The Tomb of Jupiter

Who is so senseless as to imagine that a man reigns in heaven who should never have reigned even on earth? There was some humor in a book a certain poet wrote about the triumph of Cupid, where he made Cupid not only the most powerful of the gods but their conqueror. He listed the love affairs of each of them, the affairs by which they had fallen into Cupid’s power and rule, and then he set out a procession: Jupiter, with the rest of the gods, led in chains before the chariot of the boy celebrating his triumph. The poet drew it elegantly, and it is not far from the truth. For the man who has no virtue, who is overpowered by desire and by wicked lusts, is not — as the poet pretended — the subject of Cupid, but of everlasting death. [a]

But let me stop talking about morals and look at the thing itself, so that people may see what errors they are miserably tangled in. Ordinary people imagine that Jupiter reigns in heaven, and the educated and the uneducated are equally convinced of it. Their religion itself proves it, and so do their prayers, their hymns, their shrines and their images. And yet they also admit that he was descended from Saturn and Rhea. How can he look like a god, or be believed — as the poet says — to be the maker of men and of all things, when countless thousands of men existed before he was born? Take the ones who lived under Saturn’s reign and saw daylight earlier than Jupiter did. What I see is that one god was king in the earliest times and another in the times that followed. So it is possible that there may be yet another later on. If the first kingdom was changed, why should we not expect that the second may be changed too — unless perhaps Saturn was able to father someone more powerful than himself and Jupiter was not? And yet divine government is always unchangeable; or if it is changeable, which is impossible, then it is certainly changeable at every moment.

Is it possible, then, for Jupiter to lose his kingdom the way his father lost his? It certainly is. That god had spared neither virgins nor married women, and he kept away from Thetis alone, and only because of an oracle that foretold that any son born from her would be greater than his father. Notice, first, that this is a failure of foreknowledge that does not suit a god: if Themis had not told him what was coming, he would not have known it on his own. But if he is not divine, then he is not a god at all, since “divinity” is derived from “god” as “humanity” is from “man.” Notice, next, that he was aware of his own weakness. A man who has been afraid has plainly been afraid of someone greater than himself, and a man who is afraid like that knows he is not the greatest, since something greater can exist. He also swears his most solemn oath by the marsh of the Styx:

What is this object of dread? And who set it there? Is there, then, some mighty power that can punish gods who swear falsely? Why this great fear of the marsh below, if they are immortal? Why should they be afraid of something that nobody is ever going to see except those who are bound by the necessity of dying? Why, then, do people lift their eyes to the sky? Why do they swear by the gods above, when the gods above themselves fall back on the gods below and find among them something to venerate and worship?

And what is the meaning of that saying, that there are Fates whom all the gods, and Jupiter himself, obey? If the power of the Fates is so great that they count for more than all the gods of heaven, and more than the gods’ own ruler and lord, why should the Fates not rather be said to reign, since necessity forces all the gods to obey their laws and their decrees? Who can doubt that a being who is subject to anything cannot be the greatest? If he were, he would not receive his fate; he would assign it.

Now I come back to something I passed over. There was one goddess, and one only, with whom he held himself back, though he was deeply in love with her — and not out of any virtue, but out of fear of a successor. That fear marks him plainly as mortal, feeble, and of no weight. He could have been killed in the very hour of his birth, as his elder brother had been killed; and if his brother had been allowed to live, he would never have handed the supreme power over to a younger brother. But Jupiter himself was saved by a trick and brought up in hiding, and he was called Zeus, or Zen — not, as they imagine, from the heat of the fire of heaven, nor because he is the giver of life, nor because he breathes life into living creatures, which is a power belonging to God alone. How can a man give the breath of life when he received it himself from another source? He was called that because he was the first of Saturn’s male children to live. So men might have had a different god for their ruler, if Saturn had not been deceived by his wife.

But someone will say that the poets made all this up. Anyone who thinks so is mistaken. The poets were speaking about men; but in order to dress up the men whose memory they used to celebrate with praises, they said they were gods. So the things they said about them as gods were invented, and not the things they said about them as men. An example will make this clear.

