Octavius 1

When I turn the matter over in my mind and recall to remembrance the memory of Octavius, my good and most faithful companion, so great a sweetness and affection for the man clings to me that I seem in some way to return into the past, and not merely to recall by memory things that are already finished and run their course. Thus, however much the sight of him has been withdrawn from my eyes, by just so much has it been entwined within my heart and almost in my inmost feelings. Not without cause did that excellent and holy man, in departing, leave behind in us a boundless longing for himself, since he too always burned with such great love for us that, both in jest and in earnest, he was of one will with me, desiring or refusing the very same things: you would have believed that a single mind had been divided between two men. Thus he alone was my confidant in my loves, and he himself my partner in my errors;

and when, the mist being dispelled, I emerged from the depths of darkness into the light of wisdom and truth, he did not refuse to be my companion, but—what is more glorious—he ran ahead. Therefore, while my thoughts ranged over the whole span of our intimacy and friendship, the attention of my mind settled chiefly upon that discourse of his by which, with the weightiest argument, he reformed Quintus Caecilius, who was still clinging to superstitious vanities, and brought him back to the true religion. For he had hastened to Rome on business and to visit me, leaving his home, his wife, his children, and—what is most lovable in children—those still of innocent years, still attempting words but half-formed, a speech rendered sweeter by the very fragment of the stumbling tongue.

At his arrival I cannot express in words with how great and how impatient a joy I exulted, since the unexpected presence of so dear a friend most greatly increased my gladness. So, after a day or two, when frequent and constant intercourse had now satisfied the eagerness of my longing, and we had learned by mutual report the things about each other that we did not know on account of our separation, we resolved to make for Ostia, that most pleasant city—because for my body, in drying up its humors, sea-bathing offered a soothing and suitable remedy; indeed the holidays for the vintage had also relaxed my judicial duties. For at that season, after the summer days, autumn was settling itself into a mild temperature.

And so, when at daybreak we made our way to the seashore by strolling along, that the gently breathing breeze might invigorate our limbs, and that the soft sand, yielding with exceeding pleasure beneath our footsteps, might sink down, Caecilius, having marked an image of Serapis, raised his hand to his mouth—as the superstitious crowd is wont to do—and pressed a kiss upon his lips. Then Octavius said: 'It is not the part of a good man, brother Marcus, thus to abandon a man who clings to your side at home and abroad in this blindness of vulgar ignorance, so that you should suffer him in broad daylight to stumble against stones—however shaped and anointed and crowned they be—since you know that the disgrace of this error redounds upon you no less than upon him.' With this discourse of his, having traversed the middle space of the city, we now held the open shore.

There a gentle wave, washing over the outermost sands as if to smooth them into a walkway, spread itself out; and, as the sea—even when the winds are laid—is always restless, although it did not come to land with white and foaming billows, yet we were exceedingly delighted with the curling and winding wanderings there, when we dipped our soles at the very edge of the deep, while now the wave, driven against our feet, played about them, now, gliding back and drawing back its traces, sucked them again into itself. And so, advancing gradually and tranquilly, we picked our way along the shore of the gently curving beach, beguiling our journey with stories. These stories were Octavius's narrative as he discoursed about a voyage.

But when we had spent a sufficiently just space of walking together with conversation, retracing the same road we again trod it with reversed steps; and when we had come to that spot where the little boats, drawn up and propped on underlaid timbers, rested suspended above the earthy mud, we saw boys eagerly vying in the game of throwing potsherds into the sea. The game is this: to pick from the shore a smooth potsherd, rounded and polished by the tossing of the waves; to grasp that potsherd flat-set between the fingers, and bending low, to spin it as low as one can over the waves, so that the missile either skims and swims along the back of the sea, gliding with gentle force, or leaping forth from the cut tops of the waves emerges, being lifted by repeated bounding.

Among the boys he counted himself the victor whose potsherd both ran out farthest and skipped most often. And so, when we were all taken with this pleasure of the spectacle, Caecilius paid no attention, nor laughed at the contest, but, silent, anxious, withdrawn, was confessing by his face some grief I knew not what. To him I said: 'What is this matter? Why do I not recognize, Caecilius, that liveliness of yours, and why do I miss that cheerfulness of your eyes even in serious affairs?' Then he replied: 'For a good while now the speech of our Octavius has keenly vexed and gnawed at me, in which, attacking you, he reproached you for negligence, so that under cover he might more gravely charge me with ignorance. And so I will go further: with Octavius I have business over the whole matter from the very start.

If it please you that I, as a man of that very sect, should dispute with him, he will assuredly perceive at once that it is easier to wrangle among comrades than to engage wisdom in earnest. Let us only sit down upon these barriers of rocks, thrown out for the protection of the baths and running forward into the deep, so that we may both rest from our journey and dispute the more attentively.' And at his word we sat down, in such a way that they sheltered me, placed in the midst of the three, by the encircling of their sides; nor was this an act of either rank or honor—since friendship always either receives or makes men equal—but that I, as arbiter and nearest to both, might lend my ears and, set in the middle, separate the two disputants. Then thus Caecilius began:

'Although, brother Marcus, the matter about which we are most of all inquiring is not doubtful to you—seeing that, having diligently engaged in both ways of living, you have rejected the one and approved the other—nevertheless for the present your mind must be so shaped that you hold the scales of a most impartial judge and do not lean, inclined toward either side, lest the verdict seem not so much to have been born of our debates as brought forth from your own feelings. Accordingly, if you would sit with me as though some new man and as though ignorant of both parties, it is no difficult task to make plain that all things in human affairs are doubtful, uncertain, in suspense, and all things rather plausible than true;

so that it is the more to be wondered at that some, out of weariness of searching out the truth thoroughly, rashly succumb to any opinion whatsoever rather than persevere with stubborn diligence in exploring it. And therefore all must feel indignation, all must grieve, that certain men dare—and these men untrained in studies, profane in letters, ignorant even of the meaner arts—to decree something certain about the sum of things and about majesty, concerning which, through so many ages, philosophy itself still deliberates among very many sects.

And not without reason, since human mediocrity is so far removed from the exploration of the divine that it is granted neither to know nor reverently to search out either the things suspended on high above us in the heaven, or the things sunk deep beneath the earth; and we may rightly seem blessed enough and prudent enough if, according to that ancient oracle of the wise man, we have come to know ourselves more intimately. But insofar as, indulging an insane and foolish labor, we wander beyond the bounds of our lowliness and, cast down upon the earth, transcend with bold desire the very heaven and the very stars, let us at least not entangle this error in vain and frightful opinions. Suppose that in the beginning the seeds of all things were condensed by nature coalescing in itself—who here is the author, that is, God?

