Gods of Rome’s Own Making

Those are the more obvious and more striking points I had to make about Varro’s threefold division of the gods, so that the philosophers’ gods, the poets’ gods and the gods of the nations might all seem sufficiently answered. But the exchange of true worship for false is not owed to the philosophers, or the poets, or the nations; they only handed the superstition on. It is owed to the Romans, who are the masters now, and who took the tradition over and gave it authority far and wide. So there is another side of this widespread human error still to be met — another forest for our axe, one that has overshadowed the infancy of a corrupted worship with seeds of superstition gathered from every quarter. [a]

Now even the Romans’ own gods have had a threefold classification from the same Varro: the certain, the uncertain, and the select. What nonsense! What need had they of uncertain gods when they had certain ones? Unless, of course, they wanted to let themselves in for the same folly as the Athenians; for at Athens there was an altar with this inscription: “To the unknown gods.” Does a man actually worship what he knows nothing about? And again: since they had certain gods, they ought to have been content with them and not wanted select ones. That craving is itself a conviction of irreligion. For if gods are picked over the way onions are, then the ones not chosen are being pronounced worthless.

For our part we allow the Romans two sets of gods, the shared and the private — the ones they held in common with other nations, and the ones they thought up for themselves. Were these not called the public gods and the imported gods? Their altars say so: there is a specimen of the imported gods at the shrine of Carna, and of the public gods on the Palatine. Since the shared gods fall under the philosophers’ class and the poets’ alike, we have said enough about them already. I would rather speak of Rome’s own particular kinds of god. We ought to admire the Romans, then, for that third set: the gods of their beaten enemies. No other nation ever discovered for itself so large a mass of superstition.

The rest of their gods we sort into two classes: those that became gods out of human beings, and those that got their start some other way. And since the same plausible excuse is put forward for deifying the dead — that their lives deserved it — we are forced to make the same reply: not one of them was worth so much trouble. There is that devoted father Aeneas, in whom they believed. He was never glorious, and he was brought down with a stone — a low weapon, the kind you pelt a dog with, and the wound it gave was no less undignified. And this Aeneas turns out to be a traitor to his country, quite as much as Antenor was.

If they will not believe that of him, then at the very least he deserted his companions while his country was burning, and must be reckoned inferior to that woman of Carthage. When her husband Hasdrubal went begging to the enemy with the same soft cowardice as our Aeneas, she refused to go with him. She took her children along instead, scorned to carry her beauty and her father’s noble spirit off into exile, and threw herself into the flames of burning Carthage as though rushing into the arms of her ruined country. Is he “faithful Aeneas” for rescuing his one small son and his broken-down old father, and abandoning Priam and Astyanax? The Romans ought rather to detest him. In defense of their emperors and the imperial house they give up even children and wives and every dearest pledge.

They deify the son of Venus, and this with the full knowledge and consent of her husband Vulcan, and without a word of objection from even Juno. Now if sons have seats in heaven for doing their duty by their parents, why are those noble young men of Argos not counted gods instead? To save their mother from failing in the performance of a sacred rite, with a devotion more than human, they harnessed themselves to her wagon and dragged her to the temple. Why not make a goddess, for her extraordinary devotion, of that daughter who fed her father from her own breasts while he was starving in prison? What other glorious achievement can be told of Aeneas, except that nobody saw him anywhere in the fighting on the field of Laurentum? True to form, perhaps he ran off a second time, a fugitive from the battle.

In the same way Romulus becomes a god after his death. Was it because he founded the city? Then why not the others as well who have built cities — women included? To be sure, Romulus killed his brother into the bargain, and carried off other men’s unmarried daughters by a trick. So of course he becomes a god, and a Quirinus, “god of the spear,” because it was on his account that the girls’ fathers had to take up the spear. What did Sterculus do to earn deification? If he worked hard to enrich the fields with manure, Augeas had more dung than he had to give them. If Faunus, the son of Picus, used to do violence to law and right because he was struck with madness, it would have been fitter to treat him than to consecrate him. If Faunus’ daughter was so outstanding in chastity that she would hold no conversation with men, perhaps it was rudeness, or the knowledge that she was ugly, or shame at her father’s insanity. How much worthier of divine honor than this “good goddess” was Penelope, who lived among so many suitors of the vilest sort and kept, by delicate handling, the purity they were assaulting. There is Sanctus too, who had a temple consecrated to him by king Plotius for his hospitality; and Ulysses had it in his power to bestow one more god on you in the person of that most refined host Alcinous.

