reminded, while you murmur against Him who has freed you from such
rulers, that the scenic games, exhibitions of shameless folly and
licence, were established at Rome, not by men's vicious cravings,
but by the appointment of your gods. Much more pardonably might
you have rendered divine honours to Scipio than to such gods as
these. The gods were not so moral as their pontiff. But give me now
your attention, if your mind, inebriated by its deep potations of
error, can take in any sober truth. The gods enjoined that games
be exhibited in their honour to stay a physical pestilence; their
pontiff prohibited the theatre from being constructed, to prevent a
moral pestilence. If, then, there remains in you sufficient mental
enlightenment to prefer the soul to the body, choose whom you will
worship. Besides, though the pestilence was stayed, this was not
because the voluptuous madness of stage-plays had taken possession of
a warlike people hitherto accustomed only to the games of the circus;
but these astute and wicked spirits, foreseeing that in due course
the pestilence would shortly cease, took occasion to infect, not the
bodies, but the morals of their worshippers, with a far more serious
disease. And in this pestilence these gods find great enjoyment,
because it benighted the minds of men with so gross a darkness, and
dishonoured them with so foul a deformity, that even quite recently
(will posterity be able to credit it?) some of those who fled from
the sack of Rome and found refuge in Carthage, were so infected with
this disease, that day after day they seemed to contend with one
another who should most madly run after the actors in the theatres.
33. _That the overthrow of Rome has not corrected the vices of
the Romans._
Oh infatuated men, what is this blindness, or rather madness, which
possesses you? How is it that while, as we hear, even the eastern
nations are bewailing your ruin, and while powerful states in the
most remote parts of the earth are mourning your fall as a public
calamity, ye yourselves should be crowding to the theatres, should
be pouring into them and filling them; and, in short, be playing a
madder part now than ever before? This was the foul plague-spot,
this the wreck of virtue and honour that Scipio sought to preserve
you from when he prohibited the construction of theatres; this was
his reason for desiring that you might still have an enemy to fear,
seeing as he did how easily prosperity would corrupt and destroy you.
He did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but
whose morals are in ruins. But the seductions of evil-minded devils
had more influence with you than the precautions of prudent men.
Hence the injuries you do, you will not permit to be imputed to you;
but the injuries you suffer, you impute to Christianity. Depraved by
good fortune, and not chastened by adversity, what you desire in the
restoration of a peaceful and secure state, is not the tranquillity
of the commonwealth, but the impunity of your own vicious luxury.
Scipio wished you to be hard pressed by an enemy, that you might not
abandon yourselves to luxurious manners; but so abandoned are you,
that not even when crushed by the enemy is your luxury repressed.
You have missed the profit of your calamity; you have been made most
wretched, and have remained most profligate.
34. _Of God's clemency in moderating the ruin of the city._
And that you are yet alive is due to God, who spares you that you
may be admonished to repent and reform your lives. It is He who has
permitted you, ungrateful as you are, to escape the sword of the
enemy, by calling yourselves His servants, or by finding asylum in
the sacred places of the martyrs.
It is said that Romulus and Remus, in order to increase the
population of the city they founded, opened a sanctuary in which
every man might find asylum and absolution of all crime,--a
remarkable foreshadowing of what has recently occurred in honour of
Christ. The destroyers of Rome followed the example of its founders.
But it was not greatly to their credit that the latter, for the sake
of increasing the number of their citizens, did that which the former
have done, lest the number of their enemies should be diminished.
35. _Of the sons of the church who are hidden among the wicked,
and of false Christians within the church._
Let these and similar answers (if any fuller and fitter answers can be
found) be given to their enemies by the redeemed family of the Lord
Christ, and by the pilgrim city of King Christ. But let this city bear
in mind, that among her enemies lie hid those who are destined to
be fellow-citizens, that she may not think it a fruitless labour to
bear what they inflict as enemies until they become confessors of the
faith. So, too, as long as she is a stranger in the world, the city
of God has in her communion, and bound to her by the sacraments, some
who shall not eternally dwell in the lot of the saints. Of these, some
are not now recognised; others declare themselves, and do not hesitate
to make common cause with our enemies in murmuring against God, whose
sacramental badge they wear. These men you may to-day see thronging the
churches with us, to-morrow crowding the theatres with the godless.
But we have the less reason to despair of the reclamation even of such
persons, if among our most declared enemies there are now some, unknown
to themselves, who are destined to become our friends. In truth, these
two cities are entangled together in this world, and intermixed until
the last judgment effect their separation. I now proceed to speak, as
God shall help me, of the rise, progress, and end of these two cities;
and what I write, I write for the glory of the city of God, that, being
placed in comparison with the other, it may shine with a brighter
lustre.
36. _What subjects are to be handled in the following discourse._
But I have still some things to say in confutation of those who
refer the disasters of the Roman republic to our religion, because
it prohibits the offering of sacrifices to the gods. For this end
I must recount all, or as many as may seem sufficient, of the
disasters which befell that city and its subject provinces, before
these sacrifices were prohibited; for all these disasters they would
doubtless have attributed to us, if at that time our religion had
shed its light upon them, and had prohibited their sacrifices. I
must then go on to show what social well-being the true God, in
whose hand are all kingdoms, vouchsafed to grant to them that their
empire might increase. I must show why He did so, and how their false
gods, instead of at all aiding them, greatly injured them by guile
and deceit. And, lastly, I must meet those who, when on this point
convinced and confuted by irrefragable proofs, endeavour to maintain
that they worship the gods, not hoping for the present advantages of
this life, but for those which are to be enjoyed after death. And
this, if I am not mistaken, will be the most difficult part of my
task, and will be worthy of the loftiest argument; for we must then
enter the lists with the philosophers, not the mere common herd of
philosophers, but the most renowned, who in many points agree with
ourselves, as regarding the immortality of the soul, and that the
true God created the world, and by His providence rules all He has
created. But as they differ from us on other points, we must not
shrink from the task of exposing their errors, that, having refuted
the gainsaying of the wicked with such ability as God may vouchsafe,
we may assert the city of God, and true piety, and the worship of
God, to which alone the promise of true and everlasting felicity is
attached. Here, then, let us conclude, that we may enter on these
subjects in a fresh book.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] See the Editor's Preface.
[26] Ps. xciv. 15, rendered otherwise in Eng. ver.
[27] Jas. iv. 6 and 1 Pet. v. 5.
[28] Virgil, _Æneid_, vi. 854.
[29] The Benedictines remind us that Alexander and Xenophon, at least
on some occasions, did so.
[30] Virgil, _Æneid_, ii. 501-2. The renderings of Virgil are from
Conington.
[31] _Ibid._ ii. 166.
[32] _Ibid._
[33] Horace, _Ep._ I. ii. 69.
[34] _Æneid_, i. 71.
[35] _Ibid._ ii. 319.
[36] _Ibid._ 293.
[37] Non numina bona, sed omina mala.
[38] Virgil, _Æneid_, ii. 761.
[39] Though "levis" was the word usually employed to signify the
inconstancy of the Greeks, it is evidently here used, in opposition
to "immanis" of the following clause, to indicate that the Greeks
were more civilised than the barbarians, and not relentless, but, as
we say, easily moved.
[40] _De Conj. Cat._ c. 51.
[41] Sallust, _Cat. Conj._ ix.
[42] Ps. lxxxix. 32.
[43] Matt. v. 45.
[44] Rom. ii. 4.
[45] So Cyprian (_Contra Demetrianum_) says, "Pœnam de adversis mundi
ille sentit, cui et lætitia et gloria omnis in mundo est."
[46] Ezek. xxxiii. 6.
[47] Compare with this chapter the first homily of Chrysostom to the
people of Antioch.
[48] Rom. viii. 28.
[49] 1 Pet. iii. 4.
[50] 1 Tim. vi. 6-10.
[51] Job i. 21.
[52] 1 Tim. vi. 17-19.
[53] Matt. vi. 19-21.
[54] Paulinus was a native of Bordeaux, and both by inheritance and
marriage acquired great wealth, which, after his conversion in his
thirty-sixth year, he distributed to the poor. He became bishop of
Nola in A.D. 409, being then in his fifty-sixth year. Nola was taken
by Alaric shortly after the sack of Rome.
[55] Much of a kindred nature might be gathered from the Stoics.
Antoninus says (ii. 14): "Though thou shouldest be going to live
3000 years, and as many times 10,000 years, still remember that no
man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any
other than this which he now loses. The longest and the shortest are
thus brought to the same."
[56] Augustine expresses himself more fully on this subject in his
tract, _De cura pro mortuis gerenda_.
[57] Matt. x. 28.
[58] Luke xii. 4.
[59] Ps. lxxix. 2, 3.
[60] Ps. cxvi. 15.
[61] Diogenes especially, and his followers. See also Seneca, _De
Tranq._ c. 14, and _Epist._ 92; and in Cicero's _Tusc. Disp._ i. 43,
the answer of Theodorus, the Cyrenian philosopher, to Lysimachus, who
threatened him with the cross: "Threaten that to your courtiers; it
is of no consequence to Theodorus whether he rot in the earth or in
the air."
[62] Lucan, _Pharsalia_, vii. 819, of those whom Cæsar forbade to be
buried after the battle of Pharsalia.
[63] Gen. xxv. 9, xxxv. 29, etc.
[64] Gen. xlvii. 29, l. 24.
[65] Tob. xii. 12.
[66] Matt. xxvi. 10-13.
[67] John xix. 38.
[68] Dan. iii.
[69] Jonah.
[70] "Second to none," as he is called by Herodotus, who first of all
tells his well-known story (_Clio._ 23, 24).
[71] Augustine here uses the words of Cicero ("vigilando
peremerunt"), who refers to Regulus, _in Pisonem_, c. 19. Aulus
Gellius, quoting Tubero and Tuditanus (vi. 4), adds some further
particulars regarding these tortures.
[72] As the Stoics generally would affirm.
[73] Virgil, _Æneid_, vi. 434.
[74] Plutarch's _Life of Cato_, 72.
[75] 1 Cor. ii. 11.
[76] Ecclus. iii. 27.
[77] Rom. xi. 33.
[78] Ps. xlii. 10.
[79] Ps. xcvi. 4, 5.
[80] Originally the spectators had to stand, and now (according to
Livy, _Ep._ xlviii.) the old custom was restored.
BOOK SECOND.
ARGUMENT.
IN THIS BOOK AUGUSTINE REVIEWS THOSE CALAMITIES WHICH THE ROMANS
SUFFERED BEFORE THE TIME OF CHRIST, AND WHILE THE WORSHIP OF
THE FALSE GODS WAS UNIVERSALLY PRACTISED; AND DEMONSTRATES
THAT, FAR FROM BEING PRESERVED FROM MISFORTUNE BY THE GODS, THE
ROMANS HAVE BEEN BY THEM OVERWHELMED WITH THE ONLY, OR AT LEAST
THE GREATEST, OF ALL CALAMITIES--THE CORRUPTION OF MANNERS, AND
THE VICES OF THE SOUL.
1. _Of the limits which must be put to the necessity of replying
to an adversary._
If the feeble mind of man did not presume to resist the clear evidence
of truth, but yielded its infirmity to wholesome doctrines, as to a
health-giving medicine, until it obtained from God, by its faith and
piety, the grace needed to heal it, they who have just ideas, and
express them in suitable language, would need to use no long discourse
to refute the errors of empty conjecture. But this mental infirmity
is now more prevalent and hurtful than ever, to such an extent that
even after the truth has been as fully demonstrated as man can prove
it to man, they hold for the very truth their own unreasonable
fancies, either on account of their great blindness, which prevents
them from seeing what is plainly set before them, or on account of
their opinionative obstinacy, which prevents them from acknowledging
the force of what they do see. There therefore frequently arises a
necessity of speaking more fully on those points which are already
clear, that we may, as it were, present them not to the eye, but
even to the touch, so that they may be felt even by those who close
their eyes against them. And yet to what end shall we ever bring our
discussions, or what bounds can be set to our discourse, if we proceed
on the principle that we must always reply to those who reply to us?
