Against the Nations 4.17–4.36

We could say the same things about the Mercuries, the Suns, indeed about all the others whose numbers you stretch and multiply. But it is enough to know from one case that the reasoning is the same in the rest; and so that prolixity may not breed weariness in the hearers, we will stop going through them one by one, lest, while we accuse you of excess, we too incur the fault of immoderate talkativeness. What do you say, you who invite us to the worship of the gods by the mangling of our limbs and compel us to take up the worship of your deities? We can be not difficult, if only something worthy of the reputation of so great a name is shown us. Show us Mercury, but one; give us Liber, but one; one Venus and likewise one Diana. For you will never make us believe that there are four Apollos or three Jupiters, not even if you summon Jupiter himself as a witness or set up the Pythian as your authority.

But someone on the other side says: 'How do we know whether the theologians wrote what they had examined and known, or put forth an arbitrary fiction as it seemed good to them and as they pleased?' That has nothing to do with the case, and the reasoning of this discussion does not rest on whether things are as the theologians' writings indicate or are otherwise and differ by a great distance. For it is enough for us to speak about things published, and not to ask what is in truth but to refute and convict what is set before the public and what human opinion has conceived. But if they are liars, you set out what the truth is and disclose the irrefutable secret. Yet how can this be done if the teachings of literature are set aside? For what can be said of the immortal gods that has not come to human notice from the writings of men? Or can you yourselves tell anything about their rites and ceremonies that has not been recorded in literature and published in the commentaries of writers? Or if you think these are of no weight, let all the books you have that were composed about the gods by theologians, pontiffs, and even some devoted to philosophy be abolished; indeed, let us rather imagine that from the beginning of the world no mortal ever ... anything about the gods: we want to test and desire to know whether you could mutter or open your mouth in mentioning the gods, or conceive in your mind those whom no notion from any writing had formed in your souls. But since it is agreed that you learned their names and powers from the prompting of books, it is unfair to take away credibility from those writings by whose testimony and authority you confirm what you say.

Unless perhaps these things will be false and what is said by you true. By what argument, by what sign? For since those who wrote this and those who wrote that were certainly human beings, and both sides disputed about uncertain matters, it is arrogant to say that what pleases you is true and to accuse what hurts your feelings of license and falsehood. By the rights of the human race and the fellowship of mortality itself, when you hear and read that such a god was born of such a father and such a mother, does it not touch the sense of your minds that something human is being said, something proceeding from the lowliness of the earthly race? Or, since you think this is so, do you feel no anxiety lest you incur some offense with those gods, whoever they are, because you believe they came out into a light unknown to them from shameful intercourse and the casting of seed, by the kind services of obscenity? For we, so that no one may think we are ignorant or do not know what befits the dignity of this name, hold that gods ought either to be without birth, or, if they have some origin, we hold and judge that they were sent forth by the Lord and Ruler of things for reasons that he himself knows, spotless, most chaste, pure, not knowing what that foulness of intercourse is, and with procreation brought to an end in them by the first begetting.

But you, on the contrary, forgetful of such great majesty and exaltation, join to them such births and ascribe to them such origins as people of more refined minds would hold in execration and horror. 'Diespiter,' you say, 'was born with his brothers of Ops his mother and Saturn his father.' Do the gods, then, have wives, and do they enter the bonds of marriage on terms first sought out? Do they solemnize the rites of the marriage bed by usage, by the spelt-cake ceremony, by purchase? Do they have girls they hope for, girls promised, betrothed with stipulations interposed? And why speak of the terms themselves, when ... say that some celebrated weddings and held festive gatherings, and that goddesses made merry at them, and that one, because she had no share in the Fescennine songs, threw everything into confusion by discord and sowed the dangers of destruction for the human race in time to come?

