The Gods Were Once Men

Take Apollo, whom they think more divine than any of the others and prophetic above all. He gave his answers at Colophon — he had moved there from Delphi, I suppose, because the pleasantness of Asia appealed to him. Someone once asked him who he was, or what God is at all, and he answered in twenty-one lines, of which this is the opening: [a]

Can anyone suppose this is said of Jupiter, who had both a mother and a name? And why bother to mention that Mercury, the thrice-greatest, whom I referred to earlier, not only calls God “motherless,” as Apollo does, but “fatherless” as well, because he has his origin from no source but himself? He cannot have been produced by anyone, since he himself produced everything. I think I have now taught by argument, and confirmed by witnesses, what is plain enough on its own: that there is one only King of the universe, one Father, one God.

But perhaps someone will put to us the question Hortensius asks in Cicero: “If God is only one, what solitude can be happy?” As though, in saying that he is one, we were saying that he is deserted and alone. He certainly has servants, whom we call angels. And what I said earlier is true: Seneca, in his Exhortations, said that God produced servants for his kingdom. But these are not gods, and they do not want to be called gods or to be worshiped, since they do nothing but carry out God’s command and will. Nor, on the other hand, are the gods people commonly worship these servants of ours; the common gods are few, and their number is fixed. But if the worshipers of the gods think they are worshiping the beings we call the servants of the Supreme God, then they have no reason to resent us for saying there is one God and denying that there are many.

If a crowd of gods pleases them, we do not talk about twelve, or about three hundred and sixty-five as Orpheus did; we convict them of countless mistakes in the other direction, for thinking the number so small. But let them learn what these beings ought to be called, so that they do not wrong the true God by publishing his name and then handing it out to more than one. Let them believe their own Apollo, who in that same answer took the name away from the other gods, just as he took the rule away from Jupiter. For the third line shows that God’s servants are not to be called gods, but angels. About himself, though, he lied. He belonged to the demons, and he counted himself among the angels of God — and then in other answers he admitted he was a demon. For when he was asked how he wished to be prayed to, he answered like this:

And again, when at someone’s request he pronounced a curse against Sminthian Apollo, he began with this line:

So what is left, except that by his own admission he is under the lash of the true God and under everlasting punishment? For in another answer he also said:

We deal with both subjects in the second book. For the moment it is enough for us that, while he wants to honor himself and set himself in heaven, he has confessed — as the facts require — what those are to be called who always stand beside God.

So let people take themselves away from their errors. Let them lay aside their corrupt superstitions and acknowledge their Father and Lord, whose excellence cannot be measured, whose greatness cannot be taken in, whose beginning cannot be grasped. When the human mind’s hard attention, its sharp discernment and its memory have reached him, every road has been, so to speak, run to the end and used up. The mind halts, it is at a loss, it fails, and there is nothing beyond that it can go on to. But since whatever exists must have had a beginning, it follows that, because there was nothing before him, he was produced from himself before all things. That is why Apollo calls him “self-made,” and the Sibyl calls him “self-created,” “uncreated,” “unmade.” Seneca, a sharp man, saw this and put it into words in his Exhortations. “We,” he said, “depend on someone else.” And so we look to someone to whom we owe what is best in us. One person brought us into being, another shaped us; but God made himself, by his own power.

These witnesses, then, so many and so weighty, prove that the universe is governed by the power and the providence of one God. Plato, in the Timaeus, says that God’s energy and majesty are so great that no one can either take them in with the mind or put them into words, because his power is beyond all reckoning. And then can anyone doubt whether anything can be hard or impossible for God — who planned works so great and so wonderful by his providence, set them up by his energy and finished them by his judgment; who even now holds them up by his spirit and governs them by his power; who cannot be grasped or spoken of, and is fully known to no one but himself? And so, thinking as often as I do about majesty on that scale, I find that people who worship the gods sometimes look so blind, so incapable of reflection, so senseless, so little above the dumb animals, that they can believe beings born from the ordinary intercourse of the sexes had anything of majesty and divine power about them. The Erythraean Sibyl says: “It is impossible for a god to be formed out of a man’s loins and a woman’s womb.” And if that is true, as it is, then plainly Hercules, Apollo, Bacchus, Mercury and Jupiter, with the rest of them, were men, since they were born from two sexes. What is further from the nature of God than the very act he assigned to mortals for keeping their race going — an act that cannot happen without a body? [k]

