In those years Europa is reported to have been carried off by Xanthus, king of the Cretans (whose name we find given differently by other authors), and from him were begotten Rhadamanthus, Sarpedon, and Minos, who by the more common report are said to have been sons of Jupiter by that same woman. But the worshippers of such gods reckon what we have said of the king of the Cretans as historical truth, while what the poets sing of Jupiter — which the theatres resound with, the peoples celebrate — they reckon among the vanities of fables, so that there might be an occasion for holding games to appease the deities even by these false crimes of theirs. In these times Hercules was held famous in Syria; but doubtless another, not the one of whom we spoke above. For by a more secret history there are said to have been several both Father Libers and Herculeses.
This Hercules indeed, whose twelve mighty deeds they number — among which they do not include the slaying of Antaeus the African, because that matter pertains to another Hercules — they record in their own writings to have burned himself upon Mount Oeta, since with the very strength by which he had subdued so many things, he yet could not endure the disease with which he languished. At that time Busiris, either king or rather tyrant, used to sacrifice his own guests to his own gods; they say he was the son of Neptune by his mother Libya, daughter of Epaphus. But let it not be believed that Neptune committed this outrage, lest the gods be accused; rather let these things be ascribed to the poets and the theatres, that there may be a means of appeasing them.
Of Erichthonius, king of the Athenians, in whose last years Joshua son of Nun is found to have died, Vulcan and Minerva are said to have been the parents. But since they will have it that Minerva was a virgin, they say that in a struggle between the two, Vulcan, being aroused, poured out his seed upon the earth, and from the man thereby born, for that reason, such a name was given him. For in the Greek language 'eris' is strife, 'thon' is earth, and from these two the word Erichthonius is compounded.
But — as must be admitted — the more learned refute and repel these tales from their gods, saying that this fabulous opinion arose from the fact that in the temple of Vulcan and Minerva, which the two had as one at Athens, an exposed child was found wrapped in a serpent, which signified that he would be great; and, on account of the common temple, since his parents were unknown, he was said to be the son of Vulcan and Minerva. Yet the origin of his name is designated rather by that fable than by this history. But what is that to us? Let the one instruct religious men in truthful books; let the other delight impure demons in deceitful games — demons whom nevertheless those religious men worship as gods.
For those religious men worship these demons as gods, and although they deny these things about them, they cannot cleanse them from every crime, since at their demand they present games in which base things are enacted — the very things that are, as it were, wisely denied — and by these false and base things the gods are appeased; where, even if the fable sings a false crime of the deities, yet to be delighted by a false crime is a true crime. After the death of Joshua son of Nun, the people of God had judges, in whose times there alternated among them both the humiliations of hardships on account of their sins, and the prosperities of consolations on account of God's mercy. In these times fables were invented about Triptolemus — that, at Ceres' bidding, borne by winged serpents, he brought grain by flying to lands in need of it;
about the Minotaur — that it was a beast shut up in the Labyrinth, into which when men had entered they could not, by reason of the inextricable maze, find their way out; about the Centaurs — that in them the nature of horses and of men was joined; about Cerberus — that he was the three-headed dog of the lower world; about Phrixus and his sister Helle — that they flew borne by a ram; about the Gorgon — that she was maned with serpents and turned those who looked upon her into stones; about Bellerophon — that he was borne by a horse flying with wings, which horse was called Pegasus; about Amphion — that by the sweetness of his lyre he softened stones and drew them to himself; about the craftsman Daedalus and his son Icarus — that they flew with wings fitted to themselves;
about Oedipus — that he compelled a certain monster, which was called the Sphinx, four-footed with a human face, to perish by its own headlong fall when the seemingly insoluble riddle that it used to propose was solved by him; about Antaeus, whom Hercules slew — that he was a son of the earth, for which reason, when he fell to the ground, he was wont to rise up stronger; and any others that I may perchance have passed over. These fables, down to the Trojan war — where Marcus Varro ended his second book on the race of the Roman people — were, taking their occasion from histories which contain things truly done, so fashioned by the ingenuity of men that they were not fastened upon the deities as reproaches.
Furthermore, whoever invented that the most beautiful boy Ganymede was carried off by Jupiter for defilement — a crime which king Tantalus committed and the fable ascribed to Jupiter — or that he sought intercourse with Danae through a golden shower, where it is understood that the woman's chastity was corrupted by gold: whether these things which were done or feigned in those times were done by others and feigned of Jupiter, it cannot be told how great an evil they presumed upon the hearts of men, in that men could patiently endure such lies, which they nevertheless even gladly embraced. And surely the more devoutly they worshipped Jupiter, the more severely they ought to have punished those who dared to say such things of him.