But perhaps the foulness of this disgrace shines out less in the others. Is that ruler of the sky, then, the father of gods and men, who moves and shakes the whole heaven with his brow, that is, his nod, formed from a man and a woman? And unless both sexes had dissolved into obscene pleasures with joined bodies, would that greatest Jupiter not exist, and would the deities to this day have no king, and would heaven stand without a lord? And why do we wonder that you say Jupiter was poured out of a woman's womb, when your authors write that he also had a nurse and kept the life he had received by the nourishment of another's breast? What do you say, men? Did he, I will say again, who thunders, flashes, hurls lightning, and gathers terrible clouds, suck the streams of breasts, utter wails, crawl, and, when he displayed his weeping in a most silly drawn-out way, fall silent on hearing rattles, and was he brought to sleep lying in the softest cradle and soothed by broken baby-talk? O religious defense of the gods! O showing forth and instilling of the venerable dignity of awesome greatness! Is it so, I ask, that the eminence of the powers above is born among you? Do your gods come forth into the light by the same generations by which asses, pigs, and dogs, by which all this unclean flood of earthly beasts is conceived and born?

And not content with having attributed these unions to the dignity of Saturn, you declare that the king of the world himself begot children even more shamefully than he himself was born and produced. 'Of Hyperiona as mother,' you say, 'and of Jupiter the hurler of thunderbolts, the golden and most blazing Sun was born; of Latona and the same, the Delian archer and Diana the huntress of the woods; of Leda and the same, ... whose name in Greek is the Dioscuri; of Alcmena and the same, that Theban Hercules, whom a club and a skin protected; of Semele and the same, Liber, who is called Bromius and was born a second time from his father's thigh; of the same again and Maia, Mercury, eloquent of speech and the bearer of friendly snakes.' Can any heavier insult be fixed on your Jupiter, or is there anything else that shakes or destroys the authority of the ruler of the gods, than that you believe he was once overcome by lustful pleasures and grew hot with the heat of an inflamed heart toward the desire of women? And what business did Saturn's royal son have with other men's marriages? Was Juno not enough for him, and could he not calm the rush of his desires in the queen of the deities, though such great nobility commended her, her beauty, face, dignity, and the snowy, marble-white arms? Or, not content with one wife, delighted by concubines, mistresses, and little girlfriends, did he spread his lack of self-control everywhere, as foolish young men usually do, a lecherous god, and, gray-haired, restore the ardor of his flagging pleasures from countless bodies? What do you say, you impious ones, or what foul opinions do you invent about your Jupiter? Do you not notice, do you not see, with what disgrace you brand him? Of what crime you make him the author? What stains of shameful deeds, how great infamies you heap on him?

Human beings, prone to lust and inclined to the allurements of pleasure by the weakness of nature, still punish adulteries by laws, and inflict capital penalties on those whom they catch having thrown themselves into other men's marriages by assaulting the marriage bed. Did the greatest of rulers not know what disgrace, what brand belonged to the role of seducer and adulterer? And did that watcher, as report has it, of those who deserve well and ill, having lost the reasoning of his heart, not see what it befitted him to want? And this maltreatment might perhaps be tolerated if you at least joined him to equal persons, and he were made by you an adulterer with immortal goddesses. But what beauty, I ask, what grace was there in human bodies that could provoke and turn Jupiter's eyes toward them? Skins, entrails, phlegm, and all that filth of the intestines placed beneath the coverings, at which not only that Lynceus with his penetrating sight might shudder, but anyone else might shun even by thought alone. O excellent reward of guilt! O worthy and precious sweetness, for the sake of which greatest Jupiter became a swan and a bull and the begetter of white eggs! If you are willing to open the eyes of the mind and look at the

