To the Nations 2.9–2.17

We have set out these more familiar or more notable forms of divinity according to Varro's threefold arrangement, so that enough may now seem to have been answered about the natural, the poetic, and the national kind. But since the whole substitution now belongs no longer to the philosophers, the poets, or the peoples, by whom it was handed down, but to the ruling Romans, by whom it was taken over and on whom it has built up its authority, we must now enter another breadth of human error, or rather cut down a forest which, with seeds of superstition sown on every side, has overshadowed the childishness of vice. Varro divided the gods of the Romans too into three classes: certain, uncertain, and select. What vanity! For what did they want with uncertain gods, if they had certain ones? Unless they wished to take in the Athenian stupidity; for at Athens too there is an altar inscribed: TO UNKNOWN GODS. Does anyone, then, worship what he does not know? Again, if they had certain gods, they ought to have been content and not have wanted select ones. In this they are even found irreligious. For if gods are picked out like onions, those not picked are declared worthless. We, however, recognize the gods of the Romans in two classes, common and proper: that is, those they share with everyone, and those they themselves devised. And are not these called public and foreign? The altars teach this: that of the foreign gods at the shrine of Carna, that of the public gods on the Palatine. So, since the common gods are included in both the natural and the mythical kind, we have already done with them. Now I would speak of the particular kinds. Let us marvel at that third class of the Romans, the gods of their enemies, since no other nation has found so much superstition for itself. The rest we arrange in two classes: some taken from among men, others conceived in another way. So, since they have the same pretext for the consecration of the dead, as if for the merits of their lives, we too must set against them the same answer: that none of these either was worth so much. They believed Aeneas a devoted father, a soldier never glorious, disabled by a stone. How common a weapon, fit for dogs, and how ignoble a wound! But Aeneas is also found to be a traitor to his country, Aeneas as much as Antenor. And if they will not have this be true, Aeneas at least deserted his comrades while his country was burning, to be put to shame by a Punic woman, who, when her husband Hasdrubal, with the timidity of Aeneas, was supplicating the enemy, did not go with him, but, taking her children with her … threw herself, not into flight, but into the fires of burning Carthage, as into the embrace of her dying country. “Pious” Aeneas, for the sake of one boy and a decrepit old man, abandoning Priam and Astyanax? Yet he ought to be the more detested by the Romans, who swear for the safety of the emperors and their house over their own children and wives and every pledge they have. They deify the son of Venus, and Vulcan knowingly puts up with it, and Juno allows it. If sons sit in heaven for piety toward their parents, why were not rather the Argive youths held to be gods, who, lest their mother commit a sacrilege in the rites, drew her themselves in the yoke, beyond the manner of men? Why is not she rather a goddess, who was more pious, that daughter who nourished at her own breasts her father wasting away from hunger in prison? What else was glorious about Aeneas, except that he appeared nowhere in the battle at Laurentum? Perhaps, in his usual fashion, he fled from the battle again as a deserter. Romulus likewise became a god after death. If because he founded a city, why not others too, even women, founders of cities? Romulus, to be sure, killed his brother and carried off other people's maidens by a trick. That is why he is a god, why he is Quirinus: because then the parents raised their cries (quiritatum est) on his account. What did Sterculus do to deserve divinity? If he was diligent in helping the fields with dung, Augeas contributed more manure. If Faunus, the son of Picus, was dragged into court because his mind was deranged, it was more fitting to cure him than to deify him. If the daughter of Faunus excelled in chastity so that she did not even mix among men, whether from boorishness, or from consciousness of her ugliness, or from shame at her father's madness, how much worthier a Good Goddess was Penelope, who, living among so many most worthless suitors, tenderly guarded her besieged chastity? There is also Sanctus, who obtained a shrine from king Plotius for his hospitality: Ulysses too could have given you one more god from the most humane Alcinous.

