Against the Nations 3.39–4.16

There are besides some who declare that men made gods are signified by this name, such as Hercules, Romulus, Aesculapius, Liber, Aeneas. These opinions, as appears, are all different, and it cannot happen in the nature of things that those who differ in their opinions should be held to be authors of one truth. For if Piso's opinion is true, Aelius and Granius are lying; if what they say is certain, the most learned Varro errs, who substitutes the emptiest and vainest things for things established in substance. If the number nine gives the Novensiles their name, Cornificius is convicted of bleating nonsense, who gives the force of another's power to gods presiding over renewal. If Cornificius's opinion is true, Cincius is found imprudent, who endows the gods of conquered cities with the power of the Novensile deities. If they are those whom Cincius declares, Manilius will be found to say what is false, who includes under this name the hurlers of another's thunderbolt. If what Manilius asserts is ascertained and true, those are in the greatest error who think that mortals exalted and consecrated with divine honors are called Novensiles from the newness of their honor. And if the Novensiles are those who deserved to be raised to the stars after they finished the mortality of life, there are no Novensile gods at all. For as slaves, soldiers, and masters are not names of the persons underlying them but of offices, conditions, and functions, so when we say Novensiles, if this is the name of those who from men deserved to be gods, it is plain and evident that not specially defined persons but newness itself is named by the title Novensiles.

Nigidius declared that the Penates are Neptune and Apollo, who once, on an agreed condition, surrounded Ilium with immortal walls. Again, in his sixteenth book, following the Etruscan lore, he sets out that there are four kinds of Penates: some of Jupiter, others of Neptune, a third kind of the underworld, and a fourth of mortal men, saying something inexplicable. Caesius, also following that lore, thinks they are Fortune and Ceres, the Genius Jovialis, and Pales, not the female whom the common people accept, but some male attendant and steward of Jupiter. Varro thinks that the gods we speak of are those within and in the inmost recesses of heaven, and that neither their number nor their names are known. The Etruscans say and name them the Consentes and Complices, because they rise together and set together, six males and as many females, of unknown names and very sparing of pity; but they are thought to be the counselors and partners of supreme Jupiter. Nor have there been lacking those who wrote that Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva are the Penates, without whom we cannot live and think, but who rule us inwardly by reason, heat, and breath. As you see, here too nothing harmonious is said, nothing is settled by a single statement, nor is there anything trustworthy on which the mind can rest, conjecturing ... the truth most nearly by guess. For the opinions totter so, and one opinion is torn up by another, that either nothing of all is true, or, if the truth is told by someone, it is not known amid so many differences.

We can, if you like, say something briefly about the Lares too, whom the common people think are gods of streets and roads, because Greece calls streets laurai. In different writings Nigidius says now that they are guardians of houses and dwellings, now that they are those Curetes who are said once to have hidden the wailing of Jupiter with the clashing of bronze, now that they are the Samothracian Fingers, whom the Greeks call five in number, ... named the Idaean Dactyls. Varro, similarly hesitating, declares now that they are the Manes, and that therefore Mania is called the mother of the Lares; now again that they are gods of the air and are called heroes; now, following the opinions of the ancients, he says that the Lares are Larvae, as it were certain genii and the souls of the departed.

It would be endless and immeasurable to go through each kind and make it plain from the books themselves that there is no god considered or believed in by you about whom you have not put forth ambiguous and conflicting opinions in a thousand varieties. But for brevity's sake and to avoid tedium it is enough to have said what has been said, and it is too laborious to heap many things together, when from one or two it becomes clear and evident that you hesitate and waver and say nothing certain about the things you assert. Unless perhaps you will say: 'Even if we do not know personally who the Lares are, who the Novensiles, who the Penates, still the very agreement of the authorities vindicates their existence and establishes that they hold the form of their kind among the number of the heavenly beings.' And how can it be known whether someone is a god, if what he is will be unknown and not known? Or how can the very request for benefits avail, if it will not be ascertained and certain who ought to be called for each consultation? For everyone who seeks to obtain an answer from some deity must necessarily know to whom he prays, whom he implores, from whom he asks help in human affairs and needs; especially since you yourselves report that not all gods can provide all things, and that the minds and offenses of each are appeased by very different rites.

