When I turn the matter over in my mind and recall to remembrance the memory of Octavius, my good and most faithful companion, so great a sweetness and affection for the man clings to me that I seem in some way to return into the past, and not merely to recall by memory things that are already finished and run their course. Thus, however much the sight of him has been withdrawn from my eyes, by just so much has it been entwined within my heart and almost in my inmost feelings. Not without cause did that excellent and holy man, in departing, leave behind in us a boundless longing for himself, since he too always burned with such great love for us that, both in jest and in earnest, he was of one will with me, desiring or refusing the very same things: you would have believed that a single mind had been divided between two men. Thus he alone was my confidant in my loves, and he himself my partner in my errors;
and when, the mist being dispelled, I emerged from the depths of darkness into the light of wisdom and truth, he did not refuse to be my companion, but—what is more glorious—he ran ahead. Therefore, while my thoughts ranged over the whole span of our intimacy and friendship, the attention of my mind settled chiefly upon that discourse of his by which, with the weightiest argument, he reformed Quintus Caecilius, who was still clinging to superstitious vanities, and brought him back to the true religion. For he had hastened to Rome on business and to visit me, leaving his home, his wife, his children, and—what is most lovable in children—those still of innocent years, still attempting words but half-formed, a speech rendered sweeter by the very fragment of the stumbling tongue.
At his arrival I cannot express in words with how great and how impatient a joy I exulted, since the unexpected presence of so dear a friend most greatly increased my gladness. So, after a day or two, when frequent and constant intercourse had now satisfied the eagerness of my longing, and we had learned by mutual report the things about each other that we did not know on account of our separation, we resolved to make for Ostia, that most pleasant city—because for my body, in drying up its humors, sea-bathing offered a soothing and suitable remedy; indeed the holidays for the vintage had also relaxed my judicial duties. For at that season, after the summer days, autumn was settling itself into a mild temperature.
And so, when at daybreak we made our way to the seashore by strolling along, that the gently breathing breeze might invigorate our limbs, and that the soft sand, yielding with exceeding pleasure beneath our footsteps, might sink down, Caecilius, having marked an image of Serapis, raised his hand to his mouth—as the superstitious crowd is wont to do—and pressed a kiss upon his lips. Then Octavius said: 'It is not the part of a good man, brother Marcus, thus to abandon a man who clings to your side at home and abroad in this blindness of vulgar ignorance, so that you should suffer him in broad daylight to stumble against stones—however shaped and anointed and crowned they be—since you know that the disgrace of this error redounds upon you no less than upon him.' With this discourse of his, having traversed the middle space of the city, we now held the open shore.
There a gentle wave, washing over the outermost sands as if to smooth them into a walkway, spread itself out; and, as the sea—even when the winds are laid—is always restless, although it did not come to land with white and foaming billows, yet we were exceedingly delighted with the curling and winding wanderings there, when we dipped our soles at the very edge of the deep, while now the wave, driven against our feet, played about them, now, gliding back and drawing back its traces, sucked them again into itself. And so, advancing gradually and tranquilly, we picked our way along the shore of the gently curving beach, beguiling our journey with stories. These stories were Octavius's narrative as he discoursed about a voyage.
But when we had spent a sufficiently just space of walking together with conversation, retracing the same road we again trod it with reversed steps; and when we had come to that spot where the little boats, drawn up and propped on underlaid timbers, rested suspended above the earthy mud, we saw boys eagerly vying in the game of throwing potsherds into the sea. The game is this: to pick from the shore a smooth potsherd, rounded and polished by the tossing of the waves; to grasp that potsherd flat-set between the fingers, and bending low, to spin it as low as one can over the waves, so that the missile either skims and swims along the back of the sea, gliding with gentle force, or leaping forth from the cut tops of the waves emerges, being lifted by repeated bounding.