I hasten to fouler things. Your authors were not ashamed to publish the story of Larentina. She was a hired harlot, whether as the nurse of Romulus, and so called a she-wolf because she was a harlot, or as the mistress of Hercules, and of Hercules already dead, that is, already a god. For they say that his temple-keeper, happening to be alone in the temple playing at draughts, to give himself the partner he did not have, began the game with one hand in Hercules' name and the other in his own person: if he himself won, he would take a little dinner and a little harlot from Hercules' offerings; but if Hercules, that is, the other hand, won, he would provide the same for Hercules. Hercules' hand won. That too could have been added to his twelve labors! The temple-keeper paid the dinner to Hercules and hired the harlot Larentina; the fire, which had dissolved Hercules' own body, dined, and consumed everything on the altar. Larentina slept alone in the temple, and the woman from the brothel's sport boasted that she had served Hercules in her dreams; and she could well have experienced in a dream what she was contemplating in her mind. As she came out of the temple at first light, a certain young man, a third Hercules, as they say, desired her and invited her home. She complied, remembering that Hercules had told her it would be to her advantage; indeed she obtained that they be joined in lawful marriage (for it was not permitted with impunity to have had dealings with a god's harlot); her husband also wrote her down as his heir. Soon afterwards, near death, she bequeathed to the Roman people the fairly large estate which she had gained through Hercules. Thereby she won divinity, and for her daughters too, whom the divine Larentina ought also to have made her heirs. The deities of the Romans were enhanced by her dignity! Of all the many wives of Hercules she alone was dear to him, for she alone was rich; and so she was far more fortunate than Ceres, who pleased a dead man. With so many examples and names among you, who could not be declared a god? Who, in the end, raised any dispute about Antinous's divinity? Was Ganymede more comely, or dearer to his lover? Heaven lies open to the dead among you. You force a road from the underworld to the stars. Harlots go up everywhere, so do not think you do much for your kings.

Nor are you content to declare as gods those who were once seen, heard, and handled, whose likenesses have been portrayed, whose deeds are recorded and whose memory is handed down; you demand from heaven and ratify certain shades, bodiless, lifeless, names taken from things, dividing the whole course of human life among separate powers from the very conception in the womb. So there is a god Consevius, who presides over the sowing in intercourse, and Fluviona, who keeps the infant in the womb; then Vitumnus and Sentinus, through whom the infant first lives and feels; then Diespiter, who brings the child through to birth. When women began to give birth, there is Candelifera too, since they gave birth by candlelight, and other goddesses named from the duties of childbirth. They made it the province of Postverta to help those born the wrong way, and of Prosa Carmentis those born the right way. A god was named Farinus from speaking out, and by others Locutius from talking. Cunina stands by to ward off the evil eye and supplies rest. Levana too is a nurse, and Rumina with her. It is a wonder that no gods have been provided for washing off infants' filth. Next, for taking the first food and drink, Potina and Edula; for making the infant stand, Statina. For going to, Adeona; from going away, Abeona. They also have Domiduca, and the goddess Mens, who makes the mind good, and likewise bad; also Volumnus and Voleta, of the will. They also have Paventina, of fear; Venilia, of hope; Volupia, of pleasure; Praestitia, of excellence; likewise Peragenor, from doing; Consus, from counsels; Iuventa, of youths newly in the toga; and, for grown men, Bearded Fortune. If I should discuss the wedding gods, Afferenda, properly, is from the bringing of dowries; but there are also, for shame, Mutunus and Tutunus, and the goddess Pertunda, and Subigus, and the goddess Prema, and Perfica. Spare us, shameless gods! No one intrudes on struggling bridegrooms. Even those whose wish it is blush while they rejoice outside.

