One God and Dead Kings

… what can look useful, and what plain? But I will do as much as the subject allows to compress what is spread out and to cut short what runs long — and to do it in such a way that in a work whose business is to bring the truth to light there is no lack of material to make it full, and no lack of clearness to make it understood.

The first question that arises is this: is there any providence that made the world, or that governs it? That there is, nobody doubts. Almost all the philosophers, except the school of Epicurus, speak with one voice and hold one opinion — that the world could not have been made without a designer, and cannot go on existing without a ruler. So Epicurus stands refuted not only by the most learned men but by the testimony and the plain perception of every mortal alive. For who can be in doubt about a providence when he sees that the heavens and the earth have been so arranged, and everything so regulated, that they are perfectly fitted not only for wonderful beauty and ornament but for the use of men and the convenience of the other living creatures? What exists according to a plan cannot have had its beginning without a plan. It is certain, then, that there is a providence. [b]

Another question follows: is there one God, or more than one? This one carries a great deal of ambiguity, since it is not only individuals who differ among themselves but whole peoples and nations. But anyone who follows where reason leads will understand that there cannot be more than one Lord, and cannot be more than one Father. For if the God who made all things is also Lord and Father, he must be one only, so that the same being is the head and the source of everything. Nor can the sum of things hold together unless everything is referred to one person — unless one hand holds the rudder, one guides the reins, one mind, as it were, directs all the limbs of the body. If a swarm of bees has many kings, they will die off or be scattered abroad, since [c]

If a herd has several leaders, they will fight until one wins the mastery. If an army has many commanders, the soldiers cannot obey, since the orders given are different; and the commanders cannot keep unity among themselves either, since each looks after his own interests as his temper suggests. So in this commonwealth of the world, unless there were one ruler who was also its founder, either the whole mass would come apart, or it could never have been put together at all.

Besides, the whole of authority could not belong to many gods at once, since each of them keeps his own duties and his own privileges to himself. Not one of them, then, can be called almighty, which is God’s true title, since he will be able to bring off only what depends on himself, and will not venture to attempt what depends on somebody else. Vulcan will not claim water for himself, nor Neptune fire. Ceres will not claim any acquaintance with the crafts, nor Minerva with the crops. Mercury will lay no claim to weapons, nor Mars to the lyre. Jupiter will not claim medicine, nor Aesculapius the thunderbolt — he will find it easier to put up with a thunderbolt thrown by someone else than to brandish one himself. If, then, individuals cannot do everything, they have less strength and less power; and the one to be regarded as God is the one who can accomplish the whole of it, not the one who can accomplish only the smallest part of the whole.

There is, then, one God: perfect, eternal, incorruptible, incapable of suffering, subject to no circumstance and no power, himself possessing all things and ruling all things, whom the human mind can neither take the measure of in thought nor a mortal tongue describe in speech. He is too high and too great to be grasped by a man’s thought or put into a man’s words. In short — to say nothing of the prophets, the heralds of the one God — poets too, and philosophers, and the prophetic women give their testimony that God is one. Orpheus speaks of the God who surpasses all, who made the heaven and the sun along with the other heavenly bodies, and who made the earth and the seas. Our own Virgil calls the Supreme God now a spirit and now a mind, and says that it is poured into the world’s limbs and sets the body of the whole world in motion; and that God runs through the heights of heaven, the stretches of the sea, and the lands, and that every living creature draws its life from him. Even Ovid was not ignorant that the world was made ready by God, whom he calls sometimes the framer of all things and sometimes the maker of the world. [g]

But let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is reckoned more certain than the poets’. Plato asserts God’s sole rule, saying that there is but one God, by whom the world was made ready and finished in wonderful order. Aristotle, his pupil, admits that there is one mind that presides over the world. Antisthenes says that there is one who is God by nature, the governor of the whole system. It would take a long time to recount what has been said about the Supreme God by Thales, or by Pythagoras and Anaximenes before him, or afterward by the Stoics Cleanthes and Chrysippus and Zeno, or among our own people by Seneca following the Stoics, and by Cicero himself — for all of them attempted to define what God is, and declared that the world is ruled by him alone, and that he is not subject to any nature, since all nature takes its origin from him. [j]

Hermes, who earned the name Trismegistus by his character and his knowledge of many arts, whose teaching is older than the philosophers’, and who is honored as a god by the Egyptians, asserts the majesty of the one God with endless praises. He calls him Lord and Father, and says that he has no name, because being alone he has no need of a proper name, and that he has no parents, since he exists of himself and by himself. Writing to his son he begins like this:

“To understand God is difficult; to describe him in speech is impossible, even for a man who is able to understand him. For the perfect cannot be taken in by the imperfect, nor the invisible by the visible.”

