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| What Varro Reports About the Term Areopagus, and About Deucalion’s Flood.
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Chapter 10.—What Varro Reports
About the Term Areopagus, and About Deucalion’s Flood.
Marcus Varro, however, is not willing to credit
lying fables against the gods, lest he should find something
dishonoring to their
majesty; and therefore he will
not admit that the Areopagus, the place where the Apostle Paul
disputed with the Athenians, got this name because Mars, who in
Greek is called ἌΑρης, when he was charged with the crime of homicide, and
was judged by twelve gods in that field, was acquitted by the
sentence of six; because it was the custom, when the votes were
equal, to acquit rather than condemn. Against this opinion, which
is much most widely published, he tries, from the notices of
obscure books, to support another reason for this name, lest the
Athenians should be thought to have called it Areopagus from the
words” Mars” and “field,”1137
as if it were the field of Mars,
to the dishonor of the gods, forsooth, from whom he thinks lawsuits
and judgments far removed. And he asserts that this which is said
about Mars is not less false than what is said about the three
goddesses, to wit, Juno, Minerva, and Venus, whose contest for the
palm of beauty, before Paris as judge, in order to obtain the
golden apple, is not only related, but is celebrated in songs and
dances amid the applause of the theatres, in plays meant to please
the gods who take pleasure in these crimes of their own, whether
real or fabled. Varro does not believe these things, because they
are incompatible with the nature of the gods and of morality; and
yet, in giving not a fabulous but a historic reason for the name of
Athens, he inserts in his books the strife between Neptune and
Minerva as to whose name should be given to that city, which was so
great that, when they contended by the display of prodigies, even
Apollo dared not judge between them when consulted; but, in order
to end the strife of the gods, just as Jupiter sent the three
goddesses we have named to Paris, so he sent them to men, when
Minerva won by the vote, and yet was defeated by the punishment of
her own voters, for she was unable to confer the title of Athenians
on the women who were her friends, although she could impose it on
the men who were her opponents. In these times, when Cranaos
reigned at Athens as the successor of Cecrops, as Varro writes,
but, according to our Eusebius and Jerome, while Cecrops himself
still remained, the flood occurred which is called Deucalion’s,
because it occurred chiefly in those parts of the earth in which he
reigned. But this flood did not at all reach Egypt or its
vicinity.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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