Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 61/87

For since the chest in which the dead man is placed, which all now call a sarcophagus, is in Greek called 'soros,' and they had begun to venerate him there as buried before his temple was built: he was called, as it were, 'Soros' and 'Apis,' at first 'Sorapis,' then, one letter being changed as is wont to happen, 'Serapis.' And it was decreed also concerning him that whoever should say he had been a human being should pay a capital penalty. And since in nearly all the temples where Isis and Serapis were worshiped there was also an image which, with finger pressed to the lips, seemed to admonish that silence should be kept: Varro thinks this signified the same thing, that it should be kept silent that they had been human beings.

But that ox, which Egypt, deceived by marvelous vanity, nourished in his honor with abundant delicacies—since they venerated it alive without a sarcophagus—was called Apis, not Serapis. When this ox died, since a calf of the same color was sought and found, that is, marked similarly with certain white spots, they believed that something wondrous had been divinely procured for them. For it was no great thing for the demons, in order to deceive them, to display a phantom of such a bull—which the cow alone perceived—to her as she conceived and grew pregnant, whence the mother's desire might draw what should already appear bodily in her offspring; just as Jacob, by means of variegated rods, brought it about that sheep and goats were born variegated.

For what men can do with true colors and bodies, this the demons can most easily display to conceiving animals by feigned figures. CHAPTER VI. Under what king reigning among the Argives, or among the Assyrians, Jacob died in Egypt. Apis, therefore, king not of the Egyptians but of the Argives, died in Egypt. To him his son Argus succeeded in the kingdom, from whose name both Argi and from this the Argives were called; but in the time of the earlier kings neither the place nor the people had this name.

In whose reign among the Argives, and among the Sicyonians Erato reigning, but among the Assyrians Baleus still remaining, Jacob died in Egypt at the age of a hundred and forty-seven, when, about to die, he had blessed his sons and grandsons by Joseph, and had most plainly prophesied Christ, saying in the blessing of Judah: 'The prince shall not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until those things come which are laid up for him; and He Himself is the expectation of the nations.' While Argus reigned, Greece began to use its own crops and to have grain fields in agriculture, seeds having been brought from elsewhere. Argus too, after his death, began to be held a god, honored with a temple and sacrifices.

Which honor, while he reigned, had been paid before him to a certain Homogyrus, a private man and struck by lightning, because he first yoked oxen to the plow. CHAPTER VII. In whose kings' time Joseph died in Egypt. When the twelfth of the Assyrians, Mamythus, and the eleventh of the Sicyonians, Plemmaeus, were reigning, and Argus still remaining among the Argives, Joseph died in Egypt at the age of a hundred and ten. After his death the people of God, marvelously increasing, remained in Egypt a hundred and forty-five years—at first tranquilly, until those died to whom Joseph had been known;

then, because his increases were envied and suspected, until from there it should be set free, it was pressed by persecutions (amid which, however, it grew by a divinely granted multiplication) and by the labors of intolerable bondage. But in Assyria and Greece during the same time the same kingdoms remained. CHAPTER VIII. In whose kings' age Moses was born, and the religion of which gods arose in those same times. When, therefore, Saphrus reigned as the fourteenth among the Assyrians, and Orthopolis the twelfth among the Sicyonians, and Criasus the fifth among the Argives, Moses was born in Egypt, through whom the people of God was set free from Egyptian servitude, in which it was fitting that it should be thus exercised, that it might long for the help of its Creator.

While the said kings were reigning, Prometheus is believed by some to have lived, whom on that account they say to have formed men out of clay, because he is reported to have been a most excellent teacher of wisdom; nor yet is it shown who were the wise men in his times. His brother Atlas is said to have been a great astrologer; whence the fable found occasion to feign that he carried the heavens, although a mountain is called by his name, by whose height rather the carrying of the heavens seems to have come into the opinion of the common people. Many other fabulous things also began at those times in Greece to be feigned;

but down to Cecrops, king of the Athenians—in whose reign that city also received such a name, and in whose reign God through Moses led His people out of Egypt—several dead men were enrolled in the number of the gods, by the blind and empty custom and superstition of the Greeks. Among whom were Melantomice, wife of King Criasus, and Phorbas their son, who after his father was the sixth king of the Argives, and Iasus, son of the seventh king Triopas, and the ninth king Sthenelas, or Stheneleus, or Sthenelus—for he is found variously in different authors. In these times also Mercury is reported to have lived, the grandson of Atlas by his daughter Maia, as even the more common writings make resound. He shone forth as skilled in many arts, which he also handed down to men;

