Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 62/87

What Varro has handed down concerning the incredible transformations of men. That Varro may establish this, he mentions other things no less incredible about that most notorious sorceress Circe, who also changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts, and about the Arcadians, who, chosen by lot, used to swim across a certain pool and there were turned into wolves and lived with similar wild beasts through the deserts of that region. But if they did not feed on human flesh, then after nine years, the same pool being swum back across, they were reformed into men.

Finally, he even named expressly a certain Demaenetus who tasted of a sacrifice which the Arcadians were wont to offer to their god Lycaeus by sacrificing a boy, and was changed into a wolf, and in the tenth year was restored to his proper figure, trained himself in boxing, and won in an Olympic contest. Nor does the same historian suppose that for any other reason was such a name attached, in Arcadia, to Pan Lycaeus and to Jupiter Lycaeus, except on account of this change of men into wolves, which they thought could not come about except by divine power. For a wolf in Greek is called 'lukos,' whence the name Lycaeus appears to be derived by inflexion. He says the Roman Luperci too arose from the seed, as it were, of those mysteries. CHAPTER XVIII.

What is to be believed concerning the transformations which seem, by the art of demons, to befall men. But concerning this so great mockery of demons, those who read these things will perhaps await what we may say. And what shall we say, except that we must flee out of the midst of Babylon? This prophetic precept is so understood spiritually, that out of the city of this world—which is assuredly the society of impious angels and men—we may flee, by the steps of faith which works through love, advancing toward the living God. For by however much greater a power of demons over these lowest things we behold, by so much the more tenaciously must we cling to the Mediator, through whom we ascend from the lowest to the highest.

For if we should say that these things are not to be believed, there are not lacking, even now, those who assert that they have heard of certain things of this kind as most certain, or even that they themselves have experienced them. For when we too were in Italy, we used to hear such things about a certain region of those parts, where they said that women keepers of inns, imbued with these evil arts, were wont to give in cheese, to whatever travelers they wished or could, something whereby they were immediately turned into beasts of burden and carried whatever was necessary, and after the works were performed, returned again to themselves; nor yet was the mind made bestial in them, but the rational and human mind was preserved—

just as Apuleius, in the books which he entitled 'The Golden Ass,' either related or feigned that it happened to himself, that, a poison being received, while his human mind remained he became an ass. These things are either false, or so unusual that they are rightly not believed. Yet it is most firmly to be believed that almighty God can do all things that He wills, whether by punishing or by bestowing; and that demons can effect nothing according to the power of their nature (for that too is an angelic creature, although malignant by its own fault) except what He has permitted, whose judgments are many hidden, none unjust. Nor indeed do demons create natures, if they do anything of this kind, of which deeds this question turns;

but only in outward appearance they alter the things that have been created by the true God, so that they may seem to be what they are not. Therefore I would by no means believe that the soul, nor even the body, can by any reasoning, by the art or power of demons, be truly converted into bestial members and lineaments; but that the phantastic element of a man—which even in thinking or in dreaming is varied through innumerable kinds of things, and, though it is not a body, yet with marvelous swiftness takes on shapes resembling bodies—can, when the bodily senses of the man are lulled or oppressed, be brought to the perception of others in a bodily form by some ineffable manner I know not how; so that the very bodies of the men lie somewhere, living indeed, but with their senses bound much more heavily and forcibly than by sleep;

but that phantastic element, as it were embodied in the likeness of some animal, appears to the senses of others, and the man even seems to himself to be such, just as he might seem to himself to be such in dreams, and to carry burdens; which burdens, if they are true bodies, are carried by demons, that men may be mocked, perceiving partly the true bodies of burdens, partly the false bodies of beasts of burden. For a certain man, by name Praestantius, used to relate that it had happened to his father that he took that poison through cheese in his own house and lay on his own bed as if asleep, who nevertheless could in no way be aroused.

