Against Symmachus

Paul, the herald of God, who first tamed the savage hearts of the nations with his sacred pen, sowing Christ with gentle teaching among peoples monstrous in their harsh rites, so that the pagan race might scorn its untamed ceremonies once it knew God, had chanced, driven by the blackest whirlwinds, to endure in a weak ship the wintry sea and the force of the ship-wrecking south wind. But when the right hand of the Lord had commanded the battles of the blue gulf to be still, the boat, drifting, glides back into port and sets the rowers, struck by the rainy cold, on the ground of the wet shore. Then from the hedges of the cold shore they quickly gather arms of dry vine branches, from which to build quick fires: each heaps his bundle on the flames, waiting for the luxury of a warm blaze. Paul, while he is busy gathering brittle twigs and thickening the heap of the fire, put his unwary hand into the piles, where a viper was numb with sluggish cold, entangling the coils of its body in the brushwood. When it had grown warm from the smoky kindling and, fierce, had loosened its stiff neck, now easy to bend, it brought the darts of its teeth to his hand with a darting head. Carrying it hanging and clinging by its bite in the wound of his finger, Paul shuddered.

Others cry out, because they believed that the deadly poison was creeping under the livid skin. But the grim form of sudden danger does not frighten the fearless Apostle: raising his eyes, he looks up to the stars, murmuring Christ in his silent breast, and shakes the asp off, flinging it far away. The snake, thrown off, beats the air and loosens the points of its gaping mouth. Soon all the venom and pain leave his right hand, as though it were torn by no wound, and the viper’s fluid dries and perishes. While its momentum whirls the snake headlong, it carried it into the middle of the fire to burn. So now, after the winter and the force of the fierce strait, in which the ship of wisdom was tossed then, when, terrified under kings who were idol-worshippers, it could scarcely run with its sail spread, and had carried its own, afflicted by the whirlwind of the world, swimming on the raging waves, the holy law has suffered a wounding bite. For the poison had previously hidden itself away, and had not put forth its swollen head, content to keep its silence shut up below in its coverings and lairs. But while impiety, lurking, chanced to be numb, sluggish, it had bitten the right hand of justice, seething with the gall of its inflamed temper. Alas, how nearly it profited nothing that the Catholic ship had sailed on with the oars of the sacred pen

which Paul gave to the various nations! Scarcely had she rested safe and victorious in a calm harbor, a thousand furies tamed; scarcely, now bound by her moorings, had she set her passengers on firm ground, when a grim danger suddenly bursts out. For while they kindle hot little fires for themselves, to loosen both age and cold, while they burn barren and superfluous rods from the vine of the faith in the flames, lest the vine, thick with straggling tendrils, should produce the filth of an overgrown idol, too much warmth has stroked destruction into life: a snake, unaccustomed, ventures to creep in its coils and to dart the shrewd head of eloquence. But the right hand, impatient of a wound, drove off the vain breath of the rhetorical mouth: the poison of talent, poured out in vain, stopped at the surface of the skin of Christians. Savior of the race of Romulus, I pray, you who give pardon to all who perish, who count no mortal as not your work, whom you may raise up with an easy hand: have mercy now, if it is possible, on this man who is falling headlong into a steep pit. He breathes sacrilegious breaths without knowing it, and, unteachable, cherishes his errors. I implore you, command that no swift impulse carry him into the middle of the fire to burn.

I believed that the city, sick with pagan vices, … and that no evil remained, after the medicine of the emperor had calmed the immoderate pains in the citadel. But since a renewed plague tries to disturb the health of the sons of Romulus, the Father’s healing must be implored, so that he may not let Rome lie foul in her old lethargy, nor let the togas of the nobles be stained with smoke and blood. Did, then, the renowned father of his country, the ruler of the world, achieve nothing by forbidding the old error to believe that shapes wandering in the dark air were gods, or to consecrate as the supreme majesty the nature of the elements, which are the craft of the Father of all? He was the only man who took care that the public wound of morals should not draw a scar lightly closed on the surface of the skin, [leaving] a hiding place of a wasting wound, deeply pressed in and eaten through with rotten pus, but strove that the nobler part of man might live within, and that the soul, cleansed of the deadly plague, might know how to keep itself safe from inner poison. The medicine of the tyrants had been to see what state before their eyes suited present and perishing things, and to give no thought to the future. Alas, they served the people ill, and flattered the fathers themselves ill, letting them sink headlong into Tartarus with Jupiter and with the great crowd of the gods; but this one extends his empire more widely into a later age, desiring to secure salvation for his own. No doubt a certain very learned man said finely: “The state,” he says, “would be fortunate enough if either kings were wise, or the wise were kings.”

Is he not one of the few who, having obtained the diadem, have cultivated the teaching of heavenly wisdom? See, a wise leader has fallen to the lot of the human race and to the toga-wearing nation: happy is the commonwealth of our Rome … [obey] him who governs the sceptre: he warns that the worst error and the superstition of our ancient ancestors be far away, and that no one think anyone God except him who stands out supreme above all and created the immensity of the great world. Is Saturn believed to have ruled the Latin forefathers better? who instructed their rustic minds and the barbarous hearts of men with edicts such as these: “I am a god; I come as a fugitive; give me hiding places, hide an old man cast down from his throne by the savagery of his tyrant son. I am pleased to lie hidden here as a fugitive and exile: I will give the nation and the place the name Latium. For pruning vines, if you have that care, I will forge curved steel, and I will also set up the walls of Saturnia for you on your river’s bank. You will consecrate a grove and celebrate altars set up in my honor (for I am, you see, begotten of Heaven).” From then, later dull generations shaped in bronze gods whose tombs, seen in their own countries, we know; whom that fugitive stranger begot, and whom horse-like lust brought into Italy; for he was the first adulterer to neigh after Tuscan girls under a feigned godhead. Soon, worse than his father, the dweller on wooded Olympus …, now carrying off his beloved on a bull’s back for crime, now tender and lighter than a feather, singing sweet whispers like a swan dying a pleasant death, by which the captured girl might bear the winged lover;

now, the doors deaf, which bar or bolt had fixed with tight wedges, a rich lover through the roof, the tiles broken, pouring from above a shower of flowing gold into the lap of his mistress as she received it; now, with his armor-bearer looking after the sordid rape, afflicting the wretched catamite with unclean embrace, while his sister is now more indignant at a boy as a rival. This is the cause and origin of the evil: that, while the old stranger reigned, crude stupidity imagined golden ages, and that crafty Jupiter, with new invention, wove manifold tricks and various deceits, so that, when he wished to change his skin and face, they thought that he was a bull, that he plundered as an eagle, that he lay with them as a swan, that he became coins and penetrated the lap of a girl. For what would the foolish rusticity of untamed men not believe, used to giving over its mind, lacking divine reason, among cattle and bestial rites? To whatever belief the cunning wickedness of the rascal drew them, the unhappy nation lent an easy ear. An age more corrupt succeeded Jupiter’s rule, which taught hardy farmers to serve vices, men without experience of theft. In this art Mercury, son of Maia, schooled them: now that god is held great, whose skill produced thieves. That most learned master of Thessalian magic, too, is said to have recalled extinguished souls to the light by the control of the wand he took up, … the Cocytian [laws] of death, but to have condemned others to death and plunged them into the deep hidden chaos: this he does, skilled in both,

so that he was [skilled in both], and armed his life with a double crime: for his harmful art knew how to call up thin shapes with magic murmuring, and skillfully to bewitch the ashes of the tomb, and likewise to rob others of life. Simple antiquity, admiring the craftsman of crimes, worshipped him as more than man, pretending that he was carried through the clouds and ran across the light winds with winged feet. See, a Greek man, shaped in bronze, stands among the gods and shines in the august citadel of Numa. There was a certain energetic owner of a cultivated field, memorable for the wealth of his gardens; yet he too was an excessive fornicator, used in his great lust to harass the country harlots, and among the willows and thick hedges to go to obscene couches, bending his untamed mind, always ready for wickedness, and never giving his hot veins rest. This god, very famous from his native Hellespont, came to the gardens of the Italians with his foul rites; a bowl of milk and these cakes of vows he receives every year, and guards the vineyards of the Sabine countryside, a god whom one would be ashamed to look at, with his shameful fixed branch. The passion of Hercules, notorious for the love of a soft boy, seethed even on the benches of the tossing Argo; nor did he blush, under the Nemean skin, to cherish the embraces of a male, and, wifeless, to search for Hylas when he perished. Now the Pinarian house frequents his temple with Salian priests and song in the vaulted seat of the Aventine hill. The Theban youth becomes a god after conquering the Indians, while, triumphant in success, he runs wild, brings back the gold of the captive nation, and, proud of the spoils,

dissolves into luxury with his half-man retinue, and, greedy for wine, drenches himself with many a draught, with the foam of the jeweled bowl, and pours new Falernian over the dripping backs of the yoked beasts. For these merits a goat is now slaughtered to Bacchus on every altar, and those who wish to appease Bromius tear green snakes with their mouths; which the drunken madness of the Satyrs did even then before the king’s eyes, and I think the Maenads themselves did it, goaded by furious frenzy, whirled into every crime by inflaming wine. While this chorus danced around him, the drunken adulterer found on the beach of a lonely shore a harlot of outstanding body, cast away, whom a faithless youth had left there, sated with an unchaste love. He bids this courtesan be taken up, hot after his wine, and stand with him amid the delights of his loose triumph, and wear a royal crown as the ornament of her head. Soon Ariadne’s fire is added to the stars of heaven: Liber paid the price of the night with this honor, that a harlot should light up the heavenly sky. The stupidity of the unteachable, foolish crowd believed that all kings at that time had such power that a commander could pass, with his filth, above the heights of heaven into an everlasting kingdom. Then every royal power was believed to hold the force of majesty, and every authority, however small, the empire of heaven: honor was given to leaders with incense too and a little shrine; and while fear or love or hope heaped it up, the ancestral custom went on for a long age among the wretched. The image of a false piety began