for which merit they wished, or even believed, him to be a god after death. Hercules is said to have been later, yet belonging to those same times of the Argives; although some prefer him to Mercury in time—whom I judge to be mistaken. But at whatever time they were born, it is agreed among serious historians, who committed these ancient things to writing, that both were men, and that, because they conferred many benefits upon mortals for the more convenient leading of this life, they earned divine honors from them. But Minerva was far more ancient than these; for in the times of Ogygus she is reported to have appeared at the lake which is called Triton's, in maidenly form, whence she was also called Tritonia;

the inventress, indeed, of many works, and the more readily believed a goddess, the less her origin became known. For that she is sung to have been born from the head of Jupiter is to be applied to poets and fables, not to history and deeds done. Although Ogygus himself, in whose times also a great flood occurred—not that greatest one, in which no men escaped except those who could be in the ark, which neither Greek nor Latin history knows of among the nations, but yet greater than that which was afterward in the time of Deucalion—when he lived, there is no agreement among the writers of history.

For Varro began from there the book of which I made mention above, and proposes for himself nothing more ancient, from which he may arrive at Roman affairs, than the flood of Ogygus—that is, the flood done in the times of Ogygus. But our writers who have written chronicles—first Eusebius, then Jerome, who certainly followed some preceding historians in this opinion—record that the flood of Ogygus occurred more than three hundred years afterward, when Phoroneus already reigned as the second king of the Argives. But at whatever time it was, Minerva was already worshiped as a goddess while Cecrops reigned over the Athenians, under which king they say the city itself was either restored or founded. CHAPTER IX.

When the city of the Athenians was founded, and what cause for its name Varro alleges. For Varro sets forth this cause why it should be called Athens, a name which surely comes from Minerva, who in Greek is called Athena. When an olive tree had suddenly appeared there, and in another place water had burst forth, these portents stirred the king, and he sent to the Delphic Apollo to inquire what was to be understood and what was to be done. The god answered that the olive signified Minerva and the water Neptune, and that it lay in the power of the citizens from which of the two gods, whose tokens these were, the city should rather take its name.

Having received this oracle, Cecrops summoned all the citizens of both sexes to cast their vote (for it was then the custom in those places that women too should take part in public deliberations). The multitude being therefore consulted, the men gave their votes for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and because one more woman was found, Minerva won. Then Neptune, in his wrath, laid waste the lands of the Athenians with the surging waves of the sea; for it is no difficult thing for demons to scatter whatever waters they please over a wider area.

That his anger might be appeased, the same author says that the women were punished by the Athenians with a threefold penalty: that they should henceforth cast no votes; that none of the children born should take the mother's name; and that no one should call them Athenaeae. Thus that city, the mother or nurse of the liberal disciplines and of so many and so great philosophers—than which Greece had nothing more illustrious or more noble—received the name Athens through the mockery of the demons, by reason of the quarrel of their gods, a male and a female, and of the victory won through women for a female; and being injured by the conquered, it was compelled to punish the very victory of the victress, dreading Neptune's waters more than Minerva's arms. For in the women who were thus punished, even Minerva, who had conquered, was conquered;

nor did she stand by her own supporters, so that, after the power of voting was thenceforth lost and the sons alienated from their mothers' names, they might at least be permitted to be called Athenaeae and to deserve the title of that goddess whom they, the women, had made victorious over the men, the gods, by casting their vote. What and how many things might be said on this point, were not my discourse hastening on to other matters! CHAPTER X. What Varro relates concerning the naming of the Areopagus and the flood of Deucalion. And yet Marcus Varro is unwilling to give credence to fabulous fictions against the gods, lest he should think anything unworthy of the dignity of their majesty.

And therefore he does not wish the Areopagus—where the Apostle Paul disputed with the Athenians, from which place the senators of that city were called Areopagites—to have taken its name from this, namely that Mars, who in Greek is called Ares, when he was made defendant on a charge of homicide and was being judged by twelve gods, was acquitted in that place by six votes (since, where the votes were of equal number, acquittal was wont to be preferred to condemnation);

but against this opinion, which is far more widely current, he tries to establish some other cause of this name, drawn from the knowledge of obscure writings, lest the Athenians should be believed to have named the Areopagus after the name of Mars and a 'pagus'—as it were the 'field of Mars'—to the injury, that is, of the deities, from whom he reckons quarrels or trials to be alien; asserting that this, which is said of Mars, is no less false than that which is told of the three goddesses—namely Juno, Minerva, and Venus—who are said to have contended over the excellence of beauty before the judge Paris for the winning of the golden apple, and who, to appease the gods (who delight in such crimes of theirs, whether true or false), are sung and danced amid theatrical applause.