Among the boys he counted himself the victor whose potsherd both ran out farthest and skipped most often. And so, when we were all taken with this pleasure of the spectacle, Caecilius paid no attention, nor laughed at the contest, but, silent, anxious, withdrawn, was confessing by his face some grief I knew not what. To him I said: 'What is this matter? Why do I not recognize, Caecilius, that liveliness of yours, and why do I miss that cheerfulness of your eyes even in serious affairs?' Then he replied: 'For a good while now the speech of our Octavius has keenly vexed and gnawed at me, in which, attacking you, he reproached you for negligence, so that under cover he might more gravely charge me with ignorance. And so I will go further: with Octavius I have business over the whole matter from the very start.
If it please you that I, as a man of that very sect, should dispute with him, he will assuredly perceive at once that it is easier to wrangle among comrades than to engage wisdom in earnest. Let us only sit down upon these barriers of rocks, thrown out for the protection of the baths and running forward into the deep, so that we may both rest from our journey and dispute the more attentively.' And at his word we sat down, in such a way that they sheltered me, placed in the midst of the three, by the encircling of their sides; nor was this an act of either rank or honor—since friendship always either receives or makes men equal—but that I, as arbiter and nearest to both, might lend my ears and, set in the middle, separate the two disputants. Then thus Caecilius began:
'Although, brother Marcus, the matter about which we are most of all inquiring is not doubtful to you—seeing that, having diligently engaged in both ways of living, you have rejected the one and approved the other—nevertheless for the present your mind must be so shaped that you hold the scales of a most impartial judge and do not lean, inclined toward either side, lest the verdict seem not so much to have been born of our debates as brought forth from your own feelings. Accordingly, if you would sit with me as though some new man and as though ignorant of both parties, it is no difficult task to make plain that all things in human affairs are doubtful, uncertain, in suspense, and all things rather plausible than true;
so that it is the more to be wondered at that some, out of weariness of searching out the truth thoroughly, rashly succumb to any opinion whatsoever rather than persevere with stubborn diligence in exploring it. And therefore all must feel indignation, all must grieve, that certain men dare—and these men untrained in studies, profane in letters, ignorant even of the meaner arts—to decree something certain about the sum of things and about majesty, concerning which, through so many ages, philosophy itself still deliberates among very many sects.
And not without reason, since human mediocrity is so far removed from the exploration of the divine that it is granted neither to know nor reverently to search out either the things suspended on high above us in the heaven, or the things sunk deep beneath the earth; and we may rightly seem blessed enough and prudent enough if, according to that ancient oracle of the wise man, we have come to know ourselves more intimately. But insofar as, indulging an insane and foolish labor, we wander beyond the bounds of our lowliness and, cast down upon the earth, transcend with bold desire the very heaven and the very stars, let us at least not entangle this error in vain and frightful opinions. Suppose that in the beginning the seeds of all things were condensed by nature coalescing in itself—who here is the author, that is, God?
Suppose the parts of the whole world have been knit together, ordered, and formed by chance concurrences—what god is the contriver? Granted that fire kindled the stars, and that the heaven hung itself up by its own matter, that it founded the earth by its weight and that the sea flowed in from liquid—whence comes this religion, whence this dread, what is this superstition? Man and every animal that is born, breathed into, raised up, is, as it were, a voluntary concretion of the elements, into which again man and every animal is divided, dissolved, scattered: thus all things flow back into their source and are revolved into themselves, with no craftsman, no judge, no author.
Thus, when the seeds of fires are gathered together, ever and ever new suns shine; thus, when the vapors of the earth are exhaled, mists ever grow; when these are thickened and compacted, clouds rise higher; when these same slip down, rains flow, winds blow, hailstones rattle, or—when the storm-clouds collide—thunders bellow, lightnings flash red, thunderbolts gleam forth: so they fall everywhere, rush upon mountains, dash against trees, touch without discrimination places sacred and profane, strike guilty men and often religious ones. Why should I speak of the various and uncertain tempests, by which the onset of all things is rolled about with no order or weighing of matters? in shipwrecks the fates of good and bad mixed, their deserts confounded? in conflagrations the destruction of innocent and guilty coming together?
