Against Symmachus

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–2.541 · 2.571–4.481 · 4.511–4.1111

1. 1.1The preface to Book 1 retells how Paul, shipwrecked on Malta, was bitten by a viper hiding in the brushwood he gathered for the fire.
2. 1.31Paul shook the viper into the fire unharmed; so now the Church, after the storms of persecution under pagan emperors, has been bitten by a hidden viper of paganism.
3. 1.61Just as the Church came to rest in peace, the eloquent Symmachus, like the viper, struck at it, but his venom did not penetrate; the poet prays Christ to have mercy on him and not let him perish in the fire.
4. 2.1The poet had thought Rome cured of paganism by Theodosius, who had forbidden the worship of idols and cared for souls, not only for outward order, unlike the pagan emperors; Plato’s saying about philosopher-kings is fulfilled in him.
5. 2.31Theodosius is a wise ruler who forbids idolatry and teaches that the one God made the world; Saturn, by contrast, was a fugitive who taught the rustic Latins to worship him, fathered gods by lust, and was followed by the worse Jupiter with his disguised seductions.
6. 2.61Jupiter’s seductions (Danae, Ganymede) and disguises were believed by a crude people; after him Mercury taught theft and magic, raising and condemning the dead with his wand.
7. 2.91Mercury the sorcerer was worshipped as a god; so too Priapus, a lustful gardener, Hercules, notorious for his love of Hylas, and Bacchus, deified after conquering India.
8. 2.121Bacchus was deified for his drunken triumphs and set Ariadne, a deserted mistress, among the stars; the crowd believed that kings could become gods, and so the worship of rulers became an ancestral custom.
9. 2.151The worship of dead kings arose from veneration of living ones; Rome’s divine parents, Mars and Venus, were really mortals whose scandals were dressed up as divine, and so Rome took up the cults of Mars, Jupiter, Minerva and Juno.
10. 2.181Rome gathered the gods of many places and has as many temples as tombs of heroes; superstition, once begun, passed unbroken from generation to generation, as children learned idolatry at home from infancy.
11. 2.211Grown up, the young Roman sees the public cults, the temple of Rome and Venus, and the statues of Hercules, the Dioscuri, Janus and the old kings, and believes them gods; so pagan custom, passed down, became a long chain.
12. 2.241Later Romans deified Augustus and made Livia a Juno, though she married him while pregnant by her former husband, with oracles approving; so too Rome made goddesses of courtesans and set Antinous, Hadrian’s favorite, in heaven.
13. 2.271Antinous was set beside Jupiter; the great emperors did not win their wars by such gods, but Rome’s triumphs were arranged by God through Christ; the pagans, ignorant of this, deified the elements and named them as persons.
14. 2.301Fire was deified as Vulcan and the sun as a god, yet the sun is bound to a fixed course and smaller than the heaven it crosses; the true God has no limit, presides over all nature and fills all things.
15. 2.331Unlike the sun, which is a servant bound to its course, man was given freedom to choose his way; yet senators kiss the statues of the sun’s horses, and Rome even worships the underworld goddess Proserpina in her threefold form.
16. 2.361The threefold goddess, Moon, Diana and Proserpina, is a demon of Tartarus; gladiatorial games are human sacrifices to Dis and Charon, a shameful thing for a royal people to offer for the safety of the state.
17. 2.391Human blood is shed in the games for Jupiter Latiaris, and tombstones dedicated “to the gods of the Shades” show that Rome worships the powers of death; Theodosius, returning victorious, sees Rome under a cloud of idolatry and calls on her to put off her mourning.
18. 2.421Theodosius urges Rome to lift her eyes above the elements to God, who made her mistress of the world, and to give up decaying idols and every deified power, place or spirit, leaving such gods to the barbarians.
19. 2.451Rome, which taught the nations civilized law, must not think like barbarians in religion, but recognize the emperor’s standards bearing the Cross, under which Constantine freed her from the tyranny of Maxentius, who imprisoned senators and seized wives and daughters.
20. 2.481The Christian labarum and shields led Constantine to victory, and the freed senators adored the name of Christ; Theodosius urges Rome to give up her idols, cleanse her statues and keep them as works of art; Rome, ashamed of her past, turns to Christ.
21. 2.511Remembering the martyrs’ tombs around the city, Rome repents of her persecutions and turns to Christ; Theodosius has saved Rome from enemies of souls more than Marius or Cicero did, and taught her an empire without end.
22. 2.541The senators lay aside their pagan priesthoods and come to baptism; the great families, the Anicii, Olybrii, Paulini, Bassi and Gracchi, have turned to Christ, so that the Senate and people of Rome are now Christian.
