City of God 2.16–2.23

Chapter 16. That if the gods had any care for justice, the Romans ought to have received precepts for living from them rather than borrowing laws from other men.

If the Romans could have received laws for living from their gods, they would not have borrowed the laws of Solon from the Athenians some years after Rome was founded; and even these they did not keep as they received them, but tried to make them better and more correct. Lycurgus, it is true, pretended that he had established laws for the Spartans on Apollo's authority, but the Romans wisely refused to believe this and therefore did not take their laws from there. Numa Pompilius, who succeeded Romulus as king, is said to have made certain laws, which were by no means sufficient to govern the city, and he also instituted many sacred rites for them; yet he is not reported to have received these laws from the deities. So the evils of the mind, of life, and of morals, which are so great that their most learned men affirm that states perish by them even while their cities stand, their gods took no care at all to keep from befalling their worshippers.

Chapter 17. On the rape of the Sabine women and other iniquities that flourished in the Roman state even in its praised times.

Or perhaps laws were not established by the deities for the Roman people because, as Sallust says, “right and good prevailed among them no more by laws than by nature”? It was from this “right and good,” I suppose, that the Sabine women were carried off. For what could be more right and good than that other men's daughters, lured by the trick of a show, should not be received from their parents but carried off by force, each as he could? For if the Sabines acted unjustly in refusing them when asked, how much more unjust was it to carry them off when not given? A war could more justly have been waged with a people that had refused its daughters in marriage to their neighbors and borderers when they asked for them than with one that was demanding them back after they had been taken. So that is what should rather have been done; then Mars would have helped his son in the fight, to avenge by arms the wrong of refused marriages, and in that way to obtain the women he wanted. For by some right of war, perhaps, a victor might justly carry off women unjustly refused; but by no right of peace did he seize women not given, and he waged an unjust war with their parents, who were justly angry. This, indeed, turned out more usefully and happily in that, although the circus show remained in memory of that trick, the example of the crime did not find favor in that city and empire; and the Romans more easily erred in consecrating Romulus as a god after that iniquity than in permitting by any law or custom that his deed in carrying off women should be imitated. It was from this “right and good” that, after King Tarquin had been expelled with his children, whose son had violently forced Lucretia, the consul Junius Brutus compelled his colleague Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, the husband of that same Lucretia, a good and innocent man, to resign his office because of the name and kinship of the Tarquins, and did not allow him to live in the city. He committed this crime with the people's favor or acquiescence, the very people from whom Collatinus, like Brutus himself, had received the consulship. It was from this “right and good” that Marcus Camillus, an outstanding man of that time, who very easily overcame the Veians, the most dangerous enemies of the Roman people, after a ten-year war in which the Roman army was so often badly beaten and gravely afflicted, when Rome itself was already doubting and trembling for its safety, and who took their very wealthy city, was put on trial through the envy of those who disparaged his merit and the insolence of the tribunes of the people; and he found the city he had freed so ungrateful that, being quite certain of his condemnation, he went into exile of his own accord and was even condemned in his absence to a fine of ten thousand pounds of bronze, soon to be, once again, the avenger of his ungrateful country against the Gauls. It is wearisome now to recall the many foul and unjust things by which that city was shaken, when the powerful tried to subject the common people to themselves and the people refused to be subjected, and the champions of each side acted more from partisanship and love of winning than with any thought of what was fair and good.

Chapter 18. What the history of Sallust reveals about the morals of the Romans, either restrained by fear or relaxed by security.