But after some days he said that he, as it were, awoke and recounted, as though they were dreams, the things he had suffered: namely that he had been made a horse and, among other beasts of burden, had carried provisions for the soldiers—which is called 'Retica,' since it is conveyed to the Rhaetias. And it was ascertained that it had been done just as he related; which nevertheless seemed to him to be his own dreams. Another also related that at his own house, by night, before he went to rest, he had seen coming to him a certain philosopher very well known to him, who had expounded to him certain Platonic matters which, when previously asked, he had refused to expound. And when it was inquired of the same philosopher why he had done in this man's house what, when asked, he had refused in his own house:

'I did not do it,' he said, 'but I dreamed that I did it.' And by this, there was exhibited to one man, waking, through a phantastic image, what the other saw in dreams. These things came to us not from any chance persons, of the kind whom we should think it unworthy to believe, but from those who reported them whom we would not suppose to have lied to us. Accordingly, as for what men are said—and it has been committed to writing—to be wont to be turned into wolves by the gods, or rather demons, of the Arcadians, and that by her songs Circe changed the companions of Ulysses, it seems to me that it could have been done after this manner which I have described, if indeed it was done at all.

But as for the Diomedean birds, since indeed their kind is reported to endure through the succession of their stock, I believe they were not made out of transformed men, but rather, the men being withdrawn, substituted in their place—as the hind for Iphigenia, the daughter of King Agamemnon. For such tricks could not have been difficult for the demons, permitted by the judgment of God; but because that virgin was afterward found alive, it was easily recognized that a hind had been substituted for her. But the companions of Diomede, because they nowhere suddenly appeared, and afterward appeared in no place—the avenging evil angels destroying them—are believed to have been turned into those birds which, in their place, were secretly brought from other places, where this kind of bird exists, to those places and suddenly substituted.

But that they bring water with their beaks to the temple of Diomede and sprinkle it, and that they fawn upon those of Greek birth and persecute foreigners, it is not to be wondered at that this is done by the instinct of demons, whose interest it is to persuade men that Diomede was made a god, in order to deceive men, so that they may worship many false gods to the injury of the true God, and may serve dead men (who, even while they lived, did not truly live) with temples, altars, sacrifices, and priests—all which things, when they are right, are owed to none but the one living and true God. CHAPTER XIX. That Aeneas came into Italy at the time when Labdon the judge was presiding over the Hebrews.

At that time, after Troy had been captured and destroyed, Aeneas came into Italy with twenty ships, in which the remnants of the Trojans were borne, while Latinus reigned there, and among the Athenians Menestheus, among the Sicyonians Polyphides, among the Assyrians Tautanes, while among the Hebrews Labdon was judge. When Latinus had died, Aeneas reigned three years, the same kings remaining in the places mentioned above, except that among the Sicyonians it was now Pelasgus, and among the Hebrews the judge was Samson, who, being marvelously strong, was thought to be Hercules. But because Aeneas, when he died, did not appear, the Latins made him a god for themselves. The Sabines too enrolled their first king Sancus, or as some call him, Sanctus, among the gods.

About the same time Codrus, king of the Athenians, unrecognized, offered himself to be slain by the Peloponnesians, the enemies of that same city; and so it came to pass. In this manner they proclaim that he freed his fatherland. For the Peloponnesians had received an oracle that they would then at last conquer, if they had not killed the king of their foes. He therefore deceived them by appearing in the garb of a poor man and by provoking his own death through a quarrel. Whence Virgil says: «And the quarrels of Codrus.» And the Athenians honored him with the worship of sacrifices, as though he were a god.