23. 2.571Only a few senators cling to paganism; the common people throng to Peter’s tomb on the Vatican and to the Lateran for baptism, so Rome is Christ’s; the pagan minority, however distinguished, does not speak for the city or the senate.
24. 2.601By the ancestral rule of the majority, the senate has freely voted to banish the idols; Theodosius compels no one and even gives pagans high offices, having made Symmachus himself consul, though he alone pleads for the restoration of the pagan gods.
25. 2.631The poet praises Symmachus’s eloquence, which would be worthy of gold had he praised God, disclaims any rivalry in talent, but claims the right to defend the Faith against his attack, and ends the first book.
26. 3.1The preface to Book 2 tells how the disciples’ boat was caught in a storm at night and Christ came to them walking on the sea; Peter alone recognized him and asked for help, and Christ bade him come down onto the water.
27. 3.31Peter began to sink and Christ rebuked his weak faith and lifted him up; so the poet, a sinner launching out against the eloquent Symmachus, asks Christ to hold out his hand so that he may stand on the waves.
28. 4.1The second book answers Symmachus point by point: he urges the young emperors to keep the altar of Victory for success in war; they answer that victory comes from labor, courage and strength, not from a golden statue.
29. 4.31Victory is no winged girl, but each man’s own right hand and almighty God; painters and poets together invented the gods, as the rites of Attis and of Diana’s grove, drawn from myths like that of Hippolytus, show.
30. 4.61The emperors bid Rome hang up spoils rather than idols, for her victory is kept in heaven; Symmachus argues from ancestral custom, the genius of each city, the prosperity the gods brought, and Rome’s own plea that each people may approach the hidden God by its own road.
31. 4.91Faith answers Symmachus: human reason cannot fathom God, but Faith believes in the Almighty who promises eternal goods, since the eternal God must give eternal gifts, not perishable ones.
32. 4.121God speaks: those who would reach heaven must set aside earthly cares, for everything perishable is nothing; he made the world’s goods to be used with restraint and set this life as a contest to test the soul, which must overcome pleasure and greed.
33. 4.151Since God promises eternal goods, no wise man prefers brief pleasures; what separates man from beast is hope beyond sight, and if there were no life after death, nothing would restrain a man from adultery, fraud and murder, since human law can be evaded.
34. 4.181God declares that the soul will not die but will be punished or rewarded, and that he will raise the body too, as seeds rise from the earth after dying, so that body and soul together receive their deserts for ever.
35. 4.211God continues: one God made soul and body and gives every good of life, crops, wine, oil and childbirth; the union of the sexes for offspring is his law, which the pagans defile under the name of Venus; he needs no lesser gods, being simple and indivisible.
36. 4.241God asks for a temple not of marble but of the mind, built on faith, piety and chastity; he made man upright to look to heaven, but man turned to earth, and God’s own Spirit descended to restore him; the poet asks Symmachus whether he prefers custom to these precepts.
37. 4.271If ancient custom must be kept, then mankind should go back to acorns, caves and skins, and to throwing old men from bridges and sacrificing infants; Rome herself has changed her rites, dress, laws and arms.
38. 4.301Rome has often changed her laws, and progress is natural: as a man passes from infancy to mature age, the human race has grown from a beastlike beginning to the age when it can at last understand divine things and seek salvation.
39. 4.331If ancient custom is the rule, the first nation on earth worshipped the one God, from whom our line descends; and early Rome had few gods, but later she brought home the captured gods of conquered cities, gods that had not even protected their own shrines.
40. 4.361Rome’s worship is itself a mixture of foreign gods, so it is not ancestral custom; Symmachus says every city has a fate or Genius as each person has a soul, but the poet knows how the soul animates and governs the body, and asks when this Genius ever entered Rome.
41. 4.391The poet mocks the idea of Rome’s Genius, born with Romulus or appearing with the augural vultures; if such a soul governed Rome, it would be free to change its religion, as it changed its form of government for seven hundred years, from kings to consuls, tribunes and decemvirs.
42. 4.421After changing between consuls and triumvirs Rome finally settled under the emperor; if she could change her government until she found the right one, she can also accept the divine law now revealed, and she has, for Rome, meaning her people, is subject to Christ; the pagans assign Genii and fates even to gates and walls.
43. 4.451If fate governs everything, laws and punishments are unjust, since no one would be guilty; but each person chooses freely and is guilty by his own will; God is above the stars, and Christ makes any fate powerless.
44. 4.481Symmachus says the gods led Rome to her triumphs; the poet asks whether the gods of Delphi, Egypt, Rhodes, Ephesus and Carthage betrayed their own cities to Rome, or whether Rome simply conquered gods who could not defend themselves.