These things Varro does not believe, lest he should believe what is unbecoming to the natures or morals of the gods; and yet, while rendering an account of the name of Athens that is not fabulous but historical, he inserts in his own writings so great a quarrel between Neptune and Minerva over the name from which that city should rather be called, that, when they contended by the display of portents, neither did Apollo, when consulted, dare to judge between them, but, just as Jupiter sent the aforesaid three goddesses to Paris, so he too sent the dispute of the gods to be settled by men—where Minerva conquered by the votes, and yet was conquered in the punishment of her own supporters; she who was able to obtain Athens among her adversaries the men, yet could not have her friends the women as Athenaeae.

At these times, as Varro writes, when Cranaus, the successor of Cecrops, was reigning over the Athenians—but, as our authors Eusebius and Jerome say, while that same Cecrops still continued—there occurred the flood which was called Deucalion's, for the reason that he was reigning in those parts of those lands where it chiefly occurred. But this flood by no means reached Egypt and its neighboring regions. CHAPTER XI. At what time Moses led the people of God out of Egypt, and Joshua the son of Nun, who succeeded him, in whose age, of which kings, he died. Moses, then, led the people of God out of Egypt in the latest time of Cecrops, king of the Athenians, when among the Assyrians Ascatades was reigning, among the Sicyonians Marathus, among the Argives Triopas.

And after the people had been led forth, on Mount Sinai he delivered to them the law received from God, which is called the Old Testament, because it has earthly promises, whereas through Jesus Christ there was to be a New Testament, by which the kingdom of heaven should be promised. For this order had to be observed, just as in each single man who advances toward God it comes to pass what the Apostle says: that the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual; since, as he also says and as is true, the first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven.

Now Moses ruled the people forty years in the wilderness and died at the age of a hundred and twenty, after he too had prophesied of Christ through the figures of the carnal observances—in the tabernacle and the priesthood and the sacrifices and the many other mystical injunctions. Joshua the son of Nun succeeded Moses, and settled the people, brought into the land of promise, by divine authority, the nations being subdued from whom those same places were held. When he had ruled the people twenty-seven years after the death of Moses, he too died, in the reign, among the Assyrians, of the eighteenth king Amyntas, among the Sicyonians of the sixteenth Corax, among the Argives of the tenth Danaus, among the Athenians of the fourth Erichthonius. CHAPTER XII.

Concerning the rites of the false gods which the kings of Greece instituted in those times, which are reckoned from the departure of Israel out of Egypt down to the death of Joshua the son of Nun. Throughout these times, that is, from the departure of Israel out of Egypt down to the death of Joshua the son of Nun, through whom that same people received the land of promise, rites were instituted to false gods by the kings of Greece, which by a solemn celebration recalled the memory of the flood and of the deliverance of men from it, and of the then-wretched life of those migrating now to the heights, now to the plains. For they so interpret the ascent and descent of the Luperci along the sacred way that they say there are signified by them the men who, on account of the flood of waters, sought the tops of the mountains and again, when the same had subsided, returned to the lowlands.

At these times Dionysus, who was also called Father Liber and after his death held to be a god, is said to have shown the vine to his host in the land of Attica. Then musical games were instituted to the Delphic Apollo, that his wrath might be appeased, by which they thought the regions of Greece had been afflicted with barrenness, because they had not defended his temple, which King Danaus, when he had invaded those same lands in war, had burned. And that they should institute these games, they were admonished by his oracle. But in Attica King Erichthonius first instituted games to him, and not to him only, but also to Minerva, in which oil was set as the prize for the victors, because they relate that Minerva was the discoverer of that fruit, as Liber of wine.

In those years, Europa is said to have been carried off by Xanthus, king of the Cretans (whose name we find given otherwise in other authors), and thence to have been born Rhadamanthus, Sarpedon, and Minos—who are rather commonly reported to have been sons of Jupiter by that same woman. But the worshippers of such gods assign what we have said about the king of the Cretans to historical truth, but that which the poets sing about Jupiter, the theaters resound, the peoples celebrate, to the vanity of fables—so that there might be something out of which games could be held to appease the deities even with their false crimes. At these times Hercules was held famous in Syria; but doubtless another, not the one of whom we spoke above. For in a more secret history it is said that there were several Fathers Liber and several Herculeses.