truth itself without any private partiality, you will find that the causes of all the miseries by which, as you say, the human race has long been afflicted flow from such opinions as you have held from ancient times about your gods, and which you have refused to reform for the better when the truth was placed before your eyes. For what unseemly thing have we ever thought about them, or published in unbecoming writings, that the troubles of the human race and the diminished resources by which we live should be thrown on us as a reproach? Is it said by us that some gods were begotten from eggs like storks and pigeons? That the whiteness of Cytherean Venus grew together from the foam of the sea and the cut-off genitals of Caelus? That Saturn was bound for parricide and on fixed days is washed and relieved of the weight of his chains? That Jupiter was saved from death by the kindness of the Curetes? That he drove his father from the kingdom and held by violence and fraud a rule that belonged to another? That the old man, driven out, hid in the borders of the Italians, and because he had been safe there from his son, gave the name Latium as a reward? Do we say that Jupiter himself made an incestuous marriage with his sister, or that, invited to the right of the table, he unknowingly dined on Lycaon's child in place of pork? That Vulcan, lame in one foot, practiced the work of a smith on the island of Lemnos? That Aesculapius was pierced by the bolt of the thunderbolt for greed and avarice, as Pindar the Boeotian sings? That Apollo, made rich, deceived by the ambiguity of his answer the very kings whose treasures and gifts had enriched him? Did we publish that Mercury was a thief? That Laverna exists and presides together with him over thieves' frauds? Is Myrtilus, who declares that the Muses were the little maidservants of Megaclo, daughter of Macar, one of ours? That Venus, a little harlot ... by a Cyprian king named Cinyras, was consecrated in the number of the gods?

Who declared that the Palladium was put together from the remains of Pelops? Was it not you? Who, that Mars was a Spartan? Was it not Epicharmus, your author? Who, that he was born in the borders of Thrace? Was it not Sophocles the Athenian, with all the theaters agreeing? Who, that he was bound for thirteen months in Arcadia? Was it not the son of the river Meles? Who, that dogs are sacrificed to him by the Carians and asses by the Scythians? Was it not, first and foremost with the others, Apollodorus? Who, that while he was insulting another's marriage bed he was caught entangled in snares? Was it not your commentaries? Was it not your stage? Was it ever written by us that gods served in hired slavery, as Hercules at Sardis for love and wantonness, as Delian Apollo for Admetus, as the brother of Jupiter for Laomedon of Troy, as the Pythian for the same king together with his uncle, and as Minerva for those joining in the secrets of marriage, as the attendant of light and the regulator of lamps? Is it not your prophet 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 Polemo show that the warrior maiden was struck, bloodied, and harassed by Ornytus? Does not Sosibius declare that Hercules himself, tortured by the sons of Hippocoon, came back with inflicted wounds and pain? Is it handed down as told by us that Jupiter was committed to burial on the island of Crete? Do we say that the brothers born together in eggs were buried in the Spartan and Lacedaemonian lands? Is he our author, who is shown in the titles of writings as Patrocles of Thurii, who records that the tomb and remains of Saturn are kept in Sicilian soil? Is Hieronymus ... Plutarch proved to be of our party, who declared that Hercules, after the ruin of epileptic fits, was dissolved into ashes on the heights of Oeta?

For what shall I say of those loves by which, as it is recorded in your literature and authors, the holy heavenly ones burned for women? Is it we who accuse the king of the sea of robbing Amphitrites, Hippothoes, Amymones, Melanippes, and Alcyones of the chastity of their virginity through the heat of furious desire? That Apollo, son of Latona, that spotless, most chaste, and pure one, sought Arsinoes, Aethusas, Hypsipyles, Marpessas, Zeuxippes and Prothoes, Daphnes and Steropes with the passions of a reckless heart? Is it shown in our poems that old Saturn, long covered with gray hair and already cold with the age of years, was caught by his wife in adultery, put on the form of a beast, and flew off under the appearance of a horse, neighing? Is not Jupiter himself, king of the world, infamous through you for going through countless forms and hiding the flame of wanton love under slavish deceptions? Was it ever written by us that, to accomplish his lustful thefts, he was turned now into gold, now into a playful satyr, into a serpent, a bird, a bull, and, what surpasses every kind of insult, into a little ant, so that, forsooth, he might make Clitor's daughter the mother of Myrmidon among the Thessalians? Who made him stay awake for nine continuous nights with Alcmena? Was it not you? Who made him lie idle in his loves, having abandoned his post in heaven? Was it not you? And indeed you add no small benefits, since there was born for us a god, Hercules, who in matters of this kind surpassed and exceeded the powers of his father. The one, in hardly nine nights, could beat out, put together, and compose one offspring; but Hercules, the holy god, in one night taught fifty daughters of Thestius both to lay aside the name of virginity and to bear the burdens of mothers. What of this, that not content with having attributed to the gods cares for the female sex, you also add males loved by them? Someone loves Hylas, another is occupied with Hyacinthus; that one burns with desire for Pelops, this one sighs more ardently for Chrysippus; Catamitus is snatched away to become a darling and keeper of the cups, and Fabius, so that he may be called Jupiter's chick, is branded in his soft parts and sealed behind.

