CHAPTER XIII.

In fact, you act most sacrilegiously towards your deities, both private and public.

'BUT to us they are gods,' you say. How is it, then, that you on the contrary are convicted of acting impiously and sacrilegiously and irreverently towards your gods; seeing that you neglect those whose existence you assume, destroy those whom you fear, and ridicule those whom you even avenge? Consider if I am not speaking the truth. In the first place, when some of you worship one god and some another, of course you offend those whom you do not worship. Your preference for one cannot but issue in the slight of another, since choice implies rejection. Therefore you undoubtedly insult those whom you reject, and to whom you are not afraid of giving offence by your rejection. For the case of each god, as we touched upon before ³¹, depended upon the judgement of the senate. He was no god at all whom a man, when consulted upon the point, had refused to deify, and by his refusal had condemned.

Over your household gods, whom you call Lares, you exercise a household authority, pawning them, selling them, changing them, — sometimes from a Saturn into a cooking-pot, sometimes from a Minerva into a fire-pan,—as each god has become worn out or battered from being long worshipped, or as each [45] master of the house has found his domestic necessity more sacred.

Equally you profane your public gods by public right, by putting them in an auction-catalogue ³² as sources of revenue. The Capitol and the vegetable-market are bid for in identically the same way; under the same voice of the crier, under the same hammer, under the same booking of the bids by the quaestor, divinity is taken on lease, knocked down to the highest bidder. Yet lands burdened with a tax are less valuable, and persons who are subject to assessment for a poll-tax are less noble; for these are the marks of serfdom. But gods are the more holy the more they are subject to tribute; nay, they are holier in proportion to the amount of tribute they pay. Their very majesty is prostituted into a source of gain. Religion goes the round of the taverns begging. You demand payment for standing on temple ground, for access to the sacred rites; one is not allowed to get acquainted with the gods for nothing: they are on sale. What do you do at all to honour them that you do not also confer on your deceased friends? The temples and the altars serve for both alike. Their dress is the same, and the ornaments on their statues. Just as the dead man has his age, his craft, his occupation, so has the god. Wherein lies the difference between a funeral feast for an old man and a feast of Jupiter? between the [46] sacrificial and the funeral chalice? between the augur and the embalmer? for an augur, too, is in attendance on the dead. But worthily do you assign the honour of divinity to your deceased emperors, since you ascribe it to them even while living. Your gods will give you credit for it; nay, they will be grateful that their masters have been made their equals. But when you worship Larentina, a common prostitute (I wish it had at least been Lais or Phryne) amongst your Junos and Ceres and Dianas; when you invest Simon Magus with sanctity by a statue and an inscription of a 'holy god ³³;' when you make some vicious court-page or other a god of the sacred synod;—although your ancient gods were no nobler in character, yet they will account themselves insulted by you, in that you have allowed to others also what antiquity conferred on them alone.