And how far am I to go in bringing out the gods, since we must discuss what kind of gods you have received? How much you ought to blush! Whether I should laugh at your vanity or reproach your blindness is quite uncertain. For how many gods shall I bring forward, and which? The greater, or the lesser too? The old, or the new too? Male, or female too? Unmarried, or joined in wedlock too? Skilled, or idle too? Rustic, or urban too? Citizens, or foreigners too? For so many families and so many nations are seeking in good faith to be enrolled that they cannot be surveyed, distinguished, and described. But the more widespread the matter is, the more tightly we must draw it in; and so, since in this class we keep to one aim, to show that they were all men (not indeed so that you may learn it, for you behave as though you had forgotten it), let us take a shortcut from the very method of inquiry, by going back over the origin of their race. For the origin determines all the posterity. That origin of your gods is marked, I think, by Saturn. For even if Varro reports Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva as the most ancient gods, it should not escape us that every father is older than his sons, Saturn than Jupiter, as Heaven than Saturn; for Saturn is from Heaven and Earth. And yet I pass over the origin of Heaven and Earth. From wherever they came, they were for a long time unmarried and childless before they became husband and parents. They had, of course, to grow for a long age to reach such great stature. At length, as soon as Heaven's voice began to break and Earth's breasts to harden, they made a marriage between them. I suppose either Heaven came down to his bride or Earth went up to her groom. At any rate Earth conceived by Heaven and, when the year was out, bore Saturn, in a marvelous way. Which parent did he resemble? But even if she bore him, certainly they begot no one before Saturn, and afterwards only Ops; after that there was no more offspring. For Saturn castrated Heaven as he slept. We read Caelum as masculine; and how could he be a father unless masculine? But with what was he castrated? With a sickle. In that age? For Vulcan was not yet a smith of iron. Earth, bereaved, though still of youthful age, put off marrying another. But then there was no other Heaven for her. What, though, if not the Sea, embraces her? But he smells of brine; she is used to fresh waters. So Saturn was the only male child of Heaven and Earth. But when he reached puberty, he was joined to his sister. There were not yet laws to forbid incest, nor to punish parricide. So he devoured his male children; better that he should do it himself than the wolves, if he exposed them. He was afraid, no doubt, that one of them might have learned the use of his father's sickle. When Jupiter was born and soon carried off, he swallowed a stone in place of the infant. Secure for a long while by this device, he was at last overpowered by a son he had not digested, who had grown up in hiding, and he was deprived of his kingdom. This is the patriarch of the gods whom Heaven and Earth begot for you, with the poets for midwives. But some think themselves elegant in interpreting Saturn physically, by allegorical argument, as time: that Heaven and Earth are his parents because they too have no origin; that he bears a sickle because all things are cut off by time; that he devours his own because time consumes in itself everything produced from itself. They also press the testimony of the name: that he is called Kronos in Greek as being Chronos, “time.” Likewise, those who conjecture him to be a begetter derive the Latin name from sowings (sationes), since through him the seeds of heaven are brought down to earth. They join Ops to him, because seeds bestow the means (ops) of life, and also because seeds come up by work (opus). Explain to me, I pray, what this transference means. Either he was Saturn or he was time. How Saturn, if time? If Saturn, how time? For you cannot think both are bodily in one and the same being. What prevented time from being worshipped in its own character? What prevented the body of a man, or the fable of a man, from being worshipped in its own form and not as time? What does this interpretation aim at, except to color foul matters with false arguments? You do not want Saturn to be time because you call him a man; or, while you make him time, you no longer want him to have been a man. Plainly your god Saturn is recorded in the ancient memorials as a being of human character on earth. Anything whatever that never existed can be imagined as bodiless; there is no room for imagining where there is truth. But since it is established that Saturn lived, you transform him in vain; he whom you will not deny was a man is not conceded to you as either god or time, for he can be defended as neither. The record of Saturn is found everywhere in your literature. We read of him in Cassius Severus, in Cornelius Nepos and Tacitus, and among the Greeks in Diodorus and the others who have collected the hoary tales of antiquity. Nor are his traces marked more faithfully anywhere than in Italy itself. For after very many lands and a sojourn in Attica, he settled in Italy, or Oenotria as it was then called, received by Janus, or Janes as the Salii call him. The hill he had inhabited was called Saturnian; the city he had marked out is Saturnia to this day; indeed all Italy was once called after Saturn. On the witness of such a land, the land that now rules the world, even if there is doubt about Saturn's origin, it is established from his deeds that he was a man. So if Saturn was a man, he was without doubt born of a man; indeed, because he was a man, he was surely not born of Heaven and Earth; but since his parents were unknown, it was easy for some to call him the son of those whose sons all may seem to be. For who would not call heaven and earth father and mother out of veneration? Or did it come from the human custom by which unknown persons who appear unexpectedly are said to have come from heaven? So, because he had come as a stranger, it became established everywhere that he should be called heaven-sent, for he had appeared suddenly. For we also commonly call people of uncertain birth sons of earth. I say nothing of the state of antiquity, when men's eyes and minds were so rude that they were moved at the sight of any new man as at something divine, still more at a king, and indeed the first. I will dwell a little longer on Saturn, so as to lay down a shortcut for the others too, now that I have had enough of the dispute about origins; and I will not pass over the weightier testimonies of the divine writings, to which greater credit is owed for their antiquity. For the Sibyl existed before all literature: that Sibyl, of course, the true prophetess of the truth, whose name you have put on the prophets of the demons. She, in six-foot verse, sets forth to this effect the lineage of Saturn and his deeds: “In the tenth generation of men,” she says, “since the flood befell the former ones, Saturn and Titan and Iapetus reigned, the mightiest sons of Earth and Heaven.” If, then, any credit attaches either to your own writers or to your earlier literature, which is all the nearer to the facts because it belongs to that age, it has been proved enough about Saturn and his lineage that they were men. We hold a shortcut, a prescription from origin against the rest, so as not to wander through them one by one. The character of the posterity is shown by the founders of the race: mortal from mortal, earthly from earthly; stage is matched to stage; marriages, conceptions, and births have run their course; their countries, seats, kingdoms, and monuments are plain to see. So let those who cannot deny that they were born believe that they died; and let those who confess that they died not think them gods.