But among you do only the male gods love, and has the female sex kept its holiness? Is it not recorded in your literature that Tithonus was loved by Aurora, that the Moon burned for Endymion, a Nereid for Aeacus, Thetis for the father of Achilles, Proserpina for Adonis, her mother Ceres for some rustic Iasion, and, after Vulcan, Phaethon, and Mars, that very Venus, mother of the sons of Aeneas and author of Roman dominion, for marriage with Anchises? Since, then, you hurl such disgraces and shameful monstrosities, not at some one god by name, but at the whole race of gods above, whom you think we deny, without any exception, do you dare, with your modesty intact, to say either that we are impious or that you are pious, when they receive much greater offenses from you from all the disgraces you gather into slanders against them than dignities and honors from the rite and duty of worship? For either all those things that are published about each of them, injuring their reputation and majesty, are false, and it is a matter wholly worthy of the gods utterly destroying the whole race of mortals; or, if they are ascertained, true, and grasped beyond any doubt, the matter is brought to this conclusion, that, very much against your will, we believe that they were not of the race above but of the human race.

For where there are weddings, marriages, childbirths, nurses, crafts, and infirmities; where there is loss of civil status and the condition of slavery; where there are wounds, slaughter, and blood; where there are loves, desires, and pleasures; where there is every feeling of the mind arising from restless disturbances: there nothing divine can be, nor can what is proper to a perishable race and earthly frailty attach to a more excellent nature. For who, if only he recognizes and perceives what the force of that power is, would believe either that God had genital parts and was deprived of them by a most shameful cutting off; or that he once swallowed the offspring produced from himself and was restrained by the punishment of chains; or that he somehow waged civil war with his father and kept him from his royal right; or that, terrified by fear of a younger one, he turned his back, overcome, and hid like a runaway and exile in remote hiding places? Who, I say, would believe that a god reclined at human tables, was killed for greed, deceived suppliants with the ambiguity of an answer, excelled in the tricks of theft, committed adultery, served as a slave, was wounded, fell in love, and carried the seductiveness of incestuous desires through every form of lust? Yet you assert that all these things both happened and are present in your gods, and you pass over no kind of vice, crime, or fall that you do not, by the wantonness of your opinions, bring in to slander the deities. So either you must seek other gods to whom all these things do not apply (for those to whom they apply are of the human and earthly race), or, if these are the only ones whose names and characters you have published, you abolish them by your own opinions. For whatever you relate is mortal.

And we could show at this point that all those whom you bring before us and call gods were human beings, either by unrolling Euhemerus of Acragas, whose books Ennius translated into the Italian language so that the matter might become clear to all; or through Nicagoras of Cyprus, Leon of Pella, Theodorus of Cyrene, Hippon and Diagoras of Melos, or a thousand other authors, who with the care of scrupulous diligence brought hidden things to light with free and frank independence. We could, I say, if you please, set out both the deeds of Jupiter and the wars of Minerva, the virgin, and of Diana; by what tricks Liber aimed at the rule of the Indians; of what condition Venus was, of what trade, of what earnings; whose marriage the Great Mother held; what hope, what pleasure she conceived from handsome Attis; where Egyptian Serapis came from, where Isis; or for what reasons the very designation of their names was devised.