For if this god wants a black hide and that one a white; if one must be sacrificed to with the head veiled and another with it bare; if one is consulted about marriages and another provides remedies for troubles: it cannot make no difference whether this or that one is the Novensile, since ignorance of the facts and confusion of persons both force the gods to be offended and necessarily incur guilt requiring atonement. For imagine me praying to one of these deities to escape some trouble and avert danger, saying: 'Be present, be present, gods Penates, you Apollo and you Neptune, and by the mercy of your divinity avert all these evils by which I am burned, scorched, and troubled.' Will there be any hope of receiving help from them, if Ceres, Pales, Fortune, Jovialis, or the Genius, and not Neptune and Apollo, are the Penates? Or if I invoke the Curetes as Lares, whom part of your authors assert to be the Samothracian Fingers, how shall I be able to have them as helpers and well-disposed, when I shall have given these not their own names and those names not their own? So far does the matter demand that the gods be known individually, and that there be no uncertainty or doubt about the power of each one's name, lest, if they are invoked with others' rites and titles, they keep their ears closed and hold us bound by inexpiable guilt.

So if it is clear to you that this multitude of gods which you enumerate dwells and abides in the lofty palaces of heaven, you ought to stand within the bounds of a single statement, and not, pulled apart through various and conflicting opinions, destroy the credibility of the very things you build up. If it is Janus, let it be Janus; if Liber, let it be Liber; if Summanus, let it be Summanus: for this is to trust, this is to hold, to be fixed in the knowledge of an ascertained thing; not, like the blind and wandering, to say: 'The Novensiles are the Muses; no, they are the gods of Trebia; no, the number nine; or rather the guardians of overthrown cities', and to bring such great things into this danger, that while you take away some and put others in their place, it may rightly be doubted of all of them whether they exist in any part at all.

I would like to ask you, and above all the Romans themselves, lords and rulers of the world: do you think that Piety, Concord, Safety, Honor, Virtue, Happiness, and the other names of this kind, to which we see you have built altars with magnificent shrines, have divine power and dwell in the regions of heaven? Or have you, as usually happens, entered them in the roll of the gods above for form's sake, because we wish and want these good things to befall us? For if, thinking these are empty words and names without substance, you nevertheless consecrate them to the divine regions, you will have to consider whether this is a childish game or aims at mocking your deities, to whom you equate and join the fictions of empty words. But if, from a firmer conviction of mind, you have honored these too with temples and sacred couches, thinking them gods, we beg you to teach our ignorance: in what way, by what path, can Victory, Peace, Equity, and the others mentioned above be understood to be gods and to belong to the council of the gods above?

For we, unless perhaps you take away and snatch from us common sense, perceive and see that none of these has the power of a deity or is contained in any form of its own kind; rather, virtue is the virtue of a man, safety of one who is safe, honor of one who is honored, victory of a victor, concord of the concordant, piety of the pious, memory of one who remembers, and happiness of one who lives happily and without any misfortunes. That this is said by us most truly is evident from the contraries and can be recognized from the opposites: unhappiness, discord, forgetfulness, injustice, impiety, cowardice of heart, and poor health of body. For as these happen to people and are found in human actions and chance feelings, so what is opposed to them and named from kinder qualities must reside in others, from whom, thus formed, this fashioning of names was conceived.

As for your bringing in other troops of unknown gods, we cannot judge whether you do it seriously and in the belief of an ascertained fact, or whether, playing with empty fictions of the imagination, you frolic in extravagance. 'Because a she-wolf, not gentle by nature, spared the abandoned infants,' he says, 'she was called the goddess Luperca, on the authority of Varro.' Was this goddess, then, produced by the outcome of events, not by the force of nature? And after the savage beast held back its fierce bites, did she herself begin to exist and draw the meaning of her very name from it? Or if she was a goddess long before Romulus and his brother were born, tell us what her name and title was. Praestana was so called, as you say, because Quirinus surpassed (praestiterit) the strength of all in throwing the javelin; and because Titus Tatius was allowed to open and lay open (pandere) the way to take the Capitoline hill, a goddess was called Panda or Pantica. So these too had never been deities before the deeds; and unless Romulus had held the Palatine by the cast of his spear, and unless the Sabine king had been able to take the Tarpeian rock, would there be no Pantica and no Praestana? If you say that these too existed before the cause of their name, then, as was asked in the previous point, tell us what their names were.

