The Gods Rome Made

I have described the religious rites that all nations share. Now I will speak about the gods the Romans keep to themselves. Everyone knows that the wife of Faustulus — the nurse of Romulus and Remus, in whose honor the festival of the Larentinalia was set up — was a prostitute. That is why she was called Lupa, and shown in the shape of a wild animal. Faula and Flora were prostitutes too. One was the mistress of Hercules, as Verrius reports; the other made a great fortune with her body, left it to the Roman people in her will, and for that reason the games called the Floralia are held in her honor. [a]

Tatius dedicated a statue of a woman that had been found in the main sewer and gave it the name of the goddess Cloacina. When the Gauls besieged Rome, the Romans made their catapults out of women’s hair, and for that they put up an altar and a temple to Venus Calva. They put up another to Jupiter Pistor, because he had told them in a dream to bake every scrap of their grain into loaves and throw it down at the enemy; and when they had done it, the Gauls gave up hope of starving them out and abandoned the siege. Tullus Hostilius made gods out of Fear and Pallor. Mind is worshiped as well — though if they had any, I doubt they would ever have thought it needed worshiping. Marcellus started Honor and Courage.

The senate set up other false gods of the same kind: Hope, Faith, Harmony, Peace, Chastity, Devotion. All of these ought really to live in people’s minds, and instead they have been falsely housed inside walls. They have no substantial existence outside a human being; still, I would rather see them worshiped than Blight or Fever, which deserve to be cursed rather than consecrated — or Fornax with her holy ovens, or Stercutus, who first showed people how to enrich the ground with manure, or the goddess Muta, who gave birth to the Lares, or Cunina, who presides over babies’ cradles, or Caca, who told Hercules where his stolen cattle were so that he could kill her own brother. How many other grotesque and ridiculous inventions there are — it is painful even to speak of them. [g]

Still, I do not want to pass over Terminus, since the story goes that he would not give way even to Jupiter, though he was nothing but an unworked stone. They take him to be the keeper of boundaries, and public prayers are offered to him, asking him to hold the stone on the Capitol immovable and to guard and enlarge the boundaries of the Roman empire.

Faunus was the first in Latium to bring in these follies. He set up blood sacrifices to his grandfather Saturn, wanted his father Picus worshiped as a god, placed his wife Fatua Fauna — who was also his sister — among the gods, and named her the Good Goddess. Then at Rome, Numa loaded those rough country people down with new superstitions. He set up priesthoods and parceled the gods out among families and clans, so as to draw the fierce temper of the people away from making war. So Lucilius, mocking the folly of men who are slaves to empty superstitions, wrote these lines: [i]

Cicero too, writing on the nature of the gods, complains that false and invented gods have been brought in, and that out of this have come false opinions, unsettling errors, and superstitions fit for an old woman. His judgment ought to be weighed more heavily than other men’s, because the man who said it was both a philosopher and a priest.

We have talked about the gods; now we will talk about the rites and practices of their worship. A human being used to be slaughtered for the Jupiter of Cyprus, a rite Teucer established. In the same way the Tauri used to offer up strangers to Diana, and Jupiter of Latium was appeased with human blood. And before Saturn, men sixty years old were thrown from a bridge into the Tiber, on the strength of an oracle of Apollo. The Carthaginians not only offered infants to this same Saturn; after they were beaten by the Sicilians, they sacrificed two hundred sons of their noble families to make amends. No gentler are the offerings still made today to the Great Mother and to Bellona, in which the priests make their offering not with someone else’s blood but with their own: they mutilate themselves, and so stop being men without crossing over to the women; or they cut their shoulders and spatter their own blood over those loathsome altars. But these are the cruel rites. [m]

Now for the mild ones. The rites of Isis show nothing except how she lost and found her little son, who is called Osiris. First her priests and attendants shave every part of their bodies, beat their chests, and howl and mourn and search, acting out how the mother felt; then the boy is found by Cynocephalus. So the mourning ends in gladness. The mystery of Ceres is much the same: torches are lit, Proserpina is searched for all night, and when she has been found the whole rite ends with congratulations and torches thrown about. The people of Lampsacus sacrifice a donkey to Priapus as the fitting victim. Lindus is a town on Rhodes where the rites in honor of Hercules are performed with abuse. For when Hercules had taken a ploughman’s oxen and slaughtered them, the man avenged the injury by cursing him; and afterwards, when he had been made priest himself, it was laid down that he and the priests after him should perform the sacrifices with the same abuse.