But in this discourse we have not undertaken the small labor or the intention of showing and publishing who all these were. Our purpose is this: since you call us impious and irreligious and, on the contrary, maintain that you are pious and worshipers of the gods, to demonstrate and set forth that they are treated more disgracefully by no people than by you. If it is plain from the very slanders that this is so, it follows that it must be understood that it is you who provoke the gods to the goads of frenzied indignation, you who either hear or believe such foul things about them, or yourselves compose disgraceful fables. For it is not the one who carefully rereads the ritual and slaughters unblemished victims, who gives heaps of incense to be burned in the fire, who must be judged to worship the deities or alone to fulfill the duties of religion. True worship is in the heart, and an opinion of the gods worthy of them; and the offering of blood and gore is of no use if you believe things of them that are not only far removed and distant from their nature, but even bring some stain and disgrace on their majesty and honor.

For I would like to question you and call you to answer a brief question: do you think it more serious to slaughter no victims for them, because you think so great a nature neither wants nor desires them, or to conceive, in the foulness of your opinions, such disgraces about them as could rouse anyone's mind to a frenzy of revenge? If the weight of things is weighed, you would find no judge so ... as not to think it more criminal to have one's reputation torn by notorious slanders than to be passed over by someone in silence. For the latter may perhaps be thought and believed to have some reason; the former belongs to a sacrilegious mind and to a desperate blindness in fictions. If in your ceremonies and divine rites there is room for demands for repetition, and the commission of a fault needing atonement is said to have been incurred if through a slip of carelessness someone has gone astray in a word or with the ladle; or again, if in the solemn games and sacred races you all at once cry out that a fault has been committed against the sacred rites, if a dancer has stopped, or a flute player has suddenly fallen silent, or if that boy who is called patrimus and matrimus has let go of the thong through ignorance or has not been able to keep hold of the ground: do you dare to deny that the gods are always outraged by you in such serious offenses, when you yourselves confess that they are angry, often to the ruin of the state, for slighter causes?

'But all these things,' they say, 'are the fictions of poets and games composed for pleasure.' It is certainly not credible that men by no means stupid, and investigators of the most remote antiquity, either did not insert in their poems those tales which survived in people's notions and were lodged in their ears, or that they wanted to claim for themselves so licentious a right as to invent through folly things which were not far from madness and which could bring them fear from the gods and danger from men. But let us grant, as you say, that the poets were the composers and inventors of such great deformities: even so you are not free from mistreating the gods, you who either fail to punish such misdeeds, or do not meet such great recklessness with laws passed and severe penalties, and have not decreed that no one in future should say anything close to disgrace or unworthy of the majesty of the gods. For whoever allows the sinner to sin supplies strength to his boldness; and it is a greater insult to brand and mark someone with false charges than to press and reproach him with true offenses. For what you are said to be and feel yourself to be has a lesser sting, blunted by the testimony of silent recognition; but what brands the innocent and defames the honor of their name and reputation wounds most bitterly.

Your gods are written of as dining in heavenly banqueting halls and golden porticoes, drinking, and finally being soothed by lyres and the melody of voices. You lend most patient ears, and do not judge it unworthy that the gods are given those pleasures by which earthly bodies are sustained and which ears softened by the enervation of a weakened heart desire. Some of them are brought in as lovers, adulterers of chastity, having shameful and disgraceful intercourse not only with women but also with men. You have no care what is said about such great matters, nor do you restrain the boldness of licentious literature with any fear of correction. Some, through madness and frenzy, bereave themselves and stain themselves with their own parricide as though with an enemy's blood: you admire those sacrileges, exalted in lofty style, and what ought to have been punished with every penalty you extol with the incentive of praise, so that boldness may rise up more spiritedly. Others groan at the wounds of bereavement and accuse the cruel fates with unseemly wailing: you are amazed at the power of the eloquence, and what ought to have been entirely removed from the ... of the human race, you review, you learn by heart, and you take care that none of it perishes by forgetfulness. They are said to be wounded, harassed, and to wage wars among themselves with the heat of frenzied conflicts: that description is a pleasure to you, and, to defend the great boldness of the writers, you pretend that those things are allegories and teachings of natural science.

