City of God 18.16–18.27

Chapter 16. On Diomede, placed among the gods after the destruction of Troy, whose companions were believed to have been turned into birds.

When Troy had been overthrown in that destruction sung everywhere and very well known even to children, which both by its own magnitude and by the excellent tongues of writers has been signally spread abroad and made common, and which happened when Latinus the son of Faunus was already reigning, from whom the kingdom began to be called that of the Latins, and that of the Laurentines ceased, the victorious Greeks, leaving Troy destroyed and returning to their own homes, were torn apart and crushed by various and horrible disasters; and yet from these too they increased the number of their gods. For they made even Diomede a god, who they say did not return to his own people because of a penalty inflicted by divine power; and they confirm, not by fabulous and poetic falsehood but by historical testimony, that his companions were turned into birds; and he, made a god, as they think, neither could himself restore to them their human nature nor at least obtained this from Jupiter his king, as a new inhabitant of heaven. They say moreover that there is a temple of his on the island of Diomedea, not far from Mount Garganus, which is in Apulia, and that these birds fly around this temple and inhabit it with such wonderful devotion that they fill their beaks with water and sprinkle it; and that if Greeks come there, or those descended from Greek stock, they are not only quiet but even fawn on them; but if they see foreigners, they fly up at their heads and wound them with such heavy blows as even to kill them. For they are said to be well enough armed for these battles with hard and large beaks.

Chapter 17. What Varro relates of incredible transformations of men.

To support this, Varro records other things no less incredible, about that most famous sorceress Circe, who also changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts, and about the Arcadians who, chosen by lot, used to swim across a certain pool and there be turned into wolves, and live with similar wild beasts in the wilds of that region. But if they did not eat human flesh, after nine years they swam back across the same pool and were changed back into men. Finally he even named expressly a certain Demaenetus who tasted of the sacrifice which the Arcadians used to make to their god Lycaeus by sacrificing a boy, and was changed into a wolf, and in the tenth year, restored to his own shape, trained himself in boxing and won in the Olympic contest. And the same historian thinks that in Arcadia such a name was given to Pan Lycaeus and Jupiter Lycaeus for no other reason than this changing of men into wolves, because they thought it could not happen except by divine power. For a wolf is called lykos in Greek, from which the name Lycaeus appears to be derived. He says too that the Roman Luperci arose as it were from the seed of those mysteries.

Chapter 18. What is to be believed about transformations which seem to happen to men by the art of demons.

But those who read this may perhaps expect what we are to say about so great a deception of demons. And what shall we say, except that we must flee from the midst of Babylon? This prophetic command is understood spiritually in this way: that we should flee from the city of this world, which is indeed the society of ungodly angels and men, by advancing toward the living God with the steps of faith, which works through love. For the greater we see the power of demons to be in these lower things, the more firmly we must cling to the Mediator, through whom we climb from the lowest to the highest. For if we say that these things are not to be believed, there are not lacking even now those who assert that they have heard some things of this kind on the surest authority, or have even experienced them. For we too, when we were in Italy, used to hear such things of a certain region of those parts, where they said that women who kept inns, steeped in these evil arts, used to give something in cheese to such travellers as they wished or could, by which they were at once turned into beasts of burden and carried whatever was needed, and after the work was done they returned again to themselves; and yet their mind did not become bestial but remained rational and human; just as Apuleius, in the books he entitled The Golden Ass, either reported or invented that it happened to himself that on taking a drug he became an ass while his human mind remained.

These things are either false or so unusual that they are rightly not believed. Yet it must be most firmly believed that almighty God can do whatever he wills, whether in punishing or in granting, and that demons accomplish nothing by the power of their nature (for it too is an angelic creature, though malignant by its own fault) except what he permits, whose judgments are many of them hidden, none unjust. Nor indeed do demons create natures, if they do anything of the kind about which this question turns; but they change in appearance only things created by the true God, so that they seem to be what they are not. So I would not believe that by the art or power of demons either the soul, or even the body, can by any means truly be turned into the members and features of beasts. But I think that a man's phantasm, which even in thought or in dreams is varied through innumerable kinds of things, and, though it is not a body, yet with wonderful speed takes forms like bodies, can, when the bodily senses of the man are lulled or oppressed, be brought in some ineffable way I do not know to the senses of others in bodily shape; so that men's bodies themselves lie somewhere, alive indeed, but with their senses shut up much more heavily and powerfully than in sleep, while that phantasm, as though embodied in the likeness of some animal, appears to the senses of others; and the man himself seems to himself to be such, as he might seem to himself in dreams, and to carry burdens; which burdens, if they are real bodies, are carried by demons so that men may be deluded, seeing partly the real bodies of the burdens and partly the false bodies of the beasts of burden.

