'Right and good prevailed among them not so much by laws as by nature.' Now if those times are found to be such — times in which the Roman commonwealth is proclaimed to have been most beautiful and best — what then ought we to judge must be said or thought of the age that followed, when (to use the words of the same historian) 'being gradually changed, from most beautiful and best it became most base and most disgraceful,' namely after the destruction of Carthage, as he recorded? How those times are briefly reviewed and described by Sallust himself can be read in his history; he shows by how great evils of morals, which sprang up in prosperity, men came at length even to civil wars.
'From which time,' as he says, 'the morals of their forefathers were precipitated headlong, not gradually as before, but like a torrent; to such a degree was the youth corrupted by luxury and avarice that men were rightly said to have been born who could neither themselves keep their family estates nor suffer others to do so.' Sallust then says many things about the vices of Sulla and about the rest of the foulness of the commonwealth, and other writers agree with this, though in far inferior eloquence. Yet you discern, as I suppose — and whoever attends will most easily perceive — into what filth of the most depraved morals that state had slid before the coming of our heavenly King. For these things were done not only before Christ, present in the flesh, had begun to teach, but even before He had been born of the Virgin.
Since therefore they dare not impute to their own gods the many and great evils of those times — whether the more tolerable ones earlier, or the intolerable and horrible ones after Carthage was overthrown — though it was malignant cunning that implanted in human minds those opinions from which such vices ran wild: why do they impute present evils to Christ, who by His most wholesome teaching forbids the worship of false and deceiving gods, and who, detesting and condemning by divine authority these noxious and disgraceful lusts of men, gradually everywhere withdraws His own household from this world that is rotting and slipping away in these evils, that He may found out of it an eternal and most glorious City — not by the applause of vanity, but by the judgment of truth? CHAPTER XIX.
On the corruption of the Roman commonwealth before Christ took away the worship of the gods. Behold, the Roman commonwealth (which I am not the first to say, but their own authors, from whom we learned these things at a price, said so long before, before the coming of Christ) 'being gradually changed, from most beautiful and best became most base and most disgraceful.' Behold, before the coming of Christ, after Carthage was destroyed, 'the morals of their forefathers were precipitated headlong, not gradually as before, but like a torrent, so far was the youth corrupted by luxury and avarice.' Let them read out to us the precepts of their gods against luxury and avarice given to the Roman people;
to whom would that they had at least kept silent about chaste and modest things, rather than also demanding from that people shameful and ignominious acts, by which, through a false divinity, they procured for themselves a pernicious authority. Let them read our writings — through the prophets, through the holy Gospel, through the apostolic Acts, through the Epistles — so many things against avarice and luxury, addressed everywhere to the peoples gathered together for this end; how excellently, how divinely, not as if to clatter from the disputes of philosophers, but as if to thunder from oracles and from the clouds of God. And yet they do not impute to their gods that, by luxury and avarice and savage and base morals, the commonwealth was made most base and most disgraceful before the coming of Christ;
yet whatever affliction of it their pride and pleasures have suffered in this present time, they reproach upon the Christian religion. But if the kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and maidens, old men with the younger, every capable age and either sex — and those whom John the Baptist addresses, the very tax-gatherers and soldiers — would together hear and heed its precepts concerning just and upright morals: then the commonwealth would adorn even the lands of the present life with its felicity, and would mount most blessedly to the summit of eternal life, there to reign. But because the one heeds and the other despises, and more men are friends to vices that flatter them basely than to the profitable harshness of the virtues:
the servants of Christ are bidden to bear with it — whether they be kings or princes or judges, whether soldiers or provincials, whether rich or poor, whether free or slave, of either sex — to bear even with a most base, if it be so necessary, and most disgraceful commonwealth, and even by this very endurance to prepare for themselves a most illustrious place in that holy and most august court of the angels, and in that heavenly commonwealth where the will of God is law. CHAPTER XX. With what kind of felicity they wish to rejoice, and by what morals they wish to live, who blame the times of the Christian religion.
But such worshippers and lovers of those gods — they who even rejoice to be imitators of them in crimes and disgraceful deeds — in no way care that the commonwealth be not most base and most disgraceful. Only let it stand, they say, only let it flourish, filled with abundance, glorious in victories, or — what is yet more fortunate — let it be secure in peace. And what is that to us? Nay rather, this concerns us more: that each one increase his riches forever, riches that may supply his daily extravagances, and through which each more powerful man may subject to himself even the weaker. Let the poor obey the rich for the sake of being filled, and that under their patronage they may enjoy a quiet idleness; let the rich abuse the poor as their dependents and for the service of their pride.