So I will keep within bounds and rather bring in Sallust himself as witness. Although he said in praise of the Romans, which is where this discussion of ours began, “Right and good prevailed among them no more by laws than by nature,” extolling that time when, after the kings had been expelled, the city grew incredibly in a short space of time, yet the same man admits in the first book of his History, at its very beginning, that even then, when the state had passed from kings to consuls, after a short interval there were wrongs done by the more powerful, and because of them a secession of the plebs from the patricians, and other dissensions in the City. For after he had recalled that the Roman people lived with the best morals and the greatest concord between the second and the last Carthaginian war, and had said that the cause of this good was not love of justice but, while Carthage stood, fear of an insecure peace (which is why that Nasica did not want Carthage destroyed, so as to check wickedness and preserve those excellent morals, that vices might be restrained by fear), the same Sallust at once added: “But discord, avarice, ambition, and the other evils that usually arise from prosperity increased greatly after the destruction of Carthage”; so that we should understand that they usually arose and increased even before. Then, adding why he said this: “For wrongs done by the more powerful,” he says, “and because of them the secession of the plebs from the patricians and other dissensions at home, existed from the very beginning; nor was there fair and moderate justice for longer than, after the kings were driven out, the fear of Tarquin and the heavy war with Etruria lasted.” You see how, even in that short time, when after the kings were driven out, that is, expelled, there was some fair and moderate justice, he said fear was the cause, because they feared the war which King Tarquin, driven from his throne and the City and allied with the Etruscans, was waging against the Romans. Notice then what he adds next: “Then the patricians began to treat the plebs as slaves, to dispose of their lives and backs in the manner of kings, to drive them from their land, and to rule alone, with the rest shut out. Oppressed by these cruelties, and above all by debt, the plebs, since it had to bear both taxes and military service in continual wars, took up arms and occupied the Sacred Mount and the Aventine, and then obtained for itself tribunes of the plebs and other rights. The end of discords and strife on both sides was the second Punic war.” You see from what time, that is, a short interval after the kings were driven out, what kind of men the Romans were of whom he says, “Right and good prevailed among them no more by laws than by nature.” Further, if those times are found to be such, in which the Roman state is proclaimed to have been most beautiful and best, what do we think must be said or thought of the following age, when, “gradually changed,” to use the words of the same historian, “from the most beautiful and best it became the worst and most shameful,” namely after the destruction of Carthage, as he recalled? How Sallust himself briefly recalls and describes those times can be read in his History: to what great evils of morals, which arose from prosperity, he shows that things came, right up to the civil wars. “From that time,” he says, “the morals of the ancestors were hurled headlong, not gradually as before, but like a torrent; the youth was so corrupted by luxury and avarice that it may rightly be said that men were born who could neither keep property themselves nor allow others to keep it.” Sallust then says more about the vices of Sulla and the other foulness of the state, and other writers agree with him, though far unequal in eloquence. Yet you see, I think, and whoever pays attention sees very easily, into what a sewer of the worst morals that city had sunk before the coming of our heavenly King. For these things happened not only before Christ, present in the flesh, had begun to teach, but even before he was born of the Virgin. Since, then, they do not dare to blame their gods for so many and such great evils of those times, whether the more tolerable earlier ones or the intolerable and horrible ones after Carthage was overthrown, gods who with malign cunning planted in human minds the opinions from which such vices grew like a forest, why do they blame the present evils on Christ, who by his most wholesome teaching forbids false and deceitful gods to be worshipped, and, detesting and condemning these harmful and shameful human desires by divine authority, is gradually withdrawing his household everywhere from this world, wasting away and sinking under these evils, so as to found with it an eternal city, most glorious not by the applause of vanity but by the judgment of truth?

Chapter 19. On the corruption of the Roman state before Christ took away the worship of the gods.

See, the Roman state (I am not the first to say it; their own authors, from whom we learned these things for a fee, said it so long ago, before the coming of Christ) “gradually changed from the most beautiful and best and became the worst and most shameful.” See, before the coming of Christ, after Carthage was destroyed, “the morals of the ancestors were hurled headlong, not gradually as before, but like a torrent; the youth was so corrupted by luxury and avarice.” Let them read to us the precepts of their gods against luxury and avarice given to the Roman people; would that the gods had merely been silent about chaste and modest things, and had not also demanded from that people disgraceful and ignominious things, to which they gave a pernicious authority through their false divinity! Let them read ours, how many precepts against avarice and luxury, through the prophets, through the holy gospel, through the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles, everywhere, to peoples gathered for this purpose, sound out, how excellently, how divinely, not as if clamoring from the disputes of philosophers, but thundering as if from the oracles and clouds of God. And yet they do not blame their gods for the state's having become the worst and most shameful before the coming of Christ through luxury and avarice and cruel and foul morals; but whatever affliction their pride and self-indulgence have suffered in this time, they lay to the charge of the Christian religion. If the kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all judges of the earth, young men and maidens, old with young, every age capable of it and both sexes, and those whom John the Baptist addresses, the tax collectors themselves and the soldiers, were to hear and heed its precepts about just and upright morals together, the state would both adorn the lands of the present life with its happiness and ascend to the height of eternal life to reign in bliss. But because one hears and another despises, and more are friends to vices that flatter to harm than to the useful harshness of virtues, the servants of Christ, whether kings or princes or judges, soldiers or provincials, rich or poor, free or slave, of either sex, are commanded to bear with even the worst and most shameful state, if necessary, and by this very endurance to win for themselves a most glorious place in that most holy and majestic senate of angels, as it were, and heavenly commonwealth, where God's will is law.

Chapter 20. What kind of happiness those who accuse the times of the Christian religion want to enjoy, and by what morals they want to live.

