The Pedigree of the Gods

How much further do I need to go, counting up your gods? What I set out to do was to go through the character of the ones you have taken on. I honestly cannot tell whether to laugh at how absurd it is or to scold you for being blind. For how many gods am I to bring forward, and which? The greater ones or the lesser? The old or the new? The male or the female? The single or the married? The skilled or the unskilled? The country ones or the town ones? Our own or the imported? In plain fact there are so many households and so many nations, each of them requiring its own register of gods, that the list cannot possibly be reviewed, or sorted out, or described. But the wider the subject spreads, the tighter I have to hold it. [a]

Since in this review I keep only one object in front of me — proving that all these gods were once human beings (not to teach you the fact, but rather to bring it back to your memory, for the way you behave shows you have forgotten it) — let me take my short summary from the nature of the case itself, by looking at where their line began. For the beginning of a line settles the character of everything that comes after it. And this line of your gods is entered on the register, I take it, from Saturn onward. When Varro names Jupiter, Juno and Minerva as the most ancient of the gods, he ought not to have missed the fact that every father is older than his sons, and that Saturn therefore has to come before Jupiter, just as Caelus comes before Saturn, since Saturn was born of Caelus and Terra.

Where Caelus and Terra themselves came from I leave alone. For reasons nobody can give, the two of them lived unmarried and had no children. They needed a long stretch of growing, of course, to reach such a height as that. Then in time, as soon as Caelus’ voice began to break and Terra’s breasts began to firm up, the two contract a marriage with each other. I suppose either the sky came down to his wife or the earth went up to meet her husband. Either way, Earth conceived seed from Sky, and when her year was up she brought forth Saturn — remarkably enough. Which of his parents did he take after? Well, once the childbearing had begun, it is certain that they had no child before Saturn and only one daughter after him, Ops; and from then on they stopped. The fact is that Saturn castrated Caelus in his sleep. We read this name Caelus as masculine — and for that matter, how could he be a father if he were not male? But with what instrument was the castration done? He had a scythe. Already, so early? Vulcan was not yet a worker in iron. Terra was a widow now, and still quite young, but she was in no hurry to marry again. There was no second Caelus for her, after all. Who is there to offer her an embrace but Ocean? But he tastes of salt, and she had been used to fresh water.

So Saturn is the only son Caelus and Terra had. When he came of age he married his own sister. No law yet forbade incest or punished the killing of a parent. Then, when sons were born to him, he would eat them — better him than the wolves, which would have had them if he put them out to die. No doubt he was afraid one of them might take the lesson of the scythe he had used on his own father. When Jupiter was born in his turn, he was got out of the way, and the father swallowed a stone instead of the son, or so the pretence went. The trick kept him safe for a time; but in the end the son he had not eaten, grown up in hiding, fell on him and stripped him of his kingdom. That, then, is the founding father of the gods whom sky and earth produced for you, with the poets standing by as midwives.

Now there are people of finer imagination who hold that in this allegorical fable of Saturn there is a picture of Time drawn from nature. Because all things are destroyed by Time, they say, Caelus and Terra were themselves parents without any parents of their own; that is why the scythe comes in, and why Saturn devoured his own offspring — because Time, in fact, takes back into itself everything that has issued out of it. They call his name in as a witness too: in Greek, they say, he is Kronos, which means the same as chronos, time. His Latin name they get from the sowing of seed, taking him for the actual begetter — the one by whose act the seed was dropped from sky to earth. And they marry him to Ops because seed produces the plenty (ops) that life is kept alive by, and because it comes on through work (opus).

Now I would like you to explain this figure of speech. It was either Saturn or Time. If it was Time, how could it be Saturn? If it was Saturn, how could it be Time? You cannot possibly reckon two bodily things as existing together in one person. And what was there to stop you worshiping Time under the quality that actually belongs to it? Why not make a human being, or even a legendary man, the object of your worship — but each in its own nature, not under the character of Time? What is that clever conceit of your minds for, if not to color the foulest matters with the counterfeit look of reasoned proof? On the one hand you do not mean Saturn to be Time, since you say he was a human being; on the other, while you paint him as Time, you do not by that mean he was ever human. In the accounts of remote antiquity, at any rate, your god Saturn is plainly described as living on earth in human shape. Anything that never existed can obviously be pictured as having no body; where there is a real thing, there is simply no room for that kind of invention. So, since there is clear evidence that Saturn once existed, it is useless to alter his character. The man you will not deny to have once been a man is not at your disposal to be handled however you like, and it cannot be maintained that he is either divine or Time.

Saturn’s descent stands out on every page of your own literature. We read of him in Cassius Severus, and in the two Corneliuses, Nepos and Tacitus, and among the Greeks in Diodorus and all the other compilers of ancient records. Nowhere are the accounts of him more trustworthy than in Italy itself. After traveling through many countries, and taking the hospitality of Athens, he settled in Italy — Oenotria, as it was then called — having found a kind welcome from Janus, or Janes, as the Salii call him. The hill he settled on took the name Saturnian, while the city he staked out still bears the name Saturnia; in short, the whole of Italy once had the same name. That is the testimony that comes from the country which is now mistress of the world. Whatever doubt hangs over where Saturn came from, what he did tells us plainly that he was a human being.

Since Saturn was human, then, he certainly came from human stock; and further, since he was a man, he plainly did not come from Caelus and Terra. But it was easy enough for people who did not know his parents to call him the son of the gods from whom everyone may in some sense seem to be descended. For who is there who does not, out of a kind of reverence, speak of the sky and the earth as his own father and mother? Or who does not follow the habit among us of saying of anyone unknown, or suddenly turning up, that he “came out of the sky”? That is how it happened: because a stranger appeared out of nowhere, it became the custom to call him sky-born — just as we habitually call earth-born all those whose descent is unknown. I say nothing of the state of that early world, when men’s eyes and minds were so coarse that the arrival of any newcomer stirred them as if a god had come — how much more if he were a king, and the first king at that.

