Who Invented These Rites

The man who invented these follies among the Romans, and set them up, was that Sabine king who more than anyone else tangled the rough and ignorant minds of men in new superstitions. And so that he could do it with some authority behind him, he gave out that he had meetings by night with the goddess Egeria. There was a very dark cave in the grove at Aricia, and out of it ran a stream from a spring that never failed. He used to withdraw there with no one watching, so that he could claim he was handing the people the sacred rites the gods liked best, given him by the advice of the goddess, his wife. It is obvious that he wanted to copy the cunning of Minos, who shut himself up in the cave of Jupiter and, after a long delay there, came out with laws, as though Jupiter had handed them to him — so that he might bind men to obedience not only by the authority of his government but by the sanction of religion. And it was no hard thing to talk shepherds around. So he set up pontiffs, priests, Salii, and augurs; he arranged the gods in families; and by these means he softened the fierce temper of a new people and called them away from the business of war to the pursuit of peace. [a]

But though he deceived others, he did not deceive himself. Many years later, in the consulship of Cornelius and Baebius, in a field belonging to the clerk Petilius under the Janiculum, men who were digging found two stone chests. In one was the body of Numa. In the other were seven books in Latin on the law of the pontiffs, and the same number written in Greek on systems of philosophy — and in them he annulled not only the religious rites he had set up himself, but everyone else’s as well. When the matter was reported to the senate, it was decreed that the books should be destroyed. So Quintus Petilius, the praetor who had jurisdiction in the city, burned them in an assembly of the people. It was a senseless proceeding. What good was it that the books were burned, when the very reason they were burned — that they took away the authority religion is owed — was itself handed down to memory? Every man in that senate was an utter fool. The books could have been burned and the matter itself left unknown. As it was, in wanting to prove even to later generations how devoutly they had defended the religious institutions, they used their own testimony to weaken the authority of those institutions.

But just as Pompilius was the founder of foolish superstitions among the Romans, so before Pompilius there was Faunus in Latium. He established unholy rites to his grandfather Saturn, honored his father Picus with a place among the gods, and consecrated his sister Fatua Fauna, who was also his wife. According to Gabius Bassus she was called Fatua because she had been in the habit of foretelling their fates to women, as Faunus did to men. And Varro writes that she was a woman of such great modesty that as long as she lived no male but her husband ever saw her or heard her name. That is why women sacrifice to her in secret and call her the Good Goddess. But Sextus Claudius, in the book he wrote in Greek, relates that it was the wife of Faunus who drank a jar of wine, against the practice and dignity of royalty, and got drunk, and was beaten to death by her husband with myrtle rods. Afterwards, when he was sorry for what he had done and could not bear how much he missed her, he paid her divine honors. That, they say, is why a covered jar of wine is set out at her sacred rites. So Faunus too left no slight error to later generations, which anyone with sense can see through. For Lucilius, in these lines, derides the folly of men who imagine that images are gods:

The poet, for his part, compares foolish men to infants. But I say they are far more senseless than infants. Infants suppose that images are men; these men take them for gods. The one group imagines what is not true because of their age, the other because of their folly. At any rate the infants soon stopped being deceived, while the foolishness of the others is permanent and always increasing. Orpheus was the first to bring the rites of father Liber into Greece, and he first celebrated them on a mountain of Boeotia very close to Thebes, where Liber was born. And because that mountain rang continually with the strains of the lyre, it was called Cithaeron. Those sacred rites are called Orphic even now — the rites in which he himself was cut open and torn to pieces. He lived at about the same time as Faunus. Which of the two was earlier admits of doubt, since Latinus and Priam reigned during the same years, and so did their fathers Faunus and Laomedon, in whose reign Orpheus came with the Argonauts to the coast of the Trojans.

