City of God 2.24–3.6

Chapter 24. On the deeds of Sulla, of which the demons boasted that they were the helpers.

Sulla himself, certainly, whose times were such that the earlier times, of which he seemed to be the avenger, were missed by comparison with them, when he first moved his camp against Marius toward the City, found the entrails so favorable as he sacrificed, as Livy writes, that the soothsayer Postumius asked to be kept in custody, ready to undergo capital punishment if Sulla did not accomplish, with the gods' help, what he had in mind. See, the gods had not “departed, leaving their shrines and altars,” when they were foretelling the outcome of events and cared nothing for correcting Sulla himself. By their presages they promised great good fortune, and did not break his evil desire by threats. Then, when he was in Asia waging the Mithridatic war, he was told by Jupiter through Lucius Titius that he would conquer Mithridates, and so it happened. And afterward, when he was preparing to return to the City and avenge the wrongs done to himself and his friends with the blood of citizens, he was told again by the same Jupiter, through a certain soldier of the sixth legion, that he had earlier foretold the victory over Mithridates and now promised to give him power to recover the state from his enemies, not without much bloodshed. Then Sulla asked what form had appeared to the soldier, and when he described it, Sulla recalled that it was the one he had heard of earlier from the man who had brought him the message from the same god about the Mithridatic victory. What answer can be given here as to why the gods took care to announce these things as if they were fortunate, and none of them took care to correct Sulla by warning him, when he was about to do such great evils with criminal civil arms as would not merely disfigure the state but destroy it altogether? Plainly the demons are understood, as I have often said, as is known to us from the sacred writings, and as the facts themselves sufficiently show, to be doing their own business: that they may be held and worshipped as gods, and that those things may be offered to them by which those who offer them are joined with them and have one evil case with them at the judgment of God. Then, when Sulla had come to Tarentum and sacrificed there, he saw on the head of a calf's liver the likeness of a golden crown. Then that soothsayer Postumius answered that it signified a glorious victory and ordered him to eat of those entrails alone. A little later the slave of a certain Lucius Pontius cried out, prophesying: “I come as a messenger from Bellona; the victory is yours, Sulla.” Then he added that the Capitol would burn. When he had said this, he at once left the camp, and returned the next day more excited, crying out that the Capitol had burned. And the Capitol had in fact burned. It was easy for a demon both to foresee this and to announce it very quickly. But notice this above all, which bears most on the case: under what kind of gods those people want to be who blaspheme the Savior who frees the wills of the faithful from the domination of demons. The man cried out, prophesying, “Victory is yours, Sulla,” and, so that he might be believed to cry it by a divine spirit, he also announced something both near at hand and soon done, from which the man through whom that spirit spoke was far away; yet he did not cry out, “Refrain from crimes, Sulla,” the crimes so horrible which he committed there as victor, he to whom a golden crown, the most brilliant sign of that very victory, appeared on a calf's liver. If just gods, and not ungodly demons, usually gave such signs, surely in those entrails they would rather have shown the wicked evils to come, gravely harmful to Sulla himself. For that victory did not profit his rank as much as it harmed his desire; by it he came, gaping after immoderate things and lifted up and thrown headlong by prosperity, to perish more himself in his morals than he destroyed his enemies in their bodies. These truly sad and truly lamentable things those gods did not foretell by entrails, by auguries, by anyone's dream or prophecy. For they feared more that he might be corrected than that he might be conquered. Rather, they did enough to make the glorious conqueror of his fellow citizens be conquered and taken captive by unspeakable vices, and through these subjected far more tightly to the demons themselves.

Chapter 25. How strongly the malign spirits incite men to shameful deeds when they interpose the seemingly divine authority of their own example for committing crimes.

