To the Nations 2.9

We have set out these more familiar or more notable forms of divinity according to Varro's threefold arrangement, so that enough may now seem to have been answered about the natural, the poetic, and the national kind. But since the whole substitution now belongs no longer to the philosophers, the poets, or the peoples, by whom it was handed down, but to the ruling Romans, by whom it was taken over and on whom it has built up its authority, we must now enter another breadth of human error, or rather cut down a forest which, with seeds of superstition sown on every side, has overshadowed the childishness of vice. Varro divided the gods of the Romans too into three classes: certain, uncertain, and select. What vanity! For what did they want with uncertain gods, if they had certain ones? Unless they wished to take in the Athenian stupidity; for at Athens too there is an altar inscribed: TO UNKNOWN GODS. Does anyone, then, worship what he does not know? Again, if they had certain gods, they ought to have been content and not have wanted select ones. In this they are even found irreligious. For if gods are picked out like onions, those not picked are declared worthless. We, however, recognize the gods of the Romans in two classes, common and proper: that is, those they share with everyone, and those they themselves devised. And are not these called public and foreign? The altars teach this: that of the foreign gods at the shrine of Carna, that of the public gods on the Palatine. So, since the common gods are included in both the natural and the mythical kind, we have already done with them. Now I would speak of the particular kinds. Let us marvel at that third class of the Romans, the gods of their enemies, since no other nation has found so much superstition for itself. The rest we arrange in two classes: some taken from among men, others conceived in another way. So, since they have the same pretext for the consecration of the dead, as if for the merits of their lives, we too must set against them the same answer: that none of these either was worth so much. They believed Aeneas a devoted father, a soldier never glorious, disabled by a stone. How common a weapon, fit for dogs, and how ignoble a wound! But Aeneas is also found to be a traitor to his country, Aeneas as much as Antenor. And if they will not have this be true, Aeneas at least deserted his comrades while his country was burning, to be put to shame by a Punic woman, who, when her husband Hasdrubal, with the timidity of Aeneas, was supplicating the enemy, did not go with him, but, taking her children with her … threw herself, not into flight, but into the fires of burning Carthage, as into the embrace of her dying country. “Pious” Aeneas, for the sake of one boy and a decrepit old man, abandoning Priam and Astyanax? Yet he ought to be the more detested by the Romans, who swear for the safety of the emperors and their house over their own children and wives and every pledge they have. They deify the son of Venus, and Vulcan knowingly puts up with it, and Juno allows it. If sons sit in heaven for piety toward their parents, why were not rather the Argive youths held to be gods, who, lest their mother commit a sacrilege in the rites, drew her themselves in the yoke, beyond the manner of men? Why is not she rather a goddess, who was more pious, that daughter who nourished at her own breasts her father wasting away from hunger in prison? What else was glorious about Aeneas, except that he appeared nowhere in the battle at Laurentum? Perhaps, in his usual fashion, he fled from the battle again as a deserter. Romulus likewise became a god after death. If because he founded a city, why not others too, even women, founders of cities? Romulus, to be sure, killed his brother and carried off other people's maidens by a trick. That is why he is a god, why he is Quirinus: because then the parents raised their cries (quiritatum est) on his account. What did Sterculus do to deserve divinity? If he was diligent in helping the fields with dung, Augeas contributed more manure. If Faunus, the son of Picus, was dragged into court because his mind was deranged, it was more fitting to cure him than to deify him. If the daughter of Faunus excelled in chastity so that she did not even mix among men, whether from boorishness, or from consciousness of her ugliness, or from shame at her father's madness, how much worthier a Good Goddess was Penelope, who, living among so many most worthless suitors, tenderly guarded her besieged chastity? There is also Sanctus, who obtained a shrine from king Plotius for his hospitality: Ulysses too could have given you one more god from the most humane Alcinous.