And when a tract of the sky is infected with a pestilential corruption, all perish without distinction? And when men rage with the ardor of war, do not rather the better men fall? In peace too not only is wickedness made equal to the better, but it is even honored, so that in many cases you cannot tell whether their depravity is to be detested or their good fortune to be desired. But if the world were governed by divine providence and by the authority of some deity, never would Phalaris and Dionysius have deserved a kingdom, never would Rutilius and Camillus have deserved exile, never would Socrates have deserved poison. Behold, the fruit-bearing orchards, behold the grain now gray with ripeness, the now intoxicating vintage—all is spoiled by rain, beaten down by hail.
So either the truth is hidden and kept down from us as uncertain, or—what is rather to be believed—Fortune, loosed from all laws, holds sway with varied and slippery chances. Since therefore either Fortune is certain or Nature uncertain, how much more venerable and better it is to receive the teaching of our forefathers as the high priest of truth, to cultivate the religions handed down, to adore the gods whom you were trained from your parents to fear rather than to know intimately, and not to pass judgment about the deities, but to believe our predecessors, who in an age still rude, at the very birth of the world itself, were counted worthy to have the gods either gracious or for their kings!
Hence indeed we see, throughout all the empires, provinces, and towns, that individual peoples have their own native rites of worship and reverence their local gods: as the Eleusinians worship Ceres, the Phrygians the Great Mother, the Epidaurians Aesculapius, the Chaldaeans Belus, the Syrians Astarte, the Taurians Diana, the Gauls Mercury, the Romans all of them.
Thus their power and authority has occupied the whole circuit of the world; thus they have extended their dominion beyond the paths of the sun and the very bounds of Ocean, while they exercise in arms a religious valor, while they fortify the city with the religious observances of sacred things, with chaste virgins, with many honors and titles of priests; while, besieged and—save for the Capitol alone—captured, they worship the gods whom another would by now have despised as angry; and through the Gallic battle-lines, who marveled at the boldness of their superstition, they advance unarmed of weapons but armed with the cultivation of religion; while in the captured enemy's walls, with victory still raging, they venerate the conquered deities; while from every quarter they seek out foreign gods and make them their own, while they build altars even to unknown deities and to the Manes.
Thus, while they take up the sacred rites of all nations, they have even deserved empires. Hence a perpetual tenor of veneration has remained, which is not weakened by long age but increased: since antiquity has been wont to grant to ceremonies and shrines just so much sanctity as it has heaped up of age. Nor yet did our ancestors devote their effort rashly (for I venture meanwhile myself to concede it, and thus the better to err) either to observing auguries, or to consulting entrails, or to instituting sacred rites, or to dedicating shrines. Look to the record from the books; you will already find that they initiated the rites of all religions, either that divine indulgence might be repaid, or that an impending wrath might be averted, or, when already swelling and raging, might be appeased.
Witness the Idaean Mother, who by her arrival both proved the chastity of the matron and freed the city from the fear of the enemy; witnesses are the consecrated statues of the equestrian brothers at the lake, just as they had shown themselves—who, panting with foaming and smoking horses, announced the victory over Perseus on the same day on which they had won it; witness the repetition of the games, the offended Jupiter being declared so through the dream of a man of the people; and the ratified self-devotion of the Decii is a witness; witness too is Curtius, who by the mass or the honor of his horseman filled up the gaping chasm of the profound abyss to a level. More frequently even than we would have wished, slighted auspices have testified to the presence of the gods.
