[I] Of the two cities—of which one is God's, the other of this world, in which, so far as pertains to the race of men, even this City of God is a sojourner—I promised that I would write concerning their rise and course and due ends, after I had first refuted, so far as His grace should aid me, the enemies of the City of God, who prefer their own gods to Christ its Founder and, with a most pernicious envy to themselves, cruelly envy the Christians; which I did in the first ten volumes.
But of this threefold promise of mine which I have just now recalled, the rise of both cities was set forth in the four books following the tenth; then their course from the first man down to the flood in one book, which is the fifteenth of this work; and thence again down to Abraham both ran on together, as in the times, so also in our pages. But from Abraham the father down to the times of the kings of Israel, where we concluded the sixteenth volume, and thence down to the coming of the Saviour Himself in the flesh, whither the seventeenth book extends, the City of God alone seems to have run on in my pen;
although in this world it did not run on alone, but assuredly both ran on together in the human race, as from the beginning, and by their joint course varied the ages. But I did this for this reason: that first, from the time when the promises of God began to be more open, down to His birth from the Virgin—in which the things that were first promised were to be fulfilled—this city, which is God's, running on without interruption from the opposition of the other city, might appear the more distinctly; although until the revelation of the New Testament it ran on not in light, but in shadow. Now therefore I see that I must do what I had deferred, namely, that from the times of Abraham I may touch, so far as seems sufficient, upon how that other city too ran on, so that both may be compared with each other by the consideration of readers.
[II] The society, then, of mortals everywhere spread abroad throughout the earth, and, amid however great diversities of places, bound together by a certain community of one and the same nature, while each pursues its own advantages and desires—since that which is sought either suffices for none or not for all, because it is not that very good itself—is for the most part divided against itself, and the part which prevails oppresses the other part. For the conquered yields to the conqueror, preferring any sort of peace and safety to domination, or even to liberty; so that those have been to great men objects of wonder who chose rather to perish than to serve.
For in almost all nations the voice of nature has in a certain way resounded thus, that they who happened to be conquered should prefer to be subjugated to the victors rather than to be destroyed by all-manner warlike devastation. Hence it came to pass—not without the providence of God, in whose power it is that each should be either subjugated or subjugate in war—that some were endowed with kingdoms, others made subject to those who reign. But among the very many kingdoms of the earth, into which the society of earthly advantage or desire is divided (which we call by the universal name the city of this world), we discern two kingdoms far more illustrious than the rest, first that of the Assyrians, then that of the Romans, ordered and distinguished between themselves as in times, so also in places. For as the former was earlier, this latter later:
in like manner the one arose in the East, the other in the West; and finally, at the end of the former was straightway the beginning of the latter. The other kingdoms and the other kings I would call, as it were, appendages of these. Ninus, then, was already the second king of the Assyrians, who had succeeded his father Belus, the first king of that kingdom, when in the land of the Chaldeans Abraham was born. There was also at that time the kingdom of the Sicyonians, exceedingly small, with which that most learned man in every respect, Marcus Varro, writing of the nation of the Roman people, began as with an ancient time. For from these kings of the Sicyonians he came down to the Athenians, from these to the Latins, and thence to the Romans. But before the founding of Rome, these things are recorded as very slight in comparison with the kingdom of the Assyrians;
although the Athenians shone forth most in Greece, as even Sallust, the Roman historian, admits—yet more by fame than by the thing itself. For speaking of them he says: 'The deeds of the Athenians, as I judge, were sufficiently great and magnificent; but yet somewhat less than they are borne up by report. But because there arose there great talents of writers, throughout the whole world the deeds of the Athenians are celebrated as the greatest. So the valour of those who did them is reckoned as great as illustrious talents were able to exalt it by words.' There accrues to this city no small glory also from letters and philosophers, because there above all such studies flourished.
For as regards empire, none in the earliest times was greater than that of the Assyrians, nor so far and wide diffused; seeing that King Ninus, son of Belus, is reported to have subdued all Asia—which is said to be a third of the whole world by the number of its parts, but is found to be a half in magnitude—as far as the borders of Libya. Only the Indians in the parts of the East he did not rule; whom, however, after his death, his wife Semiramis attacked by making war. Thus it came to pass that whatever peoples or kings there were in those lands obeyed the kingdom and dominion of the Assyrians and carried out whatever was commanded. Abraham, therefore, was born in that kingdom, among the Chaldeans, in the times of Ninus.