to pass among ignorant descendants in a cloudy error, then, because the veneration that had formerly fallen to kings while they lived passed to them when their days were done, and transferred the altars to the black urns. Hence came the deceptions of girls, the offspring of childbirth, the furtive love of youths, and the detected corruption of the marriage bed: for the royal court was then accustomed to seethe with vices, and the offspring of the gods, lost in luxury, did not remember holy modesty. And, Rome, to touch briefly on your parents from the heavenly seat, the authors from whom they boast you were born a demigoddess, Gradivus or Cytherea: he violates a priestess; she, on the other hand, yields to a Phrygian husband. The union was unequal for both. It did not befit a goddess to enter on an earthly marriage with a mortal, nor a heavenly youth to descend to the violation of a virgin and burn with a stealthy fire. But Venus, a woman of noble blood, clung to a cheap private man through a forbidden disgrace. And if Rhea, deceived by the love of lascivious Mars, lost her sacred chastity in the river sedge, I would believe that someone of noble stock, but infamous in his morals, having violated the virgin by force, said he was a god, so that no one should dare to reproach the shameful and wretched girl with the rape of a deity. This rumor or this error led the Italian forefathers to celebrate the rites of Mars on the Campus of Romulus, and to mark the Capitol, founded on the Palatine rocks, with the title of their ancestor Jupiter and of Pelasgian Pallas, and to call Juno from her Libyan citadel;

and that the nobles should summon gods akin to Mars, and the naked statue of Venus from the summit of Eryx; and that the mother of the gods should be brought from Phrygian Ida, and the Bacchic orgies sought from green Naxos. Rome became the one home of earth-born majesty, and there are as many temples of the gods in Rome as one may count tombs of heroes in the city; the shades whom legend ennobles, our people venerates and adores. These were the gods that Ancus, Numitor, Numa, and Tullus had; such were the divinities that fled the flames of Pergamum. So it is with Vesta, the Palladium, the shade of the Penates; and such a terror guarded the ancient asylum. Once vain superstition had besieged the pagan hearts of the fathers, it ran on uninterrupted through a thousand steps of the ages. The tender heir shuddered and worshipped whatever his gray-haired ancestors had shown him as venerable. The infancy of boys drank in error with their milk at first: amid its wailing it had tasted the sacrificial meal; it had seen stones smeared with wax and the black household gods dripping with ointment. As a little child he had seen a figure of Fortune with her rich horn and a consecrated stone standing in the house, and his mother turning pale there in prayer. Soon, set on his nurse’s shoulders, he too wore down the flint with pressed lips, poured out childish vows, and asked wealth for himself from a hewn rock, and was persuaded that whatever one wished must be sought from there. Never did he lift his eyes and mind and bring them back to the citadel of reason, but credulously kept a senseless custom, honoring private gods with the blood of lambs.

And now, going out from home, when he marveled at the public festivals, the holidays and the games, and saw the lofty Capitol, the laurel-crowned ministers standing at the temples of the gods, and the Sacred Way resounding with lowing [of victims] before the shrine of Rome (for she too is worshipped with blood like a goddess, and the name of the place is held as a deity, and the temples of the City and of Venus rise with equal roofs, and incense is burned to the twin goddesses together), thinking true whatever is done on the senate’s authority, he gave his faith to the images, and thought them lords of heaven who stand in a row with dreadful faces. There Alcides, the guest of Arcadia after he had plundered Gades, stands stiff in tawny bronze; the twin brothers too, bastards of a seduced mother, the offspring of Leda, the riders by night, two divinities of lofty Rome, hang over it, a spit holding them, and plant the footprints that announced a great triumph in poured lead. There stand also the effigies of the ancient kings: Tros, Italus, two-faced Janus, father Sabinus, old Saturn, and Picus with spotted body, sprinkled through his limbs with the poison his wife made him drink. Before the feet of each is set his own foul little altar. To Janus too sacrifice is made in his famous month with auspices and sacred banquets, which, alas, the wretches keep under an inveterate honor, and they spend the festive joys of the Kalends. So the observance grew, badly begun once by the ancestors; then, handed down to the following times and increased by later descendants, thoughtless hearts drew a long chain, and a dark custom flowed on into vicious ages.

Following this custom of the ancients, posterity, at an age now teachable, worshipped Augustus with a month, shrines, a flamen, and altars, appeased him with calf and lamb, lay prostrate before his couch, and asked for oracles. Inscriptions bear witness and decrees of the senate reveal it, setting up a temple to Caesar in the likeness of Jupiter. They added a rite by which Livia should become Juno, she who had obtained the couch of a marriage no less infamous than when Saturn’s daughter burned in her brother’s bed. She had not yet emptied her womb in childbirth, but was carrying, near to giving birth, the child conceived by her [former] husband, when the bride’s matron [led her]; already the marriage couch is prepared for the pregnant woman; already the bridegroom, while the bride’s womb leaps, calls his friends, now sure that his betrothed will not be barren. The stepfather, too hot to wait, forestalls the slow birth of a stepson not yet born; soon, amid the wedding songs, another man’s offspring is born to the new husband. And the lots of the gods and the caves of Apollo gave this counsel: for the answer was that the torches never go better than when a pregnant new bride is joined. This goddess, Rome, consecrated with titles and perpetual honor, you created among your Floras and Venuses. No wonder; for what wise man would doubt that those goddesses were born of mortal stock and lived, and that they too, famous for the praise of their charm, shone with the beauty of their form in love affairs, even to the ruin of their reputation? Why should I speak of Antinous, set in a heavenly seat, that one, now the darling of the divine emperor, that one, robbed of his manhood in a purple lap, the Ganymede of the god Hadrian, who [does not pour] cups for the gods,

hold out to the gods, but, reclining with Jupiter in the middle of the couch, drinks the sacred wine of ambrosial nectar and hears prayers in the temples with her husband? Was it then under these patrons that Trajan, Nerva, Severus, Titus, and the brave Neros waged their wars? men whom earthly glory made illustrious and frail virtue carried up to the heights of fame, lying on earth under an adopted religion. How shameful that they were persuaded that they and the Roman armies could be ruled by such beings, by the love of Mars, while the ill-flattering adulterer of the Paphian sells himself and increases his descendants of Aeneas with successes! Happy they, had they known that all their prosperity was arranged by God, with Christ as Ruler, who willed that kingdoms should run guided in fixed ways, and the triumphs of the Romans should grow, and that he should pour himself into the fulfilled ages. But they plunged into the foul abyss of death their darkened souls, lacking light, slaughtered in the shrines of Jupiter and Augustus, in the temples of the two Junos, and in the chapels of Mars and Venus too, thinking that the supreme rule was in the gross parts of the world and was located at the sunken bottom of the universe. Whatever wonderful thing the earth or the sea brings forth, that they took for gods: hills, straits, rivers, flames. These elements, formed into various figures, our fathers set up for themselves, and wrote the names of men on dumb statues, calling the Ocean Neptune, or the hollow rivers blue Nymphs, or the forests Dryads, or the out-of-the-way countryside Napaeae. Fire itself, made to serve our use,

is called Vulcan, imagined as a heavenly power, and has shrines, made like a god in name and face; and he is said to reign over furnaces too, and to be the supreme smith of Aeolia or of Etna. There is one who sought the gods in the visible stars, daring to hold the Sun as god, on whom a condition has been imposed to bear a sleepless labor on a fixed path, set before mortal sight, rushing headlong in its round orbit and flying through the void as a smooth globe, and, as no one denies, smaller than the world and the heaven. For the space is greater than he who runs through it, and the expanse of the field in which he shines out and the burning wheel rolls on its swift axle is far wider. Although some like to say that the earth is shorter in circuit than that most beautiful circle, and that the flames of the immense star stretch beyond the measure of the earth in an extended ring, is the orb of heaven also smaller and more contracted, whose plane the compass, running out with a long sweep, labors to cross with an inner limit? That is the true God, than whom no matter is greater, who has no end, who presides over all nature, who at once encloses and fills all things. A fixed region holds the sun, a fixed tract confines him; he is marked by various times: he either comes up at rising, or rushes down at setting, or lies hidden, running back under the night; he cannot turn his torch toward the signs of the Bears, nor approach the gates of the north wind in a slanting orbit, nor turn round and call back his accustomed path. Will this, then, be God, who, under one law,

is given over to prescribed duties? A wider freedom has been granted to man himself: he is allowed to bend the form of his life and will, whether he prefers to climb by the right-hand path or run down the left-hand plain, to take rest or to continue his labor, to obey God or to turn to the contrary. Such power is by no means given by the Maker to the Sun, who ministers the solemn rule of the days, but as a subject servant he does whatever is necessary. They imagined that this star drives a chariot and swift four-horse team, and ordered the rays of his head, the whip of his right hand, the reins, the trappings, and the panting breasts of the horses to shine, polished, in gleaming metal of gilded bronze, or marble, or brass. After the robes of state, the ivory eagle, and the curule chair, a bearded old man bows his face and fixes kisses on the legs of bronze-footed horses, if it is right to believe it, and either adorns the motionless wheels and the reins that cannot bend with wreaths of roses or fumigates them with incense. Yet this is somehow tolerable. What of this, that even the shades of the infernal gulf give you gods, Rome? The mistress of the Furies thrusts her head out of the Stygian cave, Proserpina, snatched away to the bridal chamber of the king of Tartarus; and if ever she deigns to visit her Quirites, she is appeased by the severed neck of a barren cow, and she is thought to reign in heaven and in Erebus at once: now to rein a two-horse chariot of oxen, now to send the savage ranks of her Sisters against those above with a viper whip, now also to scatter flying arrows on the backs of roe deer, and the same goddess to vary her form threefold.

In short, when she is the Moon, she shines in a dim robe; when, girt up, she shoots arrows, she is Latona’s virgin daughter; when she sits enthroned, she is Pluto’s wife, commands the Furies, and dictates laws to Megaera. If you seek the truth, under the name of Trivia a demon of Tartarus is worshipped, who now snatches you up to the sky and persuades you that a god must be venerated in a starry body; now forces you to run about through the woods of a deadly world and to follow errors, and to think that there is a goddess of the groves, who pierces the trembling hearts of men, and destroys wild minds with deadly wound; now overwhelms your senses, pressed down below the earth with fear, so that they implore powers without light and commit themselves to the power of covered night. Look at the wicked sanctuaries of terrifying Dis, for whom the gladiator falls, laid low on the ill-omened sand, alas, a victim for Phlegethon from an ill-purified Rome! For what does the impious art of the mad game mean? What do the deaths of young men mean? What the pleasure fed on blood? What the ever-funereal dust of the arena, and those grim spectacles of the amphitheatre’s show? Charon, of course, receives from the throats of the wretched offerings worthy of himself as leader, appeased by a sacred crime. These are the delights of the infernal Jupiter; in these the ruler of dark Avernus rests content. Is it not shameful that a royal people, powerful with sceptres, should judge that such sacrifices must be offered for the safety of the fatherland, and should seek the aid of religion from caves beneath the earth? Alas, it calls up from his dark seat the minister of destruction, to pay him splendid human deaths as penalties.

