The Gods You Promoted

But they insist that the ones who were promoted out of the human condition into the honors of godhood should be kept in a class of their own, and that the line the Stoic Dionysius drew should stand: gods born gods on one side, gods made into gods on the other. So let me add a few words about this second class too. I will take Hercules himself to sum up the answer to the question, whether he earned heaven and divine honors. For, as you choose to have it, those honors were awarded him for his merits. Was it his courage in killing wild beasts without flinching? What was so very memorable about that? Do not condemned criminals, pushed as they are into the contest of a squalid arena, finish off several animals at a time, and with more heart for the job? Was it his travels over the whole world? How often has the same been done by rich men at their comfortable leisure, or by philosophers in their beggar’s poverty? Has everyone forgotten that Asclepiades the Cynic went over the whole world and saw it with his own eyes, riding on the back of one wretched cow and sometimes living off her udder? And if Hercules went down among the dead, who does not know that the road to Hades is open to everybody? [a]

If you made him a god for his heavy slaughter and his many battles, then the famous Pompey won a far greater number of victories — the man who beat the pirates, and they had not spared even Ostia in their raids. And as for slaughter: how many thousands, may I ask, were penned into one corner of the citadel of Carthage and cut down by Scipio? Scipio, then, is the better candidate for godhood than Hercules.

You will have to be still more careful to add to our Hercules’ claims his affairs with concubines and wives, and Omphale’s bands, and his shameful desertion of the Argonauts because he had lost his beautiful boy. To this badge of disgrace add his fits of madness, for his greater glory; worship the arrows that killed his sons and his wife. This is the man who, after judging himself to deserve a funeral pyre in the agony of remorse for murdering his own family, deserved rather the dishonored death that was waiting for him, wrapped in the poisoned robe his wife sent him because he was lusting after another woman. And yet you lifted him off the pyre and into the sky — as easily as you did the same for another hero, who was destroyed by the violence of fire from the gods.

He had worked out a few experiments, and was said to have brought the dead back to life by his treatments. He was Apollo’s son, half human, though a grandson of Jupiter and a great-grandson of Saturn — or rather of doubtful stock, since nobody knew who his father was, as Socrates of Argos has recorded. He was exposed as an infant as well, and taken up into worse keeping than even Jupiter’s: he was suckled at a dog’s teats. Nobody can deny that he deserved the end that came to him when he was killed by a stroke of lightning. In this business, however, your excellent Jupiter is once again in the wrong — impious toward his own grandson, and jealous of his skill. Pindar, for that matter, did not hide what the man really had coming. According to him, he was punished for his greed and his love of profit: it was these that made him bring the living to their death rather than the dead to life, by the crooked use of a medical art he had put up for sale.

They say his mother was killed by the same stroke, and it was only right that the woman who had bestowed so dangerous a beast on the world should escape into heaven by the same ladder. Even so, the Athenians will not be at a loss how to sacrifice to gods of this quality: they pay divine honors to Aesculapius and his mother among their departed worthies. As though they did not have their own Theseus ready to hand to worship, so richly deserving of a god’s rank! Well, why not? Did he not abandon on a foreign shore the woman who had saved his life, with the same coolness — no, the same mindlessness — that made him the cause of his own father’s death?

It would be tedious to go through all the others as well, the ones you have buried among the constellations and then have the nerve to wait on as gods. I suppose your two Castors, and Perseus, and Erigone have exactly the same claim on the honors of the sky as Jupiter’s own kept boy had. But why be surprised? You have moved dogs and scorpions and crabs up to heaven too. I will put off for now everything I have to say about the ones you worship in your oracles. That this worship goes on is proved by the man who delivers the oracle. Why, you insist on having gods to preside even over misery: Viduus, who widows the soul by parting it from the body, and whom you have condemned yourselves by refusing to let him inside your city walls; Caeculus, to take the sight out of eyes; Orbana, to take the life out of seed; and the goddess Death herself. To hurry past all the rest, you count as gods the sites of places and of the city — Father Janus, for instance, there being a goddess Jana of the bow as well, and Septimontius of the seven hills. [i]

Men sacrifice to these same Genii where they have altars or shrines in the same places, and to others besides when they are living away from home or in rented lodgings. I say nothing about Ascensus, who takes his name from climbing, or Clivicola, from her slopes. I pass over in silence the gods called Forculus from the leaves of a door, and Cardea from its hinges, and Limentinus the god of the threshold, and whatever other doorkeeper gods your neighbors worship. There is nothing strange about it, since men have their own gods in their brothels, their kitchens, and even in prison.

So heaven is crowded with countless gods of its own, both these and the others that belong to the Romans, and they have divided the functions of a person’s whole life among them so thoroughly that there is no room left for the other gods. And yet — granted that the gods we have listed are reckoned as peculiarly Roman and are not easily recognized abroad — how is it that all those functions and occasions over which men have decided their gods preside come about just the same in every part of the human race and in every nation, where these guarantors of yours have not merely no official standing but no standing at all?

Ah, but certain men discovered fruits and various necessities of life, and so deserve to be made gods. Then let me ask you this: when you call these people “discoverers,” are you not admitting that what they discovered was already there? Why not honor the Maker instead, the one the gifts really come from, rather than turning the Maker into a crowd of discoverers? Before you ever thought of it, the man who made the find had thanked the Maker himself, no doubt; no doubt he felt that the one to whom the religious service truly belonged was God, the Creator of the gift, who had created both the man who discovered and the thing discovered. [p]

Nobody in Rome had ever heard of the green fig of Africa until Cato brought one into the Senate, to show how close that enemy province was whose destruction he never stopped demanding. The cherry was first made common in Italy by Gnaeus Pompey, who imported it from Pontus. I might have gone so far as to think the men who first brought apples to the Romans deserved the public honor of being made gods. But that would be as silly a reason for making gods as the invention of the useful arts is.

And yet, if the skilled men of our own day are set beside those older ones, how much better suited the later generation would be to godhood than the earlier! Tell me: have not all the inventions we have now put the old arts out of date, while everyday experience keeps adding to the new stock? So the men you regard as divine on account of their arts, you are actually wronging by your own arts — you are challenging their claim with rival achievements that cannot be beaten.