In this controversy let the Greeks and the Romans contend. The Greeks think they rightly honor the scenic men, because they worship the gods who demand the scenic games; but the Romans do not allow scenic men to dishonor even a plebeian tribe, much less the senatorial curia. In this dispute a reasoning of this sort settles the sum of the question. The Greeks propose: If such gods are to be worshiped, then assuredly such men also are to be honored. The Romans assume: But by no means are such men to be honored. The Christians conclude: By no means, therefore, are such gods to be worshiped.
[XIV] Next we ask: those very poets, the composers of such fables, who by the law of the Twelve Tables are forbidden to injure the reputation of citizens, why, when they hurl such shameful abuse against the gods, are they not accounted as disreputable as stage-actors? By what reasoning is it right that the performers of these poetic fictions about the ignominious gods should be branded with infamy, while the authors are honoured? Or is the palm rather to be given to the Greek Plato, who, when he was framing by reason what sort a commonwealth ought to be, judged that the poets should be driven from the city as enemies of the truth? He indeed both took ill the insults done to the gods, and would not have the minds of the citizens counterfeited and corrupted by such fictions.
Now compare Plato's humanity, which banishes the poets from the city lest they deceive the citizens, with the divinity of the gods, which demanded stage-plays in its own honour. Plato, though he did not persuade by argument that such things should not even be written, yet counselled it against the levity and wantonness of the Greeks; but these gods, that such things should even be acted, wrung it by command from the gravity and modesty of the Romans. Nor did they merely wish these things to be performed, but to be dedicated to themselves, consecrated to themselves, solemnly displayed to themselves. To whom, then, might the city more honourably decree divine honours? To Plato, who forbade these base and unspeakable things, or to the demons who delight in this deception of men, whom Plato could not persuade of the truth?
This Plato Labeo thought worthy to be reckoned among the demigods, like Hercules, like Romulus. Now he sets demigods above heroes, but places both among the divine powers. Yet for my part I do not doubt that this man, whom he calls a demigod, should be preferred not only to the heroes but even to the gods themselves. Moreover the laws of the Romans come near to Plato's discourses, since he condemns all poetic fictions outright, while they at least take from the poets the licence of speaking evil against men; he removes the poets from dwelling in the city itself, they at least remove the actors of poetic fables from the fellowship of the state; and if they had dared anything against the gods who demand stage-plays, they would perhaps have removed them from every quarter.
By no means, therefore, could the Romans receive or hope from their gods laws for establishing good morals or correcting bad ones—those gods whom by their own laws they surpass and convict. For the gods demand stage-plays in their own honour, while the Romans repel stage-players from all honours; the gods command the disgraces of the gods to be celebrated for them in poetic fictions, while the Romans restrain the shamelessness of the poets from the disgraces of men. But that demigod Plato both withstood the lust of such gods, and showed what ought to be brought to perfection out of the disposition of the Romans, for he refused altogether that the poets—who either lie at their own whim or set before wretched men the basest deeds of the gods as though to be imitated—should live in a well-ordered city.
We indeed hold Plato to be neither a god nor a demigod, nor do we compare him to any holy angel of the most high God, nor to any truthful prophet, nor to any apostle, nor to any martyr of Christ, nor to any Christian man; and the reasoning of this our judgment shall be set forth in its own place, God prospering us. Yet since they themselves are willing that he was a demigod, we judge that he ought to be preferred—if not to Romulus and Hercules (although no historian or poet has said or feigned that Plato slew a brother or committed any crime), then certainly to Priapus, or to some Dog-headed god, or lastly to Fever, whom the Romans partly received as foreign deities, partly consecrated as their own.
How, then, could such gods, by good precepts and laws, either forbid so great evils of soul and morals when threatening, or care to root out those that were implanted—gods who even took care to sow and increase disgraceful deeds, desiring that such things, whether their own or as though their own, should be made known to the peoples through theatrical festivities, so that human lust, most wicked, might of its own accord be kindled as though by divine authority—Cicero crying out against this in vain, who, when he was treating of the poets, said:
"When to these," he says, "there is added the shout and approval of the people as of some great and wise master, what darkness do they spread abroad, what fears do they bring in, what lusts do they inflame!" [XV] But what reasoning—or rather, what flattery—is there in the choosing of the gods to be honoured, even of those false ones themselves? For this Plato, whom they wish to be a demigod, labouring with such great disputations lest human morals be corrupted by the evils of the soul, which are chiefly to be guarded against, they thought worthy of no little sacred shrine, and preferred their own Romulus to many gods, although their more secret doctrine commends even him as a demigod rather than a god.
