Statues That Cannot Defend Themselves

What majesty, then, can images have, when they lie entirely at the mercy of some feeble little man — who may turn them into something else, or never make them at all? That is why Priapus talks like this in Horace: [a]

Who would not feel safe with a guardian like that? Thieves, it seems, are stupid enough to be frightened of a figure of Priapus — though the birds themselves, which are supposed to be scared off by his hook, come and settle on the images that are made most skillfully, that is, on the ones that look most like men. They build their nests there and foul them. But Horace was writing satire, and he was laughing at how foolish people are. The men who make the images think they are doing serious business.

In short, that very great poet, a shrewd man in everything else, showed his folly in this one thing — not like a poet but like an old woman — when even in those most carefully finished books of his he gives this order:

So they worship mortal things, made by mortals. The things can be broken, or burned, or destroyed. They are often smashed to pieces when a house falls down with age, or eaten away to ashes in a fire; and in many cases, unless their sheer size protects them or somebody keeps careful watch over them, they are carried off by thieves. What madness is it, then, to be afraid of objects that themselves have a collapsing roof, or fire, or theft to fear? What folly, to hope for protection from things that cannot protect themselves? What perversity, to run for help to things that, when they are damaged, go unavenged unless their own worshipers take the revenge for them? Where, then, is truth to be found? Where no violence can be done to religion; where there is nothing that can be damaged; where no sacrilege can be committed.

But whatever is open to the eyes and to the hands is perishable, and so has nothing to do with the whole subject of immortality. It is pointless, therefore, for men to trick their gods out and decorate them with gold and ivory and jewels, as though the gods could take any pleasure in such things. What use are expensive gifts to objects that cannot feel? The same use the dead have for them. People embalm the bodies of the dead, wrap them in spices and costly clothes, and bury them in the ground; and in exactly the same way they honor gods who did not notice it when they were made and know nothing about it when they are worshiped — for they were not given the power to feel at their consecration.

Persius was annoyed that golden vessels should be carried into the temples. He thought it was pointless to count as a religious offering something that is not an instrument of holiness but of greed. For these are the gifts it is better to offer to the god you would rightly worship:

A noble and wise sentiment. But then he added something ridiculous: that this gold in the temples is like the dolls a girl gives to Venus — which perhaps he despised because they are small. He did not see that the very images and statues of the gods, worked in gold and ivory by the hands of Polyclitus, Euphranor and Phidias, were nothing more than large dolls, dedicated not by girls, whose games we can afford to indulge, but by grown, bearded men. So Seneca is right to laugh at the folly even of old men.

“We are not boys twice over, as the saying goes; we are boys always. The only difference is that as men we have bigger things to play with.”

And so men bring these dolls — outsized ones, dressed up as if for the stage — perfumes and incense and sweet smells. They sacrifice to them costly, fattened animals, though the dolls have a mouth that cannot eat. They bring them robes and expensive clothes, though they need no clothing. They dedicate gold and silver to them, which the ones who receive it have as little as the ones who gave it away.

And Dionysius, the tyrant of Sicily, had good reason, once a victory had made him master of Greece, to despise gods like these, to plunder them and to jeer at them; he followed up his acts of sacrilege with jokes. When he had stripped a golden robe off the statue of Olympian Jupiter, he ordered a woolen one to be put on the god instead, saying that a golden robe was heavy in summer and cold in winter, while a woolen one suited both seasons. He also took the golden beard off Aesculapius, saying it was unbecoming and unfair that the son should be seen wearing a beard while his father Apollo was still smooth and beardless. He took away the bowls and the spoils and the little figures held out in the statues’ outstretched hands, and said he was not taking them but receiving them: it would be very foolish and ungrateful, he said, to refuse to accept good things when they are offered freely by the very people from whom men are used to begging them.

He did all this and went unpunished, because he was a king and he had won. What is more, his usual good luck stayed with him: he lived to be an old man and handed the kingdom on to his son. In his case, then, since men could not punish his sacrilege, it was for the gods to be their own avengers. But if some humble person commits a crime of that sort, the whip is ready for him, and fire, and the rack, and the cross, and whatever other torture men can invent in their anger and rage.