From this, who does not understand, who does not see, unless he has chosen rather to imitate such gods than to be separated from their company by divine grace, how hard these malign spirits labor to supply crimes with a seemingly divine authority by their own example? For in a broad plain of Campania, where not long afterward the armies of the civil war clashed in a wicked battle, they themselves were first seen fighting one another. For huge crashes were first heard there, and soon many reported that for several days they had seen two armies fighting. When the fight stopped, they even found tracks, as of men and horses, such as could be imprinted by that conflict. If, then, the deities really fought among themselves, human civil wars are now excused; yet let the malice or misery of such gods be considered. But if they pretended to have fought, what else did they do but make it seem to the Romans that in fighting civil wars they committed no wickedness, as if following the example of the gods? For civil wars had already begun, and the execrable slaughter of some unspeakable battles had gone before. Many had already been moved by the story of a certain soldier who, while stripping the spoils from a man he had killed, recognized his brother when the corpse was stripped, and, cursing civil wars, killed himself on the spot and laid himself beside his brother's body. So that men would not be sickened at all by so great an evil, but the ardor of criminal arms might grow more and more, the harmful demons, whom these people thought gods and judged to be worshipped and venerated, chose to appear to men fighting among themselves, so that the affection of citizens would not shrink from imitating such battles, but rather human crime would be excused by divine example. By this cunning the malign spirits also ordered the stage plays, about which I have already said much, to be dedicated and consecrated to them, in which such shameful deeds of the gods were celebrated in theatrical songs and the acting of fables, so that both whoever believed they had done them and whoever did not believe it, but saw that they most gladly had such things exhibited to them, might imitate them without worry. So that no one might think that the poets had written insults against the gods rather than something worthy of them, wherever the poets recorded that the gods had fought among themselves, the gods themselves confirmed the poets' songs in order to deceive men, exhibiting their battles to human eyes not only through actors in the theater but also through themselves on the field. We have been compelled to say these things because their own authors did not hesitate to say and write that the Roman state had already been ruined by the worst morals of its citizens and that none remained before the coming of Jesus Christ our Lord. This ruin they do not blame on their gods, while they blame on our Christ the passing evils by which the good, whether they live or die, cannot perish; though our Christ so often gives so many precepts for the best morals against depraved morals, while their gods did nothing by any such precepts with the people that worshipped them for that state, so that it would not perish; rather, by corrupting those same morals with harmful authority, as it were by their own examples, they acted so that it would perish. No one, I think, will now dare to say that it perished then because “the gods all departed, leaving their shrines and altars,” as friends of virtue offended by men's vices; for by so many signs from entrails, auguries, and prophecies, by which they were eager to boast and commend themselves as foreknowing the future and helping in battles, they are proved to have been present. If they had really gone away, the Romans would have been fired into civil wars more mildly by their own desires than they were by the instigations of these gods.

Chapter 26. On the secret admonitions of the demons that concerned good morals, while all wickedness was openly learned in their rites.