But the manifest has its own force to support it. Those whom they cannot assert to have been anything but men from the beginning, they receive into divinity, affirming that they became gods after death, as Varro does and those who dreamed with him. Here, then, I take my stand: if your gods were elected into this name and divinity as into the senatorial order, your wisdom must now grant that there is some supreme ruler with the power of election, a kind of Caesar; for no one can confer on others what he does not himself control. Besides, if they could make themselves gods after death, come, why did they wish to be of worse condition from the beginning? Or if there is no one who made them gods, how will they be said to have been made, who could have been made only by another? So you are given no room to deny that there is some owner of divinity. Let us, then, examine the reasons for electing mortality into heaven. I believe you will offer a twofold reason. Either whoever does this does it to have supports, or defenses, or even ornaments for his own eminence; or it is the requirement of deserts, bestowing it on all who are worthy. Nothing else can be supposed. No one, in granting something to another, acts except either for his own sake or for the other's. But it cannot befit the deity, having such great power as to make gods, to be charged with so much human weakness as to need the work or help of certain beings, and dead ones at that; which is strange, since he could have established immortals for himself from the beginning. Nor will anyone who has compared human things with divine need to argue about this any longer. Certainly the latter opinion must be examined: whether God bestowed divinity in remembrance of deserts. But if it was so bestowed, if heaven lay open to the men of old for their deserts, we must reflect that since then no one has been worthy of that honor. Unless the place can hold no more. Antiquity, no doubt, earned heaven by great privileges! So let us consider whether it earned it. Let him who says it did set forth its merits. If the offenses committed in the cradle of time count toward the vote for divinity, you have received Ops and Saturn, brother and sister, stained with incest. Your Jupiter, a stolen infant, unworthy both of a roof and of a human breast, rightly stayed in Crete, so bad an offspring. When grown up, he deprived his father, whatever sort of father he was, of a most happy kingdom: the king of the golden age, of course, under whom glad peace rested, knowing neither toil nor want, under whom “No farmers subdued the fields; the earth herself bore all things, with no one asking.” But he hated his father for his incest and as the one who had once castrated his grandfather. Yet see, he too couples with his sister, so that I would think that saying was first spoken of him: “Like father, like child.” As pious a father as a pious son! If even then things had been done under just laws, Jupiter ought to have been divided between two sacks. After this, why should he hesitate, with his lust hardened by incest, to pour himself out into lighter offenses, that is, adulteries and seductions? Poetry has made sport of him much as we do when a runaway slave is advertised, putting his doings up for sale for others to ask about and abuse: now figuring him in the prices of his lust, as if he had paid with an ox or the price of an ox, or had poured rain into a balcony, or broken in with money; now in the very likenesses of his acts, as an eagle because he carried off, as a swan because he had sung. Are not these fables composed of the most disgusting foulness and the worst of shameful deeds? Or perhaps men's morals and minds do not come away from them more wanton? How the demons, the offspring of the evil angels, sent out long ago, have striven by unbelief and fables like these to turn people away from the faith need not be treated at length here. For even if the common people were not of the same nature as their kings, princes, and forefathers, authority elsewhere demanded likeness of morals. But how much worse than those is one who is no better? By a special title you commonly call Jupiter “Best,” and Virgil has “Just Jupiter.” So all of them were incestuous toward their own, unchaste toward strangers, impious, unjust. Any to whom fable left no notable infamy was not considered worthy to become a god.