When he was about to force himself on Danae, he poured a great heap of gold coins into her lap. That was the price he paid for her ruin. But the poets, who spoke about him as a god and did not want to weaken the standing of his supposed majesty, pretended that he came down himself in a shower of gold — using the same figure of speech they use when they call a storm of javelins and arrows a shower of iron.

He is said to have carried Ganymede off by an eagle. That is a picture drawn by the poets. Either he carried him off with a legion, which has an eagle for its standard, or the ship he was put aboard had an eagle for its emblem — just as another ship carried the figure of a bull when he seized Europa and took her across the sea. In the same way they tell us that he turned Io, the daughter of Inachus, into a heifer; and that in order to escape Juno’s anger she swam over the sea just as she was, covered now with rough hair and shaped like a cow, and came into Egypt, where she got her old appearance back and became the goddess who is now called Isis.

By what argument, then, can it be proved that Europa did not sit on the bull, and that Io was not turned into a heifer? By this one: there is a fixed day in the records on which the voyage of Isis is celebrated, and from that we learn that she did not swim across the sea but sailed over it. And so the people who think themselves wise because they understand that a living, earthly body cannot be in heaven throw out the whole story of Ganymede as false — and they see that the thing happened on earth, since the business itself, and the lust in it, are earthly.

The poets did not, then, invent these events; if they had, they would be worthless. What they did was add a certain color to them. They said these things not to run the gods down but out of a wish to dress them up. That is how people are deceived, and especially because, while they think the poets invented all of it, they go on worshipping what they know nothing about. They do not know what the limits of poetic license are — how far it is allowable to go in fiction — since it is the poet’s business to take things that actually happened and, with some gracefulness, change them and carry them over into other images by an oblique turn. But to invent the whole of what you are telling is to be a fool and a liar rather than a poet.

But grant that they invented the things that are believed to be fables — did they also invent what is told about the goddesses and the marriages of the gods? Then why are the goddesses represented that way, and worshipped that way? Unless perhaps it is not only the poets who tell lies, but the painters and the sculptors too. If this Jupiter whom you call a god is not the one born from Saturn and Ops, then his image and no other should have been set up in all the temples. What are the female figures doing there? What is the point of both sexes? If it is this Jupiter who is being represented among them, the very stones will confess that he is a man. They say the poets lied, and yet they believe them — in fact they prove by the thing itself that the poets did not lie, since they shape the images of the gods in such a way that the mere difference of sex shows that what the poets say is true. What else can the image of Ganymede and the figure of the eagle mean, set at Jupiter’s feet in the temples and worshipped equally with him, except that the memory of a wicked and shameful act stays there forever?

Nothing at all, then, is wholly invented by the poets. Something is perhaps transferred and darkened by an oblique shaping, and the truth is wrapped up and hidden underneath it — like the story about the dividing of the kingdoms by lot. They say that heaven fell to Jupiter, the sea to Neptune, and the underworld to Pluto. Why was the earth not taken as the third share instead, unless the whole transaction happened on the earth?

So the truth is that they divided and portioned out the government of the world like this: the empire of the east fell to Jupiter, and a part of the west was allotted to Pluto, who had the surname Agesilaus — because the region of the east, from which light is given to mortals, seems to be the higher, and the region of the west the lower. In that way they veiled the truth under a fiction, so that the truth itself took nothing away from what the public believed. Neptune’s share is obvious. His kingdom, we say, was like that unlimited authority held by Marcus Antonius, to whom the senate voted power over the whole coastline, so that he might punish the pirates and quiet the entire sea. In that way all the seacoasts, and the islands with them, fell to Neptune’s lot.

How can this be proved? By old records, certainly. Euhemerus, an early writer who came from the city of Messene, collected the deeds of Jupiter and of the others who are counted as gods, and put together a history out of the titles and sacred inscriptions kept in the oldest temples — above all in the sanctuary of Triphylian Jupiter, where an inscription said that a golden column had been set up by Jupiter himself, and that on that column he had written an account of his exploits, so that later generations would have a record of what he had done. Ennius translated this history and followed it. His words are these:

“Where Jupiter gives Neptune the government of the sea, so that he might reign over all the islands and the places bordering on the sea.”

