Against the Pagans 5 part 1/3

So be it: let all those disgraces of the immortal gods have been put forth by playful poets. What then? Are those things which grave, serious, and painstaking histories contain, and which are handed down in the secret mysteries, the inventions of poetic wantonness? If these seemed to you to be tales of such trifling, you would neither retain some of them in their proper use, nor through the annual course would you celebrate rejoicings as festivals, nor would you preserve them in your rites as images of deeds performed. Of these, so many as they are, I will for the present set down one — following a measured restraint — in which that very Jupiter is brought in as stupid and imprudent, played upon by the ambiguities of words. In the second book of Antias [Annals, Fr.]

[Fr. 6 Peter] — that no one may perchance suppose that we are trumping up charges through slanders — such a tale is recorded: that king Numa, since he did not possess the knowledge of averting the thunderbolt, and had a desire to learn it, at the advice of Egeria hid twelve young men on watch near a spring with bonds, so that, when Faunus and Martius Picus should come to that place to drink — for they had a customary route hither for watering — they might set upon them, bind them fast, and take them captive. But that the thing might be done more readily, the king filled goblets, no small number, with wine and honey-mead, and set a treacherous snare around the approaches of the spring for those who should come. And they, seized as usual by the appetite for drinking, came to the familiar resort.

But when they had come upon the goblets fragrant with scented liquors, they preferred the new things to their older draughts, fell upon them greedily, and, drawn on by the sweetness of the drink, drank far too much and, becoming heavy, fell asleep; then the twelve fell upon the slumbering pair, cast bonds upon them as they lay soaked with drink, and, when they had awoken, at once thoroughly instructed the king by what means Jupiter could be drawn down to the earth and elicited by sacrifices. And the king, having received the knowledge, performed the sacred rite on the Aventine, drew Jupiter down to earth, and asked of him the ritual and manner of the expiation. Jupiter, long hesitating, said: 'You shall expiate things struck by lightning with a head'; the king answered: 'With that of an onion'; Jupiter again: 'With a human one'; the king rejoined: 'But with hair'; the god in reply: 'With a living thing';

'A sprat,' Pompilius put in. Then Jupiter, caught by the ambiguous propositions, uttered these words: 'You have deceived me, Numa; for I had appointed that things struck by lightning should be expiated with human heads, not with a sprat, hair, and onion. Yet since your cunning has circumvented me, keep the rite you wished, and with these things which you have bargained for you shall ever undertake the expiation of things thunder-struck.' What the mind should first pursue, and what last, or where it should fall silent, is neither easy to say nor made simple by any considerations.

For all these things are so contrived and framed for mockery that you would do better to strive that they be believed false, even if they were true, than to wish to maintain them as true and to insinuate them as something marvelous, not without contempt of the deity himself. For what do you say, you people? Are we to believe that that Faunus and Martius Picus, if they belong to the number of the gods and to that everlasting and immortal nature, were ever parched dry with thirst and, that they might slake the burning of their veins, went along the streams of the springs? Are we to believe that, captivated by the wine and enticed by the sweetness of the mead, they gorged themselves so long on the treacherous cups that it came even to the peril of drunkenness?

Are we to believe that, bound fast by sleep and sunk in the oblivion of deepest slumber, they offered to earthly creatures the opportunity of binding them? On what parts, then, were those fastenings of the bonds thrown? Had their hands anything of solidity, or were they formed of hard bones, such as could be tied fast with nooses and constrained by the knotting of cords? For I do not ask, I do not demand, whether they could utter anything as they tottered in the estrangement of drunkenness, or whether — Jupiter being unwilling, or rather unaware — anyone could publish the rite for drawing him down to the earth:

