29. We might, however, even
yet be able to receive from you these thoughts, most full of wicked
falsehoods, if it were not that you yourselves, in bringing forward
many things about the gods so inconsistent and mutually destructive,
compel us to withhold our minds from assenting. For when you
strive individually to excel each other in reputation for more
recondite knowledge, you both overthrow the very gods in whom you
believe, and replace them by others who have clearly no existence; and
different men give different opinions on the same subjects,4001
| 4001
Stewechius and Orelli would omit rebus, and interpret
“about the same gods.” Instead of
de—“about,” the ms. has deos. |
and you
write that
those whom general consent has ever received as single persons are
infinite in number. Let us, too, begin
duty, then, with
father
Janus, whom certain of you have declared to be the
world, others the
year, some the sun. But if we are to believe that this is true,
it follows as a consequence, that it should be understood that there
never was any Janus, who, they say, being sprung from Cœlus and
Hecate,
reigned first in
Italy, founded the
town Janiculum, was the
father of Fons,
4002
| 4002
The ms. reads fonti,
corrected by Meursius Fontis, as above. |
the son-in-
law
of Vulturnus, the
husband of Juturna; and thus you erase the name of
the
god to whom in all prayers you give the first place, and whom you
believe to procure for you a hearing from the gods. But, again, if Janus be the
year, neither thus can he be a
god. For who does not know that
the year is a
fixed space
4003
of time, and that there is nothing
divine in that which is
formed
4004
by the duration
of months and lapse of days? Now this very
argument may,
in like manner, be applied to Saturn. For if time is meant under
this title, as the expounders of Grecian ideas think, so that that is
regarded as Kronos,
4005
which is chronos,
4006
there is no
such
deity as Saturn. For who is so senseless as to say that time
is a
god, when it is but a certain space measured off
4007
| 4007 Lit.,
“the measuring of a certain space included in,” etc. |
in the unending succession of
eternity? And thus will be removed from the rank of the immortals
that deity too, whom the men of old declared, and handed down to their
posterity, to be born of father Cœlus, the progenitor of the
dii magni, the planter of the vine, the bearer of the
pruning-knife.
4008
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