Divine Institutes

Men of great and outstanding ability, when they had given themselves wholly to learning, set at nothing all business, private and public alike, and devoted whatever labour could be spent to the pursuit of searching out the truth. They judged it far more excellent to investigate and to know the principle of human and divine things than to cling to piling up wealth or heaping up honours,

for by such things, since they are fragile and earthly and pertain only to the care of the body, no one can be made better or more just.

Those men were indeed most worthy of knowing the truth, since they desired so greatly to know it, and did so in such a way that they preferred it to

all things. For it is well known that some even cast away their property and renounced every pleasure, so that, stripped and unencumbered, they might follow virtue alone and unadorned; and the name and authority of virtue counted for so much among them that

they judged the reward of the highest good to lie in virtue itself. Yet they did not attain what they wished, and they lost their effort and industry together, because the truth, that is, the secret of the supreme God who made all things, cannot be grasped by ability and by one's own senses. Otherwise there would be no difference between God and man, if human thought could reach the counsels and ordinances of that eternal majesty.

And because it could not be that the divine plan should become known to man by his own efforts, God did not allow man, as he sought the light of wisdom, to wander any longer and roam without any fruit of his labour through darkness from which there was no way out. At length he opened his eyes and made the knowledge of the truth his own gift, so as both to show that human wisdom is nothing and to point out to the wandering and straying man the way to gain immortality.

But few make use of this heavenly kindness and gift, because the truth lies hidden, wrapped in obscurity. The learned despise it because it lacks competent champions; the unlearned hate it for the severity that belongs to it, which human nature, prone to vice, cannot bear. For since bitterness is mixed with the virtues, while the vices are seasoned with pleasure, men are repelled by the one and charmed by the other; they rush headlong and, deceived by the appearance of good things, embrace evils in place of goods. I have therefore believed that I must come to the help of these errors, so that the learned may be directed to true wisdom and the unlearned to true religion.

This profession is to be judged far better, more useful, and more glorious than that of oratory, in which I was long engaged, training young men not to virtue but plainly to clever wickedness. Much more rightly shall I now discourse on the heavenly precepts, by which I may be able to form the minds of men for the worship of the true majesty.

Nor does one who imparts the skill of speaking well deserve as well of the human race as one who teaches how to live piously and innocently. That is why among the Greeks the philosophers were held in greater glory than the orators: they were regarded as teachers of right living, which is far more excellent, since speaking well concerns few, but living well concerns all.

Still, that practice in fictitious lawsuits has been of great use to me, so that I can now plead the cause of truth with greater fullness and fluency of speech. Although the truth can be defended without eloquence, as it often has been defended by many, yet it ought to be made illustrious, and in a manner championed, by clarity and elegance of language, so that it may flow more powerfully into men's minds, both equipped with its own force and adorned with the light of speech. So I undertake a discussion of religion and of divine things.

For if certain very great orators, like veterans having finished the campaigns of their pleading, at last gave themselves to philosophy and thought it the most just rest from their labours, and yet tortured their minds in searching for things that could not be found, so that they seem to have sought for themselves not leisure but business, and indeed far more troublesome business than that in which they had been occupied before, how much more justly shall I betake myself, as to a most secure harbour, to that pious, true, and divine wisdom, in which all things are ready to be said, pleasant to hear, easy to understand, and honourable to undertake?

And if certain wise men, arbiters of equity, composed and published institutes of civil law to settle the quarrels and disputes of citizens at variance, how much better and more rightly shall we set out in writing divine institutes, in which we shall speak not of eaves-drip, or of warding off rainwater, or of joining hands in a claim at law, but of hope, of life, of salvation, of immortality, of God, so that we may put to rest deadly superstitions and most shameful errors?

Leaving aside, then, the teachers of this earthly philosophy, who offer nothing certain, let us take the right road. If I thought them adequate guides to living well, I would follow them myself and urge others to follow them;

but since they disagree among themselves in great contention and are very often at odds with themselves, it is plain that their road is by no means straight. Each of them has marked out his own paths as he pleased, and they have left great confusion for those who seek the truth.

But we, who have received the sacrament of the true religion, since the truth has been revealed by God, and since we follow God as the teacher of wisdom and the guide of virtue, call all people without any distinction of sex or age to the heavenly food;

for no food is sweeter to the soul than the knowledge of the truth. To asserting and illustrating it I have devoted seven volumes, although the subject is a task almost without end and without measure, so that if anyone wished to expand and pursue these things in full, such an abundance of matter would pour out on him that his speech would find neither limit for books nor end.

But we shall gather everything together briefly, because the things we are going to set forth are so clear and bright that it seems more wonderful that the truth should seem so obscure to men, and especially to those who are commonly thought wise; or because we shall have only to instruct men, that is, to call them back from the error in which they are entangled to a more correct road.

If we succeed in this, as I hope, we shall send them to the very fountain of teaching, most abundant and most full, so that by drinking from it they may quench the thirst they have conceived within and extinguish its burning; and everything will be easy, ready, and plain to them, provided they are not reluctant to lend patience to reading or hearing, so as to take in the discipline of wisdom.

For many, clinging stubbornly to vain superstitions, harden themselves against the manifest truth, deserving well not so much of their religions, which they wrongly defend, as ill of themselves. Though they have a straight road, they follow winding byways; they desert the level ground to slip down the precipice; they leave the light to lie blind and helpless in darkness.

We must take thought for these people, that they may not fight against themselves but may at last be willing to be freed from their inveterate errors; and this they will surely do, if they ever come to see clearly for what purpose they were born.

For this is the cause of perversity: ignorance of oneself. If anyone dispels it by coming to know the truth, he will know to what end his life must be directed and how it must be lived. The sum of this knowledge I briefly define thus: no religion is to be taken up without wisdom, and no wisdom approved without religion.

Having undertaken, then, the task of illustrating the truth, I did not think it so necessary to begin from that question which seems by nature to come first: whether there is a providence that takes thought for all things, or whether all things were made or are carried on by chance.

The author of that opinion is Democritus, its confirmer Epicurus. But earlier Protagoras, who called the gods into doubt, and later Diagoras, who shut them out altogether, and some others who thought the gods do not exist, what else did they achieve than that there should be thought to be no providence? Yet the other philosophers, and especially the Stoics, beat them back most vigorously, teaching that the world could neither have come into being without divine reason nor hold together unless it were governed by the highest reason.

Marcus Tullius too, although he was a defender of the Academic school, discussed providence as the governor of things often and at length, confirming the arguments of the Stoics and bringing forward very many new ones himself. He does this in all his philosophical books, but above all in those On the Nature of the Gods.

Nor was it difficult indeed to refute the lies of a few men who held perverse views by the testimony of peoples and nations, which do not disagree on this one matter.

For no one is so rude and so savage in character that, lifting his eyes to heaven, even if he does not know by the providence of which god all this that is seen is ruled, he does not nevertheless understand from the very greatness of things, their motion, arrangement, constancy, usefulness, beauty, and balance, that there is some providence, and that it cannot be but that what is constituted with wonderful order has been arranged by some greater design.

And it would certainly be very easy for us to pursue this subject as fully as we liked. But since the matter has been much debated among philosophers, and those who deny providence seem to have been answered sufficiently by acute and eloquent men, and since we must in any case speak here and there throughout this whole work that we have undertaken about the skill of divine providence, let us pass over this question for the present. It is so bound up with the others that nothing, it seems, can be discussed by us without providence being discussed at the same time.

Let the beginning of our work, then, be the question that follows as the second: whether the world is governed by the power of one God or of many. No one who is wise and reckons the matter within himself fails to understand that there is one who both founded all things and governs them by the same power by which he founded them.

For what need is there of many to sustain the government of the world? Unless perhaps we shall think that, if there are several, each has less strength and power;

and this is what those who want there to be many do in fact imply, since they must be weak, if each one without the help of the rest cannot hold the helm of so vast a mass. But God, who is eternal Mind, is certainly of perfect and complete power in every respect;

and if this is true, he must be one. For absolute power or might keeps its own proper firmness. That is to be judged solid from which nothing can be taken away, and that perfect to which nothing can be added.

Who would doubt that a king who holds the rule of the whole world is most powerful? And rightly, since all things everywhere are his, and all resources from every side are gathered to him alone.

But if several divide the world, each will certainly have less wealth and less strength, since each keeps within the portion assigned to him.

In the same way the gods also, if there are several, will be less strong, since others have just as much in themselves. But the perfect nature of power can exist in the one in whom the whole is, rather than in one who has only a small part of the whole. God, if he is perfect, as he must be, cannot be other than one, so that all things may be in him.

The powers and might of the gods, then, must be weaker, since each will lack as much as is in the others; so the more there are, the less they will be.

What of the fact that that supreme power over things, the divine might, cannot be divided even once? For whatever admits of division must also admit of destruction. But if destruction is far from God, because he is incorruptible and eternal, it follows that the divine power cannot be divided.

God is therefore one, if nothing else can exist that has as much power. And yet those who think there are many say that they have divided their offices among themselves. We shall discuss all these in their place.

Meanwhile I hold to what concerns the present point: if they have divided their offices among themselves, the matter comes back to the same place, that none of them can suffice for all things. He will therefore not be perfect who cannot govern all things if the rest are idle. So it follows that to rule the world there is need of the perfect power of one rather than the weakness of many.

Whoever thinks that so great a magnitude cannot be ruled by one is mistaken and does not understand how great is the force and power of the divine majesty, if he supposes that the one God who could make the world cannot rule what he made.

But if he conceives in his mind how great is the immensity of this divine work, and that, although before there was nothing, it was nevertheless brought together out of nothing by the power and counsel of God, a work that could not have been begun and completed except by one, he will now understand that what was established by one is much more easily ruled by one.

Someone may perhaps say that so immense a work as the world could not even have been fashioned except by several. Let him make them as many and as great as he likes: whatever greatness, power, might, and majesty he places in the many, I gather all of it into one and say that it is in one, so that there is as much of these things in him as can neither be thought nor spoken.

And since in this we fail both in understanding and in words, because the human breast cannot contain so great a light of understanding, nor mortal tongue an explanation of such great things, we ought to understand and to say that very thing.

Again I see what can be said on the other side: that those many are such as we want the one to be. But this cannot possibly happen, because the power of each will not be able to advance further when it meets the powers of the others. For each must either be unable to pass his own boundaries, or, if he has passed them, must drive another from his territory.

Those who believe there are many gods do not see that it could happen that they wish different things, from which dispute and conflict would arise among them; just as Homer imagined the gods warring among themselves, some wishing Troy to be taken and others opposing it.

The world must therefore be ruled by the will of one. For unless the power over the several parts is referred to one providence, the whole itself cannot hold together, each caring for nothing beyond what properly belongs to him; just as not even military affairs can stand unless they have one commander and director.

If in one army there were as many generals as there are legions, cohorts, wedges, and squadrons, first, the battle line could not be drawn up, each one refusing the danger; nor could it easily be ruled or controlled, because all would follow their own counsels, and by their diversity they would do more harm than good. So in this empire of nature, unless there were one to whom the care of the whole was referred, all things would be dissolved and would collapse.

To say that the world is ruled by the will of many is as if someone were to assert that in one body there are many minds, because the functions of the limbs are many and various, so that each sense of the body is believed to be ruled by its own mind; and likewise the many emotions by which we are usually moved, to anger or desire or joy or fear or pity, so that in all these as many minds are supposed to be at work. If anyone did say this, he would seem not to have even the one mind that there is.

But if in one body one mind has the government of so many things and attends to all of them at once, why should anyone think that the world cannot be ruled by one but can be ruled by many? Because these champions of the gods understand this, they say that the gods preside over particular things and parts in such a way that there is nevertheless one supreme ruler.

Then the others will no longer be gods but attendants and ministers, whom that one, the greatest and mighty over all, has set over those offices, so that they serve his command and nod. If they are not all equal, then they are not all gods: for what serves and what rules cannot be the same.

For if "god" is the name of the highest power, he must be incorruptible, perfect, impassible, subject to nothing. Those, therefore, whom necessity compels to obey the one greatest God are not gods.

But since those who think so are not deceived without cause, we shall disclose the cause of this error a little later. Now let us prove the unity of the divine power by testimonies.

The prophets, who were very many, proclaim one God and speak of one, since, being filled with the Spirit of the one God, they foretold what was to come with a like and harmonious voice.

But those who have no share in the truth think they should not be believed. They say those were not divine but human voices; evidently, because they proclaim one God, they were either mad or deceivers.

Yet we see that their prophecies have been fulfilled and are being fulfilled daily, and their divination, agreeing in one meaning, shows that they were not raving. For who with a disordered mind could not only foretell the future but also speak coherently?

Were they, then, deceivers who spoke such things? What was so foreign to them as the design of deceiving, when they restrained others from all fraud? For this is why they were sent by God: to be heralds of his majesty and correctors of human wickedness.

Moreover, the will to feign and lie belongs to those who seek riches and desire gain; and this was far from those holy men.

For they discharged the office entrusted to them in such a way that, leaving behind everything needed to sustain life, they took no trouble not only for the future but not even for the day, content with the food of the moment which God supplied. And they not only had no gain, but even tortures and death.

For the precepts of justice are bitter to the vicious and to those who live evilly. So those whose sins were exposed and forbidden tortured them most cruelly and killed them. Those, therefore, who had no love of gain had no will or reason to deceive.

What of the fact that some of them were princes or even kings, on whom no suspicion of greed or fraud can fall, and yet they proclaimed the one God with the same inspiration as the rest?

But let us by all means leave aside the testimonies of the prophets, lest the proof seem less adequate if drawn from those who are not believed at all.

Let us come to authorities, and call as witnesses to prove the truth the very men whom they are accustomed to use against us: I mean the poets and philosophers. From these we must prove that God is one, not because they had knowledge of the truth, but because the force of truth itself is so great that no one can be so blind as not to see the divine brightness forcing itself upon his eyes.

The poets, then, although they adorned the gods in their songs and magnified their deeds with the highest praises, yet very often confess that all things are held together and ruled by one spirit or mind.

Orpheus, who is the most ancient of the poets and a contemporary of the gods themselves, since he is said to have sailed among the Argonauts with the sons of Tyndareus and Hercules, calls the true and great God Protogonos, "first-born," because nothing was born before him, but all things were begotten from him. He also names him Phanes, "the one who appears," because when as yet nothing existed he first appeared and came forth from the infinite.

Because he could not conceive in his mind his origin and nature, he said he was born of the boundless air: "First-born Phaethon, son of the far-stretching air."

For he had nothing further to say. He says that he is the parent of all the gods, for whose sake he founded heaven and provided for his children, that they might have a dwelling and a common home: "He built for the immortals an imperishable house." So under the guidance of nature and reason he understood that there is a most excellent power, the founder of heaven and earth.

For he could not say that Jupiter was the first principle of things, since he was begotten of Saturn; nor Saturn himself, who was said to have been born of Heaven; and he did not dare to set up Heaven as the first god, because he saw that it was an element of the world and itself needed an author. This reasoning led him to that first-begotten God, to whom he assigns and grants the primacy.

Homer could give us nothing that pertains to the truth, since he wrote of human rather than divine things. Hesiod could have, since he embraced the generation of the gods in the work of one book; but he gave nothing, taking his beginning not from God the Creator but from Chaos, which is a confused heap of raw and disordered matter, whereas he ought first to have explained from where, when, and how Chaos itself began to be or to exist.

Clearly, just as all things were arranged, ordered, and made by some craftsman, so matter itself must have been made by someone. Who then made it but God, to whose power all things are subject?

But he shrank from this, shuddering at the unknown truth. For he did not pour out that song on Helicon by the inspiration of the Muses, as he wished to appear, but came having thought it out and prepared it.

The first of our own poets, Maro, was not far from the truth. Of the supreme God, whom he called mind and spirit, these are his words: "In the beginning the heaven and the lands, and the watery plains, the shining globe of the moon, and the Titanian stars, a spirit within nourishes; and mind, poured through all the limbs, moves the whole mass and mingles with the great body."

And lest anyone should perhaps not know who that spirit was which had so much power, he made it plain in another place, saying: "For God goes through all lands, and the tracts of the sea, and the deep heaven; from him flocks, herds, men, every kind of wild beast, each at birth draws its slender life."

Ovid also, at the beginning of his famous work, without any concealment of the name, confesses that the world was set in order by God, whom he calls the fabricator of the world, the maker of things.

If either Orpheus or these poets of ours had consistently defended what they perceived under the guidance of nature, they would have grasped the truth and held the same doctrine that we follow.

But enough about the poets. Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is weightier and judgment more certain, because they are believed to have devoted themselves not to fictions but to searching out the truth.

Thales of Miletus, who was one of the number of the Seven Wise Men and who is said to have been the first of all to inquire into natural causes, said that water is that from which all things were born, but that God is the mind that formed all things from water. So he placed the matter of things in moisture and set the principle and cause of birth in God.

Pythagoras defined what God is thus: a soul passing through and spread through all the parts of the world and all nature, from which all living things that are born receive life.

Anaxagoras says that God is infinite mind, which moves of itself. Antisthenes says that there are indeed many gods of the people, but one of nature, that is, the maker of the whole universe.

Cleanthes and Anaximenes say that the aether is the supreme God, and our poet agreed with that opinion: "Then the almighty father Aether descends with fruitful showers into the lap of his glad spouse, and, great himself, mingled with her great body, nourishes all offspring."

Chrysippus calls God a natural force endowed with divine reason, sometimes a divine necessity; likewise Zeno calls him the natural and divine law.

The view of all these men, although it is uncertain, yet looks to the same point: they agree that there is one providence. For whether you call it nature or aether or reason or mind or fated necessity or divine law or anything else, it is the same as what we call God. Nor does the diversity of names stand in the way, since in their meaning they all come back to one.

Aristotle, although he disagrees with himself and both says and thinks things contradictory to one another, nevertheless testifies in sum that one Mind presides over the world.

Plato, who is judged the wisest of all, plainly and openly defends monarchy, the rule of one; and he names him neither aether nor reason nor nature but, as he is, God, and says that this perfect and wonderful world was fashioned by him.

Cicero, following and imitating him in very many things, frequently confesses God and calls him supreme in the books he wrote On the Laws; and he argues that the world is ruled by him when he discusses the nature of the gods, in this way: "Nothing is more excellent than God; therefore the world must be ruled by him. Therefore God is obedient or subject to no nature; therefore he himself rules all nature."

And what God is he defines in the Consolation: "Nor can God himself, as he is understood by us, be understood in any other way than as a mind unbound and free, separated from every mortal compound, perceiving all things

and moving all things." Annaeus Seneca too, who was the keenest Stoic among the Romans, how often he honours the supreme God with deserved praise! For when he was discussing untimely death, he said: "Do you not understand the authority and majesty of your judge, the ruler of the world and of heaven, and the God of all the gods, on whom those divinities that we worship and honour one by one depend?"

Likewise in the Exhortations: "When he was laying the first foundations of this most beautiful mass and beginning this work, than which nature has known nothing greater or better, so that all things might go under their own leaders, although he had extended himself through the whole body, yet God begot ministers of his kingdom."

And how many other things like ours he said about God! These I defer now, because they are more suitable in other places. For now it is enough to show that men of the highest ability touched the truth and almost held it, had not custom, stained with perverse opinions, snatched them back; by which custom they both supposed that there were other gods and believed that the things God made for man's use were to be held and worshipped as gods, as if they were endowed with sense.

Now let us pass to divine testimonies. But first I shall bring forward one that is like a divine one, both because of its very great antiquity and because the man I shall name was transferred from among men to the gods. In Cicero,

the pontiff Cotta, disputing against the Stoics about religion and the variety of opinions usually held about the gods, in order to make everything uncertain after the manner of the Academics, says that there were five Mercuries; and having listed four in order, he says the fifth was the one by whom Argus was killed, and that for this reason he fled into Egypt and gave the Egyptians their laws and letters.

The Egyptians call him Thoth, and from him the first month of their year, that is, September, took its name. He also founded a town which is still called in Greek the city of Mercury, and the people of Pheneus worship him devoutly. Although he was a man, he was yet most ancient and so thoroughly instructed in every kind of learning that his knowledge of many things and arts gave him the surname Trismegistus.

He wrote books, and indeed many, pertaining to the knowledge of divine things, in which he asserts the majesty of the supreme and only God and calls him by the same names as we do, Lord and Father. And lest anyone should ask his name, he said he was "nameless," because he does not need the distinction of a name, by reason, namely, of his very oneness. These are his own words: "God is one, and the one has no need of a name; for he who is, is nameless."

God therefore has no name, because he is alone; nor is a proper name needed, except when a multitude requires a distinction, so that you may mark each person by his own sign and title. But for God, because he is always one, his proper name is God.

It remains to bring forward testimonies from oracles and sacred verses, which are much more certain. For perhaps those against whom we are arguing think that neither the poets should be believed, as inventing vain things, nor the philosophers, since they could have erred, because they too were men.

Marcus Varro, than whom no more learned man ever lived, not even among the Greeks, in the books on divine things that he wrote to Gaius Caesar, the chief pontiff, when speaking of the Fifteen Men, says that the Sibylline books were not the work of one Sibyl but were called by one name "Sibylline" because all women prophets were called Sibyls by the ancients, either from the name of the one at Delphi or from their announcing the counsels of the gods. For in the Aeolic dialect they called the gods "sioi," not "theoi," and counsel not "boulē" but "bulla"; and so the Sibyl was so called as if "Theoboulē" (divine counsel).

He says further that there were ten Sibyls, and he listed them all, with the authors who wrote about each. The first was from Persia, mentioned by Nicanor, who wrote the deeds of Alexander of Macedon; the second the Libyan, whom Euripides mentions in the prologue of the Lamia;

the third the Delphic, of whom Chrysippus speaks in the book he composed on divination; the fourth the Cimmerian in Italy, whom Naevius names in his books on the Punic War and Piso in his annals; the fifth the Erythraean, whom Apollodorus of Erythrae asserts was his fellow citizen, and who prophesied to the Greeks as they sailed for Ilium both that Troy would perish and that Homer would write lies; the sixth the Samian, of whom Eratosthenes writes that he found her mentioned in the ancient annals of the Samians;

the seventh the Cumaean, named Amalthea, who is called by others Herophile or Demophile. She brought nine books to King Tarquinius Priscus and asked three hundred gold pieces for them; the king scorned the greatness of the price and laughed at the woman's madness. In the king's sight she burned three and asked the same price for the rest; Tarquinius thought the woman much madder still.

When she burned three more and still held to the same price, the king was moved and bought the remaining books for three hundred gold pieces. Their number was later increased, after the Capitol was rebuilt, because the verses of any Sibyl whatever were collected from all the cities, Italian and Greek, and especially from Erythrae, and brought to Rome.

The eighth was the Hellespontine, born in the territory of Troy, in the village of Marmessus near the town of Gergithium, whom Heraclides of Pontus writes lived in the times of Solon and Cyrus; the ninth the Phrygian, who prophesied at Ancyra; the tenth the Tiburtine, named Albunea, who is worshipped as a goddess at Tibur beside the banks of the river Anio, in whose depths her statue is said to have been found holding a book in its hand.

The verses of all these Sibyls are both in circulation and possessed, except those of the Cumaean, whose books are kept secret by the Romans, and they hold it unlawful for anyone but the Fifteen Men to look into them. Each Sibyl has her own book; but because they are inscribed with the name "Sibyl," they are believed to be the work of one, and they are mixed together and cannot be distinguished and assigned each to its own author, except that of the Erythraean, who both inserted her true name into her poem and foretold that she would be called Erythraean, though she was born at Babylon.

But we too shall speak of "the Sibyl" without distinction wherever we have to use their testimonies. All these Sibyls, then, proclaim one God, and above all the Erythraean, who is held more celebrated and noble among the rest. For Fenestella, a most careful writer, speaking of the Fifteen Men, says that after the Capitol was restored the consul Gaius Curio proposed to the senate that envoys be sent to Erythrae to seek out the Sibyl's verses and bring them to Rome; and so Publius Gabinius, Marcus Otacilius, and Lucius Valerius were sent, who brought to Rome about a thousand verses copied out by private persons. That Varro said the same we have shown above.

In these verses, then, which the envoys brought to Rome, there are these testimonies about one God: "One God, who alone rules, exceedingly great, unbegotten." That this one is the only supreme God, who made heaven and adorned it with lights: "But God alone is one, highest over all, who made heaven and sun and stars and moon, the fruitful earth and the swelling waters of the sea."

And since he alone is the builder of the world and the maker of things, both those of which it consists and those which are in it, she testifies that he alone ought to be worshipped: "Worship him who alone is, the ruler of the world, who alone was made from age to age." Likewise another Sibyl, whichever she is, when she said that she was carrying to men the voice of God, speaks thus: "For I alone am God, and there is no other God."

I would now go through the testimonies of the others, were not these enough and were I not reserving those for more suitable places. But since we are defending the cause of truth before those who have strayed from the truth and serve false religions, what kind of proof ought we to use against them rather than to refute them by the testimonies of their own gods?

For Apollo, whom they consider divine beyond the rest and the greatest prophet, residing at Colophon, where I suppose he had moved from Delphi, drawn by the pleasantness of Asia, when someone asked him who or what God was at all, replied in twenty-one verses, of which this is the beginning: "Self-grown, untaught, motherless, unshaken, not contained in a name, not even in reason, dwelling in fire: this is God; and we angels are a small portion of God."

Can anyone suspect that this was said of Jupiter, who had both a mother and a name? What of the fact that that Mercury Thrice-Greatest, whom I mentioned above, calls God not only "motherless," as Apollo does, but also "fatherless," because he has no origin from elsewhere?

For he who himself begot all things cannot have been begotten by anyone. I have, I think, sufficiently taught by arguments and confirmed by witnesses what is in itself clear enough: that there is one King of the world, one Father, one Lord.

