Octavius

When I revolve in my mind and call up the memory of Octavius, my good and most faithful companion, so great a sweetness and affection for the man clings to me that I seem in some sort to return into the past myself, rather than merely to recall by remembrance things now done and gone:

so much, in proportion as the sight of him is withdrawn from my eyes, is he entwined about my heart and my inmost feelings.

Not without cause did that excellent and holy man, in departing, leave us a boundless longing for him, since he too always burned with so great a love for me that, both in play and in earnest, his will and mine were one, to wish and to be unwilling in the same things; you would have thought one mind divided between the two of us.

Thus he alone was the sharer of my loves, my comrade in my errors; and when, the mist dispelled, I emerged from the depth of darkness into the light of wisdom and truth, he did not spurn his companion but, what is more glorious, ran on ahead.

And so, as my thought turned over the whole span of our intimacy and friendship, the attention of my mind settled chiefly on that discourse of his by which, in a most weighty argument, he brought back to true religion Quintus Caecilius, who still clung to the vanities of superstition.

For on business and for the sake of visiting me he had hurried to Rome, leaving his home, his wife, his children, and—what is most lovable in children—those still of innocent years, attempting words yet but half-formed, a speech the sweeter for the very stumbling and breaking of the tongue.

At his arrival I cannot express in words with what great and impatient joy I exulted, since the unlooked-for presence of so dear a friend most increased my gladness.

So, after a day or two, when the constant enjoyment of his company had satisfied the eagerness of my longing, and we had learned from each other, by mutual report, what we did not know of one another through our absence, we resolved to go to Ostia, a most pleasant town, because the sea-baths there would be a soothing and fitting cure for my body, to dry up its humours; and indeed the holiday of the vintage had relaxed the cares of my judicial duties. For at that season, after the summer's day, autumn was settling into mildness.

And so, at daybreak, as we were walking along the shore toward the sea, that the air breathing gently might refresh our limbs, and that with rare delight the sand, yielding to our soft footstep, might sink down, Caecilius, catching sight of an image of Serapis, raised his hand to his mouth, as the superstitious crowd is wont, and pressed a kiss upon his lips.

Then Octavius said: "It is not the part of a good man, brother Marcus, thus to abandon in this blindness of vulgar ignorance one who clings to your side at home and abroad, so that on so bright a day you suffer him to stumble upon stones, fashioned indeed and anointed and crowned, when you know that the disgrace of this error redounds no less to you than to himself."

While he was speaking thus we had crossed the middle of the town and now reached the open shore.

There a gentle wave, spreading over the outermost sands as though it would smooth a walking-place, was creeping in; and, as the sea is ever restless even when the winds are laid, although it did not come up to the land with white and foaming billows, yet we were greatly delighted with its curling and winding wanderings there, as we dipped our soles at the very edge of the water, which now, dashing against our feet, played about them, and now, gliding back and drawing back its traces, sucked them into itself.

So, advancing slowly and quietly, we kept along the edge of the gently curving shore, beguiling the way with tales. These tales were Octavius' narrative as he discoursed of his voyage.

But when we had spent a fair enough space in walking and talking, we measured the same path back and retraced our steps; and when we came to the place where some little boats, drawn up and resting on oaken supports, hung suspended clear of the earth's defilement, we saw boys eagerly vying in the sport of throwing potsherds into the sea.

This game is to pick from the shore a sherd worn smooth and round by the tossing of the waves, to grasp this sherd flat between the fingers and, bending low and crouching as far as one can, to spin it skimming over the waves, so that the missile either grazes and skims the surface of the sea as it glides on with gentle force, or, shearing the tops of the waves, leaps and bobs up as it is borne along by continual bounding. That boy claimed himself the victor among the rest whose sherd ran farthest and skipped most often.

So, while we were all taken with the pleasure of this spectacle, Caecilius gave no heed and did not laugh at the contest, but, silent, anxious, and apart, by his face confessed some grief I could not tell.

To him I said: "What is the matter? Why do I not recognise that cheerfulness of yours, Caecili, and why do I miss that gaiety of your eyes even in serious matters?"

Then he said: "For some time now the speech of our friend Octavius bitterly stings and gnaws me, in which, inveighing against you, he reproached you with negligence, that by this dissembling he might more gravely charge me with ignorance.

And so I will go further: with Octavius I have a whole and entire quarrel. If it please you, let me, as a man of his very own school, dispute with him; he will then surely understand that it is easier to argue among companions than to grapple in earnest with wisdom.

Let us sit down here on those barriers of rock thrown out to protect the baths and running far into the deep, that we may both rest from our walk and dispute the more intently."

And at his word we sat down, so that they sheltered me, set in the midst of the three, by their flanking position; nor was this an act of deference to rank or honour, since friendship always either receives or makes equals, but that, as arbiter and close to both, I might lend my ears and, in the middle, keep the two disputants apart.