In the reign of Silvius, the fourth king of the Latins, the son of Aeneas—not by Creusa, by whom was born Ascanius, who reigned there third, but by Lavinia the daughter of Latinus, whom Aeneas is said to have had as a posthumous son—and in the twenty-ninth year of the Assyrian kings Oneus and Melanthus, and the sixteenth among the Athenians, while Eli the priest was judge of the Hebrews, the kingdom of the Sicyonians came to an end, which is said to have been prolonged through nine hundred and fifty-nine years. CHAPTER XX. On the succession of the royal order among the Israelites after the time of the judges. Soon, while those same kings reigned through the places mentioned, the kingdom of the Israelites, when the time of the judges was ended, took its beginning from Saul as king, at which time Samuel was prophet.

From that time, therefore, these began to be kings of the Latins, whom they surnamed Silvii; for from him who, as the son of Aeneas, was first called Silvius, the rest who followed had both their own proper names imposed upon them and this surname was not lacking; just as long afterward those were surnamed Caesars who succeeded Caesar Augustus. But Saul having been rejected, that none from his stock should reign, and he being dead, David succeeded to the kingdom forty years after the rule of Saul began. Then the Athenians, after the death of Codrus, ceased to have kings thereafter and began to have magistrates for administering the commonwealth.

After David, who himself also reigned forty years, his son Solomon was king of the Israelites, who built that most renowned temple of God at Jerusalem. In his time Alba was founded among the Latins, from which thereafter the kings began to be called, not kings of the Latins, but of the Albans, yet in the same Latium. To Solomon succeeded his son Rehoboam, under whom that people was divided into two kingdoms, and each part began to have its own several kings. CHAPTER XXI. On the kings of Latium, of whom the first, Aeneas, and the twelfth, Aventinus, were made gods. After Aeneas, whom they made a god, Latium had eleven kings, of whom none was made a god.

But Aventinus, who follows Aeneas in the twelfth place, when he had been laid low in war and buried on that mountain which even now is called by his name, was added to the number of such gods as they were making for themselves. Some indeed were unwilling to record that he was slain in battle, but said that he did not appear; nor that the mountain was named from his name, but that it was called Aventine from the coming of birds. After him no god was made in Latium except Romulus the founder of Rome. But between this one and that one two kings are found, of whom the first is, that I may speak of him in a Virgilian verse: «Next there is Procas, glory of the Trojan race.»

In whose time, because Rome was now in a manner being brought to birth, that greatest of all kingdoms, the Assyrian, received the end of so great a duration. For it was transferred to the Medes after almost one thousand three hundred and five years, if indeed the times of Belus also, who begat Ninus and was there the first king content with a small empire, be reckoned. Now Procas reigned before Amulius. Moreover Amulius had made Rhea by name—who was also called Ilia—the daughter of his brother Numitor and the mother of Romulus, a Vestal virgin; whom they will have it conceived twins by Mars, in this way honoring or excusing her defilement, and adducing as proof that a she-wolf nursed the exposed infants.

For they suppose that this kind of beast pertains to Mars, so that, namely, the she-wolf is believed to have offered her teats to the little ones because she recognized the sons of her lord Mars; although there are not lacking those who say that, when the exposed infants lay wailing, they were first gathered up by some harlot or other and sucked her first breasts (now they used to call harlots she-wolves, whence even now the shameful places of such women are called lupanaria), and that they afterward came to the shepherd Faustulus and were nursed by his wife Acca. Yet if, in order to rebuke a king and man who had cruelly ordered them to be cast into the water, God willed to come to the aid of those infants, by whom so great a city was to be founded, when they had been divinely delivered from the water, by means of a suckling beast, what wonder is it?

Amulius was succeeded in the Latian kingdom by his brother Numitor, the grandfather of Romulus, in whose, that is Numitor's, first year Rome was founded; and so thereafter he reigned together with his grandson, namely Romulus. CHAPTER XXII. That Rome was founded at the time when the kingdom of the Assyrians fell and when Hezekiah was reigning in Judah. Not to delay over many things, the city of Rome was founded as another Babylon and as the daughter of the former Babylon, through which it pleased God to subdue the world of the earth and to bring it into one fellowship of commonwealth and laws, and to pacify it far and wide.

