To the Nations 2.13

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.