City of God 3.7–3.15

Chapter 7. On the overthrow of Ilium, which Fimbria, the general of Marius, destroyed.

For surely, when the civil wars were already breaking out, what wretched thing had Ilium done that it should be overthrown by Fimbria, a most wicked man of the Marian party, far more fiercely and cruelly than once by the Greeks? For then many fled from it, and many who were taken captive at least lived in slavery; but Fimbria first published an edict that no one should be spared, and burned the whole city and all the people in it. This is what Ilium received, not from the Greeks, whom it had provoked by its own iniquity, but from the Romans, whom it had propagated by its own calamity, while those common gods did nothing to help ward these things off, or, which is the truth, could do nothing. Did then too “all the gods depart, leaving their shrines and altars,” the gods by whom that town had stood after it was rebuilt from the ancient fires and ruins of the Greeks? But if they had departed, I ask the reason; and the better I find the townspeople's cause, the worse I find the gods'. For the townspeople had shut their gates against Fimbria to preserve the city intact for Sulla; for this he burned them in his anger, or rather utterly destroyed them. Sulla was at that time still the leader of the better side in the civil strife, still trying to recover the state by arms; he had not yet had the evil outcomes of these good beginnings. What better, then, could the citizens of that city have done, what more honorable, more loyal, more worthy of their Roman kinship, than to preserve their city for the better cause of the Romans and shut their gates against a parricide of the Roman state? But let the defenders of the gods consider into what destruction this turned for them. Suppose the gods deserted adulterers and left Ilium to the flames of the Greeks, so that a chaster Rome might be born from its ashes; why did they afterwards desert the same city, kin to the Romans, not rebelling against Rome its noble daughter, but keeping most constant and dutiful faith with its juster party, and leave it to be destroyed, not by the brave men of the Greeks, but by the foulest man of the Romans? Or if the cause of Sulla's party displeased the gods, for which the wretched people shut their gates to preserve the city, why did they promise and foretell such great good things to that same Sulla? Are they not here too recognized as flatterers of the fortunate rather than defenders of the unfortunate? So Ilium was not overthrown even then because they deserted it. For the demons, always most watchful to deceive, did what they could. For when all the images had been overthrown and burned together with the town, only that of Minerva, as Livy writes, is said to have stood intact amid such great ruin of her temple; not that it might be said to their praise, “Gods of our fathers, under whose divinity Troy ever stands,” but that it might not be said in their defense, “All the gods have departed, leaving their shrines and altars.” For they were permitted to do this, not to prove them powerful, but to convict them of being present.

Chapter 8. Whether Rome ought to have been entrusted to the gods of Ilium.

With what prudence, then, after the evidence of Troy itself, was Rome entrusted to the gods of Ilium for safekeeping? Someone may say that they had already become accustomed to living in Rome when Ilium fell to Fimbria's assault. Then how did the image of Minerva stand? Further, if they were at Rome when Fimbria destroyed Ilium, perhaps they were at Ilium when Rome itself was taken and burned by the Gauls; but, since they have very sharp hearing and very swift movement, they quickly returned at the voice of the goose, to protect at least the Capitoline hill, which had held out; but they were warned too late to return to defend the rest.

Chapter 9. Whether it is to be believed that the gods gave that peace which existed in the reign of Numa.

These gods are also believed to have helped Numa Pompilius, the successor of Romulus, to have peace throughout the whole time of his reign and to shut the gates of Janus, which are usually open in wars, because, of course, he established many sacred rites for the Romans. That man would indeed have been fortunate in so much leisure if only he had known how to spend it on wholesome things and, neglecting a most pernicious curiosity, to seek the true God with true godliness. As it was, the gods did not give him that leisure; but perhaps they would have deceived him less if they had not found him at leisure. For the less occupied they found him, the more they occupied him themselves. For what he undertook, and by what arts he was able to associate such gods with himself or with that city, Varro reveals; this will be discussed more carefully in its place, if it pleases the Lord. Now, since the question is about their benefits: peace is a great benefit, but it is the benefit of the true God, often bestowed, like the sun, like rain, and other aids of life, even on the ungrateful and worthless. But if those gods conferred so great a good on Rome or on Pompilius, why did they never afterwards grant it to the Roman empire, even in those praiseworthy times? Were the rites more useful when they were being established than when, once established, they were celebrated? Yet then they did not yet exist, but were being added so that they might exist; afterwards they did exist and were kept so that they might be of use. Why, then, were those forty-three, or as others would have it, thirty-nine years passed in such long peace in Numa's reign, and afterwards, when the rites had been established and the gods themselves, who had been invited by those rites, were already its protectors and guardians, scarcely one year after so many years from the founding of the City to Augustus is recorded, as a great wonder, after the first Punic war, in which the Romans were able to shut the gates of war?