But since Greek affairs are much better known to us than Assyrian, and those who have searched into the nation of the Roman people in the antiquity of its origin have drawn down the series of the times through the Greeks to the Latins and thence to the Romans—who themselves also are Latins—on this account we ought, where it is needful, to name the Assyrian kings, that it may appear in what way Babylon, as it were a first Rome, ran on together with the pilgrim City of God in this world; but the events which, for the sake of comparing the two cities, namely the earthly and the heavenly, it behoves us to insert into this work, we ought rather to draw from the Greeks and Latins, where Rome itself is, as it were, a second Babylon.
When, therefore, Abraham was born, the second kings among the Assyrians were Ninus, and among the Sicyonians Europs; but the first there were Belus, and here Aegialeus. But when, after Abraham had gone out of Babylon, God promised him that from him a great nation should come, and in his seed the blessing of all nations, the Assyrians had a fourth king, the Sicyonians a fifth; for among them reigned the son of Ninus after his mother Semiramis, who is reported to have been slain by him, she having dared to defile her son by incestuous union. Some think that she founded Babylon, which indeed she could have rebuilt. But when or in what way it was founded, we have said in the sixteenth book.
Further, the son of Ninus and Semiramis, who succeeded his mother in the kingdom, some call also himself Ninus, but some, by a name derived from his father, call him Ninyas. But the kingdom of the Sicyonians was then held by Telxion. In whose reign there were times there so mild and glad that, when he died, they worshipped him as a god by sacrificing and by celebrating games, which they say were first instituted for him. [III] In his times also Isaac was born, by the promise of God, a son to Abraham a hundred years old, of Sarah his wife, who, being barren and now an old woman, had lost the hope of offspring. Then too among the Assyrians the fifth king was Arrius.
But to Isaac himself, when he was sixty years old, were born twins, Esau and Jacob, whom Rebecca his wife bore to him, their grandfather Abraham being still alive and passing his hundred and sixtieth year of age, who, when he had completed a hundred and seventy-five, died, when there reigned among the Assyrians that elder Xerxes, who was also called Baleus, and among the Sicyonians Thuriacus, whom some write Thurimachus—the seventh kings. But the kingdom of the Argives arose together with the grandchildren of Abraham, where Inachus first reigned. Indeed, what ought not to have been passed over, Varro relates that the Sicyonians were wont to sacrifice even at the tomb of Thuriacus, their seventh king.
Further, when the eighth kings were reigning—Armamitres of the Assyrians, Leucippus of the Sicyonians, and the first of the Argives, Inachus—God spoke to Isaac and promised to him also those same two things which He had promised to his father, namely, to his seed the land of Canaan and in his seed the blessing of all nations. These same things were promised also to his son, the grandson of Abraham, who was called first Jacob, afterwards Israel, when now Belochus reigned as the ninth king of Assyria, and Phoroneus, son of Inachus, reigned as the second over the Argives, Leucippus still remaining among the Sicyonians. In these times Greece, under Phoroneus the Argive king, was made somewhat more famous by certain institutions of laws and courts of judgement.
Yet when Phegous, the younger brother of this Phoroneus, had died, a temple was set up at his tomb, in which he was worshipped as a god and oxen were sacrificed to him. I believe they thought him worthy of so great an honour for this reason, that in his portion of the kingdom (for their father had distributed to both the regions in which, while he lived, they should reign) he had established shrines for the worship of gods, and had taught men to observe the seasons by months and years, and how far to measure and reckon each of them. Men still rude, wondering at these new things in him, when he had died either supposed or wished that he had become a god. For Io also is said to have been the daughter of Inachus, who afterwards, called Isis, was worshipped as a great goddess in Egypt;
although others write that she came as a queen from Ethiopia into Egypt, and that, because she ruled widely and justly and established for them many advantages and letters, this divine honour was paid to her after she had died there, and so great an honour that anyone would be held guilty of a capital crime if he said that she had been a human being. [IV] When there reigned among the Assyrians the tenth king Baleus, and among the Sicyonians the ninth Messapus, who by some is also handed down as Cephisos (if indeed one man had two names, and they did not rather suppose that one man had been another in place of the other, who set down in their writings the other name), and when the third king of the Argives was Apis, Isaac died at a hundred and eighty years, and left his twins at a hundred and twenty years;
of whom the younger, Jacob, pertaining to the City of God about which we write—the elder being of course rejected—had twelve sons, one of whom, who was called Joseph, his brothers had sold to merchants passing over into Egypt, while their grandfather Isaac was still living. But Joseph stood before Pharaoh when, out of the lowliness which he had endured, he was exalted, being thirty years old;
since, having divinely interpreted the king's dreams, he foretold that seven years of plenty were to come, whose surpassing abundance seven other barren years following were to consume; and on this account the king set him over Egypt, having freed him from the prison into which the integrity of chastity had cast him—that chastity which, valiantly keeping, when he would not consent to defilement with a mistress who loved wickedly and a master who was wickedly credulous of her lie, he even left his garment behind in the hands of her who dragged him, and fled away.