Yet when they punish men caught in the act of sacrilege, they are showing that they themselves distrust their gods’ power. Why should they not leave the chance of revenge to the gods above all, if they think the gods are able to take it? What is more, they also imagine it was the will of the gods that the temple-robbers were found out and arrested; and their cruelty is driven not so much by anger as by fear — fear that they will be punished themselves if they fail to avenge the injury done to the gods. And in fact they show an unbelievable shallowness in supposing that the gods will hurt them for somebody else’s guilt, when those same gods could not, on their own, hurt the very people who profaned and robbed them.

But, it will be said, the gods have often punished the sacrilegious themselves. That may have happened by chance; it has happened sometimes, but not always. I will show presently how it happened. For now let me ask this: why did they not punish so many and such great acts of sacrilege in Dionysius, who insulted the gods openly and not in secret? Why did they not drive this sacrilegious man, with all his power, away from their temples, their rites and their images? Why, when he had carried off their sacred things, did he even have a good voyage — as he himself testified, in his usual joking way?

“Do you see what a fine voyage the immortal gods themselves grant to the sacrilegious?”

That is what he said to his companions, who were afraid of shipwreck. But perhaps he had learned from Plato that the gods are nothing.

What about Gaius Verres, whom his prosecutor Cicero compares to this same Dionysius, and to Phalaris, and to every tyrant? Did he not plunder the whole of Sicily, carrying away the images of the gods and the ornaments of the temples? There is no point in following up every case one by one. I will mention just one, the one over which the prosecutor — with all the force of his eloquence, with every effort of voice and body — lamented: the Ceres of Catina, or the Ceres of Henna. The first was of such great holiness that men were not allowed to enter the hidden rooms of her temple; the second was of such great antiquity that every account says the goddess herself first discovered grain in the soil of Henna, and that it was from that same place that her virgin daughter was carried off. And in the time of the Gracchi, when the state was in turmoil with rioting and with omens, it was found in the Sibylline predictions that the most ancient Ceres had to be appeased, and ambassadors were sent to Henna. This Ceres, then — either the most holy one, whom men were not allowed even to look at for the sake of worship, or the most ancient one, whom the senate and people of Rome had appeased with sacrifices and gifts — was carried off out of her secret and ancient chambers by Gaius Verres, and he went unpunished for it; he had sent in a gang of his slaves to do the robbing.

The same orator, when he said that the Sicilians had begged him to take up the case of the province, used these words:

“They now have not even any gods left in their cities to turn to, since Verres has taken the most sacred images out of their most revered shrines.”

As though, of course, if Verres had taken them out of the cities and the shrines, he had taken them out of heaven as well! From which it appears that those gods have nothing in them beyond the material they are made of. And the Sicilians had good reason to turn to you, Marcus Tullius — that is, to a man — since they had had three years’ experience that those gods had no power. They would have been complete fools to run for protection from the injuries men were doing them to gods who could not even be angry with Gaius Verres on their own behalf.

But, it will be urged, Verres was condemned for what he had done. Then he was punished not by the gods but by Cicero’s energy, which either crushed the men defending him or stood up to his influence. And why should I say that in Verres’ own case the sentence was not so much a condemnation as a rest from work? Just as the immortal gods had given Dionysius a good voyage when he was carrying off their spoils, so they seem to have given Verres a quiet retirement in which he could enjoy the profits of his sacrilege in peace. When the civil wars broke out afterward, he was out of all danger and all worry, and under the cover of his conviction he heard of other men’s ruinous misfortunes and wretched deaths. The man who seemed to have fallen while everyone else kept his footing was in truth the one man who kept his footing while everyone else fell — until the proscription of the triumvirs, the very proscription that carried off Cicero, the avenger of the gods’ violated majesty, carried him off too, full at last both of the wealth his sacrilege had won him and of life itself, and worn out with old age. He was fortunate even in this, that before his own death he heard of the cruel end of the man who had prosecuted him. The gods, no doubt, were seeing to it that this sacrilegious plunderer of their worship should not die before he had received the consolation of revenge.