Book 1

pr. Paul, the herald of God, who first subdued the savage hearts of the nations with his sacred pen, sowing Christ among peoples hardened in their rough rites, scattering with gentle doctrine the seed among the brutish, that the pagan race, untamed, once God was known, might spurn its own ceremonies, was driven, as it chanced, by the blackest whirlwinds across a wintry sea in a frail and failing boat, and had endured the force of the ship-wrecking south wind. But when the right hand of the Lord had bidden the battles of the dark-blue gulf grow still, the drifting skiff slid back toward the harbour and set down upon the soil of the wet shore the oarsmen huddled with the cold of the rain. Then from the hedges along the strand they hastily gather the chilled arms of withered vine-shoots to build from them a quick-burning fire; each heaps up his own bundle for the flames, awaiting the luxury of a warm pyre. Paul, while he was busy collecting the brittle twigs and packing close the heap of the fire, thrust an unwary hand into the pile, where a viper, numb with sluggish ice, lay still, weaving the coils of its body among the branches. But when it grew warm in the smoking kindling and the fierce thing loosened its stiffened neck, now easy to bend, it brought to his hand its darting head and the points of its fangs. Bearing it clinging to his finger by the bite, and hanging there, Paul shuddered. The others cried out, for they believed the deadly venom was creeping along the livid skin. But the fearless apostle was not terrified by the grim shape of so sudden a peril. Lifting his eyes, he looked up to the stars, murmuring Christ within his silent breast, and shook the serpent far off and flung it down; the cast-off snake lashed the air and unclenched the points of its gaping mouth. Soon all the poison and the pain left him, as if no wound had torn his right hand, and, dried up, the viper's venom perished, while a rush of force whirled the headlong serpent and hurled it, doomed to burn, into the midst of the flames. So now, after the storm and the violence of the savage sea, by which the ship of Wisdom was then tossed, when, frightened beneath the temple-serving kings, it could scarcely run with its canvas barely spread, and, swimming amid the raging billows, had carried its afflicted ones through the world's whirlwind, the holy Law endured the wounding bite. For at first the venom hid itself, kept secret, and had not lifted up its gravid head, content to press its sealed silence below, in its wrappings and its lairs. But while the lurking impiety lay stiff by chance, it had bitten the right hand of Justice, seething, its stomach fired with kindled gall. Alas, how nearly it availed nothing that the catholic vessel had learned to sail by the oarage of the sacred pen which Paul set forth among the various nations! Scarcely had it found safe rest in the calm harbour, victorious over a thousand tamed furies; scarcely, made fast by its own moorings, had it set its passengers on stable ground: when suddenly a grim peril breaks out; for while they kindle very hot little fires for themselves to thaw both age and frost, while they burn in the flames the barren and superfluous shoots broken from the vine of the faith, that the matted vineyard, with its straggling tendrils, might cast off the foulness of the forest idol, an excessive warmth fondled to life their ruin. An unwonted snake comes creeping along its windings and shrewdly darting up its head of eloquence; but the hand, impatient of the wound, drove back the ineffectual breath of the rhetorician's mouth; the venom of genius, poured out in vain, came to rest only on the surface of the Christians' skin. Saviour of the race of Romulus, I pray, you who grant pardon to all the perishing, you who decree that no mortal is outside your handiwork, none whom you cannot raise again with an easy hand, now, if it can be, have mercy on this man, on his headlong plunge into the broken pit. He breathes, unknowing, with sacrilegious gusts, and unteachable he nurses his own errors; I beseech you, bid that no swift onset carry him, doomed to burn, into the midst of the flames.

1. I believed that the city, sick with heathen vices, had now driven off enough of the perils of its ancient disease, and that no evil remained, since the medicine of the emperor had calmed the excessive pains within the citadel; but since a renewed plague tries to disturb the health of the sons of Romulus, the Father's healing must be implored, that he let not Rome lie squalid in her old decay, nor the gowns of the nobles be steeped in smoke and blood. The renowned parent of the fatherland, then, and ruler of the world, accomplished nothing if he but forbade that wandering error of old believe there are gods in shapes beneath the darkening air, or, with supreme reverence, consecrate the nature of the elements, which is the craft of the Father, maker of all things — he, the one man whose care it was that the public wound of morals should not draw over itself a scar lightly closed at the skin's surface, and that, with the recess of the rotting injury pressed deep within and eaten away from beneath by foul corruption, a joining surface should