CHAPTER XV.

You insult them in your burlesques and at your theatres.

THE rest of your ingenious amusements, too, minister to your pleasures through the dishonour of the [49] gods. Examine the choice farces of your Lentuli and Hostilii, and see whether in the jokes and tricks it is the actors or your gods that you laugh at:—'the adulterer Anubis;' 'the male Luna;' 'the scourged Diana;' the recital of 'the will of the deceased Jupiter;' and 'the three starved Hercules' held up to derision. Moreover, the literature of the stage depicts all their foulness. The Sun mourns for his son cast out of heaven, and you are delighted: Cybele sighs for her scornful shepherd ³⁵, and you blush not for shame. You allow the criminal record of Jupiter to be sung; and Juno, Venus, and Minerva to be judged by a shepherd ³⁶. Why, actually the mask of your god clothes an ignominious and infamous head : a body impure and rendered fit for the part by emasculation represents a Minerva or a Hercules! Is not their majesty outraged and their divinity prostituted, whilst you applaud?

You are, I presume, more religious in the theatre, where your gods in the same way dance over human blood, the stains resulting from penalties undergone, and supply the arguments and stories for the criminals —except that the criminals themselves often impersonate your very gods. We have sometimes seen Atys, that god from Pessinus, mutilated ³⁷; and one burnt alive who had assumed the part of Hercules. We have smiled, too, amidst the sportive cruelties of the noon-day combats, at Mercury examining the dead with a branding iron. We have seen the brother [50] of Jupiter dragging off the corpses of the gladiators with his hammer in his hand.

But who can go through all your farces up to date one by one? If they destroy the honour of the divinity of the gods, if they obliterate the traces of their majesty, such burlesques find their origin surely in the contempt in which the gods are held both by those who perform them, and by those for whose amusement they are performed.

'But these are stage plays,' you say. If, however, I shall add, what the consciences of all will no less admit,—that adulteries are committed in the temples, that the pander's trade is carried on amidst the altars, that lust is consummated generally in the very abodes of the sacristans and priests, under the self-same fillets and sacred caps and purple vestments, while the incense is burning,—I know not whether your gods have not more reason to complain of you than of the Christians. Certainly those guilty of sacrilege are ever detected from among yourselves. For Christians never enter your temples even in the daytime. They, too, might perchance despoil them, if they, too, reverenced them. What then do they worship Avho worship not such things? It may indeed already be easily understood that they who are not devotees of falsehood are worshippers of the truth; for they no longer err in a matter wherein they ceased to err on the recognition of their previous error. Receive this first, and then from it, after certain false notions about it have been rebutted, deduce the whole system of our religion. [51]