For a certain man named Praestantius used to report that this had happened to his father: that he took that drug in cheese in his own house and lay on his bed as though asleep, yet could in no way be roused. After some days, he said, his father woke, as it were, and told as though they were dreams the things he had undergone: namely, that he had become a horse and among other beasts of burden had carried to the soldiers the supplies called Raetian, because they are taken to Raetia. This was found to have happened just as he told it; yet it seemed to him to be his own dreams. Another also reported that at night in his own house, before he went to rest, he saw a certain philosopher well known to him coming to him and explaining to him some Platonic matters which he had earlier been asked to explain and had refused. And when that same philosopher was asked why he had done in the other's house what he had refused to do when asked in his own, he said: “I did not do it, but I dreamed that I did.” And so what one saw in his sleep was shown to the other while awake through a phantasmal image.

These things came to us not from just anyone, whom we might think it unworthy to believe, but from those who reported them, whom we did not think had lied to us. Accordingly, what men say and what is committed to writing, that the Arcadians used to be turned into wolves by gods, or rather demons, and that “by her songs Circe changed the companions of Ulysses,” seems to me to have been able to happen in the way I have described, if indeed it happened. But the Diomedean birds, since their kind is said to continue by succession of offspring, I believe were not made from men changed, but were substituted for men taken away, as the hind was for Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon. For such tricks could not have been difficult for demons when permitted by the judgment of God; but because that maiden was afterwards found alive, it was easily recognized that the hind had been substituted for her. But the companions of Diomede, because they suddenly disappeared and afterwards appeared nowhere, the avenging evil angels destroying them, are believed to have been turned into those birds, which were secretly brought to those places from other places where that kind of bird exists and suddenly substituted for them. And that they bring water in their beaks to Diomede's temple and sprinkle it, and fawn on those of Greek birth and pursue foreigners, it is no wonder that this should happen at the instigation of demons, whose interest it is to persuade men that Diomede was made a god, so as to deceive them into worshipping many false gods to the injury of the true God, and serving dead men, who even when alive did not truly live, with temples, altars, sacrifices, and priests, all of which, when they are right, are owed only to the one living and true God.

Chapter 19. That Aeneas came into Italy at the time when Abdon the judge ruled over the Hebrews.

At that time, after Troy had been taken and destroyed, Aeneas came into Italy with twenty ships carrying the remnants of the Trojans, while Latinus reigned there, and Menestheus among the Athenians, Polyphides among the Sicyonians, Tautanes among the Assyrians, while among the Hebrews Abdon was judge. After the death of Latinus Aeneas reigned three years, the same kings remaining in the places mentioned above, except that Pelasgus was now king of the Sicyonians and Samson judge of the Hebrews; who, since he was marvellously strong, was thought to be Hercules. But the Latins made Aeneas a god for themselves, since when he died he disappeared. The Sabines too placed their first king, Sancus, or as some call him Sanctus, among the gods. About the same time Codrus, king of the Athenians, exposed himself unrecognized to the Peloponnesians, enemies of that city, to be killed; and so it happened. In this way they proclaim that he freed his country. For the Peloponnesians had received an oracle that they would conquer only if they did not kill the king of the Athenians. He deceived them, then, by appearing in the dress of a poor man and provoking them to kill him by a quarrel. Hence Virgil says: “and the quarrels of Codrus.” And the Athenians worshipped him too as a god with the honour of sacrifices. When Silvius was the fourth king of the Latins, the son of Aeneas not by Creusa, of whom Ascanius was born, who reigned there as the third, but by Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, a posthumous son, as Aeneas is said to have had him; and Oneus the twenty-ninth of the Assyrians, and Melanthus the sixteenth of the Athenians; and when Eli the priest was judge of the Hebrews, the kingdom of the Sicyonians came to an end, which is said to have lasted nine hundred and fifty-nine years.