foster it while the physician was deceived; but he strove that the nobler part of man within should live, and that the soul, cleansed of its deadly plague, should know how to keep itself safe from the inward venom? That had been the tyrants' medicine: to see what state, before their eyes, might suit the things of the present and the perishing, and to take no thought for what is to come. Alas, ill-deserving of the people, ill-flattering even of the fathers themselves, whom they let be plunged headlong into Tartarus together with Jove and the whole rabble of the gods! But this man extends his rule more widely into a later age, desiring to secure salvation for his own. No doubt some most learned man said, and finely, that the state would then be 'fortunate enough, if either kings were wise or the wise reigned.' Is he not of the number of those few who, allotted the diadem, have cherished the teaching of heavenly wisdom? Behold, to the race of men and to the toga-clad nation there has fallen a wise leader; happy is the commonwealth of our Rome, which flourishes while justice reigns. Obey the master who steers the sceptre. He warns that the basest error, and the superstition of the old forefathers, must be far away, and that none should think there is a god save him who, supreme, towers above all things and has created the boundless mass of the great world. Is Saturn believed to have ruled the Latin forefathers better, he who shaped with edicts such as these the rustic minds and barbarous hearts of men? 'I am a god. I come fleeing; afford me hiding; conceal an old man cast from his throne by the savagery of a tyrant son. It pleases me, a fugitive and exile, to lie hid here; I will give the name Latium to the people and the place, bent over the vines, if there is any such care, to be pruned I will forge the steel, and on the bank of your river I will set up walls of Saturn for you. You, hallowing a grove and the altars placed in my honour (for I am born of Heaven), shall keep up the worship.' From this the lesser men, dull-witted, fashioned in bronze gods whose ancestral tombs we know we have looked upon, gods whom a runaway stranger, and horse-like lust, brought into Italy; for to the Tuscan girls that adulterer first neighed with a feigned divinity. Soon, worse than his father, the dweller on wooded Olympus, Jupiter, fouled the Spartan women with incestuous defilement, now snatching off to crime his beloved, borne upon a bull, now tender and lighter than a feather, echoing soft whispers in the manner of a swan sweetly dying, that the captivated maiden might carry off a winged love; now, with the doors deaf — doors which even the bolt with tight wedges had made fast — through the roof, a wealthy lover, breaking the tiles, pouring a rain of streaming gold from above into the lap of his welcoming mistress; now, while his armour-bearer attended to the squalid plunder, afflicting the wretched catamite with foul embrace, when the boy was now his concubine, and his sister more indignant. This is the cause and origin of the evil: that an age, with its old guest reigning, in its raw stupor invented golden tales, and that crafty Jupiter, with new ingenuity, wove manifold and various deceits, so that, when he wished to change his skin and face, they might think he was a bull, that an eagle was carrying off plunder, that a swan lay coupling, that he turned into coins and entered a girl's lap. For what would the foolish rusticity of untamed men not believe — men wont to give their minds, among beasts and brutish rites, bereft of the divine reason? Into whatever belief the crafty wickedness of the rogue drew them, the wretched race lent a ready ear. A more corrupt age succeeded to the rule of Jove, which taught the unbending farmers to be slaves to vices. Men who knew not how to steal were steeped in this art by Mercury, born of Maia; now he is held a great god, the god whose practical lessons produced thieves, and he too, the most learned in Thessalian magic, is said, by the wielding of a staff he took up, to have called the dead back into the light, the souls, and the Cocytian laws of death to have unsealed for the shades flying back to the upper world, but to have condemned others to death and plunged them deep into the hidden void. He was skilled at both, so that he armed his life with a twofold crime; for with a magic murmur to call up faint shapes and cunningly to enchant the ashes of the tomb, his baneful art knows how, likewise, to rob others of life. A simple-minded antiquity, marvelling at this craftsman of crimes, worshipped him above a man, imagining him borne through the clouds and skimming the swift winds with wingèd feet. Behold, shaped in bronze, there stands among the gods a Greek man, and he shines forth in the august citadel of Numa. There was a certain energetic master of a well-tilled field, notable for the wealth of his gardens; yet this same man was an excessive whoremonger, and, by much lust grown practised, used to harass the rustic harlots, and among the willow-thickets and the dense hedges to go to obscene beddings, straining his untamed mind, ever ready for vice, to wickedness, never giving rest to his hot veins. This god, full