But since they hold that some were received into divinity separately from among men, and that a distinction should be made between gods born and gods made, according to Dionysius the Stoic, I will add something on this class too. The sum of my answer will concern Hercules himself: whether he was worthy of heaven and divinity; for so they assign divinity to merits at their pleasure. If for his valor, because he steadfastly slew wild beasts, what is so memorable in that? Do not criminals condemned to the gladiatorial school, or even men of the cheap sort given to the arena for a show, slay very many beasts at once, and fiercer ones at that? If for traveling over the world, how many rich men has sweet leisure, or philosophers a servile beggary, enabled to do the same? Do they not remember that Asclepiades the Cynic, with a single little cow, on whose back he rode and from whose udder he was sometimes fed, brought the whole world under his eyes? If Hercules also went down to the underworld, who does not know that the road to the underworld lies open to all? If you deified him for his many slaughters and battles, the great Pompey produced a much greater number, the conqueror of the pirates who had not even left Ostia safe; and how many thousands, pray, were cut down by Scipio right into one corner of the Byrsa of Carthage? So Scipio should more rightly be counted worthy of divinity than Hercules. Add rather to Hercules' titles his seductions of girls and wives, and the swaddling-bands of Omphale, and the expedition of the Argonauts shamefully deserted over the loss of a comely boy. Add to his glory, after the mark of disgrace, his fits of madness too; adore the arrows that killed his sons and his wife. He who would then more fittingly have put himself on the pyre in grief for the killing of his own, who, entrapped by poison through his wife's wantonness, rather deserved to die a dishonorable death: him you raised from the pyre to heaven, with the same ease as you raised another, destroyed by fire from the divine power, who, having devised a few ingenious experiments, was said to have restored the dead to life. He was the son of Apollo, as much a man as he was a grandson of Jupiter and great-grandson of Saturn (or rather illegitimate, being of uncertain father, as Socrates of Argos reported: exposed, found, and, more shamefully than Jupiter, reared, on a dog's udder no less); deservedly, as no one can deny, he was consumed by the thunderbolt. Here again your Jupiter “Best” is bad: impious toward his grandson, envious of the craftsman. But Pindar did not hide what he deserved: he says that his greed and avarice for gain were punished, by which he brought the living to death, not the dead to life, through the malpractice of a venal medicine. His mother too is said to have died by the same stroke, and rightly, since she who had borne so dangerous a beast into the world burst into heaven by the same ladder, as it were. And yet the Athenians know how to sacrifice to such gods: for they offer funeral rites to Aesculapius and his mother among the dead. As if they did not also adore their Theseus, a god deservedly! Why not? Since he abandoned his rescuer on a foreign shore, with the same forgetfulness, or rather madness, which caused his father's death.

It would take long to review also those whom you have buried among the stars and boldly assign as ministers to the gods. So, I suppose, the Castors, Perseus, and Erigone are worthy of heaven, just as Jupiter's catamite is. But why wonder? You have even transferred dogs and scorpions and crabs to heaven. I put off those whom you worship in oracles; that something divine is at work there is attested. What? You even want gods to be the arbiters of sorrow: Viduus, who widows the body of its soul, whom you condemned by not allowing him within the walls; likewise Caeculus, who deprives the eyes of sight; likewise Orbana, who extinguishes the seed in childlessness; and there is a goddess of death herself. To fly past the rest, you also regard as gods the spirits of places and of the city's districts: Father Janus (and there is a goddess Jana, of the arches), and Septimontius, of the seven hills. People make offerings to the same Genii who have altars or shrines in those same places, and besides to others who live in someone else's place or for rent. I say nothing of Ascensus, from climbing, and Clivicola, from slopes; I say nothing of the gods Forculus, from doors, and Cardea, from hinges, and Limentinus, of thresholds, or whatever other door-keeping deities are adored among you by the neighbors. For what great thing is that, when they have their own deities even in brothels, in kitchens, and even in prison? So heaven is filled with countless particular gods, these and other gods of the Romans, among whom the duties of all life are divided, in such a way that there is no need of the other gods. Indeed, since those we have noted above are reckoned as peculiar to the Romans and are not readily known abroad, how do all the things over which they have set them to preside come about throughout the human race and in every nation, where their guarantors lack not only honor but even recognition?