Pellonia is a goddess mighty in driving away (pellendis) enemies. Tell us, if it is not troublesome: whose enemies? Sides clash and decide the issue between them in close combat with weapons, and this side is the enemy of that, and that hostile to this: whom, then, will Pellonia drive away when there is fighting on both sides? Or to whom will she yield her favor, when she ought to give the power and service of her name to both sides? If she does so, that is, if she gives favor and support to both sides, she will lose the force of her name, which was formed for driving away one side. Unless perhaps you will say: 'This goddess belongs to the Romans only, and, siding with the Quirites alone, is always ready with favorable help.' We would indeed wish it were so, for we favor the name; but the matter raises no small question. For what? Do the Romans possess gods of their own, who do not belong to other nations? And how can they be gods if they do not show the evenness of their name to all nations everywhere? And where, I ask, was this Pellonia long ago, when the public honor was sent under the yoke at the Caudine Forks, when torrents of blood ran at Lake Trasimene, when the plains of Diomedes were heaped with Roman corpses, when a thousand other wounds of battle were received in countless defeats? Was she sleeping, snoring, or, as base persons usually do, had she deserted to the enemy's camp?

The left gods and left goddesses preside only over the left-hand regions and are enemies of the right-hand parts. On what principle or in what sense of mind this is said, we neither grasp ourselves nor trust that you can bring it into any light of common understanding. For first, the world itself in itself has no right or left regions, no upper or lower, no front or back. For whatever is round and enclosed on every side by the convexity of solid roundness has no beginning and no end; and where there is no end and no beginning, there cannot be any part of that name. So when we say, 'This region is right, and that left', we do not say it with respect to the state of the world, which is wholly alike to itself, but we refer it to our position and situation, since we are so formed that some things are said to be on our right and others on our left. Yet these very things we call left and right have nothing permanent, nothing fixed in us, but take their shapes from our sides according as chance and the event of the moment have placed us. If I look toward the rising sun, the pole of cold and the north becomes my left; if I turn my face toward it, the west, which was behind my back with respect to the sun, will be on my left. Again, if I cast my eyes toward the west, the south and midday pass into the name of left; and if the necessary course of time turns me around to that part, it happens that the east is called left by the change of my body's direction. From this it can very easily be recognized that nothing is right or left by nature, but by positions, by times, according as the situation of our body is placed with respect to the surroundings of things. Since this is so, on what principle, in what way, will there be gods of the left-hand parts, when it is established that the same regions become now right and now left? Or how have the right-hand parts deserved it of the immortal gods to live without any guardians, the parts which they have always declared lucky and attended with favorable omens?

Lateranus, as you say, is the god and genius of hearths, and received this name because this kind of fireplace is built by people from unbaked bricks (laterculi). What then? If hearths are made of earthenware or any other material, will they have no genii, and will this Lateranus, whoever he is, withdraw from his office of guardianship because the possession of his kingdom is not built of clay forms? And what, I ask, does this god, who has drawn the presidency of hearths, do? Does he run through the kitchens of the human race, inspecting and exploring what kinds of wood are used to kindle the heat in his hearths; does he give strength to earthen pots so that they do not burst, overcome by the force of the flames; does he see to it that the flavors of unspoiled food come to the sense of the palate with their pleasantness; and does he perform the office of a taster, testing whether the dishes are properly seasoned? Is this not foul, or rather, to speak more truly, is it not insulting and impious to bring in some fictions of gods merely for this purpose, not to honor them with worthy honors, but to set them over base things and shameful activity?