For those who are either unable to understand our arguments, or are so
hardened by the habit of contradiction, that though they understand
they cannot yield to them, reply to us, and, as it is written, "speak
hard things,"[81] and are incorrigibly vain. Now, if we were to propose
to confute their objections as often as they with brazen face chose
to disregard our arguments, and as often as they could by any means
contradict our statements, you see how endless, and fruitless, and
painful a task we should be undertaking. And therefore I do not wish my
writings to be judged even by you, my son Marcellinus, nor by any of
those others at whose service this work of mine is freely and in all
Christian charity put, if at least you intend always to require a reply
to every exception which you hear taken to what you read in it; for so
you would become like those silly women of whom the apostle says that
they are "always learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of
the truth."[82]
2. _Recapitulation of the contents of the first book._
In the foregoing book, having begun to speak of the city of God, to
which I have resolved, Heaven helping me, to consecrate the whole of
this work, it was my first endeavour to reply to those who attribute
the wars by which the world is being devastated, and specially the
recent sack of Rome by the barbarians, to the religion of Christ, which
prohibits the offering of abominable sacrifices to devils. I have shown
that they ought rather to attribute it to Christ, that for His name's
sake the barbarians, in contravention of all custom and law of war,
threw open as sanctuaries the largest churches, and in many instances
showed such reverence to Christ, that not only His genuine servants,
but even those who in their terror feigned themselves to be so, were
exempted from all those hardships which by the custom of war may
lawfully be inflicted. Then out of this there arose the question, why
wicked and ungrateful men were permitted to share in these benefits;
and why, too, the hardships and calamities of war were inflicted on the
godly as well as on the ungodly. And in giving a suitably full answer
to this large question, I occupied some considerable space, partly that
I might relieve the anxieties which disturb many when they observe that
the blessings of God, and the common and daily human casualties, fall
to the lot of bad men and good without distinction; but mainly that I
might minister some consolation to those holy and chaste women who were
outraged by the enemy, in such a way as to shock their modesty, though
not to sully their purity, and that I might preserve them from being
ashamed of life, though they have no guilt to be ashamed of. And then I
briefly spoke against those who with a most shameless wantonness insult
over those poor Christians who were subjected to those calamities, and
especially over those broken-hearted and humiliated, though chaste and
holy women; these fellows themselves being most depraved and unmanly
profligates, quite degenerate from the genuine Romans, whose famous
deeds are abundantly recorded in history, and everywhere celebrated,
but who have found in their descendants the greatest enemies of
their glory. In truth, Rome, which was founded and increased by the
labours of these ancient heroes, was more shamefully ruined by their
descendants, while its walls were still standing, than it is now by the
razing of them. For in this ruin there fell stones and timbers; but in
the ruin those profligates effected, there fell, not the mural, but the
moral bulwarks and ornaments of the city, and their hearts burned with
passions more destructive than the flames which consumed their houses.
Thus I brought my first book to a close. And now I go on to speak of
those calamities which that city itself, or its subject provinces,
have suffered since its foundation; all of which they would equally
have attributed to the Christian religion, if at that early period the
doctrine of the gospel against their false and deceiving gods had been
as largely and freely proclaimed as now.
3. _That we need only to read history in order to see what
calamities the Romans suffered before the religion of Christ
began to compete with the worship of the gods._
But remember that, in recounting these things, I have still to
address myself to ignorant men; so ignorant, indeed, as to give birth
to the common saying, "Drought and Christianity go hand in hand."[83]
There are indeed some among them who are thoroughly well educated
men, and have a taste for history, in which the things I speak of are
open to their observation; but in order to irritate the uneducated
masses against us, they feign ignorance of these events, and do what
they can to make the vulgar believe that those disasters, which in
certain places and at certain times uniformly befall mankind, are
the result of Christianity, which is being everywhere diffused, and
is possessed of a renown and brilliancy which quite eclipse their
own gods.[84] Let them then, along with us, call to mind with what
various and repeated disasters the prosperity of Rome was blighted,
before ever Christ had come in the flesh, and before His name had
been blazoned among the nations with that glory which they vainly
grudge. Let them, if they can, defend their gods in this article,
since they maintain that they worship them in order to be preserved
from these disasters, which they now impute to us if they suffer in
the least degree. For why did these gods permit the disasters I am
to speak of to fall on their worshippers before the preaching of
Christ's name offended them, and put an end to their sacrifices?
4. _That the worshippers of the gods never received from them any
healthy moral precepts, and that in celebrating their worship
all sorts of impurities were practised._
First of all, we would ask why their gods took no steps to improve
the morals of their worshippers. That the true God should neglect
those who did not seek His help, that was but justice; but why did
those gods, from whose worship ungrateful men are now complaining
that they are prohibited, issue no laws which might have guided
their devotees to a virtuous life? Surely it was but just, that
such care as men showed to the worship of the gods, the gods on
their part should have to the conduct of men. But, it is replied, it
is by his own will a man goes astray. Who denies it? But none the
less was it incumbent on these gods, who were men's guardians, to
publish in plain terms the laws of a good life, and not to conceal
them from their worshippers. It was their part to send prophets to
reach and convict such as broke these laws, and publicly to proclaim
the punishments which await evildoers, and the rewards which may
be looked for by those that do well. Did ever the walls of any of
their temples echo to any such warning voice? I myself, when I was a
young man, used sometimes to go to the sacrilegious entertainments
and spectacles; I saw the priests raving in religious excitement,
and heard the choristers; I took pleasure in the shameful games
which were celebrated in honour of gods and goddesses, of the virgin
Cœlestis,[85] and Berecynthia,[86] the mother of all the gods. And on
the holy day consecrated to her purification, there were sung before
her couch productions so obscene and filthy for the ear--I do not say
of the mother of the gods, but of the mother of any senator or honest
man--nay, so impure, that not even the mother of the foul-mouthed
players themselves could have formed one of the audience. For natural
reverence for parents is a bond which the most abandoned cannot
ignore. And, accordingly, the lewd actions and filthy words with
which these players honoured the mother of the gods, in presence of
a vast assemblage and audience of both sexes, they could not for
very shame have rehearsed at home in presence of their own mothers.
And the crowds that were gathered from all quarters by curiosity,
offended modesty must, I should suppose, have scattered in the
confusion of shame. If these are sacred rites, what is sacrilege? If
this is purification, what is pollution? This festivity was called
the Tables,[87] as if a banquet were being given at which unclean
devils might find suitable refreshment. For it is not difficult to
see what kind of spirits they must be who are delighted with such
obscenities, unless, indeed, a man be blinded by these evil spirits
passing themselves off under the name of gods, and either disbelieves
in their existence, or leads such a life as prompts him rather to
propitiate and fear them than the true God.
5. _Of the obscenities practised in honour of the mother of
the gods._
In this matter I would prefer to have as my assessors in judgment,
not those men who rather take pleasure in these infamous customs
than take pains to put an end to them, but that same Scipio Nasica
who was chosen by the senate as the citizen most worthy to receive
in his hands the image of that demon Cybele, and convey it into the
city. He would tell us whether he would be proud to see his own
mother so highly esteemed by the state as to have divine honours
adjudged to her; as the Greeks and Romans and other nations have
decreed divine honours to men who had been of material service to
them, and have believed that their mortal benefactors were thus made
immortal, and enrolled among the gods.[88] Surely he would desire
that his mother should enjoy such felicity were it possible. But if
we proceeded to ask him whether, among the honours paid to her, he
would wish such shameful rites as these to be celebrated, would he
not at once exclaim that he would rather his mother lay stone-dead,
than survive as a goddess to lend her ear to these obscenities? Is it
possible that he who was of so severe a morality, that he used his
influence as a Roman senator to prevent the building of a theatre in
that city dedicated to the manly virtues, would wish his mother to
be propitiated as a goddess with words which would have brought the
blush to her cheek when a Roman matron? Could he possibly believe
that the modesty of an estimable woman would be so transformed by her
promotion to divinity, that she would suffer herself to be invoked
and celebrated in terms so gross and immodest, that if she had heard
the like while alive upon earth, and had listened without stopping
her ears and hurrying from the spot, her relatives, her husband, and
her children would have blushed for her? Therefore, the mother of
the gods being such a character as the most profligate man would be
ashamed to have for his mother, and meaning to enthral the minds of
the Romans, demanded for her service their best citizen, not to ripen
him still more in virtue by her helpful counsel, but to entangle
him by her deceit, like her of whom it is written, "The adulteress
will hunt for the precious soul."[89] Her intent was to puff up this
high-souled man by an apparently divine testimony to his excellence,
in order that he might rely upon his own eminence in virtue, and
make no further efforts after true piety and religion, without which
natural genius, however brilliant, vapours into pride and comes to
nothing. For what but a guileful purpose could that goddess demand
the best man, seeing that in her own sacred festivals she requires
such obscenities as the best men would be covered with shame to hear
at their own tables?
6. _That the gods of the pagans never inculcated holiness of life._
This is the reason why those divinities quite neglected the lives
and morals of the cities and nations who worshipped them, and threw
no dreadful prohibition in their way to hinder them from becoming
utterly corrupt, and to preserve them from those terrible and
detestable evils which visit not harvests and vintages, not house and
possessions, not the body which is subject to the soul, but the soul
itself, the spirit that rules the whole man. If there was any such
prohibition, let it be produced, let it be proved. They will tell us
that purity and probity were inculcated upon those who were initiated
in the mysteries of religion, and that secret incitements to virtue
were whispered in the ear of the _élite_; but this is an idle boast.
Let them show or name to us the places which were at any time
consecrated to assemblages in which, instead of the obscene songs and
licentious acting of players, instead of the celebration of those
most filthy and shameless Fugalia[90] (well called Fugalia, since
they banish modesty and right feeling), the people were commanded
in the name of the gods to restrain avarice, bridle impurity, and
conquer ambition; where, in short, they might learn in that school
which Persius vehemently lashes them to, when he says: "Be taught,
ye abandoned creatures, and ascertain the causes of things; what we
are, and for what end we are born; what is the law of our success in
life, and by what art we may turn the goal without making shipwreck;
what limit we should put to our wealth, what we may lawfully desire,
and what uses filthy lucre serves; how much we should bestow upon our
country and our family; learn, in short, what God meant thee to be,
and what place He has ordered you to fill."[91] Let them name to us
the places where such instructions were wont to be communicated from
the gods, and where the people who worshipped them were accustomed to
resort to hear them, as we can point to our churches built for this
purpose in every land where the Christian religion is received.