Chapter 20. On the succession of the royal line among the Israelites after the time of the judges.

Soon, while the same kings were reigning in the places mentioned, the time of the judges ended and the kingdom of the Israelites took its beginning with King Saul, at which time Samuel the prophet lived. From that time, then, began those kings of the Latins whom they surnamed Silvii; for from him who, as the son of Aeneas, was first called Silvius, the rest who followed were given their own names and yet did not lack this surname, just as long afterwards those who succeeded Caesar Augustus were surnamed Caesars. But when Saul had been rejected, so that none of his stock should reign, and he had died, David succeeded to the kingdom forty years after the beginning of Saul's rule. Then the Athenians, after the death of Codrus, ceased to have kings any more and began to have magistrates to administer the state. After David, who himself also reigned forty years, his son Solomon was king of the Israelites, who built that most renowned temple of God at Jerusalem. In his time Alba was founded among the Latins, from which the kings began thereafter to be called kings not of the Latins but of the Albans, though still in the same Latium. Solomon was succeeded by his son Rehoboam, under whom that people was divided into two kingdoms, and each part began to have its own king.

Chapter 21. On the kings of Latium, of whom the first, Aeneas, and the twelfth, Aventinus, were made gods.

After Aeneas, whom they made a god, Latium had eleven kings, none of whom was made a god. But Aventinus, who follows Aeneas in the twelfth place, when he had been struck down in war and buried on the hill which is still called by his name, was added to the number of such gods as they made for themselves. Some, indeed, would not write that he was killed in battle, but said that he disappeared; and that the hill was not named from his name but called Aventine from the arrival of birds. After him no one was made a god in Latium except Romulus, the founder of Rome. Between him and the other two kings are found, of whom the first is, to put it in a verse of Virgil:

“Next that Procas, glory of the Trojan race.”

In his time, because Rome was already in a way in labour to be born, that greatest of all kingdoms, the Assyrian, received the end of its long duration. For it was transferred to the Medes after about one thousand three hundred and five years, if the times of Belus too are counted, who begot Ninus and, content with a small dominion, was the first king there. Procas reigned before Amulius. Amulius, moreover, had made his brother Numitor's daughter, named Rhea, who was also called Ilia, the mother of Romulus, a Vestal virgin; they will have it that she conceived twins by Mars, in this way honouring or excusing her sexual immorality, and adding as proof that a she-wolf nursed the infants when they were exposed. For they think this kind of beast belongs to Mars, so that the she-wolf, of course, is believed to have given her teats to the little ones because she recognized them as the sons of her lord Mars; although there are not lacking those who say that when they lay exposed and crying they were first picked up by some prostitute or other and sucked her breasts first (for they used to call prostitutes lupae, “she-wolves,” whence even now their foul haunts are called lupanaria), and that afterwards they came to the shepherd Faustulus and were nursed by his wife Acca. And yet, if God willed, in order to rebuke the human king who had cruelly ordered them to be thrown into the water, to come to the aid, by means of a wild beast giving milk, of those infants who had been delivered from the water by divine power and through whom so great a city was to be founded, what wonder is it? Amulius was succeeded in the kingdom of Latium by his brother Numitor, the grandfather of Romulus, in the first year of whose reign Rome was founded; and so from then on he reigned together with his grandson, that is, Romulus.

Chapter 22. That Rome was founded at the time when the kingdom of the Assyrians fell and when Hezekiah was reigning in Judah.