noble, from his native Hellespont, came all the way to the Italian gardens with his shameful rites; a bowl of milk and these votive cakes he receives each year, and he guards the vineyards of the Sabine countryside — shame to look upon him, fixed obscenely to a bough. The notorious passion of Hercules for a soft boy blazed up, and tossed about on the rowers' benches of the Argo, nor did Nemea blush, beneath the lion's hide, to nurse illicit unions and, a celibate, to seek the perishing Hylas. Now in the song of the Salii the Pinarian house frequents its temple on the curved seat of the Aventine hill. The Theban youth becomes a god when the Indians are conquered, while, a victor exulting in success, he runs riot and brings home the gold of the captive nation, and, proud of spoils, melts into luxury with his half-male retinue, and, greedy for wine, drenches himself with deep draughts, sprinkling the dripping backs of his yoked wild beasts with the foam of a jewelled cup and with Falernian must. For these deserts now a goat is slaughtered to Bacchus on every altar, and those who wish to appease Bromius rend green water-snakes with their teeth — because his drunken madness even then, before the eyes of the king, wrought the frenzy of the satyrs, and, I think, it made the very Maenads, whirled into every crime by the wine that inflames them with furies' goads. While this chorus danced around him, the drunken adulterer found exposed on the shore of a lonely strand a harlot of surpassing body, whom there a faithless youth, sated with unholy love, had left behind. He bids this Neaera be taken up and, hot after his wine, stand among the dainties of his flowing triumph, and wear upon her head the royal crown's adornment. Soon Ariadne's fire is added to the heavenly stars: with this honour Liber paid the price of the night, so that a harlot might light up the ethereal vault. That all kings could do so much in that age was the conviction of the silly folly of a foolish crowd — that an emperor could pass over, with his own filth, into the eternal kingdom above the heights of heaven; then every royal power, and every authority, however small, was believed to retain the force of majesty and the rule of heaven; incense too was bestowed on captains, and honour upon a little shrine, and while fear, or love, or hope heaped these up, the ancestral custom went on into a long age among the wretched; the image of a false piety began to spread through ignorant descendants in a misty error; then, because the veneration which had before fallen to living kings fell, the same, to them now departed from the gift of light, and transferred its altars to the black funeral urns. Thence came the seductions of girls, the pledges, the births, the stealthy love of young men, and the caught corruption of the marriage-bed, since the court was then wont to seethe with kingly vices, nor did the offspring of the gods, lost in luxury, remember holy modesty. And that I may, O Rome, briefly touch on those parents of yours from the heavenly seat, by whose authorship they boast you sprang half-divine — Gradivus, that is, or the Cytherean — he violates a priestess; she, on the other hand, yields to a Phrygian husband; the union was unequal for each: it was not fitting that a goddess should enter an earthly marriage with a mortal, nor that a heaven-dweller should come down to a maiden's undoing and burn with a furtive fire, but Venus, a woman of common stock, clung to a husband of base blood and private station through forbidden disgrace; and, if Rhea, mocked by love of wanton Mars, lost her sacred chastity among the river-sedge, I would believe that some man of noble lineage, but the same infamous in his ways, when he had forced the maiden, called himself a god, so that no one would dare to cast the divinity's defilement upon the shameful, wretched girl. This rumour or error led on the Italian forefathers to celebrate the rites of Mars on the field of Romulus, and to mark, with the title of a Jove their ancestor, the Capitol founded on the rocks of the Palatine, and of Pelasgian Pallas, and to summon Juno from a Libyan citadel — gods akin to Mars; and the nobles also fetched the naked image of Venus from the Erycine height, that the mother of the gods might be carried to Phrygian Ida, that the Bacchic orgies might be sought from green Naxos. A single house of majesty was made for earth-born things, and there are as many temples of gods at Rome as one may count the tombs of heroes in the world; those ghosts whom legend ennobles, our people revere and adore. These gods Ancus had, and Numitor, Numa, Tullus; such were the divinities that fled the flames of Pergamum, such is Vesta, such the Palladium, such the shadow of the household gods, and such a terror preserved the ancient asylum. Once vain superstition had besieged the gentile breasts of the fathers, it ran on uninterrupted through a thousand stages of the ages; the tender heir shuddered and worshipped whatever the hoary forefathers had shown him as worthy of reverence to himself; the infancy of boys drank in error first with its milk; among its wailings it had tasted of the meal of the sacred cake, had seen stones smeared with wax, and the