This Hercules indeed—whose twelve mighty deeds they enumerate, among which they do not include the slaying of the African Antaeus, because that exploit belongs to another Hercules—their writings record to have burned himself on Mount Oeta, since with that valor by which he had subdued many things he yet could not endure the disease with which he was languishing. At that time the king, or rather the tyrant, Busiris used to sacrifice his guests to his gods—whom they report to have been the son of Neptune by his mother Libya, daughter of Epaphus. But let it not be believed that Neptune committed this debauchery, lest the gods be accused; rather, let these things be ascribed to the poets and the theaters, that there may be something whereby they are appeased.

Vulcan and Minerva are said to have been the parents of Erichthonius, king of the Athenians, in whose last years Joshua the son of Nun is found to have died. But since they will have it that Minerva was a virgin, they say that in a struggle between the two, Vulcan, being aroused, spilled his seed upon the earth, and that thence a man was born, and for that reason such a name was given to him. For in the Greek tongue 'eris' is strife, 'chthon' is earth, out of which two words is the name Erichthonius compounded.

But, what must be confessed, the more learned refute these things and repel them from their gods, who report that this fabulous opinion arose from this: that in the temple of Vulcan and Minerva, which both possessed as one at Athens, a boy was found exposed, wrapped in a serpent, which signified that he would be great; and on account of the common temple, since his parents were unknown, he was said to be the son of Vulcan and Minerva. Yet the origin of his name that fable rather than this history designates. But what is that to us? Let the one instruct religious men in truthful books; let the other delight impure demons in deceitful games;

yet those religious men worship those very demons as gods, and although they deny these things of them, they cannot purge them of every crime, since they exhibit games to them at their demand, in which things are done basely which are as it were wisely denied; and by these false and base things the gods are appeased—where, even if the fable sings a false crime of the deities, yet to take delight in a false crime is a true crime. CHAPTER XIII. What kinds of fabulous fictions arose at the time when judges began to preside over the Hebrews. After the death of Joshua the son of Nun, the people of God had judges, in whose times there alternated among them both the humiliations of toils on account of their sins, and the prosperities of consolations on account of the mercy of God.

At these times fables were invented: about Triptolemus, that at Ceres' command, borne by winged serpents, he conferred grain by flying upon lands that lacked it; about the Minotaur, that a beast was enclosed in the Labyrinth, into which when men had entered they could not come out again because of the inextricable maze; about the Centaurs, that the nature of horses and of men was joined together; about Cerberus, that he is the three-headed dog of the underworld; about Phrixus and his sister Helle, that they flew, carried on a ram; about the Gorgon, that she had hair of serpents and turned those who looked upon her into stones; about Bellerophon, that he was borne by a horse flying with wings, which horse was called Pegasus; about Amphion, that by the sweetness of his lyre he charmed and drew stones;

about the smith Daedalus and his son Icarus, that they flew by means of wings fitted to themselves; about Oedipus, that he compelled a certain monster, which was called the Sphinx—four-footed with a human face—to perish by its own headlong fall, when the as-it-were insoluble riddle that she was wont to propose was solved; about Antaeus, whom Hercules slew, that he was a son of the earth, on which account, when he fell to the earth, he was wont to rise up the stronger; and if perchance I have passed over any others. These fables, down to the Trojan war, where Marcus Varro ended his second book on the people of the Roman race, were so fashioned by the wits of men, taking their occasion from histories which contain things truly done, that they were not fastened upon the reproaches of the deities.

Moreover, whoever they were who feigned that the most beautiful boy Ganymede was carried off by Jupiter for debauchery (which abomination King Tantalus committed, but the fable attributed it to Jupiter), or that Jupiter sought intercourse with Danaë through a golden shower (where it is understood that the woman's chastity was corrupted by gold)—these things which in those times were either done or feigned, or done by others and feigned of Jupiter—it cannot be told how much evil they presumed upon men's hearts, in that they could patiently bear these lies, which nevertheless they even gladly embraced. And indeed, by however much more devotedly they worship Jupiter, by so much more severely ought they to have punished those who dared to say such things of him.

But now they were not only not angry with those who invented these things, but feared rather to have the gods themselves angry if they did not even perform such fictions in the theaters. At these times Latona bore Apollo—not the one whose oracles we spoke above of being consulted, but the one who served Admetus together with Hercules—who nevertheless was so believed to be a god that most, and almost all, suppose that there was one and the same Apollo. Then also Father Liber waged war in India, who had many women in his army, who were called Bacchae, distinguished not so much by valor as by frenzy. Some indeed write that this Liber was both conquered and bound; and a few that he was even slain in battle by Perseus, nor are they silent as to where he was buried;

and yet, in his name as it were a god's, through unclean demons the Bacchanalian rites, or rather sacrileges, were instituted, of whose raging baseness, after so many years, the Senate so blushed that it forbade them to be in the city of Rome. In those times Perseus and his wife Andromeda, after they were dead, were so believed to have been received into heaven that men were not ashamed, were not afraid, to mark their images with stars and to call them by their names. CHAPTER XIV. Of the theological poets.