The accounts the poets give, then, are true, but covered over with an outer wrapping and show. It is possible that Mount Olympus supplied the poets with the hint for saying that Jupiter obtained the kingdom of heaven, since Olympus is the name both of the mountain and of the sky. But that same history informs us that Jupiter lived on Mount Olympus. It says:

“At that time Jupiter spent the greatest part of his life on Mount Olympus, and people used to come up to him there to have justice done, if there was a dispute about anything. And if anyone had found out some new invention that might be useful for human life, he used to come up there and show it to Jupiter.”

The poets carry a great many things over in this manner — not in order to speak falsely against the objects of their worship, but so that their poems may gain beauty and grace from figures of various colors. But the people who do not understand the manner, or the cause, or the nature of what is being said in figures attack the poets as liars and blasphemers.

Even the philosophers were taken in by this mistake. Because the things told about Jupiter seemed unsuited to the character of a god, they brought in two Jupiters, one belonging to nature and one to fable. On the one hand they saw what was true, that the one the poets talk about was in fact a man. But in the case of that Jupiter of nature they went wrong, led on by the common practice of superstition, because they carried the name of a man over to God, who, as we have already said, has no need of a name at all, since he is one only.

But it cannot be denied that Jupiter is the one who was born from Ops and Saturn. So it is an empty notion when people give the name Jupiter to the Supreme God. Some are in the habit of defending their errors with this excuse: when they have been convinced that God is one, since they cannot deny it, they say that they do worship him, but that it is their pleasure to call him Jupiter. What could be more absurd than that? Jupiter is never worshipped without his wife and his daughter being worshipped along with him. That shows what he really is. And it is not right for that name to be carried over to a place where there is no Minerva and no Juno.

Why should I add that the proper meaning of this name expresses a human power and not a divine one? Cicero explains the names Jupiter and Juno as being derived from helping; Jupiter is so called as if he were a helping father — a name badly suited to God. Helping is what a man does when he brings some aid to a stranger, in a case where the benefit is small. Nobody begs God to help him; people beg him to preserve them, to give them life and safety, which is a far greater and more important thing than helping.

And since we are speaking of a father: no father is said to help his sons when he fathers them or brings them up. That word is too small to denote the size of what a father gives. How much less does it fit God, who is our true Father, by whom we exist and to whom we belong entirely, by whom we are formed, given life and given light, who grants us life, gives us safety, and supplies us with every kind of food. A man who thinks he is merely being helped by God has no grasp of what God’s gifts are. So the man who runs down the greatness of the supreme power under the name of Jupiter is not only ignorant but irreverent.

Well then: if we have proved, both from his deeds and from his character, that Jupiter was a man and reigned on earth, all that is left is for us to look into his death as well. Ennius, in his Sacred History, having described everything Jupiter did in his life, ends like this:

“Then Jupiter, when he had made the circuit of the earth five times, and had handed out governments to all his friends and relatives, and left laws to men, and provided them with a settled way of life and with grain, and given them many other benefits, and had been honored with undying glory and remembrance, left lasting memorials to his friends. And when his life was nearly spent, he changed his life in Crete and departed to the gods. And the Curetes, his sons, took charge of him and paid him honors. His tomb is in Crete, in the town of Knossos — and Vesta is said to have founded that city — and on his tomb there is an inscription in old Greek letters, ‘Zan Kronou,’ which in Latin is ‘Jupiter the son of Saturn.’”

This, without any doubt, is not handed down by poets but by writers of ancient events; and these things are so true that they are confirmed by some verses of the Sibyls, to this effect:

Cicero, in his book on the nature of the gods, after saying that three Jupiters were counted up by the theologians, adds that the third was the Cretan, the son of Saturn, and that his tomb is shown on that island. How, then, can a god be alive in one place and dead in another — have a temple in one place and a tomb in another? Let the Romans know, then, that their Capitol, which is the chief head of everything they publicly revere, is nothing but an empty monument.

