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| Gods, Those Which Were Confessedly Elevated to the Divine Condition, What Pre-Eminent Right Had They to Such Honour? Hercules an Inferior Character.
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Chapter XIV.—Gods,
Those Which Were Confessedly Elevated to the Divine Condition, What
Pre-Eminent Right Had They to Such Honour? Hercules an Inferior
Character.
But since they will have it that those who have
been admitted from the human state to the honours of deification should
be kept separate from others, and that the distinction which Dionysius
the Stoic drew should be made between the native and the
factitious1041
| 1041 Inter nativos et
factos. See above, c. ii., p. 131. | gods, I will add a
few words concerning this last class also. I will take Hercules himself
for raising the gist of a reply1042
(to the
question) whether he deserved heaven and divine honours? For, as men
choose to have it, these honours are awarded to him for his merits. If
it was for his valour in destroying wild beasts with intrepidity, what
was there in that so very memorable? Do not criminals condemned to the
games, though they are even consigned to the contest of the vile arena,
despatch several of these animals at one time, and that with more
earnest zeal? If it was for his world-wide travels, how often has the
same thing been accomplished by the rich at their pleasant leisure, or
by philosophers in their slave-like poverty?1043
| 1043 Famulatoria
mendicitas. | Is
it forgotten that the cynic Asclepiades on a single sorry cow,1044
riding on her back, and sometimes nourished
at her udder, surveyed1045
| 1045 Subegisse oculis,
“reduced to his own eyesight.” | the whole world
with a personal inspection? Even if Hercules visited the infernal
regions, who does not know that the way to Hades is open to all? If you
have deified him on account of his much carnage and many battles, a
much greater number of victories was gained by the illustrious Pompey, the conqueror of the
pirates who had not spared Ostia itself in their ravages; and (as to
carnage), how many thousands, let me ask, were cooped up in one corner
of the citadel1046
of Carthage, and
slain by Scipio? Wherefore Scipio has a better claim to be
considered a fit candidate for deification1047
| 1047 Magis obtinendus
divinitati deputatur. |
than Hercules. You must be still more careful to add to the claims of
(our) Hercules his debaucheries with concubines and wives, and
the swathes1048
of Omphale, and his
base desertion of the Argonauts because he had lost his beautiful
boy.1049
To this mark of baseness add for his
glorification likewise his attacks of madness, adore the arrows which
slew his sons and wife. This was the man who, after deeming himself
worthy of a funeral pile in the anguish of his remorse for his
parricides,1050
deserved rather to
die the unhonoured death which awaited him, arrayed in the poisoned
robe which his wife sent him on account of his lascivious attachment
(to another). You, however, raised him from the pyre to the sky, with
the same facility with which (you have distinguished in like manner)
another hero1051
also, who was
destroyed by the violence of a fire from the gods. He having devised
some few experiments, was said to have restored the dead to life by his
cures. He was the son of Apollo, half human, although the grandson of
Jupiter, and great-grandson of Saturn (or rather of spurious origin,
because his parentage was uncertain, as Socrates of Argon has related;
he was exposed also, and found in a worse tutelage than even
Jove’s, suckled even at the dugs of a dog); nobody can deny that
he deserved the end which befell him when he perished by a stroke of
lightning. In this transaction, however, your most excellent Jupiter is
once more found in the wrong—impious to his grandson, envious of
his artistic skill. Pindar, indeed, has not concealed his true desert;
according to him, he was punished for his avarice and love of gain,
influenced by which he would bring the living to their death, rather
than the dead to life, by the perverted use of his medical art which he
put up for sale.1052
| 1052 Tertullian does
not correctly quote Pindar (Pyth. iii. 54–59), who notices
the skilful hero’s love of reward, but certainly ascribes to him
the merit of curing rather than killing: Αλλὰ
κέρδει καὶ
σοφία
δέδεται
ἔτραπεν καὶ
κᾀκεῖνον
ἁγάνορι
μισθῷ χρυσὸς
ἐν χερσὶν
φανεὶς ἂνδῤ
ἐκ θανάτου
κομίσαι ἢδη
ἀλωκότα·
χερσὶ δ᾽ ἄρα
Κρονίων
ῥίψαις δἰ
ἄμφοῖν
ἀμπνοὰν
στέρνων
καθέλεν
ὠκέως, αἴθων
δὲ κεραυνὸς
ἐνέσκιμψεν
μόρον—“Even wisdom has
been bound by love of gain, and gold shining in the hand by a
magnificent reward induced even him to restore from death a man already
seized by it; and then the son of Saturn, hurling with his hands a bolt
through both, speedily took away the breath of their breasts, and the
flashing bolt inflicted death” (Dawson Turner). | It is said that his
mother was killed by the same stroke, and it was only right that she,
who had bestowed so dangerous a beast on the world,1053
| 1053 Tertullian does
not follow the legend which is usually received. He wishes to see
no good in the object of his hatred, and so takes the worst view, and
certainly improves upon it. The “bestia” is
out of reason. [He doubtless followed some copy now lost.] | should escape to heaven by the same
ladder. And yet the Athenians will not be at a loss how to
sacrifice to gods of such a fashion, for they pay divine honours to
Æsculapius and his mother amongst their dead (worthies). As if,
too, they had not ready to hand1054
their own
Theseus to worship, so highly deserving a god’s distinction!
Well, why not? Did he not on a foreign shore abandon the preserver of
his life,1055
with the same
indifference, nay heartlessness,1056
with which he
became the cause of his father’s death?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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