It remains to speak of the prophetic women. Varro relates that there were ten Sibyls: the first of the Persians, the second the Libyan, the third the Delphian, the fourth the Cimmerian, the fifth the Erythraean, the sixth the Samian, the seventh the Cumaean, the eighth the Hellespontine, the ninth the Phrygian, the tenth the Tiburtine, who goes by the name Albunea. Of all of these, he says, only the Cumaean’s three books contain the destinies of the Romans and are counted sacred; books of almost all the rest exist and are commonly kept as separate works, but they are entitled, as though under one name, the Sibylline books — except that the Erythraean, who is said to have lived at the time of the Trojan war, put her own name in her book. The writings of the others are jumbled together. [m]

All the Sibyls I have spoken of — except the Cumaean, whom none but the Quindecemviri are allowed to read — bear witness that there is but one God: the ruler, the maker, the parent, begotten of no one but sprung from himself, who was from all ages and will be to all ages, and who therefore alone deserves to be worshiped, alone to be feared, alone to be held in awe by every living being. I have left their testimonies out because I could not cut them down; but if you want to see them, you must go to the books themselves. Now let us take up what is left.

These testimonies, then, so many and so weighty, plainly teach that there is one government in the world and one power, whose origin cannot be imagined nor its force described. It is foolish, therefore, to suppose that the gods were born out of marriages. The sexes themselves, and the intercourse between them, were given to mortals by God for this reason: that every race should be kept going by a succession of offspring. But what need have immortals of sex or of succession, when neither pleasure nor death touches them? Those who are counted as gods, then, since it is plain that they were born as men and fathered others, were plainly mortal. They were believed to be gods because, being great and powerful kings, they earned divine honors after death on account of the benefits they had conferred on men; and once temples and statues had been put up to them, their memory was kept and celebrated as the memory of immortals.

But though almost every nation is convinced that they are gods, their actions, as the poets and the historians alike report them, declare that they were men. Who does not know the times Hercules lived in? He sailed with the Argonauts on their expedition, and he stormed Troy and killed Laomedon, Priam’s father, for breaking his word. From that time a little more than fifteen hundred years are counted. He is said not even to have been born honorably, but to have been sprung from Alcmena by adultery, and to have been given over himself to his father’s vices. He never kept away from women, or from males. He crossed the whole world, not so much for the sake of glory as of lust, and not so much to kill wild beasts as to father children. And though he was never beaten, he was triumphed over by Omphale alone: he handed his club and his lion skin over to her, and, dressed in a woman’s clothes and crouching at a woman’s feet, he took his day’s task to do. Afterward, in a fit of madness, he killed his young children and his wife Megara. At last he put on a garment sent by his wife Deianira, and as he was dying of the sores it raised, unable to bear the pain, he built himself a pyre on Mount Oeta and burned himself alive. So it works out that although his excellence might have got him believed to be a god, these things get him believed to have been a man. [o]

Tarquitius relates that Aesculapius was born of uncertain parents, and that for this reason he was exposed; that hunters picked him up, that he was fed at the teats of a bitch, and that he was handed over to Chiron for his schooling. He lived at Epidaurus, and was buried at Cynosurae, as Cicero says, when he had been killed by lightning. But his father Apollo did not think it beneath him to take charge of another man’s flock in order to get a wife; and when he had killed by accident a boy he loved, he wrote his own laments on a flower. Mars, a man of the greatest bravery, was not clear of the charge of adultery, since he was made a public spectacle, chained up together with the adulteress. [r]

Castor and Pollux carried off other men’s brides, and did not get away with it; Homer bears witness to their death and their burial, not with a poet’s faith but with a plain man’s. Mercury, who fathered Androgynus by his affair with Venus, deserved to be a god because he invented the lyre and the wrestling ground. Father Bacchus, after subduing India as its conqueror, came by chance to Crete and saw Ariadne on the shore, whom Theseus had raped and abandoned. Set on fire with love, he took her in marriage to himself, and set her crown, as the poets say, where all could see it among the stars. The mother of the gods herself, living on in Phrygia after her husband’s banishment and death, a widow and an old woman, fell in love with a beautiful young man; and because he was not faithful to her, she cut him and left him a half-man. That is why she takes pleasure to this day in the Galli as her priests.

