City of God 18.3–18.15

Chapter 3. In whose reigns among the Assyrians and Sicyonians Isaac was born by promise to Abraham at a hundred years old, and Esau and Jacob were born as twins of Rebecca to Isaac himself at sixty.

In his times also Isaac, the son of Abraham, was born according to the promise of God to a father a hundred years old, from his wife Sarah, who, barren and now old, had given up hope of offspring. At that time Arrius was the fifth king of the Assyrians. To Isaac himself at the age of sixty were born twins, Esau and Jacob, whom his wife Rebecca bore him, while their grandfather Abraham was still living and in his hundred and sixtieth year; he died when he had completed a hundred and seventy-five years, while Xerxes the elder, who was also called Baleus, reigned among the Assyrians, and Thuriacus, whom some write Thurimachus, among the Sicyonians, each the seventh king. The kingdom of the Argives, moreover, arose together with the grandsons of Abraham, and Inachus was its first king. Indeed, something that should not be passed over: Varro records that the Sicyonians used to sacrifice also at the tomb of their seventh king Thuriacus. Further, while the eighth kings were reigning, Armamitres of the Assyrians and Leucippus of the Sicyonians, and Inachus the first of the Argives, God spoke to Isaac and promised him also the same two things that he had promised his father: to his seed the land of Canaan, and in his seed the blessing of all nations. These same things were promised also to his son, Abraham's grandson, who was called first Jacob and afterwards Israel, when Belocus was now reigning as the ninth king of Assyria and Phoroneus the son of Inachus as the second king of the Argives, Leucippus still continuing among the Sicyonians. In these times Greece, under the Argive king Phoroneus, became more renowned for certain institutions of laws and courts. Yet when Phegous, the younger brother of this Phoroneus, had died, a temple was set up at his tomb in which he was to be worshipped as a god and oxen sacrificed to him. I believe they thought him worthy of so great an honour because in his part of the kingdom (for their father had divided territories between the two, in which they were to reign while he lived) he had set up shrines for the worship of the gods and had taught them to observe the times by months and years, how far they should measure and number them. Men still uncultivated, marvelling at these new things in him, either supposed, or chose to suppose, that he had become a god when he died. For Io too is said to have been the daughter of Inachus, who was afterwards called Isis and worshipped as a great goddess in Egypt; although others write that she came as a queen from Ethiopia into Egypt, and that because she ruled widely and justly and established many benefits and letters for them, this divine honour was paid her after she died there, and so great an honour that anyone who said she had been a human being was made guilty of a capital crime.

Chapter 4. On the times of Jacob and his son Joseph.

While Baleus, the tenth king of the Assyrians, was reigning, and Messapus, the ninth of the Sicyonians, who is said by some to have been also called Cephisus (if indeed one man had two names, and those who put the other name in their writings did not rather think that one was another man), and when Apis was the third king of the Argives, Isaac died at a hundred and eighty years, and left his twins a hundred and twenty years old. Of these the younger, Jacob, who belonged to the city of God of which we are writing, the elder being certainly rejected, had twelve sons; of whom the one called Joseph had been sold by his brothers to merchants passing into Egypt while their grandfather Isaac was still alive. Joseph stood before Pharaoh when he was raised from the humiliation which he had endured, being thirty years old; for, interpreting the king's dreams by divine gift, he foretold that there would be seven years of plenty, whose overflowing abundance seven barren years following would consume; and for this the king had set him over Egypt, freed from the prison into which his unswerving chastity had thrown him. For keeping it bravely, he did not consent to sexual immorality with his mistress, who loved him wickedly and was about to lie to her wickedly credulous master, but fled from her, leaving even his garment in the hands of her who was pulling at him. In the second year of the seven barren years Jacob came with all his family into Egypt to his son, being a hundred and thirty years old, as he himself answered the king when he asked him; Joseph being then thirty-nine, that is, thirty, as he was when he was honoured by the king, plus the seven years of plenty and two of famine.

Chapter 5. On Apis, king of the Argives, whom the Egyptians worshipped with divine honour under the name Serapis.