But in the second year of the seven barren years Jacob came into Egypt to his son with all his people, being a hundred and thirty years old, as he himself answered the king when questioned, while Joseph was thirty-nine—namely, to the thirty which he was completing when he was honoured by the king, being added the seven of plenty and the two of famine. [V] In these times Apis, king of the Argives, having been conveyed by ships into Egypt, when he had died there, was made Serapis, the greatest god of all the Egyptians. But of this name, why he was called not Apis even after death, but Serapis, Varro gave a very easy account.
For because the chest in which the dead man is placed—which all now call a sarcophagus—is called soros in Greek, and they had begun to venerate him there, buried, before his temple was built: from soros and Apis he was called first Sorapis, then, one letter being changed as is wont to happen, Serapis. And it was also decreed concerning him that whosoever said that he had been a man should pay a capital penalty. And since in almost all temples where Isis and Serapis were worshipped there was also an image which, with a finger pressed to its lips, seemed to admonish that silence should be kept: this, Varro thinks, signified that it should be kept silent that they had been men.
But that ox which Egypt, deceived by wonderful vanity, nourished with abundant delicacies in his honour, since they venerated it alive, without a sarcophagus, was called Apis, not Serapis. When this ox had died, since a calf of the same colour was sought and found—that is, marked in like manner with certain white spots—they believed that something marvellous and divinely procured for them had come to pass. For it was no great matter for the demons, in order to deceive them, to display the phantasm of such a bull, which the cow alone should behold, to a cow conceiving and pregnant, whence the mother's desire might draw off that which should already appear bodily in her offspring; just as Jacob, by means of the variegated rods, brought it about that party-coloured sheep and goats were born.
For what men can do with true colours and bodies, this the demons can most easily exhibit to conceiving animals by feigned figures. [VI] Apis therefore, king not of the Egyptians but of the Argives, died in Egypt. His son Argus succeeded him in the kingdom, from whose name both Argos and, from this, the Argives were called; but under the former kings neither the place nor the nation yet had this name. While he reigned among the Argives, and among the Sicyonians Erato reigned, but among the Assyrians Baleus still remaining, Jacob died in Egypt at a hundred and forty-seven years, when, about to die, he had blessed his sons and his grandsons by Joseph, and had most openly prophesied Christ, saying in the blessing of Judah:
The prince shall not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his loins, until there come the things which are laid up for him; and He Himself shall be the expectation of the nations. While Argus reigned, Greece began to use its own crops and to have harvests in agriculture, seeds having been brought from elsewhere. Argus too, after his death, began to be held a god, honoured with a temple and sacrifices. Which honour, in his reign, was conferred before him upon a certain Homogyrus, a private man struck by lightning, because he was the first to yoke oxen to the plough. [VII] While there reigned among the Assyrians the twelfth, Mamythus, and among the Sicyonians the eleventh, Plemmeus, and Argus still remaining among the Argives, Joseph died at a hundred and ten years.
After whose death the people of God, wonderfully increasing, remained in Egypt a hundred and forty-five years, at first tranquilly, until those died to whom Joseph had been known; then, because its increase was envied and its numbers were suspected, until it should be delivered thence, it was oppressed with persecutions (amid which, however, being divinely made fruitful, it grew by multiplication) and with the labours of an intolerable servitude. But in Assyria and Greece, throughout the same time, the same kingdoms continued.