But perhaps someone may ask of us the same thing Hortensius asks in Cicero: if God is one, what blessed solitude can there be? As if, because we say he is one, we were saying he is deserted and alone. For he has ministers, whom we call messengers.

And that is true which I reported above that Seneca said in the Exhortations, that God begot ministers of his kingdom. But these are not gods, nor do they wish to be called or worshipped as gods, since they do nothing except by the command and will of God. Nor are they those who are commonly worshipped, whose number is both small and fixed.

But if the worshippers of the gods think that they worship those very beings whom we call ministers of the supreme God, there is no reason for them to raise ill will against us, who say there is one God and deny that there are many.

If a multitude delights them, we do not say there are twelve, or three hundred and sixty-five as Orpheus did, but that they are innumerable. We charge them with error in the opposite direction, for thinking there are so few. Yet let them know by what name these ought to be called, lest they wrong the true God, whose name they expose while they assign it to many.

Let them believe their own Apollo, who in that same response took away the chief rule from Jupiter and the name from the other gods as well. For the third verse shows that the ministers of God ought to be called not gods but angels.

About himself, indeed, he lied: though he is of the number of the demons, he enrolled himself among the angels of God. In fact, in other responses he confessed that he was a demon. For when he was asked how he wished to be prayed to, he answered thus: "All-wise, all-taught, many-turning, hear, O daemon." And again, when he was asked to compose a prayer to Apollo Smintheus, he began with this verse: "Harmony of the world, light-bearer, all-wise daemon."

What then remains but that by his own confession he lies subject to the scourges of the true God and to eternal punishment? For in another response he said: "Daemons who roam about the earth and about the sea are subdued under the tireless scourge of God." We shall discuss both kinds in the second book.

Meanwhile it is enough for us that, while he wished to honour himself and place himself in heaven, he confessed, as the fact is, how those who always stand beside God ought to be called.

Let men, then, draw themselves back from their errors and, casting away perverse religions, acknowledge their Parent and Lord, whose power cannot be estimated, whose greatness cannot be seen through, whose beginning cannot be grasped. When the effort, sharpness, and memory of the human mind have reached him, as though all roads had been cut off and used up, it halts, sticks, and fails, and there is nothing further to which it can advance.

But since it cannot be that what exists did not at some time begin to exist, it follows that, since nothing was before him, he was brought forth from himself before all things; and therefore he is called by Apollo "self-grown," and by the Sibyl "self-begotten," "unbegotten," and "unmade." Seneca, an acute man, saw this in the Exhortations: "We," he says, "depend on another. So we look to someone to whom we owe what is best in us. Another brought us forth, another furnished us; God made himself."

By so many and such great witnesses, then, it is proved that the world is governed by the power and providence of one God, whose force and majesty Plato in the Timaeus says is so great that no one can either conceive it in mind or tell it in words, because of its exceeding and inestimable power.

Can anyone doubt whether anything is difficult or impossible for God, who devised such great and wonderful works by his providence, established them by his power, completed them by his reason, and now sustains them by his spirit and governs them by his might, inconceivable, ineffable, and sufficiently known to none but himself?

So when I think often about such great majesty, those who worship the gods sometimes seem to me so blind, so thoughtless, so senseless, so little different from dumb animals, that they believe that beings born from the union of male and female could have had anything of majesty and divine power, when the Erythraean Sibyl says: "God cannot be fashioned from the thighs of a man and from a womb."

If this is true, as it is, it is plain that Hercules, Apollo, Liber, Mercury, and Jupiter himself, with the rest, were men, since they were born of the two sexes.

What is so far removed from God as that work which he himself gave to mortals for propagating offspring, and which cannot exist without bodily substance? If the gods are immortal and eternal, what need is there of the other sex? Evidently, so that they may beget? What need of offspring itself, when those who will always exist do not need succession?

For certainly among men and the other animals the difference of sex, and union, and generation have no other purpose than that all kinds of living things, since by their mortal condition they will die, may be preserved by mutual succession; but God, who is everlasting, needs neither another sex nor succession.

Someone will say: so that he may have either ministers or those over whom he may rule. What need is there, then, of the female sex, when God, who is almighty as he is called, can without the use and work of a woman

beget sons? For if he granted to certain tiny creatures that they gather their young with their mouths from leaves and sweet herbs, why should anyone think that God himself cannot beget except by union with another sex? Those, then, whom the ignorant and foolish both name and adore as gods, no one is so thoughtless as not to understand were mortals. How then, someone will say, were they believed to be gods? Evidently because they were very great and powerful kings, and because of the merit of their virtues or gifts or the arts they discovered, since they had been dear to those over whom they ruled, they were consecrated in memory. If anyone doubts this, let him consider their deeds and actions, which both the poets and the ancient historians have all handed down.

Hercules, who is held most famous for his virtue and, as it were, the Africanus among the gods, did he not pollute with debauchery, adultery, and lusts the world which he is said to have travelled through and cleansed? No wonder, since he was begotten of Alcmena in adultery. What divinity, after all, could there be in one who, himself enslaved to his own vices, inflicted infamy, outrage, and disgrace on both males and females against all laws?

But not even his great and wonderful deeds are to be judged such that they seem to belong to divine powers. For what is so magnificent if he overcame a lion and a boar, if he shot down birds with arrows, if he cleared out a king's stable, if he conquered a warrior-maiden and took away her girdle, if he killed fierce horses together with their master? These are the works of a brave man, but of a man.

For the things he conquered were fragile and mortal. For there is no force so great, as the orator says, that it cannot be weakened and broken by iron and strength.

"But to conquer one's mind, to restrain anger, is the mark of the bravest man": these things Hercules never did and never could do. "Whoever does these things I do not compare with the greatest men, but judge him most like God." I wish Cicero had added something about lust, luxury, greed, and insolence, to complete the virtue of the one he judged like God.

For he is not to be thought braver who overcomes a lion than he who overcomes the violent beast shut up within himself, anger; or he who shot down the most rapacious birds than he who restrains the most greedy desires; or he who conquers the warlike Amazon than he who conquers lust, the destroyer of modesty and good name; or he who cleared the dung from a stable than he who has cleared the vices from his own heart, which are more destructive because they are domestic and personal evils, than those which could have been avoided and guarded against.

From this it follows that he alone ought to be judged a brave man who is temperate, moderate, and just. And if anyone considers what the works of God are, he will at once judge ridiculous all these things that the most foolish men admire. For they measure them not by divine powers, of which they are ignorant, but by the weakness of their own strength.

For no one has denied that Hercules served not only King Eurystheus, which may seem honourable to some extent, but also the shameless woman Omphale, who used to order him, dressed in her clothes, to sit at her feet doing his task of spinning. Detestable baseness!

But pleasure was worth that much to him. "What?" someone will say. "Do you think the poets should be believed?" Why should I not? For it is not Lucilius who tells these things, or Lucian, who spared neither gods nor men, but above all those who sang the praises of the gods.

Whom then shall we believe, if we do not trust those who praise them? Whoever thinks these poets lie, let him bring forward other authorities for us to believe, who may teach us who these gods are, how and from where they arose, what their force is, what their number, what their power, what is admirable in them, what worthy of worship, and finally what mystery is more certain and truer. He will produce none.

Let us therefore believe these men, who spoke not to find fault but to proclaim. Hercules sailed, then, with the Argonauts and stormed Troy, angry with Laomedon because the reward promised him for saving his daughter was refused. From this it is clear at what time he lived. The same man, driven by fury and madness, killed his wife together with his children.

Men think this man a god! But Philoctetes his heir did not think so: he put the torch to him when he was about to burn, he saw his limbs and sinews burned and melted, he buried his bones and ashes on Mount Oeta, and for this service he received his arrows.

Aesculapius, himself born of Apollo not without disgrace, what did he do worthy of divine honours except that he healed Hippolytus? His death, indeed, was more famous, in that he deserved to be struck by lightning by a god.

Tarquitius, discussing famous men, says that he was born of uncertain parents, exposed, found by hunters, nursed on dog's milk, handed over to Chiron, and learned medicine; that he was a Messenian but lived at Epidaurus. Tullius also says he was buried at Cynosura.

What of Apollo his father? Did he not, for the love with which he burned, most shamefully pasture another man's flock, and build walls for Laomedon, hired for a wage which could be refused him with impunity? From him first the treacherous king learned to deny whatever he had agreed with the gods. The same Apollo, while he loved a beautiful boy, violated him, and while he played with him, killed him.

Mars was a murderer, freed by the Athenians from the charge of killing by favour; and lest he seem too fierce and savage, he committed adultery with Venus.

Castor and Pollux, while carrying off other men's brides, ceased to be twins; for Idas, stirred by the pain of the injury, ran one of them through with a sword. And the poets relate that they live and die by turns, so that they are now the most wretched not only of the gods but of all mortals, since they are not allowed to die once for all.

Yet Homer testifies simply, not as poets usually do, that both were dead. For when he made Helen, sitting beside Priam on the walls, recognize all the chiefs of Greece and look in vain only for her own brothers, he added to her speech a verse of this kind: "So she spoke; but the earth already held them, buried."

Mercury, thief and scoundrel, what did he leave to his fame except the memory of his frauds? Worthy of heaven, no doubt, because he taught wrestling and was the first to invent the lyre.

Father Liber must be of the highest authority and the first to speak in the senate of the gods, because apart from Jupiter he alone of all celebrated a triumph, led an army, and subdued the Indians. But that unconquered commander, conqueror of India, was most shamefully conquered by love and lust.

For, carried to Crete with his half-man retinue, he found a shameless woman on the shore; and, confident from his Indian victory, he wished to be a man, so as not to seem too soft, and claimed as his wife her who had betrayed her father, caused her brother's death, and been abandoned and rejected by another; he made her Libera and ascended into heaven together with her.

What of the father of all these, Jupiter, who in solemn prayer is named Best and Greatest? Is he not found from his earliest boyhood impious and almost a parricide, when he drove his father from the kingdom and put him to flight, and in his lust to reign did not wait for the death of a decrepit old man? And when he had seized his father's throne by violence and arms, he was attacked in war by the Titans, which was the beginning of evils for the human race; and when they had been conquered and peace secured forever, he spent the rest of his life in debauchery and adultery.

I pass over the virgins whom he dishonoured, for that is usually judged tolerable. I cannot pass over Amphitryon and Tyndareus, whose houses he filled to the full with disgrace and infamy.

But that was of the highest impiety and wickedness, that he carried off a royal boy for sexual abuse. For it seemed too little to be stained and base in assaulting the chastity of women, unless he also did injury to his own sex. This is true adultery, since it is against nature.

Whoever does these things, we may see whether he is "Greatest"; "Best" he certainly is not. That name is far from seducers, adulterers, and the incestuous, unless perhaps we men are wrong, who call those who do such things wicked and abandoned and judge them most deserving of every punishment.

Foolish, then, was Marcus Tullius, who reproached Gaius Verres with adulteries, for Jupiter, whom he worshipped, committed the same; and Publius Clodius with incest with his sister, for to that "Best and Greatest" the same woman was both sister and wife.

Who then is so senseless as to think that he reigns in heaven who ought not to reign even on earth? Not without wit did a certain poet write a Triumph of Cupid, in which book he makes Cupid not only the most powerful of the gods but even their conqueror.

For having listed the loves of each, by which they had come into Cupid's power and dominion, he arranges a procession in which Jupiter with the other gods is led in chains before the chariot of the one triumphing. This was elegantly imagined by the poet, yet it is not far from the truth.

For whoever has no share in virtue and is conquered by desire and evil lusts is subject not to Cupid, as that poet imagined, but to eternal death.

But let us leave off speaking of morals and consider the facts, so that men may understand in what errors they wretchedly move.

The common people think that Jupiter reigns in heaven: learned and unlearned alike are persuaded of this, as religion itself, prayers, hymns, shrines, and images show.

Yet they confess that the same Jupiter was begotten of Saturn and Rhea. How can he seem a god, or, as the poet says, "the discoverer of men and things," when before his birth there were countless thousands of men, namely those who lived while Saturn reigned and enjoyed the light earlier than Jupiter?

I see that one god was king in the first times, another in the times that followed. It can happen, then, that there will be yet another later. For if the former kingdom was changed, why should we despair that the latter too can be changed? Unless perhaps Saturn could beget one stronger than himself, and Jupiter cannot.

But divine rule is either always unchangeable, or, if it is changeable, which cannot be, it is certainly always changeable. Can Jupiter, then, lose his kingdom, as his father lost it? Plainly so.

For although he never spared virgins or married women, he nevertheless kept away from Thetis alone, because an oracle had declared that whoever was born of her would be greater than his father.

And first there was in him an ignorance of the future unworthy of a god: had Themis not told him the future, he himself would not have known it. But if he is not divine, he is not even a god, since divinity itself is named from god, as humanity from man.

Next, there was the consciousness of weakness in one who feared someone greater. Whoever does this surely knows that he is not the greatest, since something greater can exist.

He also swears most solemnly by the Stygian marsh, "the one object of dread appointed for the gods above." What dread is that, or by whom appointed? Is there, then, some supreme power to punish gods who perjure themselves? What is this great fear of the infernal marsh, if they are immortal? Why should they fear what none are to see except those who must die?

Why then do men lift their eyes to heaven? Why do they swear by the gods above, when the gods above themselves turn back to the gods below and have there something to venerate and adore? And what of the saying that there are

Fates whom all the gods and Jupiter himself obey? If the power of the Parcae is so great that they can do more than all the heavenly gods and than their very ruler and lord, why should they not rather be said to reign, since necessity compels all the gods to obey their laws and decrees? Can anyone doubt that he who submits to anything is not the greatest?

For if he were, he would not receive the fates but make them. Now I return to what I had omitted. In the case of one woman alone, then, he was more restrained, though he was madly in love with her, not from any virtue but from fear of a successor.

That fear surely belongs to one who is mortal, weak, and of no account, since he could have been done away with at the very time of his birth, as his brother born before him was done away with; and had that brother been able to live, he would never have yielded the rule to a younger. But Jupiter himself, saved by stealth and nourished in secret, was called Zeus or Zēn, not, as these people think, from the heat of heavenly fire, or because he is the giver of life and breathes souls into living things, a power that belongs to God alone (for how could he breathe a soul into others who himself received it from elsewhere?), but because he was the first of Saturn's male children to live.

So men could have had another god as their ruler, had Saturn not been deceived by his wife. "But the poets invented these things." Whoever thinks this is mistaken. For they spoke about men, but in order to adorn those whose memory they celebrated with praises, they said they were gods. So it is rather what they said about them as gods that is invented, not what they said about them as men; and this will become clear from an example I shall bring forward.

When he was about to violate Danae, he poured gold coins generously into her lap: this was the price of her dishonour. But the poets, speaking as if of a god, so as not to weaken the authority of his supposed majesty, invented the story that he himself came down in a shower of gold, using the same figure by which they speak of showers of iron when describing a multitude of darts and arrows.

He is said to have carried off Catamitus by an eagle: that is poetic colouring. But either he carried him off by means of a legion whose standard is an eagle, or the ship in which the boy was placed had a protecting emblem shaped like an eagle, just as it had a bull when he carried off Europa and took her across the sea.

In the same way he is said to have turned Io, the daughter of Inachus, into a cow; and she, to escape Juno's anger, just as she was, covered with bristles and now a cow, is said to have swum across the sea and come into Egypt, and there, having recovered her former appearance, to have become the goddess now called Isis.

By what argument, then, can it be proved that Europa did not sit on a bull and that Io was not made a cow? Because a fixed day is kept in the calendar on which the Voyage of Isis is celebrated, which shows that she did not swim across but sailed.

So those who seem wise to themselves, because they understand that a living earthly body cannot be in heaven, reject the whole story of Ganymede as false, and do not perceive that it was done on earth, because the deed and the lust itself are earthly.

The poets, then, did not invent the deeds themselves (had they done so they would be utterly worthless), but they added a certain colouring to what was done. For they said these things not to disparage but wishing to adorn.

Hence men are deceived, especially because, while they think all these things invented by the poets, they worship what they do not know. For they do not know what the limit of poetic licence is, how far one may go in inventing, since the poet's task is to take things that really happened and, with a certain grace, turn and carry them over into other forms by indirect figures.

But to invent the whole of what you relate is to be foolish and a liar rather than a poet.

But suppose they invented those things that are believed to be fables; did they also invent what is said about goddesses and the marriages of the gods? Why then are they so represented and so worshipped? Unless perhaps not only the poets but also painters and sculptors are lying.

For if this is the Jupiter whom you call god, if he is not the one born of Saturn and Ops, no image but his alone ought to have been placed in all the temples.

What do images of women mean? What of the weaker sex? If this Jupiter fell to it, the very stones will confess him a man.

They say the poets lied, and yet they believe them; indeed, by the fact itself they prove that they did not lie. For they so shape the images of the gods that from the very difference of sex it appears that what the poets say is true. For what other meaning has the image of Catamitus and the figure of the eagle, when they are placed at Jupiter's feet in the temples and worshipped equally with him, than that the memory of an unspeakable crime and debauchery should remain forever?

Nothing, then, was wholly invented by the poets; something perhaps was transferred and obscured by indirect figure, so that the truth was wrapped up and covered, as in the story of the allotment of kingdoms. For they say heaven fell to Jupiter, the sea to Neptune, and the underworld to Pluto. Why did the earth not rather come as the third lot? Only because the event took place on earth.

This, then, is the truth: that they divided and allotted the kingdom of the world in such a way that the empire of the east fell to Jupiter, and the part of the west to Pluto, who had the surname Agesilaus, because the region of the east, from which light is given to mortals, seems to be higher, and that of the west lower. So they veiled the truth with a falsehood in such a way that the truth itself took nothing away from the public belief.

About Neptune's lot it is clear: we say his kingdom was like that unlimited command of Marcus Antonius, to whom the senate had decreed power over the whole sea coast, so that he might pursue the pirates and pacify the whole sea. So all the coastal regions, with the islands, fell to Neptune.

How can this be proved? The ancient histories teach it, of course. The ancient author Euhemerus, who was from the city of Messene, collected the deeds of Jupiter and of the others who are thought gods and wove a history from the titles and sacred inscriptions kept in the most ancient temples, and especially in the shrine of Triphylian Jupiter, where an inscription showed that a golden column had been set up by Jupiter himself, on which he wrote out his deeds, so that there might be a record of his achievements for posterity.

Ennius both translated and followed this history. These are his words: "Where Jupiter gives Neptune command of the sea, that he might reign over all the islands and all the places that were beside the sea." So what the poets say is true, but veiled with some covering and appearance.

Mount Olympus too may have given the poets their figure, so that they said Jupiter was allotted the kingdom of heaven, because Olympus is an ambiguous name for both the mountain and heaven. That Jupiter lived on Olympus the same history teaches, which says: "At that time Jupiter spent the greatest part of his life on Mount Olympus, and people came to him there for judgment, if any matters were in dispute. Likewise, if anyone had discovered anything new that was useful for human life, they came there and showed it to Jupiter."

The poets transfer many things in this way, not to lie against the gods whom they worship, but to add charm and grace to their poems with many-coloured figures. But those who do not understand how or why each thing is figured attack the poets as liars and blasphemers.

Deceived by this error, even the philosophers, because the things told of Jupiter seemed not at all fitting for a god, made two Jupiters, one natural and the other fabulous.

They saw in part what was true, namely that the one the poets speak of was a man; but about that natural Jupiter, led by the common habit of religion, they erred, in that they transferred the name of a man to God, who, as we said above, because he is alone, needs no name. And that Jupiter is the one born of Ops and Saturn cannot be denied.

Vain, then, is the persuasion of those who give the name Jupiter to the supreme God. For some are accustomed to defend their errors with this excuse: convinced about the one God, since they cannot deny it, they declare that they worship him, but that they are pleased to call him Jupiter. What could be more absurd? For Jupiter is not usually worshipped without the companionship of his wife and daughter. From this it is clear who he is; nor is it right for that name to be carried over to where there is no Minerva and no Juno. What of the fact that the proper meaning of this name expresses not a divine power,

but a human one? For Cicero explains that Jupiter and Juno are named from "helping" (iuvare), and Jupiter is called as it were "helping father": a name that does not suit God at all, since to help belongs to a man who brings some aid to someone not his own, and is a small kindness.

No one prays to God to help him, but to save him and grant him life and safety, which is much more and greater than helping. And since we are speaking of a father, no father is said to help his children when he begets or rears them; that word is too slight to express the greatness of a father's kindness.

How much more unfitting is it for God, who is the true Father, through whom we exist and whose we wholly are, by whom we are formed, given life, and enlightened, who imparts life to us, grants salvation, and supplies manifold food.

Whoever thinks that he is only helped by God does not understand God's kindnesses. Therefore he who diminishes the power of the supreme majesty by the name of Jupiter is not only ignorant but also impious.

So if we find from both his deeds and his character that Jupiter was a man and reigned on earth, it remains for us to investigate his death as well.

Ennius in the Sacred History, having described everything he did in his life, says at the end: "Then Jupiter, after he had gone around the lands five times and divided rule among all his friends and relatives, and left laws and customs to men, and provided grain, and did many other good things, being honoured with immortal glory and memory, left everlasting monuments of himself.

When his life had run its course, he exchanged life in Crete and departed to the gods; and the Curetes, his sons, cared for him and honoured him; and his tomb is in Crete, in the town of Gnossus, and Vesta is said to have founded this city; and on his tomb is inscribed in ancient Greek letters ZAN KRONOU, that is, in Latin, Jupiter son of Saturn."

This, certainly, is handed down not by the poets but by writers of ancient history. And it is so true that it is confirmed by the Sibylline verses, which run: "Lifeless daemons, images of the dead who have perished, whose tombs ill-fated Crete will hold as its boast."

Cicero, in On the Nature of the Gods, when he says that three Jupiters are counted by the theologians, says that the third was the Cretan, son of Saturn, whose tomb is shown on that island.

How then can a god be alive in one place and dead in another, have a temple in one place and a tomb in another? Let the Romans know, then, that their Capitol, that is, the supreme head of their public religion, is nothing but an empty monument.

Let us come now to his father, who reigned before him and who perhaps has more in him, because he is said to have been begotten from the union of such great elements. Let us see what in him was worthy of a god: first of all, that he is said to have had a golden age, because under him there was justice on earth.

I grant something in this that was not in his son. For what is so fitting for a god as a just government and a pious age?

But when I consider that he was born in the same way, I cannot think him the supreme God, since I see that something is older than he, namely heaven and earth. But I seek a God beyond whom there is nothing at all, who is the fountain and origin of things: he must be the one who founded heaven itself and established the earth.

But if Saturn was born of these, as is thought, how can he be the first God, who owes his origin to others? Or who presided over the world before Saturn was begotten?

But this, as I said a little before, is a poetic fiction. For it could not be that senseless elements separated by so great a distance should come together and beget a son, or that the one born should not be most like his parents but should bear a form his parents did not have.

Let us ask, then, what truth lies hidden under this figure. Minucius Felix, in the book entitled Octavius, argued thus: that Saturn, when he had been driven out by his son and come to Italy, was called son of Heaven because we are accustomed to say that those whose virtue we admire, or those who have arrived suddenly, have fallen from heaven; and son of Earth, because we call those born of unknown parents sons of the earth.

These things are indeed like the truth, but not true, because it is well known that he was regarded so even while he reigned.

He could have argued this way: that Saturn, being a most powerful king, to preserve the memory of his parents gave their names to heaven and earth, when these had before been called by other words; in the same way we know names were given to mountains and rivers.

For when the poets speak of the offspring of Atlas or of the river Inachus, they do not mean above all that men could be begotten from things lacking sense, but they certainly mean those who were born of the men who, living or dead, gave their names to mountains or rivers.

For this was customary among the ancients and especially the Greeks. So we learn that seas took their names from those who had fallen into them, like the Aegean, the Icarian, and the Hellespont; and in Latium Aventinus gave his name to the hill on which he was buried, and Tiberinus or Thybris to the river in which he was drowned.

It is not surprising, then, if the names of those who had begotten very powerful kings were given to heaven and earth.

It is clear, then, that Saturn was born not of heaven, which cannot be, but of the man whose name was Uranus. That this is true Trismegistus is the authority: when he said that very few had existed in whom there was perfect learning, he named among them his kinsmen Uranus, Saturn, and Mercury. Because Minucius did not know this, he took the story in another direction.

How he could have argued, I have shown. Now I shall say how, where, and by whom this was done; for it was not Saturn who did it, but Jupiter. In the Sacred History Ennius relates thus:

"Then Pan leads him to the mountain which is called the Pillar of Heaven. After he had climbed it, he surveyed the lands far and wide, and there on the mountain he built an altar to Caelus, and Jupiter was the first to sacrifice on that altar. In that place he looked up to the sky, which we now so name, and to what was above the world, which was called aether, he gave the name caelum from the name of his grandfather; and Jupiter, propitiating what is called aether, was the first to name it caelum, and he burned whole the victim he sacrificed there." Nor is this the only place where Jupiter is found to have sacrificed.

Caesar also, in his Aratus, reports that Aglaosthenes says that when Jupiter was setting out from the island of Naxos against the Titans and was sacrificing on the shore, an eagle flew to him as an omen, which, after his victory, he took as a good sign and placed under his protection.

The Sacred History testifies that even earlier an eagle had settled on his head and foretold his kingdom. To whom, then, could Jupiter have sacrificed except to Caelus his grandfather, who Euhemerus says died in Oceania and was buried in the town of Aulacia?

Since we have unveiled the mysteries of the poets and found out the parents of Saturn, let us return to his virtues and deeds. He was just in his reign.

First, from this very fact he is no longer a god, because he was (that is, he is in the past); next, because he was not even just, but impious, not only toward his sons, whom he killed, but also toward his father, whose genitals he is said to have cut off, which perhaps really happened.