This alone I desire to hear: why, if Faunus and Picus are of divine race and power, they did not themselves rather disclose to the inquirer that which Numa desired, more perilously, to hear from Jupiter himself. Or was it that Jupiter alone possessed the knowledge of this matter? For do the thunderbolts fall upon himself, so that some discipline of knowledge must be needed to avert their impending threats? Or, since he himself hurls these fires, is it another's task to know by what means it is fitting to temper his wraths and his moods? For truly it is most foolish to believe that he himself knows the remedies by which can be averted those things which he has determined should come to pass among human affairs by the casting of the thunderbolt. For this is to say:

'By that kind of rite you shall appease my wraths; and whenever I signify by lightnings that something is impending, do this and that, so that what I have determined should come to pass may become idle and empty and vanish away by the power of the sacred rites.' But let us grant, as is said, that Jupiter himself knew the remedies against himself and the arts by which it was fitting to go to meet his own signs: shall we even believe that a god of so great a divinity was drawn down to the earth and, standing on the little hillock of a single hill with a manikin, joined in a wrangling conversation? And what, I ask, was that divine matter which compelled Jupiter to be called away from so great a rush of affairs and to present himself to the summonses of mortals? Salted meal, incense, blood, the fumigation of vervain, and the roarings of terrible names?

And were all these things more powerful than Jupiter, so as to compel him against his will to obey commands, or to surrender himself, willing, to their entrapments? What of this — will it gain credence — that the son of Saturn was so improvident that he either proposed things by whose riddles he himself would be caught, or did not foresee by what means a mortal's cunning and craft would make sport of him? 'You shall expiate,' he says, 'things struck by lightning with a head.' The utterance is still incomplete, neither a full statement nor a rounded sentence. For it is necessary to know whether Diespiter ordains that this expiation be accomplished with the head of a wether, or a swine, or an ox, or of any other creature whatsoever:

And since he had not yet determined this specifically, and it was still in suspense and the sentence not yet finished, how could Numa know that Jupiter would say a human head, so as to forestall him, to get ahead, and to divert the uncertainties of that ambiguity onto the head of an onion? 'Unless perchance you will say that the king was divine': — could he possibly have been more divine than Jupiter himself? Unless a man, presuming what Jupiter would say, outwitted the god: could the god not know by what means a man was preparing to outwit him? Does it not then lie open at hand and clear that these are the little devices of childish fictions, by which, while liveliness of wit is acquired for Numa, the greatest imprudence is imputed to Jupiter?

For what is so imprudent as to confess yourself caught by the shrewdness of a human wit, and, while you grieve that you have been deceived, to yield to the will of the victor and to lay down the remedy you had offered? For if there was a reason and a certain natural fitness why the expiation of a lightning-strike ought to be undertaken with a human head, I do not see why the reply of the onion was made by the king: but if it could also be settled with an onion, then it was wantonly that a lust was felt for human blood. And thus each side is turned to its opposite, so that Numa is not shown to have wished to know what he wished, and Jupiter is proved to have been cruel — he who said that what could be undertaken with a sprat and an onion he had wished to be expiated with human heads.

In Timotheus, a man of no mean rank among the theologians, and likewise in others equally learned, concerning the Great Mother of the gods and concerning her rites, this origin is set down — dug out, as he himself writes and intimates, from the hidden books of antiquity and from the innermost mysteries. 'In the borders of Phrygia,' he says, 'there is a certain rock of an all but unheard-of vastness, whose name is Agdus, so called by the natives of that region. From it, stones taken up — as Themis had bidden in her forewarning — Deucalion and Pyrrha cast into a world empty of mortals; and from these, among the rest, was this so-called Great Mother formed and given life by divine power.'

'Her, given over to rest and sleep on the very summit of the rock, Jupiter assailed with incestuous desires; but when, having struggled long, he could not obtain what he had promised himself, he poured out his lust, defeated, upon the stone. Thereupon the rock conceived, and, after many bellowings had first been uttered, in the tenth month there is born one surnamed, from his mother's name, Agdestis. To him belonged unconquered strength and an untamable ferocity of spirit, a mad and frenzied lust, and that of both sexes; to lay waste what he had seized by force, to destroy, whithersoever the savagery of his mind had led him; to care for neither gods nor men, and to believe that nothing more powerful than himself held together the lands, the heaven, and the stars.'

