How Men Became Gods

Since all this makes it clear that they were men, it is not hard to see how they came to be called gods. If there were no kings before Saturn and Uranus — because so few people were alive then, and they lived a country life with no one ruling them — then there is no doubt that in those days men began to exalt the king himself, and his whole household, with the highest praise and with honors nobody had thought of before, so that they even called them gods. Perhaps men who were still rough and simple really believed it, on account of the king’s remarkable qualities; perhaps it was flattery of the power standing in front of them, as usually happens; or perhaps it was gratitude for the benefits by which he had brought order into their lives and made them civilized. Later on the kings themselves, since they were loved by the people whose life they had civilized, left a sense of loss behind them when they died. So men made images of them, to take some comfort in looking at the likeness; and going further still, out of love for what the man had deserved, they began to reverence the memory of the dead, both so that they might look grateful for his services and so that they might draw his successors on toward wanting to rule well. [a]

Cicero teaches this in his treatise On the Nature of the Gods: “But the life of men, and their dealings with one another, led them to lift up to heaven by reputation and goodwill the men who were outstanding in the benefits they gave. This is how Hercules, how Castor and Pollux, Aesculapius and Liber, were ranked with the gods.” And in another place: “In most states it can be seen that, in order to rouse courage — so that the bravest men would face danger more readily for their country’s sake — their memory was consecrated with the honor paid to the immortal gods.” It was doubtless on this account that the Romans consecrated their Caesars, and the Moors their kings. So step by step religious honors began to be paid to them. Those who had known them taught the practice first to their own children and grandchildren, and afterwards to all their descendants; and these great kings, because their names were famous, were honored in every province.

But separate peoples privately honored the founders of their nation or their city with the highest reverence — men outstanding for bravery, or women admirable for their chastity. So the Egyptians honored Isis, the Moors Juba, the Macedonians Cabirus, the Carthaginians Uranus, the Latins Faunus, the Sabines Sancus, the Romans Quirinus. In the same way Athens worshiped Minerva, Samos Juno, Paphos Venus, Lemnos Vulcan, Naxos Liber, and Delos Apollo. That is how all sorts of different sacred rites came to be taken up among different peoples and countries: men want to show gratitude to their rulers, and they can find no other honors to give the dead. What is more, the loyalty of the successors added a great deal to the mistake. To make themselves look as if they were born of a divine line, they paid divine honors to their own parents, and ordered that everyone else pay them too. Can anyone doubt how the honors paid to the gods were set up, when he reads in Virgil the orders Aeneas gives his companions?

And Virgil credits him not only with immortality but with power over the winds:

Liber and Pan, Mercury and Apollo did exactly the same thing for Jupiter, and afterwards their own successors did the same for them. The poets added their weight as well, lifting them to heaven by poems written to give pleasure — the way people flatter kings with false praise even when the kings are wicked. This evil began with the Greeks. Their frivolity, equipped with skill and abundance of speech, stirred up clouds of falsehood past believing. And so it was out of admiration for the Greeks that other peoples first took up their sacred rites, and handed them on to every nation. It is for this empty folly that the Sibyl rebukes them:

Marcus Tullius Cicero was not only a finished orator but a philosopher — he alone was a real imitator of Plato — and in the book in which he consoled himself over the death of his daughter, he did not hesitate to say that the gods worshiped in public were men. His testimony ought to count for all the more because he held the priesthood of the augurs, and testifies that he himself worships and reveres those same gods. And so within the compass of a few lines he has handed us two facts at once. For when he announced that he meant to consecrate an image of his daughter in the same way the ancients consecrated theirs, he both taught that they were dead and showed where a hollow superstition came from. He says: “Since in fact we see many men and women among the number of the gods, and revere their shrines, held in the greatest honor in the cities and in the countryside, let us agree with the wisdom of those men to whose talents and inventions we owe it that life is thoroughly furnished with laws and institutions and set on a firm footing. And if any living being was worthy of being consecrated, it was certainly this one. If the offspring of Cadmus, or of Amphitryon, or of Tyndareus deserved to be carried up to heaven by fame, the same honor unquestionably belongs to her. And this I will do; and with the gods’ approval I will place you, the best and most learned of all women, in their company, and consecrate you to the good opinion of all mankind.”

Someone may say that Cicero was raving from too much grief. But in truth the whole of that speech — finished in its learning, in its examples, and in the very style of it — gave no sign of a mind out of order, but of steadiness and judgment; and this particular sentence shows no sign of grief at all. I do not think he could have written with such range and fullness and ornament if his grief had not already been eased by reason itself, by the consolation of his friends, and by length of time. Why should I bring up what he says in his books on the Republic, or in the one on glory? In his treatise on the Laws, in which he wished to set out — following Plato’s example — the laws he thought a just and wise state would use, he laid this down about religion: “Let them reverence the gods, both those who have always been counted gods of heaven, and those whose services to men have placed them in heaven: Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, Pollux, and Quirinus.” And in the Tusculan Disputations, when he had said that heaven was almost entirely filled with the human race, he said: “If I were to try to look into the ancient records, and to dig out of them what the writers of Greece have handed down, then even those who are ranked highest as gods would be found to have gone to heaven from among us. Ask whose graves are pointed out in Greece. Remember, since you are initiated, what is handed down in the mysteries — and then at last you will understand how widely this belief is spread.”