Thus Allia is an 'ill-omened name'; thus that of Claudius and Junius is not a battle against the Carthaginians but a deadly shipwreck; and so that Trasimene might be both greater and discolored with Roman blood, Flaminius scorned the auguries; and—that we may recover our standards from the Parthians—Crassus both deserved and laughed at the imprecations of the dire ones. I pass over old matters, which are many, and concerning the births of the gods, their gifts and offices I neglect the songs of the poets; I leap over also the fates foretold by oracles, lest antiquity should seem to you too fabulous. Turn your attention to the temples and shrines of the gods, by which the Roman state is both protected and adorned: they are more august through the deities that dwell, are present, and lodge within them, than through their worship—rich though they be in marks of distinction and in offerings.
Hence indeed the seers, full of and mingled with the god, pluck the future beforehand, give warning against perils, a remedy for diseases, hope to the afflicted, help to the wretched, solace in calamities, relief in toils. Even in sleep we see, hear, recognize the gods whom by day we impiously deny, refuse, and forswear. Therefore, since among all nations, however uncertain may be the reason or the origin concerning the immortal gods, there yet remains a firm consensus, I cannot tolerate anyone, swelling with so great a boldness and with I know not what irreligious cleverness, who strives to dissolve or weaken this religion so ancient, so useful, so wholesome.
Let there be that Theodorus of Cyrene, or before him Diagoras of Melos, to whom antiquity gave the surname 'the Atheist'—both of whom, by asserting that there are no gods, utterly took away all the fear and reverence by which humanity is governed: never, however, in this discipline of impiety will they prevail through the name and authority of a feigned philosophy. When the Athenians, men of judgment, both banished from their borders Protagoras of Abdera—who disputed about divinity more cautiously than profanely—and burned his writings in the assembly, what then? Men (for you will endure me as I more freely put forth the force of the cause I have undertaken), men, I say, of a desperate, unlawful, and forlorn faction, to run riot against the gods—is this not to be lamented?
They, gathering the more ignorant from the lowest dregs together with credulous women, who slip through the frailty of their sex, set up a people of profane conspiracy, who are leagued together not by any sacred rite but by guilt, in nocturnal gatherings and solemn fasts and inhuman foods—a lurking and light-shunning tribe, mute in public, chattering in corners; they despise the temples as tombs, they spit upon the gods, they laugh at sacred things, they pity—if it is permitted to say so—the priests, themselves wretched; they despise honors and purple robes, themselves half-naked! O wondrous folly and incredible audacity! They scorn present torments while they dread uncertain and future ones, and while they fear to die after death, in the meantime they fear not to die: thus a deceptive hope and the solace of a revived life flatters them out of their terror!
And now, as more wicked things spring up more abundantly, with depraved morals creeping on day by day throughout the whole world, those most foul shrines of an impious confederacy grow up. This conspiracy must be utterly rooted out and execrated. They recognize one another by secret marks and signs, and love each other almost before they have come to know each other: indiscriminately too among them there is mingled, as it were, a certain religion of lusts, and they call themselves promiscuously brothers and sisters, so that even ordinary debauchery, through the intervention of a sacred name, becomes incest. Thus their vain and senseless superstition glories in crimes. Nor would shrewd rumor—itself most wicked and to be uttered only with reverence—speak of them, unless the truth underlay it.
I hear that they venerate, by some foolish persuasion I know not what, the consecrated head of the most filthy beast, an ass: a religion worthy of and born from such morals! Others report that they worship the genitals of their very president and priest, and adore, as it were, the nature of their own parent: I know not whether this is false, but certainly the suspicion is fitted to secret and nocturnal rites! And one who fables that they reverence a man punished with the utmost penalty for his crime, and the death-dealing wood of the cross, assigns to them altars congruous with abandoned and wicked men, that they may worship what they deserve. Now the tale about the initiation of young recruits is as detestable as it is well known. An infant covered with meal-paste, to deceive the unwary, is set before one who is to be steeped in the rites.
