The Authority of Ancestors

So the foolish go wrong in two ways at once. First, they put the elements — that is, the works of God — ahead of God himself. Second, they worship the figures of those same elements in human shape. They make images of the sun and the moon in the fashion of men, and images of fire and earth and sea as well, which they call Vulcan, Vesta and Neptune. They do not openly sacrifice to the elements themselves. Men are so taken with likenesses that the things which are true are now valued less. What delights them is gold, and jewels, and ivory. The beauty and glitter of these dazzles their eyes, and they think there is no religion anywhere these do not shine. And so, under cover of worshipping the gods, it is greed and desire that get worshipped. [a]

For they believe the gods love whatever they themselves want — the things for whose sake thefts and robberies and murders rage every day, for whose sake wars overturn nations and cities across the whole world. So they dedicate their spoils and their plunder to the gods, who must certainly be weak, and stripped of the highest excellence, if they are subject to desires. Why should we think them heavenly, if they long for something out of the earth? Or happy, if they are short of anything? Or uncorrupted, if they take pleasure in the very things a man is rightly blamed for wanting?

So they come to the gods not so much out of religion — which can have no place in things badly gotten and liable to rot — as to drink in the gold with their eyes, and look at the shine of polished marble or ivory, and gaze without tiring at robes worked with jewels and colors, or at cups studded with glittering stones. And the more decorated the temples are, and the more beautiful the images, the greater the majesty people believe is in them. Their religion is nothing else: it is admiring whatever human desire admires.

These are the religious institutions handed down to them by their ancestors, and they keep them up and defend them with the greatest stubbornness. They never ask what sort of things they are. They are simply sure that they are excellent and true, because the men of old handed them down; and the authority of age is so great that to look into it is called a crime. And so it is believed everywhere as settled truth.

In Cicero, for example, Cotta says this to Lucilius Balbus: “You know, Balbus, what Cotta’s opinion is, and what the pontiff’s opinion is. Now let me understand what you think. Since you are a philosopher, I ought to receive from you a reason for your religion; but in the case of our ancestors it is reasonable to believe them, even though they give no reason at all.” If you believe, then why do you ask for a reason, when the reason may have the effect of making you not believe? But if you do ask for a reason, and think the subject calls for inquiry, then you do not believe; you inquire so that you may follow the reason once you have found it. Look — reason teaches you that the religious rites of the gods are not true. What will you do? Will you choose to follow antiquity, or reason? And this was not worked into you by anyone else; you found it out and chose it yourself, since you have pulled up every religious system by the roots. If you prefer reason, you must give up the institutions and the authority of our ancestors, since nothing is right except what reason lays down. But if piety advises you to follow your ancestors, then admit that they were fools, who went along with religious rites invented against reason — and that you have no sense yourself, since you worship what you have proved to be false.

But since the name of our ancestors is thrown at us so constantly, let us see, please, who those ancestors were, from whose authority we are told it is an outrage to depart.

When Romulus was about to found the city, he called together the shepherds he had grown up among. Their number looked too small for founding a city, so he set up a place of refuge. Every worthless man in the neighboring places flocked to it, indiscriminately, with no distinction of rank; and out of all these he put a people together. The oldest of them he chose into the senate and called them Fathers, so that he might run everything by their advice. Propertius the elegiac poet writes about this senate:

These are the Fathers whose decrees learned and shrewd men obey with the greatest devotion. Every generation since is supposed to judge true and unalterable whatever a hundred old men in animal skins settled as they pleased — the same men who, as was said in the first book, were talked round by Pompilius into believing that the sacred rites he handed them were true. Is there any reason why their authority should be rated so highly by later generations, when in their own lifetime nobody, high or low, thought them worth marrying into?

It is right, then — especially in a matter on which the whole plan of life turns — that each person should trust himself, and use his own judgment and his own capacity for looking into the truth and weighing it, rather than be taken in by other men’s mistakes through trusting them, as though he had no understanding of his own. God has given wisdom to everyone alike, so that people may be able both to look into what they have not heard and to weigh what they have heard. The men before us did not outstrip us in wisdom just because they came before us in time; if wisdom is given equally to all, then those who go first cannot get to it ahead of us. It cannot be made less, any more than the light and brightness of the sun can. As the sun is the light of the eyes, so wisdom is the light of a man’s heart. [j]

So, since wisdom — that is, the search for truth — belongs to everyone by nature, people rob themselves of wisdom when they approve their ancestors’ discoveries without any judgment of their own and are led along by others like sheep. And here is what gets past them: once the word ancestors is brought in, they take it as impossible that they themselves should know more, since they are called the descendants, or that the others should be unwise, since they are called the ancestors. So what is to stop us from taking a precedent from them? As they handed their false inventions down to those who came after, so we, who have found the truth, may hand down better things to those who come after us.

