Chapter 9
TERTULLIAN
fall away from God, just as I do if I enter the circus or theater as a spectator. It is not the places in themselves that defile us, but the things done in them, by which the places themselves, as we have contended, are defiled; it is by the defiled that we are defiled.
(11) It is for this reason that we remind you who are those to whom places of this kind are dedicated to prove that what takes place in them is the work of those to whom the very places are sacred.
Chapter 9 (1) Next let us consider the arts displayed in the circus games. In times past, equestrian skill was simply a matter of riding on horseback, and certainly no guilt was involved in the ordinary use of the horse. But when this skill was pressed into the service of the games, it was changed from a gift of God into an instrument of the demons. (2) Accordingly, this kind of exhibition is regarded as sacred to Castor and Pollux, to whom horses were allotted 'by Mercury, as Stesichorus tells us.1 Also, Neptune is an equestrian deity, since the Greeks
1 Castor and Pollux, the patrons of horsemanship, were well-known figures to the Romans who were familiar with the old tales according to which the divine twins had appeared on two occasions (after the battle at the Lake Regillus in 497 b.c. and the battle of Pydna in 168 b.c.) at the pool of the water-nymph Juturna in the Roman
Forum, riding white horses and bringing news of victory. The divine horsemen were a favorite motif of ancient sculptors. It is highly improbable that Tertullian took directly from Stesichorus, a Greek lyric poet of the sixth century b.c., the story according to which the twins received their horses from Mercury. The passage is found in a number of ancient glossaries. Tertullian may have taken it from some chrestomathy or from some similar work.
SPECTACLES
call him Hippios ['Lord of Steeds'].2 (3) Moreover, concern ing the chariot, the four-horse team was consecrated to the Sun; the two-horse team, to the Moon.3 But we also read:
Erichthonius first dared to yoke four steeds to the car And to ride upon its wheels with victorious swiftness.4
This Erichthonius, a son of Minerva and Vulcan, fruit of lust, in truth, that fell to earth, is a demon-monster, or, rather, the Devil himself, not a mere snake.5 (4) If, however, the Argive Trochilus is the inventor of the chariot, he dedicated this work of his in the first place to Juno. And if, at Rome,
Romulus was the first to display a four-horse chariot, he, too, in my view, has been enrolled among the idols himself, pro vided that he is identical with Quirinus.6
2 In Ch. 5.5 the same Neptune is identified with Consus; here he is considered the same as the Greek Poseidon. Though the latter's most prominent function was that of sea god, he was also credited with the creation of the horse. When, according to a local Attic legend,
Poseidon and Athena competed for the land of Attica, Poseidon produced the first horse and Athena, whom the judges pronounced victor in the contest, planted an olive tree.
3 The Sun was supposed to'ride in a four-horse, the Moon in a twohorse, chariot (Anthologia latina 1 nr. 197.17) . Both motifs occur frequently in ancient art.
4 Virgil, Georgica 3.113-114.
5 The story runs as follows. Hephaestus (Vulcan) desired to wed Athena (Minerva). The latter, however, refused and defended herself with her spear. In the ensuing struggle, Hephaestus' seed fell on the earth which was thus fertilized and, in due time, brought forth the semi-serpentiform Erichthonius. The latter's parentage (his mother is
Ge, the Earth) and semi-serpent shape show clearly that he was an old spirit of the fertility of the soil. His partly serpentine form may have contributed to Tertullian's belief that Erichthonius was an incarnation of 'the Devil himself.' This belief would also explain
Tertullian's scornful and abusive description of the deity.
6 Not satisfied with only one tradition concerning the invention of the chariot, Tertullian adds two more versions. One of them makes
Trochilus, the son of the first priestess of Hera (Juno) at Argos, the inventor of the chariot. This may have been the sacred car in which