But now, not only were they not angry with those who invented these things, but they feared rather to have the gods themselves angry unless they should perform such fictions even in the theatres. In these times Latona bore Apollo — not the one whose oracles we were speaking above of being wont to be consulted, but the one who served Admetus along with Hercules; who nevertheless was so believed to be a god that most, and almost all, suppose that there was one and the same Apollo. Then also Father Liber made war in India; he had many women in his army, who were called Bacchae, noble not so much for valor as for frenzy. Some indeed even write that this Liber was both conquered and bound; and some that he was even slain in battle by Perseus, nor are they silent about where he was buried.
And yet under his name, as though he were a god, through unclean demons Bacchanalian rites — or rather sacrileges — were instituted, of whose raving foulness the senate, after so many years, was so ashamed that it forbade them to exist in the city of Rome. In those times Perseus and his wife Andromeda, after they had died, were believed to have been so received into heaven that men were not ashamed, nor afraid, to designate their images with stars and to call them by their names.
During the same interval of time there arose poets who were also called theologians, because they composed songs about the gods — but about such gods as, although great men, were nevertheless men, or are elements of this world which the true God made, or were ordained among the principalities and powers according to the will of the Creator and their own merits; and if they sang anything about the one true God amid much that was worthless and false, yet by worshipping others along with him — others that are not gods — and by rendering to them the service that is owed to God alone, they did not truly serve him rightly, nor could they themselves refrain from the fabulous disgrace of their own gods: Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus. But these theologians worshipped the gods; they were not themselves worshipped as gods.
although the city of the impious is somehow wont to set Orpheus over the infernal rites — or rather sacrileges. But the wife of king Athamas, who was called Ino, and her son Melicertes perished by a voluntary plunge into the sea, and by the opinion of men were reckoned among the gods, just as other men of those times, Castor and Pollux. That mother of Melicertes the Greeks called Leucothea, the Latins Matuta, both nevertheless supposing her a goddess. In those times the kingdom of the Argives came to an end, being transferred to Mycenae, whence came Agamemnon; and the kingdom of the Laurentes arose, where Picus, son of Saturn, first received the kingdom, while among the Hebrews a woman, Deborah, was judging — but through her the Spirit of God was doing this;
for she was even a prophetess, whose prophecy is less clear than that we could show, without a lengthy exposition, that it was uttered concerning Christ. Now then the Laurentes were already reigning, indeed in Italy, from whom, after the Greeks, the more evident origin of Rome is derived; and yet the Assyrian kingdom still remained, where there was the twenty-third king Lampares, when Picus had begun to be the first of the Laurentes. As for Saturn, the father of this Picus, let the worshippers of such gods see what they think of him, who deny that he was a man — of whom others also have written that he reigned in Italy before his son Picus, and Virgil says in his well-known verses:
'He it was who gathered together a race untamed and scattered over the high mountains, and gave them laws, and chose that it be called Latium, since in these shores he had lain hidden in safety. The golden ages which they tell of were under that king.' But let them suppose these to be poetic fictions, and let them rather assert that the father of Picus was Sterces, by whom, a most skilled farmer, it is said the practice was discovered of making fields fruitful with the dung of animals, which from his name was called stercus (dung); some report that he was called Stercutius. Yet for whatever reason they chose to call him Saturn, certainly they made this Sterces or Stercutius a god deservedly for agriculture. Picus likewise, his son, they received into the number of such gods, whom they assert to have been a distinguished augur and warrior.
Picus begot Faunus, the second king of the Laurentes; he too is, or was, a god to them. These men, before the Trojan war, they conferred divine honors upon, though they were dead men. But when Troy was overthrown by that destruction sung of everywhere and most well known to boys — which both by its own magnitude and by the excellent tongues of writers has been notably spread abroad and made common, and was accomplished when Latinus son of Faunus was already reigning, from whom the kingdom began to be called that of the Latins and that of the Laurentes ceased — the victorious Greeks, leaving Troy destroyed and returning to their own homes, were torn apart and crushed by various and horrible disasters; and yet even from among these they increased the number of their gods.