We are used to censuring the Tauric rites in vain: human blood is poured out in the offering to Latiaris, and that assembly of spectators pays at the altar of its Pluto its savage vows. What is holier than the altar that drinks the blood drained through mystic weapons? Or is it a doubtful belief for you that there is a god under blind darkness, whom you search for in the silent shades? See, why do you deny that the Manes are held as gods? The very tombs of the fathers prove it: there I read “To the gods of the Shades” on cut marbles, whatever ones the Latin Way guards, with its ancient ashes, and the Salarian Way with its crowded tombs. Say, to whom do you write this inscription? unless it is that you adore the empire of cruel Orcus as of a true majesty? See, in what things the palace of the supreme empire lay squalid and entangled, its rites drawn from the origin of the ancestors! When the emperor, twice victor in the slaughter of two tyrants, looked back with triumphant face on the beautiful walls, he sees the city beset by black clouds, by the darkness of shadowed night: turbid air kept the clear sky away from the citadel of the seven hills. He groaned in pity, and spoke thus: “Put off your mourning dress, faithful mother: you are famous indeed, made glorious by rich adornment; you lift your head, distinguished by proud spoils, and you are wrapped round with much gold; but the summit of your high head bristles, beset by the clouds flying nearby; a livid light dulls even the jewels, and the thick daylight and smoke spread from the altar blunt the ruddy diadem of your brow. I see dark shades carried about you, and blue-black souls and black idols flying.

I advise you to lift your face on high above the air and leave the cloudy elements beneath your feet. All that is of the world lies beneath you: God himself established this, by whose will you are mistress, rule the world, and, being powerful, trample on all mortal things. It is not fitting, queen, that you should lower your eyes … about the perishing, lowly parts of things above which you stand. I will not allow you, under my leadership, to keep old trifles, to venerate the monsters of worm-eaten gods. If it is stone, it crumbles with age or cracks when struck by a light blow; if soft leaf has covered the plaster, it gradually thins as the treacherous glue fails; if the file has joined the form of the statue with bronze plates, either the hollow limbs bend to one side under a heavy weight, or rough verdigris eats the image away and bursts it with many holes. Let not earth be your god, nor a star of heaven your god, nor Ocean your god, nor the power hidden below, condemned to the infernal darkness for its grim deserts. And let neither the virtues of men be god, nor shapes of souls or spirits wandering under a thin image. Far be it that a shade should be your god, or a genius, or a place, or a phantom flitting through the airy breezes. Let these be the pagan divinities of barbarian villages, among whom whatever fear has suggested as dreadful is sacred; whom portents compel to believe horrific monsters to be gods; who delight in a bloody custom of eating, that a fat victim be torn in a deep grove, its entrails to be devoured amid much wine.

But for you, who gave laws and rights to the conquered nations, teaching the savage customs of arms and manners to grow gentle wherever the great world stretches, it is unworthy and wretched, in holding to religion, to think as the monstrous peoples think after their bestial way, and to follow no reason in their crudeness. Whether a campaign awaits us, or we dictate quiet laws in peace, or trample the conquered necks of two tyrants in the middle of the city, you must gladly recognize my standards, queen, on which the figure of the Cross either shines set with gems or is carried in front, of solid gold, on long staffs. Unconquered by this sign, Constantine crossed the Alps as avenger and broke the wretched slavery, when Maxentius was oppressing you with his pestilent court. You were mourning, as you yourself know, a hundred fathers condemned to long imprisonment; or a bridegroom, groaning that the compact of his betrothed had been broken and she snatched away by a dreadful henchman, wept, plunged into darkness, amid hard chains; or if a wife, ordered to climb into the tyrant’s bed, had begun to delight the impure fury of her master, her husband’s indignation paid the penalty by death. The workhouses of the cruel prince were full of girls taken from their fathers: if a father, muttering when his virgin daughter was carried off, groaned too sadly, he did not betray his grief unpunished, or draw sighs that confessed his feelings. The Mulvian bridge is witness, when the Christian leader came to the city, hurling the tyrant down into the Tiber’s pools, by what majesty it saw the victorious arms

to be ruled, what sign the avenging right hand carried before it, with what emblem the javelins shone. Christ, woven in gold set with gems, marked the purple labarum; Christ had written the emblems of the shields; the cross, set on the tops of the crests, blazed. The most illustrious order of senators itself remembers it, which then came forth with matted hair, squalid with prison chains or bound with huge fetters, and, embracing the feet of the victor, lay prostrate weeping before the glorious standards. Then that senate adored the title of the avenging army and the venerable name of Christ, which shone on the arms. So beware, illustrious head of the world, of inventing for yourself henceforth empty portents and specters with stupid worship, and of scorning the power of the true God, which you have experienced. I would have you lay aside now your childish festivals, your ridiculous rites, and shrines unworthy of so great an empire. Wash the marbles stained with putrid spattering, you nobles: let the statues stand clean, the works of great artists; let these be called the most beautiful ornaments of our country, and let no discolored use pollute the monuments of an art turned to vice.” Instructed by such edicts, the city fled its old errors, shook the turbid clouds from its wrinkled face, its nobility now ready to try the eternal ways, to follow Christ at the call of its great-souled leader, and to send its hope into eternity. Then for the first time Rome, teachable in old age, blushed for her ages: she is ashamed of the time gone by; she hates the past years with their foul religions.

Soon, when, remembering that the fields next to the city’s trenches had been soaked with the innocent blood of the righteous, she sees the thousands of tombs around, a reproach to her, she repents still more of her grim judgment and of her unbridled rule and her excessive anger on behalf of foul rites: she longs to make amends for the foul wounds of injured Justice by late obedience and by asking pardon, and, lest the crime of cruelty remain on so great an empire, with piety rejected, she seeks the expiation shown her, and passes over into the faith of Christ with full love. The laurel of victorious Marius was less useful to the city when he dragged the Numidian Jugurtha in triumph while the people applauded; nor did the consul from Arpinum bring you, Rome, so much healing when Cethegus was put to death in his just chains, as the outstanding emperor of our time has foreseen and bestowed good. He drove many Catilines from home, men preparing not cruel fires for houses or daggers for the fathers, but black Tartarus for souls, and torments for the inner state of men. Enemies were wandering everywhere through temples and halls, and held the Roman forum and the lofty Capitol, who, plotting conspiracies against the very vitals of the people, were accustomed, with poison creeping within, to mingle a plague with silent marrow. So, a triumphant victor in the toga, from a hidden enemy he brings back famous trophies without blood, and accustoms the state of Quirinus to flourish for ages in a heavenly kingdom. In short, he sets no limits and fixes no times: he teaches an empire without end, so that the valor of Romulus may not now be an old woman, nor the glory won know old age. You may see the fathers exult, the most beautiful lights

of the world, and the council of old Catos eager to put on the snow-white robe of piety, a whiter toga, and to lay aside the spoils of the pontiffs. And now, leaving a few on the Tarpeian rock, the senate-house of Evander rushes to the pure sanctuaries of the Nazarenes and to the apostolic fonts, the offspring of the Annii and the famous children of the Probi. For the noble Anicius is said to have been the first to bring glory to the head of the city: so famous Rome boasts. And the heir of the Olybrian line and name, added to the consular lists, distinguished in the palm-embroidered robe, seeks to lower the fasces of Brutus before the doors of the martyr, and to bow the Ausonian axe to Christ. The ready faith of the Paulini and the Bassi did not hesitate to give themselves to Christ and to raise the proud stock of a patrician family to the age to come. Why now should I run through in song the people-loving Gracchi, supported by the right of power and first in the citadel of the senate, who ordered the images of the gods to be torn down, and consecrated themselves humbly, together with their lictors, to almighty Christ, to be ruled by him? One may count six hundred houses of noble blood of old, turned to the seals of Christ, who have emerged from the vast depth of foul idolatry. If the city has any person or any standing, it is in these; if the more excellent order makes the form of the fatherland, these make it, whenever the opinion of the people is joined with them, and the many and the better think one thing together. Look at the illustrious chamber, where the public light is: you will scarcely find a few minds covered with pagan trifles,

barely keeping to their crushed cults, minds that like to keep a darkness already driven out and not to see the sun shining at midday. Next, turn your eyes to the people: what fraction is there that does not spit on Jupiter’s altar, stained with gore? All the common people who climb to the high garrets, who wear the black flint with their various comings and goings, whom the bread distributed from the high steps feeds, either throng the tomb at the foot of the Vatican hill, where those ashes, the pledge of a beloved father, lie hidden, or run in great crowds to the Lateran house, to bring back from there the sacred sign of the royal chrism. And do we still doubt that Rome, dedicated to you, Christ, has passed under your laws, and wills, with all the people and its highest citizens, to extend its earthly kingdom now above the high stars of the great sky? Nor am I moved that a very rare part of men does not open its closed eyes on high, and wanders in its steps. However illustrious they are by their merits and famous by blood, however much, increased with titles and honors, they have brought back the high rewards of virtue, and, having reached the summit of the consular lists, have marked the annals with their own name, and are counted among the ancients in wax and bronze, yet in a few, now that their band is dwindling, neither the person of the fatherland rests, nor does the senate stand; and whatever pursuit private will cherishes, it now holds rarely; but the public wishes protest, condemning the anxious murmur with a crowded dissent. So the decrees of the conscript fathers stood

in no other way under the old time than if three hundred old men were chosen to have voted as one. Let us keep our fathers’ laws: let the weak voice of the smaller number give way and fall silent in its small part. See how our benches, in a full senate, decree that Jupiter’s infamous couch and every idol must be driven far from the purified city: where the motion of the excellent emperor calls, there the crowded house passes over freely, both with its feet and with its heart. There is no room for resentment; no harsh force terrifies; it is plain before our eyes that they so will: and all follow what is approved, not commanded, captured by reason alone. Finally, repaying fair rewards for earthly merits, the good leader bestows the highest honors on idol-worshippers and lets them compete with the glory of his own people; nor does he forbid men entangled in paganism to go through the due summits of the world, since heavenly things never stand in the way of those who walk the accustomed road of earthly things. He himself conferred on you the magistracy of consul, he himself the tribunal, and gave you the gilded garment of the toga, he whose religion displeases you, O champion of perishing gods, who alone plead for the restoration of the tricks of Vulcan, Mars and Venus, old Saturn’s stones, and the frenzies of Phoebus, the Megalesia of the Trojan mother, the Bacchic rites of Nysa, the mimic ceremonies of Isis, always mourning the lost Osiris, solemnities to be laughed at by her own bald priests, and whatever specters the Capitol usually shuts in. O tongue, flowing with a wonderful fountain of words,

the glory of Roman eloquence, to whom even Tullius himself would yield, pours out these gems from its rich fluency! A mouth worthy to be dipped in eternal gold and to shine, if it had chosen to praise God, before whom it set sordid monsters, and defiled its clear voice with crime. Just as if someone should try to turn over muddy ground with ivory rakes, or perhaps to cultivate sedges wet with mud with golden hoes, the black trench defiles the splendor of the shining tooth, and the precious edge is fouled in the squalid field. I do not fear that anyone will accuse me of excessive confidence, or think that I enter a contest of talent. I am mindful of myself, and know my trifles well enough: I would not dare to set my foot against him, nor, unskilled in speaking, to provoke the darts hurled by so great a tongue. Let his book remain unharmed, and let the excellent volume keep the fame it has won by the thunderbolt of its speech. But let me be allowed to keep my breast covered from a wound, and with my shield held up to ward off the flying javelin. For if our Faith, safe now in a quiet age, has been attacked with hostile strength and an enemy’s art, why should it not be right for me, bending my side, to mock the windy arrows whose throw is wasted? But now it is time to check the course of this long book, so that the poem, drawn out without end, may not bring weariness.

