CHAPTER XIV.

For you cheat them in your sacrifices, and mock them in your poetic and philosophic literature.

I AM unwilling to review your sacred rites; I do not mention your conduct in sacrificing which leads [47] you to slay all your worn-out and diseased and scurfy animals; to cut off all the superfluous parts from the fat and sound beasts,—the heads and hoofs, which at home you would have set apart for your slaves or the dogs; to lay not a third part of the tithe of Hercules on his altar. I rather praise your wisdom which leads you to save something at all events from being lost.

But I turn to your literature, whence you derive instruction in prudence and the honourable duties of life; and what travesties do I find! gods, engaged like pairs of gladiators, fighting one another on account of Trojans and Greeks : Venus wounded by an arrow shot by human hands, because she wished to rescue her own son Aeneas, who was nearly killed by the same Diomede: Mars in chains for thirteen months, well-nigh wasted away: Jupiter, lest he should experience the same violence from the rest of the celestials, freed by the aid of some monster; and at one time weeping for the death of Sarpedon, and at another foully lusting after his sister, with an enumeration of his mistresses not for long since loved so much as she. Thenceforward what poet is there who is not found to be a culumniator of the gods on the authority of his master ³⁴? One assigns Apollo to King Admetus to feed his cattle : another hires out the architectural services of Neptune to Laomedon; and there is the celebrated lyric poet (I mean Pindar) who sings that [48] Aesculapius was deservedly punished by a thunderbolt for his covetousness, which induced him to practise medicine wrongfully. Wicked Jupiter, if the bolt was his, acting unnaturally towards his grandson, and jealously towards the skilful physician. These things, amongst such very religious people, ought neither to be revealed if true, nor invented if false. Nor, again, do the tragic or comic writers spare them, so as to refrain from relating in their prologues the troubles or the failings of the family of some god.

I say nothing about the philosophers, content with the evidence of Socrates, who, in contempt of the gods, used to swear by an oak, a goat, and a dog. 'But for that very reason Socrates was condemned,' you may say, 'because he overthrew the gods.' True, because then, as always, truth met with hatred. Yet, when the Athenians, regretting their decision, afterwards punished Socrates' accusers, and placed a golden statue of him in a temple, the reversion of the condemnation restored the validity of Socrates' testimony to my contention. Moreover Diogenes, too, somewhere or other scoffs at Hercules, and Varro, the Roman Cynic, introduces three hundred headless Joves, or, as one should say, Jupiters.