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| Chapter XV.
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Chapter XV.
Others of your writers, in their wantonness, even
minister to your pleasures by vilifying the gods. Examine those
charming farces of your Lentuli and Hostilii, whether in the jokes and
tricks it is the buffoons or the deities which afford you merriment;
such farces I mean as Anubis the Adulterer, and Luna of the masculine
gender, and Diana under the lash, and the reading the will of Jupiter
deceased, and the three famishing Herculeses held up to ridicule. Your
dramatic literature, too, depicts all the vileness of your gods.
The Sun mourns his offspring91
cast down from heaven,
and you are full of glee; Cybele sighs after the scornful
swain,92
and you do not blush; you brook the stage
recital of Jupiter’s misdeeds, and the shepherd93
judging Juno, Venus, and Minerva. Then, again, when the likeness of a
god is put on the head of an ignominious and infamous wretch, when one
impure and trained up for the art in all effeminacy, represents a
Minerva or a Hercules, is not the majesty of your gods insulted, and
their deity dishonored? Yet you not merely look on, but applaud. You
are, I suppose, more devout in the arena, where after the same fashion
your deities dance on human blood, on the pollutions caused by
inflicted punishments, as they act their themes and stories, doing
their turn for the wretched criminals, except that these, too, often
put on divinity and actually play the very gods. We have seen in our
day a representation of the mutilation of Attis, that famous god of
Pessinus, and a man burnt alive as Hercules. We have made merry amid
the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday exhibition, at Mercury examining
the bodies of the dead with his hot iron; we have witnessed
Jove’s brother,94
mallet in hand,
dragging out the corpses of the gladiators. But who can go into
everything of this sort? If by such things as these the honour of deity
is assailed, if they go to blot out every trace of its majesty, we must
explain them by the contempt in which the gods are held, alike by those
who actually do them, and by those for whose enjoyment they are done.
This it will be said, however, is all in sport. But if I add—it
is what all know and will admit as readily to be the fact—that in
the temples adulteries are arranged, that at the altars pimping is
practised, that often in the houses of the temple-keepers and priests,
under the sacrificial fillets, and the sacred hats,95
and
the purple robes, amid the fumes of incense, deeds of licentiousness
are done, I am not sure but your gods have more reason to complain of
you than of Christians. It is certainly among the votaries of your
religion that the perpetrators of sacrilege are always found, for
Christians do not enter your temples even in the day-time. Perhaps they
too would be spoilers of them, if they worshipped in them. What then do
they worship, since their objects of worship are different from yours?
Already indeed it is implied, as the corollary from their rejection of
the lie, that they render homage to the truth; nor continue longer in
an error which they have given up in the very fact of recognizing it to
be an error. Take this in first of all, and when we have offered
a preliminary refutation of some false opinions, go on to derive from
it our entire religious system.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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