Against the Pagans 4 part 2/3

Or when you believe it to be thus, do you conceive no anxiety lest you incur some offence with those gods themselves, whoever they may be, because you believe that they came into the light—unknown to themselves—out of a base union and out of the casting of seed, by the services of obscenity? For we—lest anyone perchance suppose that we are ignorant, that we do not know what befits the dignity of that name—either hold that the gods ought to be without birth, or, if they have any beginnings, we deem and reckon them sent forth by the Lord and Prince of all things, by reasons which He Himself knows, He Himself: immaculate, most chaste, pure, not knowing what this foulness of coupling is, and, at those very ones, coming to an end with the primary generation.

But you, on the contrary, forgetful of their majesty and of such great sublimity, attach to them those births and ascribe to them those origins which men of nobler dispositions hold in execration and horror. 'From the mother Ops,' you say, 'and from the father Saturn, Diespiter was born together with his brothers.' Do the gods then have wives and come into conjugal bonds on terms arranged beforehand? Do they, by use, by confarreation, by coemption, contract the solemn pledges of the marriage-couch? Do they have women hoped for, women bespoken, women betrothed with interposed stipulations?

And why do we speak of these unions, when you dare to say that certain of them celebrated weddings and held festive gatherings, and that goddesses sported at them, and that, because they were not partakers of the Fescennine songs, they threw all things into confusion with discords and sowed for the human race for the future the crises of its ruins? 'But in the others perhaps the foulness of this baseness is less.' Was then that ruler of heaven, the father of gods and men, who with the nod of his brow moves and makes tremble the whole sky—was he compounded of a male and a female, and, unless both sexes had dissolved themselves in shameful pleasures with bodies joined together, would that Jupiter greatest of all not exist, and even to this day would the deities not have a king, and would heaven stand without a lord?

And why do we wonder that you keep saying Jupiter was poured forth from a woman's womb, when your own authorities write that he even had a nurse and preserved his life from the nourishment of another's breast? What do you say, O men? So then—I will say it again—did he who thunders, flashes, and hurls lightning, and gathers the terrible clouds, suck the streams of the breasts, utter wailing, crawl, and, so as to display in the most foolish way the tears he shed, fall silent at the sound of rattles, and was he lulled to sleep, lying in the softest cradle and soothed with broken little voices? O religious defence of the gods! O you who show and instil the venerable dignity of a majesty to be feared!

Is it thus, I ask, that among you the eminence of the supernal powers is born? Is it by these generations that your gods come into the light—the very generations by which asses, pigs, dogs, and all this unclean overflow of earthly beasts is conceived and brought forth? And not content to have attributed these gatherings to Saturnian gravity, you proclaim that the very king of the world begot children more scandalously than he himself was born and brought forth. 'From the mother Hyperion,' you say, 'and from Jupiter the hurler of the thunderbolt was born the golden and most blazing Sun; from Latona and the same, the Delian archer and Diana the ranger of the woods; from Leda and the same, the brothers whose Greek name is Dioscuri;'

'from Alcmene and the same, that Theban Hercules, whom club and hide protected; from Semele and himself, Liber, who is called Bromius and was born a second time from his father's thigh; from himself again and Maia, Mercury eloquent of speech and bearer of the affable serpents.' Can any graver insult be inflicted on your Jupiter, or is there anything else that could shake or destroy the authority of the prince of the gods, than that you believe him to have been at times overcome by lustful pleasures and to have grown hot with the fervour of an inflamed breast into womanish appetites? And what business had the Saturnian king with marriages with strangers?

Was Juno not enough for him, and could she not calm the impulse of his desires in the queen of the deities, though so great a nobility commended her—her face, her countenance, her dignity, and the snowy, marble-white radiance of her arms? Or, not content with one wife, did he, delighting in concubines, mistresses, and paramours, scatter his incontinence far and wide, as pampered young men are wont, this lecherous god, and, hoary as he was, did he from countless bodies of flaccid pleasures restore his ardour? What do you say, O impious ones, or what foulnesses of opinion do you fabricate about your Jupiter? Do you thus not notice, not see, of what disgrace you brand him? of what crime you make him the author? or what stains of scandalous deeds, how great infamies, you heap upon him?

Men, prone to lust and inclined by the weakness of their nature to the allurements of pleasures, nevertheless avenge adulteries by their laws and afflict with capital punishments those whom they have caught to have cast themselves into others' compacts by the storming of the marriage-couch. Of what turpitude, of what mark of infamy the character of a lier-in-wait and adulterer was, the greatest of all who ever reigned did not know; and that watcher, as report has it, of the well-deserving and the worst, did not, with his mind's reasoning lost, discern what it befitted him to wish. And perhaps this ill-treatment might be borne, if at least you had joined him with equal personages, and if by you an adulterer had been set up for the immortal goddesses.

