Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I come now to the cults that belong distinctly to the Romans, having already discussed the ones held in common with others. Divine honors were paid to the She-Wolf who nursed Romulus, and I could tolerate this if it were truly the animal whose shape she bears. But Livy tells us that the statue represents Larentina, and represents not her body at all, but rather her mind and her character. For she had been the wife of Faustulus, and because her much-frequented body came cheap, the shepherds nicknamed her "wolf" — meaning harlot, which is also why a brothel bears the name lupanar. In shaping this figure the Romans were obviously copying the Athenians, among whom a harlot called Leaena, after killing a tyrant, was barred by custom from having a harlot's statue raised inside a temple, so an image of the animal sharing her name was set up instead. Thus one people built a monument from a name, the other from an occupation. A festival was likewise dedicated under this name, giving rise to the Larentinalia. The Romans do not confine their reverence for harlots to her alone — Faula too is worshiped, whom Verrius records as having been Hercules's mistress. What sort of immortality, then, should we imagine this to be, when even prostitutes lay hold of it? Flora, who had piled up great riches through the business of prostitution, named the populace her heir and bequeathed a set sum of money whose yearly interest would fund games marking her birthday — games known as the Floralia. Because the Senate found this shameful, it decided instead to draw a story from her very name, so as to lend some dignity to a disreputable affair. They invented a goddess in charge of flowers, one who needed appeasing so that crops, trees, and vines alike might bloom richly and well. Working the same angle, a poet in his Fasti spun the tale that she had once been a nymph of noble lineage named Chloris, who wed Zephyr and, as a dowry from her husband, received dominion over every flower. All this sounds respectable in the telling, yet the belief behind it is disgraceful and shameful, and when we are after the truth such coverings must not fool us. Accordingly those games are staged with every sort of indecency, fittingly enough given the memory of a harlot they honor. Beyond the free rein given to obscene language, harlots are stripped bare at the crowd's insistence, take on the role of mimes, and are made to perform lewd gestures before the public eye until even shameless onlookers have had their fill. As for the statue of Cloacina discovered in the Great Sewer, Tatius consecrated it, and since he had no idea whose likeness it depicted, he simply named it after the place it was found. Tullus Hostilius, for his part, fashioned images of Fear and Pallor and paid them worship. What can be said of this, except that he wanted his gods constantly nearby, the way people usually wish for such things? From this same impulse, Marcus Marcellus's dedication of Honor and Virtue differs only in the respectability of its titles, while agreeing in substance. With equal folly the Senate also enrolled Mind among the gods — though had Mind truly been present, it would never have consented to rites of this kind. According to Cicero, Greece took on a grand and daring project when it set up shrines to Cupids and Loves within its gymnasia — plainly he was flattering Atticus while poking fun at his own good friend. That should be called neither grand nor a project of any kind, but rather the ruinous and hopeless depravity of shameless men who handed their own sons — children they ought to have raised toward virtue — over to the lust of young men; men, moreover, who planted the gods of their vice precisely where naked bodies are exposed to corrupt eyes, wanting them venerated at just the age when innocence and inexperience leave one open to entrapment before any defense is possible. Small wonder, then, that every shameful vice has poured out from this single nation, a people among whom vice itself is treated as sacred, not merely tolerated but actively worshiped. And as though outdoing the Greeks in good sense, he tacked on the maxim that virtues, and not vices, deserve consecration. But accept that, Marcus Tullius, and do you not see that vice is bound to burst in right alongside virtue, since evil clings to good and holds greater sway over the human mind? Forbid the consecration of vices, and that very Greece will reply that some gods are worshiped for the sake of gain, others simply to avoid harm. This is always the excuse given by those who treat their own evils as divine, the way the Romans do with Rust and Fever. If vices, then, should not be consecrated — and here I side with you — neither should virtues. They possess no wisdom or awareness of their own, nor should they be housed within walls or little shrines molded from clay; instead they must be lodged in the breast and grasped from within, or they turn false the instant they are placed outside a person. So I find myself laughing at that famous law of yours, phrased in these words: "But for those things by which mankind is granted ascent to heaven — Mind, Virtue, Piety, Faith — let shrines be built in their honor." Yet none of these can exist apart from a person. If they are to be worshiped at all, they must reside within the individual himself; and if instead they stand outside him, what good is worshiping what one does not actually have? Virtue itself deserves worship, not some image standing in for it, and that worship comes not through sacrifice, incense, or formal prayer, but purely