But the mystery of the Cretan Jupiter acts out how he was taken away from his father and how he was raised. The goat stands beside him, the goat at whose teats Amalthea fed the boy. The rites of the mother of the gods show the same thing. Because the Corybantes drowned out the crying of the boy then by the clashing of their helmets and the banging of their shields, that scene is repeated now in the rites; only cymbals are beaten instead of helmets and drums instead of shields, so that Saturn will not hear the child cry.

These are the mysteries of the gods. Now let us also look into where the superstitions came from, so that we can track down who set them up and when. Didymus, in the books titled On the Explanation of Pindar, reports that Melisseus was king of the Cretans; that his daughters were Amalthea and Melissa, who fed Jupiter on goat’s milk and honey; and that he brought in new rites and ceremonies of worship and was the first man to sacrifice to gods — that is, to Vesta, who is called Tellus. This is why the poet says: [s]

And afterwards he sacrificed to the mother of the gods. But Euhemerus, in his Sacred History, says that Jupiter himself, once he had taken power, put up temples in his own honor in many places. As he went about the world, he attached the chiefs of each people to himself by friendship and the bond of hospitality, and so that this would be remembered he ordered temples to be built to him and yearly festivals to be held by the men tied to him in that league of hospitality. In this way he spread the worship of himself through every land.

When they lived is easy enough to work out. Thallus writes in his history that Belus, king of the Assyrians — the one the Babylonians worship, who was the contemporary and friend of Saturn — lived three hundred and twenty-two years before the Trojan war, and it is fourteen hundred and seventy years since the taking of Troy. From this it is clear that no more than eighteen hundred years have passed since the human race went wrong by setting up new forms of divine worship.

The poets are right, then, to say that the golden age of Saturn’s reign was changed. In those days no gods were worshiped; men knew one God only. Once they made themselves subject to frail, earthly things and worshiped images of wood and bronze and stone, the change came from the golden age to the age of iron. Having lost the knowledge of God, and having broken that one bond of human society, they began to prey on one another, to plunder and to subdue. But if they would lift their eyes and look at God, who raised them upright so that they could see the sky and see him, they would never bend down and lie flat worshiping earthly things. Lucretius rebukes that folly sharply: [v]

So they tremble, and do not see how foolish it is to fear what you made yourself, or to hope for any protection from things that are mute and senseless, that neither see nor hear the person praying to them. What majesty, then, or what divine power can they have, when it lay in a man’s power not to make them at all, or to make them into something else — and it still does? They can be damaged, and they could be carried off by thieves, if human law and human guarding were not protecting them. Does a man look sane to you who sacrifices his choicest animals to gods like these, dedicates gifts to them, and offers expensive clothing, as though things that cannot move could wear it? Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily had good reason, then, to plunder the gods of Greece and laugh at them once he had taken the country as a conqueror. After the sacrilege he had committed he sailed home to Sicily with a fair wind and held his kingdom into old age, and the gods he had injured were not able to punish him.

How much better to despise these empty things and turn to God — to keep the standing you received from God, to keep your own name! For this is why a human being is called anthrōpos: because he looks upward. And the man who really looks upward is the one who looks up to the true and living God in heaven, who searches for the Maker and Parent of his soul not only with his senses and his mind but with his face and his eyes raised as well. But the man who makes himself a slave to low and earthly things is plainly putting what is beneath him above himself. He himself is the workmanship of God, and an image is the workmanship of man, and human workmanship cannot be ranked above the divine: as God is the parent of the man, so the man is the parent of the statue.

