Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Since we have unveiled the mysteries of the poets and discovered the parentage of Saturn, we turn back now to weigh his virtues and his deeds. He was, they say, just in his kingdom. But in the first place, by the very fact that he existed, he is already no god; and second, he was not even just, but wicked — not only toward his sons, whom he killed, but toward his own father, whose genitals he is said to have cut off, which perhaps really did happen in some sense. But people, out of regard for the element called "sky," reject the whole story as a most foolishly invented fable, though the Stoics, as they habitually do, try to bring it over into physical theory. Cicero, discussing their view in his book On the Nature of the Gods, records it thus: they held that the heavenly, highest, and ethereal nature — that is, the fiery one, which begets all things by itself — had no need of that part of the body which requires union with another for procreation. This reasoning could apply to Vesta, if she were said to be male. And this is precisely why they consider Vesta a virgin: fire, being an inviolable element, allows nothing to spring into being out of it, for whatever it seizes it consumes. Ovid says in the Fasti: understand Vesta as nothing other than the living flame, and you see that no bodies are born of flame. Rightly, then, she is a virgin, who neither releases nor receives any seed, and loves the companions of virginity. The same reasoning could have been applied to Vulcan, who is likewise reckoned a form of fire, though the poets left him uncastrated. It could have applied to the Sun as well, in whom lies the nature and cause of begetting; the Sun's own fiery warmth, after all, is what makes anything capable of birth or growth at all, so that no other element has less need of genitals than heat does, by whose warmth all things are conceived, born, and sustained. Finally, even granting their view, which are we more inclined to believe: that Heaven was mutilated, or that he was simply born without genitals in the first place? For if he begets by his own power alone, he surely had no need of genitals when he fathered Saturn himself; but if he did have them and they were cut off by his son, then the origin and whole nature of things would have perished. And what of the fact that they strip Saturn himself not only of divine sense but even of human sense, when they assert that he is the Saturn who governs the course and revolution of periods and times, taking his Greek title straight from that idea? Kronos is his name, a word identical to chronos — a stretch of time, that is — while in Latin he is called Saturn because he is "sated" (saturetur) with years. These are Cicero's own words, setting forth the Stoic opinion — how empty it is, anyone can grasp with the least effort. For if Saturn is the son of Heaven, how could time be born from Heaven, or Heaven be castrated by time, or time afterward be stripped of its rule by its own offspring Jupiter? By what path did Jupiter come to be born out of time itself? Or in what years could eternity, which has no end, be "sated"?
If, then, these arguments of the philosophers are empty, what remains except to believe that what truly happened is exactly what it appears to be — namely, that a man was castrated by a man? Unless someone supposes he was a god who feared a co-heir — though if he had possessed any divinity, he ought to have cut off his own genitals rather than his father's, to prevent Jupiter's birth, the son who later stripped him of his kingdom. This same Saturn, having taken his sister Rhea — whom we in Latin call Ops — as his wife, is said to have been forbidden by an oracle from raising male children, since it was foretold that he would one day be driven out by a son. Fearing this, he did not, as the story goes, devour the sons born to him, but killed them — although it is written in the Sacred History that Saturn and Ops, along with the rest of the people of that era, habitually ate human flesh, and that it was Jupiter who first, in laying down laws and customs for mankind, forbade by edict the eating of that food. But if this is true, what justice can be found in him at all? Still, let us grant, for argument's sake, that Saturn's devouring of his sons is pure fiction — but even granting some rational basis for it, is it not simply that ordinary folk describe a man as having devoured his own children once he has carried them out for burial and laid them to rest? Ops, however, when she had borne Jupiter, hid the infant away and secretly sent him to be raised in Crete. Here again I must fault his lack of foresight. Why did he need to receive the oracle from someone else in the first place? Why, seated in the heavens, could he not see what was happening on earth? Why were the Corybantes able to deceive him with their cymbals? And finally, why did some greater power arise capable of overcoming his? Clearly, an old man was easily beaten and stripped of power by a younger one. He fled, then, driven out, and came by ship to Italy after long wandering, as Ovid recounts in the books of the Fasti: the reason for the raft remains — the scythe-bearing god came by raft to the Tuscan