Then Caecilius began thus: "Although to you, brother Marcus, there is no doubt about that very thing we are now chiefly inquiring into, since, having carefully tried both ways of living, you have rejected the one and approved the other, yet for the present your mind must be so framed that you hold the balance of a most impartial judge, and do not lean weighted toward one side, lest your verdict seem to be born not so much from our discussions as brought forth from your own feelings.

Accordingly, if you sit by me as one new and ignorant, as it were, of either party, it is no hard task to show that all things in human affairs are doubtful, uncertain, in suspense, and that all are rather plausible than true:

wherefore it is the more to be wondered at that some, from weariness of searching truth thoroughly, rashly succumb to any opinion whatever, rather than persevere with stubborn diligence in the inquiry.

And so all men must feel indignation, all must grieve, that certain persons—and these unschooled in study, profane to letters, strangers even to the meaner arts—should dare to determine anything fixed about the sum of things and the supreme majesty, concerning which, through so many ages, philosophy itself, with its many schools, still deliberates.

And not without reason, since human mediocrity is so far from the exploration of the divine that we are permitted neither to know nor reverently to pry into the things suspended above us, raised aloft in heaven, nor those sunk deep beneath the earth; and we may rightly seem happy enough and prudent enough if, according to that old oracle of the wise man, we come to know ourselves more familiarly.

But since, indulging an insane and foolish labour, we stray beyond the bounds of our lowliness, and, cast upon the earth, transcend with audacious greed the very heaven and the very stars, let us at least not entangle this error with vain and dreadful opinions. Granted that at the beginning the seeds of all things were condensed by Nature coalescing into herself—what god was the author of this?

Granted that the members of the whole world were combined, arranged, and shaped by fortuitous concurrences—what god was the contriver? Though fire may have kindled the stars, and the heaven may have hung suspended by its own matter, though it may have founded the earth by its weight and the sea may have flowed in from moisture—whence this religion, whence this dread, what is this superstition?

Man, and every animal that is born, breathes, and grows, is a voluntary concretion of the elements, into which again man and every animal is divided, dissolved, and dispersed; so all things flow back into their source and revolve into themselves, with no artificer, no judge, no author.

Thus, as the seeds of fire are gathered together, suns ever new shine forth; thus, by the vapours exhaled from the earth, mists ever rise, which, condensed and packed together, mount higher into clouds; and as these fall, rains stream down, winds blow, hailstones rattle, or, when the storm-clouds clash, thunders roar, lightnings flash, thunderbolts gleam forth. So they fall at random, they crash upon the mountains, they strike the trees; without choice they touch places sacred and profane, they smite guilty men and often the devout.

Why speak of storms, various and uncertain, by which the onset of all things is whirled with no order or weighing? In shipwrecks the fates of the good and the great are mingled, their merits confounded; in conflagrations the innocent and the guilty perish together; and when a tract of sky is infected with a deadly plague, all are destroyed without distinction; and when the fury of war rages, it is rather the better men who fall.

In peace too wickedness is not only made equal to the better sort but even honoured, so that in many cases you cannot tell whether their depravity is to be detested or their good fortune to be wished for.

But if the world were ruled by divine providence and the authority of some deity, never would a Phalaris and a Dionysius deserve a throne, never a Rutilius and a Camillus exile, never a Socrates the poison.

Behold the fruitful trees, behold the now whitening corn, behold the swelling vintage—they are spoiled by rain, beaten down by hail. So either the truth is hidden from us and held down uncertain, or, what is rather to be believed, fortune, loosed from all law, holds sway amid varied and slippery chances.

Since, therefore, fortune is fixed or nature uncertain, how much more reverent and better it is to receive, as a high priest of truth, the teaching of our forefathers, to cultivate the religions handed down, to adore the gods whom from our parents we were imbued to fear before we knew them familiarly, and not to pass judgement upon the divinities, but to trust our predecessors, who in an age still rude, at the very birth of the world, deserved to have the gods either gracious or for kings! Hence indeed throughout all empires, provinces, and towns we see that peoples have their own several rites of worship and honour their local gods: as the Eleusinians Ceres, the Phrygians the Mother, the Epidaurians Aesculapius, the Chaldaeans Belus, the Syrians Astarte, the Taurians Diana, the Gauls Mercury, the Romans all of these.

Thus their power and authority has seized the compass of the whole world; thus has Rome extended her empire beyond the paths of the sun and the very bounds of the ocean, while in arms she practises a religious valour, while she fortifies her city with the sanctities of her rites, with chaste virgins, with many honours and titles of her priests; while, besieged and taken save only the Capitol, she worships the gods whom another would by now have spurned in his anger; and through the lines of the Gauls, who marvelled at the boldness of her superstition, she advances unarmed with weapons but armed with the cult of religion; while amid captured walls of the enemy, with victory still raging, she venerates the conquered deities; while on all sides she seeks out foreign gods and makes them her own; while she builds altars even to unknown divinities and to the Shades.