black household gods grow wet with ointment. The little child had watched the figure of Fortune fashioned with her rich horn, and a hallowed stone set in its place at home, and his mother turning pale there in prayer; soon, set upon the nurse's shoulders, he too rubbed the flint with pressed lips, poured out his childish vows, and from the blind rock begged riches for himself, and held it for certain that whatever one might wish was thence to be sought. Never lifting his eyes and his mind to the citadel of reason did he refer them, but, credulous, held to the insipid custom, honouring private divinities with the blood of lambs, and now, going out of doors, when he gaped at the public feasts and days and the games, and saw the lofty Capitol, and the laurel-crowned ministers of the gods standing by the temples, and the Sacred Way resounding with bellowings before the shrine of Rome (for she too is worshipped with blood, after the manner of a goddess, and the name of the place is held as a divinity, and the temples of the City and of Venus rise on an equal height, while incense is burned to both goddesses at once), reckoning true whatever is done on the senate's authority, he gave his faith to images and thought them the lords of the upper air, who stand in their row with terrifying faces. There Alcides, the guest of Arcadia after Gades was despoiled, stiffens in tawny bronze; the twin brothers too, bastards from a corrupted mother, the offspring of Leda and the nightly horsemen, two divinities of lofty Rome, hang there held up by a spit, and, messengers of a great triumph, they fix their footprints in poured-out lead; the emblems of ancient kings stand by as well — Aeneas, the Italian, two-faced Janus, and the Sabine father, old Saturn, and Picus with his spotted body, sprinkled over his limbs with the poison his wife had drained. Before the feet of each is set his own ancient little altar. To Janus too, in his famous month, sacrifice is made with auspices and sacred banquets, which — alas, the wretches! — they keep up under an inveterate honour, and they reckon the festal joys of the Kalends; thus the observance grew from forefathers, ill begun long ago, then handed on to following ages and increased for late descendants; the ill-counselled hearts drew out a long chain, and the dark custom flowed down into vicious generations. This custom of the ancients, in an age now ready to learn, posterity followed, and with a month and shrines and a priest and altars worshipped Augustus, appeased him with calf and lamb, lay prostrate at the sacred couch, and demanded oracles. The inscriptions bear witness, the decrees of the senate disclose it, which set up a temple to Caesar in the likeness of Jove. They added that Livia should become a sacred Juno, no less infamous in having drawn the lot of an adulterous chamber's bed than when the Saturnian one grew hot in her brother's bed; she had not yet emptied her mother's womb by childbirth, and, soon to bear, was carrying the offspring conceived of her husband. Already the bridesmaid, the support and the marriage-couch are made ready for the pregnant woman; already the bridegroom, with the womb leaping, summons the friends of his bride, sure that the woman pledged to him will not be barren. The over-eager stepfather forestalls the slow birth of the stepson not yet begotten; soon, amid the Fescennine songs, another man's child is brought forth for the new husband, and this counsel the lots of the gods, this the caverns of Apollo gave: for the answer was that the torches never pass better than when a new bride is wedded already with child. This goddess, hallowed for you, Rome, with titles and perpetual honour, you created among the Floras and the Venuses! And no wonder: for what wise man had doubted that those women were born of mortal stock and had lived, and that the same, famed for the praise of their charm, had ever shone in their loves in the beauty of their form, to the ruin of their reputation? Why should I speak of Antinoüs placed in a heavenly seat, him, now the darling of a deified prince, him despoiled of his manhood's lot in a purple lap, the Ganymede of the god Hadrian, who not to offer the gods their cups but, reclining on the middle couch with Jove, drinks the holy Lyaeus of ambrosial nectar, and in the temples hears the prayers offered with his own husband? So then, with these for sponsors, Trajan, Nerva, Severus, and Titus, and the valiant Neros waged their wars — men whom earthly glory made illustrious and whom frail virtue raised to the heights of fame, adopted from the earth, lying low beneath a religion! How shameful that such men were persuaded of this — that they and the Roman armies could be ruled by the love of Mars, while the ill-blandishing adulterer of the Paphian goddess peddles himself and increases his own sons of Aeneas with successes! Happy, had they known that all their prosperity was ordained by God, with Christ for prince, who willed that kingdoms, led on by fixed measures, should run their course, and that the triumphs of the Romans should grow and pour themselves into the fullness of the ages! But, blinded souls bereft of light, they plunged into the foul abyss of death men