Suppose the parts of the whole world have been knit together, ordered, and formed by chance concurrences—what god is the contriver? Granted that fire kindled the stars, and that the heaven hung itself up by its own matter, that it founded the earth by its weight and that the sea flowed in from liquid—whence comes this religion, whence this dread, what is this superstition? Man and every animal that is born, breathed into, raised up, is, as it were, a voluntary concretion of the elements, into which again man and every animal is divided, dissolved, scattered: thus all things flow back into their source and are revolved into themselves, with no craftsman, no judge, no author.

Thus, when the seeds of fires are gathered together, ever and ever new suns shine; thus, when the vapors of the earth are exhaled, mists ever grow; when these are thickened and compacted, clouds rise higher; when these same slip down, rains flow, winds blow, hailstones rattle, or—when the storm-clouds collide—thunders bellow, lightnings flash red, thunderbolts gleam forth: so they fall everywhere, rush upon mountains, dash against trees, touch without discrimination places sacred and profane, strike guilty men and often religious ones. Why should I speak of the various and uncertain tempests, by which the onset of all things is rolled about with no order or weighing of matters? in shipwrecks the fates of good and bad mixed, their deserts confounded? in conflagrations the destruction of innocent and guilty coming together?

And when a tract of the sky is infected with a pestilential corruption, all perish without distinction? And when men rage with the ardor of war, do not rather the better men fall? In peace too not only is wickedness made equal to the better, but it is even honored, so that in many cases you cannot tell whether their depravity is to be detested or their good fortune to be desired. But if the world were governed by divine providence and by the authority of some deity, never would Phalaris and Dionysius have deserved a kingdom, never would Rutilius and Camillus have deserved exile, never would Socrates have deserved poison. Behold, the fruit-bearing orchards, behold the grain now gray with ripeness, the now intoxicating vintage—all is spoiled by rain, beaten down by hail.

So either the truth is hidden and kept down from us as uncertain, or—what is rather to be believed—Fortune, loosed from all laws, holds sway with varied and slippery chances. Since therefore either Fortune is certain or Nature uncertain, how much more venerable and better it is to receive the teaching of our forefathers as the high priest of truth, to cultivate the religions handed down, to adore the gods whom you were trained from your parents to fear rather than to know intimately, and not to pass judgment about the deities, but to believe our predecessors, who in an age still rude, at the very birth of the world itself, were counted worthy to have the gods either gracious or for their kings!

Hence indeed we see, throughout all the empires, provinces, and towns, that individual peoples have their own native rites of worship and reverence their local gods: as the Eleusinians worship Ceres, the Phrygians the Great Mother, the Epidaurians Aesculapius, the Chaldaeans Belus, the Syrians Astarte, the Taurians Diana, the Gauls Mercury, the Romans all of them.

Thus their power and authority has occupied the whole circuit of the world; thus they have extended their dominion beyond the paths of the sun and the very bounds of Ocean, while they exercise in arms a religious valor, while they fortify the city with the religious observances of sacred things, with chaste virgins, with many honors and titles of priests; while, besieged and—save for the Capitol alone—captured, they worship the gods whom another would by now have despised as angry; and through the Gallic battle-lines, who marveled at the boldness of their superstition, they advance unarmed of weapons but armed with the cultivation of religion; while in the captured enemy's walls, with victory still raging, they venerate the conquered deities; while from every quarter they seek out foreign gods and make them their own, while they build altars even to unknown deities and to the Manes.

Thus, while they take up the sacred rites of all nations, they have even deserved empires. Hence a perpetual tenor of veneration has remained, which is not weakened by long age but increased: since antiquity has been wont to grant to ceremonies and shrines just so much sanctity as it has heaped up of age. Nor yet did our ancestors devote their effort rashly (for I venture meanwhile myself to concede it, and thus the better to err) either to observing auguries, or to consulting entrails, or to instituting sacred rites, or to dedicating shrines. Look to the record from the books; you will already find that they initiated the rites of all religions, either that divine indulgence might be repaid, or that an impending wrath might be averted, or, when already swelling and raging, might be appeased.

Witness the Idaean Mother, who by her arrival both proved the chastity of the matron and freed the city from the fear of the enemy; witnesses are the consecrated statues of the equestrian brothers at the lake, just as they had shown themselves—who, panting with foaming and smoking horses, announced the victory over Perseus on the same day on which they had won it; witness the repetition of the games, the offended Jupiter being declared so through the dream of a man of the people; and the ratified self-devotion of the Decii is a witness; witness too is Curtius, who by the mass or the honor of his horseman filled up the gaping chasm of the profound abyss to a level. More frequently even than we would have wished, slighted auspices have testified to the presence of the gods.

Thus Allia is an 'ill-omened name'; thus that of Claudius and Junius is not a battle against the Carthaginians but a deadly shipwreck; and so that Trasimene might be both greater and discolored with Roman blood, Flaminius scorned the auguries; and—that we may recover our standards from the Parthians—Crassus both deserved and laughed at the imprecations of the dire ones. I pass over old matters, which are many, and concerning the births of the gods, their gifts and offices I neglect the songs of the poets; I leap over also the fates foretold by oracles, lest antiquity should seem to you too fabulous. Turn your attention to the temples and shrines of the gods, by which the Roman state is both protected and adorned: they are more august through the deities that dwell, are present, and lodge within them, than through their worship—rich though they be in marks of distinction and in offerings.

Hence indeed the seers, full of and mingled with the god, pluck the future beforehand, give warning against perils, a remedy for diseases, hope to the afflicted, help to the wretched, solace in calamities, relief in toils. Even in sleep we see, hear, recognize the gods whom by day we impiously deny, refuse, and forswear. Therefore, since among all nations, however uncertain may be the reason or the origin concerning the immortal gods, there yet remains a firm consensus, I cannot tolerate anyone, swelling with so great a boldness and with I know not what irreligious cleverness, who strives to dissolve or weaken this religion so ancient, so useful, so wholesome.

Let there be that Theodorus of Cyrene, or before him Diagoras of Melos, to whom antiquity gave the surname 'the Atheist'—both of whom, by asserting that there are no gods, utterly took away all the fear and reverence by which humanity is governed: never, however, in this discipline of impiety will they prevail through the name and authority of a feigned philosophy. When the Athenians, men of judgment, both banished from their borders Protagoras of Abdera—who disputed about divinity more cautiously than profanely—and burned his writings in the assembly, what then? Men (for you will endure me as I more freely put forth the force of the cause I have undertaken), men, I say, of a desperate, unlawful, and forlorn faction, to run riot against the gods—is this not to be lamented?