But men, thinking of the element that is called heaven, hiss the whole story off the stage as most foolishly invented; yet the Stoics, as usual, try to turn it into a theory of nature. Cicero set out their view when discussing the nature of the gods.

"The heavenly, highest, ethereal nature," he says, "that is, the fiery one, which generates all things by itself, they held to be without that part of the body which needs union with another to procreate." This reasoning could have suited Vesta, if she were said to be male.

For this reason they think Vesta a virgin, because fire is an inviolable element and nothing can be born from it, since it consumes everything it seizes.

Ovid in the Fasti: "Understand Vesta to be nothing else than living flame, and you see no bodies born of flame. Rightly then is she a virgin, who gives back no seeds and takes none, and she loves companions of her virginity."

It could also have been ascribed to Vulcan, who indeed is thought to be fire, and yet the poets did not castrate him. It could also have been ascribed to the Sun, in which is the nature and cause of things that are born. For without the fiery heat of the Sun nothing can be born or grow, so that no element has less need of genitals than heat, by whose warmth all things are conceived, born, and sustained.

Finally, even if it is as they wish, why should we think Caelus castrated rather than born altogether without genitals? For if he generates by himself, he certainly did not need genitals, since he begot Saturn himself; but if he had them and they were cut off by his son, the origin of things and all nature would have perished.

What of the fact that they take from Saturn himself not only divine but even human sense, when they affirm that he is Saturn who holds the course and revolution of periods and times, and that he has that very name in Greek? For he is called Kronos, which is the same as chronos, that is, a span of time; and he was called Saturn because he is sated (saturetur) with years.

These are Cicero's words setting out the view of the Stoics; how empty it is, anyone can see at once. For if Saturn is the son of Caelus, how could time be begotten from heaven, or heaven be castrated by time, or time afterwards be stripped of rule by its son Jupiter? Or how was Jupiter born of time? Or with what years could eternity, which has no end, be sated?

If, then, these reasonings of the philosophers are empty, what remains but that we believe it really happened, that is, that a man was castrated by a man? Unless perhaps someone thinks he was a god who feared a co-heir, when, if he had had any divinity, he ought not to have cut off his father's genitals but his own, so that Jupiter would not be born, who deprived him of possession of the kingdom.

When he had his sister Rhea, whom in Latin we call Ops, as wife, he is said to have been forbidden by an oracle to rear male children, because he would be driven out by a son. Fearing this, he did not actually devour the sons born to him, as the fables say, but killed them; although it is written in the Sacred History that Saturn and Ops and the other men of that time were accustomed to eat human flesh, but that Jupiter first, when he established laws and customs for men, forbade by edict the eating of that food.

If this is true, what justice can there have been in him? But let us suppose it an invention that Saturn devoured his sons, only with some reason: was it because the common people say that one who has carried out his sons and committed them to burial has eaten them? Ops, when she had borne Jupiter, took the infant away and secretly sent him to Crete to be nursed.

Again I must criticize his lack of foresight. Why did he receive an oracle from another rather than know himself? Why, placed in heaven, did he not see what happened on earth?

Why did the Corybantes deceive him with their cymbals? Finally, why did some greater force arise to overcome his power? Clearly an old man was easily overcome by a young one and stripped of his rule.

So, driven out, he fled and came to Italy by ship after long wandering, as Ovid relates in the books of the Fasti: "The reason for the ship remains. The sickle-bearing god came by ship to the Tuscan river, after wandering over the world." Janus received him, wandering and needy.

Evidence for this are the old coins, on which is Janus with a double face and on the other side a ship, as the same poet added: "But good posterity shaped a ship's stern on the bronze, bearing witness to the arrival of the guest god."

All, then, agree that he was a man, not only the poets but also the writers of history and antiquities who handed down to memory his deeds in Italy: among the Greeks Diodorus and Thallus, among the Latins Nepos, Cassius, and Varro.

For since men in Italy lived in a rustic way, he "brought together the unteachable race, scattered on the high mountains, and gave them laws, and chose that it be called Latium, since he had lain hidden safe on these shores." Does anyone think him a god who was driven out, who fled, who lay hidden?

No one is so foolish. For whoever flees or hides must fear force and death.

Orpheus, who lived later than his times, plainly records that Saturn reigned on earth and among men: "First of all Kronos ruled over men on the earth, and from Kronos was born the great lord himself, far-seeing Zeus."

Likewise our Maro: "Golden Saturn led this life on earth." And in another place: "The ages which they call golden were under that king: so he ruled the peoples in quiet peace."

He did not say in the first passage that he lived in heaven, nor in the second that he ruled the gods above in peace. So it is clear he was an earthly king, which he declares more openly elsewhere: "He will found again the golden ages in Latium, through the fields once ruled by Saturn."

Ennius indeed, in his Euhemerus, says that it was not Saturn who reigned first but his father Uranus. "In the beginning," he says, "Caelus first held supreme rule on earth. He established and prepared that kingdom for himself together with his brothers."

The disagreement is not great, since the doubt among the greatest authors concerns only son and father. Yet both can be true: that Uranus first began to stand out among the rest in power and to hold the leadership, not a kingdom, and that later Saturn gained greater wealth for himself and took the royal title.

Now, since the Sacred History differs somewhat from what I have related, let us disclose what is contained in the true records, so that we may not seem to follow and approve the follies of the poets in accusing their religions.

These are Ennius' words: "Then Saturn married Ops. Titan, who was elder by birth, demands that he himself should reign. Then Vesta their mother and their sisters Ceres and Ops urge Saturn not to yield the kingdom to his brother.

Then Titan, who was less handsome than Saturn, both for that reason and because he saw that his mother and sisters were working for Saturn to reign, yielded to him that he should reign. So he made a pact with Saturn that if any male child were born to him, he would not rear it. He did this so that the kingdom might return to his own sons.

Then the son who was first born to Saturn, him they killed. Next twins were born, Jupiter and Juno. Then they showed Juno to Saturn and secretly hid Jupiter and gave him to Vesta to be reared, concealing him from Saturn.

Likewise Ops bears Neptune without Saturn's knowledge and hides him secretly. In the same way at a third birth Ops bears twins, Pluto and Glauca. Pluto in Latin is Dis Pater; others call him Orcus. Then they show the daughter Glauca to Saturn, but conceal and hide the son Pluto. Then Glauca dies as a little child.

This, as it is written, is the lineage and kinship of Jupiter and his brothers; in this way it has been handed down to us from the sacred writing."

Likewise a little later he adds this: "Then Titan, after he learned that sons had been begotten and reared by Saturn without his knowledge, took with him his sons, who are called Titans, seized his brother Saturn and Ops, enclosed them with a wall, and set a guard over them."

How true this history is, the Erythraean Sibyl shows, saying nearly the same things, except that she differs in a few points which do not affect the matter.

Jupiter, then, is cleared of the charge of the greatest crime, that he is said to have bound his father in fetters. For it was his uncle Titan who did it, because Saturn, against the pact and his oath, had raised male children.

The rest of the history is woven together thus: that Jupiter, grown up, having heard that his father and mother were shut in by guards and thrown into chains, came with a great multitude of Cretans, defeated Titan and his sons in battle, freed his parents from their chains, restored the kingdom to his father, and so returned to Crete.

After this an oracle was given to Saturn to beware lest his son drive him from the kingdom; to weaken the oracle and escape the danger, he plotted against Jupiter to kill him; Jupiter, learning of the plot, claimed the kingdom for himself again and put Saturn to flight.

Saturn, tossed about through all lands, pursued by armed men whom Jupiter had sent to seize or kill him, barely found a place in Italy where he might hide.

Since it is established from these facts that they were men, it is not obscure how they began to be called gods.

For if there were no kings before Saturn or Uranus, because men were few and lived a rustic life without any ruler, there is no doubt that in those times men began to honour the king himself and his whole family with the highest praises and new honours, so that they even called them gods, whether from wonder at their virtue (this they truly thought, being still rude and simple), or, as usually happens, in flattery of present power, or because of the benefits by which they had been brought to civilized life.

Then the kings themselves, since they had been dear to those whose life they had ordered, left behind them at their death a great longing.

So men made images of them, to have some comfort from looking at their likenesses; and going further out of love, they began to honour the memory of the dead, so that they might seem to repay those who had deserved well and might stir their successors to the desire of ruling well.

Cicero teaches this in On the Nature of the Gods, saying: "The life of men and common custom have adopted the practice of raising to heaven, by fame and goodwill, men outstanding for their benefits. Hence Hercules, hence Castor, hence Pollux, hence Aesculapius, hence Liber."

And in another place: "And in most cities it can be seen that, to sharpen virtue, or so that all the best men might more willingly face danger for the state, the memory of brave men has been consecrated with the honour of the immortal gods." For this reason, of course, the Romans consecrated their Caesars and the Moors their kings.

So little by little religions began, while those first who had known them instructed their children and grandchildren in that rite, and then all their descendants; and at length these greatest kings, because of the fame of their name, were worshipped in all the provinces.

Privately, however, individual peoples worshipped with the highest veneration the founders of their nation or city, whether men distinguished for bravery or women admirable for chastity: as Egypt Isis, the Moors Juba, the Macedonians Cabirus, the Carthaginians Urania, the Latins Faunus,

the Sabines Sancus, the Romans Quirinus; in just the same way Athens Minerva, Samos Juno, Paphos Venus, Lemnos Vulcan, Naxos Liber, Delos Apollo.

So various rites were taken up among peoples and regions, while men wished to be grateful to their leaders and could find no other honours to confer on those who were without life.

Besides, the dutiful affection of those who succeeded them contributed very greatly to the error: so that they might seem born of divine stock, they conferred divine honours on their parents and ordered them to be conferred.

Or can anyone doubt how the religions of the gods were established, when he reads in Maro the words of Aeneas commanding his companions: "Now pour libations to Jupiter and call on my father Anchises in prayer"? To him he assigns not only immortality but even power over the winds: "Let us ask for winds, and may he wish me to bring him these rites every year in a city founded, in temples dedicated to him."

The same, no doubt, Liber and Pan and Mercury and Apollo did for Jupiter, and afterwards their successors for them. The poets also joined in and, composing songs for pleasure, raised them to heaven, as do those who flatter even wicked kings with lying panegyrics.

This evil arose from the Greeks, whose levity, equipped with the power and abundance of speech, has raised incredible clouds of lies. So, admiring these men, they were the first to take up their rites and hand them on to all nations.

For this vanity the Sibyl rebukes them thus: "Hellas, why do you trust in men as leaders? Why do you offer vain gifts to the dead? You sacrifice to idols. Who put error in your mind, to do these things, forsaking the face of the great God?"

Marcus Tullius, who was not only a perfect orator but also a philosopher, since he alone arose as an imitator of Plato, in the book in which he consoled himself on the death of his daughter, did not hesitate to say that the gods publicly worshipped were men.

His testimony ought to be judged the weightier because he both held the priesthood of augur and testifies that he worships and venerates these same gods.

So within a few short lines he gave us two things. For while he declares that he will consecrate the image of his daughter in the same way as those were consecrated by the ancients, he both taught that they were dead and showed the origin of vain superstition.

"Since," he says, "we see many from among men, both male and female, in the number of the gods, and venerate their most august shrines in cities and countryside, let us assent to the wisdom of those by whose talents and discoveries we have our whole life cultivated and ordered with laws and institutions.

And if any living being ever deserved to be consecrated, it was surely she. If the offspring of Cadmus or Amphitryon or Tyndareus was to be raised to heaven by fame, the same honour must certainly be dedicated to her. And this indeed I will do: you, the best and most learned of all, placed in the company of the immortal gods with their own approval, I will consecrate in the belief of all mortals."

Perhaps someone will say that Cicero raved from excessive grief. But that whole speech, perfect in learning, examples, and style itself, was the work not of a sick mind but of a steady mind and judgment; and this very sentence shows no sign of grief.

For I do not think he could have written so variously, so fully, so elegantly, had not reason itself, the consolation of friends, and the length of time softened his grief.

What of the fact that he says the same in the books On the Republic and in On Glory? For in On the Laws, a work in which, following Plato, he wished to set down the laws he thought a just and wise state would use, he enacted this about religion: "Let them worship the gods and those who have always been held heavenly, and those whom their merits have placed in heaven: Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, Pollux, Quirinus."

Likewise in the Tusculans, when he said that almost the whole of heaven is filled with the human race, he says: "If I were to try to search out antiquity and dig out from it what the writers of Greece have handed down, the very gods held to be of the greater families will be found to have gone from us to heaven.

Ask whose tombs are shown in Greece; remember, since you are initiated, what is taught in the mysteries; then at last you will understand how widely this extends."

He evidently appealed to the knowledge of Atticus, that it could be understood from the mysteries themselves that all those who are worshipped were men; and though he confessed it without hesitation about Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, and Pollux, he was afraid to say it openly about Apollo and Jupiter, their fathers, and likewise about Neptune, Vulcan, Mars, and Mercury, whom he called gods of the greater families.

And for this reason he says that this extends widely, so that we may understand the same of Jupiter and the other more ancient gods. If the ancients consecrated their memory in the same way that he says he will consecrate the image and name of his daughter, those who mourn can be pardoned; those who believe cannot. For who is so

mad as to think that heaven is opened to the dead by the consent and decree of countless fools, or that anyone can give another what he himself does not have? Among the Romans Julius is a god because it pleased that wicked

man Antony; Quirinus is a god because shepherds thought so, though the one proved to be the murderer of his twin brother and the other the parricide of his country. And if Antony had not been consul, Gaius Caesar, for

all his services to the state, would have lacked even the honour due to a dead man, by the counsel of Piso his father-in-law and Lucius Caesar his kinsman, who forbade his funeral, and of the consul Dolabella, who overturned the column in the forum, that is, his memorial, and purified the forum. As for Romulus, Ennius shows that he was longed for by his people; in his poem the people, grieving for their lost king, say this:

"O Romulus, divine Romulus, what a guardian of the fatherland the gods begot in you! You brought us forth into the shores of light, O father, O begetter, O blood sprung from the gods."

Because of this longing, Julius Proculus was more easily believed when he lied. He was put up by the senators to announce to the people that he had seen the king in more than human majesty, and that he had commanded the people that a shrine be made to him, that he was a god and was to be called Quirinus.

By this he both persuaded the people that Romulus had gone away to the gods and freed the senate from suspicion of killing the king.

I could have been content with what I have related, but many things still remain necessary to the work I have undertaken.

For although by destroying the very head of these religions I have done away with them all, yet I wish to pursue the rest and refute more fully the inveterate persuasion, so that men may at last be ashamed of their errors and repent of them.

This is a great work and worthy of a man: "I go on to free minds from the knots of religions," as Lucretius says, who indeed could not accomplish it, because he brought nothing true. This task is ours, who both assert the true God and refute the false ones.

So those who think the poets invented fables about the gods, and yet believe that there are goddesses and worship them, fall back unawares into what they had denied, that the gods have intercourse and bear children.

For it cannot be that two sexes were established except for the purpose of generation. Once the difference of sexes is admitted, they do not understand that it follows that they conceive, which cannot apply to God. But these people think so: for they say there are sons of Jupiter and of the other gods.

New gods, then, are born, and indeed daily; for they are not outdone by men in fertility. Therefore everything is full of countless gods, since, of course, none dies.

For since the multitude of men is incredible and their number beyond reckoning, who yet must die as they are born, what must we think is the number of gods, born over so many ages and remaining immortal?

Why then are so few worshipped? Unless perhaps we think the two sexes of the gods exist not for the sake of begetting but only for taking pleasure, and that they practise what puny men are ashamed both to do and to undergo.

But since some are said to be born from others, it follows that they are always being born, if they were once born; or, if they have ceased to be born, we should know why or when they ceased.

Not without wit Seneca says in his books of moral philosophy: "What then is the reason why in the poets Jupiter, most lustful of all, has stopped raising children? Has he turned sixty, and has the Papian law put a clasp on him? Or has he obtained the right of three children? Or has it at last occurred to him, 'Expect from another what you have done to another,'

and does he fear that someone may do to him what he did to Saturn?" But let those who assert gods see how they will answer this argument which we shall bring: if there are two sexes of gods, intercourse follows; if they have intercourse, they must also have houses; for they do not lack virtue and modesty so as to do this promiscuously or in the open, as we see dumb animals do.

If they have houses, it follows that they also have cities, and indeed on the authority of Naso, who says: "The common folk live apart in various places; in front the powerful and famous heaven-dwellers have set up their households." If they have cities, then they will have fields too.

Now who does not see what follows? That they plough and cultivate, which is done for the sake of food: therefore they are mortal. The same argument holds equally in reverse.

For if they have no fields, they have no cities either; if they have no cities, they have no houses either; if they lack houses, they lack intercourse too; if intercourse is absent from them, so then is the female sex. But we see that among the gods there are also females: therefore they are not gods. Let anyone refute this argument if he can.

For one thing follows so closely from another that these last conclusions must be admitted.

But no one will refute this either: of the two sexes one is stronger, the other weaker; for males are more robust, females weaker. But weakness does not apply to God; therefore neither does the female sex.

To this is added that final conclusion of the former argument: that they are not gods, since among the gods there are also females.

For these reasons the Stoics interpret the gods in another way, and because they do not see through to what is true, they try to join them with a theory of natural things. Following them, Cicero gave this verdict about the gods and their religions:

"Do you see, then, how reasoning has been drawn from natural things, well and usefully discovered, to fictitious and invented gods? This has given birth to false opinions, turbulent errors, and superstitions almost worthy of old women. For the forms of the gods, their ages, dress, and adornment are known to us, and moreover their families, marriages, kinships, and everything has been carried over to the likeness of human weakness."

What could be said more plainly, more truly? The chief of Roman philosophy, holding a most distinguished priesthood, exposes fictitious and invented gods, testifies that their worship is superstition almost worthy of old women, and complains that men are entangled in false opinions and turbulent errors.

For the whole third book On the Nature of the Gods overturns and destroys all religions from the foundations. What more then is expected of us? Can we surpass Cicero in eloquence? Not at all; but confidence failed him, since he did not know the truth, which he himself simply confesses in the same work. For he says that he can more easily say what is not than what is; that is, he understands what is false but does not know what is true.

It is clear, then, that those thought to be gods were men and that their memory was consecrated after death. That is why their ages differ and each has a fixed likeness: their images are shaped in the dress and at the age in which death overtook each.

Let us consider, if you please, the troubles of these unhappy gods. Isis lost her son, Ceres her daughter; Latona, driven out and tossed through the whole world, barely found a small island in which to give birth.

The Mother of the Gods both loved a handsome young man and, catching him with a mistress, cut off his genitals and made him half a man; and that is why her rites are now celebrated by the Galli, her priests. Juno most bitterly persecuted her husband's mistresses, because she herself could not bear children by her brother.

Varro writes that the island of Samos was earlier named Parthenia, because Juno grew up there and there married Jupiter. So her most famous and ancient temple is on Samos, with a statue shaped in the dress of a bride, and her yearly rites are celebrated with the ritual of a wedding. If then she grew up, if she was first a virgin and afterwards a woman, whoever does not understand that she was a human being confesses himself a beast.

Why should I speak of the obscenity of Venus, prostituted to the lusts of all, not only of gods but also of men? For by her notorious debauchery with Mars she bore Harmonia; by Mercury, Hermaphroditus, who was born androgynous; by Jupiter, Cupid; by Anchises, Aeneas; by Butes, Eryx. By Adonis indeed she could have none, because while still a boy he was struck and killed by a boar.

She first, as the Sacred History records, instituted the art of the harlot and taught the women of Cyprus to make money by making their bodies common. She ordered this so that she alone might not seem unchaste and eager for men beyond other women.

Does even she have anything of divinity, whose adulteries outnumber her childbirths? But not even those virgin goddesses could keep their chastity untouched. For from where are we to think Erichthonius was born? From the earth, as the poets wish it to seem?

But the thing itself cries out. For when Vulcan had made arms for the gods and Jupiter had given him the choice of asking whatever reward he wished, and had sworn, as he used to, by the infernal marsh that he would refuse nothing, then the lame smith asked for marriage with Minerva.

Here Jupiter Best and Greatest, bound by so solemn an oath, could not refuse, but he warned Minerva to resist and defend her chastity. Then in that struggle, they say, Vulcan spilled his seed on the ground, from which Erichthonius was born, and that name was given him from eris and chthōn, that is, from strife and soil.

Why then did the virgin shut up that boy with a serpent, seal the chest, and entrust it to the three virgin daughters of Cecrops? A plain case of unchastity, I think, which cannot be disguised in any way.

Another, when she had almost lost her lover, who "was torn apart by his frightened horses," called in the most excellent physician Asclepius to cure the young man; and when he was healed, "the kindly goddess hid him in secret dwellings and banished him to the nymph Egeria and her grove, where alone in the Italian woods, unknown, he might pass his life, and where, his name changed, he would be Virbius." What does this so diligent, so anxious care mean?

Why the secret dwellings? Why banishment so far, or to a woman, or into solitude? Why then the change of name? Finally, why so stubborn an aversion to horses? What do all these signify but consciousness of debauchery and a love by no means virginal?

She plainly had reason to undertake so much labour for so faithful a young man, who had refused compliance to his stepmother's love.

At this point we must also refute those who not only admit that gods were made from men, but even glory in it in order to praise them, whether for virtue, like Hercules, or for gifts, like Ceres and Liber, or for arts discovered, like Aesculapius and Minerva.

How foolish these reasons are, and how unworthy of men's defiling themselves with an inexpiable crime and becoming enemies of the true God, whom they despise while they take up the rites of the dead, I shall show point by point.

They say that it is virtue which raises a man to heaven: not the virtue that philosophers discuss, which consists in goods of the soul, but this bodily kind which is called strength; and since it was pre-eminent in Hercules, he is believed to have earned immortality.

Who is so foolishly absurd as to judge bodily strength a divine or even a human good, when greater strength has been given to cattle, and it is often broken by a single illness or diminished and collapses with old age itself?

So that same Hercules, when he saw his muscles disfigured with sores, wished neither to be healed nor to grow old, lest he should ever appear less than himself or more deformed.

They thought he ascended into heaven from the pyre on which he had burned himself alive, and the very things they most foolishly admired they set up, portrayed and consecrated in statues and images, so that there might stand forever monuments to the folly of those who believed that gods were made by the killing of beasts.

But perhaps this may be the fault of the Greeks, who always held the most trivial things to be the greatest.

What of our own people? Are they any wiser? They despise the virtue of the athlete, because it does no harm, but they so admire the virtue of kings, because it usually harms widely, that they think brave and warlike generals are placed in the assembly of the gods, and that there is no other road to immortality than to lead armies, lay waste others' lands, destroy cities, raze towns, and either slaughter free peoples or subject them to slavery.

Evidently, the more men they have afflicted, plundered, and killed, the nobler and more famous they think themselves; and, captivated by the appearance of empty glory, they give the name of virtue to their crimes.

I would rather they made gods for themselves from the slaughter of wild beasts than approve so bloody an immortality. If anyone has killed one man, he is held polluted and wicked, and they think it unlawful for him to be admitted to this earthly dwelling of the gods. But he who has slaughtered countless thousands of men, flooded the plains with blood, and stained the rivers, is admitted not only into the temple but even into heaven.

In Ennius, Africanus speaks thus: "If it is lawful for anyone to ascend into the regions of the heavenly ones, for me alone the greatest gate of heaven lies open"; evidently because he destroyed and ruined a great part of the human race.

O Africanus, in what darkness you moved, or rather, O poet, you who thought that the ascent to heaven lies open to men through slaughter and blood! Cicero too assented to this vanity.

"It is so indeed, Africanus," he says, "for that same gate lay open to Hercules too"; as if he himself had plainly been the doorkeeper in heaven when it happened.

For my part, I cannot decide whether to think it more a matter for grief or for laughter, when I see serious and learned men, and wise ones as they think themselves, tossed about in such pitiable waves of error.

If this is the virtue that makes us immortal, I for one would rather die than be the destruction of as many as possible.

If immortality cannot be gained except through blood, what will happen if all agree together in concord? This could certainly happen, if they cast away their destructive and impious fury and were willing to be innocent and just. Will no one, then, be worthy of heaven?

Will virtue perish because men will not be allowed to rage against men? But these people, who count the overthrow of cities and peoples the highest glory, will not bear public peace. They will plunder and rage and, insolently inflicting wrongs, break the bond of human society, so that they may have an enemy to destroy, no more wickedly than they provoked him.

Now let us go on to the rest. The handing on of gifts gave Ceres and Liber the name of gods. I could show from the divine writings that wine and grain were in use among men before the offspring of Caelus and Saturn; but let us suppose that they were indeed discovered by them.

Can it seem more or greater to have gathered grain and taught how to grind it and make bread, or to have pressed grapes picked from the vines and made wine, than to have produced grain itself or the vines and brought them forth from the earth?

Granted that God left these things to be discovered by human ingenuity, it still cannot be but that all things are his, who gave man both the wisdom to discover them and the very things that could be discovered.

The arts too are said to have won immortality for their inventors, as medicine for Aesculapius and smithcraft for Vulcan. Let us then worship also those who taught fulling and shoemaking. And why is no honour paid to the inventor of pottery? Is it because these rich men despise Samian ware?

There are other arts too whose inventors did very great service to human life: why have temples not been assigned to them as well?

But of course it is Minerva who discovered them all, and so the craftsmen pray to her. So from these menial things Minerva ascended into heaven.

There is good reason, surely, for anyone to abandon him who began the earth with its living things and the heaven with its stars and lights, in order to venerate her who taught how to begin a web on the loom!

What of him who taught how to heal wounds in bodies? Can he be more excellent than he who formed bodies themselves, gave the power of perceiving and living, and finally devised and produced the very herbs and other things of which the art of healing consists?

But someone will say that their own veneration should be given both to this Supreme One who made all things and to those who were of service in part.