Let us come now to his father, who reigned before him, and who perhaps had more in him, since he is said to have been born from the meeting of two such great elements. Let us see what there was in him that was worthy of a god — especially since the golden age is said to be his, because in his reign there was justice on the earth. I find something in him that was not in his son. For what suits the character of a god so well as a just government and an age of reverence?

But when I reflect, on the same principle, that he is somebody’s son, I cannot regard him as the Supreme God. I see that there is something more ancient than he is: heaven and earth. But what I am looking for is a God beyond whom nothing at all exists, who is the source and origin of everything. He must of necessity exist, the one who framed heaven itself and laid the foundations of the earth. And if Saturn was born from these, as they suppose, how can he be the chief God, when he owes his existence to another? Or who presided over the universe before Saturn was born?

But this, as I said a moment ago, is a fiction of the poets. It was impossible for the senseless elements, separated as they are by so great a distance, to come together and give birth to a son, or for the son so born not to resemble his parents at all but to have a shape his parents did not have.

So let us ask what truth lies hidden under this figure. Minucius Felix, in the book that carries the title Octavius, alleged these proofs:

“Saturn, when he had been driven out by his son and had come into Italy, was called the son of Caelus — that is, of heaven — because we are in the habit of saying that people whose excellence we admire, or who have turned up unexpectedly, have fallen out of the sky; and he was called the son of Earth because we call those who are born from unknown parents sons of the earth.”

These things do have some likeness to the truth, but they are not true, because it is evident that he was regarded that way even during his reign. He might rather have argued this way: that Saturn, being a very powerful king, in order that the memory of his parents might be preserved, gave their names to heaven and earth, which had been called by other names before. That is why we know that names were applied to mountains and rivers in the same way. When the poets speak of the offspring of Atlas, or of the river Inachus, they are not saying flatly that men could possibly be born from lifeless objects; what they undoubtedly mean is the people who were born from those men who, either during their lives or after their deaths, gave their names to mountains or rivers.

That was a common practice among the ancients, and among the Greeks above all. So we have heard of seas that took the names of the men who fell into them: the Aegean, the Icarian, and the Hellespont. In Latium too, Aventinus gave his name to the hill where he was buried, and Tiberinus, or Tiber, gave his name to the river he drowned in. No wonder, then, if the names of those who had fathered the most powerful kings were given to heaven and earth.

So it turns out that Saturn was not born from heaven, which is impossible, but from that man who bore the name Uranus. And Trismegistus is a witness to the truth of this; for when he said that very few men had ever existed in whom there was complete learning, he named among them, by name, his own relatives — Uranus, Saturn, and Mercury.

And because he did not know these things, he gave a different account of the matter; how he might have argued instead, I have shown. Now I will say in what manner, at what time, and by whom this was done — for it was not Saturn who did it, but Jupiter. Ennius relates it this way in his Sacred History:

“Then Pan leads him to the mountain that is called the pillar of heaven. When he had climbed up there, he surveyed the lands far and wide, and there on that mountain he builds an altar to Caelus; and Jupiter was the first who offered sacrifice on that altar. In that place he looked up at the sky, which is the name we now call it by, and at what was above the world, which used to be called the upper air; and he gave to the sky its name from the name of his grandfather. And Jupiter in his prayer was the first to give the name heaven to what had been called the upper air, and he burned whole the victim that he offered there in sacrifice.”

And this is not the only place where Jupiter is found to have offered sacrifice. Caesar also, in his Aratus, relates that Aglaosthenes says that when Jupiter was setting out from the island of Naxos against the Titans and was offering sacrifice on the shore, an eagle flew to him as an omen, and that the victor received it as a good token and placed it under his own protection. But the Sacred History testifies that even beforehand an eagle had settled on his head and marked out the kingdom for him. To whom, then, could Jupiter have offered sacrifice, except to his grandfather Caelus, who, according to what Euhemerus says, died in Oceania and was buried in the town of Aulatia?