Thus, while she takes up the rites of all nations, she has earned dominions also. Hence has remained a perpetual current of veneration, which through long ages is not broken but increased; for antiquity has been wont to ascribe to ceremonies and shrines just so much sanctity as it has added of age.

Yet not rashly—for I venture meanwhile even myself to concede this, and so to err the more safely—did our forefathers devote their pains to observing auguries, consulting entrails, instituting sacred rites, and dedicating temples.

Consult the record from the books; you will at once find that they originated the rites of all religions, either that the divine indulgence might be requited, or that impending wrath might be turned aside, or that anger already swelling and raging might be appeased.

Witness the Idaean Mother, who by her coming both proved the chastity of the matron and freed the city from fear of the enemy; witness the statues, consecrated in the lake, of the equestrian brothers, just as they had shown themselves, who, panting, with their horses foaming and steaming, announced the victory over Perseus on the very day on which they had won it; witness the renewal of the games at the displeasure of Jupiter, from the dream of a man of the common people; and the self-devotion of the Decii, fulfilled, is a witness; witness too Curtius, who filled up the gulf of the deep chasm with the mass, or the honour, of his horse and himself.

More often even than we wished, slighted auspices have testified to the presence of the gods. So the Allia is a name of ill omen; so the affair of Claudius and Junius against the Carthaginians was no battle but a deadly shipwreck; and that Trasimene might be both swollen and discoloured with Roman blood, Flaminius despised the auguries; and—that we may recover our standards from the Parthians—Crassus both deserved and mocked the imprecations of the dread sisters.

I pass over the many old instances, and I neglect the songs of the poets concerning the births of the gods, their gifts, their offices; the fates foretold also from oracles I will pass by, lest antiquity seem to you too fabulous. Look to the temples and shrines of the gods, by which the Roman state is both protected and adorned: they are more august from the divinities that dwell, are present, lodge in them, than rich from worship, ornaments, and gifts.

Hence indeed the seers, filled and mingled with the god, pluck the future beforehand, give warning of dangers, healing for diseases, hope to the afflicted, aid to the wretched, solace in calamities, relief in toils. Even in our sleep we see, hear, and recognise the gods, whom in the day we impiously deny, refuse, and forswear.

And so, since among all nations, however uncertain be the reason or the origin of it, there yet remains a firm agreement concerning the immortal gods, I cannot endure anyone, swollen with such audacity and such irreligious—I know not what—wisdom, who strives to dissolve or weaken this religion, so ancient, so useful, so wholesome.

Be it granted that there was that Theodorus of Cyrene, or, earlier, Diagoras of Melos, to whom antiquity gave the surname Atheist, both of whom, by asserting that there are no gods, utterly took away all that fear by which mankind is governed, and veneration too: yet never shall they, in this teaching of impiety, prevail by the name and authority of a pretended philosophy.

When the Athenians, acting with judgement rather than profanity, both banished from their borders Protagoras of Abdera for disputing concerning the divinity, and burned his writings in their assembly, shall it not be lamented—what?—that men (for you will bear with me as I more freely put forth the force of the case I have undertaken), men, I say, of a desperate, unlawful, and abandoned faction, should run riot against the gods?

Men who, gathering the more ignorant from the lowest dregs, and credulous women, easily led astray by the weakness of their sex, set up a people of a profane conspiracy, who are bound together in nocturnal gatherings, solemn fasts, and inhuman feasts, not by any sacred rite but by a deed deserving expiation—a hidden and light-shunning race, dumb in public, chattering in corners. They despise the temples as charnel-houses, they spit upon the gods, they laugh at sacred things; pitiable themselves (if it be lawful to say so), they pity the priests; they despise honours and purple robes, themselves half-naked!

O wondrous folly and incredible audacity! They scorn present tortures while they fear uncertain and future ones; and while they fear to die after death, in the meantime they do not fear to die: so does a deceiving hope flatter them with the renewal of comfort and beguile their dread!

And now, as worse things spring up the more fruitfully, with corrupt morals creeping on from day to day, throughout the whole world these foulest sanctuaries of an impious gathering grow up. This conspiracy must be utterly rooted out and abhorred.

They know one another by secret marks and signs, and love one another almost before they are acquainted; everywhere too there is mingled among them a kind of religion of lust, and indiscriminately they call themselves brothers and sisters, so that even ordinary fornication, through the intervention of a sacred name, becomes incest. Thus their vain and senseless superstition glories in crimes.

