Poets, Philosophers, and Sibyls

But let us set the testimony of the prophets aside, in case a proof drawn from writers whom nobody believes should look thin. Let us come to authors instead; and to demonstrate the truth, let us call as witnesses the very men our opponents are in the habit of using against us — I mean the poets and the philosophers. From these we cannot fail to prove that God is one. Not that they had found the truth out; it is that the force of the truth itself is so great that no one can be blind enough to miss the divine brightness standing in front of his eyes. [a]

So the poets, however much they dressed the gods up in their poems and blew their exploits up with the highest praise, still confess again and again that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind. Orpheus is the oldest of the poets, as old as the gods themselves — the story goes that he sailed among the Argonauts alongside the sons of Tyndareus and Hercules. He speaks of the true and great God as the Firstborn, because nothing was produced before him and everything sprang from him. He also calls him Phanes, the one who appears, because when as yet there was nothing he was the first to show himself and come out of the infinite. And since he could not work out in his own mind where such a being came from or what he was, he said that he was born from the boundless air:

For he had nothing further to say. He declares that this being is the Parent of all the gods, and that it was for their sake that he framed the heaven and provided his children with a home and a dwelling place they could share:

So, with nature and reason for his guides, Orpheus understood that there was a power of surpassing greatness that framed heaven and earth. He could not say that Jupiter was the author of all things, since Jupiter was born from Saturn; nor could he say that Saturn himself was, since the report was that Saturn had been produced from the heaven. And he did not dare set the heaven up as the first god, because he could see that the heaven is one element of the universe and must itself have had an author. That is what drove him to the firstborn god, to whom he assigns and gives the first place.

Homer could give us no information about the truth, since he wrote about human affairs rather than divine ones. Hesiod could have. He packed the birth of the gods into the work of a single book — and still gave us no information, because he took his start not from God the Creator but from Chaos, a confused mass of raw, unsorted matter. He ought to have explained first where Chaos itself came from, when it began to exist, and how it held together. Beyond question, since everything was placed in order, arranged and made by some craftsman, matter itself must of necessity have been formed by someone. Who, then, made it, if not God, whose power everything is subject to? But Hesiod shies away from admitting it, because he dreads a truth he does not know. He wanted it to look as though he poured out that song on Helicon by the inspiration of the Muses; in fact he had come to it with the thing thought out and prepared beforehand.

Virgil was the first of our own poets to come near the truth. This is how he speaks of the highest God, whom he calls Mind and Spirit:

And in case anyone should happen not to know what this Spirit was that had so much power, he stated it in another place: “For God goes through all lands, the stretches of the sea and the depth of heaven; and from him the flocks, the herds, and men, and every kind of wild creature, each at its birth, draw their frail lives.”

Ovid too, at the beginning of his remarkable work, admits without any disguising of the name that the universe was arranged by God, whom he calls the framer of the world and the maker of all things. If only Orpheus, or these poets of our own country, had held on to what they saw under nature’s guidance, they would have grasped the truth and arrived at the same learning that we follow.

So much for the poets. Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority carries more weight and whose judgment is more to be relied on, because people believe they gave their attention not to invented stories but to the investigation of the truth.

Thales of Miletus, one of the seven wise men, and said to have been the first of all to inquire into natural causes, said that water was the element everything was produced from, and that God was the mind that formed everything out of water. So he placed the material of all things in moisture, and fixed the beginning and cause of their production in God. Pythagoras defined the being of God like this: “a soul passing to and fro through every part of the universe and through all nature, and spread through it, from which every living creature that is produced draws its life.” Anaxagoras said that God was an infinite mind which moves by its own power. Antisthenes maintained that the gods of the people were many, but that the God of nature was one only — the maker of the whole universe. Cleanthes and Anaximenes assert that the air is the chief deity, and our own poet has agreed with them:

Chrysippus speaks of God as a natural power endowed with divine reason, and sometimes as a divine necessity. Zeno calls him a divine and natural law. Uncertain as all these opinions are, they point to one thing: they agree that there is one providence. Whether you call it nature, or aether, or reason, or mind, or a fated necessity, or a divine law, or anything else you like, it is the same thing that we call God. The variety of titles is no obstacle, since by their very meaning they all refer to one object.