But why do I complain of the neglected insults to other deities? That Jupiter himself, whose name it befitted you not to utter without fear and a trembling of the whole body, is described as caught by his wife with a lover and confessing his faults, and, as though insane and unaware, hardened in shamelessness, publishing which girlfriends he preferred to his spouse, which mistresses to his wife. You say that those who produced such monstrosities are the princes and kings of poets, endowed with divine talents, most holy persons; and you have flown so far from the duty of the religions you introduced that words which violate the majesty of the heavenly beings carry more weight with you. Was it not fitting, then, if there were any fear of the gods among you, or if you believed with the confidence of a most certain conviction that they exist anywhere, to intervene, forbid, and decree by bills, plebiscites, and decrees of the senate, under fear, that no one should wish to say anything at random about the gods except what was full of reverence? Did they not at least deserve this honor from you, that by the same laws by which you drive injuries away from yourselves you should drive them away from these? Those who have muttered anything unfavorable about your kings are guilty of treason among you. You have decreed that to degrade a magistrate, or to assail a senator with abuse, is most dangerous, with severe penalties. You would not let one who writes an evil song, by which another's reputation and life are defiled, escape unpunished under the decrees of the decemvirs; and so that no one might strike your ears with more insolent abuse, you established formulas concerning outrageous injuries. Only the gods above are dishonored among you, contemptible and cheap, against whom you have given the right to say whatever anyone wants, and to hurl whatever forms of disgrace lust has invented and devised. And you do not blush to charge us with neglecting such infamous deities, when it is much more right not to believe that there are gods than to think that they are such, and of such repute?

But did you want only the poets to be allowed to invent unworthy tales and scandalous mockeries about the gods? What of your pantomimes, your actors, that multitude of mimes and of the debauched kind? Do they not misuse your gods for their own profit, and draw the enticements of pleasure from insults and outrages to the divine? The colleges of all the priests and magistrates sit at the public shows, the chief pontiffs and chief curios; the fifteen men sit crowned with laurel, and the flamens of Jupiter with their pointed caps; the augurs sit, interpreters of the divine mind and will; the chaste virgins too, perpetual nurses and keepers of the fire; the whole people and senate sit, fathers who have held the consulship, kings nearest to the gods and most august: and, what would be wicked to hear, that mother of the race of Mars, begetter of the ruling people, Venus, is danced as a lover, and is represented in shameless imitation as raving through all the feelings of a cheap harlot. The Great Mother too, adorned with sacred fillets, is danced; and that Pessinuntian Dindymene, against the dignity of her age, is represented as eager with shameful desire for the embrace of a herdsman. And in the Trachinian Women of Sophocles, Hercules, that offspring of Jupiter, caught in the snare of a poisonous garment, is brought on uttering pitiable wails, broken by the violence of pain, and consumed by the wasting of his dissolving inward parts to the last decay. Indeed, in the plays that greatest ruler of the sky himself is brought on, without any awe for his name and majesty, playing the part of adulterers, and changing his face with deceit in order to seduce the chastity of other men's wives, and taking the place of husbands by the pretense of a counterfeit body.

Nor is this fault enough. The persons of the most holy gods are also brought into mimes and scurrilous farces, and so that laughter and merriment may be stirred in idle spectators, the deities are struck with joking jibes. The theaters shout and rise, all the tiers resound with crashes and applause; and, what could be expiated by no satisfaction, gifts and rewards are established for the debauched mockers of the deities, leisure from public duties, immunity, and exemption with crowns. And after this do you dare to wonder where these evils arise from, by which mortality is flooded and oppressed without any interruption, when every day you recite and every day learn by heart all those things in which the disgraces of the deities and the inscriptions of slander are wrapped up, and, whenever you want your idle mind to be occupied with leisurely delusions, you demand that days be given you and that they be performed without any interruption? But if you had any indignation for your religions, you ought long ago to have burned these writings instead, torn down those books, and destroyed these theaters instead, in which the infamies of the deities are published daily in shameless plays. For why have our writings deserved to be given to the flames? Why have our meeting places deserved to be savagely torn down, in which the supreme God is prayed to, and peace and pardon are asked for all, for magistrates, armies, kings, friends, enemies, both those still living and those released from the bonds of the body; in which nothing is heard but what makes people humane, gentle, modest, chaste, pure, sharing their property, and joined with all of you in the bond of firm brotherhood?