Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
We have spoken about the gods themselves who are worshipped; now a few things must be said about their rites and mysteries. Among the Cypriots, it was Teucer who first offered a man's life to Jupiter as a sacrificial victim, a rite he passed on to his own descendants; only under the emperor Hadrian, in fairly recent times, was it finally abolished. Among the Taurians, a savage and inhuman people, there was a law that guests be sacrificed to Diana, and that sacrifice was celebrated for many ages. The Gauls appeased Esus and Teutates with human blood. Not even the Latins were free of this monstrous practice, since Jupiter Latiaris is even now worshipped with human blood. What good do people beg from gods to whom they sacrifice in this way? Or what can such gods provide to men, when they are placated by men's sufferings? But one need not marvel so much at barbarians, whose religion matches their manners; yet what of our own people, forever boasting that gentleness and civilized manners are glories belonging to them alone — in these sacrilegious rites are they not shown to be more savage even than barbarians? For those who, though polished by liberal studies, fall away from humanity are to be reckoned more guilty than the rough and untaught who slip into wicked deeds through ignorance of what is good. It appears, however, that this rite of sacrificing men is ancient, given that Saturn received an identical form of sacrifice within Latium — though no man was truly slain upon an altar there; rather, he was cast down into the Tiber from the Mulvian Bridge. Varro is the authority that this was done in consequence of a certain oracle, the last line of which runs thus: 'and send heads to Hades, and to the father a man' — that is, a human being. Because this seemed ambiguous, it was customary to throw in both a torch and a man. But this kind of sacrifice is said to have been abolished by Hercules on his return from Spain, though the rite continued, with images of rushes thrown in place of real men, as Ovid teaches in the Fasti: until the Tirynthian came into these fields, sad rites were performed every year in the manner of Leucas; the Romans used to throw straw men into the water, false bodies cast after Hercules' example. The Vestal Virgins perform these rites, as the same poet says: then too the maiden is accustomed to cast rush images of ancient men from the oaken bridge. But as for the infants who were sacrificed to that same Saturn out of hatred for Jupiter, I do not know what to say. So savage and barbarous were these men that a sacrifice was the name they gave to their own child-slaughter — a crime foul and accursed against the human race — when, with no regard for natural affection, they extinguished tender and innocent lives, the age dearest of all to parents, and surpassed in cruelty even the fiercest of beasts, which nonetheless love their own offspring! What madness beyond all cure! Even at their most furious, could those gods do worse than what they do while favorable — soaking their own worshippers in the blood of murdered children, robbing them of their offspring, tearing every human feeling out of them? What could be holy to men such as these? And in unholy places, what would they not dare, these men who carry out the gravest of crimes right at the altars of their own gods? Pescennius Festus, in his books of histories written as satire, reports that the Carthaginians used to sacrifice human victims to Saturn, and that when they were defeated by Agathocles, king of the Sicilians, they supposed the god was angry with them; and so, in order to atone more scrupulously, they sacrificed two hundred sons of the nobility. So much evil could religion persuade men to commit — evil that has often given birth to wicked and impious deeds. To whom, then, were these most senseless men appealing by that sacrifice, when they slaughtered so great a part of the citizenry — perhaps a greater number than even the victorious Agathocles himself had killed? No less mad than that kind of rite must be judged those public rites of which some belong to the Mother, in which men make offerings of their own virility — for having cut away their sex, they become neither men nor women — and others honor Virtue — a goddess otherwise known by the name Bellona — where it is the priests' own blood, not some other victim's, that gets offered up. For with their shoulders slashed, brandishing drawn swords in each hand, they run about, are carried away, rage in frenzy. Quintilian, therefore, says excellently in his 'Fanaticus': if a god compels this, he is angry. Are these things even sacred rites? Would it not be preferable to live as cattle live, rather than bow down to gods so bloodthirsty, so profane, so utterly impious? But whence these errors and such great outrages have flowed, we shall discuss in their proper place. Meanwhile let us look also at the rest, which are free of crime, lest we seem, out of eagerness to attack, to choose only the worst examples. The rites of the Egyptian Isis concern how she either lost or found her small son. For first her priests, their bodies shaved bare, beat their breasts and lament, just as she herself had done when she lost him; then a boy is brought forth as though found, and that mourning is turned into joy. Thus Lucan writes that Osiris is a god 'never sought with sufficient care.' For they are always losing him, always finding him. There is represented in the rites, then, an image of a thing that really happened — which, if we have any sense, surely shows that she was a mortal woman, and nearly childless, had she not found her only son. This did not escape that very poet in whom the young Pompey, on hearing of his father's death, speaks thus: 'I shall dig up from the tomb the divinity now honored by the nations, Isis, and scatter through the crowd the linen-shrouded Osiris.' This is Osiris, whom the common people call Serapis. For it is customary, when the dead are consecrated as gods, to change their names — I suppose so that no one may think them to have been men. Thus Romulus, once dead, was turned into Quirinus; Leda was turned into Nemesis; Circe into Marica. And Ino, after she hurled herself into the sea, became Leucothea, and 'Mother Matuta,' and her son Melicertes became Palaemon and Portunus. The rites of Ceres of Eleusis are not unlike these. For just as there the boy Osiris is sought amid his mother's lamentation, so here Proserpina, carried off into an incestuous marriage with her uncle, is sought; the tale that Ceres searched for her through Sicily bearing torches lit at Etna's summit explains why blazing torches are hurled about as part of her rites. At Lampsacus, the acceptable victim for Priapus is a donkey, and the reason for this sacrifice is given in the Fasti as follows. When all the gods had gathered for the feast of the Great Mother, and, sated with banqueting, were passing the night in games, Vesta lay down on the ground and fell asleep; there Priapus plotted against her sleep and her chastity, but she was roused by the untimely