So let us advance further, and inquire who really was the first author of the worship of the gods. Didymus, in the books of his commentary on Pindar, says that Melisseus, king of the Cretans, was the first to sacrifice to the gods and to introduce new rites and parades of sacrifice. He had two daughters, Amalthea and Melissa, who fed the young Jupiter on goats' milk and honey. That is where the poets' story came from, that bees flew to the child and filled his mouth with honey. He says, further, that Melissa was appointed by her father the first priestess of the Great Mother, which is why the priestesses of that same Mother are still called Melissae. But the sacred history testifies that Jupiter himself, once he had got hold of power, went so far in his insolence that he built temples in his own honor in many places. When he traveled about to different lands, on arriving in each region he attached the kings or leading men of the people to himself by hospitality and friendship; and as he was leaving each of them, he gave orders that a shrine be dedicated to himself in his host’s name, as though the memory of their friendship and alliance could be preserved that way. So temples were founded in honor of Jupiter Atabyrius and Jupiter Labrandius, since Atabyrius and Labrandius were his hosts and his helpers in war. Temples were also built to Jupiter Laprius, to Jupiter Molion, to Jupiter Casius, and to others in the same manner. It was a very crafty device on his part, that he might get divine honor for himself and, at the same time, a name that would last for his hosts, tied in with religious observance. And so they were glad of it, and cheerfully submitted to his command, and kept up yearly rites and festivals for the sake of handing down their own names. Aeneas did something like this in Sicily, when he gave the name of his host Acestes to a city he had built, so that Acestes might afterwards joyfully and willingly love it, enlarge it, and adorn it.

In this way Jupiter spread the observance of his own worship through the world, and gave others an example to imitate. So whether the practice of worshiping the gods proceeded from Melisseus, as Didymus related, or from Jupiter himself as well, as Euhemerus says, the date at which the gods began to be worshiped is agreed on all the same. Melisseus, of course, came a good deal earlier, seeing that he brought up Jupiter, his grandson. It is therefore possible that before Jupiter was born, or while he was still a boy, Melisseus taught the worship of the gods — that is, of the boy’s mother, of the boy’s grandmother Tellus, who was the wife of Uranus, and of the boy’s father Saturn. And by that example and institution he may himself have puffed Jupiter up to such pride that Jupiter afterwards dared to claim divine honors for himself.

Now that we have found out where these empty superstitions came from, it remains for us to collect the dates as well — the times during which the men whose memory is honored were alive. Theophilus, in his book written to Autolycus on chronology, says that Thallus relates in his history that Belus, who is worshiped by the Babylonians and Assyrians, is found to have lived 322 years before the Trojan war, and that Belus was a contemporary of Saturn, the two of them growing up at one and the same time. And that is so true that it can be worked out by reason itself. For Agamemnon, who carried on the Trojan war, was Jupiter’s great-great-grandson, and Achilles and Ajax were his great-grandsons, and Ulysses was related in the same degree. Priam, on the other hand, was distant by a long series of descents. But according to some authorities Dardanus and Iasius were the sons of Coritus, not of Jupiter — for if they had been Jupiter’s, Jupiter could not have committed that incest with Ganymede, who was his own descendant. So if you divide up the years that are in agreement, the number will be found to match the parents of the men I have named above. Now from the destruction of the city of Troy, fourteen hundred and seventy years have been made up. From this calculation of dates it is plain that Saturn has not been born more than eighteen hundred years — and he was the father of all the gods. So let them not glory in the antiquity of their sacred rites, since the origin of those rites, and their system, and their dates have all been ascertained. [p]

There are still some things left that would carry great weight for the disproving of the false religions; but I have determined to bring this book to an end now, so that it does not run past reasonable limits. Those matters must be followed up more fully, so that when everything which seems to stand against the truth has been refuted, we may be able to instruct in true religion the men who wander in uncertainty because they do not know what is good. But the first step toward wisdom is to understand what is false; the second, to find out what is true. So the man who has profited by this first discussion of mine, in which we have exposed false things, will be stirred up to the knowledge of the truth — and no pleasure is more satisfying to a human being than that. And he will now be worthy of the wisdom of heavenly training, if he comes willingly and prepared to the knowledge of the rest.