Nor would sagacious report speak of them—were not the truth at the bottom of it—as guilty of things most wicked and to be uttered only under protest. I hear that, by I know not what foolish persuasion, they consecrate and worship the head of an ass, that basest of beasts: a religion worthy of and born from such morals!

Others report that they reverence the genitals of their very president and priest, and adore the nature, as it were, of their own parent: I know not whether this be false, but the suspicion certainly attaches to secret and nocturnal rites! And whoever tells the tale that they worship a man punished with the utmost penalty for his crime, and the deadly wood of the cross, assigns fitting altars to lost and abandoned men, that they may worship what they deserve.

Now the story of the initiation of novices is as detestable as it is notorious. An infant, covered with meal so as to deceive the unwary, is set before him who is to be admitted to the rites. This infant, by him who is to be initiated, prompted as if to harmless blows upon the surface of the meal, is slain with blind and hidden wounds. Of this infant—O horror!—they thirstily lap up the blood, and vie in distributing his limbs; by this victim they are leagued together; by complicity in this crime they pledge themselves to mutual silence. These rites are fouler than all sacrileges.

And their banquet too is notorious; everyone everywhere speaks of it, and the oration of our man of Cirta attests it. On a solemn day they come together to the feast with all their children, sisters, mothers, people of every sex and every age. There, after much feasting, when the banquet has grown warm and the heat of incestuous lust has blazed up in the drunken, a dog tied to the lampstand is provoked, by the casting of a morsel beyond the length of the cord by which it is bound, to a rush and a leap.

So, the conscious light being overturned and put out, in shameless darkness they enfold the embraces of unspeakable desire, by the chance of the lot; and even if not all in the deed, yet all alike in complicity of incest, since whatever can happen in the act of individuals is sought by the wish of all.

Many things I purposely pass over: for these too are far too many, all or most of which are declared to be true by the very obscurity of this depraved religion.

For why do they strive so greatly to conceal and hide whatever it is they worship, when honourable things always rejoice in the open, and crimes are kept secret? Why have they no altars, no temples, no known images? Why do they never speak openly, never gather freely, unless what they worship and suppress is either deserving of punishment or of shame?

But whence, or who, is that god of theirs, one, solitary, forsaken, whom no free nation, no kingdoms, not even the Roman superstition has known?

The lonely and wretched race of the Jews worshipped one god, and that one openly, with temples, altars, victims, and ceremonies; yet he has so little might and power that he is, together with his own nation, a captive to the men of Rome.

But what monsters, what portents, the Christians make up! That god of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see, they say diligently inquires into the morals of all, the acts of all, the very words and hidden thoughts of all, running about, that is, and present everywhere: they would have him troublesome, restless, even shamelessly inquisitive, since he stands by at all deeds, wanders through all places, when he can neither attend to particulars, distracted over the whole, nor suffice for the whole, occupied with particulars.

What of this, that they threaten conflagration to the whole world and to the very universe with its stars, and contrive its ruin, as if either the eternal order established by the divine laws of nature could be disturbed, or, the bond of all the elements being broken and the heavenly framework sundered, this mass by which it is contained and girt could be overthrown?

And not content with this frenzied opinion, they patch on and append old wives' tales: they say that, after death, after ashes and embers, they are born again, and with I know not what assurance they believe each other's lies: you would think they had already come back to life.

A double evil and twofold madness, to denounce destruction to heaven and the stars, which we leave just as we found them, and to promise eternity to themselves when dead and extinct—who, just as we are born, also perish!

Hence, plainly, they both execrate the funeral pyres and condemn burial by fire, as though every body, even if withdrawn from the flames, were not nonetheless dissolved into earth by years and ages; and as though it mattered whether wild beasts tore it, the seas consumed it, the ground covered it, or the flame took it away—when, for corpses, every burial, if they feel it, is a torment, and if they feel it not, the very swiftness of dispatch is a remedy.

Deceived by this error, they promise themselves, as good men, a blessed and everlasting life when dead, and to the rest, as unjust, eternal punishment. Much I might add to this, did not my speech hasten on. That they themselves are rather the unjust I take no trouble to show; I have already shown it: though, even if I granted them just, I know that, by the verdict of most men, guilt or innocence too is assigned to fate.

And this is your own agreement; for whatever we do, as others ascribe it to fate, so you ascribe it to god: so, of your sect, men do not desire of their own will, but are chosen. Therefore you feign an unjust judge who punishes in men the lot, not the will.'

Yet I should like to ask whether men rise again with bodies or without bodies, and with what bodies, the same or renewed. Without a body? This, so far as I know, is neither mind nor soul nor life. With the same body? But it has already crumbled away before. With another body? Then a new man is born, not that former one repaired.

And yet so long an age has gone by, countless centuries have flowed away: what single one of all men has ever come back from the dead, even by the lot of a Protesilaus, were it but for a brief allowed return of hours, that we might believe by the example?