Simon, whom they call Peter, the chief disciple of God, at the close of day, as it happened, when the saffron evening reddens, had pulled up his curved anchor, catching the winds with his sails, and wishing to cross the strait. The night stirs up a contrary wind to churn the sea from its depths; … the sailors’ cry strikes the sky, wailing and howling, with the shrieking of the ropes; nor was there any hope left for the shipwrecked, about to sink, when the crew, pale with danger, see Christ far off, treading the sea with his feet, as if he walked along a dry shore on a solid road. The other passengers, terrified, are astounded at these wonders. Peter alone, not trembling, recognizes the Lord of the sky, of the earth, and of the pathless sea, to whose omnipotence it belongs to put the waters under his feet. He stretches out his hands in supplication and asks for the help he knows. But Christ, nodding gently, bids him leap down from the ship.

… But he had begun to dip his steps in the tops of the waves, and, his step slipping, to sink his slippery feet to the bottom. God rebukes the mortal for being of unsteady faith, so that he could neither tread on the flowing waters nor follow Christ. Then with his right hand he lifts his servant, sets him up, and teaches him to walk over the swelling back of the sea. So my talkative tongue, now that I have left safe silence, carries me into doubtful dangers: not like the disciple Peter, trusting both in merit and in faith, but as one whom frequent sin rolls, light and shipwrecked, through the straits. I am plainly rash, who, conscious of the night of life that I spend in darkness, do not fear to entrust my ship to the waves of so great a man, than whom no one now is more eloquent, who exults, roars, thunders, and swells with the winds of eloquence; for whom it is very easy to sink one unskilled in handling his boat, unless you, mighty Christ, stretch out your hand with favoring power, so that the onrush of the eloquent mouth may not overwhelm me with its waves. … I shall stand firm on the floods.

So far we have told of the first cradles of the old gods, and the causes by which dull error was kindled in the world, and that Rome now believes in our Christ; now I will read the objections, now refute words with words. Where, then, do they say he began, or from what start, so as to bend the holy hearts of the leaders with seductive art? The masters of arms, flourishing in the flower of youth, born in their father’s camp, brought up under their grandfather’s image, warm with the examples heaped up at home, the clever orator urges on, as if he were sounding the trumpets of war, sharpens their spirits, and throws out such words: “If Victory, men, whether won already or to be won hereafter, is dear to your hearts, let the virgin goddess keep her consecrated temple while you reign. What friend of the enemy denies that she should be devoutly worshipped by your empire, which she always attends and fills with glory?” When the envoy had said this, the brother emperors answer with most calm faces: “We know how sweet Victory is to the brave, most eloquent man of the Ausonian tongue. But by what means, by what method she is to be called, we know: in this art our father first instructed us as boys; this he himself learned as a boy, with his father as teacher. Happy Victory does not come when entreated with altars or sacrificial meal: tireless labor, rough valor, force of mind, outstanding ardor, vigor, care grant her, a hard strength in handling arms. If these are lacking to those who fight, though golden Victory spread her glowing wings in a marble temple and rise, shaped from many talents of metal, she will not be present, and will be seen offended, with spears turned back.

Why, soldier, distrusting your own strength, do you fit to yourself the vain consolations of a female form? Never has an iron-clad legion seen a winged girl who directed the weapons of panting men. Do you seek the mistress of victory? each has his own right hand … not one hanging on a bare foot, girt with a breast-band, nor clothed as to her swelling breasts with flowing fold. Either the painters’ hand taught you, with counterfeit …, or charming painting took from your shrine what it might draw into a face, imitating it with various marks and with liquid wax, and, enhanced by the art of its partner poetry, dare to play with colored dyes. So they follow one path; so Homer, keen Apelles, and Numa conceive empty dreams in figures, and a threefold power of deceit, akin in evil, pigments, the Muses, and idols, has fused them together. If these things are not so, let it be told why the poetic fable furnishes you with sacred rites from pictures and waxes. Why does the Berecynthian priest lose his mutilated groin, when poetry has castrated the handsome Attis? Why are horn-footed horses kept away from the temple of Trivia and her sacred groves, when the Muse has snatched away a chaste youth along the shores in a winged chariot, and the many-colored wall portrays it for you too? Stop at last, if you have any shame, pagan foolishness, inventing incorporeal things with counterfeit limbs; stop covering a human back with feathers: in vain a woman is said to be a bird, and the same goddess a great vulture. Do you wish to adorn your senate, wealthiest Rome?

Hang up spoils taken by arms and blood; heap up, as victor, the diadems of slaughtered kings; break the foul ornaments of rejected gods: now victory has been won for you not only on earth, but will be kept for you above the stars too, in the midst of the temple.” While the emperors interrupt with such words, he goes on and blows his trumpet with great harmonies: he cites the ancient custom; he affirms that nothing is sweeter than what is customary, and that peoples and men are held by their own law. “As various souls,” he says, “fall to boys at birth, so the hour and day brings to cities, when their walls first rise, either a fate or a genius by whose guidance they reign.” He adds that the secret of things and the hiding places of truth can be detected by some prosperity, through the proofs of good fortune, if things are happy which one proves by experience; that every idol always turned out happily and auspiciously for our forefathers. He recounts the force of long time; he rouses Rome herself, white with snowy hair, her brow wrinkled, demanding back her gods with plaintive mouth: “I am free; let me live by my own custom. And who will there be to blame my thousand years? We are all set under one sun, we are quickened by the same air, the breath of life is common to all living things. But what God is, and of what kind, we seek following different ways, and by paths far apart we all go to one hidden thing. Each nation has its own custom, by which way it may hasten to go to so great a deep.” To these words, so magnificent and flowing with such art,

Faith alone has answered, most skilled to open first the entrance to the inner shrine of the true way. For when we deal with divine things, and strive to conjecture in our mind him who neither had a beginning nor will have an end, who was before chaos and created the world, the strength is small, since our nature is lesser, if it tries to direct its gaze more keenly and to penetrate the secrets of the supreme God. Who would doubt that the frail mind grows weary, its sight overcome, and that the force of the tired mind is troubled in the little breast, and, dulled, succumbs to cares too weak for it? But the easy way of Faith invites us to believe in an Almighty who gives not only present goods, but promises also those to come, without end in long ages, so that I may not go wholly dissolved into empty nothing, and perish after a brief enjoyment of the light. Weigh the authors of the gift by the gift itself. The eternal gives eternal things; the mortal bestows mortal things: God gives divine things, the perishing perishable. All things that time completes and that an end takes away are cheap by their shortness, and not worthy of an everlasting Giver, whose proper wealth it is never to cease, and to give man what will never cease. For if God grants something corrupt or to be corrupted, and has nothing more precious than these things, he is poor and weak and unworthy of the highest honor, and not almighty, but the empty shadow of a deity. By this reasoning Faith wisely infers, or rather does not doubt, that he is the true God who bids us hope that what we are and what we live will be always unharmed if we deserve it,

“If you wish to climb to heaven,” he says, “drive earthly cares from your mind. For as far as the earth lies below in its low position, and the palace of the vaulted heaven is divided from the ground, so far do your worldly things stand from my future things, the dreadful from the good, the wicked from the holy, the dark from the serene. Whatever can die, I advise you to flee; whatever by the law of nature takes on decay and grows old, count it as nothing, since it will return to nothing. All that the earth brings forth, all that it contains, I myself established in the beginning; I gave the shining world its notable ornaments and fashioned beautiful seeds. But I willed that there be measure, and granted them to be enjoyed with sparing ways, as much as the dying and sick use of the body and of a fleeting life requires; not so that man, captured by his pursuits and burning to no purpose, should think every good lies in the sweetness of things and in thin appearance, things I bade run in time; and I set an age under which I might test noble hearts, lest virtue, numb and unexercised, should bear an enervated strength without the glory of the wrestling-ground. For the taste of these things is enticing and pestilent, which, while they pass, hold minds entangled and bound with wonderful delight. Pleasure must be conquered, the constancy of the mind must be roused, so that it be not held down, tied and captive by soft and pliant bonds. One must wrestle with the utmost efforts; amid hardships one must follow the way of virtue, so that it does not love the sweets of a fleeting condition, nor heap up too much gold, nor wish greedily to gaze at the varied colors of stones

ambitiously, nor show itself off to the popular breezes, and swell, puffed up with fine honor; nor stretch out its native soil and the acres of its father’s farm, and spread its mind over other men’s fields; and not give over to the bodily senses all that it wills or does; not prefer the useful to the just, and set all its hope on me; what I shall give will never perish, and my gifts are to be enjoyed for a long day.” Since God promises these things, then, who that is brave and keen and capable of virtue would prefer for himself anything brief to things everlasting? or what wise man would think the joys of the limbs better than the rewards of the living mind? Is it not one difference that separates man and beast, that the goods of four-footed beasts lie before their eyes, while I, on the contrary, hope for what is kept beyond sight for a long age? For if all my life perishes with my body, and nothing of mine can survive after death, who is the ruler of heaven to me? who the founder of the world? who is God? or what power is now rightly to be feared? I will go through impure luxuries with burning lust; I will defile marriage beds and trample on sacred modesty; I will deny a deposit I hold from a neighbor without a witness; I will greedily rob poor clients; I will kill my long-lived mother with a magic spell: the old woman delays me, her heir, by putting off her death. Nor do I fear evil: the public laws are deceived. The law sits armed, but does not know the hidden crime; or, if the matter comes out, the judge is corrupted with gold. Rarely does punishment strike the guilty with the just axe. But why do I think about these things? See, God, threatening