'When it had often been sought in the deliberation of the gods by what means his boldness might be either weakened or repressed, and the rest were hesitating, Liber takes upon himself the charge of this task. A spring familiar to Agdestis, with which he had been wont to soothe the burning heat kindled by sport and hunting, and the raging of his thirst, Liber inflamed with the strongest force of unmixed wine. In the hour of need Agdestis runs up for a draught, and with gaping veins snatches the drink too immoderately: whereby it comes to pass that, overcome by the unaccustomed thing, he is sunk into the deepest slumber. Liber is at hand for the ambush; from bristles most skillfully twisted together he casts a noose about the sole of his foot, and with the other part he takes hold of his offspring together with the genitals themselves.'

'When the force of the wine has been breathed out, he starts up with a rush, and, as his foot draws the noose taut, by his own strength he deprives himself of that sex in which he had been a male. With the tearing away of the parts an immense flow of blood pours forth; these are caught up and drunk in by the earth, and suddenly from them is born a pomegranate tree with its fruits. Nana, the daughter of king Sangarius, or of the river, contemplating its beauty, plucks a fruit, marveling, and lays it in her bosom: from it she becomes pregnant. Her father shuts her up as though defiled and takes care that she should die of starvation: but she is sustained by the mother of the gods with fruits and other nourishment. She brings forth a little child. But Sangarius orders it to be exposed:'

'Someone or other, finding it, takes it up and nourishes it with goat's milk; and because the Lydian tongue calls pretty ones by this name, or because the Phrygians call goats "attagi" in their speech, thence it came about that he should be allotted the name Attis. Him the mother of the gods loved uniquely, since he was of most excellent countenance. Agdestis too loved him, a coaxing companion to the youth as he grew, and — in the only way he could — leading the youth, bound to him by less than upright flatteries, through the wooded glades and forests, and bestowing on him many gifts of wild game; which the boy Attis at first, boasting, said were the fruit of his own toil and labor; but afterward, through wine, he confesses that he is loved by Agdestis and honored by him with sylvan gifts: whence, because wine betrayed his silence, it is forbidden for the polluted to bring themselves into his holy rite.'

'Then Midas, king of Pessinus, wishing to draw the boy away from so infamous a union, betroths his own daughter to him in marriage, and, lest some ill-omened person should interrupt the nuptial joys, he had the town shut up. But the mother of the gods, knowing the fate of the young man — that he would be safe among men only so long as he remained free from the bond of marriage — and lest anything sorrowful should befall, enters the city closed with walls, having lifted up its head; whence, for this reason, it began to be towered. Agdestis, seething with anger that the boy was torn from him and diverted to the zeal for a wife, instills madness and frenzy into all the banqueters:'

'The terrified Phrygians cry aloud, "Adore, adore!"; the daughter of the concubine cuts off her own breasts; Attis snatches the flute which the very instigator of the madness was carrying, and, now himself full of the furies, having raged wildly and been tossed about, at last flings himself down and, beneath a pine tree, cuts off his own genitals, saying: "Take these for yourself, Agdestis, for whose sake you have stirred up such great commotions of frenzied conflicts." With the gushing of the blood his life flies away; but the Great Mother of the gods gathers up and washes what had been cut off, casts earth upon them, and covers and wraps them, as they were, in the garment of the dead. From the flowing of the blood a violet flower is born, and from it the tree is wreathed: hence has arisen the custom that even now the sacred pines are veiled and crowned.'