So if the gods are immortal and eternal, what need have they of the other sex, when they need no successors, since they are always going to exist? For with human beings and the other animals there is no reason at all for the difference of the sexes, for conceiving and giving birth, except this: that every class of living creature, doomed to death by the terms of its mortality, may be kept in being by one generation succeeding another. But God is immortal. He has no need of a difference of sex, and none of successors. Someone will say the arrangement is necessary so that he may have beings to serve him, or beings to rule over. What need is there of the female sex, when God, who is almighty, is able to produce sons with no female involved? For if he has granted to certain tiny creatures that they should “gather their young for themselves with their mouths, off the leaves and the sweet herbs,” why should anyone think it impossible for God himself to have offspring except by union with the other sex?

So no one is so thoughtless as to fail to see that those beings were only mortal men, whom the ignorant and the foolish regard and worship as gods. Why were they believed to be gods, then? No doubt because they were very great and powerful kings; and because they were loved by the people they had ruled — for the merits of their virtues, or their offices, or the arts they discovered — they were consecrated to lasting memory. And if anyone doubts it, let him look at their exploits and their deeds, all of which both the ancient poets and the historians have handed down.

Take Hercules, the most famous of them all for courage, the Africanus of the gods. Did he not pollute with his debaucheries, his lusts and his adulteries the very world he is said to have crossed and cleaned up? And no wonder, since he was born from an adulterous affair with Alcmena. [o]

What divine power could there have been in a man who was a slave to his own vices, and who, against every law, disgraced and outraged males and females alike? Nor are the great and marvelous things he did to be judged the sort of thing that deserves to be credited to divine excellence. What is so magnificent about it? He beat a lion and a boar. He shot birds down with arrows. He cleaned out a king’s stable. He defeated a warrior woman and took her belt. He killed some savage horses along with their owner. These are the deeds of a brave and heroic man — but still a man, since the things he overcame were frail and mortal. As the orator says, there is no strength so great that iron and force cannot weaken and break it. “But to conquer your own mind, and to hold anger back — that is what the bravest man does.” And these are the things Hercules never did and never could do. “The man who does them I do not merely rank with the greatest men; I judge him to be most like a god.”

I could wish the orator had added something about lust, self-indulgence, greed and arrogance, and so completed the excellence of the man he judged to be like a god. For the braver man is not the one who beats a lion, but the one who beats the violent wild animal shut up inside himself — anger. Not the one who has brought down the greediest birds, but the one who holds back the greediest desires. Not the one who defeats a warlike Amazon, but the one who defeats lust, the conqueror of modesty and reputation. Not the one who cleans the dung out of a stable, but the one who cleans the vices out of his own heart — vices that do more damage precisely because they are his own, where the others could have been avoided and guarded against. It follows that the only man who ought to be judged brave is the man who is temperate, moderate and just.

But anyone who considers what the works of God are will judge at once that all these things, which the most trifling men admire, are ridiculous. They measure them not by the divine power, of which they know nothing, but by the weakness of their own strength. And no one will deny this, that Hercules was a servant not only to Eurystheus, a king — which up to a point may look respectable — but to an unchaste woman as well, Omphale, who used to make him sit at her feet, dressed in her clothes and working through the task she had set him. Detestable degradation! But that was the price at which pleasure was valued. What! Do you really think the poets are to be believed? Why should I not think so? It is not Lucilius who tells these stories, or Lucian, who spared neither men nor gods, but above all the very people who sing the gods’ praises.

Whom, then, are we to believe, if we do not credit the men who praise them? Let anyone who thinks these writers are lying produce other authorities we can rely on — writers who can teach us who these gods are, in what manner and from what source they came to be, what their strength is, their number, their power, what there is in them that is admirable and worth worshiping; what secret rite, in the end, is more reliable and more true. He will produce no such authorities. So let us give credit to the people who spoke not to run the gods down but to proclaim their praise.

