Collected Works 9 part 2/7

'Rumor has it that he was allotted a province,' but: 'He was allotted a province,' and: 'This was done at Rome.' Rumor, the name of the uncertain, has no place where there is certainty. Or would anyone but a thoughtless man believe rumor? For the wise man does not believe the uncertain. It is for everyone to estimate that, however widely spread by that eager diffusion, however strongly built up by asseveration, it must at some time have arisen from a single author. Thence it creeps through the offshoots of tongues and ears, and thus the flaw of a slender seed so obscures the rest of the report that no one reflects whether that first mouth may have sown a lie -- which often happens either through the disposition of rivalry, or through the will of suspicion, or through a pleasure in lying that is, in some men, not new but inborn.

But it is well that time reveals all things, as even your own proverbs and sayings testify, by the disposition of nature, which has so ordered it that nothing lies hidden for long, even that which rumor has not spread abroad. Deservedly, then, is rumor for so long the sole party privy to the crimes of the Christians; this you produce as an informer against us -- rumor which, though it once boasted of it and over so great a span of time strengthened it into an opinion, has to this very day been unable to prove it. That I may appeal to the good faith of nature itself against those who presume that such things ought to be believed, behold, we set before you the reward of these crimes: they promise eternal life. Believe it for the moment! For about this I ask: whether you also, having believed, would count it worth so much to attain to it with such a conscience.

Come, plunge the knife into an infant that is nobody's enemy, guilty of nothing, everybody's child; or, if that is another's task, do you only stand by a man as he dies before he has lived; await the fresh soul as it flees, catch the raw blood, sate your bread with it, feed to your heart's content! Meanwhile, as you recline, count up the places, where your mother is, where your sister; mark them carefully, that when the darkness of the dogs has fallen you may not go astray! For you will have committed an expiatory offense unless you have committed incest. Initiated and sealed with such rites, you live forever. I long for you to answer, if eternity is worth so much; or, if not, then neither is it to be believed. Even if you have believed it, I deny that you would be willing; even if you were willing, I deny that you would be able. Why, then, should others be able, if you are not? Why should you not be able, if others are?

We are, I suppose, of another nature, Cynopennae or Sciapodes; we have other ranks of teeth, other sinews for incestuous lust. You who believe such things of a man, can also do them; you too are a man, even as the Christian is. You who cannot do them, ought not to believe them. For the Christian too is a man, and is even what you are. 'But it is foisted and imposed upon those who are ignorant. For they knew nothing of the kind was asserted of the Christians -- a thing surely to be watched for by them and searched out with all vigilance.' And yet it is the custom, I suppose, for those willing to be initiated first to approach that father of the sacred rites, to describe what must be prepared. Then he says: 'You will need an infant, still tender, that does not know death, that will smile beneath your knife; likewise bread, with which to gather up the broth of blood;

besides that, lampstands and lamps and certain dogs and morsels which may draw them on to the overturning of the lamps; before all else you must come with your mother and sister.' But what if they are unwilling, or if there are none? What, in short, of solitary Christians? There will be, I suppose, no lawful Christian unless he is a brother or a son. What now, if all these things are prepared for those who are ignorant? Surely afterward they learn of it, and endure it, and pardon it. 'They fear to be punished, if they should cry out.' Men who will deserve to be defended, who would even rather perish of their own accord than live under such a conscience? Come now, let them fear; why do they even persevere? For it follows that you would no longer wish to be that which, had you known beforehand, you would never have become.

That I may the more refute these charges, I shall show them to be done by you, partly openly, partly in secret -- through which, perhaps, you have come to believe them of us as well. Infants were sacrificed to Saturn openly throughout Africa, down to the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed those same priests upon the very trees of Saturn's temple that overshadowed their crimes, on votive crosses -- as the soldiery of our own country bears witness, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this sacred crime is persisted in, in secret. It is not you Christians alone whom men despise, nor is any crime ever uprooted forever, nor does any god change his ways. Since Saturn did not spare his own sons, he certainly persevered in not sparing strangers, whom indeed their very own parents used to offer up;

and they answered willingly and fondled their infants, lest they should be sacrificed weeping. And yet parricide differs much from homicide. Among the Gauls a person of riper age is slaughtered for Mercury. I leave the Tauric fables to their own theaters. Behold, in that most religious city of the pious sons of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter whom at his games they drench with human blood. 'But it is that of a beast-fighter,' you say. This, I suppose, is less than that of a man! Or is it more shameful because it is the blood of a bad man? At any rate it is poured out from a homicide all the same. O Christian Jupiter, and only son of the Father in respect of cruelty! But since, in the matter of infanticide, it makes no difference whether it be perpetrated by sacred rite or by choice -- although parricide differs from homicide -- I shall turn to the populace.