slaughtered in the shrines of Jove and Augustus, and in the temples of the two Junos, and in the chapels of Mars and Venus, believing that the supreme governance lay in the gross regions of the world and stood fixed at the sunken bottom of the sky. Whatever marvel the earth, whatever the sea brings forth, they reckoned to be gods. Hills, seas, rivers, fires — these elements, shaped for themselves into various figures, the fathers established, and wrote the names of men upon dumb statues, calling now Neptune the ocean, now the hollow rivers Cyanean Nymphs, now the woods Dryads, now the trackless fields Napaeae. Fire itself, made to serve our use, is called Vulcan, and is feigned to be in the power of heaven, and has shrines, a god in name and face made like to a man, and is said to reign over the forges and to be the chief smith of Aeolian isle or of Aetna. There is one who sought the gods among the conspicuous stars, daring to hold the sun for a god — the sun on whom, by a fixed track, the condition is laid to endure a vigilant labour, set before mortal eyes, headlong with rounded orb, flying through the void on its smooth sphere, and — as no one denies — smaller than the world and the heaven, for the field is greater than what runs across it, and the space of the plain in which it darts is far more widely spread, and it glows and its swift wheel is rolled upon a winged axle. Although it pleases some to say that the earth is smaller in circuit than that most beautiful circle, and to stretch the flames of the boundless star beyond the measure of the earth in an extended ring, is not the sphere of the heaven also lesser and more contracted, whose level the running compass labours to traverse along its long course at an inner goal? He is the true God, than whom no matter is greater, who knows no end, who presides over all nature, who at once encloses and fills all things. A fixed region holds the sun, a fixed tract confines it, it is marked off by changing seasons: now it rises at dawn, now it falls at setting, or hides, returning beneath the night; nor can it turn its torch toward the constellations of the Bears, nor approach the gates of the north on a slanting circle, nor, reversed, recall its accustomed path backward. Will this, then, be a god, bound to prescribed duties under a single law? A freer liberty is granted to man himself, who is allowed to bend the form of his life and of his will, whether he prefer to climb by the right path or to run down the field on the left, to take rest or to continue his labour, to obey God or to turn to the contrary. To this servant who ministers the solemn governance of the days no such power is given by its Maker as belongs to a god, but, a subject slave, it does whatever is needful. That this star drives a chariot and the swift four-horse teams, they imagined, and the rays of its head and the lashings of its hand, and the reins and the trappings and the panting breasts of the horses they bade gleam, polished, of gilded bronze, or marble, or orichalc, in shining metal. After the robes of state, and the ivory eagle, and the curule chair, a bearded old man bows down his face and presses kisses upon the legs of the bronze-footed horses — if it is right to believe it — and the motionless wheels and the reins that cannot be bent he either decks, wreathed with roses, or perfumes with incense. Yet this, such as it is, is bearable; what of this — that the very shades of the infernal gulf give you gods, O Rome? The mistress of the Eumenides lifts her head from the Stygian cave, Proserpina, snatched off to the marriage-bed of the king of Tartarus, and, if ever she deigns to visit her own Quirites, is appeased by the severed neck of a barren cow, and is thought to reign at once in heaven and in Erebus, now to bridle a yoke of oxen, now to send the cruel ranks of her sisters against those above with a viperous scourge, now even to scatter winged arrows into the backs of the wild goats, and three times the same goddess to vary her shapes: when she is the Moon, at last, she shines in a faint-glimmering mantle; when, girt up, she hurls her shafts, she is the Latonian maiden; when she sits propped upon her throne, the consort of Pluto, she commands the Furies and dictates laws to Megaera. If you seek the truth, under the name of Trivia a Tartarean demon is worshipped, who now snatches you up toward the upper air and urges that the god be venerated in a starry constellation, now drives you to run through the woods of this death-dealing world and to follow errors, and to think that of the groves she is a goddess who transfixes the trembling hearts of men and slays wild minds with a deadly wound; now buries beneath the earth the senses sunk in dread, so that they implore the divinities, starved of light, and commit themselves to the power of hidden night. Look upon the wicked sanctuaries of dread Dis, to whom falls the gladiator poured out on the ill-omened sand — alas, the Phlegethontian victim of ill-purified Rome! For what does the impious art of the mad games mean to itself? What the deaths of the young? What the pleasure fed on blood? What the dust of the arena, ever funereal, and those mournful spectacles of the