They busy themselves with farming or attend to the tasks of war: so that Vulcan, mighty with flames, may forge swords for them or hammer out the iron tools of the field. They have need of a covering of clothing: so that the maiden Tritonia may more carefully spin the thread and, according to the quality of the season, weave triple-woven tunics or lay on garments of silk. They accuse and refute charges: so that the offspring of Atlas, cultivated by studious practice, may carry off the first prizes of eloquence. 「But you err,」 he says, 「and are deceived; for the gods are not themselves craftsmen, but they subject these arts to the talents of men, and, that life may be better furnished, they hand down to mortals the things to be known.」
— But whoever imparts some discipline to one who is unlearned and ignorant, and strives to make him skilled by knowledge of some work, must himself of necessity first know that which he has resolved to teach another. For no one can be the transmitter of any knowledge without having the precepts of what he transmits well known, and holding the method thoroughly grasped by long practice. Therefore the gods are the first craftsmen, whether because they themselves, as you say, implant knowledge in minds, or because, being immortal and unbegotten, they precede by the antiquity of time the whole earthly race. This then is the question: since among the gods above there is no place for these arts nor any use of them, and their nature does not require the knowing of anything ingenious or fit for a bench-worker:
why do you say that some are versed in some perceptions and others in others, and that they possess skills in which they severally excel, being distinguished by the knowledge of different sciences? 「Unless perhaps you say this: that the gods are not craftsmen, but that they preside over these arts, watch over them—nay, that all things which we administer, which we carry on, are placed under their guardianship, and that, that they may turn out well and happily, they are attended to by the gods' foresight.」 — This indeed would seem to be said deservedly and with probability, if the things we undertake, which we carry on, or in which we are imperilled amid human affairs, always proceeded according to our will and purpose.
But since things daily turn out to the contrary, and the outcomes of our actions do not answer to the purpose of our will, it is the part of a jester to say that the gods stand over us as guardians—gods whom our suspicion has fashioned, not whom explored truth has apprehended. 「Over the seas Matuta grants the safest voyages to travellers」: — and why has the raging sea so often set forth the ruins of cruel shipwrecks? 「Consus supplies saving and trusty counsels to our thoughts」: — and why is there constantly turned upon us the unlooked-for reversal of our resolves into contrary outcomes? 「Pales and Inuus preside as guardians over the herds and flocks of cattle」: — and why do they not care to ward off with hostile inactivity the savage contagions and pestilent diseases from the summer pastures? 「That Flora, the mother」:
— and by the sacred obscenity of games she takes good care that the fields may flourish: and why does the most harmful frost daily scorch and kill the little buds and the sprouting herbs? 「Juno is set over childbirths and aids mothers in labour」: — and why do thousands of mothers daily perish, slain by their murderous throes? 「Fire is under Vulcan's protection, and its substance is set under his governance」: — and why does he most frequently suffer sacred temples and portions of cities to collapse into ashes by the voracity of flames? 「The Pythian bestows the science of divination on soothsayers」: — and why does he oftener give and furnish responses that are oblique, doubtful, sunk in the obscurities of murk?
「Aesculapius presides over the offices and arts of healing」: — and why can so many kinds of diseases and sicknesses not be brought back to health and soundness—nay, why do they grow more dreadful under the very hands of those who heal? 「Mercury attends to the wrestling-schools, and presides over boxing and wrestling」: — and why does he not render invincible all those over whom he presides? Why, in the discharge of a single presidency, does he make these masters of victory, but suffers others to be mocked with an ignominious weakness? 「No one,」 he says, 「supplicates the tutelary gods, and therefore they severally fail in their familiar offices and aids.」
— For unless they receive incense and salted grain, the gods cannot do good; and unless they behold their little altars smeared with the blood of cattle, do they desert and cast off their guardianships? But I supposed a little while ago that the kindnesses of the deities were spontaneous, and that unlooked-for gifts of benevolence flowed of their own accord from them. For is the King of heaven besought with any libation or victim, that he may lavish upon the nations of mortals all those advantages by which they live? Does not the god of the sun supply the generative heat, the seasons of night, the winds, rains, and crops, equally to all—to good and bad, to the unjust, to slaves, to the poor, to the rich? For this is the property of the god who is powerful and true, to bestow unentreated benefits upon the weary and the feeble,
and to things ever hedged about with manifold hardship. For to grant that which you ask when sacrifices have been offered is not to succour the petitioners, but to sell as merchandise the bounty of one's own kindness. We men make sport and wanton in so great a matter, and, forgetting who God is, and what the magnificence of that name is, whatever mean or base thing we have been able by suspicious credulity to imagine, we arrogate to the tutelary gods. 「Unxia,」 he says, 「is set over anointings, Cinxia over the fastening of girdles; the most holy Victa and Potua provide for eating and drinking.」 — O excellent and singular interpretation of the deities and their powers:
unless the doorposts were smeared by brides with fatty ointment, unless the already ardent and impending husbands loosed the maidenly bonds, unless men drank and chewed, the gods would have no names? What of this, that, not content with having subjected and entangled the gods in such unseemly cares, you also assign to them natures wild, savage, monstrous, ever rejoicing in evils and in the devastation of the human race? We shall not mention here the goddess Laverna of thieves; we pass over in the silence of taciturnity the Bellonas, Discords, Furies, and those sinister deities you establish. We shall set in the midst Mars himself, and that beautiful mother of the Cupids, of whom you set one in charge of battles, the other of loves and the ardour of desire.