How many of these bystanders, gaping for the blood of Christians -- how many even of you yourselves, our most righteous and most severe magistrates against us -- would you have me strike upon the conscience for putting to death their own children born to them? If indeed there is a difference even in the manner of the killing, surely it is more cruel to wrench out the breath in water, or to expose them to cold and hunger and dogs; for even one of riper age would prefer to die by the sword. But for us, since homicide has been forbidden once for all, it is not even permitted to dissolve what is conceived in the womb, while the blood is still being drawn together into a man. To hinder birth is a hastening of homicide, and it makes no difference whether one snatches away a soul already born or disturbs one coming to birth. He too is a man who is going to be one; indeed, every fruit is already present in the seed.

As for feeding on blood and such tragic dishes, read -- lest it be recorded somewhere; it is in Herodotus, I think -- how certain nations tasted blood drawn from their arms, from one another, to seal a treaty. I know not what was likewise tasted under Catiline. They say too that among certain Scythian tribes each of the dead is eaten by his own people. I run far afield. Today, hereabouts, the blood of one consecrated to Bellona, caught in the palm from a gashed thigh and given him to drink, seals the pledge. Likewise those who, at the games in the arena, quench a raging thirst by draining the fresh blood of malefactors slain by the throat, running down from the cut throat -- those who thereby seek to cure the falling sickness -- where are they? Likewise those who dine on the wild-beast meats from the arena, who go after the boar, who after the stag?

That boar, in the struggle, has wiped upon itself the blood it shed; that stag has lain in the gladiator's blood. The very bellies of bears are sought after, still undigested with human entrails; and so flesh fed upon a man is belched forth by a man. You who eat these things, how far are you from the banquets of the Christians? And do those men do less who with savage lust gape after human limbs, because they devour the living? Are they less consecrated to filthiness by human blood, because they lick up blood that is to be? They do not, to be sure, eat infants, but rather full-grown persons.

Let your error blush before the Christians, who do not have even the blood of animals in our edible feasts, who for that reason abstain also from things strangled and from carrion, lest we be in any way contaminated by blood, even blood buried within the entrails. Finally, among the temptations you set for Christians you even bring forward sausages stuffed with gore, being most certain, of course, that among them the very thing is unlawful by which you wish to make them stray. Furthermore, how is it that those whom you are confident shudder at the blood of a beast, you believe to gape after human blood -- unless perchance you have found it more delightful? Which indeed ought likewise to have been employed as a tester of Christians, like the brazier, like the incense-box. For thus they would be proved by their craving human blood, just as by their spurning the sacrifice;

otherwise they would have to be denied, if they had not tasted, just as if they had not sacrificed. And surely, in the questioning of the prisons and the condemnation, human blood would not be lacking to you. Moreover, who are more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself has taught? Ctesias reports that the Persians couple with their own mothers. But the Macedonians too are under suspicion, because, when they first heard the tragedy Oedipus, laughing at the pain of the incest, they would say: 'He was driving against his mother!' Now, then, reflect upon how great a license errors give for the committing of incest, since the promiscuity of luxury supplies the materials.

In the first place, you expose your children to be taken up by some stranger's passing pity, or to be adopted by better parents after being emancipated. The memory of an alienated stock must of necessity at some time be dissipated; and once error has thrust its way in, thenceforth by the creeping propagation of the race the offshoot of incest advances along with the crime. Then, next, in whatever place -- at home, abroad, across the seas -- lust is a companion, whose leaps can easily anywhere beget children upon those who know it not, or from some portion of seed, so that thus a scattered race, meeting through human dealings, may run together into its own kindred, and the blind man not recognize them as of incestuous blood.

From this outcome a most diligent and most faithful chastity has hedged us in; and just as far as we are safe from fornication and from every excess after marriage, so far are we also safe from the mishap of incest. Some, far more secure, drive off the whole force of this error by virgin continence, old men who are yet boys. If you would but consider that these things are found among you, you would perceive in like manner that they are not found among Christians. The same eyes would have reported both. But two kinds of blindness readily meet together, so that those who do not see the things that are, seem to see the things that are not. Thus in all matters I shall make it plain. Now I shall speak of the more manifest charges.