amphitheatre's pomp? Surely Charon, made worthy by their leader of the slit throats of the wretched, receives such offerings, appeased by the holy crime; these are the delights of an infernal Jove, in these the judge of dark Avernus calmly takes his rest. Is it not a shame that a king, a people powerful in its sceptre, should reckon such things fit to be offered for the fatherland's welfare, and seek the aid of religion from the caverns below? He summons up, alas, the minister of destruction from the shadowy seat of punishments, that he may grant him the splendid funerals of men. In vain are we wont to denounce now the Tauric rites: human blood is poured out in the Latian show, and that assembly of spectators pays at the altar the savage vows of its own Pluto. What more sacred than an altar that drinks the gore drawn out through the mystic weapons? Or is your faith in doubt that, beneath the blind darkness, there is a god, whom you would search out in the silent shades? Behold — why do you deny that there are gods of the dead? The very monuments of your fathers prove it: 'To the Gods Below' there I read on the cut marble, wherever the Latin road keeps the ancient ashes, and the Salarian among its crowded graves. Tell me, to whom do you inscribe this title, save that you adore the rule of grim Orcus as a true majesty? Lo, with what entangling rites the palace of the supreme empire lay squalid, with the rites of the ancestors broken from their source, when the prince, twice victor over the slaughter of a double tyrant, looked back with triumphant face upon the beautiful walls. He sees the city beset by blackening clouds, in the gloom of an overshadowed night; the turbid air shut out the clear brightness from the seven-citadeled hill, he groaned in pity and spoke thus: 'Put off your sad attire, faithful parent! Indeed you are renowned, illustrious in a richly adorned dress, and, distinguished by proud spoils, you lift up your head and flow about with much gold; but, beset by the clouds flitting near, the peak of your high summit bristles, and a livid light, a thick day, dulls even the very gems, and the smoke poured about your face beats back the ruddy diadem of your brow. I see dark shades carried about you, and dark-blue souls and black idols flying; I counsel that you lift your face on high above the air, and leave the storm-clouded elements beneath your feet. All that is of the world is subject to you; this God himself established, at whose nod you are mistress and rule the globe, and, all-powerful, tread upon all mortal things. It is not fitting that a queen, abasing her eyes, should gaze upon the perishable ground and seek majesty among the lowly parts of things, over which you yourself stand. I will not suffer that, with me for your guide, you hold to the old trifles, that you venerate the monstrous shapes of crumbling gods. If it is stone, it is dissolved by age or cracks, struck by a slight blow; if a soft gold-leaf has covered the gypsum, it grows thin little by little as its weak glue fails; if the file, wearing it down, has joined the statue's form of bronze plates, either the hollow limbs are bent inward by the weight pressing them, or rough verdigris eats away and consumes the eaten image and breaks it with many a hole. Let not the earth be your god, nor a star of heaven your god, nor the ocean a god, nor the power which lies hidden below, condemned to the grim darkness of the underworld for its evil desert, nor yet let the virtues of men be your god, nor the wandering forms of souls or spirits under a thin image; far be it that a shadow be your god, or a genius, or a place, or a god, a phantom flying through the airy breezes. Let these be the gentile divinities of barbarous regions, in whose keeping is all that is sacred, whatever dreadful thing fear may have suggested; whom prodigious monsters compel to believe in horrible gods; whom the bloodthirsty custom of devouring delights, so that a fat victim is butchered in a high grove, its entrails to be gorged amid much wine. But for you — you who have given laws and statutes to the conquered nations, teaching, as far as the great world extends, the savage rites of arms and of customs to grow gentle — it is unworthy and wretched, in the religion you must hold, to be wise after this fashion, the way the brutish peoples are wise after their bestial custom, and, untaught, follow nothing by reason. Whether the array of battle await us, or whether in peace we dictate quiet laws, or whether we tread down in the city's midst the necks of two tyrants overcome in war, you must, O queen, gladly acknowledge my standards, on which the image of the cross either gleams set with gems, or is borne aloft on long spears, of solid gold. With this sign Constantine, unconquered avenger, crossing the Alps, loosed the wretched servitude, when Maxentius pressed you with his pestilent court. You were mourning the fathers condemned to a long prison's hundred chains, as you yourself know; or a bridegroom, lamenting the broken covenants of his betrothed and her seizure by a grim satellite, lay buried in darkness amid hard fetters in atonement; or, if a bride, bidden to mount the king's bed, had begun to face the