For they made even Diomedes a god, whom they report never returned to his own people because of a punishment divinely inflicted; and they confirm — not by a fabulous and poetic lie, but by historical attestation — that his companions were turned into birds; whom, as they suppose, he could not, even after being made a god, recall to human nature, either himself, or at least obtain it as a new-comer among the celestials from Jupiter his king. Nay more, they say that there is a temple of his on the island of Diomedea, not far from Mount Garganus, which is in Apulia, and that these birds fly about this temple and dwell there with so wonderful an obeisance that they fill their beaks with water and sprinkle it; and if Greeks come there, or those sprung from Greek stock, they are not only quiet but even, besides, fawn upon them;
but if they see foreigners, they fly up at their heads and wound them with such heavy blows that they even kill them. For with hard and large beaks they are said to be sufficiently armed for these combats. Varro, to establish this, mentions other things no less incredible about that most notorious sorceress Circe, who also changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts, and about the Arcadians who, chosen by lot, would swim across a certain pool and there be turned into wolves and live with similar wild beasts through the deserts of that region. But if they did not feed on human flesh, then after nine years, by swimming back across the same pool, they were reformed into men.
Finally he even expressed by name a certain Demaenetus, who tasted of the sacrifice which the Arcadians were wont to make to their god Lycaeus by immolating a boy, and was changed into a wolf, and in the tenth year was restored to his own shape, practised boxing, and won in the Olympic contest. Nor does the same historian think that such a name was attached in Arcadia to Pan Lycaeus and Jupiter Lycaeus for any other reason than on account of this transformation of men into wolves, since they thought it could not happen except by divine power. For 'wolf' in Greek is called lykos, whence the name Lycaeus appears to be derived by inflection. He says that the Roman Luperci also arose from a kind of seed, as it were, of those mysteries.
But as to this so great mockery of the demons, perhaps those who shall read these things await what we may say. And what shall we say, except that we must flee out of the midst of Babylon? This prophetic precept is understood spiritually in this way: that by the steps of faith, which works through love, we should flee toward the living God by advancing away from the city of this world, which is assuredly a society of impious angels and men. For the greater we see the power of demons to be in these lowest things, the more tenaciously must we cling to the Mediator, through whom we ascend from the lowest to the highest. For if we should say that these things are not to be believed, there are not lacking even now those who assert that they have heard, or even themselves experienced, certain things of this kind as most certain.
For we too, when we were in Italy, used to hear such things about a certain region of those parts, where they said that women who kept inns, steeped in these evil arts, were wont to give something in cheese to travellers whom they wished, or were able, so to affect, whereby they were straightway turned into beasts of burden and carried whatever necessary loads, and after the tasks were done returned again to themselves; nor yet was their mind made bestial in them, but a rational and human mind was preserved — just as Apuleius, in the books which he entitled 'The Golden Ass,' either related or feigned to have happened to himself, that upon taking poison, while his human mind remained, he became an ass. These things are either false, or so unusual that they are with reason not believed.
Yet it is to be most firmly believed that Almighty God can do all things that He wills, whether in punishing or in bestowing; and that the demons work nothing according to the power of their own nature (for that nature too is an angelic creature, although by its own fault it is malignant) except what He shall have permitted, whose judgments are many hidden, none unjust. Nor indeed do the demons create natures, if they do any such thing as those deeds are about which this question turns; but only in appearance do they alter what has been created by the true God, so that things may seem to be what they are not.
I would therefore in no way believe that not only the mind, but not even the body, can by any means, by the art or power of the demons, be truly changed into the limbs and features of a beast; but that the phantasm of a man — which even in thinking or dreaming is varied through innumerable kinds of things and, though it is not a body, yet takes on shapes resembling bodies with wonderful swiftness — can, when the bodily senses of the man are lulled or oppressed, be brought forth, in a bodily form, to the perception of others by some ineffable manner I know not; so that the very bodies of the men lie somewhere, living indeed, but with their senses locked far more heavily and violently than in sleep;
while that phantasm, as it were made corporeal in the likeness of some animal, appears to the senses of others, and the man may even seem such to himself, just as one might seem such to oneself in dreams, and may carry loads — which loads, if they are true bodies, are carried by the demons, that men may be mocked, seeing in part the true bodies of the loads, in part the false bodies of the beasts of burden. For a certain man by the name of Praestantius reported that this had befallen his own father: that he took that poison in cheese in his own house and lay on his bed as though sleeping, who nevertheless could by no means be roused.