For there were now strong and mighty peoples and nations trained in arms, who would not easily yield, and who needed to be overcome by huge perils and no small devastation on both sides and by dreadful toil. For when the kingdom of the Assyrians subjugated almost all Asia, although it was done by warfare, yet it could not be accomplished by very harsh and difficult wars, because the nations were as yet untrained to resist, nor so many nor so great. Indeed, after that greatest and universal flood, when only eight men escaped in Noah's ark, not much more than a thousand years had passed when Ninus subjugated all Asia except India.

But Rome did not subdue with such speed and ease those many nations of the East and the West, which we behold subject to the Roman empire, since, growing little by little, it found them robust and warlike wherever it spread itself. At the time, therefore, when Rome was founded, the people of Israel had been in the land of promise seven hundred and eighteen years. Of these, twenty-seven pertain to Joshua the son of Nun, then to the time of the judges three hundred and twenty-nine. And from the time kings began to be there, the years were three hundred and sixty-two. And there was then a king in Judah whose name was Ahaz, or, as others reckon, his successor Hezekiah, whom it is agreed to have been a most excellent and most pious king, reigning in the times of Romulus.

But in that part of the Hebrew people which was called Israel, Hoshea had begun to reign. CHAPTER XXIII. On the Erythraean Sibyl, who among the other Sibyls is known to have sung many clear things about Christ. About the same time some report that the Erythraean Sibyl prophesied. Now Varro relates that there were many Sibyls, not one. This Erythraean Sibyl certainly wrote down certain manifest things about Christ; which also we ourselves earlier read in the Latin tongue in verses badly Latin and not holding together, through the unskilfulness of some translator or other, as we afterward came to know. For a most illustrious man—

Flaccianus, who was also proconsul, a man of most ready eloquence and much learning, when we were conversing about Christ, brought forth to us a Greek codex, saying that the verses were of the Erythraean Sibyl, where he showed that in a certain place the order of the letters at the beginnings of the verses was such that these words might be read in it: «Ἰησοῦς Χρειστὸς Θεοῦ υἱὸς σωτήρ», which is in Latin, «Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.» Now these verses, whose first letters render the sense which we have said, just as a certain person interpreted them in Latin and metrical verses, contain this: «I.—A sign of judgment: the earth shall grow wet with sweat. H.—From heaven shall come the King who is to be through the ages, Σ.—namely, present in the flesh, that he may judge the world.»

«O.—Whence both the unbeliever and the faithful shall behold God, exalted with the saints at the very end of the age now come. Σ.—So shall souls be present with their flesh, which he himself judges, X.—when the world lies uncultivated amid dense thickets. P.—Men shall cast away their idols and all their treasure as well; E.—fire shall burn up the lands and the sea and the sky, I.—and searching shall break open the gates of foul Avernus. Σ.—But indeed the free light shall be delivered to all the flesh of the saints; T.—eternal flame shall consume the guilty. O.—Each, laying bare his hidden deeds, shall then speak Σ.—his secrets, and God shall open hearts to the light. Θ.—Then too there shall be wailing, all shall gnash with their teeth. E.—The radiance of the sun is snatched away and the chorus of the stars perishes. O.—The heaven shall be rolled up, the splendor of the moon shall fail; Υ.—He shall cast down the hills, he shall lift up the valleys from the depth.»

«Υ.—Nothing lofty or high shall remain among the affairs of men. I.—Now the mountains are made level with the plains, and the blue of the sea, O.—all things shall cease; the earth, broken to pieces, shall perish: Σ.—so likewise the fountains and the rivers shall be parched by fire. Σ.—But then the trumpet shall send down a mournful sound from on high, Ω.—bewailing the wretched crime and the various toils, T.—and the earth, gaping open, shall display the chaos of Tartarus. H.—And here before the Lord the kings shall be set, even to a single one. P.—From heaven shall fall a river of fire and brimstone.»