'You do not worship the gods,' you protest, 'and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.' It follows that on the same principle we do not sacrifice for others, since we do not for ourselves either, by not worshiping the gods once for all. And so we are arraigned as guilty of sacrilege and of treason. This is the chief charge -- nay, it is the whole -- and assuredly worthy to be examined, if it be not presumption or injustice that judges: the one which despairs of the truth, the other which refuses it. We cease to worship your gods from the moment when we recognize that they are not gods. This, then, is what you ought to demand: that we prove they are not gods, and therefore not to be worshiped, since only then ought they to have been worshiped, if they had been gods. And then too the Christians ought to be punished, if it were established that those whom they did not worship, because they thought them not to exist, really were gods.

'But to us,' you say, 'they are gods.' We appeal and call upon you, from yourselves to your own conscience; let that conscience judge us, let it condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were men. But if it too shall go into denial, it will be refuted out of your own records of antiquity, from which it learned about them -- with the cities in which they were born, and the regions in which they left traces of some work they had done, and in which they are even shown to be buried, bearing witness to this very day. Shall I now run through them one by one, so many and so great, new and old, barbarian and Greek, Roman and foreign, captive and adoptive, private and common, male and female, rustic and urban, seafaring and military? It would be idle even to pursue their titles.

To sum it up in brief -- and this not that you may learn it, but recognize it anew, for surely you are behaving as though you had forgotten -- before Saturn there is among you no god; from him is the reckoning of all divinity, or at least of the more important and better-known. Therefore what shall have been established concerning the origin will hold good also concerning the posterity. As for Saturn, then, so far as letters teach, neither Diodorus the Greek nor Thallus, neither Cassius Severus nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any chronicler of such antiquities, has proclaimed him anything other than a man; so far as the evidence of facts goes, nowhere do I find more trustworthy proofs than in Italy itself, where Saturn settled after many wanderings and after his Attic hospitality, received by Janus, or Jane, as the Salii would have it.

The mountain which he had inhabited was called Saturnian; the city which he had marked out is Saturnia to this very day; in short, all Italy, after having been Oenotria, was surnamed Saturnia. By him first were tablets stamped, and the coin marked with an image, and hence he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was a man, he was certainly of human origin, and, because from a man, certainly not from Heaven and Earth. But since his parents were unknown, it was easy for him to be called the son of those of whom we can all seem to be. For who would not call heaven and earth mother and father, for the sake of veneration and honor, or from human custom, whereby those who are unknown or who appear unexpectedly are said to have come from heaven? Accordingly it fell to Saturn, appearing suddenly everywhere, to be called heaven-born;

for the common people also call those whose lineage is uncertain 'sons of earth.' I say nothing of the fact that men, still so rude, behaved in such a way that they were moved as by something divine at the sight of any new man -- whereas today, now that they are polished, they consecrate as gods those whom, a few days before, they had confessed to have died amid public mourning. Enough now of Saturn, though in few words. We shall show that Jupiter too was as much a man as one born of a man, and thereafter that the whole swarm of the race was as mortal as it was of a like seed with him. And since, just as you do not dare to deny that they were men, so you have taken to asserting that they were made gods after death, let us reconsider the reasons that demanded this.

In the first place, indeed, you must grant that there is some more exalted god and a certain sovereign owner of divinity, who has made gods out of men. For neither could they have assumed for themselves a divinity which they did not possess, nor could another bestow it upon those who did not possess it, save one who properly possessed it. But if there were no one to make the gods, you vainly presume that gods were made, by doing away with a maker. Certainly, indeed, if they could have made themselves, they would never have been men, possessing, that is, the power of a better condition. Therefore, if there is one who makes gods, I return to examining the reasons for making gods out of men, and I find none -- unless that great god desired ministries and aids for his divine offices.

In the first place, it is unworthy that he should stand in need of anyone's labor, and that of a dead man at that -- since it would have been more worthy for him from the beginning to have made some god who was going to require the labor of a dead man. But neither do I see a place for such labor. For this whole body of the world, whether unborn and unmade according to Pythagoras, or born and made according to Plato, was assuredly once for all, in this construction of it, found to be arranged and equipped and ordered with the whole governance of reason. That could not have been imperfect which perfected all things. Nothing was awaiting Saturn and the Saturnian race.

Men will be foolish, unless they are certain that from the very beginning both rains poured down from heaven, and stars shone, and lights flourished, and thunders rumbled, and Jupiter himself dreaded the thunderbolts which you place in his hand -- likewise that every fruit sprang up abundantly from the earth before Liber and Ceres and Minerva, nay, before that first man, whoever he was; because nothing could have been brought in after man for the sustaining and supporting of man, when nothing had been provided for him. Finally, they are said to have discovered these necessaries of life, not to have instituted them. But what is discovered, existed; and what existed shall be reckoned not to him who discovered it, but to him who instituted it; for it was, before it was discovered.