They, gathering the more ignorant from the lowest dregs together with credulous women, who slip through the frailty of their sex, set up a people of profane conspiracy, who are leagued together not by any sacred rite but by guilt, in nocturnal gatherings and solemn fasts and inhuman foods—a lurking and light-shunning tribe, mute in public, chattering in corners; they despise the temples as tombs, they spit upon the gods, they laugh at sacred things, they pity—if it is permitted to say so—the priests, themselves wretched; they despise honors and purple robes, themselves half-naked! O wondrous folly and incredible audacity! They scorn present torments while they dread uncertain and future ones, and while they fear to die after death, in the meantime they fear not to die: thus a deceptive hope and the solace of a revived life flatters them out of their terror!

And now, as more wicked things spring up more abundantly, with depraved morals creeping on day by day throughout the whole world, those most foul shrines of an impious confederacy grow up. This conspiracy must be utterly rooted out and execrated. They recognize one another by secret marks and signs, and love each other almost before they have come to know each other: indiscriminately too among them there is mingled, as it were, a certain religion of lusts, and they call themselves promiscuously brothers and sisters, so that even ordinary debauchery, through the intervention of a sacred name, becomes incest. Thus their vain and senseless superstition glories in crimes. Nor would shrewd rumor—itself most wicked and to be uttered only with reverence—speak of them, unless the truth underlay it.

I hear that they venerate, by some foolish persuasion I know not what, the consecrated head of the most filthy beast, an ass: a religion worthy of and born from such morals! Others report that they worship the genitals of their very president and priest, and adore, as it were, the nature of their own parent: I know not whether this is false, but certainly the suspicion is fitted to secret and nocturnal rites! And one who fables that they reverence a man punished with the utmost penalty for his crime, and the death-dealing wood of the cross, assigns to them altars congruous with abandoned and wicked men, that they may worship what they deserve. Now the tale about the initiation of young recruits is as detestable as it is well known. An infant covered with meal-paste, to deceive the unwary, is set before one who is to be steeped in the rites.

That infant is slain by the recruit—provoked, as it were, to harmless blows on the surface of the meal—with blind and hidden wounds. Of this infant, O abomination! they thirstily lap the blood; its limbs they eagerly distribute; by this victim they are leagued together; by this complicity in crime they are pledged to mutual silence. These rites are fouler than all sacrileges. And about their banquet it is well known; everyone everywhere speaks of it, and the speech of our man of Cirta also attests it. On a solemn day they come together to a feast with all their children, sisters, mothers—people of every sex and every age.

There, after many courses, when the banquet has grown heated and the fervor of incestuous lust has flared up amid drunkenness, a dog which is tied to the candlestick is provoked, by the throwing of a morsel beyond the length of the cord by which it is bound, to a rush and a leap. So, the conscious light being overturned and extinguished, in shameless darkness they entwine the bonds of unspeakable desire through the uncertainty of lot; and even if not all in deed, yet all alike in complicity of incest, since whatever can happen in the act of individuals is sought by the wish of all. Much I deliberately pass over: for even these things are too many, the obscurity of that depraved religion itself declaring all or most of them to be true.

For why else do they strive so greatly to conceal and hide whatever it is they worship, since honorable things always rejoice in publicity, while crimes are kept secret? Why have they no altars, no temples, no known images, never speak openly, never freely assemble, unless that which they worship and suppress is either to be punished or to be ashamed of? Whence, moreover, or who is that god of theirs—single, solitary, forsaken—whom no free nation, no kingdoms, not even the Roman superstition has known? The sole and wretched nationality of the Jews worshipped one god, they too, but openly, with temples, altars, victims, and ceremonies—a god of such utter lack of force and power that he is, together with his own nation, a captive to the Romans.

But the Christians too—what monsters, what portents do they fabricate! That god of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see, they imagine diligently inquires into the morals of all, the acts of all, even the words and hidden thoughts of all—running about, that is, and everywhere present: they want him to be troublesome, restless, even shamelessly curious, seeing that he stands by all deeds, wanders amid all places—since he can neither attend to individuals, being distracted over the universe, nor suffice for the whole, being occupied with individuals.

What of this, that they threaten conflagration to the whole earth and to the universe itself with its stars, and contrive its ruin—as though either the eternal order established by the divine laws of nature could be disturbed, or, the covenant of all the elements being broken and the heavenly framework divided, this mass, by which it is contained and girded, could be undermined? Nor content with this frenzied opinion, they pile up and append old wives' fables: they say that they themselves are born again after death, into ashes and cinders, and with I know not what confidence they mutually believe their own lies: you would think they had already come back to life. A twofold evil and double madness: to announce destruction to the heaven and the stars, which we leave just as we found them, and to promise eternity to themselves, dead and extinguished, who, just as we are born, also perish!

Hence, evidently, they also execrate funeral pyres and condemn burials by fire, as though every body, even if withdrawn from the flames, were not nevertheless dissolved into the earth by years and ages, and as though it made no difference whether wild beasts tear it apart, or the seas consume it, or the ground covers it, or the flame removes it—since to dead bodies every burial, if they feel it, is a punishment, but if they do not feel it, the very swiftness of the consuming is a remedy. Deceived by this error, they promise to themselves, as good men, a blessed and perpetual life when dead, but to the rest, as unjust men, eternal punishment. Many things present themselves in answer to this, did not my discourse hasten on. That they themselves are the unjust ones I do not even labor to prove; I have already shown it: although, even if I granted them to be just, yet I know that guilt or innocence is, by the opinions of very many, ascribed to fate.

And this is your consensus too; for whatever we do, as others ascribe it to fate, so you ascribe it to god: thus the men of your sect do not desire of their own accord, but are chosen. Therefore you fashion an unjust judge, who punishes in men their lot, not their will. I should like, however, to inquire whether one rises again with bodies or without bodies, and with what bodies—the same or renewed ones. Without a body? This, so far as I know, is neither mind nor soul nor life. With the very same body? But it has already disintegrated before. With another body? Then a new man is born, that former one is not restored. And yet so great an age has gone by, countless ages have flowed away; what single one of any sort has returned from the dead—even by the lot of Protesilaus, with the granted passage of but a few hours—or that we might believe by example?

All those figments of an unsound opinion and foolish consolations, sported by deceitful poets for the sweetness of their song, have been disgracefully reshaped by you, credulous of course, into your god. Nor do you even take from present things a proof of how empty are the vows of an idle promise that deceive you: estimate, wretches, what hangs over you after death, while you still live. Behold, the part of you—and the greater, the better part, as you say—you are in want, you are cold, you toil with labor and hunger, and god allows it, dissembles, either will not or cannot succor his own; so he is either powerless or unjust! You, who dream of a posthumous immortality, when you are shaken with peril, when you burn with fevers, when you are torn with pain—do you not yet feel your condition?