First, it has never happened that anyone who worshipped these also worshipped God, nor can it happen; for if the same honour is given to others, he is not worshipped at all, since his religion is to believe that he is the one and only God.

The greatest poet cries out that all those "who adorned life with the arts they discovered" are among the dead below, and that the very "discoverer of such medicine and art" was "thrust down by a thunderbolt to the Stygian waters," so that we may understand how great is the power of the Almighty Father, who even extinguishes gods with thunderbolts.

But clever men perhaps reasoned with themselves thus: since a god cannot be struck by lightning, it is clear that it did not happen. On the contrary: since it did happen, it is clear that he was a man, not a god.

The lie of the poets is not in the fact but in the name; for they feared harm if they confessed what was true against public belief.

But if it is agreed among them that gods were made from men, why then do they not believe the poets when they describe their flights, wounds, deaths, wars, and adulteries?

From these things it can be understood that they could in no way have become gods, since they were not even good men, and in their lives they did things that bring forth eternal death.

I come now to the religions peculiar to the Romans, since I have spoken of those they share with others. Romulus' nurse, the She-wolf, has been given divine honours; and I would bear it if it were the animal itself whose figure she bears.

But Livy is the authority that it is an image of Larentina, and indeed not of her body but of her mind and character. For she was the wife of Faustulus, and because of the cheapness of her body, made common to all, she was called among the shepherds "lupa," that is, a harlot; from which also a brothel is called lupanar.

In representing her, the Romans evidently followed the example of the Athenians, among whom a certain harlot named Leaena had killed a tyrant; because it was unlawful for a statue of a harlot to be set up in a temple, they set up the image of the animal whose name she bore.

So as the Athenians made her memorial from her name, the Romans made theirs from her profession. A festal day was also dedicated to her name, and the Larentinalia were established.

Nor is this the only harlot the Romans worship, but also Faula, who Verrius writes was Hercules' mistress. How great must this immortality be thought, which even harlots attain?

Flora, having gained great wealth from the harlot's trade, made the people her heir and left a fixed sum of money, from the annual interest of which her birthday was to be celebrated by the presentation of games, which they call the Floralia.

Because this seemed disgraceful to the senate, they decided to take an argument from the name itself, so that some dignity might be added to a shameful thing. They invented a goddess who presides over flowers and must be appeased so that crops, trees, and vines might flower well and prosperously.

Following that colouring, the poet in the Fasti related that she was a nymph of good standing called Chloris, and that, married to Zephyrus, she received from her husband as a kind of dowry the gift of power over all flowers.

These things are said decently, but believed indecently and shamefully; and when the truth is sought, coverings of this kind ought not to deceive us.

So those games are celebrated, as befits the memory of a harlot, with every kind of lewdness. For besides the licence of words, in which all obscenity is poured out, harlots are also stripped of their clothes at the people's demand; they then play the part of mime actresses and are kept in the sight of the people, with shameful movements, until the shameless eyes are sated.

Tatius consecrated a statue of Cloacina found in the Great Sewer, and because he did not know whose likeness it was, he named her after the place. Tullus Hostilius represented Fear and Pallor and worshipped them.

What shall I say of this man, except that he deserved always to have his gods present with him, as people usually pray? From him Marcus Marcellus' consecration of Honour and Virtue differs in the decency of the names, but agrees in substance.

With the same vanity the senate placed Mind too among the gods; had it possessed a mind, it would never have taken up such rites.

Cicero says that Greece adopted a great and bold plan in consecrating images of Cupids and Loves in the gymnasia: evidently he flattered Atticus and mocked his friend.

For that was not to be called a great plan, or a plan at all, but the desperate and deplorable wickedness of shameless men, who prostituted their own children, whom they ought to have trained to decency, to the lust of youth. They wished gods of disgrace to be worshipped by these children, and above all in those places where naked bodies lie open to the eyes of corrupters, and at that age which, simple and unwary, can be ensnared and fall into traps before it can be on guard.

What wonder if all disgraces have flowed from this nation, among whom vices themselves are sacred, and are not only not avoided but even worshipped? And so to this statement, as if he surpassed the Greeks in prudence, he added: "For virtues, not vices, ought to be consecrated."

But if you accept this, Marcus Tullius, do you not see that vices will burst in along with virtues, because evils cling to goods and are more powerful in the minds of men? If you forbid them to be consecrated, that same Greece will answer you that it worships some gods to do it good and others to keep them from doing it harm. For this is always the excuse of those who treat their own evils as gods, as the Romans do Blight and Fever.

If, then, vices are not to be consecrated, in which I agree with you, neither are virtues. For they do not have understanding or sense in themselves, nor are they to be placed within walls or little shrines made of clay, but within the breast, and to be held inwardly, lest they be false if placed outside man.

So I laugh at that fine law of yours which you set down in these words: "But those things on account of which ascent to heaven is granted to man, Mind, Virtue, Piety, Faith: let there be shrines of these praises." Yet these cannot be separated from man. If they are to be worshipped, they must be in man himself.

But if they are outside man, what need is there to worship things you lack? For it is virtue that must be cultivated, not the image of virtue, and it must be cultivated not by any sacrifice or incense or solemn prayer, but by will and purpose alone.

For what else is it to cultivate virtue than to grasp it with the mind and hold it fast? And each one attains this as soon as he begins to will it. This alone is the cultivation of virtue; for no other religion and veneration is to be held but that of the one God.

What need is there then, O wisest of men, to fill places with superfluous buildings which could yield to human uses? Why appoint priests to serve empty and senseless things? Why sacrifice victims? Why spend such great sums on making or worshipping images?

A firmer and more incorruptible temple is the human breast: let this rather be adorned, let this be filled with those true divinities.

What must follow, then, follows these false consecrations. For those who worship the virtues in this way, that is, who pursue the shadows and images of virtues, cannot hold the very things that are true.

So there is no virtue in anyone, vices ruling everywhere; no faith, each seizing everything for himself; no piety, avarice and greed sparing neither kin nor parents and rushing to poison and the sword; no peace, no concord, with wars raging publicly and private enmities raging even to bloodshed; no chastity, unbridled lusts defiling every sex and every part of the body.

Yet they do not cease to worship the very things they flee and hate. For they worship with incense and with the tips of their fingers what they ought to shudder at in their inmost feelings; and all this error comes down from ignorance of that principal and supreme good.

When the city was taken by the Gauls, the Romans besieged on the Capitol, having made engines from women's hair, dedicated a temple to Bald Venus.

They do not understand, then, how empty their religions are, even from the very fact that they make fun of them with such absurdities.

Perhaps they had learned from the Lacedaemonians to invent gods for themselves from events. When the Lacedaemonians were besieging the Messenians, and the Messenians, secretly slipping past the besiegers, had run to plunder Lacedaemon, they were routed and put to flight by the Spartan women.

When the Lacedaemonians learned of the enemy's trick, they followed. The armed women went out a long way to meet them; and when they saw their husbands preparing for battle, because they thought they were Messenians, they bared their bodies.

And the men, recognizing their wives and roused to lust by the sight, lay with them armed as they were, indeed promiscuously,

for there was no time to tell them apart, just as the young men earlier sent by the same people had lain with the virgins, from whom the Partheniae were born. In memory of this deed they set up a temple and statue to Armed Venus; and although it came from a shameful cause, it seems more decent to have consecrated Venus armed than bald.

At the same time an altar was also set up to Jupiter the Baker, because he had warned them in a dream to make bread from all the grain they had and throw it into the enemy camp; and when this was done the siege was lifted, the Gauls despairing that the Romans could be subdued by want. What mockery of religions is this?

If I were their defender, what could I complain of more seriously than that the divinity of the gods had come into such contempt that it is made a laughing-stock with the most shameful names?

Who would not laugh at the goddess Oven, or rather at learned men busying themselves with celebrating the Fornacalia? Who, hearing of the goddess Muta, can hold back laughter? They say she is the one from whom the Lares were born, and they name her Lara or Larunda. What can she offer her worshipper who cannot speak?

Caca too is worshipped, who informed Hercules of the theft of his cattle and gained divinity because she betrayed her brother; and Cunina, who guards infants in their cradles and wards off the evil eye; and Stercutus, who first introduced the method of manuring fields; and Tutinus, on whose shameful lap brides sit, so that the god may seem to have tasted their chastity first; and a thousand other monstrosities, so that we must now say those who took up the worship of these things are more foolish than the Egyptians, who venerate certain monstrous and ridiculous images.

And these at least have some image. What of those who worship a shapeless rough stone called Terminus? This is the one Saturn is said to have swallowed in place of Jupiter, and not without reason is honour paid to him.

For when Tarquinius wished to build the Capitol and there were shrines of many gods on that site, he consulted them by augury whether they would yield to Jupiter; and when the rest yielded, Terminus alone remained. Hence the poet calls him "the immovable rock of the Capitol."

From this very fact it is found how great Jupiter is, to whom a stone did not yield, perhaps trusting in the fact that it had freed him from his father's jaws.

So when the Capitol was built, an opening was left in the roof above Terminus himself, so that, because he had not yielded, he might enjoy the open sky: which those who thought a stone could enjoy it did not enjoy themselves.

To him, then, public prayers are made as a god guarding boundaries, who is sometimes not only a stone but even a stake.

What would you say of those who worship such things, except that they themselves above all are stones and stakes?

We have spoken of the gods themselves who are worshipped; now a few things must be said about their rites and mysteries. Among the Cypriots Teucer sacrificed a human victim to Jupiter and handed that sacrifice down to posterity; it was abolished only recently, in the reign of Hadrian.

There was a law among the Taurians, an inhuman and savage people, that strangers should be sacrificed to Diana, and that sacrifice was celebrated for a long time.

The Gauls appeased Esus and Teutates with human blood. Not even the Latins were free of this savagery, since Jupiter Latiaris is even now worshipped with human blood. What good do they ask from these gods, who sacrifice in this way?

Or what can such gods offer men, who are propitiated by men's sufferings? But with barbarians it is not so surprising, whose religion agrees with their character; but our own people, who have always claimed the glory of gentleness and humanity, are they not found more savage in these sacrilegious rites?

For those are rather to be held wicked who, though polished by the study of liberal learning, fall away from humanity, than those who, rude and unskilled, slip into evil deeds through ignorance of good things.

It is clear, however, that this rite of sacrificing men is ancient, since Saturn was worshipped in Latium with the same kind of sacrifice, not indeed by a man being slain at the altar, but by his being thrown into the Tiber from the Mulvian bridge.

Varro is the authority that this was done because of a certain oracle, of which the last verse is this: "And send heads to Hades, and to the father a man (phōta)." Because this seems ambiguous, both a torch and a man are usually thrown to him.

But that kind of sacrifice is said to have been abolished by Hercules when he returned from Spain, the rite nevertheless remaining, so that images made of rushes were thrown in place of real men, as Ovid teaches in the Fasti: "Until the Tirynthian came to these fields, every year the grim rites were performed in the Leucadian manner. He threw Quirites of straw into the water; now, after Hercules' example, false bodies are thrown."

The Vestal virgins perform these rites, as the same poet says: "Then also the virgin is wont to throw rush likenesses of men of old from the oaken bridge." As for the infants who were sacrificed to the same Saturn out of hatred of Jupiter, I cannot find what to say.

That men were so barbarous, so savage, as to call their own parricide, that is, a crime foul and accursed to the human race, a sacrifice, when they destroyed tender and innocent lives, at the age which is sweetest to parents, without any regard for natural affection, and surpassed in ferocity the savagery of all beasts, which at least love their young!

O incurable madness! What more could these gods do to them if they were most angry than they do when propitious, when they pollute their worshippers with parricides, strike them with childlessness, and strip them of human feeling?

What can be holy to these men? Or what would they do in unconsecrated places, who commit the greatest crimes among the altars of the gods?

Pescennius Festus, in the books of his history in miscellany form, relates that the Carthaginians were accustomed to sacrifice human victims to Saturn, and that when they had been defeated by Agathocles, king of the Sicilians, they thought the god was angry with them; and so, to pay the expiation more carefully, they sacrificed two hundred sons of their nobles.

"So great the evils religion could persuade," "which has often brought forth wicked and impious deeds."

For whom, then, were these utterly mad men providing by that sacrifice, when they killed so great a part of the city as perhaps not even Agathocles had killed as victor?

From this kind of rite, those public rites are to be judged of no less madness, some of which belong to the Mother, in which men make offering of their own genitals (for having cut off their sex they make themselves neither men nor women), others to Virtus, whom they also call Bellona, in which the priests themselves sacrifice not with another's blood but with their own.

For having cut their shoulders and brandishing drawn swords in both hands, they run, they are carried away, they rave. Excellently, then, Quintilian says in his Fanatic: "If a god compels this, he is angry."

Are these, too, sacred rites? Is it not better to live like cattle than to worship gods so impious, so profane, so bloodthirsty?

But from where these errors and such great outrages have flowed we shall discuss in its place. Meanwhile let us look at the other rites too, which are free of crime, so that we may not seem, from eagerness to attack, to choose the worse.

The rites of Egyptian Isis concern how she lost and found her little son. For first her priests, with shaven bodies, beat their breasts and lament, as she herself had done when she lost him; then the boy is brought out as if found, and that mourning is changed into joy. Hence Lucan: "and Osiris never sought enough."

For they always lose him and always find him. So in the rites there is represented an image of something that really happened, which, if we have any sense, shows that she was a mortal woman and almost bereaved, had she not found her only son. This did not escape that very poet, in whom the young Pompey, hearing of his father's death, says: "I will turn Isis, now a deity for the nations, out of her tomb, and scatter Osiris, covered in linen, among the crowd."

This is the Osiris whom the common people call Serapis. For the names of the dead who are consecrated are usually changed, I suppose so that no one may think they were men.

For Romulus too after death became Quirinus, Leda Nemesis, and Circe Marica; and Ino, after she threw herself into the sea, became Leucothea and Mother Matuta, and her son Melicertes Palaemon and Portunus.

The rites of Eleusinian Ceres are not unlike these. For as there the boy Osiris is sought with his mother's wailing, so here Proserpina is carried off to an incestuous marriage with her uncle; and because Ceres is said to have sought her in Sicily with torches lit from the summit of Etna, her rites are celebrated by tossing burning torches.

At Lampsacus the acceptable victim for Priapus is an ass, and the reason for this sacrifice is given thus in the Fasti: when all the gods had gathered for the feast of the Great Mother and, full from the banquet, were spending the night in games, Vesta lay down on the ground and fell asleep; there Priapus plotted against her sleep and chastity, but she was woken by the untimely braying of the ass on which Silenus rode, and the lust of the plotter was foiled;

for this reason the people of Lampsacus were accustomed to sacrifice an ass to Priapus as if in revenge, while among the Romans the same animal, in the rites of Vesta, is crowned with loaves in honour of the chastity it preserved.

What is more shameful, more disgraceful, than that Vesta is a virgin thanks to an ass? "But the poet invented the story."

Is that story truer, then, which is told by those who wrote the Phaenomena, when they speak of the two stars of Cancer which the Greeks call "the asses": that they were asses who carried Father Liber across when he could not cross a river, and that to one of them he gave this reward, that it should speak with a human voice? And so a contest arose between it and Priapus about the size of the obscene member, and Priapus, defeated and angry, killed the victor.

This is much more absurd still, but poets may do whatever they like. I do not shake out so ugly a mystery, nor strip Priapus, lest anything worthy of laughter appear. Let the poets have invented these things, by all means; but they must have been invented to cover some greater baseness.

Let us ask, then, what it is. And surely it is plain. For just as a bull is sacrificed to the Moon because it has similar horns, and "Persia appeases Hyperion, girt with rays, with a horse, lest a slow victim be given to the swift god," so here, because the size of the male member is enormous, no more fitting victim could be found for that monster than one that could imitate the very one to whom it is sacrificed.

At Lindus, a town of Rhodes, there are rites of Hercules whose ritual is very different from the others, since they are celebrated not with "euphēmia," as the Greeks call it, but with curses and execration; and they consider them violated if at any time during the solemn rites a good word has escaped anyone, even unintentionally.

This reason is given for it, if there can be any reason in things so utterly empty.

When Hercules had been carried there and was suffering from hunger, he saw a ploughman at work and began to ask him to sell him one ox. The man said it could not be done, because all his hope of tilling the land rested on those two bullocks.

Hercules, using his usual violence, since he could not get one, took both. And the unhappy man, when he saw his oxen being slaughtered, avenged his wrong with curses, which was most pleasing to that elegant and witty man.

For while he prepared a feast for his companions and devoured another man's oxen, he listened with laughter and guffaws to the man abusing him most bitterly.

But after it was decided to give Hercules divine honours out of admiration for his virtue, the citizens set up an altar to him, which from the deed he named "Bouzygos" (the ox-yoke), at which two yoked oxen should be sacrificed, like those he had taken from the ploughman; and he appointed that very man as his priest and commanded him always to use the same curses in celebrating the sacrifices, because he said he had never feasted more pleasantly.

These are no longer rites but sacrileges, in which what is counted holy would be punished most severely if it were done in other rites.

And the rites of Cretan Jupiter himself, what do they show but how he was stolen away from his father or how he was nursed? There is the she-goat of the nymph Amalthea, which fed the infant at her udders; of which Germanicus Caesar says in his poem on Aratus: "She is thought to be the nurse of Jupiter; if truly the infant Jupiter sucked the udders of the most faithful Cretan goat, who by her bright star bears witness to her grateful nursling."

Musaeus is the authority that Jupiter used the hide of this goat as a shield when fighting the Titans, from which the poets call him "aigiochos" (aegis-bearing). So whatever was done in hiding the boy is itself performed in image in the rites.

And the mystery of his mother contains the same thing, which Ovid explains in the Fasti: "Lofty Ida has long been ringing with clashing, so that the boy may wail safely with his infant mouth. Some beat shields with staves, some empty helmets: this is the Curetes' work, this the Corybantes'. The thing was hidden, and imitations of the ancient deed remain: the goddess's companions shake bronzes and hoarse hides. They beat cymbals for helmets, drums for shields; the flute gives Phrygian measures, as it gave before."

Sallust rejects this whole opinion as invented by the poets and wished to explain ingeniously why the Curetes are said to have been the nurturers of Jupiter; and he says this: because they were the first to understand the divine, antiquity, magnifying things as it does everything else, celebrated them as nurturers of Jupiter.

How far the learned man went astray the fact itself now shows. For if Jupiter is the first of both gods and religions, if before him no gods were commonly worshipped because those who are worshipped had not yet been born, it is clear that the Curetes were, on the contrary, the first not to understand the divine: through them all error was brought in and the memory of the true God taken away.

From these very mysteries and ceremonies, then, they ought to have understood that they were praying to dead men.

I do not require, then, that anyone should believe the fictions of the poets. Whoever thinks they lie, let him consider the writings of the pontiffs themselves and turn over whatever literature concerns the sacred rites. He will perhaps find more than we bring forward, from which he may understand that all that is held sacred is empty, foolish, and invented.

But whoever has laid aside error on receiving wisdom will surely laugh at the follies of men who are nearly mad: I mean those who either leap in an indecent dance, or who run naked, anointed, garlanded, or masked, or smeared with mud. What shall I say of the shields now rotten with age?

When they carry them, they think they are bearing the gods themselves on their shoulders.

For Furius Bibaculus is counted among the chief examples of piety, who, though he was praetor, still carried a sacred shield with his lictors going before him, though by the privilege of his office he was exempt from that duty.

He was not Furius, then, but plainly furious, who thought he adorned his praetorship with this service. Rightly, then, since these things are done by men not unskilled and rude, Lucretius exclaims: "O foolish minds of men, O blind hearts! In what darkness of life and in how great dangers this little span of time is spent!"

Who that has any sanity would not laugh at these mockeries, when he sees men, as if out of their minds, doing seriously what, if anyone did it in play, he would seem too wanton and foolish?

The author and founder of these vanities among the Romans was that Sabine king who above all entangled the rude and ignorant minds of men in new superstitions; and to do this with some authority, he pretended that he held nightly meetings with the goddess Egeria.

There was a very dark cave in the grove of Aricia, from which a stream flowed from a perpetual spring. He used to go in there with witnesses sent away, so that he could lie that, at the prompting of the goddess his wife, he was handing on to the people the rites most acceptable to the gods.

Evidently he wished to imitate the cunning of Minos, who used to hide himself in the cave of Jupiter and, after staying there a long time, brought laws as if handed to him by Jupiter, so as to bind men to obey not only by command but also by religion.

Nor was it difficult to persuade shepherds. So he created pontiffs, flamens, Salii, and augurs, and distributed the gods among families. Thus he softened the fierce spirits of a new people and called them away from war to the pursuits of peace.

But though he deceived others, he did not deceive himself. For many years later, in the consulship of Cornelius and Baebius, two stone chests were found by diggers in the field of the scribe Petilius below the Janiculum. In one was the body of Numa, in the other seven Latin books on pontifical law and the same number of Greek books on the discipline of wisdom, in which he dissolved not only the religions he himself had instituted but all others besides. When this was reported to the senate, it was decreed that these books be destroyed.

So Quintus Petilius, the city praetor, burned them in an assembly of the people.

Foolishly, indeed: for what good was it that the books were burned, when this very fact, that they were burned because they disparaged the religions, has been handed down to memory?

Everyone in the senate then was most foolish: for the books could have been destroyed and yet the matter not have passed into memory. So while they wished to prove to posterity too with what piety they had defended religion, they diminished the authority of religion itself by their testimony.

But as Pompilius was the founder of foolish religions among the Romans, so before Pompilius was Faunus in Latium, who established impious rites for his grandfather Saturn, honoured his father Picus among the gods, and consecrated his sister Fenta Fauna, who was also his wife; Gavius Bassus reports that she was named Fatua because she used to foretell fates to women, as Faunus did to men.

Varro writes that she was of such modesty that no male but her husband saw her as long as she lived, or heard her name.

For this reason women sacrifice to her in secret and name her the Good Goddess. And Sextus Clodius, in the book he wrote in Greek, relates that she was the wife of Faunus; and because, against custom and royal decency, she had secretly drunk a jar of wine and become drunk, she was beaten to death by her husband with myrtle rods; but afterwards, when he regretted his deed and could not bear his longing for her, he conferred divine honour on her; and that is why in her rites a covered jar of wine is set out.

Faunus too, then, left posterity no small amount of error, which, however, all prudent people see through.

For Lucilius mocks the folly of those who think images are gods in these verses: "The bogey Lamias, which the Fauni and Numa Pompilius set up, he trembles at these, he rests everything on them. As infant children believe all bronze statues live and are men, so these think all fictions true; they believe a heart is in the bronze statues. A painters' gallery, nothing true, all fiction!"

The poet compared foolish men to infants; but I say they are much more senseless. For the children think the images are men, these think they are gods; age makes the children think what is not, folly makes these; the children will certainly soon cease to be deceived, while the vanity of these both lasts

forever and grows. Orpheus first introduced the rites of Father Liber into Greece and first celebrated them on a mountain of Boeotia very near Thebes, where Liber was born; and because it often resounded with the song of his lyre, it was called Cithaeron.

Those rites are still called Orphic, in which he himself was afterwards torn apart and plucked to pieces; and he lived at about the same time as Faunus.

But which preceded in age may be doubted, since Latinus and Priam reigned in the same years, and likewise their fathers Faunus and Laomedon, in whose reign Orpheus came with the Argonauts to the shore of Ilium.

Let us go further, then, and ask who at all was the first author of worshipping gods.

Didymus, in his books of Commentary on Pindar, says that Melisseus, king of the Cretans, was the first to sacrifice to the gods and introduced new rites and processions of sacred things; that he had two daughters, Amalthea and Melissa, who fed the boy Jupiter with goat's milk and honey

(from which that poetic tale took its origin, that bees flew to the boy and filled his mouth with honey); and that Melissa was appointed by her father as the first priestess of the Great Mother, from which the priestesses of that same Mother are still called Melissae.

But the Sacred History testifies that Jupiter himself, after he gained power, came to such insolence that he set up shrines to himself in many places.

For as he went around the lands, whenever he came into any region he joined the kings or leaders of the peoples to himself by hospitality and friendship; and when he departed from each, he ordered a shrine to be made to himself in his host's name, as if so that the memory of their friendship and alliance might be preserved.

So temples were established to Jupiter Atabyrius and Jupiter Labryandius, for Atabyrus and Labryandus were his hosts and helpers in war; likewise to Jupiter Laprius, Jupiter Molion, Jupiter Casius, and others of the same kind. He devised this most cunningly, so as to gain divine honour for himself and a perpetual name, joined with religion, for his hosts.

So they were glad and willingly obeyed this command of his, and for the sake of their own name they celebrated yearly rites and festivals.

Aeneas did something similar in Sicily, when he gave the city he founded the name of his host Acestes, so that Acestes might afterwards gladly and willingly love, enlarge, and adorn it.

In this way Jupiter sowed the religion of his own worship throughout the world and gave the others an example to imitate.

So whether the rite of worshipping gods flowed from Melisseus, as Didymus reported, or from Jupiter himself, as Euhemerus says, it is at any rate agreed at what time gods began to be worshipped.

Melisseus indeed was much earlier in age, since he reared Jupiter as a grandson. So it can be that, either before Jupiter or while he was still a boy, he instituted the worship of gods, that is, of his foster child's mother Ops, his grandmother Tellus, who was the wife of Uranus, and his father Saturn; and by this example and institution he himself led Jupiter to such pride that he afterwards dared to take divine honours for himself.

Now, since we have found the origin of vain superstitions, it remains for us also to gather the times in which those lived whose memory is worshipped.

Theophilus, in the book On the Times written to Autolycus, says that Thallus says in his history that Belus, whom the Babylonians and Assyrians worship, is found to have been three hundred and twenty-two years older than the Trojan War, and that Belus was a contemporary of Saturn and both grew up at the same time. This is so true that it can be gathered by reason itself.