Let the peoples applaud, not those who consult their true interests, but those who lavish pleasures upon them. Let no hard things be commanded, let no impure things be forbidden. Let kings care not how good, but how submissive a people they rule. Let the provinces serve their kings not as directors of morals, but as masters of their possessions and as providers of their pleasures, and let them honor them not sincerely, but slavishly fear them. Let the laws look to what harm each man does to another's vineyard rather than to his own life. Let no one be brought before a judge except him who has been troublesome or noxious to another's property, house, safety, or to any unwilling person; but for the rest, let each man do as he pleases with his own, or with his own people, or with whomever consents.
Let public harlots abound, either for the sake of all who wish to enjoy them, or chiefly for the sake of those who cannot keep private ones. Let most spacious and most ornate houses be built, let sumptuous banquets be frequented, where, whenever and however anyone pleases, by day and by night let men play, drink, vomit, and dissolve themselves. Let dances resound on every side, let theaters seethe with the cries of dishonest mirth and with every kind of pleasure, whether most cruel or most shameful. Let that man be held a public enemy to whom this felicity is displeasing; whoever shall attempt to change or take it away, let the free multitude turn him away from their ears, overturn him from his seats, take him away from the living.
Let those be held the true gods who have procured this felicity for the peoples to attain, and, once attained, have preserved it. Let them be worshipped as they will, let them demand such games as they will, which they may have with or from their worshippers: only let them bring it about that nothing be feared from any enemy, nothing from any plague, nothing from any disaster, against such felicity. — What sound man would compare this commonwealth, I will not say to the Roman Empire, but to the house of Sardanapalus? — who was once a king so given over to pleasures that he caused to be written upon his tomb that he possessed in death only those things which his lust, even while he lived, had consumed by indulgence.
If these people had such a king, indulgent to them in such matters and opposing no one in them with any severity, they would more gladly consecrate a temple and a flamen to him than the old Romans did to Romulus. CHAPTER XXI. What was Cicero's opinion concerning the Roman commonwealth. But if he is despised who called the Roman commonwealth most base and most disgraceful, and these men care not by how great a stain and disgrace of the most base and most disgraceful morals it be filled, but only that it stand and remain: let them hear that it became not, as Sallust relates, most base and most disgraceful, but, as Cicero argues, had even then utterly perished, and that no commonwealth at all remained.
For he introduces Scipio — that very man who had destroyed Carthage — disputing about the commonwealth, at a time when there was a foreboding that, through the corruption which Sallust describes, it was even then on the very point of perishing. For the discussion takes place at that time when one of the Gracchi had already been slain, from whom Sallust writes that grievous seditions began. For mention of his death is made in those same books. Now when Scipio, at the end of the second book, had said that, just as in lyres or flutes and in song itself and in voices a certain harmony must be maintained out of distinct sounds, which, if altered or discordant, trained ears cannot endure, and this harmony, out of the regulation of most dissimilar voices, is nevertheless rendered concordant and fitting:
so, out of the highest and lowest and the middle orders interposed between them, as out of sounds, by a regulated proportion, a city sounds together in harmony by the consent of the most dissimilar elements; and that which is called harmony by musicians in song, this in a city is concord, the closest and best bond of safety in every commonwealth, and that this can in no way exist without justice. And then, when he had discoursed somewhat more broadly and fully on how much justice profits a city and how much it harms it if it be absent, Philus — one of those who were present at the discussion — took up the matter, and demanded that this very question be treated more diligently and that more be said concerning justice, on account of that which was now commonly bruited about, that the commonwealth cannot be governed without injustice.
Scipio accordingly agreed that this question must be discussed and unravelled, and answered that nothing of what had hitherto been said about the commonwealth seemed to him such that they could proceed further, unless it were established not only that that saying — 'it cannot exist without injustice' — was false, but that this was most true: that the commonwealth cannot be governed without the highest justice. And when the unfolding of this question had been deferred to the following day, in the third book the matter was carried out with great contention.
For Philus himself took up the case of those who held that the commonwealth cannot be carried on without injustice, expressly clearing himself, lest he be thought to hold this view himself, and he pleaded diligently for injustice against justice, endeavouring as it were to show, by plausible reasonings and examples, that the former is useful to the commonwealth, but the latter useless.
