Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Such numerous and weighty witnesses together establish this: one God's power and forethought hold the world in order, and Plato, in the Timaeus, calls his might and majesty too vast for any mind to grasp or any speech to render, given how immense and unfathomable that power is. Yet let anyone try to doubt that something might be difficult or unattainable for a deity who fashioned such vast and astonishing works through foresight, gave them stability through his own excellence, carried them through to completion by reasoning, and continues, even now, to uphold them with his breath while steering them with his strength — a deity impossible to picture, impossible to describe fully, and truly known only to himself. Hence, as I have often pondered this great majesty, those who worship the gods have seemed to me at times so blind, so thoughtless, so devoid of understanding, so little different from mute beasts, in that they believe that beings born from the union of a male and a female could possess any measure of majesty or divine power — when the Erythraean Sibyl says: it is not possible for one shaped from a man's loins and a womb to be a god. And if this is true, as indeed it is, it is clear that Hercules, Apollo, Liber, Mercury, and Jupiter himself, along with the rest, were men, since they were born of two sexes. For what is further removed from God than that act which he himself granted to mortals for the propagation of offspring, and which cannot exist apart from bodily substance? If the gods, then, are immortal and eternal, what need have they of a second sex — surely only in order to beget? And what need have they of offspring at all, since those who are always to exist have no need of succession? For indeed, among men and other living creatures, the difference of sex, and coupling, and begetting, have no other purpose than that all the kinds of living things, since by the condition of their mortality they are doomed to perish, may be preserved by mutual succession; but for God, who is everlasting, neither a second sex nor succession is necessary. Someone will say, 'so that he might have servants, or beings over whom he himself could rule.' What need, then, is there of a female sex, when God — who is called almighty — could beget sons without the use and labor of a woman? For if he has granted this to certain tiny creatures, that their offspring gather themselves from leaves and sweet herbs with their own mouths, why should anyone suppose that God himself could not beget except by the mingling of the opposite sex? As for those, then, whom the ignorant and unwise call and worship as gods, there is no one so thoughtless as not to understand that they were mortal. 'How, then,' someone will ask, 'did they come to be believed gods?' Doubtless because they had been kings of surpassing greatness and power, and thanks to their outstanding qualities — whether the good they did for others or the skills they invented — the very people under their former rule cherished them and set them apart in lasting remembrance. And if anyone doubts this, let him consider their deeds and their acts, all of which poets and ancient historians alike have handed down.
Hercules, who because of his valor is most renowned, and is held to be, as it were, the Africanus among the gods, did he not defile the whole earth, which he is said to have traversed and purged, with fornications, adulteries, and lusts? Nor is it any wonder, since he himself was begotten of an adulterous union with Alcmena. What, after all, could there have been of the divine in one who, himself enslaved to his own vices, brought infamy, disgrace, and shame upon males and females alike, against every law? But not even those great and marvelous deeds of his ought to be judged such that they should be attributed to divine virtues. What greatness, really, lies in beating down a lion and a boar, shooting birds out of the sky, mucking out a king's stable, stripping the belt from a warrior-woman he defeated, or killing savage horses together with their owner? Such feats belong to a man of courage — a man nonetheless. Everything he subdued was, after all, weak and destined to perish. As the orator observes, no strength exists that iron and muscle together cannot eventually break down; true bravery, instead, lies in mastering one's own spirit and holding anger in check — something Hercules never managed, nor was he ever capable of it. Whoever does this, I do not merely compare him with the greatest of men — I judge him most like a god. I could wish he had added something concerning lust, luxury, greed, and arrogance, so as to complete the portrait of the virtue of the one he judged to be like a god. For the man who overcomes a lion is not to be reckoned braver than the man who overcomes the violent beast enclosed within himself, namely anger; nor is the one who brought down the most rapacious birds braver than the one who restrains his most greedy desires; nor the one who defeated the warrior Amazon braver than the one who conquers lust, that destroyer of modesty and reputation; nor the one who removed dung from a stable braver than the one who drives vices out of his own heart — vices which are the more pernicious because they are one's own domestic evils, whereas those other things could be avoided and guarded against. The conclusion follows: only a man marked by self-control, moderation, and justice deserves to count as brave. And anyone who truly weighed what belongs to the works of God would immediately see as absurd all the things over which the most foolish men marvel. Such men measure these exploits not against divine excellence, of which they know nothing, but instead against the puniness of their own bodily power. For indeed no one has denied that Hercules served not only King Eurystheus — which might in some measure seem honorable — but also a shameless woman, Omphale, who made him sit at her feet, clothed in her own garments, spinning wool. A detestable disgrace! But so great was the pleasure that it was worth it to him. 'Well then,' someone may object, 'do you actually trust what the poets say?' And why wouldn't I trust them? These are not the words of Lucilius, nor of Lucian, that mocker who spared no god and no man alike, but rather of those very poets whose whole business was singing the gods' praises above everyone else's. So if we refuse to trust the ones who praised them, whose word are we left to rely on? Let whoever thinks these poets lie produce other authorities whom we may trust, who can teach us who these gods are, how and whence they arose, what their power is, what their number, what their authority, what in them is worthy of wonder, what deserving of worship, and finally what surer and truer mystery there is. He will produce none. Let us believe, then, these poets, who spoke not to find fault but to proclaim praise. So then, he sailed with the Argonauts, and stormed Troy in anger against Laomedon over a reward denied him for saving Laomedon's daughter — from which it is clear at what period he lived. This same man, driven by fury and madness, killed his own wife along with their children. And people take this creature for a god! Philoctetes, though, his heir, held no such belief — the very man who lit the pyre beneath him as he prepared to burn, who stood by watching his limbs and sinews dissolve into ash, who gathered his charred remains for burial on Mount Oeta — and got the hero's arrows as payment for performing that service.