For Agamemnon, who waged the Trojan War, was the great-great-grandson of Jupiter, and Achilles and Ajax his great-grandsons, and Ulysses next in the same degree, Priam indeed by a long line.... But some authors report that Dardanus and Iasius were sons of Corythus, not of Jupiter; for if it had been so, he could not have had his own great-grandson Ganymede for shameful uses.

So if you assign fitting years to the parents of those I named above, the number will agree. And from the destruction of the city of Troy one thousand four hundred and seventy years are counted.

From this reckoning of times it is clear that Saturn, who was the sower of all the gods, was born not more than eighteen hundred years ago. So let them not boast of the antiquity of their rites, whose origin, reason, and times have been discovered.

Some things still remain that would be very effective for refuting false religions, but I have now decided to end the book, lest it exceed due measure.

For these things must be pursued more fully, so that, having refuted everything that seems to stand in the way of truth, we may be able to instruct in true religion men who wander uncertain through ignorance of good things.

The first step of wisdom is to understand what is false, the second to know what is true. So anyone with whom this first

instruction of ours has made progress, in which we have uncovered what is false, will be stirred to the knowledge of the truth, than which no pleasure is sweeter to man; and he will now be worthy of the wisdom of the heavenly teaching who comes willingly and ready to learn the rest.

Although in the first book I have shown that the religions of the gods are false, because those whose various and unlike cults the consent of men has taken up throughout the whole earth by foolish persuasion were mortal and, having finished their lives, yielded to the divine necessity by death, yet so that no doubt may remain, this second book will lay open the very fountain of errors and explain all the causes by which men were deceived, both at first believing that there are gods and afterwards, by inveterate persuasion, persisting in religions most wrongly adopted.

For I am eager, once these empty things are refuted and men's impious vanity exposed, to assert the majesty of the one God, undertaking the more useful and greater task of calling men back from crooked ways and reconciling them with themselves, so that they may not, as certain philosophers do, despise themselves so greatly, nor think themselves weak, superfluous, worthless, and born entirely in vain; for that opinion drives most people to vice.

For while they suppose that we are of concern to no god, or that after death we shall be nothing, they give themselves wholly to lusts and, thinking it permitted to them, apply themselves thirstily to draining pleasures, through which they run unawares into the snares of death.

For they do not know what the purpose of man is. If they wished to hold it, they would first acknowledge their Lord, follow virtue and justice, not subject their souls to earthly images, not seek the deadly sweetness of lusts; in short, they would value themselves highly and understand that there is more in man than appears, whose power and condition cannot be kept unless, putting away perversity, they take up the worship of their true Father.

For my part, as I often reflect, as one should, on the whole of things, I am accustomed to wonder that the majesty of the one God, which holds together and rules all things, has come into such oblivion that what alone ought to be worshipped is above all alone neglected, and that men themselves have been led into such blindness that they prefer the dead to the true and living God, and earthly beings buried in the earth to him who was the founder of the earth itself.

And yet pardon could be granted to this impiety of men if this error came wholly from ignorance of the divine name. But since we often see the very worshippers of the gods both confessing and proclaiming the supreme God, what pardon can they hope for their impiety who do not acknowledge the worship of him whom it is not right for man to be wholly ignorant of?

For when they swear, when they wish, and when they give thanks, they name not Jupiter or many gods but God: so truly does the truth itself, under nature's compulsion, burst out even from unwilling hearts.

They do not do this in prosperity, however. For then above all God slips from the memory of men, when, enjoying his benefits, they ought to give honour to the divine kindness.

But if some heavy necessity presses them, then they remember God. If the terror of war has roared, if the deadly force of disease has settled on them, if long drought has denied food from the crops, if a savage storm or hail has fallen, they flee to God, help is sought from God, God is prayed to come to their aid.

If anyone is tossed at sea in a raging wind, it is he whom he invokes; if anyone is afflicted by some violence, it is he rather whom he implores; if anyone, brought to the last necessity of begging, asks for food by prayers, he calls on God alone and seeks men's pity for himself by his divine and unique name.

So they never remember God except while they are in trouble. After fear has left them and dangers have receded, then they eagerly run together to the temples of the gods; to these they pour libations, to these they sacrifice, these they crown with garlands.

But to God, whom they had implored in their very need, they do not give thanks even with a word. So true is it that from prosperity comes luxury, and from luxury, as every vice, so impiety toward God is born.

For what cause are we to think this happens, except that there is some perverse power, always hostile to the truth, which rejoices in human errors, whose one and perpetual work is to pour out darkness and blind the minds of men, so that they may not see the light, nor, in short, look up to heaven and keep the nature of their own bodies?

For while the other living creatures look to the ground with bodies bent down, because they have not received reason and wisdom, while to us an upright posture and a lofty face have been given by God the Maker, it is clear that these religions of the gods are not of human reason, because they bend a heavenly creature down to venerate earthly things.

For that one and only Parent of ours, when he formed man, that is, a creature intelligent and capable of reason, raised him from the ground and set him upright to contemplate his Maker. This the ingenious poet expressed excellently: "And while the other animals bend down and look at the earth, he gave man a lofty face and bade him see the heaven and raise his upturned face to the stars."

Hence, surely, the Greeks called him anthrōpos, because he looks upward. Those, then, who look not upward but downward renounce themselves and disown the name of men; unless perhaps they think that the very fact that we are upright was given to man without a reason.

God wished us to look at the heaven, and surely not in vain. For both birds and almost all dumb creatures see the heaven, but to us it is given in a special way to gaze at heaven upright and standing, so that we may seek religion there, so that we may contemplate with the mind God, whose seat it is, since we cannot with our eyes. This he certainly does not do who venerates bronze or stone, which are earthly.

It is most perverse that the posture of the body, which is temporal, should be upright, while the soul itself, which is eternal, is made lowly, since the figure and posture signify nothing else than that the mind of man ought to look where his face looks, and that the soul ought to be as upright as the body, so as to imitate what it ought to rule.

But men, forgetting both their name and their reason, cast their eyes down from on high, fix them on the ground, and fear the works of their own fingers, as if anything could be greater than its maker.

What madness is it, then, either to fashion things which they themselves afterwards fear, or to fear things which they have fashioned? "We do not fear the things themselves," they say, "but those in whose likeness they were fashioned and to whose names they were consecrated." Surely you fear them because you think they are in heaven; for if they are gods, it cannot be otherwise.

Why then do you not lift your eyes to heaven and, calling on their names, celebrate sacrifices in the open? Why do you look at walls and wood and stones rather than there, where you believe them to be? What do temples mean, what do altars mean, what finally do the images themselves mean, which are memorials either of the dead or of the absent?

For the practice of making likenesses was invented by men altogether so that the memory of those could be kept who had been taken away by death or separated by absence.

Among which, then, shall we place the gods? If among the dead, who is so foolish as to worship them? If among the absent, then they are not to be worshipped, if they neither see what we do nor hear what we pray.

But if gods cannot be absent, since, being divine, in whatever part of the world they are, they see and hear everything, then images are superfluous, since they are present everywhere; it is enough to call on their names in prayer, since they hear.

"But they are present only at their images." Just so: as the common people think that the souls of the dead wander around their tombs and the remains of their bodies.

But even so, once that god has begun to be present, his image is no longer needed. For I ask: if someone often gazes at the image of a man who is abroad, to take comfort from it for his absence, would he seem sane if, when the man has returned and is present, he went on gazing at the image and preferred to enjoy it rather than the sight of the man himself?

Certainly not. And yet a man's image seems necessary when he is far away and will be superfluous when he is present; but the image of God, whose divinity and spirit are spread everywhere and can never be absent, is always superfluous.

But they fear that their whole religion would be empty and vain if they saw nothing present to adore; and so they set up images, which, because they are images of the dead, are like the dead: for they lack all sense.

But the image of the God who lives forever ought to be living and sensible. If it took that name from likeness, how can those images be judged like God which neither feel nor move? So the image of God is not that which is made by human fingers out of stone or bronze or other material, but man himself, since he both feels and moves and has many great activities.

Nor do these most foolish men understand that, if images could feel and move, they would of their own accord have adored the man by whom they were polished; for they would be either rough, unshaped stone or shapeless, raw material, had they not been formed by man.

Man, then, is to be regarded as their parent, as it were, by whose hands they were born, through whom they began to have figure, appearance, and beauty; and therefore he who made them is better than the things made.

And yet no one looks up to or reveres the maker himself: they fear what he made, as if there could be more in the work than in the workman.

Rightly, then, Seneca says in his moral books: "They venerate the images of the gods, pray to them on bended knee, adore them, sit or stand by them all day long, throw them coins, slaughter victims; and while they look up to these things so greatly, they despise the craftsmen who made them."

What is so self-contradictory as to despise the sculptor and adore the statue, and not even to admit to your table the man who makes your gods? What force, then, what power can they have, when the man who made them does not have it? But he could not even give them what he did have: to see, hear, speak, and move.

Is anyone so foolish, then, as to think there is anything in the image of a god, in which there is not even anything of a man except his shadow? But no one considers this: for they are stained with a vain persuasion, and their minds have drunk deeply of the juice of folly.

So those who feel adore what does not feel; those who are wise, what lacks reason; the living, the lifeless; those who spring from heaven, earthly things.

It is pleasing, then, as if placed on some lofty watchtower from which all could hear, to proclaim that line of Persius: "O souls bent down to the earth and empty of heavenly things!" Look rather to heaven, to the sight of which God your Maker has raised you.

He gave you a lofty face; you bend down to the earth. Your minds, which are lofty and raised up toward their Parent together with your bodies, you press down to lower things, as if you regretted not having been born four-footed.

It is not right for a heavenly creature to be made equal to earthly creatures bent toward the earth. Why do you deprive yourselves of heavenly benefits and fall forward of your own accord onto the ground? For you wretches roll on the ground when you seek below what you ought to have sought on high.

For those playthings of mortal fingers, those fragile figments formed from any kind of material, what else are they but earth, from which they were born?

Why then do you subject yourselves to lower things? Why do you set earth above your heads? For when you submit yourselves to the earth and make yourselves lower, you plunge yourselves of your own accord into the underworld and condemn yourselves to death, since nothing is lower and humbler than the earth except death and the underworld.

If you wished to escape these, you would despise the earth set beneath your feet, keeping your bodily posture intact, which you received upright for this reason, that you might turn your eyes and mind to him who made it.

To despise and trample on the earth is nothing else than not to adore images, because they are made from earth; and likewise not to covet riches and to spurn the pleasures of the body, because wealth and the very body whose hospitality we use are earth. Worship the Living One, that you may live; for he must die who has assigned himself and his soul to the dead.

But what use is it to harangue the crowd and the unlearned in this way, when we see that even learned and prudent men, though they understand the vanity of these religions, nevertheless by some perversity persist in worshipping the very things they condemn? Cicero understood that the things men adored were false.

For when he had said many things that tended to overthrow religions, he nevertheless said that these things were not to be discussed before the common people, lest such discussion extinguish the religions publicly adopted.

What can you do with a man who, knowing that he is in error, of his own accord dashes himself against the stones so that all the people may stumble, and tears out his own eyes so that all may be blind? He deserves well neither of others, whom he allows to err, nor of himself, since he joins in others' errors; nor does he at last use the good of his own wisdom so as to fulfil in deeds what he has grasped in mind, but knowingly and wittingly puts his foot into the snare, so that he himself is caught together with the rest, whom as the wiser he ought to have freed.

Rather, Cicero, if you have any courage, try to make the people wise. It is a cause worthy of your putting forth all your eloquence; for there is no fear that speech would fail you in so good a cause, you who have often defended even bad causes fully and boldly.

But no doubt you fear the prison of Socrates, and so you do not dare to take up the defence of the truth. Yet as a wise man you ought to have despised death, and it would have been far nobler to die for good speech rather than for abuse; nor could the Philippics have brought you more praise than the dispelling of the error of the human race and the recalling of men's minds to health by your reasoning.

But let us make allowance for timidity, which ought not to be in a wise man: why then do you yourself remain in the same error? I see you venerating earthly things made by hand: you understand that they are vain, and yet you do the same things as those whom you yourself confess to be most foolish.

What good was it, then, for you to have seen the truth, when you would neither defend it nor follow it? But even those who know they are in error err willingly; how much more the unlearned crowd, which delights in empty processions, looks at everything with childish minds, is amused by trifles, is captured by the appearance of images, and cannot weigh each thing with itself so as to understand that nothing seen by mortal eyes is to be worshipped, because it must be mortal!

Nor is it surprising if they do not see God, since they do not even see the man whom they think they see. For what is subject to the eyes is not the man but the man's receptacle; his quality and form are discerned not from the outlines of the little vessel in which he is contained, but from his deeds and character.

Those who worship images, then, are bodies without men in them, because they have given themselves to bodily things and see nothing more with the mind than with the body, although it is the task of the soul to discern more finely what the bodily eye cannot see.

These men that same philosopher and poet sharply accuses as lowly and abject, since against the reason of their own nature they prostrate themselves to venerate earthly things. For he says: "And they make their souls lowly with fear of the gods, and press them down, bowed to the earth." He meant something else, indeed, when he said this: that nothing at all should be worshipped, since the gods do not care for human affairs.

Finally, in another place he confesses that religions and the worship of the gods are an empty duty: "Nor is it piety to be often seen with veiled head turning toward a stone and approaching every altar, and to fall prostrate on the ground and spread out the palms before the shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle the altars with much blood of beasts, nor to link vow to vow." If these things are indeed vain, lofty and exalted souls should not be called away and pressed to the earth, but should think of nothing but heavenly things.

False religions, then, were attacked by the more prudent, because they perceived them to be false; but the true one was not brought in, because they did not know what or where it was.

So they behaved as if there were none at all, because they could not find the true one; and in this way they fell into a far greater error than those who held the false one.

For those worshippers of fragile things, though they are foolish in setting heavenly things in corruptible and earthly objects, still retain something of wisdom and can be pardoned, since they hold to the highest duty of man, if not in fact, at least in intention; for the only difference, or at any rate the greatest, between men and dumb animals lies in religion.

But these philosophers, the wiser they were in understanding the error of false religion, the more foolish they became in not thinking there was any true one.

So, since it is easier to judge others' affairs than one's own, while they saw others' fall over the precipice, they did not look out for what was before their own feet.

On both sides, then, are found both the height of folly and a certain scent of wisdom, so that you may doubt whom above all to call the more foolish: those who adopt a false religion or those who adopt none.

But, as I said, pardon can be granted to the unlearned and to those who confess that they are not wise; but not to those who, professing wisdom, display folly instead.

I am not so unfair as to think they ought to have divined so as to find the truth by themselves, which I confess cannot be done; but I require of them what they could have achieved by reason itself.

For they would act more prudently if they both understood that there is some true religion and, having attacked the false, openly declared that the one which is true is not held by men. But perhaps this moved them: that if there were a true religion, it would put itself forward and vindicate itself and not allow anything else to exist.

For they could in no way see why, or by whom, and how true religion was suppressed, which belongs to the divine mystery and the heavenly secret; and this no one can know in any way unless he is taught. This is the sum of the matter:

the unlearned and foolish hold false religions for true, because they neither know the true nor understand the false; but the more prudent, because they do not know the true, either persist in those they understand to be false, so as to seem to hold something, or worship nothing at all, lest they fall into error, though this itself is the greatest error: to imitate the life of cattle under the form of man.

To understand what is false belongs indeed to wisdom, but human wisdom; beyond this step man cannot go, and so many philosophers, as I have shown, did away with religions. But to know what is true belongs to divine wisdom; and man cannot come to this knowledge by himself unless he is taught by God.

So the philosophers attained what was the highest point of human wisdom, to understand what is not; they could not attain to saying what is. Cicero's saying is well known: "I wish I could find the truth as easily as I can refute the false."

Because this exceeds the powers of the human condition, the ability for this task has been given to us, to whom God has handed down the knowledge of the truth. The last four books will serve to explain it; for now, meanwhile, let us uncover the false, as we began.

What majesty, then, can images have, which were in the power of a puny man either to become something else or not to be made at all? That is why in Horace Priapus speaks thus: "Once I was a fig-tree trunk, a useless log, when the carpenter, unsure whether to make a stool or a Priapus, preferred that I be a god. So a god I am, the greatest terror of thieves and birds."

Who would not feel safe with so great a guardian? For thieves are so foolish as to fear Priapus' lust, while the very birds which they think are driven off by the terror of his sickle or his groin settle on skilfully made images, that is, ones plainly like men, and nest on them and foul them.

But Flaccus, as a writer of satirical verse, mocked the vanity of men; yet those who do these things think they are doing something serious.

And the greatest poet, a man prudent in other things, in this alone is foolish, not as a poet but as an old woman, when in those most polished books he even commands this to be done: "And let the guardianship of Hellespontine Priapus, keeper against thieves and birds with his willow sickle, protect them."

They adore, then, things mortal or made by mortals: for they can be broken, burned, destroyed. For when roofs collapse with age they are often smashed, and when consumed by fire they fall into ashes, and often, unless their size saves them or careful guarding protects them, they become the prey of thieves.

What madness is it, then, to fear things for which ruin or fire or theft must be feared? What vanity to hope for any protection from things that cannot protect themselves? What perversity to run for help to things which, when violated, remain unavenged unless their worshippers avenge them? Where then is truth?

Where no force can be applied to religion, where nothing appears that can be violated, where sacrilege cannot be committed. But whatever is subject to the eyes and hands, because it is fragile, is foreign to every notion of immortality.

In vain, then, do men adorn and deck out their gods with gold, ivory, and jewels, as if they could take any pleasure in these things.

What use are costly gifts to things that feel nothing? The same as to the dead? For by the same reasoning they bury the bodies of the dead, smeared with perfumes and wrapped in costly garments, as they honour the gods, who neither felt anything when they were made nor know when they are worshipped; for they did not acquire sense by consecration.

Persius did not like golden vessels being brought into temples, thinking it superfluous in religion to have what is an instrument not of holiness but of greed.

For it is better to bring to God, if you would worship him rightly, as a gift, "justice and right well blended in the mind, holy recesses of the soul, and a breast steeped in noble honour." He thought excellently and wisely.

But he added that ridiculously: that gold in temples is what dolls given to Venus by a girl are; which he perhaps despised for their smallness.

For he did not see that the very images and likenesses of the gods, completed in gold and ivory by the hand of Polyclitus, Euphranor, and Phidias, are nothing else than large dolls, consecrated not by girls, whose play can be pardoned, but by bearded men.

Rightly, then, Seneca too mocks the folly of old men: "We are not twice children," he says, "as is commonly said, but always; only there is this difference, that we play at greater things."

So to these playthings, these adorned and large dolls, they bring ointments, incense, and perfumes; to these they sacrifice fat and choice victims, which have a mouth indeed but without the use of teeth; to these they offer robes and costly garments, which have no use for covering; to these they consecrate gold and silver, which those who receive them possess no more than those who gave them.

Not without reason did Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily, having won control of Greece after a victory, despise, plunder, and mock such gods; for he even accompanied his sacrileges with jokes.

For when he had taken a golden cloak from Olympian Jupiter, he ordered a woollen one to be put on him, saying that a golden one was heavy in summer and cold in winter, but a woollen one suited both seasons.

The same man, taking a golden beard from Aesculapius, said it was unsuitable and unfair that the son should appear bearded before the father, since his father Apollo was still beardless and smooth.

Likewise he took away the bowls and spoils and certain small figures held in the outstretched hands of the images, and said he was receiving them, not carrying them off: for it was very foolish and ungrateful to be unwilling to receive from those who offered them of their own accord, from whom men prayed for good things.

He did these things with impunity, because he was king and victor; indeed, his usual good fortune followed him: he lived to old age and handed on his kingdom to his son. In his case, then, since men could not avenge the sacrileges, the gods themselves ought to have been their own avengers.

But if a lowly man commits anything of the kind, for him are ready scourges, fire, the rack, crosses, and whatever angry and raging men may devise. But when they punish those caught in sacrilege, they themselves

distrust the power of their own gods. For why do they not leave the place of vengeance above all to the gods themselves, if they think they can do anything?

They even think it happened by the gods' power that robbers of sacred things were caught and held, and they rage not so much from anger as from fear that, if they do not avenge the wrong done to the gods, the punishment may fall on themselves: with incredible vanity, surely, thinking the gods will harm them for others' crimes, when the gods could do no harm by themselves to those by whom they were violated and robbed. "But they themselves have often taken vengeance on the sacrilegious."

That can have happened by chance, since it happened sometimes, not always; but a little later I shall show how it happened.

Meanwhile I ask why they did not avenge so many and such great sacrileges in Dionysius, who mocked the gods not secretly but openly. Why did they not keep so powerful a sacrilegious man away from their temples, ceremonies, and images? Why did he even sail prosperously after carrying off sacred things? He himself bore witness to this jokingly, as was his habit.

"Do you see," he said to his companions, who feared shipwreck, "how prosperous a voyage is granted to the sacrilegious by the immortal gods themselves?" But perhaps he had learned from Plato that the gods are nothing.

What of Gaius Verres, whom Tullius, his accuser, compares to the same Dionysius and to Phalaris and all tyrants? Did he not plunder all Sicily, carrying off the images of the gods and the ornaments of the shrines?

It is idle to follow up each case; I wish to mention one, in which the accuser lamented with all the powers of eloquence, with every effort of voice and body, about Ceres, whether of Catina or of Henna: of whom the one had such sanctity that it was unlawful for men to approach the secret inner sanctuary of her temple, the other such antiquity that all histories say that the goddess herself first found grain on the soil of Henna and that her virgin daughter was carried off from that same place.

Indeed, in the times of the Gracchi, when the state was disturbed by seditions and portents, and it was found in the Sibylline verses that the most ancient Ceres ought to be appeased, envoys were sent to Henna.

This Ceres, then, whether the most sacred, whom males were not allowed to see even for the purpose of adoring her, or the most ancient, whom the senate and Roman people had appeased with sacrifices and gifts, was carried off with impunity from her secret and ancient sanctuary by slaves sent in as robbers by Gaius Verres.

The same Cicero, when he declared that he had been asked by the Sicilians to take up the cause of the province, used these words: that they no longer had even gods in their cities to whom they might flee, because Gaius Verres had carried off their most sacred images from the most religious shrines; as if, when Verres had carried them off from the cities and shrines, he had carried them off from heaven too.

From this it is clear that these gods have nothing in them beyond the material from which they were made.

And not without reason did the Sicilians flee to you, Marcus Tullius, that is, to a man, since for three years they had found that those gods had no power; for they would have been most foolish to flee for defence against men's wrongs to those who could not even be angry with Gaius Verres on their own behalf. "But Verres was condemned for these crimes."

Then it was not the gods who avenged them, but Cicero's diligence, by which he either overcame Verres' defenders or withstood their influence.

What of the fact that for Verres himself that condemnation was not a punishment but a holiday, so that, just as the immortal gods had given Dionysius a good voyage while he carried their spoils, so they seem to have granted Verres a good rest in which he could enjoy his sacrileges in peace?

For when civil wars later raged, removed under cover of his condemnation from every danger and fear, he heard of the heavy misfortunes and miserable deaths of others; and he who alone seemed to have fallen while all stood, alone stood while all fell, until, sated with the wealth gained by sacrilege and with life, and worn out by old age, he was carried off by the proscription of the triumvirs, the same, of course, that carried off Tullius, the avenger of the violated majesty of the gods.

Indeed, he was fortunate even in this, that before his own death he heard of the most cruel end of his accuser: the gods, evidently, providing that that robber and despoiler of their religions should not die before he had taken the comfort of revenge.

How much more right it is, then, to leave senseless and empty things and turn our eyes to where the seat and dwelling of the true God is, who hung the earth in stable firmness, who adorned the heaven with shining stars, who kindled the sun as the brightest and unique light for human affairs as a sign of his unique majesty, who poured the seas around the lands, commanded the rivers to flow in everlasting course, and "ordered the plains to stretch out, the valleys to sink, the woods to be covered with leaves, the rocky mountains to rise."

All these things Jupiter certainly did not make, who was born seventeen hundred years ago, but that "maker of things, the origin of a better world," who is called God, whose beginning, since it cannot be grasped, ought not even to be sought.

It is enough for man, for full and perfect prudence, to understand that God exists. The force and sum of this understanding is this: that he look up to and honour the common Parent of the human race and the maker of wonderful things.

Hence some of dull and blunted heart adore the elements, which were both made and lack sense, as if they were gods.

For when they admired the works of God, that is, the heaven with its various lights, the earth with its plains and mountains, the sea with its rivers, lakes, and springs, they were stunned with admiration of these things and, forgetting the Maker himself, whom they could not see, began to venerate and worship his works; and they could never understand how much greater and more wonderful is he who made them out of nothing.

Though they see these things obeying divine laws and serving by perpetual necessity the advantage and use of man, they nevertheless think them gods, ungrateful toward the divine benefits, since they have preferred God's own works to God, the most indulgent Father.

But what wonder if barbarous or unlearned men err, when even philosophers of the Stoic school hold the same opinion, judging that all the heavenly bodies that move are to be counted among the gods? For Lucilius the Stoic speaks thus in Cicero:

"This constancy, then, in the stars, this great agreement of times through all eternity in such varied courses, I cannot understand without mind, reason, and purpose. And since we see these in the stars, we cannot but place them among the gods."

Likewise a little earlier: "It remains," he says, "that the motion of the stars is voluntary; and whoever sees this would act not only ignorantly but impiously if he denied that they are gods."

But we deny it, and firmly, and we prove you, O philosophers, not only ignorant and impious, but also blind, foolish, and deranged, who have surpassed the ignorance of the unlearned by your vanity. For they think the sun and moon gods; you think even the stars are.

Hand down to us, then, the mysteries of the stars, so that we may set up altars and temples to each, so that we may know with what rite and on what day to worship each, and by what names and prayers to call on them; unless perhaps we ought to worship such countless and tiny gods in a heap without distinction.