Then Laelius, at the request of all, undertook to defend justice and affirmed, as far as he could, that nothing is so hostile to a city as injustice, and that a commonwealth cannot be carried on or stand at all except by great justice. When this question had been treated as fully as seemed sufficient, Scipio returned to what had been interrupted and recalled and commended his own brief definition of the commonwealth, by which he had said it to be 'the affair of the people' (res populi). But he determines a people to be not every assembly of a multitude, but an assembly associated by a consent of law and a community of interest.
He then teaches how great is the usefulness of definition in disputing, and from those his definitions he concludes that there is then a commonwealth — that is, the affair of the people — when it is administered well and justly, whether by one king, or by a few aristocrats, or by the whole people. But when the king is unjust (whom in the Greek manner he called a tyrant), or the aristocrats unjust (whose consent he said was a faction), or the people itself unjust (for whom he could find no customary name, except that he should call it too a tyrant):
then there is no longer a vicious commonwealth, as had been argued the day before, but — as the reasoning connected from those definitions had taught — there is no commonwealth at all, since it would not be the affair of the people, when a tyrant or a faction seized it; nor would the people itself be any longer a people, if it were unjust, since it would not be a multitude associated by a consent of law and a community of interest, as the people had been defined. When therefore the Roman commonwealth was such as Sallust describes it, it was not now most base and most disgraceful, as he himself says, but, according to this reasoning, was no commonwealth at all, which the discussion about the commonwealth, held among its great leaders of that time, made plain.
So also Tullius himself, speaking not in the person of Scipio nor of any other, but in his own discourse at the beginning of the fifth book, having first recalled that verse of the poet Ennius in which he had said: 'On ancient morals and on men the Roman state stands fast' — 'which verse,' he says, 'whether for its brevity or its truth, seems to me to have been uttered as if from some oracle. For neither would the men, unless the city had been so charactered, nor the morals, unless these men had presided, have been able either to found or so long to maintain a commonwealth so great and ruling so justly far and wide. And so, before our memory, both the ancestral custom itself furnished excellent men, and excellent men retained the old custom and the institutions of their forefathers.'
'But our age, having received the commonwealth like an outstanding picture, yet fading with age, has not only neglected to renew it with the same colors that it had, but has not even taken care to preserve at least its form and, as it were, its outermost outlines. For what remains of those ancient morals, on which he said the Roman state stood fast — which we see so worn away by oblivion that they are not only not cultivated, but are now even unknown? And what shall I say of the men? For the morals themselves have perished through a dearth of men; of which so great an evil not only must the account be rendered by us, but a defense must also in a manner be pleaded by us, as if we were defendants on a capital charge.
For it is by our own vices, not by any chance, that we retain the commonwealth in word, while in very fact we have long since lost it.' These things Cicero confessed — far indeed after the death of Africanus, whom in his books he made to dispute about the commonwealth, yet still before the coming of Christ. If these things were perceived and spoken when the Christian religion was being slandered and prevailing, who of these men would not judge that they must be imputed to the Christians? Wherefore, why did their gods not take care that that commonwealth might not then perish and be lost — the commonwealth which Cicero, long before Christ had come in the flesh, so mournfully laments as lost?
Let its praisers see what sort it was even with those ancient men and morals — whether true justice flourished in it, or perhaps even then it was not alive in its morals but painted in colors; which Cicero himself, unawares, expressed even while he was preferring it. But of this, if God shall will, we shall see elsewhere. For I shall strive in its own place to show, according to the very definitions of Cicero — by which, with Scipio speaking, he briefly set forth what a commonwealth is and what a people is (with many opinions attesting it, whether his own or those of the men whom he made to speak in that same discussion) — that it was never a commonwealth, because true justice was never in it.
But according to more probable definitions, it was, after a certain manner of its own, a commonwealth, and was better administered by the more ancient Romans than by the later ones; yet true justice does not exist except in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ — if indeed it pleases us to call it a commonwealth, since we cannot deny it to be the affair of a people. But if this name, which is elsewhere and otherwise commonly used, is perhaps too remote from our manner of speech, certainly in that city there is true justice, of which the holy Scripture says: 'Glorious things are spoken of thee, O City of God.' CHAPTER XXII. That the Romans' gods never had any care lest the commonwealth should perish through evil morals.