But after some days he said that his father had, as it were, awakened and had, as it were, narrated as dreams the things he had suffered: namely that he had been made a horse and, among other beasts of burden, had carried grain-provisions for the soldiers, provisions which are called Rhaetic, because they are transported to Rhaetia. And it was ascertained that this had happened just as he related; which nevertheless seemed to him to be his own dreams. Another also reported that at his own house, during the night, before he went to rest, he had seen a certain philosopher, very well known to him, coming to him and expounding to him some points of Plato which, when previously asked, he had refused to expound. And when it was asked of this same philosopher why he had done in the other's house what he had refused when asked in his own house:
'I did not do it,' he said, 'but I dreamed that I did it.' And by this, there was exhibited to one man, waking, through a phantasmal image, what the other saw in dreams. These things came to us not from any chance persons, such as we should think it unworthy to believe, but reported by those whom we would not suppose to have lied to us. Accordingly, as to what men are said — and it has been committed to writing — to be wont to be turned into wolves by the gods, or rather demons, of the Arcadians, and that by her incantations Circe changed the companions of Ulysses, it seems to me that it could have been done after that manner which I have described, if indeed it was done at all.
But as for the Diomedean birds, since indeed their species is said to endure through the succession of offspring, I believe that they were not made from changed men, but were substituted when the men had been secretly withdrawn — just as a hind was substituted for Iphigenia, the daughter of king Agamemnon. Nor indeed could tricks of this kind have been difficult for the demons when permitted by the judgment of God; but because that maiden was afterward found alive, it was easily recognized that a hind had been substituted for her. But the companions of Diomedes, because they nowhere suddenly appeared and afterward appeared in no place — the evil avenging angels destroying them — are believed to have been turned into those birds which were secretly substituted for them, brought from other places where this kind of bird exists, to those places, and suddenly put in their stead.
But that they bring water in their beaks to the temple of Diomedes and sprinkle it, and that they fawn upon those of Greek birth and persecute foreigners, it is not to be wondered at that this is done by the instigation of the demons, whose interest it is to persuade men that Diomedes has been made a god, in order to deceive men, so that they may worship many false gods to the injury of the true God, and may render service — with temples, altars, sacrifices, and priests, all of which, when they are right, are owed to none but the one living and true God — to dead men who, even while they lived, did not truly live.
At that time, after Troy had been captured and destroyed, Aeneas came into Italy with twenty ships, in which were carried the remnants of the Trojans, while Latinus was reigning there, and among the Athenians Menestheus, among the Sicyonians Polyphides, among the Assyrians Tautanes, but among the Hebrews Labdon was judge. And when Latinus had died, Aeneas reigned three years, the same kings remaining in the above-said places, except that among the Sicyonians it was now Pelasgus, and the judge of the Hebrews was Samson; who, since he was marvellously strong, was thought to be Hercules. But because Aeneas, when he died, did not appear, the Latins made him a god for themselves. The Sabines also enrolled among the gods their first king Sancus, or, as some call him, Sanctus.
Around this same time Codrus, king of the Athenians, exposed himself unrecognized to the Peloponnesians, the enemies of that same city, to be killed; and so it came about. In this way they proclaim that he liberated his fatherland. For the Peloponnesians had received an oracle that they would prevail only then, if they had not slain the king of the Athenians. He therefore deceived them by appearing in the garb of a poor man and by provoking his own death through a quarrel. Whence Virgil says: 'And the brawls of Codrus.' And this man the Athenians honored, as though a god, with the tribute of sacrifices.
In the reign of Silvius, the fourth king of the Latins—the son of Aeneas, not by Creusa, from whom came Ascanius who reigned there as the third king, but by Lavinia the daughter of Latinus, whom Aeneas is said to have had as a posthumous son—and in the twenty-ninth reign of the Assyrians under Oneus, and the sixteenth of the Athenians under Melanthus, and while Eli the priest was judge of the Hebrews, the kingdom of the Sicyonians came to an end, which is reported to have been extended over nine hundred and fifty-nine years. [XX] Soon, while these same kings were reigning over the places mentioned, the kingdom of the Israelites, the time of the judges being ended, took its beginning from king Saul, in whose time Samuel was prophet. From that time, then, these kings of the Latins began to be, whom they surnamed the Silvii;
for from him who was called the first Silvius, the son of Aeneas, to the rest who followed, both their own proper names were bestowed and this surname was not lacking; just as long afterward those who succeeded Caesar Augustus were surnamed Caesars. But Saul being rejected, so that none of his stock should reign, and he being dead, David succeeded to the kingdom forty years after the beginning of Saul's rule. Then the Athenians, after the death of Codrus, ceased thereafter to have kings and began to have magistrates for administering the commonwealth. After David, who himself also reigned forty years, his son Solomon was king of the Israelites, who built that most renowned temple of God at Jerusalem.