But such worshippers and lovers of these gods, whose imitators in crimes and shameful deeds they are glad to be, do not care at all that the state should not be the worst and most shameful. “Only let it stand,” they say, “only let it flourish, full of resources, glorious with victories, or, what is happier, secure in peace. And what is it to us? Rather, what concerns us more is that everyone should keep increasing his riches, so that they may be enough for daily extravagance, and so that each more powerful man may subject the weaker to himself. Let the poor court the rich for the sake of a full belly and so as to enjoy quiet idleness under their patronage; let the rich misuse the poor as clients and as servants of their own pomp. Let the peoples applaud not those who look after their interests but those who lavish pleasures on them. Let nothing hard be commanded, nothing impure forbidden. Let kings care not how good but how subject their subjects are. Let the provinces serve the kings not as rulers of morals but as lords of property and providers of their pleasures, and let them honor them not sincerely but fear them slavishly. Let the laws take notice of the harm one does to another's vineyard rather than to one's own life. Let no one be brought before a judge except one who has been a nuisance or harm to another's property, house, or safety, or to anyone against his will; otherwise let each do as he likes with his own, or with his own people, or with anyone who is willing. Let there be plenty of public prostitutes, both for all who like to enjoy them and especially for those who cannot keep private ones. Let very large and richly adorned houses be built, let sumptuous banquets be thronged, where, as each likes and is able, there may be gambling, drinking, vomiting, and dissipation day and night. Let dancing resound everywhere; let the theaters seethe with shouts of indecent merriment and every kind of pleasure, whether most cruel or most foul. Let him be a public enemy who dislikes this happiness; whoever tries to change or take it away, let the free multitude turn him from its ears, turn him out of his home, and take him from among the living. Let those be held true gods who have procured this happiness for the peoples and preserved it once procured. Let them be worshipped as they wish, let them demand what games they wish, which they can have with their worshippers or at their worshippers' expense; only let them bring it about that such happiness fears nothing from the enemy, nothing from plague, nothing from any disaster.” What sane person would compare this state, I will not say with the Roman empire, but with the house of Sardanapalus? He was once a king so given to pleasures that he had it written on his tomb that in death he had only what his lust had consumed by swallowing it down while he lived. If these people had such a king, indulgent to them in such things and opposing no one in them with any severity, they would more gladly consecrate a temple and a flamen to him than the ancient Romans did to Romulus.

Chapter 21. What Cicero's opinion was of the Roman state.