Aristotle, although he is at variance with himself and both utters and holds opinions at odds with one another, on the whole bears witness that one Mind presides over the universe. Plato, who is judged the wisest of them all, plainly and openly maintains the rule of one God; and he does not name him Aether or Reason or Nature, but, as he truly is, God, and says that this universe, so perfect and so wonderful, was fabricated by him. Cicero follows and imitates Plato at many points, acknowledges God again and again in the books he wrote on the subject of laws, and calls him supreme. He offers proof that the universe is governed by him when he argues about the nature of the gods in this way: “Nothing is superior to God. The world must therefore be governed by him. God is therefore obedient or subject to no nature; and so he himself governs all nature.” But what God himself is he defines in his Consolation: “Nor can God himself, as he is grasped by us, be grasped in any other way than as a mind free and unrestrained, far removed from all mortal matter, perceiving all things and setting all things in motion.”

And how often Annaeus Seneca, the keenest Stoic Rome produced, follows up the supreme God with the praise he deserves! When he was discussing death that comes too soon, he said: “You do not understand the authority and majesty of your Judge, the Ruler of the world, the God of heaven and of all gods, on whom the deities we worship and honor one by one depend.” And in his Exhortations: “When he was laying the first foundations of that most beautiful structure, and beginning a work than which nature has known nothing greater or better — so that all things might serve their own rulers — although he had spread himself out through the whole body, he still produced gods as officers of his kingdom.”

And how many other things he said about God that sound like our own writers! But I am putting these off for the present, because they are better suited to other parts of the subject. For now it is enough to demonstrate that men of the highest genius touched the truth and all but took hold of it — and would have, if custom, made stupid by false opinions, had not carried them back. It was that custom that made them think there were other gods, and made them believe that the things God made for people to use were to be held and worshiped as gods, as though those things could perceive anything.

Now let us pass on to divine testimonies. But first I will bring forward one that comes close to being a divine testimony, both because it is so extremely old and because the man I am about to name was taken from among men and placed among the gods. [i]

According to Cicero, Gaius Cotta the pontiff — arguing against the Stoics about superstitions and about the range of opinions people hold concerning the gods, and trying, as the Academics do, to leave everything unsettled — says that there were five Mercuries. He counts four of them off in order, and then says that the fifth was the one who killed Argus, and that this was why he fled into Egypt and gave the Egyptians their laws and their letters. The Egyptians call him Thoth, and the first month of their year, which falls in September, takes its name from him among them. He also built a town that is still called Hermopolis in Greek — Mercury’s city — and the people of Pheneus honor him with religious worship.

He was a man; but he lived a very long time ago, and he was soaked through with every kind of learning, so that his knowledge of many subjects and arts earned him the name Trismegistus, thrice greatest. He wrote books, and a great many of them, about the knowledge of divine things; and in them he asserts the majesty of the supreme and only God, and mentions him by the same names that we use, God and Father. And so that no one should ask his name, he said that he was without a name, and that his very oneness means he does not need the mark of a name. These are his own words: “God is one, and the one who is one only has no need of a name; for he who exists of himself is nameless.” So God has no name, because he is alone. There is no need of a proper name except where a crowd of persons requires a distinguishing mark, so that you can point out each one by his own mark and title. But God, because he is always one, has no name of his own.

What remains is for me to bring forward the testimony of the sacred responses and predictions, which are far more to be relied on. For the people we are arguing against may perhaps think that no credit is to be given to poets, on the grounds that they invented fictions, nor to philosophers either, since they were only men and liable to be wrong.

Marcus Varro — and no man of greater learning ever lived, among the Greeks, much less among the Latins — was speaking of the Quindecemviri in those books on divine subjects that he addressed to Gaius Caesar the chief pontiff, and he says this. The Sibylline books were not the production of one Sibyl only; they were all called Sibylline under one name because the ancients called every prophetess a Sibyl, either from the name of one of them, the priestess at Delphi, or from their proclaiming the counsels of the gods. For in the Aeolic dialect people used to call the gods sioi, not theoi, and to say bule for counsel, not boule — and so the Sibyl received her name, as though siobule.