For they even appointed a flamen for him, which kind of priesthood so excelled in Roman religion—as the apex on the cap bears witness—that they had only three flamens appointed for three deities: the Dial flamen for Jupiter, the Martial for Mars, the Quirinal for Romulus. For by the goodwill of the citizens Romulus, as though received into heaven, was afterwards named Quirinus. And by this honour Romulus was preferred to Neptune and Pluto, the brothers of Jupiter, and to Saturn himself, their father, so that they assigned to him also this priesthood which they had bestowed on Jupiter as something great, and to Mars as though his father, perhaps on his account.
[XVI] But if the Romans could have received laws of living from their gods, they would not, some years after the founding of Rome, have borrowed from the Athenians the laws of Solon—which nevertheless they did not keep as they received them, but tried to make better and more amended; although Lycurgus pretended that he had established laws for the Lacedaemonians on the authority of Apollo, a thing which the Romans prudently refused to believe, and therefore did not receive their laws from that source. Numa Pompilius, who succeeded Romulus in the kingdom, is said to have framed certain laws, which indeed were by no means sufficient for governing the state, and he also established for them many religious rites; yet he is not reported to have received those laws from the divine powers.
Therefore the evils of the soul, the evils of life, the evils of morals, which are so great that even while cities stand their most learned men affirm that the commonwealths perish by them—these their gods took no care at all to prevent from befalling their worshippers; nay rather, as was argued above, they took every care that they should be increased. [XVII] Or was it perhaps that laws were not established for the Roman people by the divine powers because, as Sallust says, "right and goodness prevailed among them not more by laws than by nature"? From this right and goodness, I suppose, the Sabine women were carried off. For what is more just and better than that other men's daughters, lured by the fraud of a spectacle, should not be received from their parents, but be seized by force, as each man was able?
For if the Sabines did wrong in refusing their daughters when asked, how much more wrong was it to seize them when not given! A juster war could have been waged against that people who had refused their daughters, when sought in marriage by their neighbours and borderers, than against those who demanded back the women that had been carried off. That war, therefore, ought rather to have been fought; there let Mars have helped his son as he fought, so that by arms he might avenge the wrong of the refused marriages, and thus attain to the women he had desired. For by some right of war, perhaps, the victor might justly have carried off those unjustly refused; but by no right of peace did he seize those not given, and he waged an unjust war against their parents, who were justly angry.
This, to be sure, turned out more usefully and happily, in that, although the spectacle of the circus games remained as a memorial of that fraud, yet the example of the crime found no favour in that city and empire; and the Romans erred more readily in this—that after that iniquity they consecrated Romulus as a god for themselves—than that they should have permitted, by any law or custom, that his deed in carrying off the women be imitated.
From this right and goodness, after King Tarquinius had been expelled with his children—whose son had violently oppressed Lucretia with rape—the consul Junius Brutus compelled Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, the husband of that same Lucretia, his own colleague, a good and innocent man, to resign his magistracy on account of his name and kinship with the Tarquinii, and did not permit him to live in the city. This crime he committed with the people favouring or suffering it—that people from whom this same Collatinus, like Brutus himself, had received the consulship.
From this right and goodness, Marcus Camillus, an outstanding man of that age, who most easily overcame the Veientes, the most grievous enemies of the Roman people, after a ten years' war in which the Roman army, so often fighting badly, was gravely afflicted, when Rome itself was now doubting and trembling for its safety, and captured their most opulent city—by the envy of the detractors of his valour and the insolence of the tribunes of the plebs was made a defendant, and found the city as ungrateful as he had delivered it, so that, most certain of his own condemnation, he departed of his own accord into exile, and was even condemned in his absence to ten thousand asses—soon to be again the avenger of his ungrateful fatherland against the Gauls.
It now wearies me to recount the many foul and unjust things by which that city was agitated, when the powerful strove to subject the plebs to themselves and the plebs refused to be subjected to them, and the defenders of each party acted more from partisanship, out of a love of winning, than they took thought for anything equitable and good. [XVIII] And so I will keep a limit, and rather bring forward Sallust himself as a witness, who, when in praise of the Romans he had said—whence this discourse of ours arose—"Right and goodness prevailed among them not by laws..."