But in human bodies, I ask, what was there of beauty, what of comeliness, that could excite, that could turn Jupiter's eyes upon itself? Skin, flesh, phlegm, and all that overflow of the intestines set beneath their coverings, which not only that Lynceus with his penetrating gaze might shudder at, but even any other might avoid by the mere thought of it. O splendid reward of guilt! O worthy and precious sweetness, for the sake of which Jupiter greatest of all became a swan and a bull and the begetter of white eggs!

If you are willing to open the eyes of the mind and to gaze upon the very truth without any private favouring, you will find that the causes of all the miseries by which, as you say, the human race has long been afflicted, flow from opinions of this kind which you hold of old about your gods, and which, though the truth is set before your eyes, you refuse to reform for the better. For what have we ever either felt that was unbecoming about them, or published in unseemly writings, that the labours of the human race and the conveniences by which life is sustained should be diminished and cast into odium against us? Is it said by us that certain gods were begotten from eggs, like storks, like wood-pigeons?

Was it we who said that the whiteness of Cytherean Venus was compacted and curdled together from the foam of the sea and from the severed genitals of Caelus? that Saturn was bound because of parricide and, on fixed days, is washed and relieved of the weights of his fetters? that Jupiter was saved from destruction by the kindness of the Curetes? that he drove his father from the kingdom and held by violence and fraud a dominion that was another's by right? that the old man, driven out by us, hid himself within the borders of the Italians, and, because he had been safe from his son, gave the name Latium to the region as a gift? Do we say that Jupiter himself contracted an incestuous marriage with his sister, or that, invited to the right of the table, he dined unwittingly on the flesh of the boy Lycaon's offspring instead of pork?

Was it we who said that Vulcan, lame in one foot, plied the smith's works on the island of Lemnos? that, out of desire and greed, as the Boeotian Pindar sings, Aesculapius was transfixed by the weapon of the thunderbolt? that Apollo, made rich by those very kings whose treasures and gifts had enriched him, deceived them by the ambiguity of his oracle? Was it we who published Mercury as a thief? that we are Laverna, and that together with him she presides over stealthy frauds? Is it from us that Myrtilus is the authority, who declares that the Muses were the little serving-maids of Megaclo, daughter of Macar? Was it dictated by us that from the Cyprian king, whose name is Cinyras, the little harlot Venus was consecrated among the number of the divine?

Who handed down that the Palladium was fashioned from the remains of Pelops? Was it not you? Who that Mars was a Spartan? Was it not Epicharmus, your own authority? Who that he was born within the borders of Thrace? Was it not Sophocles the Attic, with all the theatres consenting? Who that he was bound in Arcadia for thirteen months? Was it not the son of the river Mela? Who that dogs are sacrificed to him by the Carians, that asses by the Scythians? Was it not Apollodorus principally, together with the rest? Who that, while he insulted another's marriage-bed, he stuck fast, entangled in the snares? Was it not your commentaries? Was it not the stage?

Was it ever anywhere written down by us that the gods served in hireling servitude—as that Hercules served at Sardis for the sake of love and wantonness, as Delian Apollo served Admetus, as the brother of Jupiter served Trojan Laomedon, as the Pythian served the same but along with his uncle, as Minerva was the ministress of light and player of the lamps for those who were mingling in conjugal secrets? Is it not that bard of yours who made Mars and Venus wounded by the hands of mortals? Is not Panyassis one of you, who records that Father Dis and Queen Juno were wounded by Hercules? Do not the writings of your own Polemon indicate that a heroine was cut down, bloodied, and mangled by Ornytus?

Does not Sosibius report that Hercules himself was tortured by the sons of Hippocoon, both by the wound inflicted and by the pain? Is it handed down and published by us that Jupiter was consigned to burial on the island of Crete? Do we say that the brothers, reared together in cradles, were buried within the Spartan and Lacedaemonian borders? Is it our authority who is indicated in the titles of the writings as Patrocles of Thurii, who records that the tombs and Saturnian remains are contained in the Sicilian earth? Are Hieronymus and Plutarch proved to be of our party, who related that Hercules, on the peaks of Oeta, after the ravages of epileptic diseases, was dissolved into ashes?