Not to delay over many things, the city of Rome was founded as a second Babylon, as it were, and as the daughter, as it were, of the former Babylon, through which it pleased God to subdue the world and, having brought it into one fellowship of commonwealth and laws, to pacify it far and wide. For there were already strong and brave peoples and nations trained in arms, which would not easily yield, and which could be overcome only with enormous dangers, no small devastation on both sides, and dreadful toil. For when the kingdom of the Assyrians subjugated almost the whole of Asia, although it was done by fighting, yet it could not be done by very harsh and difficult wars, because the nations were still untrained in resisting and were neither so many nor so great. For after that greatest and universal flood, when only eight people escaped in the ark of Noah, not much more than a thousand years had passed when Ninus subjugated the whole of Asia except India. But Rome did not subdue with the same speed and ease so many nations of the East and the West, which we see made subject to the Roman empire, because, growing little by little, it found them strong and warlike in whatever direction it spread.

At the time, then, when Rome was founded, the people of Israel had been in the land of promise seven hundred and eighteen years. Of these twenty-seven belong to Joshua the son of Nun, then three hundred and twenty-nine to the time of the judges. But from the time when there began to be kings there, there were three hundred and sixty-two years. And the king in Judah at that time was named Ahaz, or, as others reckon, Hezekiah, who succeeded him, a most excellent and most pious king, who is agreed to have reigned in the times of Romulus. In that part of the Hebrew people which was called Israel, Hoshea had begun to reign.

Chapter 23. On the Erythraean Sibyl, who among the other Sibyls is known to have sung many things clearly about Christ.

At the same time, some say, the Erythraean Sibyl prophesied. Varro reports that there were several Sibyls, not one. This Erythraean Sibyl certainly wrote some things that are plain about Christ; which we too first read in the Latin language in bad Latin verses that did not scan, through the unskilfulness of some translator or other, as we afterwards learned. For the most distinguished Flaccianus, who was also proconsul, a man of very ready eloquence and much learning, when we were conversing about Christ, brought out a Greek manuscript to us, saying that it was the songs of the Erythraean Sibyl, and showed us in one place that the order of the letters at the beginnings of the lines was such that these words could be read in it: Iēsous Chreistos Theou huios sōtēr, which in Latin is “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.” These lines, whose first letters give the sense we have mentioned, as someone has translated them into Latin verses that scan, contain the following:

Ι The earth shall be wet with sweat, the sign of judgment. Η From heaven shall come the King who will reign through the ages, Σ present, that is, in the flesh, to judge the world. Ο Hence the unbeliever and the faithful shall see God Υ on high with the saints, at the very end of the age. Σ So souls shall be present with the flesh, which he himself judges, Χ when the world lies untilled among thick thorns. Ρ Men shall cast away their idols and all their treasure too; Ε fire shall burn up the lands and the sea and the sky, Ι and, searching, shall break the gates of loathsome Avernus. Σ But to all the flesh of the saints free light Τ shall be given; the guilty the eternal flame shall burn. Ο Uncovering hidden deeds, each one shall then speak Σ his secrets, and God shall open hearts to the light. Θ Then there shall be mourning too; all shall gnash their teeth. Ε The radiance of the sun is snatched away, and the choir of stars perishes. Ο The sky shall be rolled up; the moon's splendour shall die; Υ he shall cast down the hills and raise the valleys from the depths. Υ There shall be nothing lofty or high in human affairs. Ι Now the mountains are levelled with the plains, and the blue of the sea— Ο all things shall cease; the earth shall perish, shattered. Σ So springs and rivers alike are scorched with fire. Σ But then the trumpet shall send forth a mournful sound from the height Ω of the world, lamenting wretched crime and manifold toils, Τ and the earth, gaping open, shall show the chaos of Tartarus. Η And here before the Lord kings shall be set, every one. Ρ A river of fire and of sulphur shall fall from heaven.

In these Latin verses, translated from the Greek as best they could be, the sense that arises when the letters at their beginnings are joined could not appear where the letter Υ is placed in the Greek, because Latin words could not be found that begin with that letter and fit the meaning. These are three lines, the fifth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth. Accordingly, if, joining the letters at the beginnings of all the lines, we do not read the letters written at the beginning of these three, but remember the letter Υ in their place, as though it stood in those very places, there is expressed in five words: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”; but only when this is said in Greek, not in Latin. And there are twenty-seven lines, which number makes the cube of three. For three times three makes nine; and if nine itself is taken three times, so that the figure rises from breadth to height, it comes to twenty-seven. And if you join the first letters of these five Greek words, Iēsous Chreistos Theou huios sōtēr, which in Latin is “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour,” it will be ichthys, that is, “fish,” in which name Christ is mystically understood, because in the abyss of this mortality, as in the depth of waters, he was able to be alive, that is, without sin.