All those figments of an unsound opinion and foolish consolations, sported in the sweetness of song by deceitful poets, you, doubtless in your credulity, have shamefully refashioned in favour of your god.

Nor do you take even from the present any proof how the empty vows of an idle promise deceive you: while you yet live, estimate, you wretches, what hangs over you after death.

Behold, a part of you—and the greater, the better, as you say—you are in want, you are cold, you toil in labour and hunger, and your god allows it, dissembles, will not or cannot help his own: so he is either powerless or unjust!

You, who dream of a posthumous immortality, when you are shaken by peril, when you are burned with fevers, when you are torn with pain, do you not yet feel your condition? Do you not yet acknowledge your frailty? Against your will, poor wretch, you are convicted of weakness, and yet you do not confess it!

But I pass over what is common to all. Behold, for you there are threats, punishments, tortures, and crosses now not to be adored but to be undergone, fires too which you both foretell and fear: where is that god who can succour the revived, but cannot succour the living?

Do not the Romans, without your god, rule, reign, enjoy the whole world, and lord it over you too? But you, anxious and troubled in the meantime, abstain from honest pleasures: you do not visit the shows, you take no part in the processions, the public banquets are held without you; the sacred contests, the meats taken from the sacrifices and the drinks poured upon the altars, you shudder at. So do you dread the gods you deny!

You do not bind your heads with flowers, you do not honour your bodies with perfumes; you reserve unguents for funerals, you deny garlands even to your tombs—pale, trembling, worthy of pity, but the pity of our gods. Thus, wretches, you neither rise again nor live in the meantime!

Wherefore, if you have any wisdom or any modesty, cease to pry into the regions of heaven and the destinies and secrets of the world: it is enough to look at what lies before your feet, especially for men unlearned, unpolished, rude, and rustic, to whom, since it is not given to understand civil matters, much more is it denied to discourse of divine ones.

And yet, if you have a passion for philosophising, let whoever of you is great enough imitate, if he can, Socrates, the prince of wisdom. Famous is the answer of that man, as often as he was asked about heavenly things: 'What is above us is nothing to us.'

Deservedly, then, he earned from the oracle the testimony of singular prudence. Which oracle he himself perceived to mean that he was set above all men, not because he had learned all things, but because he had learned that he knew nothing: thus the highest wisdom is the confession of ignorance.

From this fountain flowed the safe doubt of Arcesilas, and long after of Carneades and very many of the Academics, in the highest questions—a manner of philosophising by which both the unlearned can be cautious and the learned win glory.

What of the hesitation of Simonides of Melos? Is it not to be admired and followed by all? When Simonides was asked by the tyrant Hiero what and of what kind he thought the gods to be, he first asked a day for deliberation; the next day he put it off two days; soon, being pressed, he added as many again. At last, when the tyrant inquired the cause of so great a delay, he answered that, the longer the inquiry went on, the more obscure the truth became to him.

In my opinion too, things that are doubtful, as they are, must be left so; and, while so many and so great men deliberate, no verdict must be rashly and boldly given to one side or the other, lest either an old wives' superstition be brought in or all religion be destroyed."

So Caecilius spoke, and, smiling—for the rush of his outpoured oration had relaxed the swelling of his indignation—said: "And what does Octavius venture against all this—a man of the Plautine stock, foremost of millers as he is last of philosophers?"

"Forbear," said I, "to applaud against him: for it is not fitting that you should exult at the neatness of your discourse before both sides have more fully pleaded, especially since your debate rests not on praise but on truth.

And although in great measure your speech has delighted me by its subtle variety, yet I am more deeply moved, not about the present case, but about the whole manner of disputing, that for the most part, according to the abilities of the disputants and the power of their eloquence, the very condition of plain truth is altered.

That this happens is well known from the easy compliance of hearers, who, while they are drawn away by the allurement of words from the real points at issue, assent without discrimination to all that is said, and do not separate false from true, not knowing that there lies hidden both an incredible truth and a plausible falsehood.

And so, the oftener they trust assertions, the more frequently are they refuted by men of greater skill: thus, constantly deceived by rashness, they shift the blame from the judge to the complaint of uncertainty, so that, condemning all things, they prefer to hold everything in suspense rather than to decide concerning deceits.

We must therefore take care lest we labour under a hatred of all discourses, so far that very many of the simpler sort are carried away into execration and hatred of mankind. For the incautiously credulous are circumvented by those whom they thought good; then, by a like error, suspecting all, they fear as wicked even those whom they might have perceived to be the best.

We, accordingly, anxious because every matter is argued on both sides, and on the one side the truth is for the most part obscure, while on the other there is a wondrous subtlety which sometimes, by abundance of speech, counterfeits the credit of a proof confessed, let us carefully weigh each point as much as we can, that we may praise the cleverness indeed, but choose, approve, and embrace what is right."