So a man who worships what he made himself is a fool with no sense in him. The inventor of that detestable and stupid craft was Prometheus, son of Iapetus, the uncle of Jupiter. When Jupiter had first obtained supreme power and wanted to establish himself as a god and to found temples, he was looking for someone able to copy the human figure. Prometheus was alive then, and he shaped the likeness of a man out of stiff clay so closely that the newness and cleverness of the craft was a wonder. In the end the men of his own time, and the poets after them, handed him down as the maker of a real, living man — just as we, whenever we praise a well-made statue, say that it lives and breathes. He was the inventor of images in clay. Those who came after him followed his lead, carving them out of marble and casting them in bronze; and in time ornament of gold and ivory was added, so that not only the likeness but the sheer glitter would dazzle the eyes. Trapped that way by beauty, and forgetting what real majesty is, beings with senses judged that senseless things, beings with reason that unreasoning things, living beings that lifeless things, were to be worshiped and revered by them.

Now let us also refute the men who take the elements of the world for gods — the sky, the sun, the moon. Not knowing the Maker of these things, they admire and worship the works themselves. And this mistake does not belong to the uneducated only; philosophers make it too. The Stoics hold that all the heavenly bodies are to be counted among the gods, since they all have fixed and regular motions, by which they keep the turn of one season into the next with complete constancy. But then they have no motion of their own will, since they obey laws laid down for them — plainly not by any sense of their own, but by the workmanship of the supreme Creator, who so ordered them that they should run courses that never stray and circuits that never change, and by these vary the alternation of day and night, of summer and winter. [y]

But if men admire what these bodies do, if they admire their courses, their brightness, their regularity, their beauty, they ought to have understood how much more beautiful, more splendid, and more powerful than these is their maker and designer himself, who is God. Instead they measured what is divine by the objects that fall under human sight, not knowing that objects that come within sight cannot be eternal, and that what is eternal cannot be made out by mortal eyes.

One subject remains, and it is the last. It usually happens, as we read in the histories, that the gods appear to have displayed their power by omens, by dreams, by oracles, and by the punishment of men who had committed sacrilege; and I want to show what cause produced that effect, so that no one even now falls into the same traps the men of old fell into. [z]

When God, in his surpassing majesty, had framed the world out of nothing, had hung the sky with lights, and had filled the land and the sea with living creatures, he formed man out of clay and fashioned him after the resemblance of his own likeness. He breathed into him so that he would live, and set him in a garden he had planted with every kind of fruit-bearing tree. He commanded him not to eat from one tree, in which he had placed the knowledge of good and evil, warning him that if he did it he would lose his life, but that if he kept God’s command he would remain immortal. Then the serpent, who was one of God’s servants, envied the man because he had been made immortal, and by a trick enticed him into breaking God’s command and law. And so he did indeed receive the knowledge of good and evil, but he lost the life God had given him to have forever.

So God drove the sinner out of that holy place and banished him into this world, to look for his food by labor and to undergo hardship and trouble as he deserved. And he ringed the garden itself with a fence of fire, so that no one, right up to the day of judgment, could slip in secretly to that place of unending happiness. Then death came upon man by the sentence of God. Even so, though his life had now begun to be temporary, its limit was a thousand years, and that was the span of human life all the way to the flood. After the flood the life of men was gradually shortened and was brought down to a hundred and twenty years. But that serpent, who from what he did received the name devil — that is, accuser, or informer — never stopped hounding the offspring of the man he had deceived from the beginning. In the end he drove the first man ever born, under the goad of envy, to the murder of his brother, so that of the first two men born he might destroy the one and make a murderer of his own blood out of the other. Nor did he stop there. Generation after generation he poured the venom of malice into human hearts, corrupting and debasing them; in short, he swamped them in such crimes that an instance of justice was now a rarity, and men lived like animals.

But when God saw this, he sent his angels to teach the human race and to protect it from every evil. He gave them a command to keep away from earthly things, so that no stain would defile them and cost them the honor of angels. But while they were staying among men, that cunning accuser lured these too into pleasures, so that they defiled themselves with women. Then, condemned by the sentence of God and cast out for their sin, they lost both the name and the substance of angels. So, having become the ministers of the devil, and wanting some consolation in their own ruin, they set about the ruin of the men they had come to protect.