But if the man who called the Roman state the worst and most shameful is disregarded, and these people do not care with what stain and disgrace of the worst and most shameful morals it is filled, but only that it should stand firm and last, let them hear that it had not, as Sallust relates, become the worst and most shameful, but, as Cicero argues, had even then utterly perished and no state at all remained. For he brings in Scipio, the very man who had destroyed Carthage, discussing the state at a time when it was foreseen that it would soon perish through the corruption Sallust describes. For the discussion is set at the time when one of the Gracchi had already been killed, from whom, Sallust writes, the serious seditions began; for his death is mentioned in the same books. Now at the end of the second book Scipio had said that, as with strings or pipes and in singing and voices themselves, a certain harmony must be kept among the different sounds, which trained ears cannot bear to hear altered or discordant, and this harmony is made concordant and consistent by the regulation of the most dissimilar voices, so from the highest, the lowest, and the intermediate orders, as from sounds, a city, by reasoned regulation, sounds in harmony through the agreement of the most dissimilar elements; and what musicians call harmony in singing is concord in a city, the closest and best bond of safety in every state, and this can by no means exist without justice. Then, when he had discussed at somewhat greater length and more fully how much justice benefits a city and how much it harms it if it is absent, Philus, one of those present at the discussion, took up the subject and asked that this very question be treated more carefully and more be said about justice, because of what was then commonly said, that a state cannot be governed without injustice. Scipio agreed that this question must be discussed and unraveled, and answered that nothing he thought had yet been said about the state would allow them to go further unless it were established not only that this saying, that it cannot be done without injustice, is false, but that this is most true: that a state cannot be governed without the highest justice. The treatment of this question was put off to the following day, and in the third book the matter was fought out in a great contest. For Philus himself took up the argument of those who held that a state cannot be run without injustice, protesting especially that he should not be thought to hold this himself; and he pleaded earnestly for injustice against justice, trying, as it were, to show by plausible reasons and examples that the one is useful to the state and the other useless. Then Laelius, at the request of all, undertook to defend justice, and asserted as far as he could that nothing is so hostile to a city as injustice, and that a state cannot be run or stand at all except by great justice. When this question had been treated as much as seemed sufficient, Scipio returns to what had been interrupted, recalls and commends his own brief definition of a state, in which he had said that it is the property of a people. And he defines a people not as every gathering of a multitude, but as a gathering united by agreement about right and by a partnership for the common good. He then teaches how great the usefulness of definition is in argument, and concludes from these definitions of his that a state, that is, the property of a people, exists when it is governed well and justly, whether by one king, or by a few nobles, or by the whole people. But when the king is unjust, whom he called a tyrant in the Greek fashion, or the nobles unjust, whose agreement he called a faction, or the people itself unjust, for which he found no customary name except to call it too a tyrant, then the state is no longer faulty, as had been argued the day before, but, as the reasoning connected with those definitions had taught, there is no state at all, since it is not the property of a people when a tyrant or a faction seizes it, nor is the people itself any longer a people if it is unjust, since it is no longer a multitude united by agreement about right and by a partnership for the common good, as a people had been defined. When, then, the Roman state was such as Sallust describes it, it was no longer the worst and most shameful, as he says, but no state at all, according to that reasoning which the discussion about the state held by its great leading men of that time made plain. So too Tullius himself, speaking not in the person of Scipio or anyone else but in his own words, at the beginning of the fifth book, first quotes the line of the poet Ennius in which he had said: “On ancient morals and on men the Roman state stands firm.” “This line,” he says, “seems to me to have been uttered as if by an oracle, for its brevity and its truth. For neither the men, unless the city had had such morals, nor the morals, unless these men had been in charge, could have founded or maintained for so long so great a state, ruling so justly far and wide. So before our time the ancestral custom itself brought forward outstanding men, and excellent men kept to the old custom and the institutions of their ancestors. But our age, having received the state like an excellent painting, though fading with age, not only neglected to restore it with the same colors it had had, but did not even take care to preserve at least its form and, as it were, its outlines. For what remains of the ancient morals on which he said the Roman state stands firm? We see them so worn out by forgetfulness that they are not only not practiced but no longer even known. And what shall I say of the men? For the morals themselves have perished through a lack of men, and for so great an evil we must not only give an account but even, in a way, plead our case as if accused on a capital charge. For it is by our own vices, not by some accident, that we keep the state in name but have long since lost it in reality.” Cicero admitted this long after the death of Africanus, whom he made a speaker on the state in his books, but still before the coming of Christ. If such things were thought and said when the Christian religion had been spread abroad and was prevailing, which of these people would not judge that they should be blamed on the Christians? Why then did their gods not take care that that state, whose loss Cicero laments so mournfully long before Christ came in the flesh, should not perish and be lost then? Let its praisers consider what it was like even with those ancient men and morals, whether true justice flourished in it, or whether perhaps even then it was not living in its morals but painted in colors; which Cicero himself expressed without knowing it, while extolling it. But we shall see this elsewhere, if God wills. For I shall try in its place to show, according to Cicero's own definitions, in which he briefly set out through Scipio's mouth what a state is and what a people is (supported also by many statements, whether his own or of those he made speak in the same discussion), that it never was a state, because there never was true justice in it. According to more acceptable definitions, however, it was a state in its own way, and it was better administered by the earlier Romans than by the later. But true justice exists only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ, if we choose to call it a commonwealth too, since we cannot deny that it is the property of a people. But if this name, which is commonly used elsewhere and in other senses, is perhaps too far from our usual way of speaking, there is certainly true justice in that city of which holy Scripture says: “Glorious things are spoken of you, city of God.”

Chapter 22. That the gods of the Romans never took any care that the state should not perish through bad morals.