river, having roamed the whole world before. Destitute and adrift, he was taken in by Janus; evidence of which survives in ancient coins, on which Janus appears with a double face, while on the flip side stands a ship — an image the same poet then adds to: but a grateful posterity shaped the ship in bronze, bearing witness to the arrival of the guest-god. All, then — not only the poets, but also the writers of histories and antiquities who recorded his deeds in Italy — agree that he was a man: the Greeks Diodorus and Thallus, the Latins Nepos, Cassius, and Varro. For when Italy was living in a rude, rustic way, he gathered together an unruly people scattered across the high mountains, gave them laws, and chose to have the land called Latium, because he had lain hidden (latuisset) there in safety. Does anyone imagine that a god is one who was driven out, who fled, who hid? No one is so foolish. For whoever flees or hides must necessarily fear violence and death. Orpheus, who lived not long after his time, plainly recalls that Saturn reigned on earth among men: "first of all Kronos ruled as king over earthly men, and from Kronos was born the great, wide-seeing king Zeus himself." Likewise our own Virgil: "golden Saturn led this life on earth," and elsewhere: "golden were the ages they say existed under that king; so peacefully did he rule the peoples in tranquil peace." Nowhere does he say Saturn spent his life in heaven, nor that the gods above ruled in peace below; from which it is clear that he was an earthly king — a point Virgil makes still more plainly elsewhere: "he shall found again the golden ages once ruled over the fields of Latium by Saturn." Ennius, indeed, in his Euhemerus, says it was not Saturn who reigned first, but his father Uranus. "At the very start," runs his account, "Caelus was the very first to hold supreme rule on earth; this kingdom he built and secured for himself with the help of his brothers." There is no great disagreement here, since even the greatest authors are uncertain whether it was the son or the father. Yet both things may well be true — that Uranus first began to stand out among the rest in power and hold primacy, though not kingship, and that Saturn afterward gathered greater resources for himself and assumed the royal title.
Now, since the Sacred History differs somewhat from what I have reported, let us set forth what is contained in the true writings, lest we seem to follow and endorse the poets' foolishness in our indictment of these religions. These are the words of Ennius: then Saturn took Ops as his wife. Titan, who was the elder, demanded that he himself should reign. There Vesta, their mother, and their sisters Ceres and Ops, urged Saturn not to yield the kingdom to his brother. Titan, who was uglier in appearance than Saturn, and who moreover saw that his mother and sisters were working to secure the kingship for Saturn, therefore agreed that Saturn should reign. So he made a pact with Saturn: any male offspring that came to Saturn would go unraised — this he arranged so that the kingdom would eventually pass back to his own sons. A first son then arrived for Saturn, and this child they killed. Afterward twins were born, Jupiter and Juno. Then they showed Juno to Saturn but secretly hid Jupiter away, giving him to Vesta to be raised, concealing him from Saturn. Likewise Ops bore Neptune secretly from Saturn and hid him away in the same manner. In the same fashion, at a third birth, Ops bore the twins Pluto and Glauca — Pluto being in Latin Dis Pater, whom others call Orcus. There they showed the daughter Glauca to Saturn, but concealed and hid away the son Pluto. Afterward the infant Glauca died. This, as it is written, is the lineage and kinship of Jupiter and his brothers — so it has been handed down to us from the Sacred Writing. A little further on he adds this: then, after Titan learned that sons had been born to Saturn and raised in secret from him, he drew aside his own sons, who are called the Titans, seized his brother Saturn and Ops, walled them in, and set a guard over them. How true this history is, the Erythraean Sibyl shows, saying nearly the same things, differing only in a few details that do not touch the main point. Jupiter, then, is cleared of the gravest charge — that of having bound his own father in chains — for it was his uncle Titan who did this, because Saturn had broken the pact and his sworn oath by raising male children. The rest of the history unfolds thus: Jupiter, grown to manhood, on hearing that his father and mother were hemmed in under guard and cast into chains, came with a great multitude of Cretans, defeated Titan and his sons in battle, freed his parents from their chains, restored the kingdom to his father, and so returned to Crete. After this, an oracle was given to Saturn, warning him to beware lest a son drive him from his kingdom; to lighten the force of the oracle and escape the danger, he plotted against Jupiter, meaning to kill him; but Jupiter, learning of the plot, claimed the kingdom for himself once more and drove Saturn into flight. Saturn, hounded across every land by soldiers whom Jupiter had dispatched to seize or slay him, at last barely found in Italy a place where he could hide.