[VIII] When, therefore, there reigned over the Assyrians the fourteenth, Saphrus, and over the Sicyonians the twelfth, Orthopolis, and Criasus the fifth over the Argives, there was born in Egypt Moses, by whom the people of God was delivered from Egyptian servitude, in which it was fitting that it should be so exercised as to long for the help of its Creator. In the reign of the aforesaid kings, Prometheus is believed by some to have lived, whom they therefore say to have formed men out of clay, because he is reported to have been the best teacher of wisdom; nor yet is it shown who were the wise men in his times. His brother Atlas is said to have been a great astrologer; whence the fable found occasion to feign that he bore the heavens;
although a mountain is called by his name, by whose height rather the bearing of heaven seems to have come into the opinion of the common people. Many other fabulous things also began to be feigned in those times in Greece; but down to Cecrops, king of the Athenians—in whose reign that same city also received such a name, and in whose reign God through Moses led His people out of Egypt—several dead men were referred to the number of the gods by the blind and vain custom and superstition of the Greeks. Among whom were Melantomice, wife of King Criasus, and Phorbas their son, who was the sixth king of the Argives after his father, and Iasus, son of the seventh king Triopas, and the ninth king Sthenelas, or Stheneleus, or Sthenelus—for variously it is found in different authors.
In these times also Mercury is reported to have lived, grandson of Atlas by his daughter Maia, as even the more common writings proclaim. He shone forth as skilled in many arts, which he also handed down to men; for which merit they wished, or even believed, him to be a god after death. Hercules is said to have been later, yet pertaining to those times of the Argives; although some prefer him to Mercury in time, whom I judge to be mistaken. But at whatever time they were born, it is agreed among grave historians who committed these ancient things to writing that both were men, and that, because they conferred many benefits on mortals for leading this life more conveniently, they merited divine honours from them. Minerva, however, was far more ancient than these;
for in the times of Ogyges she is reported to have appeared at the lake which is called Triton's, in maiden age, whence she was also named Tritonia; being indeed the inventress of many works, and the more readily believed a goddess, the less her origin was known. For that she is sung to have been born from the head of Jupiter is to be applied to poets and fables, not to history and things done. Although as to when Ogyges himself lived—in whose times also there occurred a great flood, not that greatest one in which no men escaped save those who could be in the ark, which neither Greek nor Latin history has known, but nevertheless one greater than that which was afterwards in the time of Deucalion—among the writers of history there is no agreement.
For Varro began the book I mentioned above from this point, and he sets before himself nothing more ancient, as a starting point from which he might arrive at Roman affairs, than the flood of Ogyges, that is, the flood that occurred in the time of Ogyges. But our own writers who have composed chronicles, first Eusebius and afterward Jerome — who indeed followed certain earlier historians in this opinion — record that the flood of Ogyges took place more than three hundred years later, when Phoroneus was already reigning as the second king of the Argives. Yet at whatever time it occurred, Minerva was by then being worshipped as a goddess, while Cecrops was reigning over the Athenians; and under that king they say the city itself was either restored or founded.
For Varro indicates this reason why the city came to be called Athens — a name that certainly derives from Minerva, who in Greek is called Athena. When an olive tree had suddenly appeared there and in another place water had gushed forth, these portents disturbed the king, and he sent to Delphic Apollo to inquire what was to be understood by them and what was to be done. The god replied that the olive signified Minerva and the water Neptune, and that it lay within the power of the citizens to decide from which of these two gods, whose signs these were, the city should rather take its name. Having received this oracle, Cecrops summoned together all the citizens of both sexes to cast their vote — for the custom at that time in those regions was that women too should take part in public deliberations.
When therefore the multitude was consulted, the men cast their votes for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and because the women were found to number one more, Minerva prevailed. Then Neptune in his wrath, with the sea-waves surging up, laid waste the lands of the Athenians; for it is no hard thing for demons to scatter waters of any kind more widely. And to appease his anger, the same author says that the women were afflicted by the Athenians with a threefold punishment: that they should never again cast a vote, that none of the children born should receive the mother's name, and that no one should call them Athenians.
So that city, the mother or nurse of the liberal arts and of so many and such great philosophers — than which Greece had nothing more renowned and more noble — through the mockery of the demons over a dispute between its gods, a male and a female, and through a victory of a female by the votes of females, received the name Athens; and, harmed by the vanquished, it was compelled to punish the very victory of the victorious goddess, dreading the waters of Neptune more than the arms of Minerva. For in the women who were thus punished, even Minerva, who had conquered, was herself conquered; nor did she stand by her own supporters, so that at least — after their power of voting was thereafter lost and their sons alienated from their mothers' names — they might be permitted to be called Athenians and to merit the appellation of that goddess whom, by casting their vote, they had made victor over the men's god.