But as far as the present question is concerned, however praiseworthy they may say that state was or is, according to their most learned authors it had become the worst and most shameful long before the coming of Christ; indeed, it did not exist and had utterly perished through the most depraved morals. So that it might not perish, then, its guardian gods ought above all to have given precepts of life and morals to the people that worshipped them, by whom they were worshipped with so many temples, so many priests and kinds of sacrifices, such manifold and varied rites, so many festal solemnities, such crowded celebrations of so many great games; in all of which the demons did nothing but their own business, not caring how the people lived, but rather caring that they should live even depravedly, provided that, subject to them through fear, they performed all these things in their honor. Or if they did give them, let it be produced, shown, read: which laws of the gods given to that city did the Gracchi despise, so as to throw everything into confusion with seditions? Which did Marius and Cinna and Carbo despise, so as to go on even into civil wars undertaken for the most unjust causes, waged cruelly, and ended more cruelly still? Which, finally, did Sulla himself despise, at whose life, morals, and deeds, as Sallust and other historians describe them, who does not shudder? Who would not admit that that state perished then? Or perhaps, because of the morals of such citizens, they will dare to set against us, as they usually do in defense of their gods, that saying of Virgil: “All the gods by whom this empire had stood have departed, leaving their shrines and altars”? First, if this is so, they have no reason to complain of the Christian religion, that their gods were offended by it and deserted them, since their ancestors long ago by their morals drove away so many tiny gods, like flies, from the altars of the City. But where was this crowd of deities when, long before the ancient morals were corrupted, Rome was taken and burned by the Gauls? Perhaps they were present but asleep? For then, when the whole City had been brought into the enemy's power, only the Capitoline hill remained, and it too would have been taken had not at least the geese kept awake while the gods slept. Whence Rome nearly fell into the superstition of the Egyptians, who worship beasts and birds, when they celebrated a festival for the goose. But I am not yet discussing these external evils, which belong to the body rather than the mind and come either from enemies or from some other disaster. I am dealing now with the decay of morals, which, first gradually fading, then rushing headlong like a torrent, brought such ruin on the state, though its roofs and walls were intact, that their great authors do not hesitate to say that it was then lost. And the gods had rightly withdrawn, “all leaving their shrines and altars,” so that it might be lost, if the city had despised their precepts about a good life and justice. But now, I ask, what kind of gods were they, if they refused to live with the people that worshipped them, when they had not taught that people, living badly, to live well?

Chapter 23. That the changes of temporal things depend not on the favor or hostility of demons but on the judgment of the true God.

What of the fact that they even seem to have been present to fulfill men's desires, while they are shown not to have presided over restraining them? For it was they who helped Marius, a new man of low birth, the bloodiest instigator and conductor of civil wars, to become consul seven times and to die an old man in his seventh consulship, without falling into the hands of Sulla, who was soon to be victor. For if their gods did not help him to these things, it is no small admission that even without the favor of their gods such great temporal happiness, which they love too much, can come to a man; and that men such as Marius can be heaped with health, strength, wealth, honors, rank, and long life, and enjoy them, while the gods are angry; and that men such as Regulus can be tormented with captivity, slavery, want, sleeplessness, and pain, and die, while the gods are friendly. If they grant this, they admit in short that the gods are of no use and are worshipped to no purpose. For if they insisted rather that the people should learn what is contrary to virtues of the mind and uprightness of life, whose rewards are to be hoped for after death; if even in these passing and temporal goods they neither harm those they hate nor help those they love, why are they worshipped, why are they sought with such zeal to be worshipped? Why is there murmuring in hard and sad times, as if they had gone away offended, and why is the Christian religion wounded with most unworthy insults on their account? But if they have power in these matters either to benefit or to harm, why did they stand by the worst of men, Marius, and fail the best, Regulus? Or are they understood from this to be most unjust and wicked themselves? But if for that reason they are thought all the more to be feared and worshipped, let them not be thought so either; for Regulus is found to have worshipped them no less than Marius. Nor should the worst life seem worth choosing because the gods are thought to have favored Marius more than Regulus. For Metellus, the most praised of the Romans, who had five sons of consular rank, was fortunate even in temporal things, and Catiline, the worst of men, oppressed by poverty and laid low in the war of his own crime, was unfortunate; and the good who worship God, by whom alone it can be conferred, excel in the truest and surest happiness. So when that state was perishing through bad morals, their gods did nothing to direct or correct its morals so that it would not perish; rather they added to the depravity and corruption of its morals so that it would perish. And let them not pretend to be good, as if they had gone away offended by the wickedness of the citizens. They were certainly there; they are exposed, convicted; they could neither help by teaching nor hide by keeping silent. I pass over the fact that Marius was commended by the Minturnians, who took pity on him, to the goddess Marica in her grove, that she might prosper all things for him, and that, returning safe from the depths of despair, he led a cruel army, cruel himself, into the City; how bloody, how uncivil, and more savage than an enemy's his victory was there, let those who wish read those who have written of it. But this, as I said, I pass over; and I do not attribute the bloody good fortune of Marius to some Marica or other, but rather to the hidden providence of God, to shut the mouths of these people and free from error those who do not act from partisanship but consider these things prudently: that even if demons have some power in these matters, they have only as much as they are permitted by the secret decision of the Almighty; so that we may not set great value on earthly happiness, which is often granted even to the wicked, as it was to Marius, nor again think it evil, since we see that many godly and good worshippers of the one true God have excelled in it in spite of the demons; nor think that these most unclean spirits must be propitiated or feared for the sake of these earthly goods or evils, because, just as wicked men on earth cannot do everything they want, so neither can they, except as far as is allowed by the ordering of him whose judgments no one fully comprehends and no one justly finds fault with.