'The maiden who had been his betrothed — whom the pontiff Valerius records to have been named Ia — veils the breast of the lifeless youth with softer wool, gives her tears together with Agdestis, and slays herself: the blood of her who has perished is turned into purpling violets. The Mother buries the god as well, whence an almond tree is born, signifying the bitterness of the funeral. Then the pine tree, beneath which Attis had despoiled himself of his manhood, she carries down into her cave, and, with lamentations shared with Agdestis, she beats and wounds her breast around the trunk of the felled tree. Jupiter, entreated by Agdestis that Attis might come to life again, does not permit it;'

'yet what could be done by fate he grants without any difficulty: that his body should not rot, that his hair should grow forever, and that the smallest of his fingers should live and be perpetually moved, alone, of its own motion. Content with these favors, Agdestis is said to have consecrated the body at Pessinus, and to have honored it with annual ceremonies and with priestly presiders.' If some despiser of the deities, frenzied by the savagery of a sacrilegious heart, had set his mind to revile your gods, would he dare to say anything of them more grievous than what this history sets forth — which you have entered into a formal record as though it were something marvelous, and, lest the force of time and the long span of antiquity should render it obsolete, have solemnized with the honor of perpetuity?

For what is there set down or recorded concerning the gods in it which, if you were to say it of a man reared in modest ways and in the sterner disciplines, would not make you liable to a charge of insult and injury, and bring upon you a hatred procured by unatonable offenses and quarrels? 'From the stones,' you say, 'which Deucalion and Pyrrha cast, the mother of the gods was engendered.' What do you say, O theologians? what do you say, O presiders over the powers above? Was the mother of the gods, then, in no part of nature before the disaster of the flood, and, unless the force of the rains had destroyed the whole race of mortals, would the cause and origin of her engendering have failed to come to be?

It is, then, a human gift that she perceives that she exists, and it is to the benefactions of Pyrrha that she owes it that she sees herself to cling in the quality of some substance: which, if it be true, then this too will of necessity be not false — that she was a human being, not a goddess. For if it is certain that men derive the origin of their birth from that casting of stones, then it is necessary to believe that she too was one of us, engendered by the reckoning of like causes. For it could not come to pass, through any contradiction of things, that from one kind of stones and from the same manner of casting some should be substituted of an immortal lot, and others of a human condition.

That famous Varro, a Roman preeminent in manifold branches of learning and a searcher in the investigation of antiquity, in the first of the four books which he left written concerning the race of the Roman people, teaches by careful computations that from the time of the flood, of which we made mention above, down to the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, there are not yet two thousand years: and if his authority stands firm, then the Great Mother too must be said to have her span of life confined within the bounds of this number; and thus the matter is brought to this, that she who is related to be the progenitress of all the deities is not a mother but a daughter — nay rather an infant and a little child — since we grant that the gods have obtained, in perpetual continuation, neither beginnings nor ends of the ages.

But why do we speak of your having wrapped the mother of the gods in earthly filth, when you have not been able to make any pause from the revilings of Jupiter himself, not even for the interval of the briefest time? 'When the mother of the gods was sleeping on the topmost summit of Agdus,' you say, 'her son, an ambusher, strove to creep upon the modesty of her as she reposed.' — After countless maidens and matrons despoiled of their chastity, did Jupiter conceive even against his mother the hope of an unspeakable desire? And could not that horror avert him from the ardor of that lust — the horror to which nature herself has made subject not men alone but even some of the animals, and that sense implanted in common?

Was he lacking any regard for the piety and honour of the Capitols, guardian though he was — and could he not, with his mind thrown into confusion by madness, either reconsider or clearly perceive what crime he was lusting after? Yet, as the matter stands, forgetting his dignity and majesty, he went creeping toward that shameful theft, fearful and trembling, the breath of his mouth held in, his steps suspended through dread; and, set in the very borderland between anxiety and hope, he groped at her inmost parts, testing the depth of the sleeping woman and the endurance of his mother. O unseemly imagining of things! O foul posture of Jove, made ready for the campaign of an obscene contest!