"...more than by nature prevailed," proclaiming that time in which, the kings being expelled, the city grew incredibly much in a short span of years—yet that same Sallust, in the first book of his history and in its very opening, confesses that even then, when the commonwealth had been transferred from the kings to the consuls, after a short interval there were injuries by the more powerful, and on account of them a secession of the plebs from the fathers, and other dissensions in the City.
For when he had recorded that the Roman people acted with the best morals and the greatest concord between the second and the last Punic war, and had said that the cause of this good was not the love of justice but, while Carthage still stood, the fear of an unfaithful peace—whence that famous Nasica did not wish Carthage to be overthrown, in order to repress wickedness and to preserve those best morals, so that by fear the vices might be checked—that same Sallust immediately subjoined and said: "But discord and avarice and ambition and the other evils wont to arise in prosperity were most of all increased after the destruction of Carthage," so that we might understand that even before they were both wont to arise and to be increased.
Whence, adding why he had said this, he says: "For the injuries of the more powerful, and on account of them the secession of the plebs from the fathers, and other dissensions, had existed at home even from the very beginning; nor was affairs conducted with equitable and moderate right any longer than while, the kings being driven out, the fear from Tarquinius and the grievous war with Etruria lasted." You see in what manner even in that brief time, when the kings had been driven out—that is, cast forth—matters were conducted for a while with somewhat equitable and moderate right; he said fear was the cause, since war was feared, which King Tarquinius, driven from his kingdom and city and allied with the Etruscans, was waging against the Romans. Mark therefore what he weaves in next:
"Thereafter," he says, "the fathers began to treat the plebs with servile domination, to decide over their life and back after the manner of kings, to drive them from their land, and, all others being excluded, to hold sway alone in government. The plebs, oppressed by these cruelties and above all by usury, when amid continual wars it endured at once tribute and military service, took up arms and occupied the Sacred Mount and the Aventine, and then procured for themselves the tribunes of the plebs and other rights. The end of the discords and struggle on both sides was the Second Punic War." You discern from what time—that is, a short interval after the kings were driven out—what sort of men the Romans were, of whom he says:
"Right and goodness prevailed among them not more by laws than by nature." Further, 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, are we to think or judge must be said of the succeeding age, when, "gradually changed," to use the words of the same historian, "from most beautiful and best it became worst and most disgraceful," namely after the destruction of Carthage, as he recorded? How Sallust himself briefly recalls and describes those times may be read in his history;
how great were the evils of morals which arose in prosperity, and how he shows that they came at last even to the civil wars. "From which time," as he says, "the morals of the ancestors were hurled down headlong, not gradually as before, but like a torrent; to such a degree was the youth corrupted by luxury and avarice, that it might rightly be said that men had been born who could neither keep their own family estates nor suffer others to keep theirs." Sallust then says more about the vices of Sulla and the rest of the foulness of the commonwealth, and other writers agree in these things, though with far inferior eloquence. Yet you discern, I suppose, and whoever attends to it most easily perceives, into what a sink of the worst morals that city had sunk 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 was born of the Virgin. Since, then, they do not dare to impute to their gods the so many and so great evils of those times—the more tolerable ones above, and, after Carthage was overthrown, the intolerable and horrible ones—those gods who by malignant cunning inserted into human minds the opinions from which such vices grew rank:
why do they impute present evils to Christ, who by his most wholesome teaching forbids the false and deceitful gods to be worshipped, and, detesting and condemning by divine authority these harmful and disgraceful lusts of men, everywhere gradually withdraws his own household from a world wasting and slipping away with these evils, that he may found an everlasting City, most glorious not by the applause of vanity but by the judgment of truth? [XIX] 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—"gradually changed from most beautiful and best into worst and most disgraceful."
Behold, before the coming of Christ, after Carthage had been destroyed, "the morals of the ancestors were hurled down headlong, not gradually as before, but like a torrent; to such a degree was the youth corrupted by luxury and avarice." Let them read to us the precepts of their gods given to the Roman people against luxury and avarice; would that they had only kept silent about things chaste and modest, and had not also demanded from that people things shameful and ignominious, by which, through a false divinity, they procured a pernicious authority.