with stern majesty, calls me back, and says that the weight of my works will not perish through death: “The inner man who breathes,” he says, “will not die; he will pay an everlasting penalty for having ruled ill the limbs subject to him. Nor is it difficult for me to surround with flames a fluid nature, though it is said to be borne along like the south wind, blowing through things: I will seize it nevertheless and apply torments, I who am myself incorporeal and the one sower of spirits. Nay, I shall decree for bodies too a partnership in equal punishment, since I can restore ashes to their old appearance. Nor is the power to be despaired of: I who could form what was new will restore what was destroyed. Examples of my power are not lacking in seeds themselves. Nature teaches that all things grow green again after death: for they dry up when the vigor by which they lived before perishes; then, dry and dead, they lie committed to furrows or pits, and, buried as in a tomb, they rise from their graves with reviving shoots. Can you know or guess what so skillful a craftsman builds this, or what force works within? … See, I am the Lord of begetting and powerful to restore what has perished and flowed away: everything withered I bring back to its old forms in flower or leaf. And I shall do this very thing one day for man, that he may rise from empty ashes and his former structure stand, which shall pay me for its deserts, either by torments for its crimes, or shine in the citadel of highest virtue, henceforth not to perish, in whatever lot it remains. Meanwhile, while the substance mixed into one flourishes, let it remember its own maker, venerate and pray to

its maker humbly. One did not make the image of the breathing soul and another that of the body; nor do many divinities govern the goods of the present life; it is not one god who supplies the crops and the grain in the ear, and another who gives new wine to the grapes and pours the purple juice from the heavy vine-branch. It is I myself who make the green olives grow fat with their berries, which you pretend were born of Greek Pallas, and who grant the hours of Lucina to those being born. By my law the twofold sex, through mutual covenants, loves to beget offspring and rejoices in the propagation of its kind; this fire you violate with wanton loves, and cloak your debaucheries with the shadow of the goddess Venus. I alone rule the elements, and I am not wearied by the mass of the work, like someone wretched or weak or frail. Mine is boundless light and an age that cannot be dissolved, an antiquity not understood by your senses. So I have no need of ministers for so many governments of the world, nor do I seek partners or associates. Moreover, it is mine to know the angelic legions which my right hand made, what nature subsists in created things, and for what uses they are kept for me. You, passing me by, devise a thousand divinities, which you pretend obey my powers, so as to diminish me through various parts: I from whom no part or form can be cut off, since I am a simple substance, and cannot be a part. Division belongs only to things compounded and made: no one created me, so that I could be split; I am the one founder of all.

Believe that what I formed from nothing is not a part of me. Come then, mortal, build a temple to me alone, and let no one dedicate to me the stones that Paros cuts, or the Punic cliff, or that green Lacedaemon or spotted Synnada has, or the native purple of the rock. I love a temple of the mind, not of marble; in it the golden foundations of faith remain; the building rises, shining with snowy piety; kindly modesty covers the high roof with the flower of chastity, and guards the halls. This house is fit for me; this most beautiful seat receives me, worthy of an eternal and heavenly guest. Nor is this place new: my glory flowed into the limbs, the true light of God. God enlightened the matter he nourished, and as Parent made the body habitable for himself, so that he might rest in a peaceful temple. I had made man perfect; I had commanded him to look at things above, turned toward me with all his senses, with upright bearing and lofty stance, gazing on high; but he looked down to the ground, bent himself to the riches of the world, and drove my divinity from his breast. He had to be restored to me: my Spirit himself descended, sent down into him, and informed with divine powers the flesh brought forth from the mud, … transformed it, and taught it to grow warm again in our worship.” I would like to know with what ears you, most learned censor of the Italian nation, receive these precepts of the Father. Or do you choose only the old custom, abandoning reason? And does a wise man’s sharpness and a man’s talent allow it to be said: “The ancient custom is preferable to me to the way of justice, to the piety revealed from heaven,

than faith in the truth, than the rule of the right way.” If whatever custom held in the crude years of the newborn world must be devoutly kept and preserved, let us roll back every age along its own footsteps to the beginning: let us decide to condemn step by step whatever later usage found as its successor. In the new world no farmers tamed the fields. What is the use of ploughs? What of the superfluous care of the hoe? The belly is better filled with acorns of the holm-oak. The first men split the cleavable wood with wedges: let the burning furnace boil the axes back into a lump, and the ore drip back into its own metal. Slain cattle gave clothing, and a cold cave gave small houses: let us go back to the caves and put on shaggy garments of sewn skins. Let the once savage peoples, whose ferocity has been subdued and tamed, now roar grimly again, and return to their beastly ways, and run back to their old state. Let the young man hurl his shriveled father, with Scythian piety, from the bridge of vows: so the custom was once. Let the rites of Saturn smoke with the slaughter of infants, and the cruel altars resound with pitiful wailing. Let the Roman nation itself weave huts of fragile thatch: so they say Remus lived; let them strew royal couches with hay, or wear on their shaggy bodies a cloak made of the skin of a Libyan bear: such things the Sicilian or Tuscan chieftain had. Ancient Rome is not consistent with herself, but turned through the ages, and changed in rites, dress, laws, and arms: she worships many things that she did not worship under King Quirinus;

she has established some things better, and avoided some, and has not ceased to vary her custom, and has turned to the contrary the laws she founded long ago. Why do you throw ritual custom in my face, Roman senator, when the opinion of what pleased has often renewed, by change, the decrees of the fathers and of the people on the tablets? Even now, whenever it is useful to depart from the customary and to condemn past habits by a new way of life, we rejoice that something has been found and at last uncovered that lay hidden: the life of man always grows, increased by slow advances, and makes progress by long practice. So the changing order of mortal life holds itself; so nature varies its stages: infancy crawls, the boy’s step and mind totter feebly, sinewy youth seethes with very hot blood; soon comes the age of mature strength, settled; the last age, better in counsel but sick in strength, succumbs in body, old age with its mind purified. By these courses the human race has led its changeable life through discordant times: so at first it lived dull in its beginnings and sunk in the soil like a four-footed beast; soon it was tender, with teachable mind, and now fit for learning arts, and polished by the various novelty of things; then, swelling with vices, it grew into hot years, until it made its strength solid with ripened vigor. The time is here for it now to understand divine things, with the counsel of a serene mind, to seek hidden things more keenly and skillfully, and at last to keep watch for eternal salvation.

However, if there is so great a love and care for the old custom, and it pleases you not to depart from the ancient rite, there is a noble example in the ancient books, … that the nation that first inhabited the new lands and dwelt in the empty world served God; from it the extended offspring of our stock draws its line, and restores the laws of native piety. But since we are speaking of Roman worship, I prove that the very people of Hector’s blood for a long time did not worship many gods, but, content with few shrines, set up few altars on the hills. Afterward Rome acquired countless gods when cities were subdued by her valor, and by her famous triumphs. Amid the smoking ruins of temples, the armed right hand of the victor took the enemy’s images and carried them home as captives, venerating them as divinities. … That one she took as plunder from burned Athens; conquered Cleopatra gave some effigies with dog’s heads; some Syrtic trophies from the subdued sands of Ammon had horned faces. Whenever famous Rome received with applause the chariot of a triumphant general, she added altars of the gods, and made new divinities for herself from the spoils: divinities which, torn up with their native walls, could bring no protection to their own shrines. You see how the footprints of ancient custom

are proved to have tottered variously with uncertain steps, adopting gods unknown to the ancestors, and dedicating themselves under a foreign religion, and not keeping their own rites? Whatever there is of sacred rites is in exile, and has come as a foreigner into a hostile city. In vain, then, wicked observance, you cling to the customary. It is not ancestral custom that you love, wicked man, it is not. But the skillful orator says that the City was allotted by fate the Genius under which it should pass its own age. “For to all peoples and walls,” he says, “is given either a fate or a Genius, in the manner of our souls, which enter new bodies under different lots.” … whom it suits, I do not know: what a shapeless spirit can do, and whence it arises, without body or form, or whether it has any appearance, and what it knows, what duties it cares for. On the other hand, I understand that human souls are so poured into the vital veins within, that from them the blood receives a light motion and a delicate warmth, kindles what is cold, waters what is dry, relaxes what is hard. So the living mind tempers and governs the life of man for itself, the mind that you try to compare with a feigned Genius of the walls, which is nowhere and never was. Moreover, the living mind turns over the highest counsel for ruling bodies, to provide faithful protections for the naked and weak, to avoid fearful dangers, to foresee what is useful, to busy itself with various arts, to consider to what master it should submit itself, and whom it should think the author of the world, whom the sum of things follows. But tell me, I want to know, when did this Genius of your city first begin to pour itself into Rome, still small?

Did it flow from the wolf’s udders in the wooded valley, and nourish the twin infants while it was itself being born? Or did an unknown shade, flying through the air with the vultures, suddenly draw its shape from a cloud? Does it sit on the highest roofs, or does it guard the inner shrines? Did it establish morals and found the laws of the forum? Or does it even intervene in the trenches of the camp? Does it drive keen men to arms, rouse them with trumpets, urge them against the enemy? Who would not see that these things deserve the laughter of the wise? Let us suppose, however, that there is some shade or soul that cares for such things, through which the state has drawn its fate and is animated in all its warm marrow: why does it not take counsel about the religion to be worshipped? Why does it not look up freely to heaven? Why does it think, like a captive, that fate is prescribed for it and unchangeable? Why does it imagine the chains of a nativity? Why may it not now refuse what it was then allowed to will, and abolish its errors and turn its feelings? So for about seven hundred years it wandered, slippery and always doubting what form of empire pleased it, what power of ruling was fair. … not without the aged being placed in a share of the cares. Soon we see the nobles from the stock of the elders handling the helm of counsel; then the plebeian crowds, joined to the fathers with equal powers mixed together, ruled for a long time in managing war and peace. The nobility flourished under the consul; the people trusted in the tribune. This state suddenly displeases, and twice five summits of the highest nobles are created, whom twelve fasces surround, and each his own axe.