But some, they say, pointed out the crops and the necessities of life. I ask you: when you say that they discovered them, do you not confess that the things to be discovered existed beforehand? Why then do you not rather honor the author, whose gifts these are, instead of transferring the author's honor to the discoverers? Surely the discoverer himself, before anything else, gave thanks to the author; surely he recognized as God the one to whom the ministry of the founder truly belongs, by whom both the discoverer himself and the very thing to be discovered were established. No one at Rome knew the green African fig when Cato brought one before the senate, to show how near was the enemy province which he was always pressing them to subdue. Gnaeus Pompeius first spread the cherry from Pontus through Italy. These men, for all I care, might have earned the proclamation of divinity as the discoverers of new fruits among the Romans! It is as vain as holding men to be gods for the inventions of the arts. If the craftsmen of our own age were compared with them, how much more fittingly would consecration have belonged to the later than to the earlier! I ask you, has not antiquity become obsolete in all the crafts, as daily use everywhere supplies novelty? And so those whom you sanctify for the arts you injure in the arts themselves, and you provoke them with rivals who surpass them.

Finally, since you do not deny to the guardians of your religion all these whom antiquity willed to be gods and posterity believed, there remains for us that enormous presumption of Roman superstition, over which we have to engage with you, nations: that the Romans became masters and arbiters of the whole world because by the duties of religion they deserved to rule, so much so that they come near to surpassing their gods themselves. No doubt Sterculus, and Mutunus, and Larentina advanced this empire! The Romans, one people destined by its gods for dominion! For I would not think that foreign gods wished this done for an alien people rather than their own, so as to become deserters and abandoners, nay traitors, of their native soil, in which they were born, grew up, gained renown, and were buried. So not even Jupiter would allow his Crete to be shaken by the Roman fasces, forgetting that Idaean cave, and the Corybantian bronzes, and the most pleasant smell of his nurse there. Would he not have preferred that tomb of his to the whole Capitol, so that the land which covers Jupiter's ashes might rather reign? Would Juno want the Punic city, loved above Samos, to be burned, and by the fires of Aeneas's race at that? As far as I know, “Here were her arms, here her chariot; that this should be the kingdom of the nations, if the fates allowed, the goddess even then strives and fosters.” Poor thing, she could not prevail against the fates! And yet the Romans did not decree as much honor to the fates, who surrendered Carthage to them, as they did to Larentina. But these gods do not have the power of conferring a kingdom. For if Jupiter reigned in Crete, and Saturn in Italy, and Isis in Egypt, they reigned as men, and many of them are recorded as having worked for others. So the one who serves also makes masters, and the bondsman of Admetus enlarges the Roman citizens with empire, while he ruined his generous worshipper Croesus by deceiving him with ambiguous oracles. What was the god afraid of, that he did not steadily foretell the truth, that Croesus was to lose his kingdom? As if, enriched with the power of reigning, they could ever have protected their own cities! If they had power to grant it to the Romans, why did Minerva not defend Athens from Xerxes? Or why did Apollo not rescue Delphi from the hand of Pyrrhus? Those who lost their own cities preserve the city of Rome, if Roman religiosity has earned this! And yet was not superstition sought out after the supreme empire had been won, when the state had already grown? Although rites were introduced by Numa, still the divine did not yet mock your affairs with images or temples. Religion was frugal, and superstition poor; altars were makeshift and vessels plain, the smoke from them slight, and the god himself nowhere. So they were not religious before they were great, as though they were great because they were religious. And yet how can empire seem to have been won by the Romans on account of supreme religion and the deepest care for the gods, when it was increased rather by injuring the gods? For, unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is won by wars and enlarged by wars. But the gods of a city too are injured by the victors. For there is the same destruction of walls and temples, equal slaughter of citizens and priests, the same plunder of things profane and sacred. As many trophies as the Romans have, so many sacrileges; as many triumphs over nations, so many over gods. The captive images still remain, and surely, if they perceive their conquerors, they do not love them. But because they perceive nothing, they are injured with impunity, and because they are injured with impunity, they are adored in vain. So those whose eminence grew through victories cannot be thought to have grown by the merits of religion, whether they injured religion by growing or grew by injuring it. All nations have held dominion, each in its own time, as the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Egyptians; some hold it still; and yet those who lost it were not without religions and worship and gods to propitiate, until at last almost universal dominion passed to the Romans. The lot of the times has so turned kingdoms about. Ask who ordered the changes of the times. The same one dispenses kingdoms, and has now gathered that supreme power among the Romans, like money exacted from many debtors, into one chest. What he has determined about it, those near him know.