Does military Venus also preside over the shameful doings of the camp and the debauching of boys? Is Perfica also one of the populace of deities, who makes those obscene and filthy pleasures proceed to completion with unhindered sweetness? Pertunda too, who is present in bedrooms when husbands dig through the virginal trench? Tutunus too, on whose huge private parts and bristling member you think it lucky and desirable for your matrons to ride? But if the facts themselves do not move you at all to understand the truth, can you not at least recognize from the names themselves that these are the fictions of the emptiest superstition and the imaginings of false gods? Puta, you say, is present at the pruning (putationes) of trees, Peta at asking (petendis) for things; Nemestrinus is the god of groves (nemora); Patellana is a deity and so is Patella, one of whom is set over things opened (patefactis), the other over things to be opened. Nodutis is said to be the god who brings sown crops to the knots (nodos); and the goddess who presides over threshing (terendis) crops is Noduterensis; the goddess ... frees from wandering off roads; parents bereaved (orbati) of children are under the guardianship of Orbona, and those whose last hours have come under Nenia's. Now she who hardens and solidifies the bones (ossa) of little infants is called Ossipago herself; Mellonia is a goddess powerful and mighty among bees, caring for and guarding the sweetness of honey (mel).

Tell me, I pray you, so that Peta, Puta, and Patella may favor you: if there were no bees at all on earth, or if we human beings were born boneless like some little worms, would the goddess Mellonia not exist, or would Ossipago, the solidifier of bones, not have her own name? For I ask and ask again: do the gods seem to you older by nature, time, and antiquity than human beings, or than bees, crops, shrubs, and the rest? No one will doubt that you say the gods precede all things that exist by countless ages and generations. If this is so, how can it happen in the nature of things that beings earlier in time should receive names from things produced later, or that the gods should have drawn the guardianship of things not yet born and given to mortals for their use? Or were the gods long without names, and after things began to be born and to exist on earth, were they deemed worthy by you to be called by these marks and titles? And how could you know what names to give each, when you did not know at all that they existed or that certain powers were in them, since it was likewise unknown to you which of them could do what and over what thing each ought to be set according to the power of its divinity?

'What then,' you say, 'do you judge that these gods exist nowhere at all and have been established by false opinions?' Not we alone say this, but truth itself, and reason, and that common sense which is in all mortals. For who would believe that there are Lucrian gods who preside over the gaining of profits (lucra), when profits very often come from shameful causes and always consist of others' losses? Who would believe that Libentina and ... watch over lusts, which wisdom bids us flee and which shameless obscenity tries and practices in a thousand forms? Who would believe that Limentinus and Lima keep watch over thresholds (limina) and perform the duties of doorkeepers, when we see the thresholds of shrines and of private houses torn down and undermined every day, and the shameful goings to the brothels are not without them? Who would believe in the Limi, guardians of crookedness, in Saturn, guardian of sowing, in Montinus of mountains, in Murcida of the sluggish? Who, finally, would believe that there is a goddess Money, whom your literature shows, as though she were the greatest deity, giving gold rings, front seats at games and shows, the highest platforms of honors, the grandeur of magistracy, and, what the lazy love most, carefree leisure through wealth?

But if bones, honey, thresholds, and all the other things we have either touched on in passing or left untouched to avoid excessive tedium have their own guardians in the divine seats, it is possible on the same principle to bring in a thousand other gods, who must give their care and protection to countless things. For why should a god preside over honey alone, and not over gourds, turnips, savory, cress, vetches, beets, and cabbages? Why should bones alone have deserved guardianship, and not nails, hair, and all the other things placed in hidden and more modest parts, though they are exposed to very many accidents and need the gods' care and attention more? Or if you say that these parts too are under guardian gods, there will begin to be as many gods as there are things; and no reason will be given why divine care should not preside over all things, if you say there are certain things over which deities preside and provide.