That leaves a large subject to look into, and the discussion of it calls not for cleverness but for knowledge. It must be set out at some length, so that nothing at all is left in doubt. For someone may fall back on the things handed down by many undoubted authorities: that these very persons, whom we have shown to be no gods, have often displayed their majesty by prodigies, by dreams, by auguries and by oracles.

Plenty of remarkable things can indeed be listed, and this one above all. Accius Navius was an augur without equal. He was warning Tarquinius Priscus to begin nothing new until the auguries had been taken first, and the king, belittling his art, told him to consult the birds and then announce whether the thing he had conceived in his own mind could be carried out. Navius declared that it could. “Then take this whetstone,” he said, “and cut it through with a razor.” And the other man took it and cut it, without a moment’s hesitation.

Next comes the fact that Castor and Pollux were seen in the Latin war at the lake of Juturna, washing the sweat off their horses, when their temple next to the spring had opened of its own accord. In the Macedonian war the same two, mounted on white horses, are said to have presented themselves to Publius Vatienus as he was traveling to Rome at night, announcing that King Perseus had been beaten and taken prisoner that day — which was proved true by a dispatch from Paulus a few days afterward. It is remarkable, too, that the statue of Fortune in a woman’s form is reported to have spoken more than once; and so is the statue of Juno Moneta, which, when Veii was captured and one of the soldiers sent to carry it off asked her jokingly whether she wanted to move to Rome, answered that she did. Claudia is also brought forward as an example of a miracle. When the Idaean Mother was sent for on the direction of the Sibylline books, the ship carrying her ran aground on a shoal of the river Tiber and could not be shifted by any force. They report that Claudia, who had always been thought unchaste because she overdid her personal ornament, knelt down and begged the goddess, if she judged her chaste, to follow her sash; and so the ship that all the men of military age could not move was moved by a single woman. It is just as remarkable that during an outbreak of disease Aesculapius, summoned from Epidaurus, is said to have freed the city of Rome from a plague it had had for a long time.

Men guilty of sacrilege can be named as well — men whose immediate punishment is taken as proof that the gods avenged the wrong done to them. Appius Claudius the censor, against the advice of the oracle, transferred the sacred rites of Hercules to public slaves, and lost his eyesight; and the Potitian family, which gave up its privilege, was extinct within the space of one year. In the same way the censor Fulvius, when he had stripped the marble tiles from the temple of Lacinian Juno to roof the temple of Fortuna Equestris that he had built at Rome, lost his mind, and, after losing his two sons who were serving in Illyricum, was eaten up with grief. Turullius too, Mark Antony’s lieutenant, cut down a grove of Aesculapius on Cos and built a fleet out of it, and was afterward killed on that very spot by Caesar’s soldiers. To these cases add Pyrrhus, who took money from the treasury of Proserpine at Locri and was shipwrecked and dashed against the shore near the goddess’ temple, so that nothing was found undamaged except that money. Ceres of Miletus also won great reverence for herself. When the city had been taken by Alexander and the soldiers had rushed in to plunder her temple, a burst of flame thrown at them suddenly blinded them all.

There are dreams as well that seem to show the power of the gods. It is said that Jupiter came to Tiberius Atinius, a commoner, in his sleep, and ordered him to report to the consuls and the senate that at the last games in the circus a public dancer had displeased him, because a certain Antonius Maximus had flogged a slave hard, tied to the fork, in the middle of the circus, and then led him off to punishment; and that the games ought therefore to be held again. When he ignored the command, they say he lost his son that same day and was himself seized by a serious illness; and that when he saw the same figure again, asking whether he had suffered punishment enough for ignoring the command, he had himself carried on a litter to the consuls, and, once he had laid the whole matter before the senate, got his bodily strength back and returned home on foot. And that other dream was no less remarkable — the one to which Augustus Caesar is said to have owed his life. In the civil war against Brutus he was laid low by a serious illness and had decided to keep out of the battle, when the figure of Minerva presented itself to his physician Artorius and advised him that Caesar should not stay shut up in the camp on account of his bodily weakness. So he was carried on a litter out to the army — and that same day the camp was taken by Brutus. Many other examples of the same sort could be brought forward; but I am afraid that if I take too long setting out the case on the other side, I may either look as though I have forgotten my purpose, or lay myself open to the charge of talking too much.