Do you not yet acknowledge your frailty? Unwilling, wretch, you are convicted of your infirmity, yet you will not confess it! But I pass over things in common. Behold, for you there are threats, punishments, torments, and crosses now not to be adored but to be undergone, fires too which you both foretell and fear: where is that god of yours, who can come to the aid of those returning to life, but cannot to the living? Do not the Romans, without your god, rule and reign, enjoy the whole world, and lord it over you? But you, anxious and worried meanwhile, abstain from honorable pleasures: you do not visit the spectacles, you take no part in the processions, the public banquets are held without you; you shrink from the sacred contests, the foods plucked beforehand, and the drinks poured upon the altars. Thus you dread the gods whom you deny!

You do not bind your head with flowers, you do not honor your body with perfumes; you reserve unguents for funerals, you deny even garlands to tombs—pale, trembling, worthy of pity, but of the pity of our gods. So you neither rise again, wretches, nor live in the meantime! Accordingly, if there is in you any wisdom or modesty, cease to pry into the regions of the heaven and the fates of the world and its secrets: it is enough to look at what lies before your feet, especially for the untaught, the uncouth, the rude, the rustic, to whom it is not given to understand civil matters, much more is it denied to discourse of divine ones. Yet if there is a desire of philosophizing, let whoever of you is great enough imitate, if he can, Socrates, the prince of wisdom. The reply of that man, as often as he was asked about the things of heaven, is well known:

'What is above us is nothing to us.' Deservedly, then, he won from the oracle the testimony of singular prudence. Which oracle he himself also perceived to have been given on this account—that he was set before all, not because he had ascertained all things, but because he had learned that he knew nothing: thus the highest prudence lies in a confessed ignorance. From this fountain flowed the safe doubt of Arcesilaus and, much later, of Carneades and very many of the Academics, in the highest questions—a kind of philosophizing in which the untaught can be cautious and the learned glorious. What of it? Is not the hesitation of Simonides of Ceos to be admired by all and to be followed?

This Simonides, when he was asked by the tyrant Hiero what and of what sort he reckoned the gods to be, first asked a day for deliberation; the next day he prolonged it by two days; soon, being reminded, he added as much again. At last, when the tyrant inquired the causes of so great a delay, he replied 'that, the longer his inquiry proceeded, the more obscure the truth became to him.' In my opinion too, things that are doubtful are, as they are, to be left so; nor, when so many and so great men deliberate, is a verdict to be rashly and boldly carried to either side, lest either an old wives' superstition be brought in, or all religion be destroyed.' Thus Caecilius, and smiling (for the impetus of his outpoured speech had relaxed the swelling of his indignation):

'Has Octavius'—he said—'anything to dare against this, a man of Plautine stock, the foremost of millers as he is the last of philosophers?' 'Spare,' said I, 'to applaud over him: for it is not fitting for you to exult over the neatness of your speech before fuller pleading has been made on both sides, especially since your debate rests not upon praise but upon truth. And although your speech, with its subtle variety, has delighted me in great measure, yet I am more deeply moved—not about the present case, but about the whole manner of disputing—because for the most part, according to the powers of the disputants and the might of eloquence, even the condition of evident truth is altered.

That this comes about is very well known, through the easy compliance of hearers, who, while they are drawn away from attention to the substance by the allurement of words, assent without discrimination to all that is said, nor separate the false from the right, not knowing that there is both an incredible truth and a plausible falsehood. And so, the more often they believe in mere assertions, the more frequently are they refuted by those more skilled: thus, constantly deceived by their own rashness, they transfer the blame from the judge to a complaint of uncertainty, so that, all things being condemned, they would rather hold everything in suspense than judge concerning deceptive matters. Therefore we must take care lest we labor under a like hatred of all discourses, so that very many of the simpler sort are carried away into execration and hatred of men. For the incautiously credulous are circumvented by those whom they had thought good;

Soon, through a similar error, all men become suspect, and they fear as wicked even those whom they could have perceived to be the best. 'I, therefore, being anxious—since the matter is debated on both sides with every effort, and on the one side the truth is for the most part obscure, while on the other side there is a remarkable subtlety that sometimes, by its abundance of speech, mimics the credibility of a confessed proof—let us carefully weigh each point as far as possible, so that we may praise the cleverness indeed, but choose, approve, and take up those things that are right.' 'You are departing,' said Caecilius, 'from the duty of a scrupulous judge:

for it is most unjust that you should weaken the force of my argument by the interposition of a most weighty discussion, when Octavius has each point whole and untouched to refute, if he can.' 'What you charge me with,' I said, 'I have, unless I am mistaken, brought forward for our common advantage, so that by scrupulous examination we may weigh our verdict not by the swelling of eloquence, but by the solidity of the facts themselves. Nor should our attention be diverted any longer, as you complain, since in complete silence we may now hear the response of our Januarius, who is already eager.' And Octavius said: 'I will indeed speak, as best I can according to my strength, and you must strive together with me, so that with a flood of truthful words we may wash away the most bitter stain of these revilings.

And I will not conceal at the outset that the opinion of my friend Natalis wavered so erringly, vaguely, and slipperily, that we are left in doubt whether your learning has been thrown into confusion, or whether it faltered through error. For he varied between believing the gods at one moment and deliberating at another, so that, by the uncertainty of his proposition, the aim of our response might be founded all the more uncertainly. But in my friend Natalis I do not wish to suppose cunning, nor do I believe it: subtle sophistication is far from his simplicity. What then? Just as one who does not know the right road, when, as happens, it splits into several, because he does not know the way, hesitates anxiously and dares neither to choose any single one nor to approve them all: so he who has no stable judgment of the truth, as treacherous suspicion is scattered abroad, so his doubtful opinion is dispersed.

It is therefore no wonder if Caecilius is again and again tossed about, seethes, and wavers among contrary and conflicting things. That this may no longer happen, I will refute and convict whatever has been said, however divergent, confirming and proving it by one single truth: so that henceforth he need neither doubt nor wander. 'And since my brother burst out, taking it ill, growing indignant, vexed, and grieved that the unlettered, the poor, and the unskilled should dispute about heavenly matters, let him know that all men, without distinction of age, sex, or rank, are begotten capable and apt for reason and understanding, and that they have not obtained wisdom by chance, but have it implanted by nature:

indeed even the philosophers themselves, or any others who have passed into memory as inventors of the arts, before they brought forth fame for their name by the skill of their mind, were reckoned as common, unlearned, and half-naked: so true is it that the rich, bound fast to their possessions, have been accustomed to gaze up at gold rather than at heaven, while our poor men both devised wisdom and handed down instruction to the rest. Whence it appears that talent is not given by means, nor procured by study, but is engendered together with the very forming of the mind. Therefore there is nothing to be indignant or grieved at, if anyone whosoever inquires, perceives, and declares concerning divine things, since it is not the authority of the disputant that is required, but the truth of the disputation itself.