But as concerns the present question, however praiseworthy they may say that commonwealth was or is, according to their own most learned authors it had already, long before the coming of Christ, become most base and most disgraceful; nay rather, it was no commonwealth at all and had utterly perished through its most ruined morals. Therefore, that it might not perish, its guardian gods ought above all to have given precepts of life and morals to the people that worshipped them — by whom they were worshipped with so many temples, so many priests and kinds of sacrifices, with so manifold and various rites, with so many festal solemnities, with so many celebrations of so great games;
wherein the demons did nothing except their own business, not caring how those people lived — nay, caring that they should even live in ruin, provided only that, subjected by fear, they ministered all those things to the demons' honor. Or if the gods did give such precepts, let it be produced, let it be shown, let it be read: what laws of the gods, given to that city, did the Gracchi despise, that they should throw everything into confusion by seditions; what laws did Marius and Cinna and Carbo despise, that they should even advance to civil wars undertaken on most iniquitous grounds and waged cruelly and ended more cruelly still; what laws, finally, did Sulla himself despise, whose life, morals, and deeds, as described by Sallust and other historians, who would not shudder at? Who would not confess that that commonwealth had then perished?
Perhaps, on account of citizens of this sort of morals, they will dare to set against us, as they are wont, in defense of their gods, that Vergilian sentence: 'All the gods departed, leaving the shrines and altars, by whom this empire had stood'? First, if it be so, they have no cause to complain of the Christian religion, that, offended by it, their gods deserted them — since indeed their own forefathers, by their morals, had long since driven from the City's altars so many petty gods, like flies. But yet, where was this throng of deities, when, long before the ancient morals were corrupted, Rome was captured and burned by the Gauls? Were they perhaps present, but asleep?
For at that time, when the whole City had been reduced into the power of the enemy, the Capitoline hill alone remained, which would even itself have been captured, had not at least the geese kept watch while the gods slept. Whence Rome had nearly fallen into the superstition of the Egyptians, who worship beasts and birds, when they celebrated solemnities to a goose. But concerning these adventitious evils, evils rather of the body than of the soul, which befall either from enemies or from some other disaster, I do not yet for the moment dispute: now I treat of the ruin of morals, by which — first gradually losing their color, then precipitated like a torrent — so great a ruin of the commonwealth was wrought, even with roofs and walls intact, that their own great authors do not hesitate to say that it was then lost.
Rightly, then, had all the gods departed — leaving the shrines and altars — that it might be lost, if that city had despised their precepts concerning a good life and justice. But now, I ask, what sort of gods were they, if they were unwilling to live with the people that worshipped them — a people whom, while it lived wickedly, they had not taught to live well? CHAPTER XXIII. That the variations of temporal affairs depend not on the favor or assault of demons, but on the judgment of the true God.
What of the fact that they even seem to have assisted in fulfilling the lusts of these men, and are shown not to have presided over restraining them? For they helped Marius — a new man and base-born, a most bloody author and prosecutor of civil wars — that he might be made consul seven times, and that in his seventh consulship he might die an old man and not rush into the hands of Sulla, who was soon to be victor. If indeed their gods did not help him to these things, it is no small admission that they confess that even without their gods being propitious, such great temporal felicity (which they love too much) can befall a man, and that men, such as Marius was, can be heaped with safety, strength, wealth, honors, dignity, and length of days, and enjoy them, though the gods are angry;
and that men also, such as Regulus was, can be tortured and die — by captivity, slavery, want, sleepless nights, and pains — though the gods are friendly. But if they grant that this is so, they confess in sum that the gods profit nothing and are worshipped to no purpose. For if they have rather urged upon the people what is contrary to the virtues of the soul and to uprightness of life (whose rewards are to be hoped for after death); if also in these transitory and temporal goods they neither harm those whom they hate nor profit those whom they love — why are they worshipped, why are they sought to be worshipped with such great zeal? Why, in laborious and gloomy times, is there muttering, as though they had departed offended, and on their account is the Christian religion wounded with most unworthy reproaches?
But if they have power in these matters either of benefit or of harm, why were they present to that most evil man Marius and absent from the most excellent Regulus? Or are they thereby understood to be most unjust and most evil? But if for that reason they are thought all the more to be feared and worshipped, let them not be thought so either; for Regulus is found to have worshipped them no less than Marius. Nor on that account does a most wicked life seem to be one we ought to choose, because the gods are reckoned to have favored Marius more than Regulus.
For Metellus, the most praised of the Romans, who had five sons of consular rank, was also fortunate in temporal affairs; and Catiline, a most evil man, oppressed by want and laid low in the war of his own crime, was unfortunate; and the good who worship God prevail with a truest and most certain felicity, which can be conferred by Him alone. Therefore, when that commonwealth was perishing through evil morals, its gods did nothing toward directing or correcting those morals, that it might not perish; nay rather, they added to depraving and corrupting those morals, that it might perish. Nor let them feign themselves good, as though they had departed offended by the iniquity of the citizens. Plainly they were there; they are betrayed, they are convicted; they could neither help by precept nor lie hidden by keeping silent.
