards his own temples and images with persistent watchfulness? 'Unless perhaps you will say that the gods neglect these damages and do not think there is a sufficient cause for which they should exert themselves and inflict on the guilty the punishment for violated religion.' — Therefore, if these things are so, the gods themselves do not even desire to have images,

which they suffer to be torn down and plundered with impunity — nay, on the contrary, they plainly teach that they despise those things, in which, when they are scorned, they do not care to signify themselves by any vengeance. Philostephanus, in his work On Cyprus, is the authority that Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, fell in love, as with a woman, with a statue of Venus which was held among the Cypriots to be of ancient sanctity and religion — his mind, soul, light of reason, and judgment being blinded — and that, deranged, he was accustomed, as though it were a marital matter, to lift the divinity onto his little couch and couple with it in embraces and with his mouth, and to do the other empty acts of lust, mocked by imagination.

In a similar manner Posidippus, in that book which he indicates was written about Cnidos and its affairs, records a youth of no ignoble birth — but he conceals his name — seized with love of the Venus on whose account Cnidos is famous, and that he too mingled amatory wantonness with the statue of that same divinity, using the nuptial couches and the ends of the pleasures that follow. So that I may similarly ask again: 'If in the bronze and in the other materials from which the statues are formed the powers of the upper gods lie hidden, where in the world had the one Venus and the other been, that they should have driven far from themselves the shameless wantonness of the young men and punished the impious contacts with tormenting restraint?

Or, since the goddesses are mild and of more tranquil dispositions, how fitting it would have been that they should extinguish for the wretched their frenzied joys and lead their minds back, restored, into sound senses?' Unless perhaps, as you allege, the goddesses of lust and of pleasures held these insults most welcome and did not judge the deed worthy of vengeance, because it also soothed their own minds, and because they knew that they too were made subject to human desires.

But if the goddesses, the Venuses endowed with more placid dispositions, judged that indulgence must be shown to the misfortunes of the blind, then when the devouring fire so often consumed the Capitol and seized the Capitoline Jupiter himself together with his wife and daughter, where at that time was the thunderer, that he might ward off that wicked conflagration and rescue his own property and himself and his whole household from the pestilent disaster? Where was Juno the queen, when the same force of flame destroyed her renowned fane and the priestess Chrysis in the Argive city? Where was Egyptian Serapis, when by a like disaster he lay dissolved into ashes with all his mysteries and with Isis? Where was Liber Eleutherius, when at Athens? Where Diana, when at Ephesus? Where Dodonaean Jupiter, when at Dodona?

Where, finally, was divine Apollo, when he was so despoiled and burned by pirates and sea-robbers that, out of so many weights of gold which countless ages had heaped up, he had not even a single scruple left to show to the swallows of his host — as Varro, the Menippean one, says? It is a work of infinite labor to describe throughout the whole world what fanes have been overthrown by earthquakes and storms, which burned by enemies, which by kings and tyrants, which the overseers and priests and even they themselves — their suspicion averted — have stripped bare, and which at last thieves and, opening what was locked by the obscurity of [magical] remedies, the burglars [have plundered]:

which would surely have remained safe and subject to no chance mishaps, if the gods were present as protectors, or had, as is said, any care of their temples. But now, because they are empty and roofed with no inhabitants, fortune holds its own right over them, and they are exposed to all chances just as are all other things deprived of interior motion.

'On this same point the defenders of images are also wont to say this: that the ancients were not ignorant that the statues have nothing of divinity nor any sense at all in them, but that, on account of the untamed and unskilled crowd — which is the greatest part among peoples and in cities — they fashioned them wholesomely and with design, so that, as if by a certain semblance of divinities set before them, the crowd might cast off their harshness through fear, and, thinking that they were acting in the presence of the gods, might reckon impious deeds [as such] and pass over to human duties by a change of manners:

and for no other cause were venerable forms sought for them in gold and silver, except that some power might be believed to be present in the very brilliancies — a power which should not only strike the sense of the eyes, but also terrify the very minds with the radiances of most august light.' Which might perhaps seem to be said with some reason, if, after the temples of the gods were founded and the images established, there had been no one wicked in the world, no wickedness at all; if justice, peace, and faith possessed the breasts of mortals, and no one on earth were called guilty or innocent, wicked works being unknown to all.