In his time Alba was founded among the Latins, from which thenceforth the kings began to be called not kings of the Latins but of the Albans, though still within the same Latium. To Solomon succeeded his son Rehoboam, under whom that people was divided into two kingdoms, and each part began to have its own several kings. [XXI] After Aeneas, whom they made a god, Latium had eleven kings, of whom none was made a god. But Aventinus, who follows Aeneas in the twelfth place, when he had been laid low in war and buried on that hill which even now is called by his name, was added to the number of such gods as they made for themselves. Yet others were unwilling to record that he was slain in battle, but said that he had disappeared;
and that the hill was named not from his name, but called Aventine from the coming of the birds (aves). After him no god was made in Latium except Romulus the founder of Rome. But between this one and that one two kings are found, of whom the first is—to speak of him in Virgil's verse—'Next comes that Procas, the glory of the Trojan race.' In his time, because Rome was now in a manner being brought to birth, that greatest of all kingdoms, the Assyrian, received the end of so great a duration. For it was transferred to the Medes after nearly one thousand three hundred and five years, if we reckon also the times of Belus, who begot Ninus and was there the first king, content with a small dominion. But Procas reigned before Amulius.
Now Amulius had made Rhea by name—also called Ilia—the daughter of his brother Numitor and the mother of Romulus, a Vestal virgin. They will have it that she conceived twins by Mars, in this way honoring or excusing her defilement, and adducing as proof that a she-wolf suckled the exposed infants. For they suppose this kind of beast to pertain to Mars, so that, forsooth, the she-wolf is believed to have offered her teats to the little ones because she recognized the sons of her lord Mars;
although there are those who say that, when the exposed infants lay wailing, they were first gathered up by some harlot and sucked her breasts first (for they used to call harlots she-wolves—lupae—whence even now their shameful places are called lupanaria, brothels), and that afterward they came to the shepherd Faustulus and were reared by his wife Acca. Yet if, to convict a man—a king—who had cruelly ordered them to be cast into the water, God willed to succor those infants (through whom so great a city was to be founded), when they had been divinely delivered from the water by means of a suckling beast, what wonder is there? To Amulius succeeded in the Latin kingdom his brother Numitor, the grandfather of Romulus; and in the first year of this Numitor Rome was founded;
and thus he reigned thenceforth together with his grandson, that is, Romulus. [XXII] Not to delay long, the city of Rome was founded as a kind of second Babylon and, as it were, the daughter of the former Babylon, through which it pleased God to subdue the whole world and, having brought it into one fellowship of commonwealth and laws, to pacify it far and wide. For there were now peoples strong and mighty, nations trained in arms, who would not easily yield, and who had to be overcome with immense perils and no small devastation on both sides and dreadful toil.
For when the kingdom of the Assyrians subjugated almost all Asia, although it was accomplished by warfare, yet it could not be done by very harsh and difficult wars, because the nations were as yet untrained to resist, nor so many or so great, seeing that after that greatest and universal flood, when only eight men escaped in Noah's ark, not much more than a thousand years had passed when Ninus subjugated all Asia except India. But Rome did not subdue with such speed and ease so many nations, both of the East and of the West, which we behold made subject to the Roman empire, since, growing gradually, it found them, whithersoever it spread, robust and warlike.
At the time, therefore, when Rome was founded, the people of Israel had been in the land of promise seven hundred and eighteen years. Of these, twenty-seven pertain to Joshua the son of Nun, then three hundred and twenty-nine to the time of the judges. And from the time when kings began to be there, the years were three hundred and sixty-two. And there was then king in Judah, whose name was Ahaz—or, as others reckon, Hezekiah who succeeded him, who indeed is agreed to have reigned in the times of Romulus as a most excellent and most pious king. But in that part of the Hebrew people which was called Israel, Hoshea had begun to reign. [XXIII] At the same time some report that the Erythraean Sibyl prophesied. But Varro records that there were several Sibyls, not one.
This Erythraean Sibyl certainly wrote down certain manifest things concerning Christ; which we too formerly read in the Latin tongue in verses that were poor Latin and did not scan, through the unskillfulness of some translator or other, as we afterward learned. For that most distinguished man Flaccianus, who was also proconsul, a man of most ready eloquence and much learning, when we were conversing about Christ, brought out to us a Greek codex, saying that they were the verses of the Erythraean Sibyl, where he showed that in a certain passage the initial letters of the verses had this order of letters, so that these words might be read therein: 'Iesous Chreistos Theou Yios Soter,' which is in Latin 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.'