braying of the donkey on which Silenus was riding, and the lecher's design was thereby foiled. For this reason the people of Lampsacus habitually slaughter a donkey to Priapus as though in vengeance, while among the Romans that same animal, in honor of preserved chastity, is crowned with loaves at the Vestal rites. What could be more shameful, more disgraceful, than that Vesta should be a virgin only by the kindness of a donkey? But the poet invented a story. Surely, then, is it any truer what those who wrote the 'Phaenomena' report, when they speak of the two stars of Cancer that the Greeks call 'the Asses' — that they had been donkeys which carried Father Liber across when he could not cross a river, and that he gave one of them as a reward the power of speaking with a human voice? And so a contest arose between it and Priapus over the size of their private parts; Priapus, defeated and enraged, killed the winner. This is far more absurd, but poets may say whatever they please. I will not further expose so unseemly a mystery, nor strip Priapus bare, lest something appear worth laughing at. Granted that poets invented these things — but they must have invented them to conceal some greater indecency. Let us ask, then, what that is. And indeed it is quite plain. For just as a bull is sacrificed to the Moon because it has similar horns, and the Persians placate with a horse the sun-god girded with rays, so that a swift victim not be given to a slow god, so in this case, because the size of the male member is monstrous, no victim more fitting could be found for the monster than one that could imitate the very thing to which it is sacrificed. At Lindus, a town of Rhodes, there are rites of Hercules whose manner differs greatly from all others, since they are celebrated not with 'good words,' as the Greeks call it, but with curses and execration, should so much as an unintended good word slip from someone's lips during the solemn ceremonies, this counts as a violation of the rite. The reason given for this — if there can be any reason in matters so utterly foolish — is as follows. When Hercules had arrived there and was suffering hunger, he came upon a plowman laboring in his field and pressed the man to part with one of his oxen for a price. The man refused, saying it could not be done, since all his hope of tilling the land rested on those two young oxen. Hercules, with his usual violence, since he could not get one, took both. But the unfortunate man, seeing his oxen about to be slaughtered, avenged his injury with curses — which was most gratifying to that refined and urbane hero. For while he prepared the feast for his companions and devoured another man's oxen, he listened with laughter and guffaws to the man cursing him most bitterly. But afterward, once his valor had won him a decision that divine honors be granted, the citizens raised an altar in Hercules' name, which by that deed he named 'Bouzygos' ('ox-yoker'), at which two yoked oxen were to be sacrificed just as those he had stolen from the plowman, and he appointed that very man his priest, and ordered him always to use the same curses in performing the sacrifices, since he declared he had never dined more pleasantly. These are no longer sacred rites but sacrileges, in which that is held holy which, if done in any other context, would be most severely punished. As for the rites of the Cretan Jupiter himself, what else do they show but how he was either hidden away from his father or nursed? There is the she-goat of the nymph Amalthea, who nourished the infant with her udders; concerning which Germanicus Caesar says in his poem on the Aratea: 'She is thought to be Jupiter's nurse, if truly the infant Jupiter suckled at the most faithful udders of the Cretan goat, which by its bright star bears witness to its beloved foster-child.' Musaeus is the authority that Jupiter used the hide of this she-goat as a shield when fighting against the Titans, whence he is called by the poets 'aegis-bearing.' Thus whatever was done in hiding the child is reenacted symbolically in the rites. But the mystery of his mother contains the same thing, which Ovid sets out in the Fasti: 'Steep Ida now resounds for a long while with clashing, so that the child may wail safely with infant mouth. Staves strike against shields for some, against hollow helmets for others — this is the Curetes' task, and this the Corybantes'. The deed lay hidden, and imitations of the ancient act remain: the goddess's attendants strike bronze and hoarse-sounding hides. They clash cymbals in place of helmets, drums in place of shields; the pipe gives forth its Phrygian strains, as it did of old.' Sallust rejects this whole notion as though invented by poets, and wishes to interpret it ingeniously, saying that the Curetes are called the fosterers of Jupiter because they were the first to understand things divine, and that antiquity — as it magnifies everything else — celebrated them as fosterers of Jupiter. How greatly that learned man erred, the matter itself now makes clear. For if Jupiter is the first of both gods and religions, if before him no gods were commonly worshipped, because those who are worshipped had not yet been born, then it is evident that the Curetes were, on the contrary, the first to understand nothing divine — for it was precisely through them that every error entered in, and all recollection of the true God was wiped away. From these very mysteries and ceremonies, then, men ought to have understood that they were making supplication to dead men. I do not, then, insist that anyone believe the fictions of the poets; let him who thinks these poets are lying instead examine the writings of the pontiffs themselves, and turn over whatever literature there is concerning sacred matters: he will perhaps find more than we adduce, from which he may understand that everything held sacred is empty, absurd, and invented. But if anyone, having attained wisdom, lays aside his error, he will surely laugh at the follies of men nearly out of their minds — I mean those who either dance in indecent leaping, or run naked, oiled, garlanded, or masked, or smeared with mud. What shall I say of shields already rotting with age? When men carry these, they suppose they are bearing the gods themselves upon their shoulders. For Furius Bibaculus is counted among the outstanding examples of piety, who, though he was praetor, nevertheless carried the sacred shield with his lictors going before him, though the office allowed him exemption from that service by privilege of his rank. He was not, then, so much a Furius as plainly a madman, who thought he could adorn his praetorship with this service. And rightly does Lucretius cry out, given that it is men neither uncultured nor coarse who do such things: 'O foolish minds of men, O blind hearts! In what darkness of life, in what great perils, is passed whatever span of time this is!' Who, having any sanity, would not laugh at these mockeries, seeing men, as though out of their minds, do in earnest what, if anyone did them in jest, would seem far too wanton and foolish?