What do you say, you fathers of new religions and new powers? Do you cry out and complain that these gods are violated and neglected by us with sacrilegious contempt: Lateranus, genius of hearths, Limentinus, guardian of thresholds, Pertunda, Perfica, Noduterensis? And because we do not fall down as suppliants before Mutunus and Tutunus, do you say that affairs have slipped into ruin, and that the world itself has changed its laws and ordinances? But look and consider whether, when you invent and devise such monsters, you have not offended the true gods, if there are any who deserve to bear and hold the dignity of that name, and whether it is not for this reason that the evils you speak of boil up and grow worse with daily additions. 'Why then,' perhaps one of you will say, 'is it false that these gods exist? They obey when invoked by the soothsayers, come when summoned by their names, and give faithful answers to those who ask.' We can maintain that what is said is false, either because the whole matter is full of superstitions, or because we see every day many predictions either fall out otherwise or be twisted into contrary outcomes, with expectation disappointed.

But let them be true, as you assert: how will you prove that Mellonia, for example, or Limentinus enters the entrails and fits them to the meanings of the things you ask about? Have you ever seen their face, bearing, and features, or can these be seen in lungs or little livers? Can it not happen, however cunningly you conceal it, that one comes in place of another, deceiving, playing, tricking, and presenting the appearance of the one invoked? If the magi, the brothers of the soothsayers, report that in their summonings 'counter-gods' often creep in in place of those summoned, and that these are certain spirits of grosser matter who pretend to be gods and mock the ignorant with lies and pretenses, why should we not believe on a like principle that here too others substitute themselves for those who do not exist, both to confirm your opinions and to rejoice that victims are slaughtered for themselves under others' names?

Or if you refuse to accept this because it is new, how can you know whether there is one single being who takes the place of all whom you invoke, and, putting himself in all the parts and divisions of places, presents to us the appearance of many gods and powers? 'Who is this one?' someone may ask. We can say, taught by true authorities; but so that you may not refuse to believe us, let him ask the Egyptians, Persians, Indians, Chaldaeans, Armenians, and all those others who have seen and learned these things by more secret arts: you will surely learn who the one god is, or who are the very many under him who pretend to be gods and mock the ignorance of the human race. We have long been ashamed to come to that point at which not only little boys and saucy fellows cannot keep from laughing, but even serious people hardened into sternness of face. For since we have all received it as taught and handed down by our teachers that in the declension of gods' names there are no plural numbers, because the gods are individuals and the particularity of each one's name cannot be shared in common by many, you, forgetting this fact and with the memory of your childhood schooling put to sleep, have both supplied several gods under the same names, and, though elsewhere you are rather restrictive in their number, have made them manifold again by sharing titles. This part men of keen judgment and penetrating mind once explained in both the Italian and the Greek language. And that fact could have given us a shortcut, if we did not see that some are unacquainted with that literature, and if the discourse we have undertaken did not compel us also to set out something on these matters, though taken and recorded from them.

Your theologians, then, and the authors of hidden antiquity, say that there are three Jupiters in the nature of things: one begotten of Father Ether, another of Heaven, and the third of Saturn, both born and buried in the island of Crete. Five Suns and five Mercuries: of whom, as they relate, the first Sun is said to be the son of Jupiter and is considered the grandson of Ether; the second, likewise of Jupiter, born of Hyperiona as his mother; the third, of Vulcan, not the Lemnian but the son of the Nile; the fourth, the father of Ialysus, whom Acantho bore at Rhodes in heroic times; the fifth is held to be the father of the Scythian king and of shape-shifting Circe. Now the first Mercury, who is said to have neighed with lust at Proserpina with his parts erect, is the offspring of highest Heaven; the second is under the earth, who is claimed to be Trophonius; the third was born of Maia his mother and of Jupiter, but the third Jupiter; the fourth is the offspring of the Nile, whose name the Egyptian people shudder and fear to utter; the fifth is the slayer of Argus, a fugitive and exile, and the discloser of letters in Egypt. 'But there are also five Minervas,' they say, 'as there are five Suns and Mercuries': the first not a virgin, but the mother of Apollo by Vulcan; the second the offspring of the Nile, who is held to be Egyptian; the third is the child of Saturn, who devised the use of weapons; the fourth the offspring of Jupiter, whom the Messenians call Coryphasia; and the fifth is she who killed her father Pallas when he sought her incestuously.