And indeed, the more unskilled the speech, the more illustrious is the reasoning, since it is not painted over with the pomp of eloquence and charm, but is sustained, as it is, by the rule of rightness. 'Nor do I refuse what Caecilius strove to assert among his chief points: that a man ought to know himself and to consider what he is, whence he is, and why he is—whether compounded of the elements or assembled from atoms, or rather made, formed, and animated by God.

This very thing we cannot explore and dig out without an inquiry into the universe, since they are so cohering, connected, and chained together, that unless you diligently sift out the principle of divinity, you cannot know that of humanity; nor can you conduct civic affairs well, unless you have come to know this commonwealth common to the whole world—especially since in this we differ from wild beasts, that they, bent downward and inclining toward the earth, are born to look out for nothing but their fodder, whereas we, to whom an upright countenance is given, to whom a gaze toward heaven, speech, and reason are granted, through which we recognize, perceive, and imitate God—it is neither right nor lawful for us to be ignorant of the heavenly brightness that thrusts itself upon our eyes and senses:

for it is the very image of sacrilege to seek down upon the ground what you ought to find on high. 'All the more, therefore, do those seem to me to lack mind, sense, and even their very eyes, who hold that this entire ornament of the world was not perfected by divine reason, but heaped together out of certain fragments cohering at random. For what can be so open, so manifest, and so plain—when you have lifted your eyes to heaven and surveyed the things below and around—as that there is some divine power of a most excellent mind, by which all nature is inspired, moved, nourished, and governed? 'Behold heaven itself: how widely it is stretched out, how swiftly it revolves, whether it is distinguished by stars into night, or illumined by the sun into day:

now you will know how wondrous and divine is in it the balancing of the supreme Governor. Behold also the year, how the circuit of the sun completes it; and behold the month, how the moon carries it round by waxing, waning, and labor. What shall I say of the recurring alternations of darkness and light, that there might be for us an alternate renewal of work and rest? Let a more extended discourse about the stars be left to the astrologers—whether they govern the course of sailing, or bring on the season for plowing and reaping. Each of these things not only required the supreme Craftsman and a perfect reason in order to be created, made, and arranged, but also cannot be felt, perceived, and understood without the highest skill and reason. 'What then?

When the order of the seasons and of the crops is marked out with a fixed variety, does it not bear witness to its author and parent—spring alike with its flowers, and summer with its harvests, and the welcome ripeness of autumn, and the necessary olive-gathering of winter? This order would easily be thrown into disorder, did it not stand fast by supreme reason. And then, how great is the providence, lest winter alone should sear with frost or summer alone should scorch with heat, to insert the moderating mean of autumn and spring, so that through their own footsteps the unseen and harmless passages of the returning year may glide by! 'Look upon the sea: it is bound by the law of the shore. Whatever there is of trees, behold how it is animated from the bowels of the earth! Look upon the ocean: it flows back with reciprocal tides. Behold the springs: they flow with perennial veins. Gaze upon the rivers:

they ever go with practiced glidings. 'Why should I speak of the rightly disposed ridges of mountains, the curves of hills, the spread-out plains? Or why should I speak of the manifold protection of living creatures against one another?—some armed with horns, others hedged with teeth and grounded upon hoofs and spiked with stings, or set free by swiftness of foot or by the lifting of wings? 'The very beauty of our own form above all confesses God as its artificer: our upright posture, our erect countenance, our eyes set at the top as if on a watchtower, and all the other senses arranged as if in a citadel. 'It would take long to go through each part. There is nothing among the limbs in a man that is not both for the sake of necessity and for adornment; and, what is more wonderful, the same figure belongs to all, yet certain lineaments are bent differently for each one:

thus we all appear similar, and yet among ourselves we are found, each one, dissimilar. 'What of the manner of being born? What? Was not the desire of begetting given by God, and that the breasts should turn to milk as the birth ripens, and that the tender offspring should grow up by the abundance of the milky dew? 'Nor does God take thought for the universe only, but also for its parts. Britain is wanting in sunshine, but is restored by the warmth of the surrounding sea; the river Nile is wont to temper the dryness of Egypt; the Euphrates compensates Mesopotamia in place of rains; the river Indus is said both to sow the East and to water it. 'But if, on entering some house, you had seen everything cultivated, arranged, and adorned, you would surely believe that a master presided over it, and that he was far better than all those good things:

so in this house of the world, when in heaven and earth you discern providence, order, and law, believe that there is a Lord and Parent of the universe, more beautiful than the very stars and than all the parts of the whole world. 'Unless perhaps, since there is no doubt about providence, you think it must be inquired whether the heavenly kingdom is governed by the command of one or by the will of many—a thing which is of no great labor to make plain to one who considers earthly empires, for which the examples surely come from heaven. When did a partnership in royal power ever either begin with good faith or part without bloodshed? I pass over the Persians, who divined their sovereignty from the neighing of horses, and I leave aside the pair of Thebans, a dead fable. Concerning the kingdom of shepherds and a hut, the memory of the twins is most well known.

The wars of son-in-law and father-in-law were spread over the whole world, and fortune did not contain two of so great an empire. 'Look at the rest: there is one king for the bees, one leader in the flocks, one ruler in the herds. Would you believe that in heaven the supreme power is divided, and that the whole majesty of that true and divine rule is split apart—when it is manifest that God, the parent of all, has neither beginning nor end; who grants nativity to all, perpetuity to himself; who existed before the world, himself instead of a world to himself; who commands all things, whatsoever they are, by his word, dispenses them by his reason, and brings them to perfection by his power. 'This One cannot be seen: he is brighter than sight; nor grasped: he is purer than touch; nor estimated: he is greater than the senses, infinite, immeasurable, and known in his full greatness only to himself.