I pass over the fact that Marius was commended by the compassionate people of Minturnae to the goddess Marica in her grove, that she might prosper all things for him; and, returning unharmed from the depths of despair, the cruel man led a cruel army into the City — where how bloody, how uncivil, and more monstrous than that of an enemy his victory was, let those who wish read those who have written of it.
But this, as I said, I pass over, nor do I attribute to some Marica (I know not who) the bloody felicity of Marius, but rather to the hidden providence of God, in order to close the mouths of these men and to deliver from error those who consider these things prudently, not out of partisan zeal: namely, that even if the demons can do something in these matters, they can do only as much as they are permitted by the secret arbitration of the Almighty — that we may neither greatly prize earthly felicity, which, as to Marius, is for the most part granted even to the wicked, nor again judge it to be evil, since we see that many even pious and good worshippers of the one true God have, against the demons' will, prevailed in it; nor think that these most unclean spirits are to be propitiated or feared on account of these very earthly goods or evils — because, just as evil men themselves on earth, so also those spirits cannot do all the things they wish, except insofar as it is permitted by the ordinance of Him whose judgments no one fully comprehends, and whom no one justly reproaches.
CHAPTER XXIV. On the deeds of Sulla, in which the demons showed themselves to be his helpers. Sulla himself certainly — whose times were such that the earlier ones, of which he seemed to be the avenger, came to be sought after by comparison with his — when he first moved his camp toward the City against Marius, Livy writes that the entrails were so favorable to him as he sacrificed, that Postumius the soothsayer wished to be kept under guard, ready to undergo capital punishment unless Sulla, with the gods aiding him, accomplished those things which he had in mind. Behold, the gods had not departed, leaving the shrines and altars, when they foretold the outcome of events and cared nothing about the correction of Sulla himself. By their presaging they promised great felicity, and did not break his evil desire by any threatening.
Next, while he was in Asia waging the Mithridatic War, a message was sent to him from Jupiter through Lucius Titius, that he would overcome Mithridates; and so it came to pass. And afterward, when he was endeavoring to return to the City and to avenge with civil bloodshed the wrongs done to himself and his friends, a message was again sent to him by the same Jupiter through a certain soldier of the sixth legion, saying that He had earlier foretold the victory over Mithridates, and now promised to grant him the power by which he might recover the commonwealth from his enemies, not without much bloodshed. Then Sulla, having inquired what the appearance of the soldier had been, when the man described it, recalled it as the very same which he had earlier heard from the one who had brought him the earlier instructions from the same god concerning the Mithridatic victory.
What can be answered here, as to why these gods took care to announce such seemingly fortunate things, yet none of them took care to correct Sulla by warning him that he would commit such great evils by his wicked civil arms—evils that would not merely defile but utterly destroy the commonwealth? Surely these are understood to be demons, as I have often said and as is known to us in the sacred Scriptures, and as the facts themselves sufficiently indicate, pursuing their own business: that they may be held as gods and worshiped, that those things may be rendered to them by which those who render them are made partners with them in one most wicked cause at the judgment of God. Then, when Sulla had come to Tarentum and had sacrificed there, he saw on the head of the liver of a calf the likeness of a golden crown.
Then that soothsayer Postumius replied that it signified an illustrious victory, and bade him alone partake of those entrails. Shortly afterward the slave of a certain Lucius Pontius cried out in prophesying: 'I come as a messenger from Bellona; the victory is yours, Sulla.' Then he added that the Capitol would be burned. When he had said this, going forth at once from the camp, he returned the next day more frenzied, and cried out that the Capitol had been burned. And in fact the Capitol had burned. This indeed the demon could both easily foresee and most swiftly announce. But mark this well, which pertains most to the point: under what sort of gods do those wish to be who blaspheme the Savior who frees the wills of the faithful from the dominion of demons. The man cried out in prophesying:
'The victory is yours, Sulla'; and so that it might be believed that he cried this out by a divine spirit, he announced also something both near at hand in the future and soon fulfilled, far removed from where the one through whom that spirit spoke was; yet he did not cry out: 'Spare yourself from crimes, Sulla'—those most horrible deeds which there as victor he committed, he to whom the golden crown, that most illustrious sign of victory itself, appeared in the calf's liver. If just gods were wont to give such signs, and not impious demons, surely those entrails would rather have portended wicked deeds, and evils gravely harmful to Sulla himself. For that victory did not so much profit his dignity as it harmed his greed;