What of the fact that the argument by which they conclude that all heavenly bodies are gods proves the opposite? For if they think they are gods because they have fixed and regular courses, they err. For from this it appears that they are not gods, because they are not permitted to leave their appointed paths.

Otherwise, if they were gods, they would be carried here and there at random without any necessity, like living creatures on earth, which, because their wills are free, wander here and there as they please, and each goes wherever its mind has led it.

The motion of the stars, then, is not voluntary but necessary, because they serve fixed laws and duties.

But when he was discussing the courses of the stars, which he understood from the very agreement of things and times not to be fortuitous, he thought they were voluntary, as if they could not move so orderly and so regularly unless there were sense in them aware of their duty.

O how difficult is truth to those who do not know it, and how easy to those who know! "If the motions of the stars are not fortuitous," he says, "nothing remains but that they are voluntary." On the contrary: as it is clear that they are not fortuitous, so neither are they voluntary.

How then do they keep their constancy in completing their journeys? Clearly, God, the Maker of the universe, so arranged and contrived them that they should run through the spaces of heaven by a divine and wonderful plan, to produce the varieties of the seasons succeeding one another.

Could Archimedes of Sicily contrive a likeness and figure of the world in hollow bronze, in which he so arranged the sun and moon that they produced unequal motions, like the heavenly revolutions, as if in single days, and that sphere, as it turned, displayed not only the approach and withdrawal of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon, but also the unequal courses of the stars, both fixed and wandering; and could God not contrive and make the real things which the skill of man could simulate by imitation?

Would the Stoic, then, if he had seen the figures of the stars painted and fashioned in that bronze, say that they moved by their own purpose and not rather by the skill of the craftsman? There is, then, in the stars a reason fitted to accomplishing their courses, but it is the reason of God, who both made and rules all things, not of the stars themselves which are moved. For if he had wished the sun to stand still,

there would certainly be perpetual day. Likewise, if the stars had no motion, who doubts that there would have been everlasting night?

But so that there might be alternations of day and night, he willed them to move, and to move so variously that there should be not only mutual alternations of light and darkness, by which alternating periods of labour and rest are formed, but also of cold and heat, so that the force and power of the different seasons might suit either the producing or ripening of crops.

Because the philosophers did not see this skill of the divine power in contriving the paths of the stars, they thought the stars were living creatures, as if they advanced on feet and of their own accord, not by divine reason.

And why God devised them, who does not understand? Namely, so that when the sun's light departed, night might not grow too blind and heavy with foul and dreadful darkness and harm the living. So he both adorned the heaven with wonderful variety and tempered the darkness itself with many small lights.

How much more prudent, then, was Naso than those who think they pursue wisdom, since he perceived that those lights were established by God to drive away the horror of darkness! He ended the book in which he briefly covered the Phaenomena with these three verses: "So many in number and of such form God placed likenesses in the sky, and, scattered through the black darkness, commanded them to give bright light to the frosty night."

But if the stars cannot be gods, then neither can the sun and moon be gods, since they differ from the lights of the stars not in kind but in size. And if these are not gods, then neither is the heaven in which all these are contained.

In the same way, if the earth, which we tread on, which we subdue and cultivate for food, is not a god, neither will the plains and mountains be gods; and if these are not, then neither can the whole earth seem a god.

Likewise, if water, which serves living creatures for drinking or washing, is not a god, neither are the springs from which the water flows; if the springs are not, neither are the rivers gathered from the springs; if the rivers too are not gods, then the sea, which is made up of rivers, cannot be held a god either.

But if neither heaven nor earth nor sea, which are parts of the world, can be gods, then neither is the whole world a god, which the same Stoics contend is both living and wise and therefore a god. In this they were so inconsistent that nothing was said by them that was not overturned by the same men.

For they argue thus: it cannot be that what generates sentient beings from itself lacks sense; but the world generates man, who is endowed with sense; therefore it too is sentient.

Likewise: that cannot be without sense of which a part has sense; therefore, since man is sentient, there is also sense in the world, of which man is a part.

The propositions indeed are true, both that what begets a being endowed with sense is sentient and that that has sense of which a part is endowed with sense; but the minor premises by which they conclude the arguments are false, because the world does not beget man, nor is man a part of the world. For the same God who made the world made man from the beginning, and man is not a part of the world as a limb is of a body.

For the world can exist without man, as a city or a house can. Rather, as a house is the dwelling of one man and a city of one people, so the world is the home of the whole human race; and what is inhabited is one thing, what inhabits another.

But while they were eager to confirm what they had wrongly adopted, that the world is both sentient and a god, they did not see the consequences of their own arguments.

For if man is part of the world and the world is sentient because man feels, then, since man is mortal, the world too must be mortal, and not only mortal but subject to all diseases and sufferings.

And conversely, if the world is a god and its parts are certainly immortal, then man too is a god, since he is, as you say, a part of the world. If man, then also beasts of burden and cattle and all other kinds of beasts, birds, and fish, since they too feel in the same way and are parts of the world.

But this is tolerable; for the Egyptians worship these too. But the matter comes to this, that frogs, gnats, and ants seem to be gods, since they too have sense and are part of the world. So arguments drawn from a false premise always have foolish and absurd outcomes.

What of the fact that these same men say the world was built for the sake of gods and men as a common house? Then the world is neither a god nor a living being, if it was built: for a living being is not built but born; and if it was constructed, it was surely like a house, like a ship. There is, then, some God who is the Maker of the world, and the world which was made will be separate from him who made it.

Now how contradictory and absurd is this, that while they affirm the heavenly fires and the other elements of the world to be gods, they also call the world itself a god! How can one god be made out of a heap of many gods?

If the stars are gods, then the world is not a god but the dwelling of gods. But if the world is a god, then all the things in it are not gods but limbs of a god, which cannot by themselves receive the name of god. For no one would rightly say that the limbs

of one man are many men. But the comparison between a living creature and the world is not alike. For a living creature, since it is endowed with sense, has sense in its limbs too, and they become senseless only when torn from the body. What, then, does the world resemble?

They themselves teach it, of course, when they do not deny that it was made to be, as it were, a common house for gods and men. If, then, it was built like a house, neither is it a god, nor are the elements, which are its parts, since neither a house nor the things of which a house consists can have dominion over itself.

They are refuted, then, not only by the truth but also by their own words. For as a house made for dwelling feels nothing of itself and is subject to the master who made it or lives in it, so the world, feeling nothing of itself, is subject to God its Maker, who made it for his own use.

The foolish, then, sin in two ways: first, in that they prefer the elements, that is, the works of God, to God; next, in that they worship figures of the elements themselves represented in human form. For images of the sun and moon

they shape in human fashion, and likewise of fire, earth, and sea, which they call Vulcan, Vesta, and Neptune; and they do not sacrifice to the elements themselves in the open. Such a desire for images holds men that the things which are real are now held cheaper: they delight, of course, in gold and gems and ivory.

The beauty and splendour of these dazzle the eyes, and they think there is no religion wherever these do not shine. So under the cover of gods avarice and greed are worshipped. For they believe the gods love whatever they themselves covet, whatever it is for which thefts, murders, and robberies rage daily, for which wars overturn peoples and cities throughout the world.

So they consecrate their spoils and plunder to the gods, who surely must be weak and without the highest virtue, if they are subject to desires.

For why should we think them heavenly, if they desire anything from the earth; or blessed, if they need anything; or incorruptible, if they take pleasure in the things for which men's greed is rightly condemned?

So they come to the gods not so much for the sake of religion, which can have no place in things ill-gotten and corruptible, as to drink in gold with their eyes, to gaze at the gleam of polished marble or ivory, to handle with insatiable contemplation garments distinguished with jewels and colours or cups adorned with shining gems. And the more ornate the temples and the more beautiful the images, the more majesty they are believed to have: so true is it that their religion is nothing else than what human greed admires.

These are the religions, handed down to them by their ancestors, which they persist in guarding and defending most stubbornly. They do not consider what they are like, but are confident they are true and proven from the fact that the ancients handed them down; and so great is the authority of antiquity that to inquire into it is considered a crime. So it is everywhere believed as if it were known truth.

Indeed, in Cicero, Cotta says this to Lucilius: "You have, Balbus, what Cotta, what a pontiff, thinks. Now let me understand what you think: for from you, a philosopher, I ought to receive a reason for religion, but our ancestors I ought to believe even when no reason is given."

If you believe, why then do you seek a reason, which can bring it about that you do not believe? But if you think a reason must be sought, then you do not believe: for you seek it in order to follow it when you have found it.

See, reason teaches you that the religions of the gods are not true: what will you do? Will you follow your ancestors rather than reason, which indeed was not instilled into you by another but found and brought out by yourself, when you tore up all religions by the roots?

If you prefer reason, you must depart from the institutions and authority of the ancestors, since that alone is right which reason prescribes. But if piety persuades you to follow the ancestors, then confess both that they were foolish, who served religions devised against reason, and that you are absurd, who worship what you have proved false.

But since the name of the ancestors is opposed to us so strongly, let us see at last who those ancestors were from whose authority it is thought wicked to depart.

Romulus, about to found the city, called together the shepherds among whom he had grown up; and when that number seemed too small for founding a city, he set up an asylum. To it fled from the neighbouring places all the worst men, without any distinction of condition.

So from all these he formed a people, and chose for the senate those who were older and called them Fathers, by whose counsel he conducted everything. Of this senate Propertius, the writer of elegies, says: "The trumpet called the old Quirites to speeches; those hundred men in a meadow were often the senate. The senate house, which now shines on high with its purple-bordered senate, held fathers clad in skins, rustic hearts."

These are the fathers whose decrees learned and prudent men most devotedly serve, and all posterity judges true and unchangeable what a hundred skin-clad old men wished to be established; whom, however, as was said in the first book, Pompilius enticed into believing that the rites he himself handed down were true.

There is good reason, surely, for the authority of these men to be so highly esteemed by posterity, whom, while they lived, no one, whether of the highest or the lowest rank, judged worthy of marriage alliance!

Therefore it is right, above all in the matter on which the conduct of life turns, that each should trust himself and rely on his own judgment and his own senses in investigating and weighing the truth, rather than, by believing, be deceived by the errors of others as though he himself lacked reason.

God has given wisdom to all in their proper share, so that they might both investigate things unheard and weigh things heard. Nor, because our ancestors preceded us in time, did they also precede us in wisdom; for if wisdom is given equally to all, it cannot be seized in advance by those who come first.

It cannot be diminished, like the light and brightness of the sun; for as the sun is the light of the eyes, so wisdom is the light of the human heart.

So since to be wise, that is, to seek the truth, is inborn in all, those take wisdom away from themselves who without any judgment approve what their ancestors discovered and are led by others like cattle.

But they are deceived by this: once the name of "ancestors" (maiores, the greater) is used, they do not think it possible either that they themselves are wiser, because they are called "descendants" (minores, the lesser), or that those were foolish, because they are named "the greater."

What, then, prevents us from taking an example from them, so that, just as they handed down to posterity the falsehoods they had found, we who have found the truth may hand down better things to posterity?

There remains a huge question, the discussion of which comes not from ingenuity but from knowledge; it must be explained at greater length, so that no doubt at all may be left. For perhaps someone may take refuge in the things handed down by many trustworthy authors: that those very beings whom we have shown not to be gods have very often shown their majesty by prodigies, dreams, auguries, and oracles.

And certainly many things worthy of wonder can be listed, first of all that when Attus Navius, the chief augur, warned Tarquinius Priscus to begin nothing new unless he had first taken the auspices, and the king, disparaging the credibility of his art, told him to consult the birds and report whether what he himself had conceived in his mind could be done, and Navius affirmed that it could, the king said: "Take this whetstone, then, and cut it with a razor." And he took it without hesitation and cut it.

Next, that Castor and Pollux were seen in the Latin War at the lake of Juturna washing the sweat from their horses, when their temple, which adjoined the spring, had opened of its own accord.

The same pair, in the Macedonian War, riding white horses, are said to have appeared to Publius Vatienus as he came to Rome at night, announcing that on that day King Perseus had been defeated and captured; and a few days later the letter of Paulus showed that this was true.

This too is wonderful, that the statue of Womanly Fortune is said to have spoken more than once, and likewise that of Juno Moneta: when, after Veii was taken, one of the soldiers sent to move her jokingly and playfully asked whether she wished to move to Rome, she answered that she did.

Claudia too is put forward as an example of a miracle. For when the Idaean Mother had been summoned in accordance with the Sibylline books, and the ship carrying her had stuck in a shallow of the Tiber and could not be moved by any force, they say that Claudia, who had always been thought unchaste because of her excessive attention to her person, prayed to the goddess on bended knees that, if she judged her chaste, she would follow her girdle; and so the ship, which all the young men could not move, was moved by one woman.

Equally wonderful is that, when a plague was raging, Aesculapius, summoned from Epidaurus, is said to have freed the city of Rome from a long pestilence.

Sacrilegious men too can be listed, by whose immediate punishment the gods are believed to have avenged the wrong done to them.

Appius Claudius the censor, when he had transferred the rites of Hercules to public slaves, was deprived of his sight, and the family of the Potitii, who had given them up, died out within a single year.

Likewise the censor Fulvius, when he had taken the marble tiles from the temple of Lacinian Juno to roof the temple of Equestrian Fortune which he had built at Rome, both lost his mind and, having lost two sons serving in Illyricum, was consumed by the deepest grief.

Also Turullius, a prefect of Mark Antony, having cut down the grove of Aesculapius on Cos to build a fleet, was later killed in that same place by Caesar's soldiers.

To these examples is added Pyrrhus, who, having taken money from the treasury of Proserpina at Locri, was shipwrecked and dashed on the shores near the goddess's shrine, so that nothing was found safe except that money.

Milesian Ceres too gained much veneration among men. For when the city had been taken by Alexander and the soldiers had burst in to plunder her, a flash suddenly thrown before them put out the eyes of all.

Dreams too are reported which seem to show the power of the gods. For Jupiter is said to have appeared in sleep to Tiberius Atinius, a plebeian, and to have commanded him to tell the consuls and senate that the leading dancer at the last Circensian games had displeased him, because a certain Autronius Maximus had led a slave, after scourging him, under the fork through the middle of the circus to execution, and that the games must therefore be renewed.

When he neglected this, he lost his son that same day and was himself seized by a serious illness; and when he again saw the same figure asking whether he had paid enough penalty for neglecting the command, he was carried in a litter to the consuls, and when the whole matter had been laid before the senate, he recovered his bodily strength and returned home on his own feet.

No less wonderful was that dream by which Caesar Augustus is said to have been saved. For when, involved in the civil war against Brutus, he had decided to stay out of battle because of a serious illness, the figure of Minerva appeared to his physician Artorius, warning that Caesar should not keep to the camp because of his bodily weakness. So he was carried into the battle line in a litter, and on that same day his camp was

taken by Brutus. Many similar examples can be brought forward besides, but I fear that if I linger too long in setting out opposing matters, I may seem either to have forgotten my purpose or to incur the charge of talkativeness.

I shall therefore set out the explanation of all these things, so that difficult and obscure matters may be more easily understood, and I shall unveil all these deceptions of a counterfeit divinity, by which men have been led far away from the path of truth.

But I shall go back much further, so that anyone who comes to read without knowledge of the truth may be instructed and understand what at last is the head and cause of these evils, and, having received the light, may see through his own errors and those of the whole human race.

Since God was most provident in planning and most skilful in making, before he began this work of the world, because the fountain of full and complete good was in him, as it always is, so that good might spring from him like a stream and flow far, he brought forth a Spirit like himself, who should be endowed with the powers of God the Father. How he willed this, we shall try to teach in the fourth book.

Then he made another, in whom the character of the divine stock did not remain. So he was infected by his own envy as by poison and passed over from good to evil, and by his own choice, which had been given him free by God, he took for himself a name contrary to him.

From this it appears that envy is the fountain of all evils. For he envied that one who came before him, who by persevering with God the Father is both approved and also dear.

This one, then, who from good became evil by his own act, the Greeks call diabolos; we call him the accuser, because he reports to God the crimes into which he himself entices men.

So God, beginning the fabric of the world, set that first and greatest Son over the whole work and used him at once as counsellor and craftsman in devising, arranging, and completing things, since he is perfect in providence, reason, and power. Of him I say little now, because his power, name, and nature must be set out by us in another place.

Let no one ask from what materials God made such great and wonderful works: for he made all things out of nothing. Nor are the poets to be listened to, who say that chaos was in the beginning, that is, a confusion of things and elements, and that afterwards God divided that whole mass and, having separated each thing from the confused heap and arranged them in order, both built and adorned the world.

It is easy to answer them, since they do not understand the power of God, whom they believe can make nothing except from material lying ready and prepared; and in this error even the philosophers were.

For Cicero, discussing the nature of the gods, says this: "First, then, it is not probable that the matter of things from which all things arose was made by divine providence, but that it has and has had its own force and nature.

As, therefore, a builder, when he is going to build something, does not himself make the material but uses what is ready, and a modeller likewise uses wax, so for that divine providence material had to be at hand, not one which it made itself, but one which it had ready. But if matter was not made by God, then neither earth nor water nor air nor fire was made by God."

O how many faults there are in these ten lines! First, that he who in other discussions and in almost all his books was a champion of providence, and who attacked with the sharpest arguments those who said there was no providence, now like some traitor or deserter has tried to abolish providence.

If you wished to contradict him in this, you need neither thought nor labour: his own words need only be read out to him; for Cicero could be refuted by no one more forcefully than by Cicero.

But let us grant this to the custom and practice of the Academics, that men who are very free may say and think what they like: let us consider the opinions themselves. "It is not probable," he says, "that the matter of things was made by God." By what arguments do you show this?

For you have said nothing about why this is not probable.

So to me, on the contrary, it seems most probable, and not without reason, when I consider that there is something more in God, whom you reduce to the weakness of man, granting him nothing but craftsmanship.

In what, then, will that divine power differ from man, if God, like man, needs another's help? And he does need it, if he can build nothing unless material is supplied to him by another. If that is so, his power is certainly imperfect, and the one who provided the material must now be judged more powerful. By what name, then, will he be called who surpasses God in power?

For it is greater to make one's own things than to arrange another's.

But if it cannot be that anything is more powerful than God, who must be of perfect power, might, and reason, then the same one is the maker of matter who is the maker of the things that consist of matter. For nothing either could or should exist without God making it or against his will.

"But it is probable," he says, "that the matter of things both has and has had its own force and nature." What force could it have if no one gave it? What nature if no one begot it? If it had force, it took it from someone. From whom could it take it except from God?

If it had a nature, which is certainly named from being born (nasci), it was born. From whom but God could it have been produced? For nature, from which you say all things arose, if it has no purpose, can make nothing; but if it is able to generate and make, then it has purpose and therefore must be

God; nor can that force be called by any other name, in which there is both the providence to devise and the skill and power to make.

Better, then, Seneca, the keenest of all the Stoics, who saw that nature is nothing else than God. "Shall we then not praise God," he says, "whose virtue is natural? For he did not learn it from anyone. Yes, we shall praise him; for although it is natural to him, he gave it to himself, since God himself is nature."

When, then, you assign the origin of things to nature and take it from God, "stuck in the same mud, you pay off a debt by borrowing, Geta." For you plainly confess, with the name changed, that things were made by the one by whom you deny they were made.

There follows a most foolish comparison. "As a builder," he says, "when he is going to build something, does not himself make the material but uses what is ready, and a modeller likewise wax, so for that divine providence material had to be at hand, not one which it made itself, but one which it had ready."

On the contrary, it did not have to: for God will be of lesser power if he makes things from what is ready, which is man's way. A builder will build nothing without wood, because he cannot make the wood itself; and not to be able belongs to human weakness.

But God makes material for himself, because he can: for to be able belongs to God; if he cannot, he is not God.

Man makes from what exists, because through mortality he is weak, and through weakness of limited and moderate power; but God makes from what does not exist, because through eternity he is strong, and through strength of immense power, which has neither end nor measure, like the life of the Maker.

What wonder, then, if God, when about to make the world, first prepared the material from which to make it, and prepared it out of what did not exist? For it is unthinkable that God should borrow anything from elsewhere, since all things are from him or in him.

For if there is anything before him, if anything was made not by him, he will lose both the power and the name of God. "But matter was never made, just as God, who made this world out of matter, was not."

Then two eternal things are established, and those contrary to each other, which cannot happen without discord and destruction; for things whose force and nature are different must collide. So both could not be eternal if they conflict, since one must overcome the other.

It must be, therefore, that the nature of the eternal is simple, so that all things may descend from it as from a fountain. So either God arose from matter or matter from God. Which of these is truer is easy to understand. For of these two, one has sense, the other lacks sense.

The power of making anything can exist only in what feels, is wise, thinks, and moves.

Nor can anything be begun, made, or completed unless it has been foreseen by reason both how it is to be made before it exists and how it is to endure after it has been made.

In short, he makes something who has the will to make it and hands to carry out what he has willed. But what lacks sense always lies inert and sluggish; nothing can arise from where there is no voluntary motion.

For if every living creature consists of reason, it certainly cannot be born from what is not endowed with reason, nor can what is not in the source be received from it.

Nor let it disturb anyone that certain animals seem to be born from the earth. For the earth does not beget these of itself, but the Spirit of God, without whom nothing is begotten.

God, then, is not from matter, because the sentient can never arise from the insentient, the wise from the brute, the impassible from the passible, the bodiless from the bodily; rather matter is from God.

For whatever has a solid and tangible body receives external force; what receives force is dissoluble; what is dissolved will perish; what perishes must have come into being; what has come into being had a source from which it arose, that is, some maker who is sentient, provident, and skilled in making. This is certainly none other than God.

And since he is endowed with sense, reason, providence, power, and might, he can create and make both living and lifeless things, because he knows how each thing is to be made.

But matter cannot always have existed, because it would not admit change if it had. For what always was does not cease always to be, and from what has had no beginning an end also must be absent. Indeed, it is easier for what had a beginning to lack an end than for what lacked a beginning to have an end.

So if matter was not made, nothing can be made from it either; if nothing can be made from it, it will not even be matter; for matter is that from which something is made. But everything from which something is made, since it receives the craftsman's hand, is destroyed and begins to be something else.

Therefore, since matter had an end when the world was made from it, it also had a beginning. For what is destroyed was built up, what is loosed was bound, what is ended was begun. If, then, it is gathered from its change and end that matter had a beginning, by whom else could it have been made but by God?

God alone, then, is the one who was not made, and therefore he can destroy other things but cannot himself be destroyed. He will always remain in what he was, because he was not begotten from elsewhere, nor does his origin and birth depend on any other thing which, if changed, might dissolve him. He is from himself, as we said in the first book, and therefore he is such as he willed to be: impassible, unchangeable, incorrupt, blessed, eternal.

Now that conclusion with which he ended the sentence is much more absurd: "But if matter was not made by God, neither were earth and water and air and fire made by God." How cleverly he flew past the danger!

For he assumed the former point as if it needed no proof, although it was much more uncertain than that for the sake of which it was assumed. "If matter was not made by God," he says, "neither was the world made by God."

He preferred to infer the false from the false rather than the true from the true; and while uncertain things ought to be proved from certain ones, he took his proof from the uncertain to overturn what was certain.

For that the world was made by divine providence (to say nothing of Trismegistus, who proclaims this, nothing of the verses of the Sibyls, which announce the same, nothing of the prophets, who testify with one spirit and a like voice to the work of the world and the craftsmanship of God) is agreed even among almost all philosophers; for this the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Peripatetics, which are the chief schools of all, hold.

In short, from those first seven wise men down to Socrates and Plato it was held as admitted and undoubted, until, many ages later, there arose one crazy Epicurus, who dared to deny what is most evident, from a desire, of course, of finding novelties, so that he might found a school in his own name.

And because he could find nothing new, he wished to overturn old views, so as still to seem to disagree with the rest; in which all the philosophers barking around him refuted him. It is more certain, then, that the world was built by providence than that matter was gathered by providence.

So he ought not to have thought that the world was not made by divine providence because its matter was not made by divine providence, but, because the world was made by divine providence, that matter too was made by God.

For it is more credible that matter was made by God, since God can do all things, than that the world was not made by God, since nothing can be made without mind, reason, and purpose.

But this is not Cicero's fault but his school's. For when he had undertaken a discussion to do away with the nature of the gods, about which the philosophers prattled, in ignorance of the truth he thought that all divinity had to be done away with.

So he could do away with the gods, because they did not exist; but when he tried to overturn the divine providence which is in the one God, because he had begun to strive against the truth, his arguments failed and he necessarily fell into this pit, from which he could not extricate himself. Here, then, I hold him stuck, I hold him fixed, since Lucilius, who argued on the other side, fell silent.

This is the hinge of things, on this all turns. Let Cotta extricate himself from this abyss if he can; let him bring forward arguments to show that matter always existed, which no providence made; let him show how anything ponderous and heavy could either exist without an author or be changed, and cease to be what it always was, so as to begin to be what it never was.

If he proves these things, then at last I will agree that even the world was not established by divine providence; and yet I will agree in such a way as to hold him with other snares.

For he will come back to the point to which he does not wish to come, so as to say that both the matter of which the world is made and the world which is made of matter arose by nature, while I contend that nature itself is God.

For no one can make wonderful things, that is, things constituted with the greatest reason, except one who has mind, providence, and power.

So it will follow that God made all things, and that nothing at all can exist which has not drawn its origin from God.

But the same man, whenever he plays the Epicurean and does not want the world to have been made by God, usually asks with what hands, what machines, what levers, what effort he made so great a work. You might perhaps have seen it, had you been able to be there at the time he made it.

But so that man might not see through the works of God, God did not wish to bring him into this world until everything was completed.