7. _That the suggestions of philosophers are precluded from having
any moral effect, because they have not the authority which
belongs to divine instruction, and because man's natural bias
to evil induces him rather to follow the examples of the gods
than to obey the precepts of men._
But will they perhaps remind us of the schools of the philosophers,
and their disputations? In the first place, these belong not to Rome,
but to Greece; and even if we yield to them that they are now Roman,
because Greece itself has become a Roman province, still the teachings
of the philosophers are not the commandments of the gods, but the
discoveries of men, who, at the prompting of their own speculative
ability, made efforts to discover the hidden laws of nature, and
the right and wrong in ethics, and in dialectic what was consequent
according to the rules of logic, and what was inconsequent and
erroneous. And some of them, by God's help, made great discoveries;
but when left to themselves they were betrayed by human infirmity, and
fell into mistakes. And this was ordered by divine providence, that
their pride might be restrained, and that by their example it might
be pointed out that it is humility which has access to the highest
regions. But of this we shall have more to say, if the Lord God of
truth permit, in its own place.[92] However, if the philosophers have
made any discoveries which are sufficient to guide men to virtue and
blessedness, would it not have been greater justice to vote divine
honours to them? Were it not more accordant with every virtuous
sentiment to read Plato's writings in a "Temple of Plato," than to be
present in the temples of devils to witness the priests of Cybele[93]
mutilating themselves, the effeminate being consecrated, the raving
fanatics cutting themselves, and whatever other cruel or shameful,
or shamefully cruel or cruelly shameful, ceremony is enjoined by the
ritual of such gods as these? Were it not a more suitable education,
and more likely to prompt the youth to virtue, if they heard public
recitals of the laws of the gods, instead of the vain laudation of the
customs and laws of their ancestors? Certainly all the worshippers of
the Roman gods, when once they are possessed by what Persius calls "the
burning poison of lust,"[94] prefer to witness the deeds of Jupiter
rather than to hear what Plato taught or Cato censured. Hence the young
profligate in Terence, when he sees on the wall a fresco representing
the fabled descent of Jupiter into the lap of Danaë in the form of a
golden shower, accepts this as authoritative precedent for his own
licentiousness, and boasts that he is an imitator of God. "And what
God?" he says. "He who with His thunder shakes the loftiest temples.
And was I, a poor creature compared to Him, to make bones of it? No; I
did it, and with all my heart."[95]
8. _That the theatrical exhibitions publishing the shameful actions
of the gods, propitiated rather than offended them._
But, some one will interpose, these are the fables of poets, not
the deliverances of the gods themselves. Well, I have no mind to
arbitrate between the lewdness of theatrical entertainments and of
mystic rites; only this I say, and history bears me out in making the
assertion, that those same entertainments, in which the fictions of
poets are the main attraction, were not introduced in the festivals
of the gods by the ignorant devotion of the Romans, but that the gods
themselves gave the most urgent commands to this effect, and indeed
extorted from the Romans these solemnities and celebrations in their
honour. I touched on this in the preceding book, and mentioned that
dramatic entertainments were first inaugurated at Rome on occasion
of a pestilence, and by authority of the pontiff. And what man is
there who is not more likely to adopt, for the regulation of his own
life, the examples that are represented in plays which have a divine
sanction, rather than the precepts written and promulgated with no
more than human authority? If the poets gave a false representation
of Jove in describing him as adulterous, then it were to be expected
that the chaste gods should in anger avenge so wicked a fiction, in
place of encouraging the games which circulated it. Of these plays,
the most inoffensive are comedies and tragedies, that is to say, the
dramas which poets write for the stage, and which, though they often
handle impure subjects, yet do so without the filthiness of language
which characterizes many other performances; and it is these dramas
which boys are obliged by their seniors to read and learn as a part
of what is called a liberal and gentlemanly education.[96]
9. _That the poetical licence which the Greeks, in obedience to
their gods, allowed, was restrained by the ancient Romans._
The opinion of the ancient Romans on this matter is attested by
Cicero in his work _De Republica_, in which Scipio, one of the
interlocutors, says, "The lewdness of comedy could never have been
suffered by audiences, unless the customs of society had previously
sanctioned the same lewdness." And in the earlier days the Greeks
preserved a certain reasonableness in their licence, and made it a
law, that whatever comedy wished to say of any one, it must say it
of him by name. And so in the same work of Cicero's, Scipio says,
"Whom has it not aspersed? Nay, whom has it not worried? Whom has
it spared? Allow that it may assail demagogues and factions, men
injurious to the commonwealth--a Cleon, a Cleophon, a Hyperbolus.
That is tolerable, though it had been more seemly for the public
censor to brand such men, than for a poet to lampoon them; but to
blacken the fame of Pericles with scurrilous verse, after he had
with the utmost dignity presided over their state alike in war and
in peace, was as unworthy of a poet, as if our own Plautus or Nævius
were to bring Publius and Cneius Scipio on the comic stage, or as if
Cæcilius were to caricature Cato." And then a little after he goes
on: "Though our Twelve Tables attached the penalty of death only to
a very few offences, yet among these few this was one: if any man
should have sung a pasquinade, or have composed a satire calculated
to bring infamy or disgrace on another person. Wisely decreed. For it
is by the decisions of magistrates, and by a well-informed justice,
that our lives ought to be judged, and not by the flighty fancies of
poets; neither ought we to be exposed to hear calumnies, save where
we have the liberty of replying, and defending ourselves before an
adequate tribunal." This much I have judged it advisable to quote
from the fourth book of Cicero's _De Republica_; and I have made the
quotation word for word, with the exception of some words omitted,
and some slightly transposed, for the sake of giving the sense more
readily. And certainly the extract is pertinent to the matter I am
endeavouring to explain. Cicero makes some further remarks, and
concludes the passage by showing that the ancient Romans did not
permit any living man to be either praised or blamed on the stage.
But the Greeks, as I said, though not so moral, were more logical in
allowing this licence which the Romans forbade: for they saw that
their gods approved and enjoyed the scurrilous language of low comedy
when directed not only against men, but even against themselves; and
this, whether the infamous actions imputed to them were the fictions
of poets, or were their actual iniquities commemorated and acted in
the theatres. And would that the spectators had judged them worthy
only of laughter, and not of imitation! Manifestly it had been a
stretch of pride to spare the good name of the leading men and the
common citizens, when the very deities did not grudge that their own
reputation should be blemished.
10. _That the devils, in suffering either false or true crimes to
be laid to their charge, meant to do men a mischief._
It is alleged, in excuse of this practice, that the stories told
of the gods are not true, but false, and mere inventions; but this
only makes matters worse, if we form our estimate by the morality
our religion teaches; and if we consider the malice of the devils,
what more wily and astute artifice could they practise upon men?
When a slander is uttered against a leading statesman of upright and
useful life, is it not reprehensible in proportion to its untruth
and groundlessness? What punishment, then, shall be sufficient when
the gods are the objects of so wicked and outrageous an injustice?
But the devils, whom these men repute gods, are content that even
iniquities they are guiltless of should be ascribed to them, so long
as they may entangle men's minds in the meshes of these opinions, and
draw them on along with themselves to their predestinated punishment:
whether such things were actually committed by the men whom these
devils, delighting in human infatuation, cause to be worshipped as
gods, and in whose stead they, by a thousand malign and deceitful
artifices, substitute themselves, and so receive worship; or whether,
though they were really the crimes of men, these wicked spirits
gladly allowed them to be attributed to higher beings, that there
might seem to be conveyed from heaven itself a sufficient sanction
for the perpetration of shameful wickedness. The Greeks, therefore,
seeing the character of the gods they served, thought that the poets
should certainly not refrain from showing up human vices on the
stage, either because they desired to be like their gods in this, or
because they were afraid that, if they required for themselves a more
unblemished reputation than they asserted for the gods, they might
provoke them to anger.
11. _That the Greeks admitted players to offices of state, on
the ground that men who pleased the gods should not be
contemptuously treated by their fellows_.
It was a part of this same reasonableness of the Greeks which induced
them to bestow upon the actors of these same plays no inconsiderable
civic honours. In the above-mentioned book of the _De Republica_,
it is mentioned that Æschines, a very eloquent Athenian, who had
been a tragic actor in his youth, became a statesman, and that the
Athenians again and again sent another tragedian, Aristodemus, as
their plenipotentiary to Philip. For they judged it unbecoming to
condemn and treat as infamous persons those who were the chief actors
in the scenic entertainments which they saw to be so pleasing to
the gods. No doubt this was immoral of the Greeks, but there can
be as little doubt they acted in conformity with the character of
their gods; for how could they have presumed to protect the conduct
of the citizens from being cut to pieces by the tongues of poets
and players, who were allowed, and even enjoined by the gods, to
tear their divine reputation to tatters? And how could they hold in
contempt the men who acted in the theatres those dramas which, as
they had ascertained, gave pleasure to the gods whom they worshipped?
Nay, how could they but grant to them the highest civic honours?
On what plea could they honour the priests who offered for them
acceptable sacrifices to the gods, if they branded with infamy the
actors who in behalf of the people gave to the gods that pleasure
or honour which they demanded, and which, according to the account
of the priests, they were angry at not receiving? Labeo,[97] whose
learning makes him an authority on such points, is of opinion that
the distinction between good and evil deities should find expression
in a difference of worship; that the evil should be propitiated by
bloody sacrifices and doleful rites, but the good with a joyful and
pleasant observance, as, _e.g._ (as he says himself), with plays,
festivals, and banquets.[98] All this we shall, with God's help,
hereafter discuss. At present, and speaking to the subject on hand,
whether all kinds of offerings are made indiscriminately to all the
gods, as if all were good (and it is an unseemly thing to conceive
that there are evil gods; but these gods of the pagans are all evil,
because they are not gods, but evil spirits), or whether, as Labeo
thinks, a distinction is made between the offerings presented to the
different gods, the Greeks are equally justified in honouring alike
the priests by whom the sacrifices are offered, and the players by
whom the dramas are acted, that they may not be open to the charge of
doing an injury to all their gods, if the plays are pleasing to all
of them, or (which were still worse) to their good gods, if the plays
are relished only by them.
12. _That the Romans, by refusing to the poets the same licence in
respect of men which they allowed them in the case of the gods,
showed a more delicate sensitiveness regarding themselves than
regarding the gods._
The Romans, however, as Scipio boasts in that same discussion,
declined having their conduct and good name subjected to the assaults
and slanders of the poets, and went so far as to make it a capital
crime if any one should dare to compose such verses. This was a
very honourable course to pursue, so far as they themselves were
concerned, but in respect of the gods it was proud and irreligious:
for they knew that the gods not only tolerated, but relished, being
lashed by the injurious expressions of the poets, and yet they
themselves would not suffer this same handling; and what their
ritual prescribed as acceptable to the gods, their law prohibited
as injurious to themselves. How then, Scipio, do you praise the
Romans for refusing this licence to the poets, so that no citizen
could be calumniated, while you know that the gods were not included
under this protection? Do you count your senate-house worthy of
so much higher a regard than the Capitol? Is the one city of Rome
more valuable in your eyes than the whole heaven of gods, that you
prohibit your poets from uttering any injurious words against a
citizen, though they may with impunity cast what imputations they
please upon the gods, without the interference of senator, censor,
prince, or pontiff? It was, forsooth, intolerable that Plautus or
Nævius should attack Publius and Cneius Scipio, insufferable that
Cæcilius should lampoon Cato; but quite proper that your Terence
should encourage youthful lust by the wicked example of supreme Jove.