So then, did that king of the world, when — incautious and hasty — he was thrown back from the theft as his stealthy attempt was rebuffed, turn himself to violence; and, since he could not seize his pleasure by treacherous deceit, assault his mother with force and most openly begin to overthrow her venerable chastity? He wrestled, then, for a very long time with her against her will; overcome, broken, and vanquished he gave way; and him whom filial piety could not tear away from an unspeakable craving for his mother, unleashed lust did tear apart. Unless perhaps you will say: 'The human race shuns and abhors a union of this kind, but among the gods there are no incests.' — And why did the mother fight most fiercely against the son who was bringing force upon her? Why did she flee from his embraces, avoiding his touches as unlawful?

For if there had been nothing evil in the matter, she ought to have complied without any hesitation, just as eagerly as he wished to fulfil the incitements of his craving. And indeed at this point the authors — men of great frugality and rather sparing even in matters of a shameful deed, lest those holy seeds should seem to have been spilled in vain — say: 'the flint drank up the filthiness of Jove's incontinence.' — And what, I ask, followed next? Tell us. 'In the middle of the stone's bosom, and in the hardness of that rock, an infant was formed and given life, the future offspring of great Jove.' — It is not easy to contradict conceptions so prodigious and so marvellous.

For since the human race is said by you to have arisen and been begotten from stones, one must believe both that the stones had generative receptacles, and that they drank in the seed once cast, and that when the time was complete they raised up heavy wombs, and at last gave birth, straining with the difficulty of the female manner. This drives our curiosity to inquire: 'Since you say that the offspring was delivered after ten months, during that time when it was shut up in the womb of the stone, with what nourishments was it watered, with what juices, or what sustenance could it draw from stony rigidity, as is customary for foetuses to draw from their mothers?' 'It had not yet,' he says, 'reached the light, and already, bellowing, it imitated and echoed its father's thunder:

and after it was granted him to behold the sky and the day, he laid waste to whatever met him, charging on, and pledged that he could thrust the very gods down from the region of heaven.' — O cautious and provident mother of the god, who — lest she should incur the ill-will of so insolent a child, or lest the bellowing foetus should trouble her sleep or interrupt her rest — withdrew herself, and sent that most noxious poison of the seed far away from her, and served it up to the roughness of the rocks. 'It was debated in the councils of the gods by what means that untameable ferocity might be mastered; and since no way remained, they had recourse to the one remedy: that he should be soaked with much unmixed wine, and stripped of his manhood by cutting it off.'

— As though indeed those afflicted with such bodily losses become of feebler audacity, and as though we did not daily see that those who have mown off these parts from themselves become of greater wantonness, and — casting aside all the restraints of modesty and shame — burst forth into obscene vileness, their disgraces published by open confession.

Yet I should like to see, if it had been granted me to be born in these times, that father Liber, the vanquisher of Agdestis's ferocity: fallen from the heights of heaven after the most august courts of the gods, docking the tails of his geldings, weaving movable snares, wounding the harmless purity of the waters with much force of unmixed wine; and, after drunkenness surfaced from the drink, warily slipping in his hands, handling the private parts of the sleeper, and — so that the encircling bites of the nooses might gird all about — applying the pains of his craft thus to things that were to perish. Could anyone say this of gods, however slightly tainted by esteem for them?

Or if they are taken up with such business, thoughts, and cares, would any wise man believe them to be gods, or reckon them at least in the number of mortals? This Agdestis, I ask, whose obscene part, once cut off, was to have brought security to the heavenly ones — was he one of the earthly living creatures, or some one of the gods, endowed with the honour of immortality? For if he was held to be of our lot and human condition, why did he strike such terror into the divinities? But if he had been a god, how could he be deceived, or how could anything be cut off from a divine body? Yet we raise no question on this point; let him have been, if you will, of divine race or one of ourselves, if you think it more correct to say so: was then, by a flow of blood

and from the amputated genitals there sprang a tree of the pomegranate, and just as soon as that force of the earth was covered by its bosom, the soil embraced it with a root; it shot up into the strength of a trunk, poured forth branches laden with pomegranate-blossoms, and in the space of a moment brought forth ripe fruits, complete in the maturity proper to them? And because these arose from red blood, therefore their colour is somewhat yellowish, tinged with a purple light; add too that for this reason they are juicy, for this reason wine-like, because they draw their kind from the blood of one weighed down — and you have fittingly filled out the tale. O Abdera, Abdera, what great occasions for men's mockery you would afford, if such a tale had been thus concocted among you!