This Sibyl, whether the Erythraean or, as some rather believe, the Cumaean, has nothing in her whole poem, of which this is a tiny part, that pertains to the worship of false or fabricated gods; on the contrary, she speaks so strongly against them and against their worshippers that she seems to be reckoned among those who belong to the city of God. Lactantius also inserts in his work certain prophecies of the Sibyl about Christ, although he does not state whose. But what he set down one by one, I have thought should be set down together, as though it were one long passage, the many short sayings he recorded:

“Afterwards,” she says, “he will come into the hands of unbelievers; and they will give God blows with impure hands, and with polluted mouth they will spit poisoned spittle; but he will simply give his holy back to the scourges. And receiving buffets he will be silent, so that no one may know what word he is, or whence he comes, that he may speak to the dead and be crowned with a crown of thorns. And for food they gave gall, and for his thirst vinegar; this table of inhospitality they will show. For you yourself, foolish one, did not understand your God, who was playing with the minds of mortals, but crowned him with thorns and mixed him dreadful gall. But the veil of the temple will be torn; and at midday there will be night, exceedingly dark, for three hours. And he will die a death, having taken sleep for three days; and then, returning from the dead, he will come to the light, the first, having shown the beginning of the resurrection to those called back.”

These Sibylline testimonies Lactantius used piecemeal, at intervals in his argument, as the things he meant to prove seemed to require; we, inserting nothing, but setting them down joined in one series, have taken care to mark them off only by capitals, if only copyists hereafter do not neglect to keep them. Some indeed have written that the Erythraean Sibyl lived not in the time of Romulus but at the time of the Trojan War.

Chapter 24. That in the reign of Romulus the seven sages flourished, at the time when the ten tribes called Israel were led into captivity by the Chaldeans, and that the same Romulus when he died was granted divine honour.

While the same Romulus was reigning, Thales of Miletus is said to have lived, one of the seven sages, who after the theological poets, among whom Orpheus was the most renowned of all, were called sophoi, which in Latin is sapientes, “wise men.” At the same time the ten tribes which at the division of the people were called Israel were subdued by the Chaldeans and led captive into those lands, while there remained in the land of Judea the two tribes which were called by the name of Judah and had Jerusalem as the seat of their kingdom. When Romulus died, since he too disappeared, the Romans placed him among the gods, as is very well known even to the common people; which had by then so far ceased to be done (nor was it done afterwards, in the times of the Caesars, except by flattery, not by error) that Cicero attributes it to the great praise of Romulus that he earned these honours not in rude and unlearned times, when men were easily deceived, but in times already polished and learned; although the subtle and sharp talkativeness of the philosophers had not yet boiled up and sprouted. But even if later times did not make dead men gods, yet they did not cease to worship and regard as gods those made so by the ancients; indeed, with images, which the ancients did not have, they increased the allurement of vain and impious superstition, the unclean demons bringing this about in their hearts, deceiving them also by lying oracles, so that even the fabulous crimes of the gods, which in a more refined age were no longer invented, were nevertheless basely acted in the games in homage to those same false divinities. Then Numa reigned after Romulus, who, though he thought that city must be fortified by a great number of gods, false ones certainly, did not himself deserve to be placed among that crowd when he died; as though he were thought to have so packed heaven with a multitude of divinities that he could find no place there. While he reigned at Rome, and among the Hebrews at the beginning of the reign of Manasseh, by whom, an impious king, the prophet Isaiah is said to have been killed, they say the Samian Sibyl lived.

Chapter 25. Which philosophers were eminent when Tarquinius Priscus reigned among the Romans and Zedekiah among the Hebrews, when Jerusalem was taken and the temple overthrown.