Since this is so, since foul deeds mixed with cruelties, reproaches and crimes of the deities, whether revealed or invented, were plainly and openly consecrated and dedicated to them, even at fixed and appointed festivals, at their own demand and with their anger if it was not done, and came forth to be seen by the eyes of all as if set before them for imitation, why is it that these same demons, who confess themselves unclean spirits by such pleasures, who by their shameful deeds and crimes, whether disclosed or feigned, and by the celebration of them which they sought from the shameless and extorted from the modest, testify that they are the authors of a wicked and unclean life, are nevertheless said to give certain good precepts about morals in their sanctuaries and secret inner rooms to some select initiates of theirs? If this is so, the malice of the harmful spirits must be noted and convicted as all the craftier for it. For so great is the power of uprightness and chastity that all, or nearly all, human nature is moved by its praise, and is not so vicious in its foulness as to have lost all sense of decency. So the malignity of the demons does not accomplish its business of deception unless somewhere it transforms itself, as we know it is written in our Scriptures, into angels of light. Outside, then, unclean ungodliness resounds around the peoples with loud clamor, and inside a feigned chastity barely sounds for a few; the shameful is offered in the open and the praiseworthy in secret; decency hides and indecency is displayed; the evil that is done calls all to watch, the good that is spoken scarcely finds any hearers, as if honorable things were to be blushed at and dishonorable things gloried in. But where except in the temples of demons? Where except in the lodgings of deceit? For the one is done to catch the more honorable, who are few; the other so that the many, who are most foul, may not be corrected. Where and when the initiates of Caelestis heard precepts of chastity we do not know; but before the very temple, where we saw that image placed, all of us, flowing together from every side and standing wherever each could, watched most intently the plays that were being acted, looking now at the procession of harlots, now at the virgin goddess; her we saw suppliantly adored, before her foul things were celebrated. We saw no bashful mimes there, no more modest actress; every service of obscenity was performed. It was known what pleased the virgin deity, and there was exhibited what a matron would carry home from the temple better instructed. Some of the more modest women turned their faces away from the impure movements of the actors and learned the art of shamefulness with stealthy attention. For they were ashamed before men, and did not dare to look at the immodest gestures with free eyes; but much less did they dare to condemn with a chaste heart the rites of the goddess they worshipped. Yet what was offered to be learned openly in the temple was what, to commit it, at least privacy was sought at home; while the modesty of mortals, if there was any there, wondered greatly that men did not commit freely the shameful deeds of humans which they learned religiously from the gods, gods who would be angry if they did not also take care to exhibit them. For what other spirit, stirring the most wicked minds by a hidden impulse, both urges adulteries to be done and feeds on them when done, except the one who is also delighted by such rites, setting up images of demons in the temples, loving images of vices in the plays, whispering words of justice in secret to deceive even the few good, and multiplying invitations to wickedness in the open to possess the countless wicked?

Chapter 27. With what overthrow of public discipline the Romans consecrated the obscenities of the games to appeasing their gods.

Tullius, a serious man and something of a philosopher, when about to become aedile, cries out in the ears of the city that among the other duties of his office he must appease Mother Flora with the celebration of games; and those games are usually celebrated the more devoutly the more foully. He says elsewhere, when already consul, in the extreme dangers of the city, that games were held for ten days and nothing was left undone that pertained to appeasing the gods; as if it were not better to provoke such gods by temperance than to appease them by debauchery, and to rouse them even to enmity by decency than to soothe them with such foulness. For the men against whom they were being appeased would not have done more grievous harm by any savagery, however cruel, than the gods themselves did when they were appeased by the foulest vice. Since, to avert what was feared from the enemy in bodies, the gods were won over in a way by which virtue was defeated in minds; they would not be set as defenders against the attackers of the walls unless they first became the conquerors of good morals. This appeasement of such deities, most wanton, most impure, most shameless, most wicked, most unclean, whose performers the praiseworthy character of Roman virtue deprived of honor, removed from their tribe, recognized as foul, made infamous: this, I say, shameful appeasement of such deities, to be shunned and detested by true religion, these alluring and criminal fables about the gods, these ignominious deeds of the gods, either done wickedly and foully or invented more wickedly and foully, the whole city learned with public eyes and ears; it saw that these things when done pleased the deities, and so believed they were not only to be exhibited to them but also imitated by itself; not that something or other supposedly good and honorable which was said to so few and so secretly (if indeed it was said at all) that it was feared more that it might become known than that it might not be done.

Chapter 28. On the wholesomeness of the Christian religion.

That men are being rescued through the name of Christ from the hellish yoke and penal fellowship of these most unclean powers, and are being brought from that night of most pernicious ungodliness into the light of most wholesome godliness, is what the unjust and ungrateful complain and murmur about, being possessed more deeply and tightly by that wicked spirit; because the peoples flock to church in chaste assembly, with an honorable separation of the two sexes, where they may hear how well they ought to live here for a time so as to be worthy to live happily and forever after this life; where, as holy Scripture and the teaching of righteousness sound out from a higher place in the sight of all, both those who do it hear to their reward and those who do not hear to their judgment. Even if some mockers of such precepts come there, all their wantonness is either laid aside by a sudden change or restrained by fear or shame. For nothing foul or shameful is set before them to watch and imitate where the precepts of the true God are instilled, or his miracles told, or his gifts praised, or his benefits asked for.