13. _That the Romans should have understood that gods who desired
to be worshipped in licentious entertainments were unworthy of
divine honour._
But Scipio, were he alive, would possibly reply: "How could we attach
a penalty to that which the gods themselves have consecrated? For
the theatrical entertainments in which such things are said, and
acted, and performed, were introduced into Roman society by the
gods, who ordered that they should be dedicated and exhibited in
their honour." But was not this, then, the plainest proof that they
were no true gods, nor in any respect worthy of receiving divine
honours from the republic? Suppose they had required that in their
honour the citizens of Rome should be held up to ridicule, every
Roman would have resented the hateful proposal. How then, I would
ask, can they be esteemed worthy of worship, when they propose
that their own crimes be used as material for celebrating their
praises? Does not this artifice expose them, and prove that they are
detestable devils? Thus the Romans, though they were superstitious
enough to serve as gods those who made no secret of their desire
to be worshipped in licentious plays, yet had sufficient regard
to their hereditary dignity and virtue, to prompt them to refuse
to players any such rewards as the Greeks accorded them. On this
point we have this testimony of Scipio, recorded in Cicero: "They
[the Romans] considered comedy and all theatrical performances as
disgraceful, and therefore not only debarred players from offices and
honours open to ordinary citizens, but also decreed that their names
should be branded by the censor, and erased from the roll of their
tribe." An excellent decree, and another testimony to the sagacity
of Rome; but I could wish their prudence had been more thoroughgoing
and consistent. For when I hear that if any Roman citizen chose
the stage as his profession, he not only closed to himself every
laudable career, but even became an outcast from his own tribe, I
cannot but exclaim: This is the true Roman spirit, this is worthy of
a state jealous of its reputation. But then some one interrupts my
rapture, by inquiring with what consistency players are debarred
from all honours, while plays are counted among the honours due to
the gods? For a long while the virtue of Rome was uncontaminated
by theatrical exhibitions;[99] and if they had been adopted for
the sake of gratifying the taste of the citizens, they would have
been introduced hand in hand with the relaxation of manners. But
the fact is, that it was the gods who demanded that they should be
exhibited to gratify them. With what justice, then, is the player
excommunicated by whom God is worshipped? On what pretext can you at
once adore him who exacts, and brand him who acts these plays? This,
then, is the controversy in which the Greeks and Romans are engaged.
The Greeks think they justly honour players, because they worship the
gods who demand plays: the Romans, on the other hand, do not suffer
an actor to disgrace by his name his own plebeian tribe, far less
the senatorial order. And the whole of this discussion may be summed
up in the following syllogism. The Greeks give us the major premiss:
If such gods are to be worshipped, then certainly such men may be
honoured. The Romans add the minor: But such men must by no means be
honoured. The Christians draw the conclusion: Therefore such gods
must by no means be worshipped.
14. _That Plato, who excluded poets from a well-ordered city, was
better than these gods who desire to be honoured by theatrical
plays._
We have still to inquire why the poets who write the plays, and who
by the law of the twelve tables are prohibited from injuring the good
name of the citizens, are reckoned more estimable than the actors,
though they so shamefully asperse the character of the gods? Is it
right that the actors of these poetical and God-dishonouring effusions
be branded, while their authors are honoured? Must we not here award
the palm to a Greek, Plato, who, in framing his ideal republic,[100]
conceived that poets should be banished from the city as enemies of the
state? He could not brook that the gods be brought into disrepute,
nor that the minds of the citizens be depraved and besotted, by the
fictions of the poets. Compare now human nature as you see it in
Plato, expelling poets from the city that the citizens be uninjured,
with the divine nature as you see it in these gods exacting plays in
their own honour. Plato strove, though unsuccessfully, to persuade the
light-minded and lascivious Greeks to abstain from so much as writing
such plays; the gods used their authority to extort the acting of the
same from the dignified and sober-minded Romans. And not content with
having them acted, they had them dedicated to themselves, consecrated
to themselves, solemnly celebrated in their own honour. To which, then,
would it be more becoming in a state to decree divine honours,--to
Plato, who prohibited these wicked and licentious plays, or to the
demons who delighted in blinding men to the truth of what Plato
unsuccessfully sought to inculcate?
This philosopher, Plato, has been elevated by Labeo to the rank
of a demigod, and set thus upon a level with such as Hercules and
Romulus. Labeo ranks demigods higher than heroes, but both he counts
among the deities. But I have no doubt that he thinks this man whom
he reckons a demigod worthy of greater respect not only than the
heroes, but also than the gods themselves. The laws of the Romans
and the speculations of Plato have this resemblance, that the latter
pronounces a wholesale condemnation of poetical fictions, while the
former restrain the licence of satire, at least so far as men are the
objects of it. Plato will not suffer poets even to dwell in his city:
the laws of Rome prohibit actors from being enrolled as citizens;
and if they had not feared to offend the gods who had asked the
services of the players, they would in all likelihood have banished
them altogether. It is obvious, therefore, that the Romans could not
receive, nor reasonably expect to receive, laws for the regulation
of their conduct from their gods, since the laws they themselves
enacted far surpassed and put to shame the morality of the gods.
The gods demand stage-plays in their own honour; the Romans exclude
the players from all civic honours:[101] the former commanded that
they should be celebrated by the scenic representation of their own
disgrace; the latter commanded that no poet should dare to blemish
the reputation of any citizen. But that demigod Plato resisted the
lust of such gods as these, and showed the Romans what their genius
had left incomplete; for he absolutely excluded poets from his ideal
state, whether they composed fictions with no regard to truth, or
set the worst possible examples before wretched men under the guise
of divine actions. We for our part, indeed, reckon Plato neither a
god nor a demigod; we would not even compare him to any of God's
holy angels, nor to the truth-speaking prophets, nor to any of the
apostles or martyrs of Christ, nay, not to any faithful Christian
man. The reason of this opinion of ours we will, God prospering
us, render in its own place. Nevertheless, since they wish him to
be considered a demigod, we think he certainly is more entitled to
that rank, and is every way superior, if not to Hercules and Romulus
(though no historian could ever narrate nor any poet sing of him that
he had killed his brother, or committed any crime), yet certainly
to Priapus, or a Cynocephalus,[102] or the Fever,[103]--divinities
whom the Romans have partly received from foreigners, and partly
consecrated by home-grown rites. How, then, could gods such as these
be expected to promulgate good and wholesome laws, either for the
prevention of moral and social evils, or for their eradication where
they had already sprung up?--gods who used their influence even to
sow and cherish profligacy, by appointing that deeds truly or falsely
ascribed to them should be published to the people by means of
theatrical exhibitions, and by thus gratuitously fanning the flame of
human lust with the breath of a seemingly divine approbation. In vain
does Cicero, speaking of poets, exclaim against this state of things
in these words: "When the plaudits and acclamation of the people,
who sit as infallible judges, are won by the poets, what darkness
benights the mind, what fears invade, what passions inflame it!"[104]
15. _That it was vanity, not reason, which created some of the
Roman gods._
But is it not manifest that vanity rather than reason regulated the
choice of some of their false gods? This Plato, whom they reckon a
demigod, and who used all his eloquence to preserve men from the
most dangerous spiritual calamities, has yet not been counted worthy
even of a little shrine; but Romulus, because they can call him
their own, they have esteemed more highly than many gods, though
their secret doctrine can allow him the rank only of a demigod. To
him they allotted a flamen, that is to say, a priest of a class so
highly esteemed in their religion (distinguished, too, by their
conical mitres), that for only three of their gods were flamens
appointed--the Flamen Dialis for Jupiter, Martialis for Mars, and
Quirinalis for Romulus (for when the ardour of his fellow-citizens
had given Romulus a seat among the gods, they gave him this new name
Quirinus). And thus by this honour Romulus has been preferred to
Neptune and Pluto, Jupiter's brothers, and to Saturn himself, their
father. They have assigned the same priesthood to serve him as to
serve Jove; and in giving Mars (the reputed father of Romulus) the
same honour, is this not rather for Romulus' sake than to honour Mars?
16. _That if the gods had really possessed any regard for
righteousness, the Romans should have received good laws from
them, instead of having to borrow them from other nations._
Moreover, if the Romans had been able to receive a rule of life
from their gods, they would not have borrowed Solon's laws from
the Athenians, as they did some years after Rome was founded; and
yet they did not keep them as they received them, but endeavoured
to improve and amend them.[105] Although Lycurgus pretended that
he was authorized by Apollo to give laws to the Lacedemonians, the
sensible Romans did not choose to believe this, and were not induced
to borrow laws from Sparta. Numa Pompilius, who succeeded Romulus
in the kingdom, is said to have framed some laws, which, however,
were not sufficient for the regulation of civic affairs. Among these
regulations were many pertaining to religious observances, and yet
he is not reported to have received even these from the gods. With
respect, then, to moral evils, evils of life and conduct,--evils
which are so mighty, that, according to the wisest pagans,[106] by
them states are ruined while their cities stand uninjured,--their
gods made not the smallest provision for preserving their worshippers
from these evils, but, on the contrary, took special pains to
increase them, as we have previously endeavoured to prove.
17. _Of the rape of the Sabine women, and other iniquities
perpetrated in Rome's palmiest days._
But possibly we are to find the reason for this neglect of the
Romans by their gods, in the saying of Sallust, that "equity and
virtue prevailed among the Romans not more by force of laws than of
nature."[107] I presume it is to this inborn equity and goodness of
disposition we are to ascribe the rape of the Sabine women. What,
indeed, could be more equitable and virtuous, than to carry off by
force, as each man was fit, and without their parents' consent,
girls who were strangers and guests, and who had been decoyed and
entrapped by the pretence of a spectacle! If the Sabines were wrong
to deny their daughters when the Romans asked for them, was it not
a greater wrong in the Romans to carry them off after that denial?
The Romans might more justly have waged war against the neighbouring
nation for having refused their daughters in marriage when they first
sought them, than for having demanded them back when they had stolen
them. War should have been proclaimed at first: it was then that Mars
should have helped his warlike son, that he might by force of arms
avenge the injury done him by the refusal of marriage, and might also
thus win the women he desired. There might have been some appearance
of "right of war" in a victor carrying off, in virtue of this right,
the virgins who had been without any show of right denied him;
whereas there was no "right of peace" entitling him to carry off
those who were not given to him, and to wage an unjust war with their
justly enraged parents. One happy circumstance was indeed connected
with this act of violence, viz., that though it was commemorated
by the games of the circus, yet even this did not constitute it a
precedent in the city or realm of Rome. If one would find fault with
the results of this act, it must rather be on the ground that the
Romans made Romulus a god in spite of his perpetrating this iniquity;
for one cannot reproach them with making this deed any kind of
precedent for the rape of women.
Again, I presume it was due to this natural equity and virtue, that
after the expulsion of King Tarquin, whose son had violated Lucretia,
Junius Brutus the consul forced Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus,
Lucretia's husband and his own colleague, a good and innocent man,
to resign his office and go into banishment, on the one sole charge
that he was of the name and blood of the Tarquins. This injustice was
perpetrated with the approval, or at least connivance, of the people,
who had themselves raised to the consular office both Collatinus
and Brutus. Another instance of this equity and virtue is found in
their treatment of Marcus Camillus. This eminent man, after he had
rapidly conquered the Veians, at that time the most formidable of
Rome's enemies, and who had maintained a ten years' war, in which
the Roman army had suffered the usual calamities attendant on bad
generalship, after he had restored security to Rome, which had begun
to tremble for its safety, and after he had taken the wealthiest
city of the enemy, had charges brought against him by the malice of
those that envied his success, and by the insolence of the tribunes
of the people; and seeing that the city bore him no gratitude for
preserving it, and that he would certainly be condemned, he went into
exile, and even in his absence was fined 10,000 asses. Shortly after,
however, his ungrateful country had again to seek his protection from
the Gauls. But I cannot now mention all the shameful and iniquitous
acts with which Rome was agitated, when the aristocracy attempted to
subject the people, and the people resented their encroachments, and
the advocates of either party were actuated rather by the love of
victory than by any equitable or virtuous consideration.
