Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Among the Romans, it was that famous King Numa who founded these vanities, and who, more than anyone, ensnared the crude and untrained minds of his people in strange new superstitions. To lend the scheme some semblance of authority, he pretended that he met by night with the goddess Egeria. In the grove of Aricia there stood a certain deeply shadowed cave, out of which a stream ran from a spring that never failed. There he would withdraw, having sent every witness away, so that he could pretend he was passing on to the people, at the bidding of this divine consort, whatever rites pleased the gods most. Indeed, his real model was the cunning of Minos: that Cretan king would withdraw into a cavern sacred to Jupiter, linger there a long while out of sight, and then reappear carrying laws he insisted Jupiter had personally handed down to him. The aim, in both cases, was to make subjects obey not from mere command alone, but from religious dread as well. Persuading shepherds of such things, in fact, proved no great task. He went on to appoint pontiffs, flamens, Salii, and augurs, and to parcel out gods among the various clans; in this way he calmed the wild temperament of his still-young people and steered them away from war and toward the pursuits of peace. Yet whatever deceptions he practiced on others, he never once deceived himself. Long afterward, when Cornelius and Baebius held the consulship, diggers working in the field of the scribe Petilius, beneath the Janiculum, turned up two stone chests: one held the body of Numa, the other seven books in Latin on pontifical law, together with an equal number in Greek on the discipline of wisdom — and by these he had undercut sacred rites of every kind, not merely the ones he himself had founded. Once this discovery reached the senate, a decree followed ordering the books destroyed, and Quintus Petilius, the urban praetor, duly burned them in front of an assembly of the people. It was a foolish move nonetheless: what was gained by burning the books, when the burning itself — done precisely because the books discredited sacred rites — became a matter passed down in memory forever? Not one man in that senate escaped being a fool, since the books might have been destroyed while the affair itself never entered the record at all. So it was that, wishing to display to later generations just how devoutly they had guarded their religion, they ended up, by testifying to it, eroding the very authority of that religion. But if Numa was the one who founded foolish rites among the Romans, then before him, in Latium, there had already been Faunus, who set up unholy rites in honor of his grandfather Saturn, who counted his father Picus among the gods, and who made his own sister and wife, Fenta Fauna, into a goddess as well. Gavius Bassus records that she went by the name Fatua, since — much as Faunus did for men — she was in the habit of chanting the fates to women. Varro, for his part, writes that her chastity was so complete that, for as long as she lived, no man beheld her except her own husband, nor did anyone else so much as hear her name spoken. It is for this reason that women offer sacrifice to her away from men's eyes, calling her the Good Goddess. Sextus Clodius, however, in the book he composed in Greek, tells a different story: that she was Faunus's wife, and that, having secretly drunk a whole jar of wine against royal custom and propriety and grown drunk from it, her husband beat her with myrtle rods until she died; but afterward, overcome with regret at what he had done and unable to bear missing her, he raised her to divine status — which is why a wine jar wrapped in cloth has a place in her rites. So Faunus, too, bequeathed no small share of delusion to later ages, though anyone with sense sees straight through it. Lucilius, in fact, ridicules the folly of people who take mere images for gods, writing these lines: the bogeys and hobgoblins set up by Fauns and by Numa Pompilius — this fellow shakes before them, staking everything on their power. Just as small children believe every bronze statue is alive and human, so these grown men take every fiction for truth, imagining a heart beats inside the bronze. A painter's gallery — nothing real in it, invention throughout! The poet likened foolish men to infants, but I would say they are considerably less sensible than that. Infants, after all, mistake statues for people, while these men mistake them for gods; infants are misled by their age into believing what isn't so, these men by their own folly; and infants, at least, will soon enough grow out of being fooled, whereas the emptiness of these men only lingers and swells further. It was Orpheus who first brought Father Liber's sacred rites onto Greek soil, and who first held them on Mount Cithaeron in Boeotia, near Thebes, where Liber himself had been born close by; and because he so often set the mountain ringing with the music of his lyre, it came to be called Cithaeron. Those rites still bear the name Orphic today — the same rites during which Orpheus himself was later torn apart, limb ripped from limb; and this happened at roughly the same time as the story of Faunus. Which of the two actually came first, though, is open to question, since Latinus and Priam sat on their thrones in the very same years, as did