For what shall I say about those loves with which the holy celestials are recorded in your writings and by your authors to have grown hot toward women? Is it indeed charged by us that the king of the sea, through the ardour of frenzied desire, deprived Amphitrite, Hippothoe, Amymone, Menalippe, Alcyone of the chastity of their virginity? Is it charged that Latonian Apollo, that immaculate one, most chaste and pure, lusted after Arsinoe, Aethusa, Hypsipyle, Marpessa, Zeuxippe and Prothoe, Daphne and Sterope, with the fervours of an ill-advised breast?

Is old Saturn, long since overspread with white hairs and already cold with the age of his years, pointed out by our songs to have been caught in adultery by his wife and to have put on the form of a beast, and, under the guise of a brute, to have galloped away with neighings cast forth? Jupiter himself, king of the world—is he not made infamous by you as having gone through countless forms and cloaked the flame of wanton love with servile deceits? Was it ever anywhere written down by us that, in order to accomplish his lustful thefts, he was now turned into gold, now into a sportive satyr, into a serpent, into a bird, into a bull, and—to pass over all kinds of insults—into a tiny little ant, namely so that he might beget, among the Thessalians, the daughter of Clitor as mother of Myrmidon?

Who made him keep watch over Alcmene for nine continuous nights? Was it not you? Who made him lie idle in his loves, having deserted his station in heaven? Was it not you? And indeed you add benefits not small, since for you the god Hercules was born, who in matters of this kind should surpass and outdo his father's powers. That one could scarcely, in nine nights, hammer out, contrive, and put together one single offspring; but Hercules the holy god, in one night, thoroughly taught the fifty daughters of Thestius to lay aside the name of virginity and to bear the burdens of mothers. And what of this—that, not content to have attributed to the gods cares for the female kind, you also join to them males beloved of them?

Someone or other loves Hylas, another is taken up with Hyacinthus, that one burns with desire for Pelops, this one sighs more ardently after Chrysippus; Catamitus is snatched away to be the keeper of the delights and of the cups, and, so that he may be called Jupiter's darling, on his soft parts Fabius is inflamed and marked on his hinder parts. But do only males love among you, and is her own sanctity preserved for the female sex? Is it not laid down in your writings that Tithonus was beloved by Aurora, that the Moon burned for Endymion, the Nereid for Aeacus, Thetis for the father of Achilles, Proserpina for Adonis?

and his mother Ceres for one Iasion, some rustic or other; and, after Vulcan and Phaethon, that Mars burned in the marriage of Anchises for that very Venus herself, the mother of the Aeneadae and the author of Roman dominion? Since therefore you hurl such disgraces and scandalous monstrosities not against some one god by name, but equally against the whole race of the gods above—which you remember to exist—without any exception, do you dare, with your modesty intact, to say that either we are impious or you are pious, when the gods bear far greater offences from you out of all the reproaches which you bring together into slanders against them, than grandeurs and honours from the rite and duty of worship?

For either all those things are false which are brought forth about individual gods, wounding their reputation and majesty—and then the matter is altogether worthy for which the gods ought to abolish utterly the whole race of mortals—or, if they are explored and true and grasped without any doubts, the matter is led to this sum: that, however unwilling you may be, we must believe them to have been not of the celestial kind but of the human.

For where there are weddings, marriages, childbirths, nurses, crafts, disabilities, where there is the status of legal standing and the condition of servitude, where there are wounds, slaughters, blood, where there are loves, desires, pleasures, where there is every affection of the mind coming from restless perturbations—there it must needs be that nothing divine is present, nor can that which is proper to a perishable kind and to earthly frailty adhere to a more excellent nature.

For who is there who would believe—if only he recognises and perceives what the force of that power is—either that a god had generative parts and was deprived of them by a most foul cutting-off, or that he once intercepted offspring born from himself and was constrained by the punishments of chains, or that he in a manner waged civil wars with his father and abstained from the royal right, or that, terrified by fear of a lesser one, he was overcome and turned his back and, like a fugitive and an exile, hid himself in remote retreats?

Who is there, I say, who would believe that a god reclined at human tables, was slain for the sake of greed, deceived his suppliants with the ambiguity of an oracle, excelled in the tricks of thieveries, committed adultery, served, was wounded and fell in love, and through all the forms of lusts drove round the wiles of unchaste desires? And yet you assert that all these things both were and are present in your gods, and you pass over no kind of viciousness, of maleficence, of lapse, which you do not, with the wantonness of your opinions, apply to the reviling of the deities.