Chapter 29. An exhortation to the Romans to cast off the worship of the gods.

Desire these things rather, O praiseworthy Roman character, O offspring of the Reguli, Scaevolae, Scipios, and Fabricii; desire these things rather; distinguish these from that most foul vanity and most deceitful malignity of the demons. If anything praiseworthy stands out in you by nature, it is purified and perfected only by true godliness, but it is destroyed and punished by ungodliness. Now choose what to follow, so that you may be praised without any error, not in yourself but in the true God. For then you had popular glory, but by the hidden judgment of divine providence you lacked the true religion to choose. Wake up, it is day, as you have awoken in some, in whose perfect virtue, and in whose sufferings too for the true faith, we glory; who, fighting everywhere against the most hostile powers and conquering them by dying bravely, “won this homeland for us with their blood.” To this homeland we invite and exhort you, that you may be added to the number of its citizens, whose sanctuary, in a way, is the true remission of sins. Do not listen to your degenerate offspring who disparage Christ or Christians and accuse them as if the times were bad, when they seek times in which life is not quiet but wickedness secure. Such things never pleased you even for your earthly homeland. Now seize the heavenly one, for which you will labor very little, and in which you will reign truly and forever. For there, not the Vestal hearth, not the Capitoline stone, but the one true God “sets no bounds to your affairs nor times; he will give empire without end.” Do not seek false and deceitful gods; rather cast them off and despise them, springing forth into true liberty. They are not gods; they are malign spirits, to whom your eternal happiness is a punishment. Juno does not seem to have begrudged the Trojans, from whom you draw your fleshly origin, the Roman citadels as much as these demons, whom you still think gods, begrudge the whole human race its everlasting seats. And you yourself have judged such spirits in no small measure, when you appeased them with games and yet willed the men through whom you put on those games to be infamous. Allow your liberty to be asserted against the unclean spirits who had laid on your necks the duty of consecrating and celebrating their own disgrace. You have removed the performers of divine crimes from your honors; pray to the true God to remove from you those gods who delight in their crimes, whether true, which is most disgraceful, or false, which is most malicious. It is well that of your own accord you refused to open the fellowship of the city to actors and players; awake more fully! The divine majesty is in no way appeased by arts by which human dignity is defiled. How then can you think that gods who delight in such services are to be counted among the holy heavenly powers, when you did not think the men through whom those same services are performed should be counted among Roman citizens of any kind? Incomparably more glorious is the city above, where victory is truth, where dignity is holiness, where peace is happiness, where life is eternity. Much less does it have such gods in its fellowship, if you blushed to have such men in yours. So if you desire to reach the blessed city, avoid the fellowship of demons. Those who are appeased through the disgraceful are unworthily worshipped by the honorable. Let these, then, be removed from your godliness by Christian purification, just as those were removed from your dignity by the censor's mark. As for the fleshly goods which alone the wicked wish to enjoy, and the fleshly evils which alone they refuse to suffer, that these demons do not have the power over them that they are thought to have (though if they had it, we ought rather to despise even these things than worship them for these things' sake, and by worshipping them be unable to reach the things they begrudge us), that even in these they do not have the power these people think, who argue that they must be worshipped for such things, we shall see next; so let this be the limit of this book.

Chapter 1. On the adversities which alone the wicked fear, and which the world always suffered while it worshipped the gods.