18. _What the history of Sallust reveals regarding the life of the
Romans, either when straitened by anxiety or relaxed in security._
I will therefore pause, and adduce the testimony of Sallust himself,
whose words in praise of the Romans (that "equity and virtue
prevailed among them not more by force of laws than of nature")
have given occasion to this discussion. He was referring to that
period immediately after the expulsion of the kings, in which the
city became great in an incredibly short space of time. And yet this
same writer acknowledges in the first book of his history, in the
very exordium of his work, that even at that time, when a very brief
interval had elapsed after the government had passed from kings to
consuls, the more powerful men began to act unjustly, and occasioned
the defection of the people from the patricians, and other disorders
in the city. For after Sallust had stated that the Romans enjoyed
greater harmony and a purer state of society between the second and
third Punic wars than at any other time, and that the cause of this
was not their love of good order, but their fear lest the peace
they had with Carthage might be broken (this also, as we mentioned,
Nasica contemplated when he opposed the destruction of Carthage,
for he supposed that fear would tend to repress wickedness, and to
preserve wholesome ways of living), he then goes on to say: "Yet,
after the destruction of Carthage, discord, avarice, ambition, and
the other vices which are commonly generated by prosperity, more
than ever increased." If they "increased," and that "more than
ever," then already they had appeared, and had been increasing. And
so Sallust adds this reason for what he said. "For," he says, "the
oppressive measures of the powerful, and the consequent secessions
of the plebs from the patricians, and other civil dissensions, had
existed from the first, and affairs were administered with equity
and well-tempered justice for no longer a period than the short
time after the expulsion of the kings, while the city was occupied
with the serious Tuscan war and Tarquin's vengeance." You see how,
even in that brief period after the expulsion of the kings, fear,
he acknowledges, was the cause of the interval of equity and good
order. They were afraid, in fact, of the war which Tarquin waged
against them, after he had been driven from the throne and the city,
and had allied himself with the Tuscans. But observe what he adds:
"After that, the patricians treated the people as their slaves,
ordering them to be scourged or beheaded just as the kings had done,
driving them from their holdings, and harshly tyrannizing over
those who had no property to lose. The people, overwhelmed by these
oppressive measures, and most of all by exorbitant usury, and obliged
to contribute both money and personal service to the constant wars,
at length took arms, and seceded to Mount Aventine and Mount Sacer,
and thus obtained for themselves tribunes and protective laws. But
it was only the second Punic war that put an end on both sides to
discord and strife." You see what kind of men the Romans were, even
so early as a few years after the expulsion of the kings; and it is
of these men he says, that "equity and virtue prevailed among them
not more by force of law than of nature."
Now, if these were the days in which the Roman republic shows fairest
and best, what are we to say or think of the succeeding age, when,
to use the words of the same historian, "changing little by little
from the fair and virtuous city it was, it became utterly wicked
and dissolute?" This was, as he mentions, after the destruction of
Carthage. Sallust's brief sum and sketch of this period may be read in
his own history, in which he shows how the profligate manners which
were propagated by prosperity resulted at last even in civil wars. He
says: "And from this time the primitive manners, instead of undergoing
an insensible alteration as hitherto they had done, were swept away as
by a torrent: the young men were so depraved by luxury and avarice,
that it may justly be said that no father had a son who could either
preserve his own patrimony, or keep his hands off other men's." Sallust
adds a number of particulars about the vices of Sylla, and the debased
condition of the republic in general; and other writers make similar
observations, though in much less striking language.
However, I suppose you now see, or at least any one who gives his
attention has the means of seeing, in what a sink of iniquity
that city was plunged before the advent of our heavenly King. For
these things happened not only before Christ had begun to teach,
but before He was even born of the Virgin. If, then, they dare not
impute to their gods the grievous evils of those former times, more
tolerable before the destruction of Carthage, but intolerable and
dreadful after it, although it was the gods who by their malign craft
instilled into the minds of men the conceptions from which such
dreadful vices branched out on all sides, why do they impute these
present calamities to Christ, who teaches life-giving truth, and
forbids us to worship false and deceitful gods, and who, abominating
and condemning with His divine authority those wicked and hurtful
lusts of men, gradually withdraws His own people from a world that is
corrupted by these vices, and is falling into ruins, to make of them
an eternal city, whose glory rests not on the acclamations of vanity,
but on the judgment of truth?
19. _Of the corruption which had grown upon the Roman republic
before Christ abolished the worship of the gods._
Here, then, is this Roman republic, "which has changed little by
little from the fair and virtuous city it was, and has become utterly
wicked and dissolute." It is not I who am the first to say this, but
their own authors, from whom we learned it for a fee, and who wrote
it long before the coming of Christ. You see how, before the coming
of Christ, and after the destruction of Carthage, "the primitive
manners, instead of undergoing insensible alteration, as hitherto
they had done, were swept away as by a torrent; and how depraved by
luxury and avarice the youth were." Let them now, on their part, read
to us any laws given by their gods to the Roman people, and directed
against luxury and avarice. And would that they had only been silent
on the subjects of chastity and modesty, and had not demanded from
the people indecent and shameful practices, to which they lent a
pernicious patronage by their so-called divinity. Let them read
our commandments in the Prophets, Gospels, Acts of the Apostles,
or Epistles; let them peruse the large number of precepts against
avarice and luxury which are everywhere read to the congregations
that meet for this purpose, and which strike the ear, not with the
uncertain sound of a philosophical discussion, but with the thunder
of God's own oracle pealing from the clouds. And yet they do not
impute to their gods the luxury and avarice, the cruel and dissolute
manners, that had rendered the republic utterly wicked and corrupt,
even before the coming of Christ; but whatever affliction their
pride and effeminacy have exposed them to in these latter days,
they furiously impute to our religion. If the kings of the earth
and all their subjects, if all princes and judges of the earth, if
young men and maidens, old and young, every age, and both sexes; if
they whom the Baptist addressed, the publicans and the soldiers,
were all together to hearken to and observe the precepts of the
Christian religion regarding a just and virtuous life, then should
the republic adorn the whole earth with its own felicity, and attain
in life everlasting to the pinnacle of kingly glory. But because
this man listens, and that man scoffs, and most are enamoured of the
blandishments of vice rather than the wholesome severity of virtue,
the people of Christ, whatever be their condition--whether they be
kings, princes, judges, soldiers, or provincials, rich or poor,
bond or free, male or female--are enjoined to endure this earthly
republic, wicked and dissolute as it is, that so they may by this
endurance win for themselves an eminent place in that most holy and
august assembly of angels and republic of heaven, in which the will
of God is the law.
20. _Of the kind of happiness and life truly delighted in by those
who inveigh against the Christian religion._
But the worshippers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating
their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the
republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain
undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources;
let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in
peace; and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every
man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily
prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for
their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and
that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity;
and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister
to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their
interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe
duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their
prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their
subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral
guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their
pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile
fear. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the injury done to
another man's property, than of that done to one's own person.
If a man be a nuisance to his neighbour, or injure his property,
family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs
let every one with impunity do what he will in company with his
own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a
plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to
use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for
their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and
most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most
sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night,
play, drink, vomit,[108] dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard
the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre;
let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures
maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful
to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to
modify or put an end to it, let him be silenced, banished, put an end
to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people
this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed. Let
them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand whatever games they
please, from or with their own worshippers; only let them secure
that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague, or disaster of
any kind. What sane man would compare a republic such as this, I
will not say to the Roman empire, but to the palace of Sardanapalus,
the ancient king who was so abandoned to pleasures, that he caused
it to be inscribed on his tomb, that now that he was dead, he
possessed only those things which he had swallowed and consumed by
his appetites while alive? If these men had such a king as this, who,
while self-indulgent, should lay no severe restraint on them, they
would more enthusiastically consecrate to him a temple and a flamen
than the ancient Romans did to Romulus.
21. _Cicero's opinion of the Roman republic._
But if our adversaries do not care how foully and disgracefully
the Roman republic be stained by corrupt practices, so long only
as it holds together and continues in being, and if they therefore
pooh-pooh the testimony of Sallust to its "utterly wicked and
profligate" condition, what will they make of Cicero's statement,
that even in his time it had become entirely extinct, and that there
remained extant no Roman republic at all? He introduces Scipio (the
Scipio who had destroyed Carthage) discussing the republic, at a time
when already there were presentiments of its speedy ruin by that
corruption which Sallust describes. In fact, at the time when the
discussion took place, one of the Gracchi, who, according to Sallust,
was the first great instigator of seditions, had already been put to
death. His death, indeed, is mentioned in the same book. Now Scipio,
in the end of the second book, says: "As, among the different sounds
which proceed from lyres, flutes, and the human voice, there must be
maintained a certain harmony which a cultivated ear cannot endure
to hear disturbed or jarring, but which may be elicited in full and
absolute concord by the modulation even of voices very unlike one
another; so, where reason is allowed to modulate the diverse elements
of the state, there is obtained a perfect concord from the upper,
lower, and middle classes as from various sounds; and what musicians
call harmony in singing, is concord in matters of state, which is the
strictest bond and best security of any republic, and which by no
ingenuity can be retained where justice has become extinct." Then,
when he had expatiated somewhat more fully, and had more copiously
illustrated the benefits of its presence and the ruinous effects
of its absence upon a state, Pilus, one of the company present at
the discussion, struck in and demanded that the question should be
more thoroughly sifted, and that the subject of justice should be
freely discussed for the sake of ascertaining what truth there was
in the maxim which was then becoming daily more current, that "the
republic cannot be governed without injustice." Scipio expressed
his willingness to have this maxim discussed and sifted, and gave
it as his opinion that it was baseless, and that no progress could
be made in discussing the republic unless it was established, not
only that this maxim, that "the republic cannot be governed without
injustice," was false, but also that the truth is, that it cannot
be governed without the most absolute justice. And the discussion
of this question, being deferred till the next day, is carried on
in the third book with great animation. For Pilus himself undertook
to defend the position that the republic cannot be governed without
injustice, at the same time being at special pains to clear himself
of any real participation in that opinion. He advocated with great
keenness the cause of injustice against justice, and endeavoured
by plausible reasons and examples to demonstrate that the former
is beneficial, the latter useless, to the republic. Then, at the
request of the company, Lælius attempted to defend justice, and
strained every nerve to prove that nothing is so hurtful to a state
as injustice; and that without justice a republic can neither be
governed, nor even continue to exist.
When this question has been handled to the satisfaction of the
company, Scipio reverts to the original thread of discourse, and
repeats with commendation his own brief definition of a republic,
that it is the weal of the people. "The people" he defines as being
not every assemblage or mob, but an assemblage associated by a common
acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests. Then he shows
the use of definition in debate; and from these definitions of his
own he gathers that a republic, or "weal of the people," then exists
only when it is well and justly governed, whether by a monarch, or an
aristocracy, or by the whole people. But when the monarch is unjust,
or, as the Greeks say, a tyrant; or the aristocrats are unjust, and
form a faction; or the people themselves are unjust, and become, as
Scipio for want of a better name calls them, themselves the tyrant,
then the republic is not only blemished (as had been proved the day
before), but by legitimate deduction from those definitions, it
altogether ceases to be. For it could not be the people's weal when a
tyrant factiously lorded it over the state; neither would the people
be any longer a people if it were unjust, since it would no longer
answer the definition of a people--"an assemblage associated by a
common acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests."