In these times Apis, king of the Argives, crossed by ship into Egypt, and having died there became Serapis, the greatest of all the gods of the Egyptians. Why he was called not Apis even after his death but Serapis, Varro has given a very easy explanation. Since the chest in which a dead man is placed, which everyone now calls a sarcophagus, is called soros in Greek, and they had begun to venerate him buried there before his temple was built, he was first called, as it were, Soros-Apis, Sorapis, and then, one letter being changed, as commonly happens, Serapis. And it was decreed concerning him too that whoever said he had been a man should pay the capital penalty. And since in almost all the temples where Isis and Serapis were worshipped there was also an image which, with a finger pressed to its lips, seemed to warn that there should be silence, the same Varro thinks this signified that it should be kept silent that they had been human beings.

But that bull which Egypt, deceived by a marvellous vanity, fed in his honour with luxurious delicacies was called Apis, not Serapis, because they venerated it alive, without a sarcophagus. When that bull died, since a calf of the same colour was sought and found, that is, marked in the same way with certain white spots, they believed that something wonderful had been provided for them by divine power. For it was no great matter for demons, in order to deceive them, to show to a cow conceiving and pregnant a phantasm of such a bull, which she alone would see, from which the mother's desire would draw what would then appear bodily in her offspring; just as Jacob by means of the spotted rods brought it about that sheep and goats were born spotted. For what men can do with real colours and bodies, demons can very easily present with feigned forms to animals as they conceive.

Chapter 6. Under which king of the Argives and which of the Assyrians Jacob died in Egypt.

Apis, then, king not of the Egyptians but of the Argives, died in Egypt. His son Argus succeeded him in the kingdom, from whose name both Argos and from it the Argives took their name; for under the earlier kings neither the place nor the people yet had this name. While he reigned among the Argives, and Eratus among the Sicyonians, and Baleus still remained among the Assyrians, Jacob died in Egypt at a hundred and forty-seven years, after he had blessed his sons and his grandsons by Joseph when about to die, and had prophesied Christ most plainly, saying in the blessing of Judah: “A prince shall not fail from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until the things laid up for him come; and he is the expectation of the nations.” In the reign of Argus Greece began to use its own crops and to have harvests in agriculture, seeds having been brought from elsewhere. Argus too began to be held a god after his death, honoured with a temple and sacrifices. This honour had been given in his reign, before him, to a private man struck by lightning, a certain Homogyrus, because he was the first to yoke oxen to the plough.

Chapter 7. In the time of which kings Joseph died in Egypt.

While Mamythus, the twelfth king of the Assyrians, and Plemmeus, the eleventh of the Sicyonians, were reigning, and Argus still remained at Argos, Joseph died in Egypt at a hundred and ten years. After his death the people of God, increasing marvellously, remained in Egypt a hundred and forty-five years, peacefully at first, until those died to whom Joseph had been known; then, because its growth was envied and was suspect, until it was set free from there, it was oppressed by persecutions (amid which it nevertheless grew with a divinely fruitful multiplication) and by the labours of an intolerable slavery. In Assyria and Greece, meanwhile, the same kingdoms continued through the same period.

Chapter 8. In the age of which kings Moses was born, and the worship of which gods arose in those times.

When, then, Saphrus was reigning as the fourteenth king of the Assyrians, Orthopolis as the twelfth of the Sicyonians, and Criasus as the fifth of the Argives, Moses was born in Egypt, through whom the people of God was freed from the Egyptian slavery in which it had to be so exercised in order to long for the help of its Creator. Some believe that in the reign of these kings lived Prometheus, of whom they say that he formed men out of clay because he is reported to have been an excellent teacher of wisdom; yet it is not shown who the wise men of his times were. His brother Atlas is said to have been a great astrologer; hence the fable found occasion to feign that he holds up the sky; though a mountain is named after him, from whose height the idea of holding up the sky seems rather to have entered popular opinion. Many other fabulous things also began to be invented in Greece from those times; but down to Cecrops, king of the Athenians, in whose reign that city also received its name, and in whose reign God led his people out of Egypt through Moses, some dead men were placed among the number of the gods by the blind and vain custom and superstition of the Greeks. Among them were Melantomice, the wife of King Criasus, and Phorbas their son, who after his father was the sixth king of the Argives; and Iasus, son of Triopas the seventh king; and the ninth king, Sthenelas, or Stheneleus, or Sthenelus, for he is found variously in different authors. In these times too Mercury is said to have lived, the grandson of Atlas by his daughter Maia, as even the more popular writings proclaim. He was renowned as skilled in many arts, which he also handed on to men; for which merit they chose, or even believed, that he was a god after his death. Hercules is said to have been later, though belonging to the same period of the Argives; though some put him earlier in time than Mercury; I think they are mistaken. But at whatever time they were born, it is agreed among serious historians who committed these ancient things to writing that both were men, and that because they conferred many benefits on mortals for living this life more comfortably, they earned divine honours from them.