「Mars,」 he says, 「has power over wars.」 — Is it that he may check them when stirred up, or that he may set in motion things at rest and quiet? For if he is a queller of martial madness, why are wars not lacking daily? But if he is the inciter of them, then we shall be saying that a god, for the sweetness of his own pleasure, dashes
the whole world together, sows the causes of discord and conflict among nations separated by the remoteness of lands, brings together from opposite quarters so many thousands of mortals, and, within the space of a single word's delay, heaps the fields with corpses, hurls down torrents of blood, destroys the most firmly-founded empires, levels cities to the ground, abolishes freedom for the freeborn and imposes the condition of slavery, rejoices in civil dissensions, in the parricidal slaughter of brothers dying together, and, at the last, in the parricidal horror of the encounter of sons and fathers. This same thing it will be permitted, by like and identical reasoning, to transfer to Venus.
For if she, as you allege and believe, subjects the flames of love to human thoughts, it follows that it ought to be understood that whatever of ruin and crime proceeds from such madness ought to be imputed to the wounds of Venus.
Is it then by the goddess's compulsion that even noble women often betray their dignity to whores of the vilest name, that the bonds of steadfast marriages are unstitched, that kinship of blood blazes up into incestuous lusts, that mothers rage against their own children, that fathers turn upon themselves the vows of their own maiden daughters, that old men, against the honour of their age, groan over obscene appetites amid youthful cares, that wise and brave men undo the decrees of steadfastness when the vigour of manhood is softened, that nooses are knotted about necks, that burning pyres are mounted, and that men everywhere cast themselves down in voluntary leaps over vast and lofty crags?
Is there any human being endowed with the first beginnings of any reason who would pollute or defile the constancy of divinity with such foul characters? Who would assign to the gods such natures as human gentleness has often soothed and softened even in wild beasts? Where, I ask, is that principle that the gods are far removed from every emotion of disturbance, that they are gentle, placid, mild, that in a virtue united in kind they retain the very summit of perfection and the loftiness of wisdom itself? Or why do we pray to them to drive away from us adverse and hostile things, if they themselves are found to be the authors to us of all the evils by which we are daily plucked?
However much you call us impious, irreligious, or atheists, you will never make us believe that there are gods of loves, gods of wars, gods who sow discords, who disquiet minds with furious goads. For either they are most truly gods, and do not do those things which you have recounted; or, if they do those things which you say, they are, without any doubt, not gods. And yet we could somehow accept from you these minds full of impious fictions, if you did not compel the assent of the mind to endure many things about the gods themselves so contradictory and self-destroying as you utter.
For while you severally strive to surpass one another in the praise of deeper knowledge, you both do away with the very gods you suppose to exist, and set up in their place others who manifestly do not exist, and you say different things about the same matters, and you enroll as many those whom human agreement has ever received as single ones. Let us begin, then, formally, with Janus, our father too, whom some of you have declared to be the world, others the year, some the sun. But if we shall accept this as true, it follows that it ought to be understood that there was never any Janus, whom they report to have been begotten of Heaven and Hecate, to have reigned first in Italy,
the founder of the town of the Janiculum, father of Fons, son-in-law of Volturnus, husband of Juturna; and thus through you the name of the god is erased—the god whom you set before all others in your prayers and believe to open for you the way to the hearing of the gods. But again, if Janus is the Year, he cannot even so be a god. For who does not know that a year is a fixed limitation of time, and that that which is bounded by the reckoning of months and the numbering of days has not the power of a deity? The same thing it will be permitted to transfer, by no dissimilar reasoning, to Saturn. For if by this name time is signified, as the Greek interpreters maintain, so that Kronos may be held to be Chronos, then there is no Saturnian deity.