Chapter 10. Whether it was desirable that the Roman empire should be increased by such fury of wars, when it could have been both quiet and safe by the policy followed under Numa.

Or do they answer that unless by constant wars following one another continuously the Roman empire could not have been enlarged so far and wide and spread abroad with such great glory? A fine reason indeed! Why should the empire have to be restless in order to be great? In human bodies, is it not better to have a moderate stature with health than to reach some giant bulk with perpetual afflictions, and not to rest once you have reached it, but to be troubled by greater evils the bigger your limbs? And what evil would there have been, rather than very great good, if those times had lasted which Sallust touched on when he says: “So at first the kings (for that was the first name of power on earth) differed: some exercised the mind, others the body; even then the life of men was passed without greed; each was well content with his own”? Or in order that the empire might be so greatly increased, had there to come what Virgil detests when he says: “Until little by little a worse and discolored age, and the madness of war and the love of gain, succeeded”? But clearly the Romans have a just defense for undertaking and waging so many wars, since what compelled them to resist enemies rushing upon them unprovoked was not greed for acquiring human praise but the necessity of protecting safety and liberty. Let it be so, clearly. For, as Sallust himself writes, “after their state, enlarged by laws, morals, and lands, seemed prosperous enough and powerful enough, as most human things go, envy arose from wealth. So neighboring kings and peoples tested them in war; few of their friends were of help, for the rest, struck with fear, kept away from dangers. But the Romans, intent at home and in the field, made haste, prepared, urged one another on, went to meet the enemy, protected liberty, country, and parents with arms. Afterwards, when they had driven off the dangers by courage, they brought help to allies and friends and gained friendships more by giving benefits than by receiving them.” By these arts Rome grew honorably. But in Numa's reign, so that the peace was so long, did wicked neighbors rush upon them and test them by war, or did nothing of the kind happen, so that that peace could last? For if even then Rome was provoked by wars and arms were not met with arms, then the means by which it was brought about that the enemies were quieted without being overcome in any battle or terrified by any warlike attack should always have been used, and Rome should always have reigned in peace with the gates of Janus shut. But if this was not in their power, then Rome did not have peace as long as their gods willed, but as long as the neighboring men all around willed, who provoked it with no war; unless perhaps such gods will dare to sell to one man what another man willed or did not will. It does matter, indeed, how far these demons are allowed to terrify or excite evil minds, already evil by their own fault; but if they could always do this, and nothing else were often done otherwise, against their efforts, by a more hidden and higher power, they would always have in their power peace and victories in war, which almost always come about through the movements of human minds; yet that these very often happen against their will is admitted not only by the fables, which tell many lies and scarcely indicate or signify anything true, but even by Roman history itself.

Chapter 11. On the statue of Cumaean Apollo, whose weeping was believed to have foretold the defeat of the Greeks, whom he could not help.