That infant is slain by the recruit—provoked, as it were, to harmless blows on the surface of the meal—with blind and hidden wounds. Of this infant, O abomination! they thirstily lap the blood; its limbs they eagerly distribute; by this victim they are leagued together; by this complicity in crime they are pledged to mutual silence. These rites are fouler than all sacrileges. And about their banquet it is well known; everyone everywhere speaks of it, and the speech of our man of Cirta also attests it. On a solemn day they come together to a feast with all their children, sisters, mothers—people of every sex and every age.
There, after many courses, when the banquet has grown heated and the fervor of incestuous lust has flared up amid drunkenness, a dog which is tied to the candlestick is provoked, by the throwing of a morsel beyond the length of the cord by which it is bound, to a rush and a leap. So, the conscious light being overturned and extinguished, in shameless darkness they entwine the bonds of unspeakable desire through the uncertainty of lot; and even if not all in deed, yet all alike in complicity of incest, since whatever can happen in the act of individuals is sought by the wish of all. Much I deliberately pass over: for even these things are too many, the obscurity of that depraved religion itself declaring all or most of them to be true.
For why else do they strive so greatly to conceal and hide whatever it is they worship, since honorable things always rejoice in publicity, while crimes are kept secret? Why have they no altars, no temples, no known images, never speak openly, never freely assemble, unless that which they worship and suppress is either to be punished or to be ashamed of? Whence, moreover, or who is that god of theirs—single, solitary, forsaken—whom no free nation, no kingdoms, not even the Roman superstition has known? The sole and wretched nationality of the Jews worshipped one god, they too, but openly, with temples, altars, victims, and ceremonies—a god of such utter lack of force and power that he is, together with his own nation, a captive to the Romans.
But the Christians too—what monsters, what portents do they fabricate! That god of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see, they imagine diligently inquires into the morals of all, the acts of all, even the words and hidden thoughts of all—running about, that is, and everywhere present: they want him to be troublesome, restless, even shamelessly curious, seeing that he stands by all deeds, wanders amid all places—since he can neither attend to individuals, being distracted over the universe, nor suffice for the whole, being occupied with individuals.
What of this, that they threaten conflagration to the whole earth and to the universe itself with its stars, and contrive its ruin—as though either the eternal order established by the divine laws of nature could be disturbed, or, the covenant of all the elements being broken and the heavenly framework divided, this mass, by which it is contained and girded, could be undermined? Nor content with this frenzied opinion, they pile up and append old wives' fables: they say that they themselves are born again after death, into ashes and cinders, and with I know not what confidence they mutually believe their own lies: you would think they had already come back to life. A twofold evil and double madness: to announce destruction to the heaven and the stars, which we leave just as we found them, and to promise eternity to themselves, dead and extinguished, who, just as we are born, also perish!
Hence, evidently, they also execrate funeral pyres and condemn burials by fire, as though every body, even if withdrawn from the flames, were not nevertheless dissolved into the earth by years and ages, and as though it made no difference whether wild beasts tear it apart, or the seas consume it, or the ground covers it, or the flame removes it—since to dead bodies every burial, if they feel it, is a punishment, but if they do not feel it, the very swiftness of the consuming is a remedy. Deceived by this error, they promise to themselves, as good men, a blessed and perpetual life when dead, but to the rest, as unjust men, eternal punishment. Many things present themselves in answer to this, did not my discourse hasten on. That they themselves are the unjust ones I do not even labor to prove; I have already shown it: although, even if I granted them to be just, yet I know that guilt or innocence is, by the opinions of very many, ascribed to fate.
And this is your consensus too; for whatever we do, as others ascribe it to fate, so you ascribe it to god: thus the men of your sect do not desire of their own accord, but are chosen. Therefore you fashion an unjust judge, who punishes in men their lot, not their will. I should like, however, to inquire whether one rises again with bodies or without bodies, and with what bodies—the same or renewed ones. Without a body? This, so far as I know, is neither mind nor soul nor life. With the very same body? But it has already disintegrated before. With another body? Then a new man is born, that former one is not restored. And yet so great an age has gone by, countless ages have flowed away; what single one of any sort has returned from the dead—even by the lot of Protesilaus, with the granted passage of but a few hours—or that we might believe by example?
