So great a blindness has invaded the Roman race that they call their enemy 'Lord,' and proclaim the plunderer of their goods to be in fact the giver of them, and give thanks to him; therefore they call them by human names, not by their proper ones, for they do not know their names; they understand that they are demons, yet they read the histories of ancient kings, and, when they see that their deeds were those of mortals, they honor them with a deifying name. Jupiter, whom they call and think to be the supreme God — when he was born, there were from the foundation of the world to that time nearly three thousand years.
This one is born in Greece of Saturn and Ops, and, lest he be slain by his father — or, if it is right to say it, be brought forth again [swallowed and reborn] — he was carried to Crete by his mother's counsel and reared in the Idaean cave, hidden by the Cretans, men said to be earth-born, who clashed their weapons; he sucked the udders of a goat, whose flayed skin he used as a garment — the skin of his own nurse, whom, of course, he had killed himself; but he sewed onto it three golden locks, each worth the price of a hundred oxen, as their author Homer records — if it is fair to believe it. He, in his grown years, waged war with his father for many years, overcame him, invaded the house by parricide, ravished his virgin sisters, of whom he chose one in marriage, and put his father to flight by arms; the rest of his deeds are written down.
From alien marriages or violated virgins he begot adulterous sons for himself, defiled freeborn boys, and oppressed peoples with tyrannical and kingly rule, without law. His father, whom the erring suppose to have been the primordial god, did not know that he was hidden on the island of Crete; his son too, whom they believe to be the more powerful god, did not know that his father, put to flight by him, was hiding in Italy. If he was in heaven, how did he not see what was being done in Italy? For the land of Italy is not in a corner. And yet, if he had been a god, he ought not to have been hidden at all; but that he whom the Italians called Saturn hid there has been clearly proven, for from his hiding [latitatio] the Hesperian tongue has been named Latin down to this present day, as their author Virgil also records.
Therefore he is said to have been begotten on earth, since he both fears lest he be driven from the kingdom, and seeks to slay the other as a rival, and, when the other has been stolen away, does not know he is in hiding; and afterward the divine son pursues his father, and the immortal seeks to kill the immortal — can this be believed? — and is deceived by the expanse of the sea, and does not know that he has fled; and while these things were being done between two gods upon the earth, heaven was left deserted. No one administered the rains, no one thundered, no one governed so great a mass of the world. For they cannot say that their deeds and their wars were done in heaven: for these took place on Mount Olympus in Greece; but heaven is not called Olympus, for heaven is heaven.
Of which of their deeds, then, shall we treat first — of the birth, of the hiding, of the ignorance, of the parricide, of the adulteries, of the obscene acts — of things committed not by a god, but by most filthy and most savage men, who, if they were in these times, would be liable under all the laws as culprits — laws which are far more just and severe than their deeds.
He struck his father with arms — the Falcidian and Sempronian law would bind the parricide in a sack together with wild beasts; and he corrupted his sisters — the Papinian law would punish the outrage with every penalty upon each several limb; he invaded the marriages of others — the Julian law would visit its adulterer with a capital sentence; he defiled freeborn boys — the Cornelian law would condemn as sacrilegious, by new penalties, the transgressor of the covenant, the perpetrator of this new kind of union. He is shown to have had no divinity: for he was a man — his father's flight lay hidden from him.
To such a man, so wicked a king, so obscene and so cruel, the honor of a god was assigned by men — who, since he was surely born on earth and grew to manhood through the stages of life, on which earth he committed all these evils, and now is not upon it, what is he thought to be, if not dead? Or does foolish error suppose that wings grew for him in old age, whereby he might fly to heaven? But men bereft of sense can believe even this — if indeed they believe that he became a swan to beget the Dioscuri, and an eagle to defile Ganymede, and a bull to violate Europa, and gold to violate Danae, and a horse to beget Pirithous;
and a he-goat, to beget Aegipan from a she-goat, and a satyr, to overpower Antiope. Because these tales concern adulteries, to which sinners are prone, they therefore believe them readily, that from a fictitious god they may borrow warrant for their wrongdoing and for every filthiness. Do they even notice how uncorrected are the other things that can be believed of his deeds — things that are also 'true,' and which they say he performed without any transformation? From Semele he begets Liber [Bacchus], from Latona Apollo and Diana, from Maia Mercury, from Alcmena Hercules. But the rest of his debaucheries, which they themselves confess, I do not wish to write down, lest a foulness now buried be renewed again in your ears.
But I have made mention of these few, whom the erring believe to be gods themselves as well — begotten, forsooth, of an incestuous father, adulterous, spurious; and they have spread abroad the seeing God, the eternal, foreknowing of things to come, of everlasting deity, the immeasurable, mingling him with such abominable crimes.