Throughout the same interval of time there arose poets who were also called theologians, because they made songs about the gods—but about such gods who, though great men, were nevertheless men, or were elements of this world which the true God made, or were ordained among principalities and powers according to the will of the Creator and their own merits. And if they sang anything of the one true God amid many vain and false things, yet by worshipping others along with Him who are not gods, and by exhibiting to them the service which is owed to the one God alone, they certainly did not duly serve Him, nor could they refrain even themselves from the fabulous disgrace of their gods—Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus. But these theologians worshipped gods, and were not worshipped as gods;

although the city of the impious is wont, I know not how, to set Orpheus over the infernal rites, or rather sacrileges. But the wife of King Athamas, who was called Ino, and her son Melicertes perished by a voluntary plunge into the sea, and by the opinion of men were placed among the gods, like other men of their times, Castor and Pollux. That mother of Melicertes the Greeks indeed called Leucothea, the Latins Matuta—both, however, supposing her a goddess. CHAPTER XV. Of the fall of the kingdom of the Argives, at which time among the Laurentes Picus the son of Saturn first received the kingdom of his father.

In those times the kingdom of the Argives came to an end, being transferred to Mycenae, whence Agamemnon came, and the kingdom of the Laurentes arose, where Picus the son of Saturn first received the kingdom—while among the Hebrews a woman, Deborah, was judging; but through her the Spirit of God was at work, for she was also a prophetess, whose prophecy is too little plain for us to be able, without a lengthy exposition, to show it to have been uttered concerning Christ. The Laurentes, then, were already reigning, namely in Italy, from whom the Roman origin is more evidently traced after the Greeks; and yet the Assyrian kingdom still continued, where there was a twenty-third king, Lampares, when the first of the Laurentes, Picus, had begun to be.

Concerning Saturn, the father of this Picus, let the worshippers of such gods see what they think—those who deny that he was a man; about whom others also have written that he himself reigned in Italy before Picus his son, and Virgil says in better-known writings: 'He gathered together a race untaught and scattered upon the high mountains, and gave them laws, and chose that it should be called Latium, since in these shores he had lain hidden in safety. The golden ages which they recount were under that king.' But let them suppose these to be poetic fictions, and let them assert that the father of Picus was rather Sterces, by whom, a most skilled farmer, it is reported to have been discovered that fields might be made fertile with the dung of animals, which from his name is called 'stercus'; this man some report to have been called Stercutius.

But for whatever cause they may have wished to call him Saturn, they certainly, with good reason, made this Sterces or Stercutius the god of agriculture. Picus likewise, his son, they received into the number of such gods, whom they assert to have been a distinguished augur and warrior. Picus begot Faunus, the second king of the Laurentes; this one too is, or was, a god to them. These men, before the Trojan war, they bestowed divine honors upon, dead men. CHAPTER XVI. Of Diomede, placed among the gods after the destruction of Troy, whose companions were believed to have been turned into birds. But Troy being overthrown by that destruction everywhere sung—

and most famous to boys—destruction overthrown, which both by its own greatness and by the excelling tongues of writers has been notably spread abroad and made common, and was accomplished when Latinus the son of Faunus was already reigning (from whom the kingdom began to be called the Latins', and that of the Laurentes ceased), the victorious Greeks, leaving Troy destroyed and returning to their own homes, were torn and ground down by diverse and dreadful disasters; and yet even from these they increased the number of their gods. For they made Diomede too a god, whom they report, by a penalty divinely inflicted, not to have returned to his own people; and that his companions were turned into birds they affirm, not by a fabulous and poetic lie, but by historical attestation;

to whom not even the god, as they think, that he was made, was able either himself to restore the human nature, or at least obtained it from Jupiter, his own king, as a newcomer among the celestials. Moreover, they say that there is a temple of his on the island of Diomedea, not far from Mount Garganus, which is in Apulia, and that these birds fly around this temple and dwell there with such marvelous attendance that they fill their beaks with water and sprinkle it; and that, if Greeks come there, or those sprung from Greek stock, they are not only quiet, but moreover even fawn upon them; but if they see foreigners, they fly up to their heads and wound them with such heavy blows that they even kill them. For with hard and large beaks they are reported to be sufficiently armed for these battles. CHAPTER XVII.