He was appealing, plainly, to what Atticus knew in his own conscience: that from the mysteries themselves it could be understood that everyone who is worshiped was once a man. And while he admitted this without hesitation in the case of Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor and Pollux, he was afraid to say the same openly about Apollo and Jupiter, their fathers, and likewise about Neptune, Vulcan, Mars and Mercury, whom he called the greater gods. So instead he says that this belief is widely spread, meaning us to understand the same about Jupiter and the other older gods. For if the ancients consecrated the memory of their dead in the same way that he says he will consecrate his daughter’s image and name, then those who mourn may be pardoned, but those who believe it cannot be. Who is so far out of his senses as to believe that heaven is opened to the dead at the consent and pleasure of a witless crowd? Or that anyone can give another what he does not have himself?

Among the Romans Julius was made a god, because a guilty man, Antony, was pleased to have it so; and Quirinus was made a god, because it seemed good to shepherds — the one having done away with his twin brother, the other with his own country. But if Antony had not been consul, Gaius Caesar would have gone without even the honor paid to an ordinary dead man, for all his services to the state; and that too on the advice of his father-in-law Piso and his relative Lucius Caesar, who opposed holding the funeral at all, and on the advice of the consul Dolabella, who pulled down the column in the forum — that is, Caesar’s monument — and purified the place. For Ennius declares that Romulus was missed by his people. He has them speak like this, in grief for the king they had lost: “O Romulus, Romulus, tell us — what a guardian of your country the gods brought forth in you! You brought us out into the regions of light. O father, O begetter, O bloodline sprung from the gods.” It was because they missed him so much that they more readily believed the lies of Julius Proculus, who was put up to it by the senators. He announced to the people that he had seen the king in a form grander than a man’s, and that the king had given orders for a temple to be built in his honor, since he was a god and was called by the name Quirinus. By that one stroke he both persuaded the people that Romulus had gone to the gods and freed the senate from the suspicion of having killed the king.

I could be content with what I have already set out, but there is still much that the work I have undertaken requires. By destroying the main part of these superstitions I have taken away the whole of them; still, it suits me to follow up the parts that remain, and to refute more fully a conviction so deeply set, so that men may at last be ashamed of their errors and change their minds. This is a great undertaking, and worthy of a man. As Lucretius says, “I proceed to release the minds of men from the tight knots of superstition.” And he himself was unable to do it, because he brought forward nothing true. This is our task, who both assert that the true God exists and refute the false ones. [l]

So then: people who hold that the poets invented the stories about the gods, and yet believe that female deities exist and worship them, are unknowingly brought back to the very thing they had denied — that the gods have sexual intercourse and give birth. For two sexes cannot have been instituted for any purpose except reproduction. But once a difference of sex is granted, they fail to see that conception follows from it. And that cannot be the case with a God. But let the matter stand as they imagine it. They say there are sons of Jupiter and of the other gods. Then new gods are being born, and born daily at that, for gods are not outdone by men in fruitfulness. It follows that everything is full of gods beyond counting, since of course none of them dies. The number of human beings is past belief and past estimating, and they at least must die once they are born; so what are we to suppose about gods who have been born through so many ages and have stayed immortal? How is it, then, that so few are worshiped? Unless we are somehow to think that the gods have two sexes not for the sake of reproduction but for mere gratification, and that they practice the things men are ashamed to do and to submit to.

But when any are said to be born from any, it follows that they always go on being born, if they were ever born at all; and if they stopped being born at some point, it is only fitting that we should be told why they stopped, or when. Seneca, in his books on moral philosophy, asks — not without some wit — “What is the reason why Jupiter, whom the poets present as the greatest of lechers, stopped fathering children? Had he turned sixty, and was the Papian law holding him back? Or did he obtain the privileges that go with having three children? Or did the thought finally occur to him, ‘What you have done to another, you may expect from another’ — and is he afraid that someone may do to him what he did to Saturn?”

But let those who maintain that these are gods see how they can answer the argument I am about to bring forward. If there are two sexes of gods, married intercourse follows; and if that takes place, they must have houses, for they are not so far without virtue and a sense of shame as to do it out in the open and indiscriminately, the way we see the brute animals do. If they have houses, it follows that they also have cities; and for this we have the authority of Ovid, who says, “The common gods live scattered in various places; here at the front the powerful and famous inhabitants of heaven have set their own homes.” If they have cities, they will have fields as well. And who cannot see what comes next — that they plow and work their land? And this is done for the sake of food. Therefore they are mortal.

The argument carries the same weight run backwards. If they have no fields, they have no cities; and if they have no cities, they are also without houses. If they have no houses, they have no married intercourse; and if they are without that, they have no female sex. But we do see that there are females among the gods. Therefore they are not gods. Let anyone do away with this argument who can. One thing follows the other so closely that it is impossible not to admit these last conclusions. But no one will refute even the earlier argument. Of the two sexes the one is stronger and the other weaker: males are more robust, females more frail. But a god is not liable to frailty; therefore there is no female sex. And to this is added that last conclusion of the earlier argument — that there are no gods, since there are females among the gods as well.