But he could not even have been brought in: for how could he have survived while the heaven was being fashioned above and the earth being founded below, when perhaps things were either congealing, damp or stiffened by excessive cold, or hardening, baked and solidified by fiery heat? Or how could he have lived before the sun was established and before crops or animals were born? So it was necessary that man be made last, when the finishing hand had already been put to the world and everything else.

In fact, the holy writings teach that man was God's last work and was brought into this world as into a house already prepared and furnished; for all things were made for his sake.

The poets too confess the same. Ovid, when the world was already completed and all the animals formed, added this: "A creature holier than these and more capable of lofty mind was still lacking, one that could rule over the rest: man was born." So much is it to be judged wrong to search into what God wished to be hidden.

But he asked not out of eagerness to hear or learn, but to refute, because he was confident no one could answer; as if it should be thought from this that these things were not made by God, because how they were made cannot be seen.

If you had been brought up in a house skilfully built and adorned and had never seen any building work, would you have thought that house was not built by man because you did not know how it is built? You would surely ask about the house what you now ask about the world: with what hands, with what tools man had produced such great works, especially if you saw huge stones, immense masonry, vast columns, the whole work lofty and high. Would these not seem to you to exceed the measure of human strength, since you did not know they were done not so much by strength as by reason and skill?

But if man, in whom nothing is perfect, nevertheless achieves more by reason than his small strength allows, why should it seem incredible to you when the world is said to have been made by God, in whom, because he is perfect, wisdom can have no limit nor strength any measure?

His works are seen by the eyes, but how he made them is not seen even by the mind, because, as Hermes says, the mortal cannot draw near to the immortal, the temporal to the everlasting, the corruptible to the incorrupt, that is, approach more closely and follow with understanding. And so a creature still earthly cannot grasp the view of heavenly things, because it is held enclosed in the body as in a prison, which keeps it from seeing all things with free and unbound sense.

Let him know, then, how foolishly he acts who inquires into things that cannot be told. For this is to go beyond the measure of one's condition and not to understand how far man is permitted to approach.

Indeed, when God opened the truth to man, he wished us to know only what it concerned man to know for attaining life; what pertained to curious and profane desire he kept silent, so that they might be secret.

Why then do you seek what you can neither know nor, if you knew it, would be happier for knowing? Wisdom in man is complete if he knows both that God is one and that all things were made by him.

Now, since we have refuted those who think otherwise than the truth about the world and God its Maker, let us return to the divine fabric of the world, which is handed down in the secret writings of holy religion.

God, then, first of all made the heaven and hung it on high, to be the seat of God the Creator himself. Then he founded the earth and placed it beneath the heaven, for man to inhabit with the other kinds of living creatures. He willed it to be surrounded and held together by water.

His own dwelling he adorned and filled with bright lights, namely the sun and the shining orb of the moon, and adorned it with the gleaming signs of the twinkling stars. But darkness, which is contrary to these, he placed on the earth; for it contains no light of itself unless it receives it from heaven. In heaven he placed perpetual light, the beings above, and everlasting life; and on the contrary, on earth, darkness, the beings below, and death.

For these are as far from those above as evils from goods and vices from virtues.

Of the earth itself also he established two parts contrary and opposed to each other, namely east and west. Of these the east is assigned to God, because he himself is the source of light and the enlightener of things, and because he makes us rise to eternal life; but the west is ascribed to that disturbed and perverse mind, because it hides the light, always brings on darkness, and makes men fall and perish in sins.

For as light belongs to the east, and the principle of life lies in light, so darkness belongs to the west, and in darkness death and destruction are contained.

Then by the same reasoning he measured out the other parts, south and north, which are joined in partnership with those two.

For the one that burns more with the heat of the sun is next to and joined with the east, while the one numb with cold and perpetual ice belongs to the same as the far west. For as darkness is contrary to light, so is cold to heat.

As, then, heat is nearest to light, so the south to the east; as cold to darkness, so the northern region to the west. To each of these parts he assigned its season: spring to the east, summer to the southern region; autumn belongs to the west, winter to the north. In these two parts also, the southern

and the northern, a figure of life and death is contained, because life is in heat and death in cold. And as heat is from fire, so cold is from water.

According to the measurement of these parts he also made day and night, to complete by alternate succession the perpetual and revolving spaces and cycles of time which we call years. The day, which the east first supplies, must belong to God, as all things that are better; but the night, which the far west brings in, belongs, of course, to him whom we have called God's rival. These two God, foreknowing the future, made also for this purpose, that from them some image both of true religion and of false superstitions might be shown.

For as the sun, which rises to make day, though it is one (from which Cicero would have it seem that it was called sol, because when the stars are darkened it appears alone, solus), yet, because it is a true light of perfect fullness and illuminates all things with most powerful heat and brightest splendour, so in God, though he is one, there is perfect majesty, power, and brightness.

But the night, which we say has been assigned to that perverse adversary of God, shows by likeness his many and various religions.

For although countless stars seem to twinkle and shine, yet because they are not full and solid lights, they give out no heat, nor do they overcome the darkness by their number.

Two principal things, then, are found, which have powers opposite and contrary to each other, heat and moisture, which God wonderfully devised for sustaining and generating

all things. For since the power of God is in heat and fire, unless he had tempered its burning force with an admixture of the matter of moisture and cold, nothing could have been born or held together, but whatever had begun to exist would at once have perished in a conflagration.

Hence certain philosophers and poets said that the world consists of a discordant concord, but they did not see the reason thoroughly.

Heraclitus said all things were born from fire, Thales from water. Each saw something, yet each erred, because if either had been alone, neither could water be born from fire nor fire from water; but it is truer that all things are generated from both mixed together.

Fire indeed cannot be mingled with water, because they are enemies, and if they come to close quarters, whichever prevails must destroy the other; but their substances can be mingled: the substance of fire is heat, that of water moisture.

Rightly, then, Ovid: "For when moisture and heat take on a balance, they conceive, and from these two all things arise; and though fire fights with water, moist vapour creates all things, and discordant concord is fit for offspring."

For the one is, as it were, the masculine element, the other the feminine; the one active, the other passive. And therefore it was established by the ancients that the bonds of marriage should be sanctioned by the rite of fire and water, because the offspring of living creatures are given body and animated to life by heat and moisture.

For since every living creature consists of soul and body, the matter of the body is in moisture, that of the soul in heat; and this we may learn from the eggs of birds, which are full of thick moisture: unless heat, as craftsman, warms them, neither can the moisture be given body nor the body be given life.

Exiles too used to be forbidden fire and water: for it still seemed wrong to inflict capital punishment on men, however wicked.

So when the use of the things by which human life consists was forbidden, the one who received that sentence was considered as if he had been punished with death. So much were these two elements held to be primary, that they believed neither the birth nor the life of man could exist without them.

One of these we have in common with the other animals, the other is given to man alone. For since we are a heavenly and immortal creature, we use fire, which has been given to us as a sign of immortality, since fire is from heaven; and because its nature is mobile and strives upward, it contains the principle of life.

But the other animals, since they are wholly mortal, use only water, which is a bodily and earthly element; and because its nature is mobile and tends downward, it shows a figure of death. That is why cattle neither look up to heaven nor perceive religion, since the use of fire is foreign to them.

But from where or how God either kindled or liquefied these two principal things, fire and water, only he who made them can know.

When the world was completed, then, he commanded living creatures of various kinds, of unlike forms, both large and small, to be made. And they were made in pairs, that is, one of each sex, from whose offspring the air, the earth, and the seas were filled; and God gave all these, according to their kinds, food from the earth, so that they might be of use to man, some for food, others for clothing, and those of great strength to help in cultivating the earth; hence they are called iumenta (beasts of burden).

So when all things had been composed in wonderful order, he resolved to prepare for himself an eternal kingdom and to create countless souls, to whom he would give immortality.

Then he made for himself a sentient and intelligent image, that is, after the form of his own image, than which nothing can be more perfect: he formed man from the slime of the earth; hence he was named homo, because he was formed from the soil (humus).

In fact Plato says the human form is "godlike," and so does the Sibyl, who says: "Man is my image, having right reason."

About this forming of man the poets too, though in a corrupted way, handed down nothing different: for they said man was made from clay by Prometheus. The fact did not escape them, but the name of the Maker did.

For they had touched no writings of truth; but what was handed down by the prophecy of the prophets and kept in God's sanctuary, they gathered from fables and obscure rumour, and, corrupted (as truth is usually corrupted when scattered among the people by varied talk, everyone adding something to what he had heard), they put it into their poems. And they did this foolishly, in giving so wonderful and divine a work to a man.

For what need was there for man to be formed from clay, when he could have been begotten in the same way in which Prometheus himself was born of Iapetus? If he was a man, he could beget a man, but he could not make one; and that he was not one of the gods his punishment on Mount Caucasus declares.

But no one called his father Iapetus or his uncle Titan gods, because the height of kingship lay with Saturn alone, through which he gained divine honours together with all his descendants. This fiction of the poets can be refuted by many arguments.

It is agreed among all that the flood was made to destroy and remove wickedness from the world. For philosophers, poets, and writers of ancient history say this, and in it they agree most of all with the words of the prophets.

If, then, the deluge was made to destroy the wickedness which had grown through the excessive multitude, how was Prometheus the maker of man, when these same writers say that his son Deucalion alone was saved for his righteousness? How could one degree of descent and one generation fill the world with men so quickly?

But evidently they corrupted this too, like the former, since they did not know at what time the deluge happened on the earth, who deserved to be saved for his righteousness when the human race was perishing, and how and with whom he was saved: all of which the prophetic writings teach. It is clear, then, that what they tell of the workmanship of Prometheus is false.

But because I had said that the poets are not wont to lie outright but to wrap up and obscure what they say in figures, I do not say they lied, but that Prometheus was the first of all to shape an image of a man from soft, rich clay, and that from him first arose the art of fashioning statues and images, since he lived in the times of Jupiter, when temples first began to be built and new cults of the gods to arise.

So truth was coloured with falsehood, and what was reported to have been made by God began to be ascribed to a man who imitated the divine work. But the forming of a true and living man from clay belongs to God.

Hermes too teaches this: he not only said that man was made by God after the image of God, but even tried to explain with what fine reasoning God formed each of the members in the human body, since none of them is not as valuable for the needs of use as for beauty.

The Stoics too try to do this when they discuss providence, and Tullius, following them, in several places; yet he touches only briefly on so copious and rich a subject. I pass over it now because I recently wrote a book of its own on this subject to my pupil Demetrianus.

I cannot pass over here what certain erring philosophers say, that men and the other animals arose from the earth without any maker; hence that line of Virgil: "and the earthborn race of men raised its head from the hard fields." And those especially held this opinion who deny that there is providence; for the Stoics attribute the fabric of living things to divine skill.

But Aristotle freed himself from toil and trouble by saying the world always existed, and therefore the human race and the other things in it have no beginning, but always were and always will be.

But since we see that each single animal which did not exist before begins to exist and ceases to exist, the whole race must at some time have begun to exist and will at some time cease, because it began.

For all things must be contained in three times: past, present, and future. To the past belongs origin, to the present existence, to the future dissolution.

All these appear in individual men: we begin when we are born, we exist while we live, and we cease when we die. That is why they held there are three Fates, one who begins the web of a man's life, another who weaves it, a third who breaks and ends it.

In the whole human race, although only the present time appears, from it are gathered both the past, that is, the origin, and the future, that is, the dissolution.

For since it exists, it is clear that it began at some time (for nothing can exist without a beginning), and since it began, it is clear that it will one day cease; for the whole cannot be immortal which consists of mortals.

For as we all perish one by one, it can happen that by some chance all perish together, whether by barrenness of the earth, which usually happens in particular places; or by pestilence spread everywhere, which often lays waste individual cities or regions; or by fire sent upon the world, such as is said to have happened under Phaethon; or by a flood of waters, such as is recorded under Deucalion, when all the race except one man was destroyed.

If that deluge happened by chance, it could certainly have happened that the one who survived also perished. But if he was kept by the will of divine providence, which cannot be denied, to restore mankind, it is clear that both the life and the destruction of the human race are in God's power. And if it can perish entirely, since it perishes in parts, it is clear that it arose at some time; and frailty, as it declares a beginning, so it declares an end.

If these things are true, Aristotle will not be able to maintain that the world itself had no beginning. And if Plato and Epicurus wrest this from Aristotle, then from Plato and Aristotle, who thought the world would last forever, eloquent though they are, the same Epicurus will against their will snatch this away, since it follows that it has an end too.

But of these things more in the last book; now let us return to the origin of man.

They say that through certain revolutions of the heaven and motions of the stars there came about a kind of ripeness for sowing living creatures, and so the new earth, holding generative seed, put forth from itself certain bags like wombs (of which Lucretius says: "wombs grew, fixed to the earth by roots"); and that when these had ripened, they burst by nature's compulsion and poured out tender animals.

Then the earth itself overflowed with a certain moisture like milk, and the living creatures were fed by that food. How then could they either bear or avoid the force of cold or heat, or be born at all, when the sun scorched and the cold bound? "There were," they say, "at the beginning of the world neither winter nor summer, but a perpetual mildness and even spring."

Why then do we see none of these things happen even now? "Because it was necessary for this to happen once, so that animals might be born; but after they began to exist, when the power of generating was granted to them, the earth ceased to bear and the condition of the season was changed."

O how easy it is to refute lies! First, because nothing can be in this world which does not continue as it began. For the sun and moon and stars either did not exist then, or, if they existed, did not have their courses; or else the divine governance, which tempers and rules their courses, began together with them.

Next, if it is as they say, there must be providence, and they fall into the very thing they most flee.

For before the animals were born, someone certainly provided that they should be born, lest the world bristle desert and untilled. And that they could be born from the earth without the service of parents must have been provided with great reason; then that that moisture congealed from the earth should be shaped into various forms of bodies, and likewise that, receiving the principle of living and feeling, they should be poured out of the bags that covered them as if from mothers' wombs, is a wonderful and inexplicable provision.

But suppose that this too happened by chance; the things that follow certainly cannot be fortuitous: that the earth flowed continuously with milk, that the temperature of the air was even.

If it is agreed that these were made so that newborn animals might have food or be free from danger, someone must have provided it by some divine reason. And who can provide but God?

Let us see, however, whether what they keep saying could have happened, that men were born from the earth. If anyone considers how long and in what ways an infant is reared, he will surely understand that those earthborn children could not have been nourished without anyone to rear them.

For they would have had to lie abandoned for many months until their sinews were strengthened and they could move and change place, which can hardly happen within the space of one year.

Now consider whether an infant could have lain for many months in the same place and in the same way in which it was poured out, and not have died, overwhelmed and corrupted by that moisture of the earth which it received for food mixed together with the refuse of its own body.

So it cannot possibly be that he was not reared by someone: unless perhaps all animals were born not tender but full-grown, which it never occurred to them to say.

That whole theory, then, is impossible and empty, if indeed it can be called a theory (ratio) whose aim is that there be no reason (ratio). For he who says all things were born of their own accord and attributes nothing to divine providence certainly does not assert reason but overturns it.

But if nothing can be made or born without reason, it is clear that there is divine providence, whose property is what is called reason. God, then, the designer of all things, made man.

Cicero, though without the heavenly writings, nevertheless saw this; in the first book On the Laws he taught the same as the prophets.

I have added his words: "This creature, provident, shrewd, many-sided, acute, mindful, full of reason and counsel, which we call man, was begotten by the supreme God in a certain glorious condition. For he alone, of so many kinds and natures of living things, shares in reason and thought, while all the rest lack them."

Do you see that a man, though far removed from knowledge of the truth, nevertheless, because he kept to an image of wisdom, understood that man could only have been begotten by God?

But divine testimonies are needed, lest human ones be insufficient. The Sibyl testifies that man is the work of God: "He who alone is God, creator, unconquerable, he himself fixed the type of the form of mortals, he himself mingled the nature of all, the begetter of life."

The holy writings contain the same. God, then, performed the office of a true father: he himself fashioned the body, he himself breathed in the soul by which we breathe; all that we are is his.

How he did this, if we needed to know, he would have taught us, as he taught the other things that have brought us knowledge both of former error and of true light.

When, then, he had first formed the male after his own likeness, he then also shaped the female after the image of the man himself, so that the two sexes, joined together, might propagate offspring and fill the whole earth with their multitude.

In the making of man himself he included and completed the principle of those two materials which we said are contrary to each other, fire and water.

For when the body had been formed, he breathed into it a soul from the living fountain of his Spirit, which is everlasting, so that he might bear the likeness of the world itself, which consists of contrary elements. For he consists of soul and body, that is, as it were of heaven and earth, since the soul by which we live arises as if from heaven, from God, and the body from the earth, from whose slime we said it was formed.

Empedocles, whom you could not tell whether to count among the poets or the philosophers, because he wrote on nature in verse, as Lucretius and Varro did among the Romans, established four elements, fire, air, water, earth, perhaps following Trismegistus, who said that our bodies were constituted by God from these four elements:

that they have in them something of fire, something of air, something of water, something of earth, and yet are neither fire nor air nor water nor earth. These things are not false: for the principle of earth is in the flesh, of moisture in the blood, of air in the breath, of fire in the vital heat.

But blood cannot be separated from the body as moisture from earth, nor vital heat from breath as fire from air: so only two elements of all things are found, whose whole principle is included in the fashioning of our body.

Man, then, was made from diverse and conflicting things, as the world itself was from light and darkness, from life and death; and God ordained that these two should fight with each other in man, so that if the soul, which arises from God, prevails, he may be immortal and dwell in perpetual light; but if the body conquers the soul and subjects it to its rule, he may be in everlasting darkness and in death.

Its force is not such as to extinguish unjust souls altogether, but to punish them forever. That punishment we call the second death, which is itself perpetual, just as immortality is.

The first we define thus: death is the dissolution of the nature of living beings; or thus: death is the separation of body and soul. The second thus: death is the enduring of eternal pain; or thus: death is the condemnation of souls to eternal punishments according to their deserts. This does not touch dumb cattle, whose souls, consisting not of God but of the common air, are dissolved by death.

In this partnership of heaven and earth, then, whose likeness is expressed in man, the higher part is held by what belongs to God, namely the soul, which has dominion over the body; but the lower part by what belongs to the devil, namely the body, which, because it is earthly, ought to be subject to the soul, as earth to heaven.

For it is like a little vessel, which this heavenly spirit uses as a temporary dwelling. The duties of each are that what is from heaven and God should rule, and what is from earth and the devil should serve.

This did not escape even that worthless man Sallust, who says: "But all our power lies in mind and body: we use the mind rather to rule, the body to serve."

Rightly, if he had lived as he spoke.

For he was a slave to the foulest pleasures and undid his own saying by the depravity of his life. But if the soul is fire, as we have shown, it ought to strive toward heaven like fire, lest it be extinguished, that is, toward immortality, which is in heaven; and as fire cannot burn and live unless it is held by some rich material in which it has nourishment, so the material and food of the soul is justice alone, by which it is held to life.

After this God placed the man, begotten in the way I have set out, in Paradise, that is, in a most fruitful and pleasant garden, which he planted in the regions of the east with every kind of wood and tree, so that he might be fed by their various fruits and, free from all labours, serve God the Father with the utmost devotion.

Then he gave him certain commands, which, if he kept them, he would remain immortal, and if he transgressed them, he would be punished with death. The precept was that he should not taste of one tree which was in the middle of Paradise, in which he had placed the knowledge of good and evil.

Then that accuser, envying the works of God, bent all his deceits and cunning to casting man down, so as to take immortality from him.

And first he enticed the woman by guile to take the forbidden food, and through her persuaded the man himself also to transgress the law of God. Having gained, then, the knowledge of good and evil, he began to be ashamed of his nakedness and hid himself from the face of God, which he had not been accustomed to do before.

Then God, passing sentence on the sinners, cast the man out of Paradise to seek his living by labour, and surrounded Paradise itself with fire, so that man could not approach, until he executes the final judgment on earth and calls the just, his worshippers, back to the same place, death being taken away, as the sacred voices teach and the Erythraean Sibyl, when she says: "But those who honour the true and everlasting God inherit life, dwelling for the time of the age in Paradise alike, the flourishing garden." But since these things belong to the end, we shall treat them in the final

part of this work; now let us explain the things that come first. Death, then, followed man according to God's sentence, which the Sibyl also teaches in her song, saying: "Man, formed by God's holy hands, whom the serpent deceived by guile, so that he went to the fate of death and received the knowledge of good and evil."

So man's life was made temporary, yet long, extending to a thousand years. Since Varro was not ignorant of this, which was handed down in the divine writings and made public to the knowledge of all, he tried to argue why the ancients were thought to have lived a thousand years.

For he says that among the Egyptians months were reckoned as years, so that not the sun's circuit through the twelve signs makes a year, but the moon, which traverses that circle of signs in the space of thirty days. This argument is plainly false: for no one then passed

his thousandth year, whereas now those who reach a hundred, which happens very often, certainly live twelve hundred months. And reliable authors report that people commonly reach a hundred and twenty years.

But because Varro did not know why or when man's life was shortened, he himself shortened it, though he knew that a man could live fourteen hundred and forty months.

Afterwards, when God saw the world filled with wickedness and crimes, he resolved to destroy the human race by a flood. But to restore the multitude he chose one, who, when all were corrupted, remained a singular example of righteousness.

When he was six hundred years old, he built an ark, as God had commanded him, in which he himself with his wife and three sons and as many daughters-in-law was preserved when the water had covered all the highest mountains.

Then, when the world had been dried, God, abhorring the injustice of the former age, lest length of life should again be a cause of devising evils, gradually shortened the age of man generation by generation and set the limit at a hundred and twenty years, which it would not be permitted to pass.

When he had come out of the ark, as the holy writings teach, he tilled the earth diligently and planted a vineyard with his own hand. By this those are refuted who think Liber the author of wine. For he preceded not only Liber but even Saturn and Uranus by many ages.

When he had first gathered fruit from that vineyard, he became merry, drank to drunkenness, and lay naked. When one of his sons, whose name was Ham, saw this, he did not cover his father's nakedness but went out and even told his brothers. But they took a cloak, went in with faces turned away, and covered their father.

When the father learned what had been done, he disowned and drove out his son. And he, a fugitive, settled in that part of the earth which is now called Arabia, and that land was called Canaan from his name, and his descendants Canaanites.

This was the first nation that did not know God, since its chief and founder did not receive the worship of God from his father, being cursed by him; and so he left ignorance of the divinity to his descendants.

From this nation, as the multitude increased, all the neighbouring peoples flowed. But the descendants of the father himself were called Hebrews, among whom the religion of God remained.

But from these too, afterwards, when their number had multiplied immensely and the narrowness of their lands could not hold them, young men, either sent by their parents or of their own accord, when want of things compelled them, went out as fugitives to seek new homes for themselves, scattered here and there, filled all the islands and the whole world, and, torn from the stock of the holy root, founded new customs and institutions for themselves at their own will.

But first of all those who had occupied Egypt began to look up to and adore the heavenly bodies. And because they were neither sheltered by houses, owing to the quality of the air, nor is the sky in that region veiled by any clouds, they observed the courses and effects of the stars, while, often venerating them, they gazed at them more curiously and freely.

Afterwards they devised monstrous figures of animals to worship, led by certain prodigies, whose authors we shall soon disclose.

But the others, who had been scattered over the earth, admiring the elements of the world, heaven, sun, earth, and sea, venerated them without any images or temples and celebrated sacrifices to them in the open, until in the course of time they made temples and images for their most powerful kings and began to worship them with victims and incense. So the Gentiles, straying from the knowledge of God, began to exist.

They err, therefore, who contend that the worship of gods existed from the beginning of things and that paganism is older than the religion of God, which they think was invented later; because they do not know the fountain and origin of truth. Now let us return to the beginning of the world.

When, then, the number of men had begun to increase, God, providing lest the devil, to whom from the beginning he had given power over the earth, should either corrupt men by his frauds or destroy them, as he had done at the beginning, sent angels for the protection and cultivation of the human race; and he commanded them above all not to be stained by contact with the earth and so lose the dignity of their heavenly substance. Evidently he forbade them to do what he knew they would do, so that they could not hope for pardon.

So, while they lived with men, that most deceitful lord of the earth gradually enticed them into vices by custom itself and defiled them by intercourse with women.

Then, not received into heaven because of the sins in which they had plunged themselves, they fell to the earth. So the devil made them, from angels of God, his own attendants and ministers.

But those who were begotten from them, because they were neither angels nor men but bore a kind of middle nature, were not received into the underworld, as their parents were not into heaven.

So two kinds of demons came into being, one heavenly, the other earthly. These are the unclean spirits, authors of the evils that are done, whose prince is the same devil.

Hence Trismegistus calls him "prince of demons." The grammarians say demons are so called as if daēmones, that is, skilled and knowing things; for they think these are gods. They do indeed know many future things, but not all, since they are not permitted to know God's counsel fully; and so they usually make their responses ambiguous in outcome.

The poets both know that they are demons and speak of them. Hesiod hands down thus: "These are daemons by the counsels of great Zeus, good, dwelling on earth, guardians of mortal men."

This was said because God had sent them as guardians to the human race; but they themselves, though they are destroyers of men, still wish to seem guardians, so that they themselves may be worshipped and God not worshipped.

The philosophers also discuss them. For Plato even tried to describe their natures in the Symposium, and Socrates used to say that there was a daemon constantly about him, which had attached itself to him as a boy, by whose nod and will his life was ruled.

The whole art and power of the magicians also consists in their inspirations; invoked by them, they deceive men's sight with blinding illusions, so that they do not see what is and think they see what is not.

These spirits, as I say, polluted and lost, wander over the whole earth and, as a comfort for their own perdition, work to destroy men.

So they fill everything with snares, frauds, deceits, and errors: for they attach themselves to individual men and occupy all houses door by door, and they take for themselves the name of genii; for so in the Latin language they translate "demons."

These they consecrate in their inner shrines, to these they pour out wine daily, and knowingly they venerate demons as earthly gods and as averters of the evils which they themselves cause and inflict.