their fathers before them, Faunus and Laomedon — and it was during Laomedon's reign that Orpheus arrived with the Argonauts on the shore of the Trojans. Let us push on, then, and ask who, before anyone else, first introduced the worship of the gods altogether. Didymus, in his commentary on Pindar, states that it was Melisseus, ruler of Crete, who first offered sacrifice to the gods and to bring in new rites along with processions for sacrifice; that he had two daughters, Amalthea and Melissa, who fed the infant Jupiter on goat's milk and honey — the source of that poetic legend in which bees are said to have flown down and filled the child's mouth with honey — and that Melissa was appointed by her own father as the very first priestess of the Great Mother, which is why the priestesses of that same Mother are still called Melissae to this day. The Sacred History, however, tells us that once Jupiter had secured control over affairs, his arrogance grew so great that he had shrines built to himself in many places. As he traveled from land to land, wherever he arrived in some region he would bind the kings or leading men of that people to himself through hospitality and friendship, and upon leaving each one he would order a shrine raised to him bearing his host's own name, as though this would keep alive the memory of their friendship and pact. This is how the temples of Jupiter Ataburius and Jupiter Labrandius came to be built, since Ataburus and Labrandus had served as his hosts and allies in war; likewise Jupiter Laprius, Jupiter Molion, Jupiter Casius, and others of this same sort. He devised this scheme with great cunning, so as to secure divine honor for himself while giving his hosts a name that would endure, bound up forever with religion. They, in turn, were delighted and gladly submitted themselves to his authority, celebrating annual rites and festivals for the honor of their own names. Aeneas did something comparable in Sicily, giving the city he founded the name of his host Acestes, so that Acestes would afterward take pleasure in loving, enlarging, and beautifying it of his own free will. In this fashion Jupiter spread devotion to himself across the whole world, setting an example that others would go on to copy. Whether, then, the custom of worshipping the gods began with Melisseus, as Didymus claims, or with Jupiter himself, as Euhemerus holds, one thing remains settled regardless: the period from which the gods began receiving worship. Melisseus, certainly, came long before in age, since he raised Jupiter as one would a grandson. It may well be, then, that either before Jupiter was born, or while he was still a boy, Melisseus had already established the worship of the gods — that is, worship of the boy's own mother (Ops), of his grandmother Earth, who had been the consort of Uranus, and of his father Saturn — and that through this very precedent and practice he himself pushed Jupiter toward the pride that later led him to dare claim divine honors for himself.
Now that we have traced the origin of these empty superstitions, it remains for us to establish also the times in which those men lived whose memory is worshipped. Theophilus, in his book on chronology addressed to Autolycus, says that in his history Thallus states that Belus, whom the Babylonians and Assyrians worship, is found to have been three hundred and twenty-two years earlier than the Trojan War, and that Belus was a contemporary of Saturn, both having grown to manhood at the same time. And this is so true that it can be established by reasoning itself. For Agamemnon, who waged the Trojan War, was the great-great-grandson of Jupiter, and Achilles and Ajax his great-grandsons, and Ulysses of the same degree, while Priam's line was a much longer one.... Some authors, however, hold that Dardanus and Iasius were the sons of Corythus rather than Jupiter's own; had things been otherwise, Jupiter would not have been able to take his own great-grandson Ganymede for shameful ends. So, if you match up the corresponding years of the ancestors of those I have named above, the reckoning agrees. Now, from the destruction of the city of Troy, one thousand four hundred and seventy years are reckoned. From this computation of dates it is clear that Saturn, who was the begetter of all the gods, was born no more than one thousand eight hundred years ago. Let them not, then, boast of the antiquity of their sacred rites, since their origin, their nature, and their dates have all been laid bare. There remain yet some further points that would be of great use in refuting these false religions, but I have decided to bring the book to an end here, lest it grow beyond measure. These matters must be pursued more fully, so that, once everything that seems to stand in the way of truth has been refuted, we may be able to instill true religion in men who wander uncertainly through ignorance of what is good. Wisdom's opening task, in fact, lies in seeing through falsehood, while its second task is coming to know what is true. So whoever has gained from this initial lesson of ours, in which falsehoods have been laid bare, will thereby be spurred toward the knowledge of truth — a pleasure than which nothing sweeter exists for mankind — and will then stand ready for the wisdom of heavenly teaching, provided he approaches it eagerly, prepared to learn what remains.