Aesculapius, himself born not without disgrace to Apollo, what else did he do worthy of divine honors, except that he healed Hippolytus? He certainly had a rather more famous death, in that he deserved to be struck by a thunderbolt from a god. Tarquitius, discussing illustrious men, says he was born of uncertain parents, exposed, found by hunters, nursed on the milk of a dog, handed over to Chiron, and taught medicine by him; that he was a Messenian, but lived at Epidaurus. Tullius, moreover, says he was buried at Cynosurae. As for Apollo, the father — a love that overpowered him drove him, did it not, to the disgraceful task of tending someone else's flock, and then to raise walls for Laomedon as hired labor, only to be cheated of that pay without consequence to the king? And it was from this that the faithless king first learned to renege on whatever agreements he had made with the gods. This same Apollo, while loving a beautiful boy, violated him, and while playing with him, killed him. Mars killed a man and was let off that charge by the Athenians out of favor; yet to avoid looking purely savage and monstrous, he went on to sleep with Venus, an adulterer as well as a killer. Castor and Pollux stopped being twins the moment they seized brides already promised to other men — Idas, stung by grief over the wrong done to him, ran one of the pair through with a blade. The poets claim the two now take turns living and dying, which makes them, out of every god or mortal, the most pitiable of all, since not even a single, final death is granted to them. Yet Homer alone testifies plainly that both were dead, not in the manner poets usually employ; for when he makes Helen, sitting on the walls beside Priam, recognize all the leading men of Greece, but ask only after her own two brothers, he adds to her speech a verse of this kind: so she spoke, but the earth already held them, buried. Mercury, a thief and a scoundrel, what has he left behind for his own fame except the memory of his own frauds? Worthy of heaven, no doubt, because he taught wrestling and was the first to invent the lyre! Father Liber must, of necessity, hold the place of highest authority and the leading vote in the senate of the gods, since he alone, apart from Jupiter, of all of them celebrated a triumph, led an army, and conquered the Indians. But that unconquered general, that conqueror of India, was most shamefully conquered by love and lust. For, carried to Crete with his half-manly retinue, he found a shameless woman on the shore, and, relying on the confidence of his Indian victory, he chose to play the man, lest he seem too soft — and he claimed for his own marriage that woman who had betrayed her father, murdered her brother, and been abandoned and repudiated by another man; he made her Libera, and together with her ascended into heaven. And what of the father of all these, Jupiter, who in the solemn prayer is called Best and Greatest? Is he not shown, from his very boyhood, to have been impious and all but a parricide, since he drove his father from his kingdom and put him to flight, unwilling even to wait for the death of the old man from decrepit age, in his eagerness to rule? And when he had seized his father's throne by force and by arms, he was assailed in war by the Titans — a war which was the beginning of evils for the human race; and once he had beaten them and locked in a lasting peace, everything that remained of his life he passed amid illicit affairs and acts of adultery. I pass over the virgins whom he violated, for that is generally judged tolerable. I cannot pass over Amphitryon and Tyndareus, whose households he filled with disgrace and infamy. But this indeed was the height of impiety and crime, that he carried off a royal boy for the purpose of violation. For it seemed too little for him, if in assaulting the chastity of women he was already stained and shameful, unless he also did wrong to his own sex — this is true adultery, as being against nature. Whoever does such things, we may see whether he is Greatest, but he is certainly not Best; for that name is absent from corrupters, from adulterers, from the incestuous — unless perhaps we are mistaken, we who call men who do such things wicked and depraved, and judge them most deserving of every punishment. Foolish, then, was Marcus Tullius, who charged Gaius Verres with adulteries — for the very same things Jupiter, whom he himself worshiped, committed; and who charged Publius Clodius with incest with his sister — yet that Best and Greatest one had one and the same woman as both sister and wife.