Again the whole commonwealth returns to two leaders and gives the consuls the right to mark the calendar. The bloody triumvir troubled the last ages. On these waves the fate, or the Genius, or the public mind once wandered: at length, taught to discover the right way, it girded an august head with the diadem, calling him father of the country, ruler of the people and the senate, who should be leader of the army, and also dictator and good censor and master of morals, guardian of wealth, avenger of crimes, bestower of honors. And if, after so many stages of things and plans so often changed, it has with difficulty at last arrived at that which it approves, and public reverence keeps with a holy covenant, why does it hesitate to recognize the divine laws, unknown to it before and at last revealed? Let us give thanks: it no longer hesitates; for subject to Christ … by Rome I mean the men, whom we believe to be the mind of the city, not a Genius, whose image is feigned in vain. And yet why do you make up one Genius of Rome for me, when you are accustomed to imagine for gates, houses, baths, stables … of the city, and through its places, many thousands of Genii, so that no corner may be empty of its own shade? It remains that the same madness should impose a fate on all buildings too, so that each wall, founded and built under its own star, received in its first hours the lot by which it should stand and when it should fall. They ascribe to stones the ill-strong threads of Lachesis, and believe that the beams of roofs hang on the whirling spindles, and assign decrees to the very rafters: as if it mattered under whose star’s rising an ash tree

was dug up, which was to climb high to the topmost summit. In short, there is no human thing, no action in the world, on which they do not say a fated lot lies. Since they establish this, let them say why the law of the twice six tables was founded, or why the rubric threatens, which forbids those to sin as culprits whom iron fates compel to crime and plunge into it inescapably, and even drive them to will it, instilling a perverse wish. Give way, if you have any shame, and blunt your sword, your harsh laws that strike with penalties those who have deserved nothing; dissolve the prison cave under which you hold the bodies of an innocent band, while it is fate that sins. No one is guilty, if fates rule what is lived and done: but rather, whoever willingly dares what is not allowed is guilty, since to will one or the other is his own, and the fates do not impose guilt on man, but he becomes guilty by his own choice, and pays for the crime he pleased to do and for his impious deeds with punishments, destroyed by his deserts, not by lot. Whoever thinks there is room for fate, let him know that God is the parent of all, forbidden to no one by fatal stars, and that holy prayers are not repelled by any prescription of astrology. For the mind breathes greater things, and lifts itself higher than the stars, passes beyond the paths and clouds of fate, and treads underfoot all the moments that are thought to fix the lot set out at the time of birth. Come here, the whole race of men; run together here, you cities: the boundless light calls you; know your Maker. … If there are any [fates], they vanish, powerless, when Christ is set against them. “But many gods have led Rome through prosperity,

whom she worships for their merit, having been given great triumphs.” Come then, warrior city, tell what power subdued Europe and Libya to you: tell the names of the gods. … as the Cynthian [gave] Delphi; with favorable omen they granted them: Isis gave up the dwellers on the Nile, Cytherea the Rhodians, the virgin huntress left Ephesus, Mars surrendered the Hebrus; … and the city which the goddess, if the fates allow, even then strove and cherished to be mistress over subject nations, she ordered to live bound to Romulus’s reins. Did so many cities fall by the treachery of their native gods? Do their altars lie destroyed, betrayed by the gods themselves? O piety, O holy faith! Did a faithless majesty transfer the places it had nurtured, and are those divinities trusted which deserved to be consecrated for their desertion? Or did their religion want to save its own, and, struggling hard, try to drive back the hostile squadrons, striving against the Roman masses? but did a stronger valor break it in the grievous dust of the fields? Yes, so it is: lacking arms and true strength, superstition was conquered, and glory fled what was empty. Nor was victory difficult or hard enough for a nation born for the field, to break inert gods and bend the soft necks of gods of every kind. Then, when the fierce Samnite and the Marsian waged war with sweat against the Dictaean Corybants of Jupiter, when the Etruscan soldier fought with scourge-bearers and boxers oiled with the art of the gymnasium, neither could Mercury, distinguished by his hat, when Lacedaemon was taken, save his wrestling-grounds from destruction,

nor could the Cybelean enemy, meeting the infantry of the Apennines in battle, defend Asia and Ida, when a Gallus drove the battle lines into combat. Unless perhaps it was a difficult work and an immense labor to hand over to slavery the Idalian roses, the laurel of the lyre-playing prophet, and the reeds and bow of the forest-dwelling girl, and to tame their trampled rites. On the waves of Actium a band had given Egypt the signal of war; the trumpet sounded against it. Thin boats and fragile pinnaces had pressed on, Memphite beaks amid the towering Liburnian galleys: the god Serapis could do nothing, nor the barker Anubis. Under a leader of the stock of Iulus, the burning army prevailed, which the cold northern sky had sent. Neither armed Venus nor Minerva with her shield came to help then; no degenerate order of gods, exiled from its homeland, aided the Roman arms. Itself conquered before, it did not help the enemy ranks either, if indeed it knew how to keep its old resentment. “But,” you say, “the gods chose where a holier practice would remain without end in the crowded worship of temples, and followed of their own accord the victorious standards of the sons of Aeneas for love of King Numa, with no one forcing them.” Did Pallas likewise willingly choose the tents of Diomedes and the camp of keen Ulysses, when the guards of the citadel were slain, where she would sweat sadly in a wet image? Or, whenever the bravest leader of the Macedonians heaped up the ashes of high temples in conquered Amyclae, did the captured gods wish to be mixed with the plunder of their masters and carried to the citadel of Assyrian Babylon?

I do not bear that the Roman name, its wars sweated out, and the titles sought with so much blood should be carped at. He takes away from the unconquered legions, and lessens Rome’s own rewards, who ascribes to Venus whatever was done bravely, and robs the victors of the palm. In vain then do we admire on top of the arch the four-horse chariots, and the leaders standing in their high chariots, the Fabricii and Curii, here the Drusi, there the Camilli, and beneath the leaders’ feet the captives with bent knees, pressed down to the yoke, their hands twisted behind their backs, and fragments of weapons hung on a heavy trunk, if Flora, Matuta, Ceres, and Larentina subdued Brennus, Antiochus, Perseus, Pyrrhus, Mithridates. “Yet under these auspices the favorable omens gave glad successes, and the lucky bird was present.” What does valor mean? what glory? if the crow of Apollo helped Corvinus with wing or throat? But why then was this crow absent on the fatal day, as it happened, when deaths covered ill-omened Cannae and the consul fell on the heaped-up corpses? Why on the fields of the Cremera did none of the gods, by crow or by the singing owl, warn the three hundred Fabii that they would perish by unlucky war, with the stock surviving in barely one? Did no Tritonian owl, flying to Crassus at gloomy Carrhae, reveal as a forerunner that the goddess was present? Or did snowy doves carry the Paphian goddess, whose gilded border the Persian nation would fear? But I see what examples of ancient valor

move you: you say that the world was subdued by land and sea; you recount the happy events and every success; you recall in order the processions of a thousand triumphs and the litters of spoils carried through the middle of Rome. Do you want me to tell you, Roman, what cause raised your labors so high? by what nurture glory grew so as to be famed for curbing the world with reins laid upon it? God, wishing to unite peoples discordant in tongue and kingdoms dissonant in worship, determined that whatever was tractable in its ways should be subjected to one empire, and bear soft bonds under a concordant yoke, so that love of religion might hold the hearts of men joined together; for there is no union worthy of Christ unless a single mind unites the nations bound together. Concord alone knows God; she alone, peaceful, rightly worships the kind Father; the most peaceful consent of human covenant makes him propitious to the world; sedition drives him away, cruel arms provoke him; the gift of peace nourishes him, quiet piety retains him. In all the lands which the western Ocean bounds and the dawn lights with its rosy rising, raging Bellona was confounding all mortal things and had armed savage hands for mutual wounds. To curb this madness God taught the nations everywhere to bow their heads under the same laws, and all to become Romans, whom the Rhine and the Danube, whom the gold-flowing Tagus, whom the great Ebro floods, through whom the horned river of the Hesperides glides, and whom the Ganges feeds and the seven mouths of the warm Nile wash.

A common law made them equal, and bound them with the same name, and brought the conquered into brotherly bonds. In every part of the world men live just as if one native city enclosed fellow citizens within one wall, and we were all united at an ancestral hearth. Regions far apart and shores divided by the sea meet now through legal summonses at one common forum, now through commerce and the arts at a crowded gathering, now through the marriage couch in the right of marriage with a foreigner; for from mixed blood one offspring is woven from alternating nations. This was accomplished by the great successes and triumphs of the Roman empire: for Christ, already then coming, believe me, the way was prepared, which long since the public … of our … For what place could there be for God in a savage world, and among the discordant hearts of men, guarding their own rights by different reasoning, as it was once? So, where the feelings in the human breast are disordered, and the parts of the mind disjoined with their covenant troubled, neither does clear wisdom visit nor does God enter. But if the summit of the mind, holding the right to rule, curbs the impulses and rebellious fibers of the pugnacious temper, and restrains all the liver by one reason, the state of life becomes stable, and a sure judgment draws in God with the heart and is subjected to one master. See, come, Almighty, flow into lands at concord: now the world receives you, Christ, which Peace and Rome hold in a united bond: these are the heads and summits of things,

you bid to be [the heads of things], and Rome without peace does not please you. And the excellence of Rome makes peace pleasing, since she both curbs various upheavals by her rule and presses them with terror; for she has not grown old, stripped of the strength of her former valor, nor felt the centuries, nor does she take up arms with trembling arms when wars call; nor does she supplicate the venerable emperors with so degenerate a mouth as that most noble senator would have it, powerful in the art of pleading and skilled in feigning cunning things, and in bringing on the false weight of a grave character, as the tragic singer covers his face with a hollow wooden mask, through whose gaping mouth he may pant out some great crime. If one may imitate a voice, surely this voice, which I shall now bring out in her name, is more fitting for Rome. She, because she thinks it shameful to say that she was repulsed when the temples flourished, and that the aegis fought for her in doubtful dangers, and to confess herself heavy with stooping age, embracing her leaders, speaks joyfully thus: “… [Hail, sons] of an unconquered emperor, under whom, reborn, [I put off] all old age … my white hair; for though length of time diminishes all mortal things, the long day brings me another age, for by living long I have learned to despise an end. Now, now just reverence befits my years; now I am rightly called venerable and the head of the world, when I shake my helmet under a garland of olive and my red crests, veiling my fierce belt with a green wreath, and, armed, I adore God without the crime of slaughter.