For it was for no other reason that the famous Apollo of Cumae, when war was being waged against the Achaeans and King Aristonicus, was reported to have wept for four days. The soothsayers, terrified by this portent, thought the statue should be thrown into the sea; but the old men of Cumae intervened and reported that such a portent had appeared in the same image in the war against Antiochus and against Perseus, and testified that, because it had turned out well for the Romans, gifts had been sent by decree of the senate to their Apollo. Then soothsayers summoned as more expert answered that the weeping of Apollo's statue was favorable to the Romans because Cumae was a Greek colony, and Apollo by weeping signified mourning and disaster for his own lands, from which he had been brought, that is, Greece itself. Soon afterwards it was reported that King Aristonicus had been conquered and captured, whom Apollo certainly did not want to be conquered, grieved over, and showed it even by the tears of his stone. Hence it is not altogether inappropriate that the ways of demons are described in the poems of the poets, fabulous though they are, yet close to the truth. For in Virgil, Diana grieved for Camilla, and Hercules wept for Pallas when he was about to die. Hence perhaps Numa Pompilius too, abounding in peace but not knowing or asking by whose gift, when he considered at leisure to what gods he should commit the safety and kingdom of Rome to be protected, not supposing that the true, almighty, and supreme God cared for these earthly things, and recalling that the Trojan gods whom Aeneas had brought had not been able to preserve for long either the Trojan kingdom or the Lavinian kingdom founded by Aeneas himself, thought that others must be provided, to be added to those earlier ones (who had either already moved to Rome with Romulus or would move at some time when Alba was overthrown), either as guards for fugitives or as helpers for the weak.

Chapter 12. How many gods the Romans added to themselves beyond those established by Numa, whose great number did not help them at all.

Yet Rome did not deign to be content with these rites, many as Pompilius had established there. For it did not yet have the chief temple of Jupiter himself; it was King Tarquin who built the Capitol there. And Aesculapius canvassed his way from Epidaurus to Rome, so that as a most skilled physician he might practice his art more gloriously in a most noble city; the Mother of the gods too came from Pessinus, from I know not where. For it was unworthy that, when her son already presided over the Capitoline hill, she herself should still lie hidden in an undistinguished place. Yet if she is the mother of all the gods, she not only followed some of her sons to Rome, but also went ahead of others who were still to follow. I would indeed be surprised if she gave birth to the Dog-headed one, who came from Egypt long afterwards. Whether the goddess Fever was also born of her, let Aesculapius, her great-grandson, see to it; but wherever she was born, the foreign gods will not, I think, dare to call a goddess who is a Roman citizen low-born. Under the protection of so many gods (who can count them, native and foreign, heavenly, earthly, and infernal, of the sea, the springs, and the rivers, and, as Varro says, certain and uncertain, and in every kind of gods, as among animals, males and females?), under the protection, then, of so many gods, Rome ought not to have been shaken and afflicted by such great and horrible disasters as those, a few out of many, that I shall recall. For with its great smoke, as if a signal had been given, it had gathered too many gods to defend it, and by establishing and providing temples, altars, sacrifices, and priests for them, it offended the supreme true God, to whom alone these things are rightly due. And it lived more happily with fewer; but the greater it became, the more gods it thought it must employ, as a ship needs more sailors; despairing, I suppose, that those fewer gods, under whom it had lived better in comparison with its worse life later, would be enough to help its greatness. For first, under the kings themselves, apart from Numa Pompilius, of whom I have already spoken above, how great an evil was the quarrelsome strife that led to the killing of Romulus's brother!

Chapter 13. By what right and by what agreement the Romans obtained their first wives.

