Who Hands Out Kingdoms

To conclude. I will not stop here to dispute about all those whom antiquity decided were gods and later ages have believed to be so, the guardians of your religion. There is one very large claim of the Roman superstition still left for me to take up against you: that the Romans became lords and masters of the whole world because their religious duties earned them that dominion — earned it so well that they come within very little of outdoing their own gods in power. [a]

No wonder, then, that Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina raised this empire to its height! The Roman people can only have been appointed to such dominion by its own gods and by no others. For I cannot imagine that any foreign gods would rather do more for a strange nation than for their own people, and by such conduct become the deserters of the homeland where they were born and raised and made famous and buried — the ones who neglected it, indeed the ones who betrayed it.

So not even Jupiter could have allowed his own Crete to be beaten down under the Roman fasces, if he remembered that cave on Ida, and the bronze cymbals of the Corybantes, and the very pleasant smell of the goat that nursed him in that dear spot. Would he not have raised that tomb of his above the whole Capitol, so that the land covering Jupiter’s ashes should be the land that ruled most widely? And would Juno have been willing for the Punic city to be destroyed — the city she loved so much that for its sake she neglected even Samos — and destroyed, at that, by fires lit by the sons of Aeneas? Though I know well enough what is written:

For all that, the unlucky queen of the gods had no power against the fates. And yet the Romans never paid the fates as much honor as they paid Larentina, though it was the fates who gave them Carthage.

But your gods, surely, have no power of conferring empire at all. When Jupiter reigned in Crete, and Saturn in Italy, and Isis in Egypt, they reigned as men reign, with plenty of hands assigned to serve them. So the one who serves is the maker of masters, and the bondsman of Admetus is the one who enlarges the citizens of Rome with an empire — though he destroyed Croesus, his own open-handed worshipper, by cheating him with an oracle that could be read two ways. Being a god, why was he afraid to foretell him the truth outright, that he was going to lose his kingdom?

Surely gods with power enough to hand out empire could always have managed to keep a watch, at least, over their own cities. If they were strong enough to confer empire on the Romans, why did Minerva not defend Athens against Xerxes? Why did Apollo not rescue Delphi out of the hand of Pyrrhus? The gods who lost their own cities are the ones preserving the city of Rome — because the religiousness of Rome, of course, has earned the protection.

Or is the truth rather this: that the superstition was worked up only after the empire had reached its glory by the growth of its power? Sacred rites were brought in by Numa, no doubt; but in his day your proceedings were not yet spoiled by a religion of idols and temples. Piety was plain and worship cheap. Altars were thrown up roughly, the vessels on them were ordinary, the incense off them was scant, and the god himself was nowhere at all. So men were not religious before they became great, nor great because they were religious.

How, then, can the Romans possibly seem to have acquired their empire by an extreme religiousness and a very deep respect for the gods, when that empire was increased rather after the gods had been damaged? Unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is acquired and enlarged by wars, and in war the conquerors injure both the peoples and their gods. The same ruin falls on city walls and on temples; the slaughter of ordinary citizens and of priests is alike; the plundering of common property and of sacred property is identical. The Romans have as many sacrileges to their name as trophies, and as many triumphs over gods as over nations. Their captured idols are still standing among them; and certainly, if they can see their conquerors at all, they do not give them their love. But since they have no perception, they are injured and nobody pays for it; and since they are injured and nobody pays for it, they are worshipped to no purpose.

So the nation that has grown to its powerful height by one victory after another cannot seem to have developed by the merits of its religion — whether they injured the religion by increasing their power, or increased their power by injuring the religion.

All nations have possessed empire, each in its own time — Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Egyptians — and some possess it even now. And yet the ones who lost their power had not been men careless of religious service and the worship of the gods, not even after those gods had turned unfriendly to them; until at last something close to universal dominion has come to the Romans. It is the fortune of the times that has kept rolling kingdoms over, one after another.

Ask who it is that has ordained these changes in the times. It is the same great One who hands out kingdoms, and who has now put the mastery of them into Roman hands, in just the way that tribute levied from many nations is gathered afterward into one treasury. What he has determined concerning it is known to those who are nearest to him.

So great a blindness has fallen on the Roman race that they call their enemy Lord, and proclaim the thief of their blessings to be the very one who gives them, and to him they give thanks. They call these beings by human names, then, not by their own, for their own names they do not know. That they are demons, they understand; but then they read the histories of the old kings, and though they can see that the career they are reading about was a mortal one, they honor the man with the name of a god.