Minerva, however, is far older than these; for in the times of Ogygus she is said to have appeared at the age of a maiden by the lake called Triton, whence she was also named Tritonia; she was indeed the discoverer of many works, and was the more readily believed a goddess the less her origin was known. For what is sung, that she was born from the head of Jupiter, must be ascribed to poets and fables, not to history and actual events. Although when Ogygus himself lived, in whose times also a great flood took place (not that greatest one, in which no men escaped except those who could be in the ark, which neither Greek nor Latin history of the nations knows, but yet greater than the one later in the time of Deucalion), is not agreed among the writers of history. For Varro began from there the book of which I made mention above, and sets before himself nothing more ancient from which to arrive at Roman affairs than the flood of Ogygus, that is, the one that took place in the times of Ogygus. But our writers who wrote chronicles, first Eusebius and afterwards Jerome, who certainly followed some earlier historians in this opinion, record that the flood of Ogygus took place more than three hundred years later, when Phoroneus, the second king of the Argives, was already reigning. But at whatever time it took place, Minerva was nevertheless already worshipped as a goddess when Cecrops reigned over the Athenians, under which king they say that the city itself was either restored or founded.

Chapter 9. When the city of the Athenians was founded, and what reason Varro gives for its name.

For Varro gives this reason why it was called Athens, a name which certainly comes from Minerva, who in Greek is called Athena. When an olive tree had suddenly appeared there, and in another place water had burst out, these portents moved the king, and he sent to Delphic Apollo to ask what should be understood or done. He answered that the olive signified Minerva and the water Neptune, and that it was in the power of the citizens from which of the two gods, whose signs these were, the city should rather be named. Having received this oracle, Cecrops called together all the citizens of both sexes (for it was then the custom in those places that women too should take part in public deliberations) to cast their votes. When the multitude was consulted, then, the men voted for Neptune and the women for Minerva, and because the women were found to be one more, Minerva won. Then Neptune in anger laid waste the lands of the Athenians with raging floods of the sea; for it is not difficult for demons to spread any waters more widely. To appease his wrath, the same author says, the women were punished by the Athenians with a threefold penalty: that they should no longer vote, that none of their children should take the mother's name, and that no one should call them Athenaeans. So that city, the mother or nurse of liberal learning and of so many and such great philosophers, than which Greece had nothing more renowned and noble, received the name Athens, through the mockery of demons, from a quarrel of its gods, male and female, and from the victory of the female through the women; and, injured by the vanquished, it was compelled to punish the very victory of the victress, fearing the waters of Neptune more than the arms of Minerva. For in the women who were thus punished Minerva too, who had conquered, was conquered; nor did she stand by her supporters, so that, when they had lost the power of voting thereafter and their sons were estranged from their mothers' names, they might at least be allowed to be called Athenaeans and to earn the name of the goddess whom they had made victorious over the male god by casting their votes. What and how much could be said on this, if my discourse were not hastening to other things!

Chapter 10. What Varro relates about the naming of the Areopagus and about the flood of Deucalion.