For who is so mad as to say that time is a god, seeing that it is the measure of a certain space enclosed in the continuous series of perpetuity? And thus in order that one too will be removed from the number of the heavenly ones, whom ancient antiquity declared to have been born of Caelus as father, to be the begetter of the great gods, the planter of the vine and bearer of the sickle, and handed him down to the younger age. For what shall we say of Jove himself, whom the wise have repeatedly asserted to be the sun, driving winged chariots with a throng of gods following, and some the aether blazing with fiery force and with the unquenchable vastness of heat?
But if this is clear and established, then there is, on your own authority, no Jupiter at all—he who, begotten of his father Saturn and his mother Ops, in order to escape his begetter's fury, is recorded to have been hidden in the territory of the Aretes. And now, does not a similar opinion likewise remove Juno from the census of the gods? For if she is air, as you Greeks are wont to jest and repeatedly assert, going back to the inverted order of the Greek name, then no sister and consort of the almighty Jove will be found, no Fluvionia, no Pomana, no Ossipagina, no Februtis, Populonia, Cinxia, Caprotina; and thus the fiction of that name will be found utterly empty, spread abroad by the celebrity of a hollow opinion.
Aristotle, as Granius records—a man most powerful in genius and pre-eminent in learning—explains by probable arguments that Minerva is the Moon, and demonstrates it by lettered authority. Others said that this same one is the ethereal summit and the very topmost point of the height; some, that she is memory, whence the very name Minerva was formed, as it were a kind of Meminerva. But if the matter gains credence, then there is no daughter Metis, no Victory, none born from the brain of Jove, no inventress of the olive, none instructed in the mastery of the arts and the varieties of disciplines. 「Because water covers the earth,」 they say, 「he was named and surnamed Neptune.」
— If, then, the covering of liquid is signified by the appellation of this name, there is no god Neptune at all; and thus there is removed and taken out of the midst the brother of Stygian Jove and the sibling of the Olympian, armed with the three-pronged iron, lord of sea-monsters and of shad, king of the salt whirlpools and shaker of the trembling ground. Mercury too was so called as a kind of Medicurrius, and because speech runs midway and passes back and forth between two speakers, the quality of this name was contrived. Therefore, if these things are so, Mercury is not the name of a god but of reciprocating speech and voice; and thus, in this way, that Cyllenian herald is abolished and extinguished—he who was poured out on Mount Algidus, the deviser of words
and names, the exchanger of market-days, wares, and commerce. Some of you have said that the Earth, because she supplies sustenance to all living things, is the Great Mother; others say that this same one, because she bears the fruit of health-giving seeds, is Ceres; while some say she is Vesta, because in the world she alone stands still, the other parts of it being established in perpetual mobility. But if this is set forth and asserted with sure reasoning, then, by your own interpreters, three deities alike are none at all:
neither the airs, nor Vesta shall be reckoned among the gods in the calendars, nor, finally, shall the very Mother of the Gods—whom Nigidius asserts to have held Saturn in marriage—rightly be able to be called a goddess, seeing that all these are names of the one Earth, and by these predications alone she is denoted. We here pass over, to avoid satiety, Vulcan, whom you all with equal consent of voices pronounce to be fire; and Venus, because she comes to all; and her who was surnamed Proserpina because the crops creep forth into the light:
in which part again you do away with the heads of three deities, seeing that the first is the name of an element, not the designation of a perceiving power; the second, of lust diffused through all living creatures; and the third signifies the germinations lifting themselves up and the motions of the sprouting crops. What of it, when you contend that Liber, Apollo, and the Sun are one deity amplified by three names? Is not, by your own opinions, the census of the gods diminished, and the proclaimed opinion falling apart? For if it is true that the same Sun is Liber and the same is Apollo, it follows that in the nature of things there is neither any Apollo nor any Liber; and thus, through you yourselves,
the son of Semele, the Pythian, is abolished and erased—the one the giver of dreggy mirth, the other the bane of the Sminthian mice. Men not unlearned among you, nor prattling from whim, pronounce that Diana, Ceres, and the Moon are the head of one god by a commonplace kinship; nor, as there are three unlikenesses of names, are there three discordances of persons: they are all called by the Moon, and into her name the series of the remaining surnames has been heaped up. But if this is ascertained, if it is fixed, and if the truth of the matter shows that it is so, then again the name of Ceres is void, void that of Diana; and thus the matter is brought to this, that both that inventress of the crops (as you allege), under your leadership and authorship, is none, and Apollo is stripped of a sister