impure madness of the master, the husband's indignation paid the penalty with death; the workhouses of the savage prince were full of girls torn from their fathers; if a father, his daughter carried off, muttering, groaned too bitterly, he did not with impunity betray his grief, nor draw too plainly his confessed sighs. The Mulvian bridge is witness, when the Christian-worshipping leader came to the city, how the tyrant, caught and hurled headlong into the Tiber's pools, beheld with what majesty the victorious arms were ruled, what sign the avenging right hand bore before it, with what blazon the javelins gleamed. Christ, woven in purple on the gem-set gold, marked the labarum; Christ had inscribed the emblems of the shields, and the cross, added, blazed on the crests' summits. The most illustrious order of senators itself remembers it, the order that came forth then with matted hair and prison chains, squalid, or bound by a vast fetter, and, embracing the feet of the victor, fell prostrate weeping before the glorious standards, lying low. Then that senate adored the title of the avenging soldiery and the venerable name of Christ, which shone bright upon the arms. Take heed, then, O peerless head of the world, after this not to feign for yourself empty prodigies and phantoms in a stupid cult, and not to spurn the power of the true God you have proved. I would have you now lay aside the festal toys of childhood, the ridiculous rites, and the sanctuaries unworthy of so great a realm. Wash, O nobles, the marbles steeped in the dripping stain: let the statues be allowed to stand pure, the works of great craftsmen; let these be the most beautiful ornaments of our fatherland, and let no disgraceful use defile the monuments of an art turned to vice.' By such edicts the city was reshaped, and fled its old errors, and shook off from its withered face the turbid clouds, now with its nobility made ready to attempt the eternal ways, and, while the great-souled leader called, to follow Christ and to send its hope into the age to come. Then for the first time Rome, grown teachable in her age, blushed for her own past times; she is ashamed of the time gone by, she hates the years gone past with their foul religions; soon, when, remembering that the fields next to the moats of her walls were drenched with the innocent blood of the righteous, she sees the hateful thousands of tombs around, she is sad, and rather repents of her judgment and of her unbridled and excessive rage for the sake of base rituals. She longs to make amends for the foul wounds of outraged justice by a late obedience and by seeking pardon; lest in so great an empire the crime of cruelty remain, spurned by piety, she seeks out the expiations shown to her, and is carried over, in full love, into the faith of Christ. The victor Marius' laurel was of less use to the city when he dragged Numidian Jugurtha amid the people's applause; nor did the Arpinian consul bring you, Rome, so great a healing when Cethegus was put to death amid lawful chains, as the foremost prince in our own time foresaw and bestowed of good. Many a Catiline he drove from the house — men preparing not savage fires for the dwellings or daggers for the fathers, but black Tartarus for the souls and torments for the inner state of men. The enemies were wandering through the temples, through the halls everywhere, and held the Roman forum and the lofty Capitol, plotting their conspired ambushes against the very vitals of the people, and were wont, with the venom creeping within, to mingle their plague into the silent marrow. Therefore the gowned conqueror, with the enemy lurking, brings back bright trophies without blood, and the state of Quirinus grows used to prevail in the heavenly realm through the ages. Indeed, he sets no goals and fixes no times: he teaches an empire without end, that the valour of Romulus be not now an old woman, that its won glory know no old age. You might see the fathers exult — the most beautiful lights of the world — and the council of old men, the Catos, rejoice to take up, in a whiter toga, the snowy mantle of piety and to lay aside the trappings of the pontiffs. And now, with few left behind on the Tarpeian rock, she rushes to the pure inner shrines of the men of Nazareth, and to the apostolic fonts, the Evandrian curia, the offspring of the Anicii and the famous pledges of the Probi. For before all others the noble Anicius is said to have made illustrious the head of the city: so does famed Rome boast. Indeed, even the heir of the Olybrian race and name, added to the consular rolls, distinguished by the palm-broidered robe, seeks to lower his fasces before the doors of the martyr Brutus, and to bow the Ausonian axe to Christ; no slower was the ready faith of the Paulini, nor of the Bassi, to give itself to Christ, and to lift up the proud stock of the patrician race to the age that is to come. Why now should I run over in song the people-cherishing Gracchi, upheld by the right of power and foremost in the senate's height, who bade the images of the gods be torn down, and, together with their own lictors, consecrated themselves as subjects to be ruled, in supplication, by the omnipotent Christ? Six