And yet Marcus Varro will not give credit to fabulous inventions against the gods, lest he think anything unworthy of the dignity of their majesty. And so he will not have it that the Areopagus, where the apostle Paul disputed with the Athenians, and from which place the councillors of that city were called Areopagites, took its name from this: that Mars, who in Greek is called Ares, when he was accused of the crime of homicide, was acquitted in that district by six votes, twelve gods sitting in judgment (because when the votes were of equal number, acquittal used to be preferred to condemnation). Against this opinion, which is much more widely celebrated, he tries to build up some other reason for this name from the knowledge of obscure writings, so that the Athenians may not be believed to have named the Areopagus from the name of Mars and pagus, as though “the district of Mars,” to the injury, of course, of the divine powers, from whom he considers lawsuits and trials to be foreign; asserting that what is said of Mars is no less false than what is told of the three goddesses, Juno, Minerva, and Venus, who are said to have contended before Paris as judge for the prize of beauty, to obtain the golden apple, and whose story is sung and danced amid the applause of the theatres at the games held to appease the gods, who delight in these crimes of theirs, whether true or false. These things Varro does not believe, lest he believe what is unfitting to the nature or character of the gods; and yet, giving not a fabulous but a historical account of the name of Athens, he inserts in his writings so great a quarrel of Neptune and Minerva, over which of their names the city should rather be called, that when they contended by a display of portents, not even Apollo when consulted dared to judge between them, but, just as Jupiter sent the three goddesses we have mentioned to Paris, so Apollo sent the quarrel of the gods to be ended by men; where Minerva won by votes and was conquered in the punishment of those who voted for her, being able to secure Athens among her opponents, the men, and unable to have her friends, the women, called Athenaeans.

In these times, as Varro writes, when Cranaus, the successor of Cecrops, was reigning over the Athenians, but, as our Eusebius and Jerome say, while the same Cecrops still remained, the flood took place which was called Deucalion's, because he reigned in those parts of the earth where it chiefly occurred. But this flood by no means reached Egypt and the regions near it.

Chapter 11. At what time Moses led the people of God out of Egypt, and in the age of which kings Joshua the son of Nun, who succeeded him, died.

Moses, then, led the people of God out of Egypt in the last years of Cecrops, king of the Athenians, when Ascatades was reigning among the Assyrians, Marathus among the Sicyonians, and Triopas among the Argives. When the people had been led out, he delivered to them on Mount Sinai the law received from God, which is called the Old Testament because it has earthly promises; and through Jesus Christ there was to be the New Testament, in which the kingdom of heaven would be promised. For this order had to be kept, just as in each individual man who advances toward God there takes place what the apostle says, that “the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterwards the spiritual”; since, as he says, and truly, “the first man was from the earth, earthly; the second man from heaven.” Moses ruled the people for forty years in the desert and died at a hundred and twenty, having himself also prophesied Christ through the figures of fleshly observances in the tabernacle, the priesthood, the sacrifices, and very many other mystical commandments. Joshua the son of Nun succeeded Moses, and brought the people into the land of promise and settled them there, having by divine authority subdued the nations by whom those places were held. When he had ruled the people for twenty-seven years after the death of Moses, he too died, while Amyntas reigned as the eighteenth king among the Assyrians, Corax as the sixteenth among the Sicyonians, Danaus as the tenth among the Argives, and Erichthonius as the fourth among the Athenians.

Chapter 12. On the rites of false gods which the kings of Greece instituted in those times, which are reckoned from the exodus of Israel from Egypt down to the death of Joshua the son of Nun.

In these times, that is, from the exodus of Israel from Egypt down to the death of Joshua the son of Nun, through whom that people received the land of promise, rites were instituted to false gods by the kings of Greece, which by solemn celebration recalled the memory of the flood, and of men's deliverance from it, and of their life at that time full of hardship, as they moved now to the heights, now to the plains. For they interpret even the going up and coming down of the Luperci along the Sacred Way thus, saying that they signify the men who because of the flooding of the waters sought the summits of the mountains, and when it subsided returned again to the lowlands. In these times, they say, Dionysus, who was also called Father Liber and after his death held a god, showed the vine to his host in the land of Attica. Then musical games were instituted for Delphic Apollo, to appease his anger, by which they thought the regions of Greece had been afflicted with barrenness because they had not defended his temple, which King Danaus burned when he invaded those lands in war. They were admonished by his oracle to institute these games. In Attica King Erichthonius first instituted games for him, and not for him only but also for Minerva, where oil was set as the prize for the victors, because they record that Minerva discovered its fruit, as Liber discovered that of wine.