Where did Ceres get Proserpine, except out of debauchery? Where did Latona get her twins, except out of a crime? Venus, once she had been the object of the lusts of gods and men alike, invented the trade of the prostitute when she was queen in Cyprus, and ordered women to sell themselves, so that she should not be the only one with a bad name. Were the virgins themselves — Minerva and Diana — chaste? Where, then, did Erichthonius come from? Did Vulcan spill his seed on the ground, and was a man born out of it like a mushroom? Or why did Diana banish Hippolytus to some out-of-the-way place, or hand him over to a woman, where he might live out his life alone among unknown groves and, with his name now changed, be called Virbius? What do such things mean but filth, which the poets do not venture to admit outright? [w]

But as for the king and father of all these, Jupiter, whom they believe to hold the chief power in heaven — what power did he have, who drove his father Saturn out of his kingdom and chased him with weapons as he fled? What self-restraint did he have, who indulged every kind of lust? He made Alcmena and Leda, the wives of great men, infamous by his adultery. Taken with the beauty of a boy, he carried him off by force while the boy was out hunting and thinking of a man’s business, so that he might use him as a woman. Why should I mention what he did to unmarried girls? How great a crowd of them there was, the number of his sons shows. In the case of Thetis alone he was more temperate. For it had been foretold that the son she should bear would be more powerful than his father, and so he fought his own love down, to keep anyone greater than himself from being born. He knew, then, that he was not perfect in virtue, greatness, and power, since he was afraid of the very thing he had himself done to his father. Why, then, is he called best and greatest, when he both dirtied himself with faults, which belongs to a man who is unjust and bad, and feared someone greater than himself, which belongs to a man who is weak and inferior? [z]

But someone will say that the poets made these things up. That is not what poets do — not to invent in such a way that you fabricate the whole thing, but so that you cover the actions themselves with a figure and, as it were, with a colored veil. Poetic license has this limit: not that it may invent the whole, which belongs to a man who is false and senseless, but that it may change something in a way that still makes sense. They said that Jupiter changed himself into a shower of gold, to deceive Danae. What is a shower of gold? Gold coins, plainly. He offered them in quantity and poured them into her lap, and by that bribe he broke down the weakness of a young girl’s mind. They speak of a shower of iron in the same way, when they mean to signify a hail of javelins. He carried off his kept boy on an eagle. What is the eagle? A legion, truly, since the figure of that bird is the legion’s standard. He carried Europa across the sea on a bull. What is the bull? Clearly a ship, one whose guardian image was fashioned in the shape of a bull. And so the daughter of Inachus was not turned into a cow, and did not swim across as one; she escaped Juno’s anger in a ship that had the form of a cow. And at last, once she had been conveyed to Egypt, she became Isis, whose voyage is celebrated on a fixed day in memory of her flight. [ab]

You see, then, that the poets did not invent everything, and that they gave a figure to some things, so that when they told the truth they might add something like divinity to the men they called gods — as they did with their kingdoms too. When they say that Jupiter drew by lot the kingdom of Caelus, they mean either Mount Olympus, where ancient stories say that Saturn, and after him Jupiter, lived, or that part of the East which is, as it were, higher, because the light comes up from there; whereas the region of the West is lower, which is why they say that Pluto obtained the lower regions. The sea was given to Neptune because he held the seacoast, with all the islands. Many things are colored in this way by the poets, and those who do not know it accuse them of lying — but only in words. In fact they believe the poets, since they so shape the images of the gods that when they make some male and some female, and admit that some are married, some parents, and some children, they plainly agree with the poets; for such relations cannot exist without intercourse and the begetting of children. [ae]

But let us leave the poets and come to history, which is supported both by the credibility of the facts and by the antiquity of the times. Euhemerus was a Messenian, a very old writer, who gave an account of the origin of Jupiter and of his exploits and of all his descendants, gathered from the sacred inscriptions of ancient temples. He also traced out the parents of the other gods, their countries, their actions, their commands, and their deaths, and even their graves. Ennius translated this history into Latin, and his words are these: [af]

“As these things are written, so is the origin and the kinship of Jupiter and his brothers; in this way it has been handed down to us in the sacred writing.”

The same Euhemerus goes on to relate that Jupiter, when he had gone around the world five times, and had handed out governments to his friends and relatives, and had given men laws, and had done them many other services, was endowed with undying glory and everlasting remembrance, and ended his life in Crete and departed to the gods; and that his tomb is in Crete, in the town of Knossos, and that on it is cut in old Greek letters Zan Kronou, which means Jupiter the son of Saturn. From the things I have set down, then, it is plain that he was a man and reigned on the earth.

Let us pass on to earlier things, so that we may find where the whole error began. Saturn is said to have been born of Caelus and Terra. That is plainly incredible; but there is a certain reason why it is told that way, and a man who does not know the reason throws it out as a fable. That Uranus was the father of Saturn both Hermes affirms and the sacred history teaches. When Trismegistus said that there were very few men of complete learning, he counted among them his own relatives — Uranus, Saturn, and Mercury. Euhemerus relates that this same Uranus was the first to reign on earth, using these words: [ah]

“In the beginning Caelus was the first to hold the chief power on earth. He set that kingdom up and prepared it for himself together with his brothers.”