through will and intention. For what is worshiping virtue, if not seizing it in the mind and holding onto it? Anyone who resolves to want it obtains it the moment he wills it. That alone counts as the true worship of virtue — religious devotion belongs to no one but the single God. So why, wisest of men, occupy land with useless structures when it could serve practical human purposes instead? Why appoint priests to tend things empty and without any feeling? Why slaughter victims? Why pour out such expense on the crafting or the upkeep of images? A sturdier, less corruptible temple already exists — the human breast. Let that be adorned instead; let that be filled with the true powers of the divine. Given false consecrations of this sort, a certain outcome inevitably follows. Those who worship virtues in such a manner — chasing after mere shadows and images of virtue — cannot themselves hold on to what is genuinely real. As a result virtue exists nowhere, vice ruling on every side; loyalty is absent, each person grabbing what he can for himself; devotion is gone, greed and desire sparing neither kindred nor parents as they rush toward poison and blade; there is no peace and no harmony, war raging openly and, in private, hatred boiling over into bloodshed; chastity, too, is gone, unchecked lust staining every sex and every part of the body. Even so they never stop worshiping the very things they flee from and despise. They honor with incense and fingertip gestures what, in their deepest feelings, ought to fill them with horror — an error that traces entirely back to ignorance of that first and highest good. After the city fell to the Gauls, with the Romans under siege on the Capitoline, they built engines of war from women's hair and then dedicated a shrine to Venus the Bald. They fail to grasp, then, how empty their religion is, evident from the very fact that they mock it with such absurdities. Perhaps they picked up from the Spartans the habit of inventing gods out of whatever happened to occur. For when the Spartans were laying siege to the Messenians, and the besieged, having tricked their besiegers, slipped out and rushed off to plunder Sparta, it was the Spartan women who drove them back in flight. Once the Spartans learned of the enemy's trick, they gave chase, and their armed wives went out a long way to meet them. When the women spotted their own husbands readying for battle and mistook them for Messenians, they stripped off their clothing. But the men, recognizing their wives at the sight and stirred by desire, mingled with them just as they stood, weapons and all — indiscriminately, naturally, since there was no leisure to be selective — much as the young men sent out earlier had mingled with the maidens, the union that produced the Partheniae. To commemorate this event they raised a shrine and statue to Venus Armed, and although it sprang from a disgraceful episode, consecrating an armed Venus still comes off as more respectable than a bald one. Around the same time an altar went up for Jupiter the Baker, because in their sleep he had told them to bake bread from whatever grain remained and hurl it into the enemy camp; that act lifted the siege, since the Gauls gave up hope of starving the Romans into submission. What a mockery of religion this is. Were I defending it, my gravest complaint would be that the majesty of the gods has sunk into such contempt that it's turned into a joke under the most humiliating names. Who wouldn't laugh at grown, learned men busying themselves over the goddess Oven, celebrating her Fornacalia? And who, hearing of the goddess Muta, could keep from laughing? The Lares, supposedly, sprang from her, and Lara or Larunda serves as her other name. What could she, unable to speak, possibly give her worshiper? Also worshiped is Iaca, who tipped off Hercules about the theft of his cattle and won divine status by betraying her own brother; and Cunina, guardian of infants in their cradles who wards off the evil eye; and Stercutus, credited with first introducing manure to the fields; and Tutinus, in whose shameful lap brides are seated so that the god may seem to sample their chastity ahead of their husbands — along with a thousand other monstrosities, enough that we might now call those who took up worshiping such things vainer than even the Egyptians, who at least revere monstrous and absurd images that resemble something. But what of those who worship a shapeless, rough-hewn stone named Terminus? This is said to be the very stone Saturn devoured in place of Jupiter, and the honor paid him is not undeserved. For when Tarquin wanted to build the Capitol, and many gods' shrines already stood on that ground, augury was taken to see whether each god was prepared to make room for Jupiter; every one of them complied except Terminus, who alone would not budge. Hence the poet calls him the immovable rock of the Capitol. From this very fact we can gauge how great a god Jupiter must be, since not even a stone would yield to him — perhaps out of confidence, since Jupiter had rescued him from his father's jaws. So once the Capitol was finished, an opening was deliberately left in the roof directly over Terminus, so that, having refused to yield, he might still enjoy open sky — though not even those who imagined the stone enjoyed it were themselves enjoying anything. Public supplication, then, is offered to him as guardian god of boundaries, one who is not only a stone but at times even a mere stake. So what are we to say of those who worship such things, except that they themselves are, above all else, stones and stakes?