Since it is established from these facts that these were men, it is not hard to see how the practice of calling them gods began. Given that no kings existed before Saturn or Uranus — mankind then being too sparse, its people living a rough country existence under no ruler at all — it can hardly be doubted that men of that era began to lavish the highest praise and extraordinary honors on the king himself and his whole lineage, going so far as to call them gods: whether from wonder at their prowess (a belief the still-unrefined and simple genuinely held), or, as often happens, out of flattery toward whoever currently held power, or in gratitude for the advantages through which they had been raised to civilized life. Then, when the kings themselves, having been beloved by those whose lives they had ordered, died, they left behind great longing for themselves. So people fashioned images of them, to have some consolation in gazing upon their likenesses; and going further, out of affection they began to honor the memory of the dead, both to seem to show gratitude to their benefactors and to entice their successors toward a desire to govern well. Cicero teaches this in his work On the Nature of the Gods, saying: human life and common custom took it upon themselves to raise men of outstanding merit to heaven through fame and goodwill. Hence Hercules, hence Castor, hence Pollux, hence Aesculapius, hence Liber. And elsewhere: in most states it can be understood that, for the sake of sharpening virtue, or so that the best men might more willingly face danger for the republic's sake, the memory of brave men has been consecrated with the honor due immortal gods. It was by this reasoning, of course, that the Romans deified their Caesars and the Moors their kings. Thus religions gradually arose, as those who first knew these men instructed their own children and grandchildren in this rite, and these in turn instructed all their descendants; and eventually these greatest kings, owing to the fame of their name, came to be worshipped throughout every province. As for private devotion, individual peoples reserved their deepest reverence for whoever had founded their own nation, tribe, or city — men famed for courage or women renowned for their chastity — so Egypt revered Isis; Juba was the god of the Moors, Cabirus of the Macedonians, Urania of the Carthaginians, Faunus of the Latins, Sancus of the Sabines, and Quirinus of the Romans; likewise Athens honored Minerva, and in the same way Juno belonged to Samos, Venus to Paphos, Vulcan to Lemnos, Liber to Naxos, and Apollo to Delos. Thus varied cults were taken up among different peoples and regions, as men, wishing to show gratitude toward their own leaders, could find no other honors to bestow on those now lacking life. Moreover, the devotion shown by those who came after did much to spread this error: wanting to seem sprung from divine stock, they bestowed divine honors on their forebears and decreed that such honors continue to be paid. Can anyone doubt how the cults of the gods came to be established, given that in Virgil one reads Aeneas's own words as he directs his companions: "Now pour libations to Jupiter, and call upon my father Anchises with prayers"? — to whom he attributes not only immortality, but even power over the winds: "let us beg for winds, and may he wish these rites brought yearly to him in temples dedicated to him, once the city is founded." The same, naturally, was later done for Jove by Liber, Pan, Mercury, and Apollo, and afterward for these very figures by their own successors in turn. The poets, too, added their part, and by composing verses meant to please, raised them to heaven, just as those who flatter even wicked kings with lying panegyrics do today. This evil arose from the Greeks, whose fickleness, equipped with skill and fluency in speaking, stirred up an unbelievable fog of falsehoods. And so, admiring them, other peoples were the first to take up their rites and hand them on to all nations. For this vanity the Sibyl rebukes them thus: "Greece, why do you place your trust in men who are your leaders? Why do you offer vain gifts to the dead? Do you sacrifice to idols? Who put this delusion in your minds, to perform these rites, abandoning the face of the great God?" Marcus Tullius Cicero — a man who was not merely a polished speaker but a philosopher too, indeed the one true disciple of Plato — in the book where he sought comfort over his daughter's death, stated without hesitation that the gods honored by the state had once been men. That testimony carries all the more weight given that he himself held the augural priesthood and admits himself to worshipping and revering those same gods. In just a few lines, then, he has handed us two truths at