When, therefore, the Roman republic was such as Sallust described
it, it was not "utterly wicked and profligate," as he says, but had
altogether ceased to exist, if we are to admit the reasoning of
that debate maintained on the subject of the republic by its best
representatives. Tully himself, too, speaking not in the person
of Scipio or any one else, but uttering his own sentiments, uses
the following language in the beginning of the fifth book, after
quoting a line from the poet Ennius, in which he said, "Rome's severe
morality and her citizens are her safeguard." "This verse," says
Cicero, "seems to me to have all the sententious truthfulness of
an oracle. For neither would the citizens have availed without the
morality of the community, nor would the morality of the commons
without outstanding men have availed either to establish or so long
to maintain in vigour so grand a republic with so wide and just an
empire. Accordingly, before our day, the hereditary usages formed
our foremost men, and they on their part retained the usages and
institutions of their fathers. But our age, receiving the republic as
a _chef-d'œuvre_ of another age which has already begun to grow old,
has not merely neglected to restore the colours of the original, but
has not even been at the pains to preserve so much as the general
outline and most outstanding features. For what survives of that
primitive morality which the poet called Rome's safeguard? It is
so obsolete and forgotten, that, far from practising it, one does
not even know it. And of the citizens what shall I say? Morality
has perished through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we
must not only assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must
answer as criminals charged with a capital crime. For it is through
our vices, and not by any mishap, that we retain only the name of a
republic, and have long since lost the reality."
This is the confession of Cicero, long indeed after the death of
Africanus, whom he introduced as an interlocutor in his work _De
Republica_, but still before the coming of Christ. Yet, if the
disasters he bewails had been lamented after the Christian religion
had been diffused, and had begun to prevail, is there a man of our
adversaries who would not have thought that they were to be imputed
to the Christians? Why, then, did their gods not take steps then to
prevent the decay and extinction of that republic, over the loss of
which Cicero, long before Christ had come in the flesh, sings so
lugubrious a dirge? Its admirers have need to inquire whether, even
in the days of primitive men and morals, true justice flourished in
it; or was it not perhaps even then, to use the casual expression
of Cicero, rather a coloured painting than the living reality?
But, if God will, we shall consider this elsewhere. For I mean in
its own place to show that--according to the definitions in which
Cicero himself, using Scipio as his mouthpiece, briefly propounded
what a republic is, and what a people is, and according to many
testimonies, both of his own lips and of those who took part in that
same debate--Rome never was a republic, because true justice had
never a place in it. But accepting the more feasible definitions
of a republic, I grant there was a republic of a certain kind, and
certainly much better administered by the more ancient Romans than by
their modern representatives. But the fact is, true justice has no
existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ,
if at least any choose to call this a republic; and indeed we cannot
deny that it is the people's weal. But if perchance this name, which
has become familiar in other connections, be considered alien to our
common parlance, we may at all events say that in this city is true
justice; the city of which Holy Scripture says, "Glorious things are
said of thee, O city of God."
22. _That the Roman gods never took any steps to prevent the
republic from being ruined by immorality._
But what is relevant to the present question is this, that however
admirable our adversaries say the republic was or is, it is certain
that by the testimony of their own most learned writers it had
become, long before the coming of Christ, utterly wicked and
dissolute, and indeed had no existence, but had been destroyed by
profligacy. To prevent this, surely these guardian gods ought to have
given precepts of morals and a rule of life to the people by whom
they were worshipped in so many temples, with so great a variety of
priests and sacrifices, with such numberless and diverse rites, so
many festal solemnities, so many celebrations of magnificent games.
But in all this the demons only looked after their own interest,
and cared not at all how their worshippers lived, or rather were at
pains to induce them to lead an abandoned life, so long as they paid
these tributes to their honour, and regarded them with fear. If any
one denies this, let him produce, let him point to, let him read the
laws which the gods had given against sedition, and which the Gracchi
transgressed when they threw everything into confusion; or those
Marius, and Cinna, and Carbo broke when they involved their country
in civil wars, most iniquitous and unjustifiable in their causes,
cruelly conducted, and yet more cruelly terminated; or those which
Sylla scorned, whose life, character, and deeds, as described by
Sallust and other historians, are the abhorrence of all mankind. Who
will deny that at that time the republic had become extinct?
Possibly they will be bold enough to suggest in defence of the gods,
that they abandoned the city on account of the profligacy of the
citizens, according to the lines of Virgil:
"Gone from each fane, each sacred shrine,
Are those who made this realm divine."[109]
But, firstly, if it be so, then they cannot complain against the
Christian religion, as if it were that which gave offence to the
gods and caused them to abandon Rome, since the Roman immorality had
long ago driven from the altars of the city a cloud of little gods,
like as many flies. And yet where was this host of divinities, when,
long before the corruption of the primitive morality, Rome was taken
and burnt by the Gauls? Perhaps they were present, but asleep? For
at that time the whole city fell into the hands of the enemy, with
the single exception of the Capitoline hill; and this too would have
been taken, had not--the watchful geese aroused the sleeping gods!
And this gave occasion to the festival of the goose, in which Rome
sank nearly to the superstition of the Egyptians, who worship beasts
and birds. But of these adventitious evils which are inflicted by
hostile armies or by some disaster, and which attach rather to the
body than the soul, I am not meanwhile disputing. At present I speak
of the decay of morality, which at first almost imperceptibly lost
its brilliant hue, but afterwards was wholly obliterated, was swept
away as by a torrent, and involved the republic in such disastrous
ruin, that though the houses and walls remained standing, the leading
writers do not scruple to say that the republic was destroyed. Now,
the departure of the gods "from each fane, each sacred shrine," and
their abandonment of the city to destruction, was an act of justice,
if their laws inculcating justice and a moral life had been held in
contempt by that city. But what kind of gods were these, pray, who
declined to live with a people who worshipped them, and whose corrupt
life they had done nothing to reform?
23. _That the vicissitudes of this life are dependent not on
the favour or hostility of demons, but on the will of the true God._
But, further, is it not obvious that the gods have abetted the
fulfilment of men's desires, instead of authoritatively bridling them?
For Marius, a low-born and self-made man, who ruthlessly provoked and
conducted civil wars, was so effectually aided by them, that he was
seven times consul, and died full of years in his seventh consulship,
escaping the hands of Sylla, who immediately afterwards came into
power. Why, then, did they not also aid him, so as to restrain him from
so many enormities? For if it is said that the gods had no hand in
his success, this is no trivial admission, that a man can attain the
dearly coveted felicity of this life even though his own gods be not
propitious; that men can be loaded with the gifts of fortune as Marius
was, can enjoy health, power, wealth, honours, dignity, length of days,
though the gods be hostile to him; and that, on the other hand, men
can be tormented as Regulus was, with captivity, bondage, destitution,
watchings, pain, and cruel death, though the gods be his friends. To
concede this is to make a compendious confession that the gods are
useless, and their worship superfluous. If the gods have taught the
people rather what goes clean counter to the virtues of the soul, and
that integrity of life which meets a reward after death; if even in
respect of temporal and transitory blessings they neither hurt those
whom they hate nor profit whom they love, why are they worshipped, why
are they invoked with such eager homage? Why do men murmur in difficult
and sad emergencies, as if the gods had retired in anger? and why, on
their account, is the Christian religion injured by the most unworthy
calumnies? If in temporal matters they have power either for good or
for evil, why did they stand by Marius, the worst of Rome's citizens,
and abandon Regulus, the best? Does this not prove themselves to be
most unjust and wicked? And even if it be supposed that for this
very reason they are the rather to be feared and worshipped, this
is a mistake; for we do not read that Regulus worshipped them less
assiduously than Marius. Neither is it apparent that a wicked life is
to be chosen, on the ground that the gods are supposed to have favoured
Marius more than Regulus. For Metellus, the most highly esteemed of
all the Romans, who had five sons in the consulship, was prosperous
even in this life; and Catiline, the worst of men, reduced to poverty
and defeated in the war his own guilt had aroused, lived and perished
miserably. Real and secure felicity is the peculiar possession of those
who worship that God by whom alone it can be conferred.
It is thus apparent, that when the republic was being destroyed by
profligate manners, its gods did nothing to hinder its destruction by
the direction or correction of its manners, but rather accelerated
its destruction by increasing the demoralization and corruption
that already existed. They need not pretend that their goodness was
shocked by the iniquity of the city, and that they withdrew in anger.
For they were there, sure enough; they are detected, convicted:
they were equally unable to break silence so as to guide others,
and to keep silence so as to conceal themselves. I do not dwell on
the fact that the inhabitants of Minturnæ took pity on Marius, and
commended him to the goddess Marica in her grove, that she might
give him success in all things, and that from the abyss of despair
in which he then lay he forthwith returned unhurt to Rome, and
entered the city the ruthless leader of a ruthless army; and they
who wish to know how bloody was his victory, how unlike a citizen,
and how much more relentlessly than any foreign foe he acted, let
them read the histories. But this, as I said, I do not dwell upon;
nor do I attribute the bloody bliss of Marius to, I know not what
Minturnian goddess [Marica], but rather to the secret providence of
God, that the mouths of our adversaries might be shut, and that they
who are not led by passion, but by prudent consideration of events,
might be delivered from error. And even if the demons have any
power in these matters, they have only that power which the secret
decree of the Almighty allots to them, in order that we may not
set too great store by earthly prosperity, seeing it is oftentimes
vouchsafed even to wicked men like Marius; and that we may not, on
the other hand, regard it as an evil, since we see that many good and
pious worshippers of the one true God are, in spite of the demons,
pre-eminently successful; and, finally, that we may not suppose that
these unclean spirits are either to be propitiated or feared for the
sake of earthly blessings or calamities: for as wicked men on earth
cannot do all they would, so neither can these demons, but only in so
far as they are permitted by the decree of Him whose judgments are
fully comprehensible, justly reprehensible by none.
24. _Of the deeds of Sylla, in which the demons boasted that he
had their help._
It is certain that Sylla--whose rule was so cruel, that, in
comparison with it, the preceding state of things which he came
to avenge was regretted--when first he advanced towards Rome to
give battle to Marius, found the auspices so favourable when he
sacrificed, that, according to Livy's account, the augur Postumius
expressed his willingness to lose his head if Sylla did not, with the
help of the gods, accomplish what he designed. The gods, you see, had
not departed from "every fane and sacred shrine," since they were
still predicting the issue of these affairs, and yet were taking no
steps to correct Sylla himself. Their presages promised him great
prosperity, but no threatenings of theirs subdued his evil passions.
And then, when he was in Asia conducting the war against Mithridates,
a message from Jupiter was delivered to him by Lucius Titius, to the
effect that he would conquer Mithridates; and so it came to pass.
And afterwards, when he was meditating a return to Rome for the
purpose of avenging in the blood of the citizens injuries done to
himself and his friends, a second message from Jupiter was delivered
to him by a soldier of the sixth legion, to the effect that it was
he who had predicted the victory over Mithridates, and that now he
promised to give him power to recover the republic from his enemies,
though with great bloodshed. Sylla at once inquired of the soldier
what form had appeared to him; and, on his reply, recognised that it
was the same as Jupiter had formerly employed to convey to him the
assurance regarding the victory over Mithridates. How, then, can the
gods be justified in this matter for the care they took to predict
these shadowy successes, and for their negligence in correcting
Sylla, and restraining him from stirring up a civil war so lamentable
and atrocious, that it not merely disfigured, but extinguished,
the republic? The truth is, as I have often said, and as Scripture
informs us, and as the facts themselves sufficiently indicate, the
demons are found to look after their own ends only, that they may
be regarded and worshipped as gods, and that men may be induced to
offer to them a worship which associates them with their crimes, and
involves them in one common wickedness and judgment of God.