But if Liber is a god on the ground that he demonstrated the vine, then Lucullus was ill treated, who first made known cherries from Pontus to Italy, in that he was not on that account consecrated as the author of a new fruit, being but its exhibitor. Wherefore, if from the beginning the universe stood both equipped and dispensed by fixed principles for the discharge of its own offices, there is on this side no room for the plea of admitting humanity into divinity; because the stations and powers which you have distributed to those gods existed from the beginning just as much as they would have existed even if you had not created those gods. But you turn to another plea, answering that the conferring of divinity was a scheme for rewarding their merits.

And hence you concede, I suppose, that this god who makes gods must surpass them in justice, seeing that he would not have dispensed so great a reward rashly, or unworthily, or wastefully. I wish, then, to review their merits, to see whether they are of such a kind as to have raised them to heaven and not rather to have plunged them into the lowest Tartarus, which you affirm, when it pleases you, to be the prison of the infernal punishments. For thither are commonly thrust down all who are impious toward their parents, and incestuous toward their sisters, and adulterers of married women, and ravishers of virgins, and defilers of boys, and those who rage, and those who murder, and those who steal, and those who deceive, and all who are like some one of your gods, not one of whom you will be able to prove free from crime or vice, unless you deny that he was a man.

But since you cannot deny that those beings were men, these further marks also come into play, which do not permit them to be believed to have afterwards been made gods. For if you preside over the punishment of such persons, if all upright men reject fellowship, conversation, and intimacy with the wicked and the base, yet that god of yours has taken their peers into the partnership of his majesty—why then do you condemn those whose colleagues you adore? Your justice is an affront in heaven. Make the most criminal into gods, so as to please your gods! Their honour is the deification of their equals. But, to omit the review of this indignity, grant that they were upright and blameless and good! How many worthier men, nonetheless, have you left behind among the shades below!

Some for wisdom—Socrates; for justice—Aristides; for generalship—Themistocles; for grandeur—Alexander; for good fortune—Polycrates; for wealth—Croesus; for eloquence—Demosthenes. Which of those gods of yours is graver and wiser than Cato, more just and more warlike than Scipio? Who loftier than Pompey, more fortunate than Sulla, richer than Crassus, more eloquent than Cicero? How much more worthily would that god have waited to take up these men, being surely foreknowing of the better! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and shut heaven once for all, and now surely blushes while his betters murmur in the world below. XII. I now leave off from this matter, since I know that from truth itself I shall demonstrate what they are not, once I have shown what they are.

As for your gods, then, I see only the names of certain men long dead, and I hear fables, and I recognize the rites drawn from the fables. As for the images themselves, I find nothing to censure except that their materials are sisters to those of common vessels and utensils—or rather, being made from those very same vessels and utensils, they change their destiny, as it were, by consecration, the licence of art transforming them, and that most insultingly and, in the very making, sacrilegiously; so that in truth it may be a solace for our punishments—we who are tormented on account of these very gods—that they too suffer the same things in order to be made gods. You set Christians upon crosses and stakes: what image is not first shaped in clay by the potter and set upon a cross and a stake?

It is upon a gibbet that the body of your god is first dedicated. You tear the sides of Christians with iron claws: but upon your gods, through all their limbs, axes and planes and rasps press yet more heavily. We bow our necks: before the lead and the glue and the bolts, your gods are without a head. We are driven to the beasts: certainly the very ones you attach to Liber and Cybele and Caelestis. We are burned with fire: so are they, from their very first lump. We are condemned to the mines: from there your gods are appraised. We are banished to islands: on some island one of your gods is wont either to be born or to die. If any divinity is established through these things, then those who are punished are consecrated, and torments must be called deities.

But of course your gods do not feel these injuries and insults of their fabrication, just as they feel no acts of homage. O impious voices, O sacrilegious revilings! Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the very ones who did not censure a certain Seneca when he inveighed at greater length and more bitterly against your superstition. Therefore, if we do not adore the cold statues and images, most like to their dead prototypes, which kites and mice and spiders comprehend—did not the repudiation of an acknowledged error deserve praise rather than punishment? For can we seem to injure those whom we are certain do not exist at all? What is not, suffers nothing from anyone, because it is not. XIII. "But to us they are gods," you say.