And Caecilius said: "You depart from the office of a religious judge: for it is most unjust that you should break the force of my pleading by the interposition of a most weighty discussion, when Octavius has each point whole and untouched to refute, if he can."

"What you charge me with," said I, "I brought forward, unless I am mistaken, for the common advantage, that by scrupulous examination we may weigh our verdict not by swelling of eloquence but by the solidity of the things themselves. Nor is our attention, as you complain, to be diverted longer, since in entire silence we may hear the reply of our Januarius, who is now eager to begin."

And Octavius: "I will speak, indeed, as I can, to the best of my powers, and you too must strive with me, that we may wash away the bitterest stain of these reproaches with a flood of truthful words.

Nor will I conceal at the outset that the opinion of my friend Natalis has so wavered, vague, slippery, and unsteady, that we must be in doubt whether your learning has been confused or has staggered through error. For at one moment he made out that he believed in the gods, at another that he was still deliberating, so that, by the uncertainty of his proposition, the aim of our reply might be founded the more uncertainly. But in my friend Natalis I will not, I do not, believe there is craft: far from his simplicity is a subtle cunning.

What then? Just as one who knows not the right road, where, as happens, one path forks into several, since he knows not the road, halts anxious, and dares neither to choose any single one nor to approve them all: so he who has no fixed judgement of the truth, as faithless suspicion is scattered abroad, so his doubtful opinion is dissipated.

It is therefore no wonder if Caecilius is again and again tossed about, surges, and fluctuates among contrary and conflicting opinions. That this may happen no further, I will convince and refute him, however diverse the things that have been said, confirming and proving them by one truth: so that henceforth he need neither doubt nor wander.

And since my brother has burst out, that he takes it ill, is vexed, is indignant, grieves, that the unlettered, the poor, the unskilled should dispute about heavenly things, let him know that all men, without distinction of age, sex, or rank, are begotten capable and fitted for reason and understanding, and have got wisdom not by fortune but implanted by nature; nay, that the very philosophers, or any other inventors of arts who have passed into memory, before they brought forth by their cleverness of mind the brightness of a name, were accounted plebeians, unlearned, half-naked: so much so that the rich, bound to their own means, have been wont to gaze rather at their gold than at heaven, while our poor men have both devised wisdom and handed down its teaching to others. Whence it appears that genius is not given with means nor procured by study, but is begotten with the very moulding of the mind.

There is therefore nothing to be indignant or grieved at, if anyone whatever inquires, judges, and sets forth concerning the divine, since not the authority of the disputant but the truth of the disputation itself is what is sought. And indeed the ruder the speech, the clearer the reasoning, since it is not painted over with the pomp of eloquence and grace, but, as it is, sustained by the rule of right.

I do not refuse what Caecilius strove to maintain as among his chief points: that a man ought to know himself and to look around and see what he is, whence he is, why he is—whether compounded of the elements or framed of atoms, or rather made, fashioned, and animated by a god.

This very thing we cannot explore and dig out without the inquiry into the universe, since things so cohere, are so connected and linked, that unless you have diligently examined the principle of divinity, you cannot know that of humanity, nor can you finely manage the affairs of the state unless you have come to know this commonwealth common to all the world; and especially since we differ from the wild beasts in this, that they, bending prone toward the earth, are born to look out for nothing but their food, while we, to whom an upright face, a gaze turned toward heaven, speech and reason are given, by which we recognise, perceive, and imitate the god—it is neither right nor permitted to be ignorant of the celestial brightness that thrusts itself upon our eyes and senses: for it is, above all, a kind of sacrilege to seek on the ground what you ought to find on high.

The more, therefore, do those seem to me to have neither mind, nor sense, nor even eyes themselves, who would have this whole adornment of the world perfected not by divine reason, but heaped up out of certain fragments cohering at random.

For what can be so manifest, so confessed, and so plain, when you have lifted up your eyes to heaven and surveyed what is below and around, as that there is some divinity of most excellent mind, by which all nature is inspired, moved, nourished, and governed?

Look at the heaven itself: how widely it is stretched, how rapidly it revolves, both when by night it is distinguished with stars, and when by day it is lit by the sun: you will then know how wondrous and divine is the balance in it of the supreme governor. Look at the year too, how the sun's circuit makes it; look at the month, how the moon wheels it round with her growth, decline, and labour.

Why speak of the recurring alternations of darkness and light, that there may be for us an alternate renewal of work and rest? The fuller discourse on the stars must indeed be left to the astrologers, whether they direct the course of sailing or bring on the time of ploughing and reaping. Each of these things needed, not only to be created, brought into being, and arranged, but also to be perceived, seen through, and understood, a supreme craftsman and a perfect reason, and cannot be without the highest skill and reason.