Afterwards, when Sylla had come to Tarentum, and had sacrificed
there, he saw on the head of the victim's liver the likeness of a
golden crown. Thereupon the same soothsayer Postumius interpreted
this to signify a signal victory, and ordered that he only should eat
of the entrails. A little afterwards, the slave of a certain Lucius
Pontius cried out, "I am Bellona's messenger; the victory is yours,
Sylla!" Then he added that the Capitol should be burned. As soon as
he had uttered this prediction he left the camp, but returned the
following day more excited than ever, and shouted, "The Capitol is
fired!" And fired indeed it was. This it was easy for a demon both
to foresee and quickly to announce. But observe, as relevant to
our subject, what kind of gods they are under whom these men desire
to live, who blaspheme the Saviour that delivers the wills of the
faithful from the dominion of devils. The man cried out in prophetic
rapture, "The victory is yours, Sylla!" And to certify that he spoke
by a divine spirit, he predicted also an event which was shortly to
happen, and which indeed did fall out, in a place from which he in
whom this spirit was speaking was far distant. But he never cried,
Forbear thy villanies, Sylla!--the villanies which were committed at
Rome by that victor to whom a golden crown on the calf's liver had
been shown as the divine evidence of his victory. If such signs as
this were customarily sent by just gods, and not by wicked demons,
then certainly the entrails he consulted should rather have given
Sylla intimation of the cruel disasters that were to befall the city
and himself. For that victory was not so conducive to his exaltation
to power, as it was fatal to his ambition; for by it he became so
insatiable in his desires, and was rendered so arrogant and reckless
by prosperity, that he may be said rather to have inflicted a moral
destruction on himself than corporal destruction on his enemies. But
these truly woful and deplorable calamities the gods gave him no
previous hint of, neither by entrails, augury, dream, nor prediction.
For they feared his amendment more than his defeat. Yea, they took
good care that this glorious conqueror of his own fellow-citizens
should be conquered and led captive by his own infamous vices, and
should thus be the more submissive slave of the demons themselves.
25. _How powerfully the evil spirits incite men to wicked actions,
by giving them the quasi-divine authority of their example._
Now, who does not hereby comprehend,--unless he has preferred to
imitate such gods rather than by divine grace to withdraw himself
from their fellowship,--who does not see how eagerly these evil
spirits strive by their example to lend, as it were, divine authority
to crime? Is not this proved by the fact that they were seen in a
wide plain in Campania rehearsing among themselves the battle which
shortly after took place there with great bloodshed between the
armies of Rome? For at first there were heard loud crashing noises,
and afterwards many reported that they had seen for some days
together two armies engaged. And when this battle ceased, they found
the ground all indented with just such footprints of men and horses
as a great conflict would leave. If, then, the deities were veritably
fighting with one another, the civil wars of men are sufficiently
justified; yet, by the way, let it be observed that such pugnacious
gods must be very wicked or very wretched. If, however, it was but
a sham-fight, what did they intend by this, but that the civil wars
of the Romans should seem no wickedness, but an imitation of the
gods? For already the civil wars had begun; and before this, some
lamentable battles and execrable massacres had occurred. Already
many had been moved by the story of the soldier, who, on stripping
the spoils of his slain foe, recognised in the stripped corpse his
own brother, and, with deep curses on civil wars, slew himself there
and then on his brother's body. To disguise the bitterness of such
tragedies, and kindle increasing ardour in this monstrous warfare,
these malign demons, who were reputed and worshipped as gods, fell
upon this plan of revealing themselves in a state of civil war,
that no compunction for fellow-citizens might cause the Romans to
shrink from such battles, but that the human criminality might be
justified by the divine example. By a like craft, too, did these
evil spirits command that scenic entertainments, of which I have
already spoken, should be instituted and dedicated to them. And in
these entertainments the poetical compositions and actions of the
drama ascribed such iniquities to the gods, that every one might
safely imitate them, whether he believed the gods had actually done
such things, or, not believing this, yet perceived that they most
eagerly desired to be represented as having done them. And that no
one might suppose, that in representing the gods as fighting with one
another, the poets had slandered them, and imputed to them unworthy
actions, the gods themselves, to complete the deception, confirmed
the compositions of the poets by exhibiting their own battles to the
eyes of men, not only through actions in the theatres, but in their
own persons on the actual field.
We have been forced to bring forward these facts, because their
authors have not scrupled to say and to write that the Roman
republic had already been ruined by the depraved moral habits of
the citizens, and had ceased to exist before the advent of our Lord
Jesus Christ. Now this ruin they do not impute to their own gods,
though they impute to our Christ the evils of this life, which cannot
ruin good men, be they alive or dead. And this they do, though our
Christ has issued so many precepts inculcating virtue and restraining
vice; while their own gods have done nothing whatever to preserve
that republic that served them, and to restrain it from ruin by such
precepts, but have rather hastened its destruction, by corrupting its
morality through their pestilent example. No one, I fancy, will now
be bold enough to say that the republic was then ruined because of
the departure of the gods "from each fane, each sacred shrine," as
if they were the friends of virtue, and were offended by the vices
of men. No, there are too many presages from entrails, auguries,
soothsayings, whereby they boastingly proclaimed themselves prescient
of future events and controllers of the fortune of war,--all which
prove them to have been present. And had they been indeed absent, the
Romans would never in these civil wars have been so far transported
by their own passions as they were by the instigations of these gods.
26. _That the demons gave in secret certain obscure instructions in
morals, while in public their own solemnities inculcated all
wickedness._
Seeing that this is so,--seeing that the filthy and cruel deeds,
the disgraceful and criminal actions of the gods, whether real or
feigned, were at their own request published, and were consecrated,
and dedicated in their honour as sacred and stated solemnities;
seeing they vowed vengeance on those who refused to exhibit them
to the eyes of all, that they might be proposed as deeds worthy of
imitation, why is it that these same demons, who, by taking pleasure
in such obscenities, acknowledge themselves to be unclean spirits,
and by delighting in their own villanies and iniquities, real or
imaginary, and by requesting from the immodest, and extorting from
the modest, the celebration of these licentious acts, proclaim
themselves instigators to a criminal and lewd life;--why, I ask, are
they represented as giving some good moral precepts to a few of their
own elect, initiated in the secrecy of their shrines? If it be so,
this very thing only serves further to demonstrate the malicious
craft of these pestilent spirits. For so great is the influence of
probity and chastity, that all men, or almost all men, are moved by
the praise of these virtues; nor is any man so depraved by vice, but
he hath some feeling of honour left in him. So that, unless the devil
sometimes transformed himself, as Scripture says, into an angel of
light,[110] he could not compass his deceitful purpose. Accordingly,
in public, a bold impurity fills the ear of the people with noisy
clamour; in private, a feigned chastity speaks in scarce audible
whispers to a few: an open stage is provided for shameful things, but
on the praiseworthy the curtain falls: grace hides, disgrace flaunts:
a wicked deed draws an overflowing house, a virtuous speech finds
scarce a hearer, as though purity were to be blushed at, impurity
boasted of. Where else can such confusion reign, but in devils'
temples? Where, but in the haunts of deceit? For the secret precepts
are given as a sop to the virtuous, who are few in number; the wicked
examples are exhibited to encourage the vicious, who are countless.
Where and when those initiated in the mysteries of Cœlestis received
any good instructions, we know not. What we do know is, that before
her shrine, in which her image is set, and amidst a vast crowd
gathering from all quarters, and standing closely packed together,
we were intensely interested spectators of the games which were
going on, and saw, as we pleased to turn the eye, on this side a
grand display of harlots, on the other the virgin goddess: we saw
this virgin worshipped with prayer and with obscene rites. There we
saw no shamefaced mimes, no actress overburdened with modesty: all
that the obscene rites demanded was fully complied with. We were
plainly shown what was pleasing to the virgin deity, and the matron
who witnessed the spectacle returned home from the temple a wiser
woman. Some, indeed, of the more prudent women turned their faces
from the immodest movements of the players, and learned the art of
wickedness by a furtive regard. For they were restrained, by the
modest demeanour due to men, from looking boldly at the immodest
gestures; but much more were they restrained from condemning with
chaste heart the sacred rites of her whom they adored. And yet this
licentiousness--which, if practised in one's home, could only be done
there in secret--was practised as a public lesson in the temple;
and if any modesty remained in men, it was occupied in marvelling
that wickedness which men could not unrestrainedly commit should be
part of the religious teaching of the gods, and that to omit its
exhibition should incur the anger of the gods. What spirit can that
be, which by a hidden inspiration stirs men's corruption, and goads
them to adultery, and feeds on the full-fledged iniquity, unless it
be the same that finds pleasure in such religious ceremonies, sets in
the temples images of devils, and loves to see in play the images of
vices; that whispers in secret some righteous sayings to deceive the
few who are good, and scatters in public invitations to profligacy,
to gain possession of the millions who are wicked?
27. _That the obscenities of those plays which the Romans
consecrated in order to propitiate their gods, contributed
largely to the overthrow of public order._
Cicero, a weighty man, and a philosopher in his way, when about to
be made edile, wished the citizens to understand[111] that, among
the other duties of his magistracy, he must propitiate Flora by
the celebration of games. And these games are reckoned devout in
proportion to their lewdness. In another place,[112] and when he was
now consul, and the state in great peril, he says that games had been
celebrated for ten days together, and that nothing had been omitted
which could pacify the gods: as if it had not been more satisfactory
to irritate the gods by temperance, than to pacify them by debauchery;
and to provoke their hate by honest living, than soothe it by such
unseemly grossness. For no matter how cruel was the ferocity of those
men who were threatening the state, and on whose account the gods
were being propitiated: it could not have been more hurtful than
the alliance of gods who were won with the foulest vices. To avert
the danger which threatened men's bodies, the gods were conciliated
in a fashion that drove virtue from their spirits; and the gods did
not enrol themselves as defenders of the battlements against the
besiegers, until they had first stormed and sacked the morality of
the citizens. This propitiation of such divinities,--a propitiation
so wanton, so impure, so immodest, so wicked, so filthy, whose actors
the innate and praiseworthy virtue of the Romans disabled from civic
honours, erased from their tribe, recognised as polluted and made
infamous;--this propitiation, I say, so foul, so detestable, and alien
from every religious feeling, these fabulous and ensnaring accounts
of the criminal actions of the gods, these scandalous actions which
they either shamefully and wickedly committed, or more shamefully and
wickedly feigned, all this the whole city learned in public both by
the words and gestures of the actors. They saw that the gods delighted
in the commission of these things, and therefore believed that they
wished them not only to be exhibited to them, but to be imitated by
themselves. But as for that good and honest instruction which they
speak of, it was given in such secrecy, and to so few (if indeed given
at all), that they seemed rather to fear it might be divulged, than
that it might not be practised.
28. _That the Christian religion is health-giving._
They, then, are but abandoned and ungrateful wretches, in deep and
fast bondage to that malign spirit, who complain and murmur that men
are rescued by the name of Christ from the hellish thraldom of these
unclean spirits, and from a participation in their punishment, and
are brought out of the night of pestilential ungodliness into the
light of most healthful piety. Only such men could murmur that the
masses flock to the churches and their chaste acts of worship, where
a seemly separation of the sexes is observed; where they learn how
they may so spend this earthly life, as to merit a blessed eternity
hereafter; where Holy Scripture and instruction in righteousness
are proclaimed from a raised platform in presence of all, that both
they who do the word may hear to their salvation, and they who do
it not may hear to judgment. And though some enter who scoff at
such precepts, all their petulance is either quenched by a sudden
change, or is restrained through fear or shame. For no filthy and
wicked action is there set forth to be gazed at or to be imitated;
but either the precepts of the true God are recommended, His miracles
narrated, His gifts praised, or His benefits implored.