But for us the breast is too narrow for understanding, and therefore we worthily estimate him in this way, when we call him inestimable. I will declare just as I feel: whoever thinks he knows the greatness of God diminishes it; whoever does not wish to diminish it, does not know it. 'Nor should you seek a name for God: God is the name. There is need of designations when a multitude must be distinguished through individuals by the proper marks of appellations: for God, who alone is, the word 'God' is the whole. If I should call him Father, you would suppose him carnal; if King, you would imagine him earthly; if Lord, you would certainly understand him as mortal. Take away the additions of names and you will perceive his brightness. 'What of the fact that I have the consent of all about this? I hear the common people:

when they stretch their hands to heaven, they say nothing other than 'God,' and 'God is great,' and 'God is true,' and 'if God should grant it.' Is this the natural speech of the common crowd, or the prayer of a confessing Christian? And those who would have Jupiter to be the chief are deceived in the name, but they agree about one power. 'I hear the poets too proclaiming 'one father of gods and men,' and that the mind of mortals is such as the parent of all has made the day to be. What? Did not the Mantuan Maro more openly, more nearly, more truly say that 'in the beginning' a 'spirit within nourishes the heaven and the earth' and the other members of the world, and 'an infused mind sets them in motion, thence the race of men and of cattle' and whatever else of living things there is? The same poet in another place names that very mind and spirit 'God.' For these are his words:

that God indeed goes through all lands and the tracts of the sea and the deep heaven, whence the race of men and the cattle, whence rain and fires. 'What else, even by us, is God proclaimed to be than Mind and Reason and Spirit? 'Let us review, if you please, the teaching of the philosophers: you will discover that they, though in varied discourses, yet in the very facts come together and conspire into this one opinion. I pass over those rude and ancient men who earned the title of wise by their own sayings. Let Thales of Miletus be the first of all, who was the first of all to discuss heavenly matters. This Milesian Thales said that the beginning of things was water, but that God was that Mind which formed all things out of water.

Granted that the reasoning about water and spirit is too lofty and too sublime to have been found out by man, and was handed down by God: you see that the opinion of this foremost philosopher resounds in deep accord with ours. Anaximenes next, and afterward Diogenes of Apollonia, set down air as God, infinite and immeasurable: of these too there is a similar consensus about divinity. The description of Anaxagoras, indeed, and the motion of an infinite mind, is called God; and the God of Pythagoras is a soul passing through and intent upon the whole nature of things, from which even the life of all living creatures is plucked. It is well known that Xenophanes hands down the whole infinite together with a mind as God; and that Antisthenes held there to be many popular gods, but one natural and supreme; and that Speusippus knew God to be an animating force by which all things are governed. What then?

Democritus, although the first inventor of atoms, does he not for the most part speak of nature, which pours forth images, and of intelligence, as God? Strato too, he himself speaks of nature. Even that Epicurus, who fashions the gods either as idle or as nonexistent, sets nature above all. Aristotle varies, yet assigns one power: for at one time he calls mind, at another the world, God; at another he sets God over the world. Theophrastus too varies, attributing primacy now to the world, now to the divine mind. Heraclides Ponticus also, though in varied ways, ascribes a divine mind to the world. Zeno and Chrysippus and Cleanthes are themselves likewise multiform, but all of them revolve back to the unity of providence.

For Cleanthes discourses of God now as the mind of nature and as soul, now as the ether, and most often as reason. Zeno, his teacher, will have it that natural and divine law, and at one moment the ether, at another reason, is the beginning of all things; and the same man, by interpreting Juno to be air, Jupiter to be heaven, Neptune the sea, fire to be Vulcan, and the other popular gods likewise to be elements, gravely arraigns and refutes the public error. Chrysippus holds nearly the same: he believes the divine rational power, nature and the world, and at times fatal necessity, to be God; and he imitates Zeno by a physiological interpretation in the songs of Hesiod, Homer, and Orpheus.

To the Babylonian Diogenes too belongs the system of expounding and discoursing that the birth of Jupiter and the origin of Minerva and other things of this kind are names of things, not of gods. For the Socratic Xenophon denies that the form of the true God can be seen, and therefore that it ought not to be inquired into; Ariston the Stoic holds that it cannot be comprehended at all: both perceived the majesty of God through despair of understanding him. To Plato the discourse about God, both about the things themselves and about the names, is more open, and would be wholly heavenly, did it not sometimes become soiled by an admixture of civic persuasion.

Thus to Plato in the Timaeus God is, by his very name, the parent of the world, the artificer of the soul, the fabricator of things heavenly and earthly, whom—he premises—it is difficult to find because of his exceeding and incredible power, and, when you have found him, impossible to declare in public. 'These things of ours are almost the same: for we both know God and call him the parent of all, yet we never proclaim him in public except when asked. 'I have set forth the opinions of nearly all the philosophers whose glory is more illustrious, who have designated the one God, though by many names, so that anyone might judge either that the Christians of today are philosophers, or that the philosophers of that time were already Christians.

'But if the world is ruled by providence and governed by the nod of one God, then the antiquity of unskilled men, delighted or captivated by their own little fables, ought not to drag us into error by their mutual consent, since it is refuted by the opinions of their own philosophers, on whose side stand the authority of both reason and antiquity. For our forefathers had such ready faith in falsehoods that they rashly believed even other monstrous things, mere wonders: the manifold Scylla, the multiform Chimaera, and the Hydra reborn through its fruitful wounds, and Centaurs—horses interwoven with their men—and whatever fame is permitted to invent, it was their pleasure to hear. What of those old wives' tales, of birds and beasts made from men, and of trees and flowers made from men?

If these things had been done, they would still be happening: because they cannot happen, therefore neither have they been done. In like manner our forefathers erred also concerning the gods: improvident and credulous, they believed with rude simplicity. While they religiously worshiped their kings, while they longed to see the departed in their images, while they were eager to detain their memories in statues, the consolations that had been adopted became sacred rites. Finally, both before the world lay open to commerce and before the nations mingled their rites and customs, each nation venerated its own founder, or a renowned leader, or a chaste queen braver than her sex, or the discoverer of some service or art, as a citizen of good memory: thus both a reward was given to the dead and an example to those to come.

'Read the writings of the historians or the writings of the wise: you will recognize the same things along with me. 'Euhemerus relates that, on account of the merits of their virtue or service, certain men were held to be gods, and he enumerates their birthdays, their native lands, and their tombs, and points them out throughout the provinces—of Dictaean Jupiter, of Delphic Apollo, of Pharian Isis, and of Eleusinian Ceres. Prodicus says that those were taken up among the gods who, in their wandering, by newly discovered crops were of profit to the welfare of men.

Persaeus philosophizes to the same effect, and he links the discovered crops and the discoverers of those very crops by the same names, as the comic saying goes, 'Venus grows cold without Liber and Ceres.' Alexander that Great Macedonian, in a remarkable volume to his mother, wrote that, through fear of his power, the secret about the gods being men had been betrayed to him by a priest: there he makes Vulcan the chief of all, and afterward the family of Jupiter. For all the writers of antiquity, both Greek and Roman, have handed down that Saturn—the chief of this race and swarm—was a man. Nepos knows this, and Cassius in his history, and Thallus and Diodorus say this.

This Saturn, then, a fugitive from Crete, had come to Italy through fear of his savage son, and, received with the hospitality of Janus, taught those rude and rustic men many things, as one Greek-bred and polished: to imprint letters, to stamp coins, to fashion tools. And so he preferred his hiding place, because he had lain hidden there safely, to be called Latium, and a city Saturnia from his own name; and the Janiculum—both of them left these to the memory of posterity. A man, therefore, who surely fled; a man who surely lay hidden; both the father of a man and born from a man: for he was reported to be the son of Earth or of Heaven, because among the Italians he was of unknown parents—just as to this day we call those unexpectedly seen 'sent from heaven,' and the obscure and unknown we call 'sons of the earth.'