Take the one they call Jupiter and think to be the highest god. When he was born, the years that had run from the founding of the world down to his time were some three thousand. He is born in Greece, from Saturn and Ops; and for fear that his father should kill him — or else, if it is lawful to say so, should give birth to him over again — he is carried down into Crete on his mother’s advice and reared in a cave on Ida. He is hidden from his father’s search by Cretans — men already born! — rattling their weapons. He sucks a she-goat’s teats; he flays her; he clothes himself in her hide; and so he wears the skin of his own nurse, having killed her, of course, with his own hand. But he sewed three golden tassels onto it, each worth the price of a hundred oxen, as their own author Homer relates — if it is fair to believe it.

This Jupiter, once grown, waged war on his father for several years; overcame him; made a parricide’s raid on his home; violated his virgin sisters; picked one of them out to marry; and drove his father off by force of arms. The remaining scenes of that act have been recorded as well. He fathered sons on other men’s wives, or else on virgins he had violated; he defiled freeborn boys; he ground peoples down lawlessly with a despot’s and a king’s rule.

The father, whom they wrongly suppose to have been the original god, did not know that this son of his was lying hidden in Crete. The son, again, whom they believe to be the mightier god, does not know that the father he had banished himself is skulking in Italy. If he was in heaven, when would he not have seen what was going on in Italy? For the land of Italy is not “in a corner.” And if he had been a god, nothing at all ought to have escaped him. But that the one the Italians call Saturn really did skulk there is plain on the face of it, from the fact that it is because of that skulking that the Hesperian tongue is called Latin to this day, as their own author Virgil relates.

So Jupiter is said to have been born on earth, while his father fears being driven from his kingdom by him and seeks to kill him as his own rival, and does not know that he has been stolen away and is in hiding. And afterward the son-god pursues his father — immortal seeking to kill immortal (is that credible?) — and is balked by a stretch of sea, and has no idea which way his quarry has fled. And while all this is going on between two gods on earth, heaven is left deserted. Nobody dealt out the rains, nobody thundered, nobody governed all this mass of a world. They cannot even say that their doings and their wars took place in heaven, since the whole of it was going on at Mount Olympus, in Greece. And heaven is not called Olympus. Heaven is heaven.

These, then, are the actions of theirs that we will take up first — a birth, a hiding, ignorance, parricide, adulteries, obscenities — things committed not by a god but by human beings of the filthiest and most savage kind; beings who, had they been living in these days, would have stood accused under every one of our laws, and our laws are far more just and strict than their actions. “He drove his father off by force of arms.” The Falcidian and Sempronian law would tie the parricide up in a sack with animals. “He violated his sisters.” The Papinian law would punish the outrage with every penalty there is, limb by limb. “He broke into other men’s marriages.” The Julian law would put its adulterous violator to death. “He defiled freeborn boys.” The Cornelian law would condemn the crime of breaking the bond of sex with penalties never used before, guilty as it is of an act of sacrilege in a union never known before.

This being is shown to have had no divinity in him either, for he was a human being: his own father’s flight got past him. And to a human being of that character, to a king so wicked, so obscene and so cruel, the honor due to God has been assigned by men. Now, to be sure, if he was born on earth and grew up on it through the advancing stages of a life, and committed all these evils on it, and is on it no longer — what is anyone to think but that he is dead? Or does foolish error suppose that wings were born to him in his old age, to fly to heaven with?

Why, even that may possibly find credit among men bereft of sense, if they do indeed believe, as they do, that he turned into a swan to father the Castors; an eagle, to contaminate Ganymede; a bull, to violate Europa; gold, to violate Danaë; a horse, to father Pirithous; a goat, to father Egyppa on a she-goat; a Satyr, to embrace Antiope. Beholding these adulteries, the very things that sinners are inclined to, they therefore easily believe that a licence for wrongdoing and for every kind of filth is borrowed from the god they have made up.

Do they notice how far from any amendment the rest of his career’s acts are — the ones that can find credit, that are indeed true, and that they say he did without transforming himself at all? On Semele he fathers Liber; on Latona, Apollo and Diana; on Maia, Mercury; on Alcmena, Hercules. But the rest of his corruptions, which they confess themselves, I am unwilling to record, for fear that turpitude once buried should be called back into men’s ears. I have made mention of these few of his offspring only — offspring whom in their error they believe to be gods themselves, born, of course, of an incestuous father: adulterous births, counterfeit births. And the living, eternal God, divine from everlasting, who knows what is coming before it comes, beyond all measure — him they have dissolved away into nothing by tying him to crimes past speaking of.