What of this, that the order of the seasons and the fruits is marked by a steady variety? Does not spring, with its flowers, and summer, with its harvests, and the welcome ripeness of autumn, and the needful olive-gathering of winter, testify to its author and parent? An order that would easily be disturbed, did it not rest on the greatest reason.

How great the providence, that lest winter alone should scorch with frost, or summer alone scorch with heat, there is inserted the medium temperateness of autumn and spring, so that, by its own footprints, the hidden and harmless transitions of the returning year glide on!

Look at the sea: it is bounded by the law of the shore. Whatever of trees there is, see how it is quickened from the bowels of the earth! Behold the ocean: it ebbs and flows with alternate tides; look at the springs: they run with perennial veins; gaze on the rivers: they go ever in their practised gliding.

Why should I speak of the fitly disposed ridges of mountains, the windings of hills, the stretches of plains? Why should I speak of the manifold defence of living creatures against one another? Some armed with horns, some fenced with teeth, set firm upon hoofs, spiked with stings, or set free by swiftness of foot or by the lifting of wings?

The very beauty of our form, above all, confesses a god as its artificer: the upright posture, the erect face, the eyes set on high as in a watchtower, and all the other senses composed as in a citadel.

It would be long to go through them one by one. There is no member in man that is not both for the sake of necessity and of comeliness; and, what is more wonderful, the same figure in all, yet certain lineaments turned aside in each one: so that we both seem all alike and are found singly unlike one another.

What of the principle of birth? What of the desire of begetting? Is it not given by god, and that the breasts should fill with milk as the offspring ripens for birth, and that the tender babe should grow by the abundance of the milky dew?

Nor does god take thought for the whole only, but for the parts. Britain lacks the sun, but is refreshed by the warmth of the encircling sea; the river Nile is wont to temper the dryness of Egypt; the Euphrates makes up to Mesopotamia for rains; the river Indus is said both to sow and to water the East.

But if, on entering some house, you saw everything trim, ordered, and adorned, you would certainly believe that a master presided over it, and was himself far better than all those good things: so in this house of the world, when through heaven and earth you perceive providence, order, and law, believe that there is a lord and parent of the universe, fairer than the very stars and the parts of the whole world.

Unless perhaps, since there is no doubt about providence, you think it must be inquired whether the heavenly kingdom is governed by the command of one or by the will of many: a thing which it is no great labour to make plain to one who considers the empires of earth, for which the examples are surely drawn from heaven.

When did partnership in rule ever either begin with good faith or part without bloodshed? I pass over the Persians divining their sovereignty from the neighing of horses, and the pair of Thebans, a dead and worn-out tale, I pass by. For the kingdom of shepherds and a hut the memory of the twins is most notorious. The wars of son-in-law and father-in-law were spread over the whole world, and fortune did not hold two men in so great an empire.

See the rest: there is one king among the bees, one leader in the flocks, one ruler in the herds. Could you believe that in heaven the supreme power is divided, and the whole majesty of that true and divine empire is rent asunder, when it is plain that the god, parent of all, has neither beginning nor end, who gives birth to all, perpetuity to himself; who was before the world, himself instead of a world to himself; who orders all things, whatsoever they are, by his word, dispenses them by his reason, and accomplishes them by his power?

He cannot be seen: he is too bright for sight; nor be grasped: he is too pure for touch; nor be measured: he is too great for the senses, infinite, immeasurable, and known in his full greatness only to himself. But for us the breast is too narrow for the understanding, and therefore we worthily estimate him while we call him beyond estimation.

I will speak as I feel: he who thinks he knows the greatness of god, diminishes it; he who would not diminish it, knows it not.

Nor seek a name for god: god is his name. There is need of words where a multitude must be distinguished by the proper marks of appellations, one by one: for god, who alone is, the word 'god' is the whole. If I call him Father, you will suppose him bodily; if King, you will imagine him earthly; if Lord, you will certainly understand him mortal. Take away the additions of names, and you will perceive his brightness.

What of this, that I have the agreement of all men about this? I hear the common people: when they stretch their hands to heaven, they say nothing else but 'god,' and 'god is great,' and 'god is true,' and 'if god grant it.' Is this the natural speech of the crowd, or the prayer of a confessing Christian? And those who would have Jupiter chief are deceived in the name, but agree concerning one power.

I hear the poets too proclaiming one 'Father of gods and men,' and that the mind of mortals is such as the parent of all has made the day.

What of this? Does not Maro of Mantua say, more openly, more closely, more truly, at the beginning: 'A spirit within nourishes the heaven and earth and the other members of the world, and an infused mind sets them in motion, whence the race of men and beasts and whatever else of living things'? The same in another place names that mind and spirit god. For these are his words: For that a god goes through all the lands and tracts of sea and the deep heaven, whence the race of men and the herds, whence rain and fire. What else is proclaimed by us than god as mind and reason and spirit?