His son Jupiter, having shut out his parent, reigned in Crete, died there, and there had sons: even now the cave of Jupiter is visited and his tomb is shown, and he is convicted of his humanity by his very sacred rites. 'It is idle to go through them one by one and to unfold the whole series of that race, since the mortality proved in the first parents has flowed down upon the rest by the very order of succession. Unless perhaps you fashion gods after death, and Romulus is a god through the perjury of Proculus, and Juba is a god by the will of the Moors, and the rest of the deified kings are gods—who are consecrated not for any belief in their divinity, but for the honor of a power well discharged. Indeed this title is ascribed to them against their will: they choose to persist as men; they fear to be made gods, even though, being now old, they have no wish for it.

'Therefore there are no gods made out of the dead, since God cannot die; nor out of those born, since everything that is born dies: but that is divine which has neither beginning nor setting. For why, if they were born, are they not also born today? Unless perhaps Jupiter has now grown old, and childbearing has failed in Juno, and Minerva has gone grey before she gave birth. Or has that generation ceased for this reason, that no assent is granted to fables of this kind? 'But if the gods could create, they could not perish, and we should have more gods than all men together, so that now neither heaven could contain them, nor air hold them, nor earth bear them. Whence it is manifest that those were men, whom we read to have been born and know to have died.

'Who then doubts that the common people pray to the consecrated images of these men and worship them publicly, while the opinion and mind of the unskilled is deceived by the neat workmanship of art, dazzled by the gleam of gold, and dulled by the brightness of silver and the whiteness of ivory? But if anyone should bring to mind by what tortures and by what machinery every idol is formed, he will blush to fear a material that has been mocked by the craftsman, so as to make a god. For a wooden god—a portion perhaps of a funeral pyre or of some unlucky log—is hung up, hewn, planed, smoothed with a plane; and a bronze or silver god is melted down out of some filthy little vessel, as has often been done by an Egyptian king, beaten with hammers, and shaped on the anvil;

and a stone god is hewn, carved, and polished by some filthy man, nor does it feel the injury of its birth, just as afterward it feels nothing of your veneration or worship. 'Unless perhaps it is not yet a god while it is stone or wood or silver. When, then, is it born? Behold, it is melted, fabricated, sculpted: it is not yet a god; behold, it is leaded, constructed, set up: nor is it yet a god; behold, it is adorned, consecrated, prayed to; then at last it is a god, when a man has willed it so and dedicated it. 'How much more truly do the dumb animals naturally judge concerning your gods! Mice, swallows, and kites know that they do not perceive: they gnaw them, tread on them, sit on them, and unless you drive them off, they nest in the very mouth of your god;

and spiders, indeed, weave over its face and hang their threads from its very head. You wipe them, clean them, scrape them, and you both protect and fear those whom you yourselves make—while not one of you considers that he ought first to know God before worshiping him; while they inconsiderately are eager to obey their parents; while they prefer to become an accession to another's error rather than to trust themselves; while they know nothing of those things which they fear. So in gold and silver avarice has been consecrated, so the form of empty statues has been sealed, so Roman superstition was born. 'And if you should review their rites, how many things are laughable, how many even pitiable! Naked men run about in the raw winter, others march wearing felt caps, carry old shields around, beat hides, and lead the gods from street to street begging:

some shrines they permit to be approached once a year, some it is wholly forbidden to visit: there is a place where a man is not allowed, and some sacred rites are without women; even for a slave to be present at certain ceremonies is an expiable offense: some rites a woman of one husband crowns, others a woman of many husbands, and with great religious zeal she is sought out who can count the more adulteries. What? He who pours a libation with his own blood and supplicates with his own wounds—would it not be better to be profane than thus religious? And the man whose obscene parts are reaped with a potsherd, how does he violate the god whom he placates in this way—when, if God wished for eunuchs, he could beget them, and not have them made? 'Who would not understand that men diseased in mind, and of a vain and ruined spirit, dote in these things, and that the very crowd of those who err lends mutual patronage to one another?

Here the common defense of madness is a raging multitude. 'Consider, finally, the sacred rites themselves and the very mysteries: you will find mournful ends, fates and funerals and lamentations and wailings of wretched gods. Isis mourns, beats her breast, and seeks her lost son, together with her Cynocephalus and her bald-headed priests; and the wretched followers of Isis beat their breasts and imitate the grief of that most unhappy mother; soon, when the little one is found, Isis rejoices, the priests exult, Cynocephalus the finder glories, and they do not cease, year after year, either to lose what they find or to find what they lose. Is it not ridiculous either to mourn what you worship or to worship what you mourn?

Yet these rites, once Egyptian, are now Roman as well, so that you should rave over Isis's swallow and sistrum, and the empty tomb of your Serapis or Osiris with its scattered limbs. 'Ceres, with kindled torches and girt about by a serpent, anxious and troubled, tracks the footsteps of Libera, stolen away and ravished by deceit: these are the Eleusinia. And what are the sacred rites of Jupiter? A she-goat is his nurse, and the infant is snatched away from his greedy father, lest he be devoured, and by the cymbals of the Corybantes, lest the father hear the wailings, a clashing is struck up. As for the Dindyma of Cybele, one is ashamed to tell how she, since she could not entice her lover—unhappily pleasing to her—to debauchery (for she herself was deformed and old, being, as it were, the mother of many gods), castrated him, so as to make a eunuch a god, forsooth.

On account of this fable the Galli worship her with the punishment of their own half-male bodies. These now are not sacred rites, but tortures. 'What? Do not the very forms and aspects convict the mockeries and disgraces of your gods? Vulcan a lame and crippled god; Apollo smooth-cheeked through so many ages; Aesculapius well-bearded, even though he is the son of the ever-youthful Apollo; Neptune with sea-green eyes, Minerva with grey-blue, Juno with ox-like eyes, Mercury with winged feet, Pan with hoofed feet, Saturn with fettered ones. Janus, indeed, bears two faces, as if he walked also backward; Diana at one time is a huntress girt high, and the Ephesian one is built up with many breasts and udders, and Trivia is horrific with three heads and many hands. What?

Jupiter himself, your own, is now set up beardless, now placed bearded; and when he is called Hammon, he has horns; and when Capitoline, then he wields thunderbolts; and when Latiaris, he is drenched with gore; and when Feretrius, he is wreathed with a crown. And, not to go about among many Jupiters too long, the monstrous shapes of Jupiter are as many as his names. Erigone is hanged from a noose, that she might become the Virgin set ablaze among the stars; the Castores die by turns that they may live; Aesculapius is struck by a thunderbolt that he may rise into a god; Hercules is consumed in the fires of Oeta that he may put off the man.