All fathers recite it and supercilious cities read it through, and you are judged to be foolish and of the most frigid stupidity. 'Through her bosom,' he says, 'Nana conceived a son from the fruit.' — The reasoning follows on: for where crags and hard rocks give birth, there fruits must needs sprout. 'With acorns and figs Berecyntia fed her while she was bound.' — Fittingly and rightly: for she who had been made a mother from fruit ought to live on fruits. 'After the offspring was brought forth, it was ordered to be cast far away by Sangarius': — he who had for some time believed it divinely conceived disdained that it should be called the pledge of his own line. 'The infant was reared on she-goat's milk.'

— O tale ever hostile to the sex and most bitterly hostile to the male, in which not only do humans set the male otherwise, but even beasts of the male kind become mothers. 'He was marked with renowned and much-praised beauty, distinguished by comeliness.' — A wonderful thing indeed, that a goatish stench did not render him a thing to be shunned and fled from. 'The Great Mother loved him.' — If as a grandmother loves a grandson, the matter is plain; but if, as the theatres resound, it is an infamous and shameful love. 'And Agdestis loved him, enriching him with hunter's gifts.' — From a half-man indeed there could be no danger to chastity; but what Midas dreaded is not easy for those who suspect it to estimate. 'The Mother herself entered together with the walls.'

— We were indeed marvelling in this part at the might and fortitude of the divinity, but again we blame her negligence, in that — though she remembered law and fate — she less providently laid open the city to enemies. 'While they were celebrating the nuptial vows, Agdestis let loose the furies and madness.' — If King Midas had given offence, who was binding the youth to a wife in marriage, what had Gallus committed, what had the concubine's daughter, that the one should deprive himself of his manhood, the other of the honour of her breasts? 'Keep for yourself,' he said, 'these things on whose account you have stirred up such great matters by the overthrowings of minds.' — We should still all be ignorant of what the fury Agdestis had desired in the grown man's body, had not the boy, having cut himself, cast the offending members before the offended one. What do you say, O nations? What do you peoples given over to opinions of this kind?

when these things are brought forth, does not shame seize you, and abashment at such great foulnesses? We long to hear or learn from you something worthy concerning the gods; but you, in truth, set forth to us cuttings-off of breasts, amputations of male members, wraths, blood, furies, the voluntary deaths of maidens, and flowers and trees begotten from the blood of the dead.

Tell us once again, O men: did then the mother of the god, mourning by herself, gather up with dutiful diligence those severed genitals with their flowings — did she herself with holy hands, herself with divine hands, handle and take up the instruments of that shameful and foul deed, and even commit them to the earth to be hidden; and, lest they should melt away naked in the lap of the bare ground, before she veiled and covered them with a garment, did she at any rate wash them, and anoint them with balsams? For whence could fragrant violets have sprung, unless that infusion of unguents tempered the stench of the member?

When you read through such histories, I ask, do you not seem to yourselves either to be listening to weaving-girls contriving delays for their tedious task, or to aged crones seeking distractions for credulous infants and setting forth various fictions under the image of truth? 'Agdestis spoke with Jove, that he might restore life to his beloved; Jupiter refused to consent, because he was forbidden by fates more powerful; and, lest he should be altogether most harsh, he granted one favour: that the body should be dissolved by no rot, that the hair should ever grow, and that the least of the fingers alone should live in the body, alone display perpetual motion.' — Would anyone admit this, or confirm it by the assent of credulity — that a hair should grow on a corpse,