CHAPTER X.

II. i. We are accused of sacrilege and disloyalty. We shall prove that your gods are no gods; for they once were men.

'You do not worship the gods,' you say to us, 'and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.' It follows that we do not sacrifice for others, for the same reason that we do not sacrifice for ourselves— [35] in a word, from our not worshipping the gods. Consequently we are judicially charged with sacrilege and disloyalty. This is the chief point in the case, or rather it is the whole case, and it certainly demands investigation, if neither prejudice nor injustice is to be the judge, the one despairing of, and the other rejecting the truth. We cease to worship your gods from that moment when we recognize that they do not exist. This, therefore, you ought to demand,— that we prove these gods to have no existence, and on that ground that they ought not to be worshipped, since worship would only be due to them in the event of their being really gods. Then, too, it will of course follow that the Christians must be punished, if it remains an established fact that those gods do exist, whom they refused to worship because they believed them to have no such existence.

'But,' you say, 'to us they are gods.' We protest, and appeal from yourselves to your conscience : let that judge us, let that condemn us, if it can deny that all those gods of yours were men. But if it itself contest the point, it shall be convicted from its own documents of antiquity, from whence it learnt about them, which testify to this day both to the cities where they were born, and to the localities where they left marks of their work, and even where they are shewn to be buried. Nor shall I go through all one by one, many and important as they are,— new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captive, adopted, peculiar, common, male, female, rural, urban, nautical, military,—it is tedious enough even to [36] recount their titles; but I will deal with them concisely; and this, not that you may learn, but that you may be reminded, for you certainly act the part of those who have forgotten.

Previous to Saturn there is with you no god : from him is the beginning of all, even of more powerful and better known divinity. Consequently, whatever shall be established of the source will also hold good of the succession. Saturn, then, as far as literature teaches, neither Diodorus the Greek, nor Thallus, nor Cassius Severus, nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any other writer on this particular kind of antiquities, has proclaimed to be anything but a man : and so far as the evidence of facts goes, nowhere do I find any more trustworthy than in Italy itself, where Saturn, after many expeditions, and after partaking of Attic hospitality, settled, being received by Janus, or Janes, as the Salians prefer it. The mountain which he inhabited was called Saturnius; the state which he founded is even to this day Saturnia; in fact the whole of Italy, after being Oenotria, was named Saturnia. By him writing-tablets were first introduced, and a stamped coinage, and for that reason he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was a man, surely he sprang from a man; and since he came into being by a man, he certainly cannot be from Heaven and Earth. But it easily came about that he, whose parents were unknown, was called the son of those whose children we may all of us also be deemed to be. For who may not call Heaven and Earth father and mother, for the sake of respect and [37] honour, or in deference to that general custom by which persons unknown or unexpectedly appearing are said to have dropped from the sky. Just so it happened to Saturn, unexpectedly appearing everywhere, to be called celestial. For those whose birth is uncertain are commonly termed sons of earth. I do not make a point of the fact that men in those ages were so ignorant as to be moved by the appearance, as though divine, of any strange man; since, cultured as they are at the present day, they consecrate as gods those whom a few days before they have admitted by a public mourning to be dead ²⁸.

We have dealt quite sufficiently, although briefly, with Saturn. We will shew that even Jupiter himself was both a man and sprung from a man; and that thereafter the whole swarm of his progeny were both mortal and like their source.