'These fables and errors we both learn from our unskilled parents and—what is more grievous—we elaborate by our very studies and disciplines, especially by the songs of the poets, who have done very great harm to truth itself by their authority. And Plato therefore nobly cast out that renowned Homer—praised and crowned—from the commonwealth which he was establishing in his discourse. For this poet above all, in the Trojan War, though he made sport, nevertheless mingled your gods in the affairs and actions of men; he composed their combats, wounded Venus, bound, wounded, and put Mars to flight.

He tells that Jupiter was set free by Briareus, lest he be bound by the other gods; and that, since he could not snatch his son Sarpedon from death, he wept tears of bloody showers; and that, more inflamed by the girdle of Venus than he is wont to be toward adulteresses, he lay with his wife Juno. Elsewhere Hercules carts out dung, and Apollo pastures Admetus's flock. For Laomedon Neptune built the walls, and the luckless builder received no wages for his work. There the thunderbolt of Jupiter, together with the arms of Aeneas, is forged on the anvil—when heaven and thunderbolts and lightnings existed long before Jupiter was born in Crete, and the flames of a true thunderbolt neither could the Cyclops imitate, nor could Jupiter himself fail to fear.

Why should I speak of the adultery of Mars and Venus, caught in the act, and of Jupiter's lust toward Ganymede, consecrated in heaven? All of which were put forth for this purpose, that some authority might be procured for the vices of men. 'By these and suchlike inventions and sweeter lies the minds of boys are corrupted, and with these same fables clinging to them they grow up even to the strength of the highest age, and in these same opinions the wretched grow old—though the truth is at hand, but only for those who seek it. 'Yet that very superstition gave to the Romans, increased, and established their empire, since they prevailed not so much by valor as by religion and piety. Doubtless the distinguished and noble justice of the Romans was inaugurated from the very cradle of the rising empire!

Was it not by crime that, in their very origin, they were gathered together and fortified, and grew strong through the terror of their own savagery? For the first populace was assembled at a place of asylum: there flocked together the desperate, the criminal, the unchaste, the assassins, the traitors; and that Romulus himself, their commander and ruler, might surpass his own people in wickedness, he committed fratricide. Such are the first auspices of this 'religious' state! Soon, contrary to all custom, he seized, violated, and mocked maidens belonging to others, already betrothed, already promised, and even some poor wives torn from their marriages; and with their parents, that is, with his own fathers-in-law, he embroiled himself in war, and shed kindred blood. What could be more irreligious, what more audacious, what more secure in its very confidence in crime?

Then to drive their neighbours from their land, to overthrow the nearest cities together with their temples and altars, to herd the captives away, to grow great by others' losses and their own crimes—this was the common practice, shared with Romulus by the other kings and by their later leaders. Thus whatever the Romans hold, cultivate, and possess is the plunder of audacity: all their temples are built from spoils of war, that is, from the ruins of cities, from the despoiling of gods, from the slaughter of priests. To serve conquered religions is to insult and mock them; to adore captive deities after victories is to deride them. For to adore what you have seized by force is to consecrate sacrilege, not divinities. As often, therefore, as the Romans triumphed, so often did they commit impiety: they took as many spoils from the gods as from the nations, and as many trophies.

Therefore the Romans were so great not because they were religious, but because they were sacrilegious with impunity. For they could not have had as helpers, in those very wars, the gods against whom they took up arms; rather, they began to worship, as 'triumphed-over,' those whom they had laid low. But what can these gods do for the Romans, who availed nothing for their own people against Roman arms? For we know the Romans' homegrown gods: Romulus, Picus, Tiberinus, Consus, Pilumnus, and Volumnus are gods; Tatius both discovered and worshipped Cloacina; Hostilius worshipped Fear and Pallor; soon Fever was dedicated by I know not whom—such is the superstition fostered by this city, the gods of diseases and ill health! Indeed Acca Larentia and Flora too, shameless harlots, must be reckoned among the Romans' diseases and gods.

It was surely these gods, no doubt, who extended the Roman empire over all the other peoples whom the nations worshipped! For these did not aid their own against their own kinsmen—neither Thracian Mars, nor Cretan Jupiter, nor Juno (now Argive, now Samian, now Punic), nor Tauric Diana, nor the Idaean Mother, nor that Egyptian thing—not divinities, but monsters. Unless, perchance, among them there was greater chastity in the virgins or holier piety in the priests—when, in the case of nearly all the virgins (those, that is, who too rashly consorted with men, while Vesta, of course, knew nothing of it), incest was punished, yet in the rest impunity was granted not by safer chastity but by more fortunate shamelessness.

But where more than among the priests, between altars and shrines, are fornications arranged, panderings carried on, adulteries plotted? In short, more often in the cells of temple-keepers than in the very brothels does burning lust spend itself. And yet, before these gods, by God's dispensation, the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, the Greeks too, and the Egyptians long held empire, though they had no Pontiffs, Arval Brethren, Salii, Vestals, or Augurs, nor chickens shut up in a cage, by whose feeding or finickiness the highest affairs of state might be governed. For now I come to those Roman auspices and auguries which you testified were gathered with the greatest labour—and were both ruefully neglected and happily observed.

Clodius, of course, and Flaminius and Junius lost their armies because they thought there was no need to wait for the chickens' most propitious 'tripudium.' What of Regulus? Did he not observe the auguries, and yet was taken captive? Mancinus kept to religion, and yet was sent under the yoke and surrendered. Paulus too had greedy chickens, yet at Cannae he was laid low along with the greater part of the commonwealth. Gaius Caesar, when the auguries and auspices resisted his sailing ships to Africa before the winter solstice, scorned them—and so all the more easily both sailed and conquered. But what and how much shall I recount about oracles? After his death Amphiaraus answered things to come, who had not known that he himself was to be betrayed by his wife for a necklace. The blind Tiresias saw things future, who did not see things present.

About Pyrrhus, Ennius fabricated responses of Pythian Apollo, although by then Apollo had ceased making verses; that wary and ambiguous oracle of his then failed, when men began to be both more refined and less credulous. And Demosthenes, because he knew the responses were feigned, complained that the Pythia 'Philippized.' Yet now and then the auspices or oracles did touch upon the truth—though, amid so many lies, chance might seem to have imitated diligence. Still, I will attack the very fount of error and depravity, whence all this darkness has flowed, and dig it up more deeply and lay it open more plainly. There are spirits insincere and wandering, who, from heavenly vigour, have been weighed down by earthly stains and lusts.