15. Chapter Xiv. Or, On The Origin And Progress Of Idolatry. Chapter Xii.
CHAPTER XIV. OR, ON THE ORIGIN
AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY.
CHAPTER XII.
T he progress of idolatry into every kind of confusion — the peculiar gods adopted by each nation for itself — the αὐτοθεϊσμός [selfdeification] of very many — the ἐκθέωσις [deification] of Alexander among the Lacedaemonians — the fable of Tiberius wishing to number Christ among the gods — in fashioning images, and in painting the gods, every sense of religion despised — the madness of the Egyptians — penalties established by law against foreign gods, inflicted only upon the worshippers of the one true God — the truly golden words of Justin Martyr.
I. We have spoken of those whom the multitude of idolaters, by common and universal consent, religiously venerated throughout almost the whole world. As polytheism grew ever stronger, every nation, every city, all peoples, adopted for themselves whatever gods they pleased. Whether in earnest or in jest, publicly or privately, from ancient tradition or on the strength of present authority, out of vain affections — everywhere the most abundant crop of deities sprang up. Pausanias relates these origins of new gods, Attica, book I: Θεὸν … δὲ Ἀμφιάραον πρώτοις Ὠρωπίοις κατέστη
νομίζειν· ὕστερον δὲ καὶ πάντες Ἕλληνες ἥγηνται· καταλέξαι δὲ καὶ ἄλλους ἔχω γενομένους τότε ἀνθρώπους, οἳ θεῶν Ἕλλησι τιμὰς ἔχουσι, τοῖς δὲ ἀνάκεινται πόλεις — that is: "The Oropians were the first of all to number
Amphiaraus among the gods, whom the rest of the Greeks afterward followed. I can also enumerate others, who, though formerly men, the Greeks have honoured as divine, and to whom cities have even been consecrated." For everywhere the custom eventually prevailed that, whenever anyone had pleased mankind, he became a god; for every people had the right to number in the ranks of the gods whomsoever they pleased.
And hence no small controversy arose between the Roman tax-farmers and the Greeks. For since it was provided by the censorial law that the land of the immortal gods should not pay tribute, the tax-farmers stoutly denied that any who had once been men were immortal — as Marcus Tullius attests,
On the Nature of the Gods, book III.
II. Alexander too, and Caligula, Claudius, Domitian, and other monsters of wickedness, wished to be reckoned gods while living — careless, perhaps, of what they should be once dead, among the shades below.
Callisthenes, in Curtius, elegantly mocks this madness: "So then," he says, "you and I, Cleo, are to make gods? Is the king to receive the authority of his own divinity from us? I should like to see your power tested: make some man a king, if you can make him a god — it is easier to bestow an empire than the heavens" — Quintus Curtius, book VIII, chapter 5. Against the Lacedaemonians, however, for denying him the right of Deity, force was threatened, until they admitted him by that custom which Cicero denies to have been lawful — he who so vehemently attacks the Clodian dedication of his own house. "Since Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god."
The Athenians, too, at that same time, fined the orator Demades ten talents,
because he had tried to persuade them to acknowledge Alexander as a god — as Athenaeus attests, book V — although they themselves afterwards paid divine honours, while he was yet living and present, to Demetrius
Poliorcetes, who was but the smallest fraction of an Alexander. Claudius's αὐτοθεϊσμός [self-deification] vanished at the sound of thunder; for, fleeing into his tent, he said, "This is a god — not Claudius."
III. From this custom among the nations there arose a fable: that Tiberius attempted to number Christ among the Roman gods, but, the senate refusing, abandoned the proposal. Would that it had never occurred to good men to spread abroad fables of this kind! God forbid that anyone hereafter should give them credit.
IV. Kings, too, and Roman emperors, numbered among the gods whomsoever they pleased; and all of them, after Julius, were judged by the senate to be either gods or public enemies. Hence the jest of the dying
Vespasian: "I think I am becoming a god." But since he who was to be reckoned a god generally had, of necessity, to die in the purple, hence
Eutropius says of Diocletian, "It befell him — a thing that has happened to no man since the birth of mankind — that, although he had died a private citizen, he was nevertheless numbered among the gods." This, however, was by no means universally true. Alexander ordered divine honours and sacrifices to be paid to his friend Hephaestion, Curtius, book X. And Antoninus Caracalla himself — a monster among men — was numbered among the gods by Macrinus, who had killed him, as Aelius Spartianus attests. Concerning Hadrian, who first sacrificed his beloved Antinous, that he might use his entrails for μαντείας [divinations] and μαγγανεῖας
[sorceries], and afterwards numbered him among the gods, setting up his images throughout the whole world, there is a dreadful account in Dio's
History, book LXIX — an impiety which Clement, in his Exhortation, and Tertullian, in his Apology, deservedly attack. Private individuals, too, were permitted to worship privately whomsoever they pleased. Witness the saying of Cornelia to her son Gaius Gracchus: "When I am dead, you shall offer funeral rites to me, and shall call upon the shade-gods of your parent; and at that time let it not shame you to seek the prayers of that god whom, living and present, you left neglected and forsaken."