Let them read our writings—both through the prophets, and through the holy Gospel, and through the acts of the apostles, and through the epistles—so many things against avarice and luxury, everywhere proclaimed to the peoples gathered for this purpose: how excellently, how divinely, not clamouring as from the contentions of philosophers, but thundering as from oracles and from the clouds of God! And yet the commonwealth, made worst and most disgraceful by luxury and avarice and by savage and shameful morals before the coming of Christ, they do not impute to their gods; but its affliction, whatever their pride and delights have suffered in this present time, they blame upon the Christian religion.
If the kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and virgins, old men with the young, every age capable and both sexes, and those whom John the Baptist addresses—the very tax-collectors and soldiers—would together hear and heed his precepts concerning just and upright morals, then the commonwealth would adorn the lands of the present life with its own felicity, and would most blessedly ascend the summit of eternal life, there to reign. But because one hears while another despises, and more are friendlier to vices that basely flatter than to the useful austerity of the virtues:
the servants of Christ are commanded to tolerate—whether they be kings or princes or judges, whether soldiers or provincials, whether rich or poor, whether free or slaves, of either sex—even a most wicked and most disgraceful commonwealth, if it be so necessary, and by this very toleration to procure for themselves a most illustrious place in that most holy and most august court of the angels and in the heavenly commonwealth, where the will of God is law. [XX] But such worshippers and lovers of those gods, whose imitators too in crimes and disgraceful deeds they rejoice to be, in no way care that the commonwealth be not most wicked and most disgraceful.
"Only let it stand," they say, "only let it flourish, packed with riches, glorious in victories, or—what is happier—let it be secure in peace. And what is that to us? Nay, this rather concerns us: that each man increase his riches ever more, to supply for his daily lavishments, whereby the more powerful may subject to himself even the weaker. Let the poor obey the rich for the sake of their bellies and to enjoy, under their patronage, a quiet idleness; let the rich abuse the poor for their retinues and for the service of their pride. Let the peoples applaud not those who counsel their interests, but those who bestow pleasures. Let no hard things be commanded, no impure things forbidden. Let kings care not how good, but how submissive, are those they rule.
Let the provinces serve their kings not as guardians of morals, but as lords of their possessions and providers of their delights; and let them honour them not sincerely, but wickedly and slavishly fear them. Let the laws attend 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 harmful to another's property, house, safety, or to any unwilling person; but for the rest, let each man do what he pleases with his own, or with his own people, or with any who are willing. Let public harlots abound, either for all who wish to enjoy them, or especially for those who cannot keep private ones.
Let most spacious and most ornate houses be built, let sumptuous banquets be frequented, where, as each man pleases and is able, let there be gaming day and night, drinking, vomiting, dissipation. Let dances resound everywhere, let the theatres seethe with the shouts of shameful merriment and with every kind of pleasure, whether most cruel or most base. Let him be reckoned a public enemy who is displeased by this felicity; whoever tries to change or take it away, let the free multitude turn him away from their ears, overturn him from his seat, take him away from the living. Let those be held true gods who have procured this felicity for the peoples to attain, and having attained it have preserved it. Let them be worshipped as they will, let them demand what games they will, which they may hold with their worshippers or from among them:
only let them bring it about that no threat be feared from enemy, from plague, or from any calamity to such felicity." Who in his right mind would compare this commonwealth, I will not say to the Roman empire, but to the house of Sardanapalus?—who once was a king so given over to pleasures that he had it inscribed on his tomb that he possessed in death only those things which his lust, even while he lived, had consumed by devouring. If these men had such a king, indulgent to them in such things and opposing no one in them with any severity, they would more gladly consecrate to him a temple and a flamen than the old Romans did to Romulus.
