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| Who are the Select Gods, and Whether They are Held to Be Exempt from the Offices of the Commoner Gods.
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Chapter 2.—Who are the Select
Gods, and Whether They are Held to Be Exempt from the Offices of
the Commoner Gods.
The following gods, certainly,
Varro signalizes as select, devoting one book to this subject:
Janus, Jupiter, Saturn, Genius, Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Vulcan,
Neptune, Sol, Orcus, father Liber, Tellus, Ceres, Juno, Luna,
Diana, Minerva, Venus, Vesta; of which twenty gods, twelve are
males, and eight females. Whether are these deities called
select, because of their higher spheres of administration in the
world, or because they have become better known to the people, and
more worship has been expended on them? If it be on account of
the greater works which are performed by them in the world, we
ought not to have found them among that, as it were, plebeian crowd
of deities, which has assigned to it the charge of minute and
trifling things. For, first of all, at the conception of a
fœtus, from which point all the works commence which have been
distributed in minute detail to many deities, Janus himself opens
the way for the reception of the seed; there also is Saturn, on
account of the seed itself; there is Liber,251
| 251 Cicero, De Nat. Deor ii.,
distinguishes this Liber from Liber Bacchus, son of Jupiter and
Semele. | who liberates the male by the
effusion of the seed; there is Libera, whom they also would have to
be Venus, who confers this same benefit on the woman, namely, that
she also be liberated by the emission of the seed;—all these are
of the number of those who are called select. But there is also
the goddess Mena, who presides over the menses; though the daughter
of Jupiter, ignoble nevertheless. And this province of the menses
the same author, in his book on the select gods, assigns to Juno
herself, who is even queen among the select gods; and here, as Juno
Lucina, along with the same Mena, her stepdaughter, she presides
over the same blood. There also are two gods, exceedingly
obscure, Vitumnus and Sentinus—the one of whom imparts life to
the fœtus, and the other sensation; and, of a truth, they bestow,
most ignoble though they be, far more than all those noble and
select gods bestow. For, surely, without life and sensation, what
is the whole fœtus which a woman carries in her womb, but a most
vile and worthless thing, no better than slime and
dust?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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