For a crime, alas, I am sorry for it, a dreadful crime had persuaded me to defile with death the sword accustomed to wars. At its instigation Nero first, after killing his mother, drank apostolic blood, and polluted me with the slaughter of the holy, and cruelly branded his own crime on me. After him Decius too, raging with cut throats, fed his mad fury; and soon the thirst of many, like him, burned, ardent to draw out, through grim wounds, illustrious souls, to make sport with punishments, and to pour out flowing deaths into my lap. … Your times have now cleansed me, guilty of this stain. I live holily under your guidance, I who was impious long ago by the art of Jupiter, I confess: for what bloody thing did he not hand down? Or what gentle or peaceful thing did he ask for himself? He, while he feared that the worship of Christ would take root, raged and fouled the wretched age with blood. And there are those who do not hesitate to reproach us with unlucky wars, since we spurned the altars of the temples, and who affirm that the Libyan Hannibal was driven back from the hinge of the Colline gate by the command of Jupiter and Mars, and that the victorious Senones were driven from the citadel of the Capitol, when the divine powers fought from the high rock. Let those who press upon me again the past disaster and the old sorrows see that in your time I suffer nothing of the kind now. No barbarian enemy shakes my gates with his spear; no stranger in arms, dress, and hair wanders everywhere through a captured city, dragging my young men into chains beyond the Alps.

Recently the Getic tyrant tried to destroy Italy, coming sworn from his native Danube, to level these citadels with the ground, to dissolve the golden roofs in flames, and to dress the toga-wearing nobles in sheepskins. … He had laid waste the wealth of the Ligurians and the pleasant countryside of the deep Po, and was pressing the Tuscan soil, the river crossed. It was no sleepless goose, betrayer of hidden danger in the dark night, that drove back these clouds of horsemen, but the raw strength of men, the breasts of those who met them broken through, and a spirit not trembling to fall in death for the fatherland and to seek fair glory through wounds. Did that day, too, give so great a reward for valor with Jupiter as patron? The leader of our army and empire was a young man mighty in Christ, and his companion and father Stilicho: one God, Christ, for both. When his altars had been adored and the cross inscribed on their foreheads, the trumpets sounded; in front of the dragons went the first lance, which carried higher the monogram of Christ. There the nation that had been the ruin of Pannonia for thirty years at last paid the penalty and was destroyed. Bodies once enriched with notorious plunder lie heaped in piles: you will marvel, posterity, in later ages, at the unburied corpses far and wide that covered the fields of Pollentia with bones. If I could lift my head, cut off by the hands of the Gauls, from the squalor of the ashes, when Camillus returned, if, smoking, I received back the standards with a smiling brow; if I could crown my wretched ruins with garlands,

and to gird the towers lately left hanging with laurel: with what embrace shall I receive you, bravest emperor? What flowers shall I scatter? With what crowns shall I adorn the halls? What hangings shall I hang on the festive gates, I who was spared so great a war, and, while you stood under arms, was free, and knew the Gothic tumults only by hearsay? Mount the triumphal chariot, and with the spoils recovered come here, with Christ as your companion: allow me to remove the chains from the captive flocks; take off the manacles worn by long servitude, you bands of mothers and youths; let the old man, exiled from his ancestral hearth, unlearn slavery, and let the boy, his mother returned to the paternal threshold, learn to know himself freeborn: let all fear be gone. We have conquered; it is a joy to exult: what such thing happened when the leader of the Carthaginians was once repulsed? He, after he had struck the trembling bars of the gate he attacked, relaxed by the waters of Baiae, abandoned his hardest strength in luxury, and broke his steel with lust. But our Stilicho, meeting him at close quarters, forced him to turn his back on the very battle line of armored men. Here Christ, God, was with us, and pure valor; there, fertile Campania, your delights conquered the wanton enemy; it was not Jupiter who protected keen Fabius, but pleasant Tarentum helped, which allowed him to trample the tyrant tamed by its allurements. What fitting rewards I shall pay for these merits I do not have. To shape limbs in statues is cheap. Nothing cheap befits virtue: for what age snatches away is cheap: bronzes fall, or tawny gold flows away, or the whiteness of silver perishes if use has failed,

and the vein of metal, darkened by neglect, spoils its color. A living glory is owed to you, emperor, a living reward of virtue, for you have followed immortal glory. As ruler of the world you will be joined with Christ for ever, under whose leadership you draw my kingdom to heaven. Let nothing move you, I pray, in the voice of the great orator, who, under the guise of an envoy, lamenting dead rites, dares, alas, with the weapons of his talent and the powers of speech, to attack our faith, and does not see that you and I, Augustus, are devoted to God, for whom we have closed the sordid temples and thrown down the altars wet with gore. Let Christ alone rule and preserve our palace, so that no demon may any longer know the citadels of Romulus, but my court may serve the Lord of peace alone.” Having spoken thus, Rome prevailed on her dutiful sons to spurn the envoy who asked what should not be granted, an envoy sent from Jupiter’s shrine by a soothsayer, but not by the fatherland: for Christ is the glory of the fatherland. Yet he persists, affirming that the way of going is many-branched and varied when the one God is sought; some hasten from here, others from there, separately, each by his own windings, but the crossroads are drawn together to the same end and run together into one; moreover, that heaven and earth, winds, sea, clouds are given to all in common, whether to us who worship you, Christ, or to those who offer rotting entrails to carved stones. I do not deny that the use of air, stars, sea, earth, and rain is common to all living things. Indeed, the unjust and the just alike live under one sky; the impious and the pious breathe the same air:

the chaste and the unchaste, the harlot and the wife; nor is the breath that tempers life with a draught of air different in the mouth of a priest from that of a gladiator. The spring cloud rains, driven by the west wind, but it fertilizes equally the fields of the thief and of the innocent farmer. So the traveler comes to the pure stream of a summer pool, as the weary robber does; so the sea serves pirates as it serves the merchant; nor does the wave obey an enemy less than when it carries the benches of a lawful ship. So nature, capable of both kinds of thing, offers itself to the peoples to be created, and does not have to distinguish the unequal merit of the living, whom it is ordered only to feed. For the world serves; it does not judge: this the supreme Lord of nature keeps for himself for the times he has prescribed. Now the gifts given are present for man by the same laws by which they were once granted. The spring flows, the river floods, the sea is cleft by sail-winged ships, the rain pours in, the thin breeze flies, the moving air is quickened, and the realm of nature becomes public and ready for all, while the elements, serving, keep their course: so the upright man and the one guilty of a capital crime enjoy the same stars and the easy kindness of the sky. To live is common, but to deserve is not common. In short, the Roman, the Dahan, the Sarmatian, the Vandal, the Hun, the Gaetulian, the Garamantian, the Alaman, the Saxon, the Galaulian, all walk on one earth, one heaven is for all, one ocean that encloses our world. I add something else: animals drink from our springs; my crop grows from the same dew as the grass for wild asses; the filthy sow swims in our river; the same breath that comes into us

enters dogs too, and quickens wild bodies with light breath. But Roman and barbarian are as far apart as the four-footed is separated from the two-footed, or the dumb from the speaking; and as far as those who duly follow God’s precepts stand apart from stupid cults and their errors. So the common sharing of air and sky does not make men equal in keeping religion: it only begets, feeds, and restores bodies, and preserves the seeds that return. Nor does it matter of what kind, or of what shape, or of what merit they are, provided they are bodies brought forth from the earth, which have their vigor from earthly elements; for the work of the craftsman Father flows out into the common stock without distinction, and does not run with a grudging gift: it was given before the first man, Adam, became foul. Nor does it fail, restricted by the vice of those who use it, nor withdraw itself from the unworthy, nor avoid foul and shameful things. Just so the sun’s ray lights up all places with its diffused splendor: it strikes golden roofs, but it strikes too roofs foul with black smoke; it enters the Capitol, bright with marbles; but it enters also the cracks of the prison, and the foul holes of the enclosed sewer, and the filthy cell in the reeking brothel. But dark workhouses will not be what royal ceilings, tawny with jeweled metal, are; far more those who seek divinity in urns and tombs and appease specters with blood will not be what those are who venerate the supreme Lord of heaven, offer justice in sacrifice, and adorn the temple of the heart. “But the great secret of hidden reason cannot be sought otherwise than if the way is multiplied into scattered

paths, and the track wears down a hundred trails, to seek the hidden God by a varied search.” The truth is far otherwise: for a great windingness of ways has doubtful turns and wanders more confusedly; only the single way is free of error, not knowing how to turn into a byway, nor wavering at many forks. Yet I do not deny that a double road always meets us, and that mortal things go in two directions when they doubt where ignorance should carry their step. One is many-branched; but the other is single, and the one follows the one God, the other worships many gods, and it has as many divergences as there are statues of temples, as many as the phantoms that fly as monsters of the air. It either snatches these off to the Dionysia of thyrsus-bearing Bacchus, or entices others to the festivals of the Saturnalia, or teaches what rites the infant Diespiter in hiding asks to be paid him, with the clashing of bronze as his protector. And now the thongs of the Lupercalia and the naked running of young men are sought; from here the Megalesian eunuch, inflamed by dreadful furies, is called to blind oracles. There are those who, ready to go by shorter crossroads, venerate cheap little vegetables in the gardens of the Nile, daring to set the leek and the onion as gods above the clouds, and garlic, and to place Serapis above the stars of heaven. For Isis and Serapis, and the ape with its great tail, and the crocodile are the same as Juno, Laverna, Priapus. These you worship, Nile; those you adore, Tiber: the superstition is one, though the error is not of one color. From here another path arises, covered with dark thickets, which cattle and dumb animals crop,

and which, hidden, is covered in the woods. Not knowing heaven, the mind of men, living captive to a cruel tyrant, thinks this: that there is no God; for all things are turned by chance, and the ages roll on under no governor. This road differs by no great distance from these ways which you tread, who think that many divinities and portents, numerous, are the supreme God. So God is the guide of the single way: he bids the mortal race go by one way, which he himself directs, lofty, up the right-hand slope to the high summits. The first face of the way is uncultivated, rather rough, grim, difficult, but most beautiful at its end, endowed with ample riches and abounding in everlasting light, and such as can repay the labors that are past. A demon is present as guide of the manifold way, who on the left confuses the hundred-branched path: from there he draws bearded sophists, from here those powerful in wealth or honor; he entices by the tongues of birds, and deceives by the soothsayer, spurs on by the riddling of the raving old Sibyl, entangles in astrology, drives into magic arts, troubles by omens, captures by the augur, terrifies with entrails. Do you see how one way wanders with many turns, having suffered such a guide, who does not let one go to the Lord of salvation, but shows the road of death through byways? byways painted with brief goods, but grim at their very end, and plunged headlong into a sudden Charybdis. Go far away, you nations: you have no fellowship of roads with the people of God; depart far away, and enter your own chaos, to which he who goes before you calls you through the tangled pathless places of infernal night.