In these Latin verses, translated as well as could be from the Greek, that sense could not be made to occur there which arises when the letters that are at their beginnings are joined together, in the place where the letter Υ was placed in the Greek, because Latin words could not be found which began with the same letter and suited the sentence. Now these are three verses, the fifth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth. Finally, if, joining the letters that are at the beginnings of all the verses, we do not read those of these three which are written, but in their place recall the letter Υ, as though it were placed in those same positions, it is expressed in five words: «Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour»; but when this is said in Greek, not in Latin.

And there are twenty-seven verses, which number renders a solid square of three. For three taken three times makes nine; and these nine, if they be taken three times, so that from breadth the figure rises into height, arrive at twenty-seven. Now of these five Greek words, which are «Ἰησοῦς Χρειστὸς Θεοῦ υἱὸς σωτήρ», which is in Latin «Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour», if you join the first letters, it will be «ἰχθύς», that is, «fish», in which name Christ is mystically understood, because in the abyss of this mortality, as in the depth of the waters, he was able to be living, that is, without sin.

Now this Sibyl, whether the Erythraean or, as some rather believe, the Cumaean, has nothing in her whole song, of which this tiny portion is a part, that pertains to the worship of false or fabricated gods; nay rather, she so speaks even against them and against their worshippers, that she may seem to be reckoned among the number of those who pertain to the City of God. Lactantius also inserts into his work certain prophecies of the Sibyl about Christ, although he does not express of which one. But the things which he set down separately, I have thought ought to be put together, as though it were one continuous passage, the many brief things which he recalled. «He shall come afterward», she says, «into the wicked hands of the unbelieving;»

«and they shall give God blows with unhallowed hands, and with impure mouth shall spit out venomous spittle; but he shall simply give his holy back to the scourges. And receiving buffets he shall be silent, lest any recognize what the Word is or whence it comes, that it may speak to those below; and he shall be crowned with a crown of thorns. For food they gave him gall, and for thirst vinegar; this table of inhospitality they shall show forth. For you yourself, foolish one, did not understand your God, who sports with the minds of mortals, but you crowned him with thorns and mingled for him dreadful gall. But the veil of the temple shall be rent; and at midday there shall be a night exceedingly dark for three hours. And he shall die a death, sleep being received for three days;»

«and then, returned from those below, he shall come to the light, the first beginning of the resurrection being shown to those recalled.» These testimonies of the Sibyl Lactantius adduced piecemeal through the intervals of his discussion, as the matters which he had set out to prove seemed to require them; which we, interposing nothing, but placing them connected in one series distinguished only by the capital letters—provided that copyists hereafter do not neglect to preserve them—have taken care to set out. Some indeed have written that the Erythraean Sibyl was not of the time of Romulus, but of the Trojan war. CHAPTER XXIV.

That in the reign of Romulus the seven sages became famous, at which time the ten tribes, which were called Israel, were led into captivity by the Chaldeans, and the same Romulus, having died, was endowed with divine honor. In the same reign of Romulus, Thales of Miletus is reported to have lived, one of the seven sages, who, after the theological poets, among whom Orpheus was ennobled most of all, were called «σοφοί», which is in Latin «wise men». About the same time the ten tribes, which in the division of the people were called Israel, were vanquished by the Chaldeans and led captive into those lands, the two tribes remaining in the land of Judea which were called by the name of Judah and had the seat of the kingdom at Jerusalem.