He sailed, then, with the Argonauts, and he sacked Troy, in a rage with Laomedon over the reward Laomedon refused him for saving his daughter — which shows plainly enough when he lived. He also killed his wife, and his children with her, worked up by rage and madness. Is this the man people take for a god? His heir Philoctetes did not take him for one. Philoctetes put the torch to him when he was to be burned; he watched his limbs and his sinews burn and waste away; he buried his bones and ashes on Mount Oeta — and for that service he was given his arrows.

What did Aesculapius ever do that was worth divine honors, apart from healing Hippolytus — and his own birth was no credit to Apollo either? His death was certainly more famous, since he earned the distinction of being struck by a god’s lightning. Tarquitius, in an essay on famous men, says he was born of unknown parents, exposed as a baby and found by some hunters; that a dog fed him; and that he was handed over to Chiron and learned the art of medicine. He adds that Aesculapius was a Messenian, but that he spent some time at Epidaurus. Cicero, too, says he was buried at Cynosurae. [v]

And what was the conduct of Apollo, his father? Did he not, because of a love affair, disgracefully herd another man’s flock? And did he not build walls for Laomedon, hired along with Neptune for a fee that could be withheld from him with no consequences at all? It was from Apollo that the treacherous king first learned that he could refuse to carry out any bargain he had made with gods. And Apollo, in love with a beautiful boy, forced himself on him — and then, while they were at play, killed him.

Mars was guilty of homicide. The Athenians let him off the charge of murder as a favor, so that he should not seem too fierce and savage — and he committed adultery with Venus. Castor and Pollux stopped being twin brothers in the middle of carrying off other men’s wives. Idas, worked up by jealousy at the wrong done him, ran one of the brothers through with his sword. And the poets tell us that the two of them live and die by turns, so that they are now the most wretched not only of the gods but of all mortals, since they are not permitted to die only once. Homer, though, differs from the other poets, and simply records that both of them died. For when he showed Helen sitting beside Priam on the walls of Troy, picking out all the chieftains of Greece but looking in vain for her brothers alone, he added a line of this kind to her speech:

What did Mercury, a thief and a spendthrift, leave behind to make his name, except the memory of his frauds? No doubt he deserved heaven, because he taught the exercises of the wrestling school and was the first to invent the lyre. And Father Liber, of course, must be the chief authority, first in rank in the senate of the gods, because he was the only one of them all except Jupiter who held a triumph, led an army and subdued the Indians. But that very great and unbeaten Indian commander was most shamefully overpowered by love and lust. Carried across to Crete with his effeminate retinue, he met an unchaste woman on the shore; and in the confidence his Indian victory had given him, he wanted to give proof of his manhood, in case he should look too effeminate. So he took her in marriage — a woman who had betrayed her father and murdered her brother, and who by then had been abandoned and cast off by another husband — and he made her Libera, and took her up to heaven with him.

And what was the conduct of Jupiter, the father of all these, whom the customary prayer calls Best and Greatest? Is he not shown, from his earliest childhood, to be impious and all but a parricide? He drove his father out of his kingdom and banished him, and would not wait for him to die, old and worn out as he was — such was his hunger to rule. And when he had taken his father’s throne by violence and arms, the Titans made war on him, which was the beginning of evils for the human race; and when they had been beaten and a lasting peace had been secured, he spent the rest of his life in debaucheries and adulteries. I say nothing of the unmarried girls he dishonored, since that sort of thing is usually judged bearable. But I cannot pass over the cases of Amphitryon and Tyndarus, whose houses he filled to overflowing with disgrace and infamy. And he reached the height of impiety and guilt in carrying off the royal boy. It was not enough, apparently, to cover himself in infamy by forcing himself on women; he had to outrage his own sex as well. This is real adultery, adultery committed against nature. Whether the man who did these things can be called Greatest is a matter for debate; that he is not the Best is certain, since corrupters, adulterers and men who commit incest have no claim to that name. Unless, of course, we men are mistaken in calling people who do such things wicked and abandoned, and in judging them to deserve every kind of punishment. But then Marcus Tullius was a fool to reproach Caius Verres with adulteries, since Jupiter, whom he worshiped, committed the same; and a fool to reproach Publius Clodius with incest with his sister, since the one who was Best and Greatest had one and the same person for sister and for wife.