But he says that the Sibyls were ten in number, and he listed them all under the writers who wrote an account of each. The first was from the Persians, and Nicanor, who wrote the exploits of Alexander of Macedon, mentions her. The second was of Libya, and Euripides mentions her in the prologue of his Lamia. The third was of Delphi, whom Chrysippus speaks of in the book he composed on divination. The fourth was a Cimmerian in Italy, whom Naevius mentions in his books on the Punic war and Piso in his annals. The fifth was of Erythrae; Apollodorus of Erythrae affirms that she was his own countrywoman, and that she foretold to the Greeks, as they were setting out for Ilium, both that Troy was doomed to destruction and that Homer would write falsehoods. The sixth was of Samos, and Eratosthenes writes that he found a written notice of her in the ancient annals of the Samians.

The seventh was of Cumae, by name Amalthaea, whom some call Herophile, or Demophile. They say that she brought nine books to King Tarquinius Priscus and asked three hundred philippics for them; that the king refused so great a price and laughed at the woman’s madness; that she burned three of the books in his sight and demanded the same price for the ones that were left; that Tarquinius thought her madder still; and that when she burned three more and went on asking the same price, the king was moved and bought the books that remained for the full three hundred gold pieces. The number of these books was increased afterwards, after the rebuilding of the Capitol, because copies were collected from all the cities of Italy and Greece, and especially from the cities of Erythrae, and brought to Rome under the name of whatever Sibyl they belonged to.

Further, the eighth was from the Hellespont, born in Trojan territory, in the village of Marpessus near the town of Gergithus; and Heraclides of Pontus writes that she lived in the times of Solon and Cyrus. The ninth was of Phrygia, and gave her oracles at Ancyra. The tenth was of Tibur, by name Albunea, who is worshiped at Tibur as a goddess, near the banks of the river Anio; her statue is said to have been found in the deep water there, holding a book in its hand. The senate had her oracles transferred into the Capitol.

The predictions of all these Sibyls are both brought forward and treated as genuine, except those of the Cumaean Sibyl, whose books the Romans keep hidden; they do not consider it lawful for anyone but the Quindecemviri to inspect them. Each Sibyl’s work is a separate book, but because they are all inscribed with the name of the Sibyl, people believe them to be the work of one; and they are jumbled together, and there is no picking out what belongs to each and assigning it to its own author — except in the case of the Erythraean Sibyl, who both worked her own true name into her verse and predicted that she would be called Erythraean, though she was born at Babylon. I too will speak of the Sibyl without distinguishing them, wherever I have occasion to use their testimonies.

All these Sibyls, then, proclaim one God — and the Erythraean above all, who is regarded among the rest as more celebrated and more noble. Fenestella, a most diligent writer, speaking of the Quindecemviri, says that after the rebuilding of the Capitol, Gaius Curio the consul proposed to the senate that ambassadors should be sent to Erythrae to search out the writings of the Sibyl and bring them to Rome; that Publius Gabinius, Marcus Otacilius and Lucius Valerius were accordingly sent; and that they conveyed to Rome about a thousand verses, written out by private persons. We have shown before that Varro made the same statement. Now in these verses that the ambassadors brought to Rome stand these testimonies about the one God:

This is the one supreme God, who made the heaven and decked it out with lights.

And since he alone is the framer of the universe and the artificer of everything it consists of or contains, her testimony is that he alone ought to be worshiped:

Another Sibyl too, whoever she is, said that she was carrying the voice of God to men, and spoke this way:

I would go on now and follow up the testimonies of the others, except that these are sufficient and I am reserving the rest for more befitting occasions. But since we are defending the cause of truth in front of people who have strayed from the truth and serve false religions, what kind of proof ought we to bring forward against them, rather than to refute them by the testimonies of their own gods?