Since they are thin and intangible spirits, they insinuate themselves into men's bodies and, working secretly in the inward parts, impair health, provoke diseases, terrify minds with dreams, shake minds with madness, so that by these evils they may compel men to run to them for help.

The nature of all these deceptions is obscure to those who have no share in the truth. For they think the demons do them good when they stop harming, though they can do nothing but harm.

Someone may perhaps say that they should therefore be worshipped so that they may not harm, since they can harm. They do indeed harm, but only those by whom they are feared, whom the mighty and lofty hand of God does not protect, who are strangers to the sacrament of truth. But the just, that is, the worshippers of God, they fear,

adjured by whose name they leave the bodies of the possessed; and scourged by their words as by whips, they not only confess that they are demons but also give their names, the ones that are adored in the temples. This they usually do in the presence of their own worshippers, not indeed to the disgrace of religion, but of their own honour, because they cannot lie either to God, by whom they are adjured, or to the just, by whose voice they are tormented.

So, often uttering the loudest howls, they cry out that they are beaten and burning and are just about to come out:

so much power has the knowledge of God and righteousness. Whom, then, can they harm but those whom they hold in their power?

In fact Hermes affirms that those who have known God are not only safe from the attacks of demons but are not even held by fate. "The one safeguard," he says, "is piety. For over a pious man neither evil daemon nor fate has power. For God rescues the pious man from every evil. For the one and only good among men is piety."

And what piety is he shows in another place in these words: "For piety is the knowledge of God." Asclepius too, his disciple, explained the same idea more fully in that Perfect Discourse which he wrote to the king.

Both of them affirm that demons are enemies and tormentors of men, whom Trismegistus therefore calls "evil angels"; so far was he from not knowing that, corrupted from heavenly beings, they had begun to be earthly.

Their inventions are astrology, soothsaying, augury, the so-called oracles themselves, necromancy, the magic art, and whatever other evils men practise either openly or in secret. All these are false in themselves, as the Erythraean Sibyl testifies: "Since all these things are deceptions, which foolish men search out day by day."

But these same authors, by their presence, make them believed to be true: so they mock men's credulity with a lying divinity, because it does not suit them to reveal the truth.

These are they who taught men to fashion images and statues; who, to turn men's minds from the worship of the true God, caused the likenesses of dead kings, fashioned and adorned with exquisite beauty, to be set up and consecrated, and put on their names as if they were masks.

But the magicians, and those whom the common people truly call sorcerers, when they practise their accursed arts, summon them by their true names, the heavenly ones which are read in the holy writings.

Moreover, these impure and wandering spirits, to throw everything into confusion and pour errors into human hearts, sow and mix false things with true. For they invented that there are many heavenly gods and one king of all, Jupiter, because there are many spirits of angels in heaven and one Lord and Parent of all, God; but they took the truth from sight, wrapped in false names.

For God, as I taught at the beginning, needs no name, since he is alone; nor do the angels, since they are immortal, allow or wish themselves to be called gods: their one and only duty is to serve God's will and to do nothing at all except at his command.

For we say the world is ruled by God as a province by its governor, whose attendants no one would call partners in governing the province, although business is carried on by their service.

And yet these can do something beyond the governor's orders through his ignorance, which belongs to the human condition; but that ruler of the world and governor of the universe, who knows all things, from whose divine eyes nothing is hidden, alone has power over all things, and in the angels there is nothing but the necessity of obeying.

So they wish no honour to be given to themselves, since all their honour is in God. But those who have revolted from God's service, because they are enemies of the truth and traitors to God, try to claim for themselves the name and worship of gods, not because they desire any honour (for what honour is there for the lost?), nor to harm God, who cannot be harmed, but to harm men, whom they strive to turn away from the worship and knowledge of the true majesty, so that they may not attain immortality, which they themselves lost by their wickedness.

So they spread darkness and cover the truth with mist, so that men may not know their Lord and Father; and to entice them easily, they hide in temples, attend all sacrifices, and often produce prodigies, so that men, astonished by them, may give images credit for divinity and power.

Hence it is that the stone was cut by the augur with a razor, that Juno of Veii answered that she wished to move to Rome, that Womanly Fortune announced danger, that the ship followed Claudia's hand, that both despoiled Juno and Locrian Proserpina and Milesian Ceres took vengeance on the sacrilegious, and Hercules on Appius, Jupiter on Atinius, and Minerva on Caesar's behalf; hence that the serpent summoned from Epidaurus freed the city of Rome from pestilence.

For the prince of demons himself was carried there in his own form, without any disguise, since the envoys sent for this purpose brought back with them a serpent of wonderful size.

But in oracles above all they deceive, whose tricks the profane cannot distinguish from the truth; and so they think that commands, victories, riches, and prosperous outcomes are granted by them, and finally that by their nod the state has often been freed from impending dangers, dangers which they both announced in responses and, appeased by sacrifices, averted.

But all these are deceptions. For since they foresee God's arrangements, having been his ministers, they interpose themselves in these matters, so that whatever has been or is being done by God, they may seem above all to be doing or to have done; and whenever something good hangs over some people or city according to God's decree, they promise by prodigies, dreams, or oracles that they will bring it about, if temples, honours, and sacrifices are given them. When these are given and what must happen happens, they win for themselves the highest veneration.

Hence temples are vowed and new images consecrated, herds of victims are slaughtered; but when these things have been done, the life and safety of those who did them is sacrificed nonetheless.

But whenever dangers threaten, they profess to be angry for some foolish and trivial reason, as Juno was with Varro because he had placed a handsome boy in Jupiter's chariot to hold the sacred emblems; and for this reason the Roman name was almost destroyed at Cannae.

But if Juno feared a second Ganymede, why did the Roman youth pay the penalty? Or if the gods care only for the leaders and neglect the rest of the multitude, why did Varro alone, who did this, escape, and Paulus, who deserved nothing, perish? Evidently nothing then happened to the Romans "by the fates of hostile Juno," when Hannibal destroyed two armies of the Roman people by cunning and courage.

For Juno could not dare either to defend Carthage, where her arms and chariot were, or to harm the Romans, because she had heard "that a race was being drawn from Trojan blood which would one day overturn the Tyrian citadels."

But these are the games of those who, lurking under the names of the dead, set snares for the living. So if the threatening danger can be avoided, they wish to seem to have averted it when appeased; if it cannot, they contrive that it seem to have happened because they were despised. So they gain authority and fear among men who do not know them.

By this craft and these arts they have made the knowledge of the true and only God grow old and fade among all nations. For, ruined by their own vices, they rage and prowl in order to ruin.

For this reason they even devised human victims, being themselves enemies of the human race, so as to devour as many souls as possible.

Someone will say: "Why then does God allow these things and not come to the help of such evil errors?" So that evils may fight with goods, that vices may be opposed to virtues, that he may have some to punish and others to honour. For he has determined at the last times to judge the living and the dead; of that judgment I shall discuss in the last book.

He delays, then, until the end of the times comes, when he may pour out his wrath in heavenly power and might, as "the predictions of the pious prophets terrify with fearful warning."

But now he allows men to err and even to be impious against himself, being himself just, gentle, and patient. For it cannot be that he in whom virtue is perfect should not also have perfect

patience. Hence some think that God does not even become angry at all, because he is not subject to emotions, which are disturbances of the mind, since every creature that is affected and moved is frail. This persuasion destroys truth and religion from the foundations.

But let this topic of discussing the anger of God be set aside for us for now, because the subject is richer and must be pursued more broadly in a work of its own. Whoever, then, has venerated and followed those most wicked spirits will gain neither heaven nor light, which belong to God, but will fall into those things which, in the distribution of things, we have shown were assigned to the prince of evils himself, namely darkness, the underworld, and eternal punishment.

I have taught that the religions of the gods are vain in three ways. First, because those images which are worshipped are likenesses of dead men; and it is perverse and unfitting that the image of a man should be worshipped by the image of God, for he worships what is worse and weaker;

and it is an inexpiable crime to desert the Living One in order to serve the memorials of the dead, who can give no one life or light, which they themselves lack; nor is there any other god besides the one, to whose judgment and power every soul is subject.

Second, because the sacred images themselves, which the most foolish men serve, lack all sense, since they are earth.

And who does not understand that it is wrong for an upright creature to bend down to adore the earth? It is placed beneath our feet so that we may tread on it, not adore it, since we were raised from it and received an upright posture beyond the other creatures, so that we might not turn back downward nor throw this heavenly face to the ground, but direct our eyes where the condition of our nature directed them, and adore nothing, worship nothing, but the one name of our sole Maker and Parent, who formed man upright so that we might know that we are called to things above and heavenly.

Third, because the spirits who preside over these religions, condemned and cast off by God, roll about the earth; they not only can give their worshippers nothing, since power over things lies with the One, but even destroy them with deadly enticements and errors, since this is their daily work: to draw darkness over men, so that the true God may not be sought by them.

They are not, then, to be worshipped, since they are subject to God's sentence. For it is the greatest sacrilege to hand oneself over to the power of those than whom, if you follow righteousness, you can be more powerful, and whom you can drive out and put to flight by adjuring them with the divine name.

If, then, it is clear that these religions are vain in the many ways I have taught, it is manifest that those who either pray to the dead or venerate the earth or enslave their souls to unclean spirits do not keep to the reason of men, and that they will pay the penalty for their impiety and crime, since, rebels against God, the Parent of the human race, they have violated all that is right by taking up inexpiable rites.

Whoever, then, strives to guard the sacrament of being human and to keep the principle of his nature, let him raise himself from the ground and, with upright mind, stretch his eyes to heaven. Let him not seek God under his feet nor dig up from his footprints something to adore, because whatever lies beneath man must be below man; but let him seek on high, seek in the highest place, because nothing can be greater than man except what is above man. But God is greater than man: therefore he is above, not below, and is to be sought not in the lowest but in the highest region.

So there is no doubt that there is no religion wherever there is an image. For if religion is from divine things, and there is nothing divine except in heavenly things, images lack religion, because nothing heavenly can be in a thing made from earth. This can appear to a wise man even from the name itself.

For whatever is simulated must be false, nor can that ever receive the name of true which counterfeits truth by paint and imitation. And if all imitation is not a serious thing but as it were play and jest, there is not religion in images (simulacra) but a mime of religion.

The truth, then, is to be preferred to all falsehoods, and earthly things trampled underfoot, so that we may attain heavenly things.

For so it is: whoever has prostrated his soul, whose origin is from heaven, to things infernal and lowest, falls where he has cast himself down; and so, mindful of his reason and posture, he ought always to strive and stretch toward nothing but things above.

Whoever does this will be judged plainly wise, just, a man, and in short worthy of heaven, whom his Parent will recognize not as lowly or cast down to the earth like a four-footed beast, but rather standing and upright as he made him.

A great and difficult portion of the work undertaken has now, unless I am mistaken, been completed, and, with the heavenly majesty supplying us the power of speech, we have driven out inveterate errors.

But now a greater and more difficult struggle is set before us with the philosophers, whose supreme learning and eloquence are opposed to me like some massive weight.

For as there we were pressed by the multitude and almost the consent of all nations, so here we are pressed by the authority of men outstanding in every kind of praise.

And who does not know that there is more weight in a few learned men than in many unlearned?

But we must not despair that these too can be driven from their opinion, with God and truth as guides; nor do I think they will be so stubborn as to deny that they see the brightest sun with sound and open eyes.

Provided only that what they themselves usually profess is true, that they are held by eagerness to search out the truth, I shall certainly make them believe that the truth, long sought, has at last been found, and confess that it could not have been found by human ingenuity.

Since truth is still thought to lie hidden in obscurity, either through the error and ignorance of the crowd, which is enslaved to various and foolish superstitions, or through the philosophers, who by the perversity of their minds confuse it rather than illuminate it, I could wish that some power of eloquence had fallen to me, if not such as was in Marcus Tullius, for his was outstanding and admirable, yet something close to it; so that, as far as truth prevails by its own proper force, it might also, supported by the strength of talent, at last put itself forward and, once the errors both of the public and of those who are thought wise had been scattered and refuted, bring the clearest light to the human race.

I would wish this for two reasons: either because people might more readily believe truth when it is adorned, since they believe even a lie when captivated by the ornament of speech and the allurement of words; or at any rate so that the philosophers themselves might be overthrown by us chiefly with their own weapons, in which they are accustomed to take pleasure and confidence.

But since God willed this to be the nature of the matter, that simple and bare truth should be the more brilliant, because it is adorned enough in itself, and so is spoiled when painted over with ornaments added from outside, while falsehood pleases by a borrowed appearance, because, being corrupt in itself, it vanishes and melts away unless it has been smeared over and polished with ornament sought from elsewhere, I bear with an even mind that only a modest talent has been granted to me.

Yet I have undertaken this work, perhaps too great to be sustained by my strength, trusting not in eloquence but in truth; and even if I should fail, truth itself will complete it, with the help of God, whose gift this is.

For since I know that the very greatest orators have often been defeated by ordinary pleaders, because the power of truth is so great that it defends itself by its own clearness even in trifling matters, why should I think that in the greatest of causes it will be overwhelmed by those men, talented indeed and eloquent,

but nevertheless speaking falsehoods, and that it will not appear clear and illustrious by its own light, if not by our speech, which flows very thin from a slender spring? Nor, if the philosophers stood out as remarkable for their learning in letters, would I concede to them also the knowledge and understanding of truth, which

no one can attain by thinking or by disputing. Nor do I now blame the zeal of those who wished to know the truth, since God made human nature most eager to gain the truth; but this I charge, this I prove, that the result did not follow their honourable and excellent intention, because they did not know what truth itself was, nor how, nor where, nor with what mind it was to be sought.

So, while they desired to rescue human beings from their errors, they themselves fell into snares and into the greatest errors. It is to this work, then, of refuting philosophy, that the very order of the subject I have undertaken has brought me.

For since all error arises either from false religion or from wisdom, in refuting it both must be overthrown.

For since it has been handed down to us in the divine writings that the thoughts of the philosophers are foolish, this very thing must be shown by facts and arguments, so that no one, led on by the honourable name of wisdom or deceived by the splendour of empty eloquence, may prefer to believe human things rather than divine.

These things, indeed, were handed down briefly and plainly. For it was not fitting that, when God spoke to man, he should support his words with arguments, as if otherwise he would not be believed; but he spoke as he ought, as the supreme judge of all things, whose part is not to argue but to pronounce.

But he did so as God. We, however, since we have testimonies of the divine voice for each matter, will surely show by how much more certain arguments true things can be defended, when even false things are defended in such a way that they are commonly taken for true.

So there is no reason for us to pay the philosophers so much honour as to be terrified of their eloquence.

For they could speak well, as learned men; but speak truly they could not in any way, because they had not learned the truth from him who had power over it.

Nor indeed shall we accomplish anything great in convicting them of ignorance, which they themselves very often confess.

Since they are not believed in the one thing in which alone they ought to have been believed, I will try to show that they were never so truthful as when they pronounced sentence on their own ignorance.

Now, since in the two previous books the falsity of the religions has been demonstrated, and also the very origin of the whole error set out, the task of this book is to show how empty and false philosophy also is, so that, all error removed, the truth may be laid open and shine forth.

Let us begin, then, from the common name of philosophy, so that, once the head itself is destroyed, an easier approach may lie open to us for cutting down the whole body, if indeed that can be called a body whose parts and members disagree and do not hold together by any joining, but, as if torn apart and scattered, seem to twitch rather than to live.

Philosophy is, as the name indicates and as they themselves define it, the pursuit of wisdom. How then may I better prove that philosophy is not wisdom than from the meaning of the name itself? For he who pursues wisdom is certainly not yet wise, but pursues it so that he may become wise.

In the other arts it is clear what pursuit achieves and at what it aims; and when someone has attained them by learning, he is no longer called a student of the craft but a craftsman.

'But it was out of modesty that they called themselves students of wisdom, not wise men.'

On the contrary, Pythagoras, who first invented this name, since he was a little wiser than those earlier men who had thought themselves wise, understood that wisdom cannot be reached by any human pursuit, and that therefore a perfect name ought not to be given to a thing not grasped and imperfect. So when he was asked what he professed himself to be, he answered, 'a philosopher', that is, a seeker of wisdom.

If, then, philosophy seeks wisdom, it is not itself wisdom, for that which seeks must be one thing and that which is sought another; nor is the seeking itself right, since it can find nothing. For my part I would not even grant that the philosophers are students of wisdom, because by that pursuit wisdom is not reached.

For if the power of finding the truth lay within this pursuit, if this pursuit were a road, as it were, to wisdom, it would at some time have been found. But since, though so many ages and so many talents have been worn out in searching for it, it has not been grasped, it is clear that there is no wisdom there.

So those who philosophize do not pursue wisdom, but think that they pursue it, because they do not know where or of what kind that is which they seek.

Whether, then, they pursue wisdom or do not, they are not wise, because that can never be found which is either not rightly sought or not sought at all. Let us see, however, whether by this pursuit something can be found, or nothing.

Philosophy seems to consist of two things, knowledge and opinion, and of nothing else.

Knowledge cannot come from one's own talent nor be grasped by thought, because to have one's own knowledge in oneself belongs not to man but to God.

Mortal nature, however, does not receive knowledge except what comes from outside. For this is why the divine skill opened eyes and ears and the other senses in the body: so that through these entrances knowledge might pass through to the mind.

For to investigate or to wish to know the causes of natural things: whether the sun is as large as it appears or many times larger than this whole earth; likewise whether the moon is spherical or concave, and whether the stars are fixed to the sky or are carried through the air in free course; of what size and of what material the sky itself consists, whether it is at rest and immovable or revolves with incredible speed; how great the thickness of the earth is, or on what foundations it is balanced and hung:

to wish, I say, to grasp these things by disputing and conjecture is surely just as if we wished to discuss what we suppose the city of some very remote nation to be like, which we have never seen and of which we have heard nothing but the name.

If we were to claim knowledge for ourselves in a matter that cannot be known, would we not seem mad, daring to affirm that in which we could be refuted? How much more are those to be judged raving and demented who think they know natural things, which cannot be known by man!

Rightly, then, did Socrates and the Academics who followed him do away with knowledge, which belongs not to one who disputes but to one who divines.

It remains that opinion alone is in philosophy; for where knowledge is absent, opinion possesses the whole. For each person holds an opinion about what he does not know. Those who dispute about natural things hold the opinion that things are as they argue. They do not know the truth, therefore, since knowledge is of what is certain, opinion of what is uncertain.

Let us return to that earlier example. Come, let us form opinions about the situation and character of that city which is unknown to us in every respect but its name. It is probable that it is set on a plain, with stone walls, lofty buildings, many streets, and magnificent and adorned temples.

Let us describe, if you like, the customs and dress of the citizens. But when we have said these things, another will argue the contrary, and when he too has finished, a third will rise and others in turn, and they will hold opinions very different from those we held.

Which of them all, then, will be truer? Perhaps none. 'But everything has been said that falls within the nature of things, so that one of them must be true.' But no one will know who has spoken the truth.

It may be that all have erred in some part and touched the truth in some part. We should be fools, then, to seek this by disputation; for someone may arrive who laughs at our opinions and takes us for madmen, for wishing to hold opinions about the character of what we do not know.

But there is no need to hunt out things placed far away, from which perhaps no one may come to refute us.

Come, let us form opinions about what is now being done in the forum, what in the senate house. That too is far. Let us say what is being done on the other side of a single wall: no one can know it except one who has heard or seen it. So no one dares to say it, because he will at once be refuted, not by words but by the fact itself before him.

Yet the philosophers do this very thing when they dispute about what goes on in heaven; but they think they do it with impunity because there is no one to prove their errors.

But if they thought that someone would come down to show them that they were raving and lying, they would never dispute about those things which they cannot know. Yet their shamelessness and daring are not to be thought the more fortunate because they are not refuted; for God refutes them, to whom alone the truth is known, although he seems to overlook it, and he reckons this human wisdom as the height of folly.

Rightly, then, did Zeno and the Stoics reject opinion. For to suppose that you know what you do not know is not the part of a wise man, but rather of a rash and foolish one.

If, then, nothing can be known, as Socrates taught, and one ought not to hold opinions, as Zeno taught, the whole of philosophy is removed. What of the fact that it is overthrown not only by these two, who were the leaders of philosophy, but by all, so that it seems long ago to have been finished off by its own weapons?

Philosophy has been divided into many sects, and all hold different views. In which shall we place the truth? Certainly it cannot be in all.

Let us name any one: then in all the others there will be no wisdom. Let us go through them one by one: in the same way, whatever we give to one we shall take away from the rest. For each sect overthrows all the others in order to establish itself and its own views, and grants wisdom to no other, lest it confess itself foolish; but as it removes the others, so it is itself removed by all the others.

For those who accuse it of folly are no less philosophers. Whichever one you praise and call true is censured as false by philosophers.

Shall we then believe one man praising himself and his own teaching, or many blaming the ignorance of one other?

What the majority thinks must be more correct than what one thinks. For no one can judge rightly about himself, as a noble poet testifies: 'Is the nature of all men so constituted that they see and judge the affairs of others better than their own?'

Since, then, all things are uncertain, either all must be believed or none. If none, then they are not wise, since each thinks himself wise; if all, they are equally not wise, since each is denied by all to be wise.

So in this way they all perish, and like those Sown Men of the poets they slaughter one another, so that none of them all is left; and this happens because they have a sword but no shield.

If, then, the individual sects are convicted of folly by the judgment of many sects, all are found to be vain and empty; thus philosophy consumes and destroys itself.

When Arcesilas, the founder of the Academy, understood this, he gathered together the criticisms of all against one another and the confession of ignorance of the famous philosophers, and armed himself against them all; so he established a new philosophy of not philosophizing.

From his initiative, then, there began to be two kinds of philosophy: the one old, which claims knowledge for itself; the other new, opposing it, which takes knowledge away. Between these two kinds I see discord and, as it were, a civil war.

In which part shall we place wisdom, which cannot be divided? If the nature of things can be known, this troop of recruits will perish; if it cannot, the veterans will be destroyed; if they are equal, philosophy, the leader of all, will perish nonetheless, because it is torn apart: for nothing can be contrary to itself without destruction.

But if, as I have shown, there can be no inward and self-derived knowledge in man because of the frailty of the human condition, the band of Arcesilas wins. But not even he will stand, because it cannot be that nothing at all is known.

For there are many things that nature itself, frequent experience, and the necessities of life compel us to know. So one must perish unless one knows what things are useful for life, so as to seek them, and what are dangerous, so as to flee and avoid them.

Besides, there are many things that experience has discovered. For the varied courses of the sun and moon, the movements of the stars, and the reckoning of times have been discovered; the nature of bodies and the powers of herbs have been gathered by physicians, and by farmers the nature of soils and also the signs of coming rains and storms; in short, there is no art that does not consist of knowledge.

Arcesilas ought, then, if he had any sense, to have distinguished which things can be known and which cannot. But if he had done that, he would have reduced himself to the common people.

For the common people are sometimes wiser, because they are wise just so far as is needed. If you ask one of them whether he knows something or nothing, he will say that he knows what he knows, and will admit that he does not know what he does not know.

He rightly, then, did away with the teachings of others, but he did not rightly found his own. For ignorance of all things cannot be wisdom, whose proper function is to know. So, when he had defeated the philosophers and taught that they knew nothing, he too lost the name of philosopher, because his teaching is that nothing is known. For he who blames others because they do not know

must himself be knowing; but since he knows nothing, what perversity or what insolence is it to set himself up as a philosopher on the very ground on which he abolishes the rest? For they can answer thus:

'If you convict us of knowing nothing, and therefore of not being wise because we know nothing, then neither are you wise, because you too confess that you know nothing.'

What, then, did Arcesilas accomplish, except that, having finished off all the philosophers, he also ran himself through with the same blade?

Is wisdom, then, nowhere? No, it was there among them, but no one saw it. Some thought that all things could be known: they certainly were not wise. Others thought nothing could be: not even these were wise; the former because they gave too much to man, the latter too little. In both, measure was lacking in one direction or the other. Where, then, is wisdom?

In neither thinking that you know all things, which belongs to God, nor that you are ignorant of all things, which belongs to a beast. For there is a middle something which belongs to man, that is, knowledge joined with ignorance and tempered by it.

Knowledge in us comes from the soul, which has its origin from heaven; ignorance from the body, which is from the earth. Hence we have some fellowship both with God and with the animals.

So, since we consist of these two elements, one endowed with light, the other with darkness, a portion of knowledge has been given us and a portion of ignorance. Across this, as across a bridge, we may pass without danger of falling; for all those who leaned to one side or the other fell, turned either to the right or to the left. How each side went astray I will explain.

The Academics argued against the natural philosophers from obscure things that there is no knowledge, and, content with examples of a few incomprehensible things, embraced ignorance, as though they had removed all knowledge because they had removed it in part.

The natural philosophers, on the other hand, drew the argument from things that are plain that ⟨all things⟩ can be known, and, content with what is evident, held on to knowledge, as though they had defended the whole of it because they had defended it in part. So neither did the latter see what is clear nor the former what is obscure; but both, while they either hold on to knowledge alone or snatch it away in hand-to-hand combat, did not see the door placed in the middle which would have brought them through to wisdom.

But Arcesilas, the master of ignorance, when he was disparaging Zeno, the leader of the Stoics, in order to overthrow the whole of philosophy, took up this view on the authority of Socrates, so as to affirm that nothing can be known.

So he refuted the belief of the philosophers who had supposed that the truth had been dug out and discovered by their own talents. Evidently, since that wisdom was mortal, and, established only a short time before, had already reached its greatest growth, so that it must now necessarily grow old and perish, the Academy suddenly arose like the old age

of philosophy, to finish it off as it was already fading; and Arcesilas rightly saw that those who think the knowledge of truth can be grasped by conjecture are arrogant, or rather foolish.