I hurry on to still more abominable cases. Your own writers have not been ashamed to publish the story of Larentina. She was a prostitute for hire — whether as the nurse of Romulus, and called Lupa, the she-wolf, on that account, because a she-wolf was what a prostitute was called; or as the mistress of Hercules, by then dead, which is to say by then deified. They tell us that his temple keeper happened to be playing dice in the temple alone, and, wanting a partner in the game when there was no real one to be had, began to play one hand for Hercules and the other for himself. The terms were that if he won the stakes off Hercules he would use them to buy a dinner and a prostitute; but if Hercules turned out the winner — his other hand, that is — then he would provide the same for Hercules. Hercules’ hand won. That achievement might well have been added to his twelve labors. So the temple keeper buys the hero a dinner and hires Larentina to prostitute herself. The fire that had once dissolved the body of even a Hercules enjoyed the dinner, and the altar consumed the lot. [s]

Larentina sleeps alone in the temple; and this woman out of the brothel boasts that in her dreams she had given herself to Hercules’ pleasure — which she may well have experienced in her sleep, since it had passed through her mind. In the morning, coming out of the temple very early, she is propositioned by a young man, “a third Hercules,” so to speak. He invites her home. She goes, remembering that Hercules had told her it would be to her advantage. He then, to be sure, gets permission for them to be joined in lawful marriage — for no one was allowed to have intercourse with a god’s concubine and go unpunished — and the husband makes her his heir. In time, just before her death, she left the Roman people the rather large estate she had come by through Hercules. After that she asked for godhood for her daughters too, whom the divine Larentina ought at least to have made her heirs as well.

So the gods of the Romans gained an addition in her ladyship. Of all Hercules’ wives she alone was dear to him, because she alone was rich; and she was far luckier than Ceres, who gratified the king of the dead. After so many examples, and such eminent names among you, who might not have been declared divine? Who, in fact, ever raised a question about the divinity of Antinous? Was even Ganymede more welcome and dear than he to the god who loved him? On your showing, heaven stands open to the dead. You lay out a road from the underworld to the stars. Prostitutes climb it from every direction — so do not suppose that you are conferring any great distinction on your emperors.

And you are not content to claim divinity for people you once knew, whom you heard and handled, whose portraits have been painted and whose deeds recounted and whose memory is still kept among you. Men insist on consecrating to a heavenly life I do not know what bodiless, lifeless shadows and bare names of things, parceling out a man’s whole existence among separate powers from his conception in the womb onward. So there is a god Consevius to preside over conception in the marriage bed; a Fluviona to keep the child growing in the womb; after them Vitumnus and Sentinus, through whom the baby first comes to have life and its earliest sensation; then Diespiter, by whose office the child accomplishes its birth. But when women go into labor, Candelifera comes to their aid as well, since childbearing needs the light of a candle; and there are other goddesses who get their names from the parts they play at the stages of the labor. There were two Carmentas likewise, on the general view: to one of them, Postverta, belonged the work of helping the birth of a child that came out the wrong way round, while the other, Prosa, did the same office for a child born rightly. [x]

The god Farinus was so called from his inspiring the first utterance, while others believed in Locutius from his gift of speech. Cunina is on hand as the guardian of the child’s deep slumber, and supplies it with refreshing rest. To lift them up when they fall there is Levana, and Rumina along with her. It is a remarkable oversight that no gods were appointed for cleaning up children’s filth. Then, to preside over their first mush and their earliest drink, you have Potina and Edula; teaching the child to stand upright is the work of Statina, while Adeona helps him come to his mother and Abeona to toddle off again. Then there is Domiduca, to bring the bride home, and the goddess Mens, to move the mind to good or to evil.

They have Volumnus and Voleta too, to control the will; Paventina, goddess of fear; Venilia, of hope; Volupia, of pleasure; Praestitia, of beauty. Then again they give their name to Peragenor, from his teaching men to get through their work, and to Consus, from his suggesting advice to them. Juventa is their guide when they put on the man’s toga, and “bearded Fortune” when they come to full manhood. If I must touch on their duties in the marriage bed, there is Afferenda, whose appointed function is to see to the handing over of the dowry. But shame on you! You have your Mutunus and Tutunus and Pertunda and Subigus, and the goddess Prema, and Perfica as well. Spare yourselves, you shameless gods! No one else is present at the secret struggles of married people. Those very few who would like to be go away blushing for shame in the middle of their pleasure.