All those figments of an unsound opinion and foolish consolations, sported by deceitful poets for the sweetness of their song, have been disgracefully reshaped by you, credulous of course, into your god. Nor do you even take from present things a proof of how empty are the vows of an idle promise that deceive you: estimate, wretches, what hangs over you after death, while you still live. Behold, the part of you—and the greater, the better part, as you say—you are in want, you are cold, you toil with labor and hunger, and god allows it, dissembles, either will not or cannot succor his own; so he is either powerless or unjust! You, who dream of a posthumous immortality, when you are shaken with peril, when you burn with fevers, when you are torn with pain—do you not yet feel your condition?
Do you not yet acknowledge your frailty? Unwilling, wretch, you are convicted of your infirmity, yet you will not confess it! But I pass over things in common. Behold, for you there are threats, punishments, torments, and crosses now not to be adored but to be undergone, fires too which you both foretell and fear: where is that god of yours, who can come to the aid of those returning to life, but cannot to the living? Do not the Romans, without your god, rule and reign, enjoy the whole world, and lord it over you? But you, anxious and worried meanwhile, abstain from honorable pleasures: you do not visit the spectacles, you take no part in the processions, the public banquets are held without you; you shrink from the sacred contests, the foods plucked beforehand, and the drinks poured upon the altars. Thus you dread the gods whom you deny!
You do not bind your head with flowers, you do not honor your body with perfumes; you reserve unguents for funerals, you deny even garlands to tombs—pale, trembling, worthy of pity, but of the pity of our gods. So you neither rise again, wretches, nor live in the meantime! Accordingly, if there is in you any wisdom or modesty, cease to pry into the regions of the heaven and the fates of the world and its secrets: it is enough to look at what lies before your feet, especially for the untaught, the uncouth, the rude, the rustic, to whom it is not given to understand civil matters, much more is it denied to discourse of divine ones. Yet if there is a desire of philosophizing, let whoever of you is great enough imitate, if he can, Socrates, the prince of wisdom. The reply of that man, as often as he was asked about the things of heaven, is well known:
'What is above us is nothing to us.' Deservedly, then, he won from the oracle the testimony of singular prudence. Which oracle he himself also perceived to have been given on this account—that he was set before all, not because he had ascertained all things, but because he had learned that he knew nothing: thus the highest prudence lies in a confessed ignorance. From this fountain flowed the safe doubt of Arcesilaus and, much later, of Carneades and very many of the Academics, in the highest questions—a kind of philosophizing in which the untaught can be cautious and the learned glorious. What of it? Is not the hesitation of Simonides of Ceos to be admired by all and to be followed?
This Simonides, when he was asked by the tyrant Hiero what and of what sort he reckoned the gods to be, first asked a day for deliberation; the next day he prolonged it by two days; soon, being reminded, he added as much again. At last, when the tyrant inquired the causes of so great a delay, he replied 'that, the longer his inquiry proceeded, the more obscure the truth became to him.' In my opinion too, things that are doubtful are, as they are, to be left so; nor, when so many and so great men deliberate, is a verdict to be rashly and boldly carried to either side, lest either an old wives' superstition be brought in, or all religion be destroyed.' Thus Caecilius, and smiling (for the impetus of his outpoured speech had relaxed the swelling of his indignation):
'Has Octavius'—he said—'anything to dare against this, a man of Plautine stock, the foremost of millers as he is the last of philosophers?' 'Spare,' said I, 'to applaud over him: for it is not fitting for you to exult over the neatness of your speech before fuller pleading has been made on both sides, especially since your debate rests not upon praise but upon truth. And although your speech, with its subtle variety, has delighted me in great measure, yet I am more deeply moved—not about the present case, but about the whole manner of disputing—because for the most part, according to the powers of the disputants and the might of eloquence, even the condition of evident truth is altered.