How was it that neither Juno, who with her Jupiter was already cherishing “the Romans, lords of the world, the toga-clad race,” nor Venus herself could help her descendants of Aeneas to obtain wives in a good and fair way, and that the disaster of this want fell on them so heavily that they seized wives by trickery and were soon compelled to fight their fathers-in-law, so that the wretched women, not yet reconciled to their husbands after the wrong done them, were now dowered with their parents' blood? But, they say, the Romans conquered their neighbors in this conflict. At the cost of how many and how great wounds and deaths on both sides, among such near relatives and neighbors, were those victories won! Because of one father-in-law, Caesar, and his one son-in-law, Pompey, when Caesar's daughter, Pompey's wife, was already dead, with what great and just impulse of grief Lucan cries out: “Of wars worse than civil across the Emathian plains, and of right given to crime, we sing.” So the Romans conquered, so that with hands bloody from the slaughter of their fathers-in-law they might wring pitiful embraces from their daughters, while the women did not dare to weep for their slain fathers lest they offend their victorious husbands, and while the fighting was still going on did not know for whom to make their vows. It was not Venus but Bellona who gave the Roman people such marriages; or perhaps that infernal fury Allecto, with Juno now favoring them, had more license against them than when she was roused by Juno's prayers against Aeneas. Andromache was more happily taken captive than those Roman brides were married. Though as a slave, yet after her embraces Pyrrhus killed none of the Trojans; but the Romans were killing in battle the fathers-in-law whose daughters they were already embracing in their bedrooms. She, subject to the victor, could only grieve the death of her own people, not fear it; they, joined to the combatants, feared the deaths of their parents when their husbands went out and grieved them when they came back, having neither their fear nor their grief free. For at the death of fellow citizens, relatives, brothers, and parents they were either dutifully tormented or cruelly glad at their husbands' victories. Add to this that, as wars go back and forth, some lost their husbands by their parents' sword, some lost both parents and husbands by the swords of both. For among the Romans too those dangers were not small, since it even came to a siege of the city, and they defended themselves behind shut gates; and when these were opened by treachery and the enemy let within the walls, a wicked and most atrocious battle was fought between sons-in-law and fathers-in-law in the very forum, and those abductors were even being beaten, and, fleeing often among their houses, they defiled more grievously their earlier victories, though these too were shameful and lamentable. Here, however, Romulus, despairing now of his men's courage, prayed to Jupiter that they might stand firm, and on this occasion Jupiter gained the name of Stator; nor would there have been an end to so great an evil had not those seized women rushed out with torn hair and, throwing themselves before their parents, calmed their most just anger not with victorious arms but with suppliant devotion. Then Romulus, who could not bear a brother as partner, was compelled to endure Tatius, king of the Sabines, as partner in the kingship; but how long would he tolerate him, who could not bear his twin brother? So he too was killed, and Romulus, in order to be a greater god, held the kingdom alone. What are these rights of marriage, these incitements to war, these bonds of brotherhood, kinship, alliance, and divinity? What, finally, is this life of the city under so many guardian gods? You see how much, and how many things, could be said on this, if our purpose were not attending to what remains and our discourse hastening on to other things.

Chapter 14. On the ungodliness of the war the Romans waged on the Albans, and on the victory gained through the lust for domination.