But for us who seek the one Lord of life the way is light and clear day and simple grace. We follow by hope, we walk by faith, and enjoy things to come, to which the joys of the present life do not come, nor do pleasure grasped and pleasure to be grasped run side by side. The envoy’s last complaint, lamented with grief, is that grain for the hearths of Pallas, or maintenance from the treasury for the virgins themselves and the chaste choirs, is denied, and that the Vestal fires are cheated of their accustomed allowances. From this, he says, the barren fields bear fruit more rarely, grim famine rages, and throughout the whole world mortals grow pale, needy and in want of bread. I do not remember that so great and so hateful a famine has arisen in the present time, such as the anger of Triptolemus and Ceres might have stirred to avenge the storehouse of the virgin; nor does rumor even whisper of anything of the kind. I hear that the Nile runs over the Egyptian fields as usual, and floods the crops of green Canopus. No messenger comes from a dry river to report that Memphis lies parched with thirst under the dust, nor that the flax of the Pelusian marsh fails to sweat. Has the spring, hidden in the secret covering of nature, dried up, and does its vein barely drip a thin stream? Does the river, fleeing, hate to touch our banks, and turn its course aside to the scorched Indians? Does a thirsty channel in the middle of its course swallow the river’s water, and are its pools absorbed in a sudden gap, so that its shallows cannot cover the furrows, nor be drawn over the dry plains of Egypt and soften the stiff clods into rich mud with the flowing waters,

from which the crop may wave far and wide in the long-haired fields, and the plain clothe itself more thickly with heavy ears? Look whether the farmer of the Libyan country stops loading ships with grain and sending heaps of wheat to the mouth of the Tiber to feed the people. Does the ploughman of the Leontine plain cease to launch grain-bearing boats from the shore of Lilybaeum? Does the fleet not give its sails to the straits, nor burst the Roman granaries, carrying the heaped-up stores of the Sardinians? Does the Carthaginian farmer, then, fill his tables with wild pears, and the Sicilian graze on plucked herbs? Does Sardinia now supply oak acorns to the people of Remus, and stony cornels now furnish the food of the Quirites? Who comes hungry to the spectacles of the great Circus? What district endures dreadful fasting with empty steps? Or what mill of the Janiculum stands silent? How much fruit each province bears, and how the rich world flows abundantly with fertile plenty, is shown by the grain supply, which is given publicly to your people, Rome, and feeds the long leisure of so great a city. Perhaps some year may be a little less fruitful: no wonder, nor anything new in the world: our forefathers learned it, often suffering famine, if a wasting air dried up the thin clouds under a burning star, and very frequent rain did not pour spring waters on the new and green crop; if the grown harvest, before it made solid its marrow conceived with tender milk, drew in its juice blasted by the hot east wind, and a barren forest of stalks deceived the farmer. By these faults, if I am not mistaken, the field was corrupted, even before

lay subject to them, before the Palladium, before Vesta, kept the Penates under the hearth of Pergamum with the fire laid up, before Priam’s father built walls with hired builders, before the virgin Pallas founded her Athens: since in these cities, as they say, the origin of the Vestal ember was taken from the first tinder, and either a Phrygian or a Greek consecrated hearths for his foster-sons. The elements have tottered with ancient errors, and, shaken from their lawful measure, they are often carried into other events than the law or the course of the year provides. Now devouring rust consumes the crop through the fault of malignant air; now, in the warm spring, after the west winds, the ice of the cold north wind burns the stalk, and they stain the scorched head of the stalk with soot. Or while the swelling blade of the tender seed sprouts, it perishes, bound by continuous and excessive frosts, and cannot fix its thin fiber in the earth; soon, thrown out of the soil, it is left over as the ice sinks, and the naked root is torn out as the field sinks away. Double-pointed caltrops and bristling thistle creep in: dry thirst brings the former, drunken moisture raises the latter. A temperate climate poured out too little or too much brings about these diseases of the lands and wounds the sick world. Not otherwise does the corrupted use of our body often fall into fault, and not keep to right order, and afflict the limbs by excess of measure: for the state of the world and of this body that we bear is one: the same nature sustains both. Things brought forth from nothing grow, and are destined for nothing.

either totter with diseases or, overcome by time, grow old. Nor is nature, on which an end presses, free of fault. Believe me, the sky has always woven the years with varied yields; these it has enriched, flowing with much fruit; some unlucky ones it has condemned through hostile stars, frustrating the farmer’s care with vain and barren hope. But if this plague, which is wickedly produced by a faithless world, avenges the Vestal girls, why does it not ravage only the little fields of the Christians, by whom the appointed gifts are denied to your virgins? We too enjoy the produce of the country and the method of farming; we are not sorry to exercise our hands; and if a stone stood there, which old error used to bind with ribbons or petition with a hen’s lung, it is broken, and Terminus is not defiled with any entrails; and the tree hung with fillets that kept smoking lamps falls, cut down by the avenging axe. Yet the fruit of the little field is not less for that, nor the glad mildness of serene weather, nor the rainy wind that tempers the cultivated fallow. But those who live frugally have no need of much, and when the greatest crops come, we do not relax into joy at an ample estate or exult in gain with greedy zeal. For to those whose hope is formed for an eternal age, every good that the present time offers is slight. O too happy the man who is wise and a countryman too, who, tilling his lands and his mind, spends wakeful care on both, such as Christ, the author, trained when he took laborers and gave them these precepts: “When you commit seeds to the furrows, beware of fields

hard with the thinness of little stones, lest what is sown fall there; for, very fertile at first, the shoot grows rank; soon, its juice failing, under the heat of the fiery star it is scorched with thirst and dries up. And let not the seeds run into thorny brambles; for they weave harsh bonds around the rising crop, and the bramble chokes the fragile stalks with sharp knots. And let not the grains thrown be scattered on the embankment of the road; for these lie open, bare, to the birds, are devoured everywhere, and lie as foul playthings for unclean crows.” By these laws God strengthens the farmer; he does not understand the heavenly law of the Father with the surface of his ear, but arranges at once the crop of his heart and of his field, so that his heart may shine with inner cultivation no less than when the glad acres display their harvests. For we root out thorny brambles from the breast, so that vicious shoots may not kill the vital germ, so that the thorny bush of evils may not hinder the fruit and crop of the soul with frequent sinning of crimes, so that thin gravel may not dry up with fasting sands the faith withering in the heart; so that the heat of the breast may not blaze and burn up the spiritual gifts in exhausted veins; finally, so that worthless care may not leave God in a trodden-down part of the heart; that it may not desert the hope on which we feed within, and let it be eaten by unclean birds, and faith, cast away, become the prey of the winged enemy. Such skill in our people brings in a hundredfold fruits of the fields, on which it presses more keenly, and does not fear that the weevil will ravage the heaped-up pile, or the black ant hide it in its holes.

Our virgins too have most beautiful rewards: modesty, a face covered with a holy veil, a private honor, not a known and public appearance, rare and slender meals, a mind always sober, and the law of chastity carried through to the end of life. From this the hundredfold fruits are brought into the barns, barns never exposed to the thief by night. For no thief approaches heaven; heavenly things are never unsealed by fraud: fraud rolls about in the lowest earth. Now I will examine what is the honor of Vestal virginity, by what law it governs all the glory of modesty. First, they are taken as little girls in their tender years, before a free choice of their own will, burning with praise of chastity and love of the gods, condemns the lawful bonds of the marrying sex. Captive modesty is handed over to thankless altars, and the pleasure of the untouched body is not despised by the wretched girls but taken away: the mind is not kept untouched. Nor is any rest given to their couches, on which the unmarried woman sighs for a blind wound and for lost wedding torches. Then, because a hope kept safe does not kill the whole fire; for it will be allowed at some time to light the dormant torches, and to draw a festive bridal veil over decrepit gray hairs. When the prescribed time is up, Vesta, seeking undefiled limbs, at last disdains virginal old age. While vigor swelled fit for the marriage bed, no love made the useless womb fruitful with a mother’s childbearing. The veteran old woman marries, her sacred labor done, and, leaving the hearths that her youth served, transfers her retired wrinkles to the marriage couch,

and, a new bride, learns to grow warm in a cold bed. Meanwhile, while the twisted fillet binds her straying hair and the unmarried priestess tends the fated coals, she is carried through the middle of the streets like a public procession, sitting in a soft carriage, and with uncovered face the conspicuous virgin presents herself to the astonished city. Then to the seating of the amphitheatre goes kindly modesty and piety that has no share in blood, to see the bloody encounters of men, and to watch with sacred eyes the deaths and wounds sold for spectacle. She sits, distinguished by the venerable trappings of her fillets, and enjoys the trainers’ shows. O tender and gentle soul! She rises at the blows, and whenever the victor plunges the steel into a throat, she calls it her delight, and the modest virgin, with turned thumb, orders the breast of the fallen man to be broken, so that no part of his life may lie hidden in his inmost vitals, while the pursuer, his sword driven deeper, quivers. Is this the merit for which they are said to keep their watch for the majesty of the Latin Palatine, to redeem the life of the people and the safety of the nobles: because they dress the hair well on their necks, or bind their temples well with ribbons and add threads to their hair, and because under the earth, with the shades as witnesses, they slaughter purifying victims into the flame and mingle murmurs? Or because, sitting in the better part of the podium, they watch how often the spears strike the bronze face with the trident driven home, and how much of the sand the wounded man soaks with his gaping wounds

when he flees, and with how much blood he marks his footsteps? That golden Rome may no longer know this kind of crime, I pray you, most august leader of the Ausonian realm, command that so grim a rite be abolished, like the rest. Look closely: is not this place of your father’s merit left empty, which God and your father’s friendly piety have kept for you to fill? “That he might not alone take the rewards of such great virtue, I reserve a part for you, my son,” he said, and left the glory whole and untouched. Seize, leader, the fame deferred to your times, and, as successor, have what remains of glory for your father. He forbade the city to be stained with the blood of bulls: you forbid the deaths of wretched men to be offered in sacrifice. Let no one fall in the city whose punishment is a pleasure, nor let virginity delight its eyes with slaughter. Let the infamous arena, now content with wild beasts alone, make sport of no homicides with bloody arms. Let Rome be devoted to God, worthy of so great an emperor, powerful in virtue and ignorant of crime; and as she follows her leader in wars, let her follow him in piety.