—the sister whom once, as she was washing the filth of her limbs in pure fountains, that horned hunter beheld and found the punishment of his curiosity. Men eminent in the study of philosophy, and exalted to the very pinnacle of that name by you their praisers, define with probable assertion that this whole mass of the world—in whose embraces we are all encompassed, covered, and sustained—is one living being, wise, rational, and provident:
and if this is their true, fixed, and certain opinion, then those too will forthwith cease to be gods whom, a little before, you were establishing in its portions under changed names. For as one man cannot, while the integrity of his own body remains, be split into many men, nor again can many men, the difference of their disjunction being preserved, be melted together into the simplicity of one sense, so, if the world is one living being and is moved by the agitation of one mind, it can neither be scattered into many deities, nor, if its particles are gods, be forced and turned into the consciousness of one living being. Moon, sun, earth, aether, stars are limbs and parts of the world: but if they are parts and limbs, they are surely not living beings of their own name:
for parts cannot in any respect be the very thing which the whole is, nor be wise for themselves, nor feel for themselves, since without the assent of the whole living being it is affected by no motions of its own. Which being established and laid down, the whole sum comes back to this, that neither the sun is a god, nor the moon, nor the aether, the earth, and the rest. For they are parts of the world, not special names of deities; and thus it is brought about that, while you confound and mingle all divine things, in the nature of things one god is established, the world, all the rest being hooted off the stage—nay, rather set up emptily, hollowly, and without any substance.
If we were to overthrow belief in your gods by just as many methods and just as many opinions, no one would doubt but that, roused by wrath and frenzy, you would demand fires, wild beasts, swords, and other kinds of tortures against us, with which you are wont to slake your thirst by the craving for our blood. But when through your very selves almost the whole race of the deities is done away with under the display of talents and learning, you dare to maintain that, on account of our name, human affairs are being pressed by the gods—when indeed, if it is true that they exist anywhere and grow hot with the flames of anger, they have nothing more just on account of which to rage against you than that you deny them to subsist or to exist in any part of nature.
Mnaseas is the author that the Muses are daughters of Earth and Heaven; the rest proclaim them to be Jove's, by his wife Memory or Mind; some write that these were virgins, others that they were mothers. For it now pleases me to touch briefly upon those parts also in which you are shown, by the diversity of opinions, to say each a different thing about the same matter. Ephorus, then, sets them forth as being three in number; Mnaseas, whom we have mentioned, four; Myrtilus brings in seven; Crates asserts eight; and, at the last, Hesiod puts forth nine with their names, enriching heaven and the stars with goddesses. Unless we are mistaken, this disagreement of men who know nothing true does not descend from the truth of the matter.
For if it were clearly known what the matter is, there would be one voice of all, and the assent of all would proceed toward and agree upon the end of the same opinion. In what way, then, can you make whole the full force of religion, when you err concerning the very gods, or invite us to venerable worship, when you teach us nothing certain about the comprehension of the deities themselves?
For, to be silent about the intermediate authors, either that first one erases and slays six divine Muses, if it is established that they are nine; or that last and final one adds six that are none, only three standing firm in truth, so that it can neither be known nor comprehended which ought to be added, which taken away, and the very undertaking of religion is brought into peril—either worshipping that which is not, or perhaps passing by that which perhaps is. Piso believes that the Novensiles are nine gods, established among the Sabines at Trebia.
Granius thinks these are the Muses, accommodating his agreement to Aelius. Varro hands down that it is the number nine, because it is always held most powerful and greatest in the moving of affairs. Cornificius makes them presidents of new things, because by their care all things are renewed and hold firm in newness. Manilius makes them nine gods, to whom alone Jupiter has granted the power of hurling his thunderbolt. Cincius declares that they are foreign deities, named from that very newness; for the Romans were wont, of the religions of conquered cities, partly to scatter them privately among families, partly to consecrate them publicly, and, lest any of the gods should be passed over through the multitude or through ignorance, for brevity's and convenience's sake they all alike were invoked together under the one name of Novensiles.