And how, on the contrary, are you found to be impious and sacrilegious and irreligious toward your gods, you who neglect those you presume to exist, destroy those you fear, and mock even those you avenge? Recall, if I lie. First: since you severally worship different gods, you assuredly offend those you do not worship. The preferment of one cannot proceed without insult to another, since there is no choosing without rejecting. Already, then, you despise those you reject, whom you do not fear to offend by rejecting them. For, as we touched on above, the standing of each god used to hang on the estimation of the Senate. That was no god whom a man, when consulted, refused, and by refusing condemned.

The household gods, whom you call Lares, you handle with domestic authority—pledging, selling, exchanging them, sometimes turning a Saturn into a little cooking-pot, sometimes a Minerva into a ladle, as each is worn down and battered by long worship, as each master has felt some more urgent domestic necessity. The public gods you likewise befoul by public law, holding them as taxable at the auction-spear. Thus the Capitol, thus the vegetable market is resorted to; under the same voice of the crier, under the same spear, under the same registration of the quaestor, the divinity is put up and knocked down to the bidder. But indeed, fields burdened with tax are cheaper, the persons of men assessed for tribute more ignoble (for these are the marks of captivity), while the gods, the more taxable they are, the more holy;

nay rather, the more holy they are, the more taxable. Majesty is turned into a source of profit: religion goes begging around the taverns; you exact a fee for the ground of a temple, for entrance to a shrine. It is not permitted to know the gods for free—they are for sale. What do you do at all to honour them that you do not also confer on your dead? Temples likewise, altars likewise. The same garb and insignia on the statues; as the dead man's age was, his craft, his occupation, so is the god. How does Jove's funeral banquet differ from the graveside meal, the sacred ladle from the drinking-cup, the soothsayer from the corpse-dresser? For the soothsayer too attends the dead. But it is fitting that you dedicate to deceased emperors the honour of divinity, seeing that you assign it to them even while living.

Your gods will take it kindly—nay, they will be grateful—that their own masters become their equals. But when you worship Larentina, a public harlot (would that it were at least Lais or Phryne), among the Junos and Cereses and Dianas; when you inaugurate Simon Magus with a statue and an inscription "To the Holy God"; when you make some fellow from the imperial pages' school a god of the senate—the old gods, though no more noble, will nonetheless reckon it an affront from you that this was permitted to others too, which antiquity conferred on them alone. XIV. I wish also to review your rites.

I will not say what sort of people you are in sacrificing, when you slaughter whatever is worn out and diseased and mangy, when from the fat and sound victims you lop off whatever is superfluous—the little heads and the hooves, which at home too you would have set aside for the slaves or the dogs; when out of the tithe due to Hercules you do not put even a third part upon his altar. I will rather praise your wisdom, that you rescue something from what is lost. But turning to your literature, by which you are formed in prudence and the liberal accomplishments, how many mockeries I find! That the gods, on account of the Trojans and the Achaeans, joined battle among themselves and fought like matched pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded by a human arrow, because she wished to snatch away her son Aeneas, who had all but been killed by that same Diomedes;

that Mars was almost consumed after thirteen months in chains; that Jupiter, lest he should suffer the same violence from the other heaven-dwellers, was freed by the work of a certain monster, and now weeps at the fall of Sarpedon, now foully lusts after his own sister with the mention of former mistresses no less once beloved. Thereafter, what poet, on the authority of his prince, is not found to be a defamer of the gods? This one assigns Apollo to King Admetus for the pasturing of cattle; that one hires out Neptune's builder's labours to Laomedon. There is also that one among the lyric poets—Pindar, I mean—who sings that Aesculapius, by the desert of avarice, because he practised medicine harmfully, was condemned by a thunderbolt. Wicked Jupiter, if the bolt is his—impious toward his grandson, envious toward the craftsman!

These things ought neither to have been reported as true nor invented as false among the most religious of men. Not even the tragic or comic poets refrain from prefacing their plays with the calamities or the errors of some god's house. I say nothing of the philosophers, content with Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, used to swear by an oak and a goat and a dog. "But Socrates was condemned for this very reason, because he was destroying the gods." Plainly, of old—that is, always—truth is an object of hatred. Yet when the Athenians, repenting of their verdict, afterward punished the accusers of Socrates and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the rescinding of his condemnation renders testimony to Socrates.

But Diogenes too makes some jest against Hercules, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings on three hundred Joves—or Jupiters, as they should be called—without heads. XV. The rest of the talents devoted to wantonness likewise labour for your pleasures at the cost of the gods' disgrace. Consider the elegances of the Lentuli and Hostilii—whether it is mimes or your gods you laugh at in their jokes and tricks: "Anubis the adulterer," and "the masculine Moon," and "Diana flogged," and "the reading of dead Jupiter's will," and "three starving Herculeses derided." But the actors' scripts too portray every foulness of them.