In those years Europa is said to have been carried off by Xanthus, king of the Cretans, whose name we find given differently by others, and from her were born Rhadamanthus, Sarpedon, and Minos, who are more commonly reported to have been the sons of Jupiter by the same woman. But the worshippers of such gods assign what we have said of the king of the Cretans to historical truth, and what the poets sing of Jupiter, what the theatres resound with, and what the peoples celebrate, to the vanity of fables, so that there might be material for making games to appease the divine powers even with false crimes of their own. In these times Hercules was held renowned in Syria; but surely another, not the one of whom we spoke above. For in more recondite history there are said to have been several Father Libers and Herculeses. This Hercules, whose twelve mighty deeds they count, among which they do not mention the killing of the African Antaeus because that belongs to another Hercules, they report in their writings to have burned himself on Mount Oeta, when with that valour by which he had subdued so much he could not, nevertheless, endure the disease from which he was suffering. At that time the king, or rather tyrant, Busiris used to sacrifice his guests to his gods; they report that he was the son of Neptune by his mother Libya, daughter of Epaphus. But let it not be believed that Neptune committed this sexual immorality, lest the gods be accused; let these things be attributed to the poets and the theatres, so that there may be something to appease them with.

Of Erichthonius, king of the Athenians, in whose last years Joshua the son of Nun is found to have died, Vulcan and Minerva are said to have been the parents. But since they will have Minerva a virgin, they say that in a struggle between the two Vulcan, being aroused, shed his seed on the earth, and that the man born from it was given such a name for this reason. For in the Greek language eris is “strife” and chthon is “earth,” and from these two the name Erichthonius is compounded. But, it must be admitted, the more learned refute these things and repel them from their gods; they say this fabulous opinion arose from the fact that in the temple of Vulcan and Minerva, which the two had in common at Athens, a boy was found exposed, wrapped in the coils of a serpent, which signified that he would be great; and because of the common temple, since his parents were unknown, he was called the son of Vulcan and Minerva. Yet that fable rather than this history accounts for the origin of his name. But what is that to us? Let the one instruct religious men in truthful books; let the other delight impure demons in deceitful games; whom nevertheless those religious men worship as gods, and when they deny these things of them they cannot clear them of every crime, since they put on games for them at their demand, where things are basely acted which are wisely, as it were, denied; and the gods are appeased by these false and base things, where, even if the fable sings a false crime of the divine powers, yet to delight in a false crime is a real crime.

Chapter 13. What fabulous fictions arose at the time when judges began to rule over the Hebrews.

After the death of Joshua the son of Nun the people of God had judges, in whose times there alternated among them humiliations of hardship because of their sins and prosperous consolations because of the mercy of God. In these times fables were invented: of Triptolemus, that at the command of Ceres he was carried by winged serpents and in his flight brought grain to lands in need; of the Minotaur, that it was a beast shut up in the Labyrinth, from which men who had entered could not get out because of its inextricable windings; of the Centaurs, that the nature of horses and of men was joined in them; of Cerberus, that he is the three-headed dog of the underworld; of Phrixus and his sister Helle, that they flew carried by a ram; of the Gorgon, that she had serpents for hair and turned those who looked at her into stone; of Bellerophon, that he was carried by a horse flying on wings, which horse was called Pegasus; of Amphion, that by the sweetness of his lyre he charmed and drew stones; of the craftsman Daedalus and his son Icarus, that they flew with wings fitted to themselves; of Oedipus, that he forced a certain monster called the Sphinx, a four-footed beast with a human face, to perish by throwing herself down, when he had solved the question she used to propose as unsolvable; of Antaeus, whom Hercules killed, that he was the son of the earth, so that when he fell to the earth he used to rise the stronger; and whatever others I may have passed over. These fables, down to the Trojan War, where Marcus Varro ended the second book on the race of the Roman people, were so invented by men's wits, on the occasion of histories containing things truly done, that they were not attached to the disgrace of the divine powers.