What, then, after Numa, under the other kings? With what great evil, not only to themselves but also to the Romans, were the Albans provoked to war, because, of course, Numa's peace, so long, had come to seem cheap! How frequent were the slaughters of the Roman and Alban armies, and the wearing down of both cities! For that Alba which Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, founded, Rome's own mother, closer than Troy, was provoked by King Tullus Hostilius and fought; and fighting, it was both afflicted and afflicted others, until they grew weary of many battles with equal losses. Then they decided to try the outcome of the war through triplet brothers on each side: from the Romans came forward the three Horatii, from the Albans the three Curiatii; two of the Horatii were overcome and killed by the three Curiatii, and the three Curiatii by one Horatius. So Rome emerged the victor, with such loss even in that final contest that of six only one returned home. For whom was the loss on both sides, for whom the mourning, if not for the stock of Aeneas, the descendants of Ascanius, the offspring of Venus, the grandsons of Jupiter? For this too was a war worse than civil, when a daughter city fought with its mother city. Another atrocious and horrible evil was added to this last fight of the triplets. For since the two peoples had previously been friends (being neighbors and relatives), the sister of the Horatii had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii; when she saw her betrothed's spoils on her victorious brother, she was killed by that same brother because she wept. The feeling of this one woman seems to me to have been more humane than that of the whole Roman people. She wept for the man she already held by pledged faith, or perhaps grieved for her very brother, who had killed the man to whom he had promised his sister; I think she did not weep culpably. Why else does the dutiful Aeneas in Virgil grieve praiseworthily for an enemy killed even by his own hand? Why did Marcellus, recalling the city of Syracuse, and reflecting on the common human lot, that its height and glory had so suddenly collapsed under his hands, pity it with tears? Let us ask of human feeling, I beg, that a woman might weep without crime for her betrothed killed by her brother, if men wept, even with praise, for enemies conquered by themselves. So while that woman was weeping for the death inflicted on her betrothed by her brother, Rome was rejoicing that it had waged war with such slaughter against its mother city and conquered with such shedding of kindred blood on both sides. Why do they hold out to me the name of praise and the name of victory? Remove the veils of mad opinion, and let the deeds be seen naked, weighed naked, judged naked. Let the charge against Alba be stated, as adultery was stated against Troy. None such is found, nothing like it; only that Tullus might “rouse to arms idle men, and ranks now unused to triumphs.” So by that vice such a crime of war against allies and kin was committed, the vice that Sallust touches on in passing as a great one. For when he had briefly recalled, in praise, the more ancient times, when “the life of men was passed without greed and each was well content with his own,” he says: “But after Cyrus in Asia, and the Spartans and Athenians in Greece, began to subdue cities and nations, to hold the lust for domination a cause of war, to think the greatest glory lay in the greatest empire,” and the rest that he had set out to say. For me it is enough to have quoted his words this far. This lust for domination troubles and crushes the human race with great evils. Conquered by this lust, Rome then triumphed at having conquered Alba, and called the praise of its crime glory; for, says our Scripture, “the sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, and he who does iniquity is blessed.” So let deceitful coverings and deceptive whitewash be removed from things, so that they may be examined by a sincere test. Let no one say to me: That man is great, and that one, because he fought with this one and conquered. Gladiators fight too, they conquer too; that cruelty too has its rewards of praise; but I think it better to pay the penalties of any idleness than to seek the glory of those arms. And yet if gladiators came into the arena to fight each other, one of whom was the son and the other the father, who would bear such a spectacle? Who would not stop it? How then could a contest of arms between a mother city and a daughter city be glorious? Or was it different because that was not the arena, and wider fields were filled with the corpses, not of two gladiators, but of many among two peoples, and those contests were not enclosed by an amphitheater, but an ungodly spectacle was offered to the whole world, both to those then living and to posterity, as far as this report extends? Yet those gods, the protectors of the Roman empire and spectators of such contests like theatergoers, suffered violence to their enthusiasm until the sister of the Horatii, on account of the three slain Curiatii, was added herself, by a brother's sword, as a third on the other side to the two brothers, so that Rome, which had conquered, might not have fewer deaths either. Then, as the fruit of victory, Alba was overthrown, where, after Ilium, which the Greeks overthrew, and after Lavinium, where Aeneas had established a foreign and fugitive kingdom, those Trojan deities had lived in the third place. But in their usual way they had perhaps already moved from there too, and so it was destroyed. “All the gods by whom that empire had stood had departed, leaving their shrines and altars.” They had departed, see, for the third time now, so that Rome might most providently be entrusted to them as the fourth. For Alba too had displeased them, where Amulius reigned after expelling his brother, and Rome had pleased them, where Romulus reigned after killing his brother. But, they say, before Alba was destroyed, its people was transferred to Rome, so that one city might be made of both. Granted, let it have been so; yet that city, the kingdom of Ascanius and the third dwelling of the Trojan gods, the mother, was overthrown by the daughter city; and for the remnants of war to make one people out of two, much blood of both, shed beforehand, was a pitiful binding. Why should I now tell one by one how under the other kings the same wars were so often renewed, which seemed ended by victories, and finished again and again with such slaughter, and taken up again and again after treaty and peace between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law and their stock and descendants? It was no small sign of this calamity that none of them shut the gates of war. None of them, then, reigned in peace under so many protecting gods.

Chapter 15. What the life and end of the Roman kings were like.