The Romans referred the dead Romulus, since he too had not appeared, among the gods—which is most commonly known—a thing which by then had so far ceased to be done (nor was it done afterward except by flattery, not by error, in the times of the Caesars), that Cicero ascribes it to the great praises of Romulus that he merited these honors not in rude and unlearned times, when men were easily deceived, but in times now polished and erudite, although the subtle and acute loquacity of the philosophers had not yet boiled over and sprouted forth. But even if later times did not institute dead men as gods, yet they did not cease to worship and to hold as gods those instituted by the ancients;

nay rather, by images, which the ancients did not have, they increased the enticement of vain and impious superstition, the unclean demons in their hearts effecting this, deceiving them also through deceitful oracles, so that even the fabulous crimes of the gods, which were now not being invented in a more refined age, were nevertheless shamefully enacted through the games in homage to those same false deities. Then reigned Numa after Romulus, who, although he thought that city ought surely to be fortified with a multitude of false gods, did not himself, when dead, merit to be referred into the same crowd, as though it were supposed that he had so packed heaven with a multitude of deities that he could not find a place there.

During his reign at Rome, and among the Hebrews at the beginning of the reign of Manasseh—by which impious king the prophet Isaiah is reported to have been killed—they say that the Samian Sibyl lived. CHAPTER XXV. What philosophers shone forth while Tarquinius Priscus reigned among the Romans and Zedekiah among the Hebrews, when Jerusalem was captured and the temple overthrown. But while Zedekiah reigned among the Hebrews and Tarquinius Priscus among the Romans, who had succeeded Ancus Marcius, the people of the Jews were led captive into Babylonia, Jerusalem having been overthrown and that temple built by Solomon. For the prophets, rebuking them for their iniquities and impieties, had foretold that these things would come upon them, especially Jeremiah, who also defined the number of the years.

At that time Pittacus of Mitylene, another of the seven sages, is reported to have lived. And Eusebius writes that the other five, who are added to Thales, whom we mentioned above, and to this Pittacus, so that they be reckoned seven, lived at the time when the captive people of God was held in Babylonia. These are they: Solon the Athenian, Chilon the Lacedaemonian, Periander the Corinthian, Cleobulus the Lindian, Bias of Priene. All these, called the seven sages, became famous after the theological poets, because they excelled other men in a certain praiseworthy manner of life and embraced certain precepts of morals in the brevity of maxims.

But they left to posterity no monuments, as far as letters are concerned, except that Solon is reported to have given certain laws to the Athenians; Thales, however, was a natural philosopher and left books of his own doctrines. At that time of the Jewish captivity, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Xenophanes, natural philosophers, became famous. Then too Pythagoras, from whom they began to be called philosophers. CHAPTER XXVI. That at the time when, the seventy years being fulfilled, the captivity of the Jews was loosed, the Romans also were freed from kingly domination. About the same time Cyrus, king of the Persians, who also ruled the Chaldeans and Assyrians, having relaxed somewhat of the captivity of the Jews, caused fifty thousand men of them to return for the restoring of the temple.

By whom only the first foundations were begun and the altar constructed. But, the enemies assailing them, they were by no means able to proceed in building, and the work was deferred even until Darius. About the same time those things also were done which are written in the book of Judith; which book indeed the Jews are said not to have received into the canon of the Scriptures. Under Darius therefore, king of the Persians, the seventy years which the prophet Jeremiah had foretold being fulfilled, liberty was restored to the Jews, the captivity being loosed, while the seventh king of the Romans, Tarquinius, reigned. He being expelled, they themselves too began to be free from the domination of their kings. Up to this time the people of Israel had prophets;

who, although they were many, the canonical writings of but a few are retained both among the Jews and among us. Concerning whom I promised to set down some things in this book, when I was closing the preceding one, which I now see ought to be done. CHAPTER XXVII. On the times of the prophets, whose oracles are had in books, and who then sang many things about the calling of the Gentiles, when the kingdom of the Romans began and that of the Assyrians failed. In order, therefore, that we may be able to mark their times, let us run back a little to earlier things. At the head of the book of the prophet Hosea, who is placed first among the twelve, it is thus written: «The word of the Lord, which came to Hosea in the days of Uzziah and Jotham and Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.» Amos too writes that he prophesied in the days of king Uzziah;