[XXI] But if he is despised who called the Roman commonwealth worst and most disgraceful, and these men care not with how great a stain and dishonour of the worst and most disgraceful morals it is filled, but only that it stand and endure: let them hear that it became, not, as Sallust relates, worst and most disgraceful, but, as Cicero argues, that even then it had utterly perished and that no commonwealth at all remained. For he brings in Scipio—that very man who had extinguished Carthage—disputing about the commonwealth, at a time when there was a foreboding that, through the corruption which Sallust describes, it was on the very point of perishing. Indeed the discussion is held at that time when one of the Gracchi had already been slain, from whom Sallust writes that grave 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, "as in stringed instruments or flutes, and in the very singing and voices, a certain harmony must be maintained out of distinct sounds, which harmony, if changed or discordant, trained ears cannot bear, and this harmony, out of the modulation of most dissimilar voices, is nevertheless rendered concordant and fitting:
so, out of the highest and lowest and middle orders set between, as out of sounds, the city sounds together in tune by a moderated proportion through the consent of the most dissimilar elements; and what is called harmony by musicians in singing, that in the city is concord, the tightest and best bond of safety in every commonwealth, and by no means can it exist without justice"—and then, when he had discoursed somewhat more broadly and richly on how much justice profited a city and how much it harmed it if it were absent, Philus, one of those who were present at the discussion, took it up and demanded that this very question be treated more diligently and that more be said about justice, on account of that which was already commonly said, that the commonwealth cannot be governed without injustice.
Scipio agreed that this question should accordingly be discussed and unravelled, and answered that he thought nothing had yet been said about the commonwealth by which they could proceed further, unless it were established not only that it was false that a commonwealth cannot exist without injustice, but that it was most true that a commonwealth cannot be governed without the highest justice. And since the unfolding of this question was deferred to the following day, in the third book the matter was carried on with great conflict.
For Philus himself took up the argument of those who held that the commonwealth cannot be conducted without injustice, chiefly clearing himself lest he be believed to hold this himself, and diligently pleaded for injustice against justice, trying, as it were, to show by plausible reasonings and examples that the former was useful to the commonwealth, the latter useless. Then Laelius, at the request of all, undertook to defend justice, and asserted, as much as he could, that nothing was so hostile as injustice to a city, and that a commonwealth could by no means be conducted or stand except by great justice.
This question having been treated as far as seemed sufficient, Scipio returns to the matters he had interrupted, and recalls and commends his own brief definition of the commonwealth, whereby he had said that it is the concern of the people. But he determines that the people is not every gathering of a multitude, but a gathering associated by a common agreement as to right and by a community of interest. He then teaches how great is the usefulness of a definition in disputing, and from those definitions of his gathers that there is then a commonwealth—that is, the concern of the people—when it is conducted well and justly, whether by one king, or by a few nobles, or by the whole people.
But when the king is unjust, whom he called a tyrant after the Greek manner, or the nobles are unjust, whose agreement he said to be a faction, or the people itself is unjust, for which he found no customary name unless he should call it too a tyrant: then the commonwealth is not merely vicious, as had been argued the day before, but, as the reasoning connected from those definitions had taught, it is no commonwealth at all, since it would not be the concern of the people, when a tyrant or a faction seized it; nor would the people itself any longer be a people, if it were unjust, since it would not be a multitude associated by a common agreement as to right and by a community of interest, as the people had been defined.
When, therefore, the Roman commonwealth was such as Sallust describes it, no longer worst and most disgraceful, as he himself says, but, according to this reasoning, no commonwealth at all, as the discussion about the commonwealth held among its great leaders of that time made plain. So too Tullius himself, speaking not in the words of Scipio nor of any other but in his own, at the beginning of the fifth book, having first recalled the verse of the poet Ennius, in which he had said, "On ancient morals and men the Roman state stands firm." Which verse, indeed, he says, whether for its brevity or its truth, seems to me to have been uttered as though from some oracle.
For neither could the men, unless the city had been so charactered, nor the morals, unless these men had presided, have either founded or so long maintained a commonwealth so great and ruling so vastly far and wide. And so, before our own memory, the ancestral custom itself supplied outstanding men, and excellent men retained the ancient custom and the institutions of their forefathers. But our age, having received the commonwealth like an excellent picture, though fading with age, not only neglected to renew it with the same colours it had had, but did not even take care to preserve at least its form and, as it were, its outermost lineaments.
For what remains of those ancient morals by which that man said the Roman state stood firm? We see them so worn away by oblivion that not only are they not practised, but they are by now unknown. And what shall I say of the men themselves? For those very morals perished through a scarcity of men, and for so great an evil we must not only render an account, but, as though we were defendants on a capital charge, we must in a manner plead our cause. For it is by our own vices, and not by any chance, that we retain the commonwealth in word only, while in very fact we have long since lost it. These things Cicero confessed, indeed long after the death of Africanus, whom in his books he represented as debating concerning the commonwealth, yet still before the coming of Christ;