And what were the ends of the kings themselves? As for Romulus, let fabulous flattery see to it, by which he is said to have been received into heaven; let some of their writers see to it, who said that he was torn to pieces by the senate because of his ferocity, and that a certain Julius Proculus was suborned to say that Romulus had appeared to him and commanded through him that the Roman people should worship him among the deities, and that in this way the people, who had begun to swell with anger against the senate, was checked and calmed. For an eclipse of the sun had also occurred, which the ignorant multitude, not knowing that it was brought about by the fixed law of the sun's course, attributed to Romulus's merits. As if, had it been the sun's mourning, it ought not rather to have been believed on that account that he was killed and that the crime itself was shown by the turning away even of the daylight; as in truth happened when the Lord was crucified by the cruelty and ungodliness of the Jews. That this darkening of the sun did not happen through the regular course of the heavenly bodies is shown well enough by the fact that it was then the Passover of the Jews; for it is celebrated at the full moon, while a regular eclipse of the sun happens only at the end of the moon. Cicero too shows clearly enough that that reception of Romulus among the gods was supposed rather than actual, when, even while praising him in his books On the Republic, in the speech of Scipio, he says: “He achieved so much that, when he had disappeared during a sudden darkening of the sun, he was thought to have been placed among the gods, an opinion which no mortal could ever attain without extraordinary glory for virtue.” (When he says that he suddenly disappeared, surely either the violence of a storm or the secrecy of a murder and crime is to be understood there; for other writers of theirs also add a sudden storm to the eclipse of the sun, which certainly either gave an opportunity for the crime or itself carried Romulus off.) For of Tullus Hostilius too, who was the third king after Romulus, and who was himself also struck by lightning, the same Cicero says in the same books that he was not believed to have been received among the gods by such a death because perhaps the Romans did not want to make common, that is, cheap, what had been established, that is, believed, in the case of Romulus, if it were easily granted to another too. He also says openly in his invectives: “Romulus, who founded this city, we have raised to the immortal gods by goodwill and fame,” so as to show that it was not truly done, but spread abroad and published in goodwill because of the merits of his virtue. And in the dialogue Hortensius, speaking of regular eclipses of the sun, he says: “So that it produces the same darkness as it produced at the death of Romulus, which took place during an eclipse of the sun.” Here certainly he was not at all afraid to speak of the man's death, because he was a debater rather than a eulogist. And the other kings of the Roman people, apart from Numa Pompilius and Ancus Marcius, who died of disease, what horrible ends they had! Tullus Hostilius, as I said, the conqueror and destroyer of Alba, was burned up by lightning together with his whole house. Tarquinius Priscus was killed by the sons of his predecessor. Servius Tullius was killed by the wicked crime of his son-in-law Tarquin the Proud, who succeeded him as king. Yet the gods did not “depart, leaving their shrines and altars,” when so great a parricide was committed against the best king of that people, the gods who, they say, were so moved by the adultery of Paris that they did this to wretched Troy and left it to the Greeks to destroy and burn; on the contrary, Tarquin himself succeeded the father-in-law he had killed. That wicked parricide, reigning by the murder of his father-in-law, and moreover glorying in many wars and victories and building the Capitol from the spoils, those gods saw, not departing but present and remaining, and they allowed their king Jupiter to preside and reign over them in that loftiest temple, that is, in the work of a parricide. For he did not build the Capitol while still innocent and afterwards get expelled from the City for evil deserts; he came to the very kingship in which he would build the Capitol by committing a most monstrous crime. As for the Romans afterwards driving him from the kingship and shutting him out from the walls of the city, the sin of the violation of Lucretia was not his but his son's, committed not only without his knowledge but even in his absence. He was then besieging the city of Ardea, waging war for the Roman people; we do not know what he would have done if his son's outrage had been brought to his notice; and yet, without his judgment being sought or tested, the people took away his command, and, taking back the army, which was ordered to desert him, then shut the gates and did not let him enter when he returned. But he, after very grievous wars, in which he wore down those same Romans by stirring up their neighbors, when, deserted by those on whose help he relied, he could not recover the kingship, lived a quiet private life for fourteen years, it is said, in the town of Tusculum near Rome, and grew old with his wife, perhaps with a more desirable end than his father-in-law, who was killed by his son-in-law's crime, and not, it is said, without his daughter's knowledge. Yet the Romans did not call this Tarquin cruel or wicked, but proud, perhaps because by another pride they could not bear his royal haughtiness. For they so disregarded the crime of the murder of their best king, his father-in-law, by him that they made him their king; and I wonder whether they did not repay so great a crime with so great a reward by a graver crime. And “the gods did not depart, leaving their shrines and altars.” Unless perhaps someone defends these gods by saying that they stayed in Rome so that they could punish the Romans with sufferings rather than help them with benefits, seducing them with empty victories and wearing them down with very heavy wars. This was the life of the Romans under the kings, in the praiseworthy time of that state, up to the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, for about two hundred and forty-three years, while all those victories, bought with so much blood and such great calamities, scarcely extended that empire twenty miles from the City; a space not to be compared even with the territory of some Gaetulian town now.