29. _An exhortation to the Romans to renounce paganism._
This, rather, is the religion worthy of your desires, O admirable
Roman race,--the progeny of your Scævolas and Scipios, of Regulus,
and of Fabricius. This rather covet, this distinguish from that foul
vanity and crafty malice of the devils. If there is in your nature
any eminent virtue, only by true piety is it purged and perfected,
while by impiety it is wrecked and punished. Choose now what you
will pursue, that your praise may be not in yourself, but in the
true God, in whom is no error. For of popular glory you have had
your share; but by the secret providence of God, the true religion
was not offered to your choice. Awake, it is now day; as you have
already awaked in the persons of some in whose perfect virtue and
sufferings for the true faith we glory: for they, contending on all
sides with hostile powers, and conquering them all by bravely dying,
have purchased for us this country of ours with their blood; to which
country we invite you, and exhort you to add yourselves to the number
of the citizens of this city, which also has a sanctuary[113] of its
own in the true remission of sins. Do not listen to those degenerate
sons of thine who slander Christ and Christians, and impute to them
these disastrous times, though they desire times in which they may
enjoy rather impunity for their wickedness than a peaceful life. Such
has never been Rome's ambition even in regard to her earthly country.
Lay hold now on the celestial country, which is easily won, and in
which you will reign truly and for ever. For there shalt thou find no
vestal fire, no Capitoline stone, but the one true God
"No date, no goal will here ordain:
But grant an endless, boundless reign."[114]
No longer, then, follow after false and deceitful gods; abjure them
rather, and despise them, bursting forth into true liberty. Gods
they are not, but malignant spirits, to whom your eternal happiness
will be a sore punishment. Juno, from whom you deduce your origin
according to the flesh, did not so bitterly grudge Rome's citadels
to the Trojans, as these devils whom yet ye repute gods, grudge an
everlasting seat to the race of mankind. And thou thyself hast in no
wavering voice passed judgment on them, when thou didst pacify them
with games, and yet didst account as infamous the men by whom the
plays were acted. Suffer us, then, to assert thy freedom against the
unclean spirits who had imposed on thy neck the yoke of celebrating
their own shame and filthiness. The actors of these divine crimes
thou hast removed from offices of honour; supplicate the true
God, that He may remove from thee those gods who delight in their
crimes,--a most disgraceful thing if the crimes are really theirs,
and a most malicious invention if the crimes are feigned. Well done,
in that thou hast spontaneously banished from the number of your
citizens all actors and players. Awake more fully: the majesty of God
cannot be propitiated by that which defiles the dignity of man. How,
then, can you believe that gods who take pleasure in such lewd plays,
belong to the number of the holy powers of heaven, when the men by
whom these plays are acted are by yourselves refused admission into
the number of Roman citizens even of the lowest grade? Incomparably
more glorious than Rome, is that heavenly city in which for victory
you have truth; for dignity, holiness; for peace, felicity; for life,
eternity. Much less does it admit into its society such gods, if thou
dost blush to admit into thine such men. Wherefore, if thou wouldst
attain to the blessed city, shun the society of devils. They who
are propitiated by deeds of shame, are unworthy of the worship of
right-hearted men. Let these, then, be obliterated from your worship
by the cleansing of the Christian religion, as those men were blotted
from your citizenship by the censor's mark.
But, so far as regards carnal benefits, which are the only blessings
the wicked desire to enjoy, and carnal miseries, which alone they
shrink from enduring, we will show in the following book that the
demons have not the power they are supposed to have; and although
they had it, we ought rather on that account to despise these
blessings, than for the sake of them to worship those gods, and
by worshipping them to miss the attainment of these blessings
they grudge us. But that they have not even this power which is
ascribed to them by those who worship them for the sake of temporal
advantages, this, I say, I will prove in the following book; so let
us here close the present argument.
FOOTNOTES:
[81] Ps. xciv. 4.
[82] 2 Tim. iii. 7.
[83] "Pluvia defit, causa Christiani." Similar accusations and
similar replies may be seen in the celebrated passage of Tertullian's
_Apol._ c. 40, and in the eloquent exordium of Arnobius, _C. Gentes_.
[84] Augustine is supposed to refer to Symmachus, who similarly
accused the Christians in his address to the Emperor Valentinianus
in the year 384. At Augustine's request, Paulus Orosius wrote his
history in confutation of Symmachus' charges.
[85] Tertullian (_Apol._ c. 24) mentions Cœlestis as specially
worshipped in Africa. Augustine mentions her again in the 26th
chapter of this book, and in other parts of his works.
[86] Berecynthia is one of the many names of Rhea or Cybele. Livy
(xxix. 11) relates that the image of Cybele was brought to Rome the
day before the ides of April, which was accordingly dedicated as
her feast-day. The image, it seems, had to be washed in the stream
Almon, a tributary of the Tiber, before being placed in the temple
of Victory; and each year, as the festival returned, the washing
was repeated with much pomp at the same spot. Hence Lucan's line
(i. 600), 'Et lotam parvo revocant Almone Cybelen,' and the elegant
verses of Ovid, _Fast._ iv. 337 et seq.
[87] "Fercula," dishes, or courses.
[88] See Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ ii. 24.
[89] Prov. vi. 26.
[90] Fugalia. Vives is uncertain to what feast Augustine refers.
Censorinus understands him to refer to a feast celebrating the
expulsion of the kings from Rome. This feast, however (celebrated on
the 24th February), was commonly called "Regifugium."
[91] Persius, _Sat._ iii. 66-72.
[92] See below, books viii.-xii.
[93] "Galli," the castrated priests of Cybele, who were named after
the river Gallus, in Phrygia, the water of which was supposed to
intoxicate or madden those who drank it. According to Vitruvius
(viii. 3), there was a similar fountain in Paphlagonia. Apuleius
(_Golden Ass_, viii.) gives a graphic and humorous description of
the dress, dancing, and imposture of these priests; mentioning,
among other things, that they lashed themselves with whips and cut
themselves with knives till the ground was wet with blood.
[94] Persius, _Sat._ iii. 37.
[95] Ter. _Eun._ iii. 5. 36; and cf. the similar allusion in
Aristoph. _Clouds_, 1033-4. It may be added that the argument of this
chapter was largely used by the wiser of the heathen themselves.
Dionysius Hal. (ii. 20) and Seneca (_De Brev. Vit._ c. xvi.) make
the very same complaint; and it will be remembered that his adoption
of this reasoning was one of the grounds on which Euripides was
suspected of atheism.
[96] This sentence recalls Augustine's own experience as a boy, which
he bewails in his _Confessions_.
[97] Labeo, a jurist of the time of Augustus, learned in law and
antiquities, and the author of several works much prized by his own
and some succeeding ages. The two articles in Smith's Dictionary on
Antistius and Cornelius Labeo should be read.
[98] "Lectisternia," feasts in which the images of the gods were laid
on pillows in the streets, and all kinds of food set before them.
[99] According to Livy (vii. 2), theatrical exhibitions were
introduced in the year 392 A. U. C. Before that time, he says, there
had only been the games of the circus. The Romans sent to Etruria for
players, who were called "histriones," "hister" being the Tuscan word
for a player. Other particulars are added by Livy.
[100] See the _Republic_, book iii.
[101] Comp. Tertullian, _De Spectac._ c. 22.
[102] The Egyptian gods represented with dogs' heads, called by Lucan
(viii. 832) _semicanes deos_.
[103] The Fever had, according to Vives, three altars in Rome. See
Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ iii. 25, and Ælian, _Var. Hist._ xii. 11.
[104] Cicero, _De Republica_, v. Compare the third _Tusculan Quæst._
c. ii.
[105] In the year A.U. 299, three ambassadors were sent from Rome
to Athens to copy Solon's laws, and acquire information about the
institutions of Greece. On their return the Decemviri were appointed
to draw up a code; and finally, after some tragic interruptions, the
celebrated Twelve Tables were accepted as the fundamental statutes
of Roman law (_fons universi publici privatique juris_). These were
graven on brass, and hung up for public information. Livy, iii. 31-34.
[106] Possibly he refers to Plautus' _Persa_, iv. 4. 11-14.
[107] Sallust, _Cat. Con._ ix. Compare the similar saying of Tacitus
regarding the chastity of the Germans: "Plusque ibi boni mores
valent, quam alibi bonæ leges" (_Germ._ xix.).
[108] The same collocation of words is used by Cicero with reference to
the well-known mode of renewing the appetite in use among the Romans.
[109] _Æneid_, ii. 351-2.
[110] 2 Cor. xi. 14.
[111] Cicero, _C. Verrem_, vi. 8.
[112] Cicero, _C. Catilinam_, iii. 8.
[113] Alluding to the sanctuary given to all who fled to Rome in its
early days.
[114] Virgil, _Æneid_, i. 278.
BOOK THIRD.
ARGUMENT.
AS IN THE FOREGOING BOOK AUGUSTINE HAS PROVED REGARDING MORAL AND
SPIRITUAL CALAMITIES, SO IN THIS BOOK HE PROVES REGARDING
EXTERNAL AND BODILY DISASTERS, THAT SINCE THE FOUNDATION OF
THE CITY THE ROMANS HAVE BEEN CONTINUALLY SUBJECT TO THEM; AND
THAT EVEN WHEN THE FALSE GODS WERE WORSHIPPED WITHOUT A RIVAL,
BEFORE THE ADVENT OF CHRIST, THEY AFFORDED NO RELIEF FROM SUCH
CALAMITIES.
1. _Of the ills which alone the wicked fear, and which the world
continually suffered, even when the gods were worshipped._
Of moral and spiritual evils, which are above all others to be
deprecated, I think enough has already been said to show that the
false gods took no steps to prevent the people who worshipped them
from being overwhelmed by such calamities, but rather aggravated
the ruin. I see I must now speak of those evils which alone are
dreaded by the heathen--famine, pestilence, war, pillage, captivity,
massacre, and the like calamities, already enumerated in the first
book. For evil men account those things alone evil which do not make
men evil; neither do they blush to praise good things, and yet to
remain evil among the good things they praise. It grieves them more
to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man's greatest good
to have everything good but himself. But not even such evils as were
alone dreaded by the heathen were warded off by their gods, even when
they were most unrestrictedly worshipped. For in various times and
places before the advent of our Redeemer, the human race was crushed
with numberless and sometimes incredible calamities; and at that
time what gods but those did the world worship, if you except the
one nation of the Hebrews, and, beyond them, such individuals as the
most secret and most just judgment of God counted worthy of divine
grace?[115] But that I may not be prolix, I will be silent regarding
the heavy calamities that have been suffered by any other nations,
and will speak only of what happened to Rome and the Roman empire, by
which I mean Rome properly so called, and those lands which already,
before the coming of Christ, had by alliance or conquest become, as
it were, members of the body of the state.
2. _Whether the gods, whom the Greeks and Romans worshipped in
common, were justified in permitting the destruction of Ilium._
First, then, why was Troy or Ilium, the cradle of the Roman people
(for I must not overlook nor disguise what I touched upon in the
first book[116]), conquered, taken, and destroyed by the Greeks,
though it esteemed and worshipped the same gods as they? Priam, some
answer, paid the penalty of the perjury of his father Laomedon.[117]
Then it is true that Laomedon hired Apollo and Neptune as his
workmen. For the story goes that he promised them wages, and then
broke his bargain. I wonder that famous diviner Apollo toiled at so
huge a work, and never suspected Laomedon was going to cheat him of
his pay. And Neptune too, his uncle, brother of Jupiter, king of the
sea, it really was not seemly that he should be ignorant of what was
to happen. For he is introduced by Homer[118] (who lived and wrote
before the building of Rome) as predicting something great of the
posterity of Æneas, who in fact founded Rome. And as Homer says,
Neptune also rescued Æneas in a cloud from the wrath of Achilles,
though (according to Virgil[119])
"All his will was to destroy
His own creation, perjured Troy."