There are, moreover, some who proclaim that men made into gods are signified by this appellation, as are Hercules, Romulus, Aesculapius, Liber, Aeneas. These opinions, as is evident, are all diverse, and it cannot happen through the nature of things that those who differ in opinions should be held authors of one truth. For if Piso's opinion is true, Aelius and Uranius lie; if what is said by these is certain, the most learned Varro errs, who, for things established in substance, substitutes the emptiest and most hollow things. If the number nine leads to the surname of Novensiles, Cornificius is convicted of bleating, who gives to gods presiding over newness the force of another's power.
But if Cornificius's opinion is true, Cincius is found imprudent, who endows the gods of conquered cities with the power of the Novensile deities. But if these are the ones whom Cincius proclaims, Manilius will be found to speak falsely, who under the appellation of this name includes the hurlers of another's thunderbolt. But if that which Manilius asserts is ascertained and true, those are in the greatest error who reckon that mortals advanced by divine honours and consecrated are named from the newness of the honour. But if the Novensiles are those who have deserved to be lifted up to the stars, after they have discharged the mortality of life, then there are absolutely no Novensile gods. For just as slaves, soldiers, and masters are not names of the persons
underlying, but of offices, conditions, and functions, so, when we say Novensiles, if that is the name of those who from men have deserved to be gods, it is manifest and plain that not persons specially defined, but newness itself, is denoted by the surname of Novensiles. Nigidius handed down that the Penates gods are Neptune and Apollo, who once, on an appointed condition, girdled Ilium with immortal walls. The same author again, in his sixth and tenth books, following the Etruscan disciplines, sets forth that there are four kinds of Penates, and that of these some are of Jove, others of Neptune, a third of the infernal ones, a fourth of mortal men—saying I know not what inexplicable thing.
Caesius, likewise following this view, reckons them to be Fortune and Ceres, the Jovial Genius and Pales — yet not that female whom common opinion accepts, but some minister and bailiff of Jupiter of the masculine gender. Varro holds that the gods of whom we speak exist within, in the innermost recesses of heaven, and that neither their number nor their names can be known. These the Etruscans call and name the Consentes and Complices, because they rise together and set together, six males and as many females, with names unknown and of the most sparing mercy; but they are believed to be the counsellors and princes of highest Jupiter.
Nor have there been lacking those who wrote that Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva are the Penates gods, without whom we cannot live or be wise, and who govern us inwardly by reason, warmth, and breath. As you see, here too nothing consistent is said, nothing is settled by a single pronouncement, nor is there anything trustworthy on which the mind may rest, conjecturing by a surmise closest to its own truth. For thus the opinions waver, and one view is torn away by another, so that either nothing of them all is true, or, if it is stated by someone, it remains unknown amid so many diversities of things. We can, if it seems good, say something briefly about the Lares too, whom the crowd reckons to be gods of the streets and roads, from the fact that Greece names streets 'laurai'.
In various writings Nigidius says they are now guardians of roofs and houses, now the Curetes, who are said to have once concealed the wailing of the infant Jupiter amid the clashing of bronze, now the Samothracian Fingers, whom the Greeks indicate are called the five Idaean Dactyls. Varro, similarly hesitating, now declares them to be the Manes — and that Mania was therefore surnamed the mother of the Lares — now again that they are called aerial gods and heroes, now, following the opinions of the ancients, says the Lares are Larvae, as it were certain spirits and the souls of the departed dead.
It would be endless and immense to go through the individual kinds and to make plain from your very books that there is no god either supposed or believed by you, about whom you have not put forth ambiguous and discordant opinions in a thousand varieties of views. But for the sake of brevity and to avoid tedium it is enough to have said what has been said; and it is too laborious to heap many things into one, since from one instance and another it becomes manifest and plain that you hesitate, waver, and say nothing certain about these matters which you assert — unless perhaps you will say: 'Even if we do not personally know who the Lares are, who the Novensiles, who the Penates, yet the very consensus of authorities vindicates their existence, and among the ranks of the heaven-dwellers
they hold a form of their own kind.' And how will it be possible to know whether some god exists, if it will be unknown and not known what he is? Or how will the very request for benefits avail, if it is not ascertained, not certain, who ought to be summoned for each consultation? For everyone who seeks to obtain the answer of some deity must necessarily know to whom he prays, whom he implores, from whom he demands aids for human affairs and necessities — especially since you yourselves report both that not all the gods can grant all things, and that the minds of individual gods are appeased, and their offenses placated, by most dissimilar rites.