Either, therefore, you must seek other gods for yourselves upon whom all these things do not fall—for those upon whom these things fall are of the human and earthly kind—or, if these are the only ones whose names and characters you have made public, you destroy them by your own opinions. For whatever you narrate is mortal.

And we can indeed at this point show that all those beings whom you introduce and call gods to us were men—whether by unrolling Euhemerus of Agrigentum, whose little books Ennius, that it might become known to all, translated into the Italian tongue; or Nicagoras of Cyprus, or Leon of Pella, or Theodorus of Cyrene, or Hippo and Diagoras of Melos, or a thousand other authors, who with the care of scrupulous diligence brought into the light, with frank liberty, things that were hidden.

We can, I say, if it please, also set forth the exploits of Jupiter and the wars of Minerva—of the virgin, that is, and of Diana; by what tricks Liber aimed at the kingdom of the Indians; of what condition Venus was, of what occupation, of what gain; whose marriage the Great Mother held; what of hope, what of pleasure she conceived from the comely Attis; whence Egyptian Serapis, whence Isis, or from what causes the very appellation of their names was contrived. But we have not undertaken in this discourse which we are making either the little task or the intention of showing and publishing who all these were.

This is our proposal: since you call us impious and irreligious, and you on the contrary contend that you are worshippers of the gods, to demonstrate and set forth in the midst that by no men are they treated more ignominiously than by you. But if it is manifest from your very maledictions that it is so, it follows that it ought to be understood that you stir up in the gods above the goads of frenzied indignations—you who yourselves compose about them fables so foul, whether heard or believed, and so ignominious. For it is not he who anxiously performs the rites and slays spotless victims, who gives heaps of incense to be burned up in fire, who is to be judged to worship the deities or alone to fulfil the duties of religion.

True worship is in the breast, and an opinion worthy of the gods; nor does the offering of blood and gore profit anything, if you believe about them those things which are not only far removed and distant from their nature, but even fasten upon their majesty and dignity something of stain and turpitude. For I would ask you and call you to answer a brief discourse: whether you judge it graver to slay no victims to them—because you suppose that so great a nature neither wills nor desires these things—or to conceive, in the foulness of your opinions, such reproaches about them as could rouse anyone's mind to the frenzy of vengeance?

If the weights of things be pondered, you would find no judge so envious as would not reckon it more criminal that anyone's reputation be torn by notorious slanders than that it be passed over by any one in silence. For this latter perhaps can be esteemed and believed a matter of reason; but the former is the mark of a sacrilegious mind and of a blindness despairing in its fictions. If in your ceremonies and divine affairs there is a place for propitiatory rites, and if guilt is said to have been contracted...

A fault: if through some slip of thoughtlessness a man goes wrong either in a word or with the sacrificial ladle, or if again some error is committed in the solemn games and the sacred processions, you all at once cry aloud that the holy rites have been profaned; if a dancer has come to a halt, or a flute-player has suddenly fallen silent, or if that boy who is called 'patrimus' has through ignorance let slip the strap or has failed to keep his hold upon the ground — do you then dare to deny that in offenses so grave the gods are forever being outraged by you, when in matters far lighter you yourselves repeatedly confess that they take offense, and that to the ruin of the state? 'But,' they say, 'all these things are the inventions of the poets and playful fictions composed for men's pleasure.'

It is indeed not credible that men who were far from dull, and searchers into the most remote antiquity, either did not weave into their songs those tales which already survived in the common notions of mankind and were lodged in men's ears, or that they wished to claim for themselves alone so unbridled a license as to fabricate through folly things which were not far removed from madness and which might procure for themselves fear and peril at the hands of the gods and of men. But let us grant, as you say, that the poets are the framers and inventors of such monstrous deformities: even so you are not free from the ill-treatment of the gods, you who either fail to punish such misdeeds, or, by laws passed and by severity ...

... of penalties have you set yourselves against so great a rashness, nor has it been established by you that henceforth no man should speak that which is next to shameful or unworthy of the majesty of the gods. For whoever suffers a sinner to sin supplies strength to his boldness; and it is a greater outrage to brand and mark a man with false accusations than to charge and cast up against him true offenses. For to be called what you are, and what you feel yourself to be, has a lighter sting, blunted by the testimony of a silent self-acknowledgment; but that wounds most bitterly which brands the innocent and defames the honor of one's name and reputation.