And so as not to seem long and excessive by wanting to go through each item in detail, the same theologians say that there are four Vulcans and three Dianas, as many Aesculapiuses, and five Dionysuses, twice three Herculeses and four Venuses, three kinds of Castors and as many of Muses, a set of three winged Cupids and a set of four bearing the name of Apollo, whose fathers and mothers they likewise point out, and the places where they were born, and show the origin of each with its lineage. If this is true and certain and shown by the assertion of an ascertained fact, either none of them are gods, since several cannot exist under the same name, as we have learned; or, if one of them is, he will be unknown and not recognized, because he is blinded by the confusion of like names. And so it comes about through you yourselves, though you would not have it so, that religion wavers, thrown into confusion, and has no certain goal toward which it can direct itself, deceived by the many errors of ambiguity.

For imagine that we, moved either by authority or by the violence of your terror, have made up our minds to worship Minerva, for example, with your solemn rites and in the customary manner. If, when we are preparing to undertake the divine service and to pay her dues on flaming altars, all the Minervas fly to us, and, contending for possession of this name, each demands that that sacrificial preparation be given to her: what shall we do in the midst, feeble creatures that we are, or to which party shall we rather transfer the duties of pious service? For perhaps that first one we mentioned will say: 'Mine is the name of Minerva, mine the divinity, who bore Apollo and Diana, and by the offspring of my womb enlarged heaven with deities and multiplied the number of the gods.' 'No,' the fifth Minerva will say, '..., you who, as wife and mother so many times, have been diminished in the holiness of pure chastity. Do you not see that in all the Capitols the image of the Minervas is virginal, and all artists give them the forms of the unmarried? Stop, then, claiming a name of a right not yours. For all the chorus of poets is witness that I am Minerva, born of Pallas as my father, who call me Pallas by a surname derived from my father.' 'What do you say?' the second will say on hearing this. 'Will you bear the name of Minerva, you wanton parricide, polluted by the defilement of incestuous love, who, while you adorned yourself with paints and harlots' arts, even roused your father's mind toward you with plainly frenzied desires? Go on, then, look for another emblem for yourself; for this title is mine, whom the Nile, greatest of rivers, begot from its liquid waters and brought into virgin form by the thickening of dew. If you ask proof of the fact, I too will give the Egyptians as witnesses, in whose language I am Neith, as Plato's Timaeus testifies.' What then do we think will happen? Will she too desist from calling herself Minerva, whose name is Coryphasia, either from the sign of her mother Corypha or because she sprang from the very top (vertex) of Jupiter's head, bearing a shield and girded with the terrors of arms? Or will the one who is third patiently give up the name? Will she not take account of herself with such words as these, and refute the arrogance of the first: 'Do you dare to usurp the pure majesty of my name, you who were brought forth and clotted out of mud and muddy whirlpools? Or you, do you take on the dignity of another goddess, you who falsely claim to have been born from the head of Jupiter and persuade the silliest mortals that you are reason? Does Jupiter beget children conceived in his head? And so that the weapons you carry could be forged and fashioned, was there a smithy in the hollow of his skull, with anvils, hammers, furnaces, bellows, coals, and tongs? Or if what you assert is true, that you are reason, stop claiming for yourself the name that is mine: for what you call reason is not a certain form of a deity but the understanding of obscure causes.' If, then, as we said, when we approach to perform the religious duties of Minerva, five are present, and, quarreling over the ownership of this name, each wants either the fumes of incense to be offered to her or wine to be poured out from golden bowls as an offering, by what arbitrator, by what judge shall we settle such great disputes? Or what investigator, what umpire will there be for such great personages, to try either to award just possession among persons of this kind or to pronounce not unjust judgments on the pledges? Will he not rather go home and, keeping himself away from such business, think it safer to touch none of these things, lest by giving to one what belongs to all he makes the others his enemies, or incur the charge of folly if he assigns to all what ought to belong to one?