Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] And how far do the gods go... since it must be discussed, what sort of gods you have taken on? How much you ought to blush! Shall I laugh at the vanity or reproach the blindness? There is quite enough... let me set it out. [2] How many gods, and which ones, am I to bring forward? The greater or also the lesser? The old or also the newly-minted? Males or also females? Bachelors or also lawfully married? Skilled craftsmen or also idlers? Country folk or also city folk? Citizens or also foreigners? [3] For so many households, so many nations, in good faith go hunting for a census of them, that they cannot be sorted and distinguished and catalogued. [4] But the more sprawling the matter is, the more we must draw it in tight; and so, holding to this one aim in this whole department — to demonstrate that all of them were men (not, of course, that you may come to know it, since you carry on as though you had forgotten it) — I will take the shortcut: by tracing back from the very top the origin of their race. For the origin is the origin of the whole line that follows. [5] That origin of your gods is marked, I think, by Saturn. For even if Varro reckons Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva the most ancient gods, it must not slip our minds that every father is older than his children — Saturn older than Jupiter, just as Heaven is older than Saturn; for Saturn came from Heaven and Earth.
[6] And yet I pass over the origin of Heaven and Earth; they existed from wherever they existed, bachelors and childless for a long time, before they were husband and wife: clearly it took them a long age of growing to reach so great a height! [7] At last, once Heaven's voice began to break and Earth's breasts began to bud with little stones, they made a marriage between themselves: I suppose either Heaven came down to the bride, or Earth climbed up to the groom. [8] Earth, however, conceived by Heaven and bore that "godless god," Saturn — by some marvelous arithmetic: which parent did he take after? [9] But even though she bore him, certainly before Saturn they had produced no one, except one child after Saturn, Ops; after that, the breeding stopped. [10] For Saturn, indeed, castrated Heaven while he slept (we read of Heaven in the masculine gender — but then how is he a father unless male? [11] But where, at that period, did he even get a sickle to castrate him with? For Vulcan, the metal-craftsman, did not yet exist), while Earth, robbed of her mate, refused — though still of youthful age — to marry anyone else. [12] "But she had no one better than Heaven." Yet whom but her does the Sea embrace? But he reeks of brine — she was used to fresh water.
[13] So Saturn was the one and only male child of Heaven and Earth. But he himself, on reaching puberty, is joined to his own sister: there were not yet laws to forbid incest, nor any to punish parricide. [14] And so he used to swallow his sons of the male sex — better him than wolves, if he had exposed them instead! He was afraid, evidently, that one of them might have learned something from his father's sickle. [15] When Jupiter was born and then smuggled away, he swallowed a stone got up to look like the infant. By this ruse he was safe for a long time, until at last, overpowered by the son he had never digested, who had grown up in the shadows, he was stripped of his kingdom. [16] This is the patriarch of your gods whom Heaven and Earth begot for you, with the poets acting as midwives. [17] But some people fancy they are being quite clever, interpreting Saturn "scientifically" through allegory to mean Time — and so Heaven and Earth are his parents, since they too have no origin of their own; and so he is armed with a sickle, because time cuts everything short; and so he devours his own children, because time consumes back into itself everything it has produced. They even drag in the evidence of the name: "Kronos" is said not to be the Greek word — meaning it is not "Chronos." [18] Likewise they derive the reasoning of the Latin word from "sowing" (sationes), guessing him to be the one who procreates, through whom the seeds of heaven are carried down into the earth. [19] They attach Ops ("Resources") to him, on the ground that Resources supply the seeds of living, and also that seeds come out through work (opus). [20] What, I ask, is the logic of this transposing? I would really like you to explain it. Either Saturn was Saturn, or he was Time. If he is Time, how is he Saturn? If he is Saturn, how is he Time? For you cannot hold him to be both bodily and bodiless at once. [21] But what stopped Time from being worshipped in its own character, not dressed up in a human's fables, or the human's fable from being told for what it plainly is, not smuggled off into the ages? [22] What is the point of this fine interpreting, except to paint over ugly material with made-up arguments? [23] You cannot both call Saturn a man and, on that very account, want him to be Time — nor, in making him Time, can you still want him to have been a man. [24] ...altogether, Saturn is recorded among the ancient records as a man, of human condition, on earth. Anything that never existed at all can be imagined as bodiless; there is room to imagine only where there is no truth. [25] But since it is agreed that Saturn actually lived, it is pointless for you to keep changing your story: you are not permitted, having granted that he lived, to deny that he was a man — a man who can be defended neither as a god nor as Time.
[26] A full census of Saturn is to be found throughout your own literature. We read it in Cassius Severus, in the Corneliuses, in Nepos and Tacitus, and among the Greeks too in Diodorus, and in whatever other collectors of the gray-haired records of antiquity there are. [27] Nor are there more reliable traces of him than those marked out in Italy itself. For after many lands and after being a guest in Attica, he took up residence in Italy — Oenotria, as the land was then named — welcomed there by Ianus, or Ianes, as the Salii style him. [28] The mountain he had dwelt on is called the Saturnian mount; the city he had laid out with boundary-stones is Saturnia to this day; and finally all Italy used to be named after Saturn. [29] With such a witness as this land, which now rules the world, even if there is doubt about Saturn's origin, it is nonetheless established from his career that the man existed. [30] So if Saturn was a man — beyond doubt from a man, indeed precisely because he was a man — then he did not come from Heaven and Earth at all, but, having some parents unknown, it was easy for him to be called the son of those in whom we can all recognize ourselves. [31] For who does not, out of reverence, call heaven and earth "father" and "mother"? Or is this not simply the human habit by which any unknown persons who turn up, born of some obscure family, are said to have come down from heaven? [32] Accordingly Saturn, being a foreigner, at once and everywhere sprang up as talk of "a heavenly one"; for we too commonly toss around the phrase "sons of the earth" for people of uncertain birth. [33] I bring up nothing about the state of antiquity, in which the eyes and minds of men were then so unrefined that they would be stirred as if by something divine at the mere sight of any new man at all — let alone a king, and the first king at that.
[34] I will linger a little longer over Saturn, so as to lay up a shortcut for dealing with the rest, once I have had my fill of arguing over origins — and I will not pass over the weightier testimonies of the divine writings, to which trust is owed on account of their superior antiquity. [35] For the Sibyl comes before the whole of your literature — that Sibyl, that is, the true prophetess of the true God, whose very name you have dressed your demons' prophets up in. [36] She, in verse of six feet, sets out this account of Saturn's lineage and his affairs: "In the tenth generation of men," she says, "counting from when the flood struck those who came before, Saturn reigned, and Titan, and Iapetus, the mightiest sons of Earth and Heaven." [37] If, then, there is credit owing — even on the word of your own authors and your own earlier writings, but all the more on the nearer ones, since they belong to that same age — enough has been proven about Saturn and his lineage: that they were men. [38] We hold in hand a shortcut for the rest, a prescription against tracing their origin, so that we need not wander through them one by one. The character of the descendants is shown by the founders of the race: mortal things from mortal beings, earthly things from earthly beings; [39] rank corresponds to rank; marriages, conceptions, births run in step; homelands, dwellings, kingdoms, monuments... Let those who cannot deny they were born, believe they died; let those who admit they died, stop thinking they are gods!
XIII.