But whoever invented that Jupiter carried off the most beautiful boy Ganymede for the purpose of sexual immorality, a wickedness which King Tantalus committed and fable ascribed to Jupiter, or that he sought to lie with Danae by means of a golden shower, by which it is understood that the woman's chastity was corrupted by gold (things that in those times were either done or invented, or done by others and invented about Jupiter), it cannot be said how much evil they presumed of men's hearts, that they could bear these lies patiently; which nevertheless they even embraced gladly. And certainly the more devoutly they worship Jupiter, the more severely they ought to have punished those who dared to say these things of him. But now they have not only not been angry with those who invented such things, but they feared rather to have the gods themselves angry with them if they did not act such fictions even in the theatres.

In these times Latona bore Apollo, not the one whose oracles we spoke of above as commonly consulted, but the one who served Admetus together with Hercules; who was nevertheless so believed a god that very many, indeed almost all, suppose there was one and the same Apollo. Then too Father Liber made war in India, who had in his army many women, called Bacchae, notable not so much for valour as for frenzy. Some indeed write that this Liber was both conquered and bound; some also that he was killed in battle by Perseus, and they do not keep silent about where he was buried; and yet in his name, as though of a god, the Bacchanalian rites, or rather sacrileges, were instituted through unclean demons, at whose raving filthiness the senate after so many years was so ashamed that it forbade them to be in the city of Rome. In those times, after Perseus and his wife Andromeda died, men so believed them received into heaven that they did not blush, did not fear, to mark out their images with stars and to call the stars by their names.

Chapter 14. On the theological poets.

In the same interval of time there arose poets who were also called theologians, because they made songs about the gods, but about such gods as, though great men, were yet men, or are elements of this world which the true God made, or were set in principalities and powers according to the will of the Creator and their own merits; and if among many vain and false things they sang anything of the one true God, by worshipping with him others who are not gods and rendering them the service owed to the one God alone, they certainly did not serve him rightly, nor could they keep even themselves from the fabulous disgrace of their gods: Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus. But these theologians worshipped the gods; they were not worshipped as gods; although the city of the ungodly usually sets Orpheus, somehow or other, over the rites, or rather sacrileges, of the underworld. The wife of King Athamas, who was called Ino, and her son Melicertes perished by throwing themselves into the sea, and by men's opinion were placed among the gods, as were other men of their times, Castor and Pollux. That mother of Melicertes the Greeks called Leucothea and the Latins Matuta, both, however, thinking her a goddess.

Chapter 15. On the fall of the kingdom of the Argives, at the time when Picus, the son of Saturn, first received the kingdom among the Laurentines.

In those times the kingdom of the Argives came to an end, being transferred to Mycenae, from which Agamemnon came, and the kingdom of the Laurentines arose, where Picus, the son of Saturn, first received the kingdom, while among the Hebrews a woman, Deborah, was judge; but the Spirit of God was doing this through her, for she was also a prophetess, though her prophecy is too obscure for us to be able to show without long exposition that it was uttered about Christ. The Laurentines, then, were already reigning in Italy, from whom the Roman origin is more clearly derived after the Greeks; and yet the Assyrian kingdom still continued, where Lampares was the twenty-third king when Picus began to be the first of the Laurentines. Of this Picus's father Saturn let the worshippers of such gods, who deny he was a man, see what they think. Others too have written of him that he himself reigned in Italy before his son Picus, and Virgil says in better-known writings:

“He gathered the unruly race, scattered on the high mountains, and gave them laws, and chose that it be called Latium, since he had lain hidden safe on these shores. The golden ages which they tell of were under that king.”

But let them think these to be poetic fictions, and let them assert that Picus's father was rather Sterces, a most skilled farmer, by whom they say it was discovered that fields could be fertilized with the dung of animals, which from his name is called stercus; some say he was called Stercutius. For whatever reason they chose to call him Saturn, it is certain that they made this Sterces or Stercutius a god for his merit in agriculture. Picus his son they likewise received into the number of such gods, whom they assert to have been a distinguished augur and warrior. Picus begot Faunus, the second king of the Laurentines; he too is or was a god to them. These divine honours they conferred on dead men before the Trojan War.