once: professing that he will consecrate his daughter's image by the very method the ancients used to consecrate those gods, he thereby reveals both that they were mortal and where this empty superstition began. "Since," he says, "we observe not a few men and women numbered among the gods, and revere their most sacred shrines across our cities and countryside, let us defer to the wisdom of those whose genius and discoveries have given our whole life the shape of laws and settled institutions. But if any living being ever merited being made divine, she was surely the one. Whether the fame of Cadmus's line, or of Amphitryon's, or of Tyndareus's, earned them a place in heaven, that same honor is certainly owed to her. And so I will do it — with the immortal gods' own approval, I will set her, finest and most learned of all women, into their assembly, and consecrate her before the judgment of every mortal." Perhaps someone will say that Cicero, from excessive grief, had lost his senses. And yet that entire speech, perfect in learning, in examples, and in style itself, was the work not of a sick mind, but of a steady and judicious one, and this very opinion carries no mark of grief at all. For I do not think he could have written with such variety, such fullness, such polish, unless reason itself, and the consolation of friends, and the passage of time, had already softened his grief. What of the fact that he says the same thing in his books On the Republic, and the same in On Glory? For in his Laws, a work in which, following Plato, he wished to set down the laws by which he thought a just and wise state ought to be governed, he decreed thus concerning religion: "let them worship the gods and those who have always been held to be heavenly, and those whom their merits have placed in heaven: Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, Pollux, Quirinus." Likewise in the Tusculan Disputations, when he said that almost the whole of heaven was filled with the human race: "but if," he says, "I should try to search out ancient matters and draw out from them what the writers of Greece have recorded, those very gods of the greater nations, who are held to be such, will be found to have set out from here to heaven. Since, then, tombs are shown in Greece, remember — since you have been initiated — what is handed down in the mysteries; then at last you will understand how widely this truth extends." Here he is plainly appealing to what his friend Atticus already knows: that the mysteries themselves reveal that everyone who receives worship was once a man; and regarding Hercules, Liber, Aesculapius, Castor, and Pollux he spoke without hesitation, but concerning their fathers Apollo and Jupiter — and no less concerning Neptune, Vulcan, Mars, and Mercury, all four of which he called gods of the greater nations — he shrank from stating the matter plainly. And so he says this truth "extends widely," so that we may understand the same of Jupiter and the other, older gods — whose memory, if the ancients consecrated it by the same reasoning by which he says he will consecrate the image and name of his daughter, then those who mourned them may be forgiven, but those who believe in them cannot be. Madness alone could make anyone think heaven opens to the dead simply because a horde of fools has agreed to say so, or that a person could hand someone else a power he does not hold himself. Consider Rome: it made Julius a god only because the criminal Antony wished it, and Quirinus a god only because shepherds fancied it — this despite the one having slain his twin brother, the other his fatherland. And had Antony not been consul, Gaius Caesar, whatever his services to the republic, would have been denied even the honor due a dead man — a fate arranged by his father-in-law Piso and his kinsman Lucius Caesar, who forbade a funeral for him, and by the consul Dolabella, who tore down the memorial column standing in the forum — his tomb, in other words — and cleansed the forum of it. As for Romulus, Ennius shows how deeply the people missed him, giving the grieving crowd, mourning their vanished king, these very words: "O Romulus, Romulus divine, what a guardian of the fatherland the gods raised up in you! You led us forth into the borders of light. O father, O begetter, O blood sprung from the gods." That same longing made the crowd all too ready to swallow a lie: Julius Proculus, coached by the senators, announced to the plebs that the king had appeared to him looking grander than any living man, ordering that a shrine be raised for him and that he now be worshipped as the god Quirinus. By this act he persuaded the people themselves that Romulus had gone to join the gods, and freed the senate of suspicion of having murdered their king.