I will stay with the case of Saturn a while longer, because by working through his beginnings in full I supply in advance a short answer for every other case; and I do not want to leave out the more convincing testimony of your own sacred literature, whose credit ought to be the greater the older it is. Now the Sibyl is earlier than all literature — the Sibyl, I mean, who was the true prophetess of truth, whose title you have borrowed for the priests of your demons. In verse of six feet to the line she sets out Saturn’s descent and his exploits, in words to this effect:

So whatever credit is attached to your older writers and their books — and still more to those nearest the events, since they belonged to that age — it becomes certain enough that Saturn and his family were human beings. We now hold, then, a short principle about their descent that works as a legal bar in every other case, and keeps us from going wrong instance by instance. What a line of descendants is like is shown by the original founders of the race: mortals from mortals, earthly from earthly. Step matches step in due order — marriage, conception, birth — and countries, settlements and kingdoms leave records that are perfectly clear. So those who cannot deny that these men were born must also grant that they died; and those who allow that they were mortal must not suppose them to be gods.

Plain cases like these do carry a force of their own. Varro and the rest of the dreamers enroll among the gods men they cannot claim were anything but men to begin with — and they do it by asserting that these became gods after their death. Here, then, is where I take my stand. If your gods were enrolled into this name and this power the way you recruit the ranks of your senate, then you cannot help conceding, in your wisdom, that there must be some supreme sovereign who holds the power of selection, a kind of Caesar; and nobody is able to confer on others a thing he does not have absolute control of himself. Besides, if they were able to make gods of themselves after their death, tell me, please, why they chose to be in an inferior condition first. Or again, if there is nobody who made them gods, how can they be said to have been made gods, when they could only have been made so by someone else? So you have no ground for denying that there is a certain wholesale contractor in divinity. [t]

Let us examine, then, the reasons for dispatching mortal beings to heaven. I suppose you will produce a pair of them. Whoever the awarder of these honors is, he does his work either so that he may have some supports, or defenses, or perhaps ornaments for his own dignity; or else because the deserving press their claims on him, and he must reward everyone who has earned it. We are not permitted to guess at any other cause. Now there is nobody who bestows a gift on another without an eye to his own interest or the other’s. But such behavior cannot be worthy of the divine Being, since his power is so great that he can make gods outright; and to make him stand in such need of human beings — as though he required the aid and support of certain persons, and dead ones at that — is a strange fancy, since from the very first he was able to create immortal beings for himself. Anyone who has set human things beside divine will need no further arguments on this.

Still, the second opinion ought to be discussed: that God granted divine honors in view of claims of merit. Well then, if the award was made on those grounds — if heaven was opened to men of that first age because they deserved it — we have to reflect that after that time nobody was worthy of such an honor; unless it is that there is now no such place left for anyone to reach. Let us grant that in ancient times men may have deserved heaven by great merits. Then let us consider whether there really was any such merit. Let the man who alleges that there was declare what he himself counts as merit.

Since deeds done in the very cradle of time are a valid claim to being made a god, you were consistent in admitting to the honor the brother and sister who were stained with the sin of incest — Ops and Saturn. Your Jupiter too, stolen away in his infancy, was reckoned unworthy of the home and the food given to human beings; and, as such a bad child deserved, he had to live in Crete. Afterwards, once he was full grown, he throws his own father off the throne — a father who, whatever his qualities as a parent, had the most prosperous of reigns, king that he was of the golden age. Under him peace kept its glad and gentle rule, a stranger to hard labor and to want; under him —

and with nobody pressing her, the earth of herself would bear every crop. But Jupiter hated a father who had been guilty of incest and had once mutilated his grandfather. And yet, look — he marries his own sister himself. So I should suppose the old saying was made for him: “his father’s own boy.” There was nothing to choose between the father’s family feeling and the son’s. If the laws had been just even at that early date, Jupiter ought to have been sewn up in two sacks.

After this confirming of his lust by incest, why should he hesitate to spend himself freely on the lighter excesses of adultery and debauchery? Ever since the poets played with his character in this way — rather as a notice is posted up in public about a runaway slave — we have made a market of his exploits, gossiping about them without restraint with anyone who stops to ask. Sometimes we sketch him out in the very shape of the money that was the fee for his debauchery: as when he played a bull, or rather paid out the price of one, and when he rained down into a girl’s locked chamber, or rather forced his way in with a bribe. Sometimes we picture him in the very likenesses of the parts he acted: as the eagle that carried off the boy, and the swan that sang.

Well now — are stories like these not made up of the most disgusting intrigues and the worst of scandals? And would men’s morals and tempers not be likely to turn loose on such examples? In what manner the demons, the offspring of evil angels who have long been busy at their errand, have labored to turn people aside from faith into unbelief and into fables of this kind, we must not speak of at any length here. Since the common crowd of them, which took its manners from its kings and chiefs and the men who first sowed the stock, was not all of one and the same nature, it was in some other way that a likeness of character was exacted from them by the authority above them.

But how much the worst of them all was the one who was not, though he ought to have been, the best of them? By a title that belongs to him alone you are in the habit of calling Jupiter “the Best,” while in Virgil he is “fair Jupiter.” So they were all like him — incestuous with their own kin, unchaste with strangers, godless, unjust. And the one whom the old stories left untouched by any conspicuous disgrace was not held worthy to be made a god.