But now, since on the contrary all things are full of evils, the name of innocence has all but perished, and by moments, by instants, swarms of misdeeds are begotten with the harmful men's ever-new wickedness — how is it fitting to say that the images were established for the crowd, to strike terrors into them, when, besides innumerable forms of crimes and misdeeds, we see the very temples assailed with sacrilegious violations by tyrants, by kings, by robbers and by nocturnal thieves, and those very gods whom old antiquity fashioned and consecrated for making men afraid going into the dens of the plunderers together with their own golden and dreadful brilliances?

For what, if you should look at the truth without any flattery, do those signs of which they speak have in themselves so great, that antiquity should have deservedly hoped and thought that at the sight of them the vices of men could be broken and their manners and misdeeds tempered?

The reaping-sickle, forsooth, which is assigned to Saturn, would have injected fear into mortals, that they might wish to lead a peaceful life and cast off malicious wills; Janus with his two-faced front, or that toothed key with which he is marked; cloaked and bearded Jupiter, holding in his right hand a stake carefully hewn in the likeness of a thunderbolt; that Junonian cestus, or a little girl hiding under a soldier's helmet; the Mother of the gods with her drum; the Muses with flutes and psalteries; winged Mercury; Aesculapius leaning on his serpent-bearing staff; Ceres with her great breasts, or the drinking-cup hanging in Liber's right hand; Mulciber in a smith's garb, or Fortune with a horn full of apples, figs, or autumn fruits; Diana with half-covered thighs, or naked Venus rousing to lust; Anubis with a dog's face, or Priapus, conspicuous below for his own genitals.

O dire shapes of terrors and dreadful frights, on account of which the race of men should be fixed in perpetual torpor, attempt nothing in its stupefaction, and restrain itself from every wicked and shameful act: little sickles, keys, headdresses, firebrands, winged sandals, staffs, little drums, flutes, psalteries, breasts prominent and huge, little cups, tongs and fruit-bearing horns, the naked bodies of women, and the magnitudes of privy parts made public! Would it not have been more satisfactory to leap and to sing, than, under the title of gravity and the pretext of severity, to relate that images so cold and so inept were fashioned by the ancients to restrain sins and as terrors of the harmful and impious?

Were the mortals of that age and time so empty in heart, of no reason and sense, that, like little children, they were restrained from wicked actions by the most monstrous grimness of masks, and even by grimaces and bogeys? And whence has the matter turned to its contrary, that, although there are in the cities so many temples full of all the images of the gods, yet the multitude of the harmful cannot be met by so many laws and kinds of such great punishments, nor can audacity be cut off by any remedies, and misdeeds, redoubled, multiply themselves all the more, the more it is striven by laws and judgments to diminish cruel deeds and to allay them by the coercion of penalties?

But if the images inflicted any fears upon mortals, the enacting of laws would cease, nor would such varied crosses be set up for the audacity of the criminal. But now, since it has been established and proved by the fact itself that the opinion of terror said to flow from the statues is empty, recourse has been had to the sanctions of the laws, from which there might be a most certain dread and a condemnation now fixed and settled — to which the very images owe even this, that they still stand unharmed and are protected by the grant of some honor.

Since it has been sufficiently shown, as the matter allowed, how vainly the images are made, the order [of discourse] next demands to speak — in as few words as possible and without any circumlocutions — about sacrifices, about the slayings and immolations of victims, about wine, about incense, and about all the other things that are performed in that department. For in this matter you are wont to stir up most tumultuous odium against us, to call us atheists, and, because we assign least [worship] to the gods, to inflict even capital punishments by the cruelties of wild beasts. Which indeed we confess we do not from contempt and disdain of the divine, but because we consider that the powers of this name demand nothing of the kind, nor are held by desires of things of this sort.