I think enough has now been said about the evils of morals and minds, which above all must be guarded against: that the false gods took no care to help the people that worshipped them so as to keep it from being crushed under the heap of those evils, but rather acted so that it would be crushed as much as possible. Now I see that I must speak of those evils which alone these people refuse to suffer, such as famine, disease, war, plunder, captivity, slaughter, and anything similar, which we have already mentioned in the first book. For the wicked count only those things as evils which do not make men evil; and they do not blush, among the good things they praise, to be evil themselves who praise them, and they are more annoyed if they have a bad villa than a bad life, as if this were man's greatest good: to have all things good except himself. But not even such evils, which alone these people dread, did their gods prevent from befalling them when they were freely worshipped by them. For when, at various times and places before the coming of our Redeemer, the human race was being crushed by countless disasters, some of them even incredible, what gods did the world worship other than these, except the one Hebrew people and certain persons outside that people, wherever they were found worthy of divine grace by the most hidden and most just judgment of God? But not to be too long, I will keep silent about the very grievous evils of other nations everywhere; I will speak only of what concerns Rome and the Roman empire, that is, the city proper and whatever lands were joined to it by alliance or subjected to it by conquest, what they suffered before the coming of Christ, when they already belonged, as it were, to the body of its state.

Chapter 2. Whether the gods, who were worshipped alike by the Romans and the Greeks, had reasons for allowing Ilium to be destroyed.

First, Troy itself, or Ilium, from which the Roman people originates (for what I touched on in the first book must not be passed over or disguised), why was it conquered, taken, and destroyed by the Greeks, when it had and worshipped the same gods? “Priam,” they say, “was paid back for his father Laomedon's perjuries.” Is it true, then, that Apollo and Neptune served that same Laomedon as hired workmen? For he is said to have promised them wages and sworn falsely. I am surprised that Apollo, famous as a diviner, labored at so great a work without knowing that Laomedon would refuse what he had promised. Though it did not befit Neptune himself either, his uncle, Jupiter's brother, king of the sea, to be ignorant of the future. For Homer, who is said to have lived before Rome was founded, brings him on predicting something great about the stock of Aeneas, from whose descendants Rome came; and he even snatched Aeneas away in a cloud, as the poet says, so that he would not be killed by Achilles, although, as he admits in Virgil, he desired to overturn from their foundations “the walls of perjured Troy, built by his own hands.” So these great gods, Neptune and Apollo, not knowing that Laomedon would refuse them their wages, were builders of the Trojan walls for nothing and for the ungrateful. Let them see whether it is not worse to believe in such gods than to perjure oneself to such gods. Homer himself did not easily believe it, since he makes Neptune fight against the Trojans but Apollo for them, though the fable relates that both were offended by that perjury. If, then, they believe the fables, let them blush to worship such deities; if they do not believe the fables, let them not plead the Trojan perjuries, or else let them wonder that the gods punished Trojan perjuries and loved Roman ones. For how did the conspiracy of Catiline, in so great and so corrupt a city, find such a large supply of men whom hand and tongue kept alive by perjury or civil bloodshed? What else were the senators doing, so often bribed in trials, and the people so often in elections or in any cases that were dealt with before them in assemblies, but sinning also by perjury? For amid the most corrupt morals the ancient custom of swearing was kept for this purpose: not that men might be restrained from crimes by religious fear, but that perjuries might be added to their other crimes.

Chapter 3. That the gods could not have been offended by the adultery of Paris, since it is reported to have been common among themselves.

There is no reason, then, why the gods by whom, they say, that empire had stood should be pretended to be angry with the perjured Trojans when they are proved to have been conquered by the stronger Greeks. Nor, as others again defend them, were they angry at Paris's adultery so as to desert Troy. For they are accustomed to be the authors and teachers of sins, not their avengers. “The city of Rome,” says Sallust, “as I have learned, was founded and at first inhabited by Trojans, who, fleeing under Aeneas's leadership, wandered without fixed homes.” If, then, the deities thought Paris's adultery must be avenged, it ought to have been punished rather in the Romans, or at least in the Romans too, because Aeneas's mother did it. But how could they hate that crime in him, when they did not hate in their companion Venus (to pass over other things) what she had committed with Anchises, by whom she bore Aeneas? Was it because the one was done while Menelaus was indignant, the other while Vulcan consented? For the gods, I suppose, are not so jealous of their wives as not to deign to share them even with men. Perhaps I am thought to be mocking fables and not treating seriously a cause of such weight. Then let us not believe, if you please, that Aeneas is the son of Venus: see, I grant it, provided that Romulus is not the son of Mars either. But if the one, why not the other? Or is it lawful for gods to mix with human women, but unlawful for male humans to mix with goddesses? A hard, or rather an incredible, condition, that what was allowed to Mars by the law of Venus in intercourse should not be allowed to Venus herself by her own law. But both have been confirmed by Roman authority. For the later Caesar believed no less that Venus was his ancestress than the earlier Romulus believed that Mars was his father.