What great things, and how many, might be said on this point, if my discourse were not hastening on to other matters! And yet Marcus Varro is unwilling to give credence to fabulous fictions against the gods, lest he should think anything unworthy of the dignity of their majesty. And therefore he refuses to believe that the Areopagus — where the apostle Paul disputed with the Athenians, and from which place the councillors of that same city were called Areopagites — took its name from the fact that Mars, who in Greek is called Ares, when he was made a defendant on a charge of homicide, was acquitted by six votes among the twelve gods sitting in judgment on that hill (for where the votes were of equal number, acquittal was customarily preferred to condemnation).
But against this opinion, which is far more widely current, he tries to construct another explanation of this name, drawn from the knowledge of obscure writings, lest the Athenians be believed to have named the Areopagus after the name of Mars and of a hill, as it were 'the hill of Mars' — that is, to the injury of the deities, from whom he judges quarrels and lawsuits to be alien; asserting that what is said of Mars is no less false than what is said of the three goddesses — namely Juno, Minerva, and Venus — who are related to have contended over the excellence of their beauty before the judge Paris in order to obtain the golden apple, and who, to appease with games the gods that delight in these crimes of theirs, whether true or false, are sung and danced amid the applause of the theatre.
These things Varro does not believe, lest he should credit the nature or morals of the gods with anything unbecoming; and yet, while giving an account of the name of Athens that is not fabulous but historical, he inserts into his own writings so great a dispute between Neptune and Minerva over whose name the city should rather bear — a dispute in which, as they contended by the display of portents, not even Apollo when consulted dared to judge between them, but sent their quarrel to be settled, just as Jupiter sent the quarrel of the three goddesses I mentioned to Paris, so this one sent it to men, where Minerva conquered by the votes yet was conquered in the punishment of her own supporters; she who was able to obtain Athens over her adversaries the men, yet was not able to keep her friends the women as Athenians.
In these times — as Varro writes, while Cranaus, the successor of Cecrops, was reigning over the Athenians, but as our own writers Eusebius and Jerome have it, while the same Cecrops still remained on the throne — there occurred the flood which was called the flood of Deucalion, so named because he was reigning in those parts of the earth where it chiefly took place. This flood, however, in no way reached Egypt and its neighboring regions. Now Moses led the people of God out of Egypt in the last years of Cecrops, king of the Athenians, when Ascatades was reigning among the Assyrians, Marathus among the Sicyonians, and Triopas among the Argives.
And when the people had been led out, on Mount Sinai Moses handed down the law divinely received, which is called the Old Testament, because it holds earthly promises; and through Jesus Christ who was to come there was to be the New Testament, in which the kingdom of heaven would be promised. For it was fitting that this order be observed, just as in each individual man who advances toward God, that comes to pass which the apostle says: that the spiritual is not first, but the animal, and afterward the spiritual; since, as he also says and it is true, the first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven.
Moses ruled the people forty years in the wilderness and died at the age of one hundred and twenty, having himself also prophesied of Christ through the figures of carnal observances — in the tabernacle and the priesthood and the sacrifices and other mystical and very many commandments. To Moses succeeded Joshua son of Nun, and he settled the people, brought into the land of promise, by divine authority, when the nations by whom those same places were held had been vanquished in war. When he had ruled the people twenty-seven years after the death of Moses, he too died, while among the Assyrians the eighteenth king Amyntas was reigning, among the Sicyonians the sixteenth Corax, among the Argives the tenth Danaus, and among the Athenians the fourth Erichthonius.
During these times — that is, from the departure of Israel out of Egypt down to the death of Joshua son of Nun, through whom that same people received the land of promise — sacred rites were instituted to false gods by the kings of Greece, rites which by a solemn celebration recalled the memory of the flood and of the deliverance of men from it, and of the life then wretched of those who migrated now to the heights, now to the plains. For they interpret even the ascent and descent of the Luperci along the Sacred Way in such a way as to say that by these are signified the men who, on account of the inundation of the waters, sought the tops of the mountains and again, when the same waters had subsided, returned to the low places. In these times they say that Dionysus, who was also called Father Liber and after his death was held to be a god, showed the vine in the land of Attica to his host.
Then musical games were instituted for Delphic Apollo, that his anger might be appeased — the anger by which they supposed the regions of Greece to have been afflicted with barrenness, because they had not defended his temple, which king Danaus, when he had invaded those same lands in war, had burned. And they were admonished by his oracle to institute these games. But in Attica king Erichthonius first instituted games for him, and not for him alone but also for Minerva, in which oil was set as the prize for the victors, since they hold that Minerva was the discoverer of that fruit, just as Liber was of wine.