V. Here, indeed, this contempt for all religion, and for every notion of Deity, was carried so far that it became at last mere sport to mix the most shameful crimes with these disgraceful superstitions. What outrages were practised in fashioning and painting the images of the gods, let the reader see in Pliny, book XXXV, chapters 9 and 10. Nothing was more customary among painters (of whom Cicero says, "We know all our gods by that face which painters and sculptors have chosen to give them") than to paint the goddesses in the likeness of their favourite courtesans — as did Arellius, who was never without a passion for some woman. And that image which Clodius consecrated in Cicero's house, under the name of the Goddess of Liberty, Cicero himself proves, in his oration To the Pontiffs, For His
House, to have been a courtesan of Tanagra. Thus, nowhere more than in religion itself do they seem to have cast off every sense of religion.
Mankind, then, being conquered, the ancient serpent triumphed indeed — and was not content merely to hold them bound to himself, but must further hold them captive for his sport, and set them foully at war and in arms against one another, for the sake of the most absurd superstitions. Such is that notable proof of human blindness and misery, labouring under Satan's yoke, which the satirist exhibits among the neighbouring peoples of Egypt,
Satire XV, lines 33–38 — the Crocodile, torch of war:
"Between neighbours an old and ancient feud, an undying hatred, and a wound never to be healed, still burns between Ombi and Tentyra.
On both sides the utmost fury rages among the common people, because each place hates the deities of its neighbours; since each believes that those alone are to be counted gods whom it itself worships."
He writes, moreover, that both peoples carried on this fight, begun for such a cause, until the victors devoured the vanquished, lines 77–83:
"Here one, in excessive terror, stumbles headlong in his flight, and is caught; and he, cut into countless pieces and morsels, so that one dead man might suffice for many, is devoured, bones and all gnawed away, by the victorious mob; nor did they cook him in a boiling cauldron, or on spits — so long and so tedious did it seem to them to wait for the fire, content instead with the raw corpse."
I am persuaded, almost with the credit of history, that the poet has related this incredible ferocity of the Egyptians in good faith — moved partly by the inbred and blind fury of so many, still raging today over dissensions in matters of almost no consequence to religion at all, and partly by the crimes of a not dissimilar kind which some, Christians in name only, have themselves perpetrated against the innocent professors of the Christian religion.
VI. But however the idolaters carried on their quarrels and enmities among themselves, in this they all seem to have conspired: to spurn the one true God, and his worship. For although it was provided by law at Athens
that no one should venerate ξένα δαιμόνια [strange deities], and at Rome, by the Twelve Tables, "that no one should have separate gods, nor privately worship new or foreign gods unless they had been publicly adopted" — yet no one can be found to have been prosecuted for violating religion, on account of any other god besides those publicly adopted for worship, except one who worshipped the one true God alone. (Socrates alone is the exception, whose accusation ran: Ἀδικεῖ Σωκράτης οὓς μὲν ἡ πόλις νομίζει θεοὺς οὐ νομίζων, ἕτερα δὲ καινὰ δαιμόνια ἐσηγούμενος. [Socrates does wrong, in that he does not acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges, but introduces other, new deities.] But with the rise of Christianity, this madness of men, and this envy of Satan, broke out with the greatest fury.
This blindness and rage the most ancient Christian writer, Justin, most elegantly reproaches to the philosopher-emperors; and with his truly golden words it pleases me to bring this digression to a close:
Μόνοι … μισούμεθα δι' ὄνομα τοῦ Χριστοῦ· καὶ μηδὲν ἀδικοῦντες ὡς ἁμαρτωλοὶ ἀναιρούμεθα· ἄλλων ἀλλαχοῦ καὶ δένδρα σεβομένων καὶ ποταμούς, καὶ μῦς καὶ αἰλούρους, καὶ κροκοδείλους, καὶ τῶν ἀλόγων ζώων τὰ πολλά· καὶ οὐ τῶν αὐτῶν ὑπὸ πάντων τιμωμένων, ἀλλὰ ἄλλων ἀλλαχόσε, ὡς εἶναι ἀσεβεῖς ἀλλήλοις πάντας, διὰ τὸ μὴ τὰ αὐτὰ σέβειν.
Ὅπερ μόνον ἐγκαλεῖν ἡμῖν ἔχετε, ὅτι μὴ τοὺς αὐτοὺς ὑμῖν σέβομεν θεούς, μηδὲ τοῖς ἀποθανοῦσι χοὰς καὶ κνίσας καὶ ἐν γραφαῖς στεφάνους καὶ θυσίας φέρομεν· ὅτι γὰρ οὐ τὰ αὐτά, παρ' οἷς μὲν θεοί, παρ' οἷς δὲ θηρία, παρ' οἷς δ' ἱερεῖα νενομισμένα ἐστίν, ἀκριβῶς ἐπίστασθε.
[We alone are hated on account of the name of Christ; and though we do nothing wrong, we are put to death as though we were sinners — while others, elsewhere, worship trees, and rivers, and mice, and cats, and crocodiles, and many of the irrational animals; and not the same creatures
are honoured by all, but different ones in different places, so that all are, in effect, impious toward one another, because they do not worship the same things. This alone you have to charge against us as a crime: that we do not worship the same gods as you, nor pour out libations and the savour of fat to the dead, nor offer crowns and sacrifices to images and statues — although you know exactly that the very same animals are, among some, deities, among others, wild beasts, and among others still, sacrificial victims.]