When Zedekiah was reigning among the Hebrews and Tarquinius Priscus, who had succeeded Ancus Marcius, among the Romans, the people of the Jews was led captive into Babylonia, Jerusalem and that temple built by Solomon having been overthrown. For the prophets, rebuking them for their iniquities and impieties, had foretold that these things would come upon them, above all Jeremiah, who even fixed the number of years. At that time Pittacus of Mitylene, another of the seven sages, is said to have lived. And Eusebius writes that the other five, who are added to Thales, whom we mentioned above, and to this Pittacus to make seven, lived at the time when the captive people of God was held in Babylonia. They are these: Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta, Periander of Corinth, Cleobulus of Lindus, Bias of Priene. All these, called the seven sages, became eminent after the theological poets, because they excelled other men by a certain praiseworthy kind of life and summed up some precepts of morals in brief sayings. But they left posterity no monuments in writing, except that Solon is said to have given certain laws to the Athenians; Thales, however, was a natural philosopher and left books of his teachings. At that time of the Jewish captivity Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Xenophanes, natural philosophers, also became eminent. Then too Pythagoras, from whom they began to be called philosophers.

Chapter 26. That at the time when the captivity of the Jews was ended after seventy years had been completed, the Romans too were freed from the rule of kings.

At the same time Cyrus, king of the Persians, who also ruled the Chaldeans and Assyrians, relaxed the captivity of the Jews somewhat and made fifty thousand of them return to restore the temple. By them only the first foundations were begun and the altar built. But because of the attacks of enemies they were by no means able to go forward with the building, and the work was put off until Darius. At the same time too the things were done that are written in the book of Judith, which the Jews indeed are said not to have received into the canon of the Scriptures. Under Darius, king of the Persians, then, when the seventy years were completed which the prophet Jeremiah had foretold, freedom was restored to the Jews, their captivity being ended, while Tarquin was reigning as the seventh king of the Romans. When he was driven out, they too began to be free from the rule of their kings. Down to this time the people of Israel had prophets; and though they were many, the canonical writings of only a few are kept both among the Jews and among us. I promised, when I was closing the preceding book, that I would set down some things about them in this book, which I see must now be done.

Chapter 27. On the times of the prophets whose oracles are contained in books and who sang many things about the calling of the nations at the time when the kingdom of the Romans began and that of the Assyrians came to an end.

In order that we may observe their times, then, let us go back a little to earlier times. At the head of the book of the prophet Hosea, who is placed first among the twelve, it is written thus: “The word of the Lord which came to Hosea in the days of Uzziah and Jotham and Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” Amos also writes that he prophesied in the days of King Uzziah; he adds also Jeroboam, king of Israel, who lived in the same days. Isaiah too, the son of Amoz, whether of the prophet mentioned above or, as is more commonly said, of another who was not a prophet and was called by the same name, places at the head of his book the same four kings whom Hosea set down, in whose days he states in his preface that he prophesied. Micah also records the same times of his prophecy, after the days of Uzziah. For he names the three kings who follow, whom Hosea also named: Jotham and Ahaz and Hezekiah. These are those who, from their own writings, are found to have prophesied together at the same time. To them are added Jonah, while the same Uzziah was reigning, and Joel, when Jotham, who succeeded Uzziah, was already reigning. But the times of these two prophets we have been able to find in the chronicles, not in their books, since they are silent about their own days. These days extend from Procas, king of the Latins, or the earlier Aventinus, down to Romulus, now king of the Romans, or even down to the beginning of the reign of his successor Numa Pompilius (for Hezekiah king of Judah reigned until then); and so in those times these springs of prophecy, as it were, burst forth together, when the Assyrian kingdom came to an end and the Roman began; so that, as at the first time of the kingdom of the Assyrians there appeared Abraham, to whom the plainest promises were made of the blessing of all nations in his seed, so at the beginning of the western Babylon, under whose rule Christ was to come, in whom those promises were to be fulfilled, the oracles of the prophets, not only speaking but also writing, might be released in testimony of so great a thing to come. For though prophets had almost never been lacking to the people of Israel from the time when there began to be kings there, they were for their use only, not for the nations'; but when prophetic Scripture was being composed more openly, which would at some time benefit the nations, it was fitting that it should begin when this city was being founded which was to rule the nations.