Your gods are described as feasting in celestial banqueting-halls and in golden chambers, drinking, and at last being soothed by the lyre and the melody of voices. You lend them your most patient ears, and you do not judge it unworthy that there should be attributed to the gods those pleasures by which earthly bodies are sustained, and which ears crave when softened by the dissolute enervation of a feeble heart. From among these gods, again, some are brought in as lovers, adulterers against chastity, and joining in shameful and disgraceful couplings not only with women but even with men. You take no care what is said concerning matters so great, nor do you check, by even the least fear of chastisement, the boldness of these wanton writings.

Others, through madness and frenzy, bereave themselves of their children, and, as though with an enemy's blood, so stain themselves with the murder of their own kin: these sacrileges you admire when they are loftily set forth, and what deserved to be chastised with every penalty — so that boldness might rise up the more spiritedly — you exalt with the incitement of praise. Others are made to bewail the wounds of bereavement and, with unseemly wailings, to arraign the cruel fates: you stand amazed at the powers of eloquence, and what ought utterly to have been removed from the fellowship of the human race, you peruse, you learn by heart, and you take care that it perish by no forgetfulness. They are recorded to be wounded, harassed, and to wage wars among themselves in the frenzied heat of their conflicts:

to you that description is a delight, and, in order to defend the writers' so great boldness, you falsely allege that those tales are allegories and doctrines of natural science. But why do I complain of the unregarded outrages done to the other deities? That very Jupiter, whose name it was fitting for you to utter not without dread and a shuddering of the whole body, is described, when caught in a love-affair by his wife, as confessing his own faults, and — like a man crazed and witless, hardened in shamelessness — as publishing openly which mistresses, which concubines he had preferred to his consort, to his wife:

But you, who exalt such portents — proclaiming the poets who devised them to be chiefs and kings endowed with divine genius, and most sacred personages — have so far flown away from the duty of the religion which you profess, that with you words by which the sublimity of the heavenly ones is violated carry the greater weight. Would it not then have been fitting — if only there were among you any fear of the gods, or if you believed with the confidence of the surest conviction that they exist anywhere — to intervene, forbid, and sanction, by bills, by plebiscites, and by the awful authority of the senate's decrees, that no one should presume to speak of the gods at random, save what was full of reverence?

Have they not deserved from you at least this much honor — that by those same laws by which you ward off wrongs from yourselves, you should ward off wrongs from them too? Men are guilty of treason among you if they have murmured anything unfavorable against your kings. To reduce a magistrate to the ranks, or to assail a senator with abuse, you have decreed to be a most perilous thing, to be visited with penalties. To compose a wicked song, whereby another's good name and life are defiled, you have not been willing should go unpunished under the ordinances of the decemvirs; and, lest anyone should strike your ears with too insolent an abuse, you have established formulas of action concerning outrageous injuries.

The gods above alone, with you, are left unhonored, contemptible, and cheap — against whom the right has been granted by you for each to say whatever he pleases, and to fling whatever forms of shameful things lust has feigned and contrived. And are you not ashamed to charge us with neglect of deities so infamous, when it is far more right not to believe that gods exist than to believe them to be such, and to hold them in such an estimation? But was it only to the poets that you wished it permitted to fabricate unworthy tales and disgraceful mockeries about the gods? What of your pantomimes, what of your actors, what of that crowd of mimes and of the debauched sort? Do they not, for the purposes of their own gain, abuse your gods, and draw the enticements of pleasure out of injuries and outrages done to the divine?

There sit, in the public spectacles, the colleges of all the priests and magistrates, the chief pontiffs and the chief curiones; there sit the laurel-crowned quindecimvirs and the flamines Diales with their pointed caps; there sit the augurs, interpreters of the divine mind and will, and likewise the chaste virgins, perpetual nurses and keepers of the fire; there sits the whole people and the senate, the fathers who have held the consulship, and the kings, nearest to the gods and most august: and — a thing unspeakable even to hear — Venus, the mother of that Martial race, the loving progenitress of a ruler and of a people, is danced out and, through every passion of harlot-baseness, is shamelessly represented as reveling in wanton imitation.

The Great Mother too is danced out, adorned with sacred fillets; and, against the dignity of her age, that Dindymene of Pessinus is disgracefully feigned to thrill with lustful longing in the embrace of a single herdsman; and likewise that offspring of Jupiter, Hercules, in the Trachiniae of Sophocles, entangled in the net of the deadly garment, is brought on uttering pitiable wailings, broken by the violence of his pain, and consumed to the utmost wasting by the melting-away of his flowing entrails. Nay, that greatest ruler of the pole himself is, in the plays, brought in — without any dread of his name and majesty — to play the parts of adulterers, and, that he may deceive the chastity of the wives of other households, to change his deceiving face and to slip into the likeness of their husbands ...