Chapter 4. On Varro's opinion, in which he said that it is useful for men to pretend to be sons of gods.

Someone may say: Do you really believe these things? No, I do not believe them. For even their most learned man, Varro, almost admits that they are false, though not boldly or confidently. But he says it is useful to states for brave men to believe that they are sons of gods, even if it is false, so that in this way the human mind, bearing the confidence of a divine lineage, may undertake great enterprises more boldly, carry them out more vigorously, and through that very assurance accomplish them more successfully. You see how wide a field this opinion of Varro, expressed as well as I could in my own words, opens to falsehood; from it we may understand that many more sacred and supposedly religious things could have been invented, where lies even about the gods themselves were thought to benefit the citizens.

Chapter 5. That it is not proved that the gods punished the adultery of Paris, since they did not avenge it in the mother of Romulus.

But whether Venus could bear Aeneas from intercourse with Anchises, or Mars beget Romulus from intercourse with Numitor's daughter, let us leave undecided. For almost such a question arises also from our Scriptures, where it is asked whether the transgressing angels lay with the daughters of men, from whom giants, that is, exceedingly large and strong men, were born, with whom the earth was then filled. So for now let our argument refer to both possibilities. For if what is read among them about Aeneas's mother and Romulus's father is true, how can the adulteries of men displease the gods, when they bear them among themselves in harmony? But if it is false, not even so can they be angry at real human adulteries, when they delight even in false ones of their own. Add to this that, if the story about Mars is not believed, so that the one about Venus may not be believed either, the case of Romulus's mother is defended by no pretext of divine intercourse. And she was a Vestal priestess, so the gods ought rather to have avenged that sacrilegious crime on the Romans than Paris's adultery on the Trojans. For the ancient Romans themselves even buried alive priestesses of Vesta detected in unchastity, while adulterous women, though they punished them with some penalty, they punished with no death: so much more severely did they avenge what they thought divine sanctuaries than human marriage beds.

Chapter 6. On the fratricide of Romulus, which the gods did not avenge.

I add another point: if the sins of men displeased those deities, so that, offended by Paris's deed, they deserted Troy and gave it up to sword and fire, the murder of Romulus's brother would have moved them against the Romans more than the deceiving of a Greek husband against the Trojans; the fratricide of a city being born would have provoked them more than the adultery of a city reigning. Nor does it matter for the case we are now arguing whether Romulus ordered it or did it himself, which many deny from shamelessness, many doubt from shame, many disguise from grief. So we will not delay by investigating this more carefully, weighing the testimonies of many writers: it is certain that Romulus's brother was killed openly, not by enemies, not by strangers. If Romulus either committed or ordered it, he was the head of the Romans more than Paris was of the Trojans. Why then did the one, the abductor of another man's wife, provoke the anger of the gods against the Trojans, and the other, the killer of his own brother, invite the protection of the same gods for the Romans? But if that crime had nothing to do with Romulus's deed or command, then, since it certainly ought to have been avenged, the whole city committed it, because the whole city disregarded it; and it killed not a brother but, what is worse, a father. For both were founders, since one, removed by a crime, was not allowed to be a ruler. There is nothing to be said, I think, about what evil Troy deserved that the gods should desert it so that it could be destroyed, or what good Rome deserved that the gods should dwell in it so that it could grow; except that, having been conquered, they fled from there and betook themselves to these people, to deceive them likewise; or rather they stayed there too to deceive in their usual way those who again inhabited those lands, and here, practicing the same arts of their deceit even more, they gloried in greater honors.