hundred houses of ancient noble blood one may count, turned to the standards of Christ, that have risen, foul, from the vast deep of idolatry. If there is any personality, or any rank, of the city, it is in these; if the more excellent order makes the form of the fatherland, these make it, as often as the judgment of the commons is joined, and the more numerous and the more powerful are of one mind together. Look to the illustrious chamber, where the public light is: scarcely will you find a few minds overgrown with gentile trifles, barely retaining their trampled cults, and those whom it pleases to keep the darkness they have outlived and not to see the sun shining at high noon. Then turn your eyes to the people: how small a part is there that does not spit out the altar of Jove stained with gore? All the crowd that climbs to the lofty upper rooms, and that treads with various comings and goings the black flint, and whom the bread dealt out from the high steps feeds, or who frequents the tomb beneath the Vatican mount, where that beloved ash lies, the pledge of a father, or in great assemblies runs to the Lateran halls, to bring back from them the sacred sign with the royal chrism — and do we still doubt that Rome, dedicated to you, O Christ, has passed over into your laws, and willingly, with all its people and its highest citizens, longs to stretch its earthly realm above the stars of the great heaven? Nor am I moved that a very rare portion of men does not open its eyes, shut against the light, and wanders in its steps. However illustrious in merits and bright in blood, enriched by the rewards of virtues, by titles and honours, they have attained the heights and, possessing the summit of the rolls, have marked the annals' pages with their own name, and are numbered among the ancients in wax and bronze — yet among the few, the throng now failing, neither the personality of the fatherland is fixed, nor does the curia consist. And whatever a private will and a now-rare zeal cherishes, the public vows cry out against, condemning with a renowned dissent the trembling murmur: if the decrees of the conscript fathers could in the old time stand in no other way than if three hundred old men were read to be of one mind in one, let us keep the ancestral laws: let the feeble voice of the lesser number yield, and fall silent in the small portion. Look how, with a full senate, our benches decree that the shameful couch of Jove, and every idol, must be driven far from the purified city. Whither the judgment of the peerless prince calls, thither the free assembly passes, with feet and heart alike, and there is no room for envy, no harsh force terrifies any; so before all eyes their will lies open, and what is approved by all, not commanded, they follow by reason alone, captivated. In short, repaying fair rewards according to earthly deserts, the good leader grants the highest honours to those who worship rightly, and lets them contend for the praise of their own, nor does he forbid men entangled in paganism to go through the world's due heights, since heavenly things never stand in the way of those who walk by the accustomed path of earth. He himself confers on you a magistracy, the consulship, himself the tribunal, and gave you the gilded robe of the toga — you whose religion displeases him, O champion of perishing gods, you the only one who plead for the restoration of the wiles of Vulcan and Mars and Venus, and the stones of old Saturn, and the frenzies of Phoebus, the Megalesia of the Trojan mother, the Bacchic rites of Nysa, the rites of Isis ever lamenting her lost Osiris — mimic solemnities, laughable to her own shaven priests — and whatever phantoms the Capitols are wont to shut within. O tongue flowing from a wondrous fountain of words, glory of Roman eloquence, to which Tully himself would yield! Such are the gems your rich fluency pours forth! A mouth worthy to gleam, dipped in eternal gold, had it chosen rather to praise God! To it you preferred filthy monsters, and defiled your clear voice with crime, just as if one should try with ivory mattocks to turn over the miry soil, or with little golden hoes to dress the sedges dripping with mud: the black ditch fouls the splendour of the shining tooth, and the precious blade lies squalid in the filthy field. I do not fear that anyone will charge me with too much self-confidence, or think I enter the contest of genius; I myself am mindful of myself, and know my own trifles well enough; I would not dare to match my step, nor to provoke with hurled darts the so untaught discharge of so great a speaking tongue. Let the book remain unhurt, and let the excellent volume keep the fame it won by the thunderbolt of its speaking; but let me be allowed to guard my breast, covered, from the wound, and, in flight, to drive off the javelin with an opposed shield. For if our faith, now safe in a quiet age, has been attacked with hostile force and with the foeman's art, why should it not be lawful for me, with the bending of a swerving flank, to play with the windy arrows in their wasted throw? But now it is time to rein in the journey of this long little book, lest the poem, drawn out without end, bring weariness.