45. 4.511The gods of Asia and Egypt could not defend their peoples, as at Actium, where Serapis and Anubis failed; Symmachus says the gods chose Rome freely, but the poet asks whether Pallas chose to be stolen by Diomedes and Ulysses, or the gods of Amyclae to be carried off by Alexander.
46. 4.541To credit Venus and the other goddesses with Rome’s victories over Brennus, Antiochus, Pyrrhus and Mithridates robs the legions of their glory; and if the crow of Apollo helped Corvinus, why did no omen warn Rome at Cannae, the Cremera or Carrhae?
47. 4.571The true cause of Rome’s triumphs was God’s plan to unite the warring peoples under one empire and one law, so that a single concord might prepare the nations for the worship of Christ.
48. 4.601Common law and citizenship, trade and intermarriage made the world one city; so the Roman empire prepared the way for Christ, since God cannot enter a discordant world or a divided soul; now the world, united in peace under Rome, receives Christ.
49. 4.631Christ wills Rome and peace to be the heads of the world; Rome is not the senile suppliant that Symmachus impersonates like a tragic actor; Rome herself speaks, saying that under the Christian emperors she is renewed and worships God without the crime of bloodshed.
50. 4.661Rome confesses that the worship of Jupiter drove her to the persecutions of Nero, Decius and others, from which the Christian emperors have cleansed her; to those who blame her misfortunes on the neglect of the gods, she answers that under Christian rule no barbarian has taken the city.
51. 4.691Rome recalls the recent invasion of Italy by Alaric the Goth, defeated at Pollentia not by sacred geese but by the courage of the army under the Christian emperor Honorius and Stilicho, who prayed at Christ’s altars and marched under the cross.
52. 4.721Rome welcomes Honorius in triumph, frees the captives, and contrasts this victory, won with Christ and true courage, with Hannibal’s, undone by the luxuries of Campania; no statue could worthily reward such virtue.
53. 4.751Rome promises Honorius eternal glory with Christ and asks him to reject Symmachus, the envoy of the gods, not of Rome; Symmachus insists that there are many paths to the one God and that nature’s gifts are common to all; the poet grants that sun and rain are shared by the just and the unjust.
54. 4.781Air, rain, water and sea serve good and bad alike, since nature serves and does not judge; God keeps judgment for himself at the appointed time; living is common to all, but merit is not, and even animals share the gifts of nature with men.
55. 4.811Sharing air and sky does not make all religions equal, any more than it makes man and beast or Roman and barbarian equal; nature’s gifts, like sunlight, fall on all alike, but the worshippers of the dead are not what the worshippers of the true God are.
56. 4.841Symmachus says the hidden God must be sought by many roads; the poet answers that only the single way is free of error: there are two roads, the one to the one God and the many-branched road of idolatry, with its Bacchic, Saturnalian, Lupercalian, Cybelean and Egyptian cults.
57. 4.871A third path is atheism, which holds that chance rules everything and differs little from polytheism; God leads by one way, hard at first but glorious at its end, while a demon leads the many-branched way of philosophy, divination and magic to death.
58. 4.901Christians walk by faith and hope toward the joys to come; Symmachus’s last complaint is that the withdrawal of the Vestals’ allowances has brought famine, but the poet answers that there is no such famine, for the Nile floods as usual.
59. 4.931Africa, Sicily and Sardinia still send their grain to Rome, the circus is full and the public bread is given out; an occasional poor harvest is nothing new, caused by drought, rain or hot winds, as in the past.
60. 4.961Crop failures existed before Troy’s Vesta or Athens were founded; the elements, disordered since antiquity, bring rust, frost, weeds and drought, just as the body falls into sickness, for world and body share one nature and are made from nothing.
61. 4.991If the famine avenged the Vestals, it would strike only Christian fields; yet Christians, who have broken the boundary stones and cut down the sacred trees, reap no less; content with little and hoping for eternity, the Christian farmer tends both his land and his soul, as Christ taught.
62. 4.1021Christ’s parable of the sower warns against rocky, thorny and roadside ground; the Christian farmer cultivates his heart as well as his field, rooting out vices so that faith may yield a hundredfold harvest that no pest can destroy.
63. 4.1051Christian virgins have the rewards of modesty, veiling, frugality and lifelong chastity, a hundredfold harvest in heaven; the Vestals, by contrast, are taken as children before they can choose, keep their bodies but not their minds untouched, and marry when old after their term of service.
64. 4.1081The Vestal is paraded through the city with uncovered face and sits in the amphitheatre, delighting in the gladiators’ deaths and turning her thumb to order the fallen to be killed; is this the merit for which she is said to guard Rome?
65. 4.1111The poet ends by asking Honorius to complete his father Theodosius’s work, who forbade the sacrifice of bulls, by abolishing the gladiatorial games, so that Rome may be devoted to God and follow her emperor in piety as in war.