Let us review, if you please, the teaching of the philosophers: you will find that they, though in varying words, yet in the things themselves come together and conspire to this one opinion.

I pass over those rude and ancient ones who by their sayings earned the name of wise. Let Thales of Miletus be first of all, who first of all disputed about heavenly things. This Thales of Miletus said that water was the beginning of things, but that god was that mind which formed all things out of water. Granted that the principle of water and spirit was too deep and lofty to have been found out by man, and was handed down by god: you see that the opinion of the chief philosopher wholly accords with ours.

Next Anaximenes, and after him Diogenes of Apollonia, set up the air as god, infinite and immeasurable: of these too the agreement concerning divinity is alike.

The description and motion of Anaxagoras is called the god of infinite mind; and the god of Pythagoras is a spirit passing through and stretched throughout all the nature of things, from which also the life of all living creatures is drawn.

It is well known that Xenophanes hands down all the infinite, together with mind, as god; and Antisthenes that there are many popular gods, but one chief by nature; and that Speusippus knew god to be an animating force by which all things are ruled. What of this?

Does not Democritus, though the first inventor of atoms, often call nature, which pours forth images, and intelligence, god? Straton too, himself, calls nature god. Even that Epicurus, who feigns the gods either idle or non-existent, sets nature above all.

Aristotle varies, and yet assigns one power: for now he calls mind, now the world, god; now he sets god over the world. Theophrastus too varies, ascribing supremacy sometimes to the world, sometimes to the divine mind. Heraclides of Pontus also, however variously, ascribes a divine mind to the world. Zeno and Chrysippus and Cleanthes are themselves many-shaped, but all return to the unity of providence. For Cleanthes discourses of god now as the mind of nature and the soul, now as the ether, most often as reason.

Zeno, his master, would have natural and divine law, and the ether, sometimes reason, to be the beginning of all things; the same, by interpreting Juno as air, Jupiter as heaven, Neptune as sea, fire as Vulcan, and by showing the other vulgar gods to be likewise elements, gravely charges and confutes the public error.

Almost the same does Chrysippus: he believes the divine rational power, nature and the world, and at times fatal necessity, to be god, and imitates Zeno by a physiological interpretation in the songs of Hesiod, Homer, and Orpheus.

Diogenes of Babylon too had the discipline of expounding and arguing that the birth of Jupiter and the rising of Minerva, and the rest of this kind, are names of things, not of gods.

For Xenophon the Socratic denies that the form of the true god can be seen, and therefore ought not to be sought; Ariston the Stoic, that it cannot be comprehended at all: each perceived the majesty of god by his despair of understanding it.

Plato has a clearer discourse about god, both in the things themselves and in the names, and one that would be wholly heavenly were it not sometimes sullied by an admixture of civil persuasion. So in the Timaeus the god of Plato is, by his very name, the parent of the world, the artificer of the soul, the fashioner of things heavenly and earthly, whom he premises both to be hard to find by reason of his exceeding and incredible power, and, when you have found him, impossible to declare to the public.

Almost the same are these things as ours: for we too both know god and call him parent of all, but never proclaim him publicly unless we are questioned.

I have set forth the opinions of well-nigh all the philosophers of more illustrious fame, who designated one god, albeit by many names, so that anyone might suppose either that the Christians of today are philosophers, or that the philosophers of old were already Christians.

But if the world is ruled by providence and governed by the nod of one god, antiquity, delighted or captivated by its own little tales, ought not to drag us into error by the consent of the mob, since it is refuted by the opinions of its own philosophers, who have on their side the authority both of reason and of age.

For our forefathers had so easy a faith in falsehoods that they rashly believed other monstrous things too, mere marvels: the manifold Scylla, the many-shaped Chimaera, and the Hydra reborn from its fortunate wounds, and the Centaurs, horses entwined with their riders; and whatever rumour is free to feign, they were glad to hear.

What of those old wives' tales, of birds and beasts made from men, and of trees and flowers made from men? If they had been done, they would still be done: because they cannot be done, therefore they were never done.

In like manner our forefathers erred about the gods too: improvident, credulous, they believed with rude simplicity. While they reverently worship their kings, while they long to behold the dead in images, while they yearn to keep their memory in statues, those things became sacred which had been taken up as solaces.

Lastly, before the world was opened to commerce and before the nations mingled their rites and customs, each people venerated its own founder, or famous leader, or chaste queen braver than her sex, or the discoverer of some boon or art, as a citizen of good memory: thus a reward was given to the dead and an example to those to come.

Read the writings of the historians or the writings of the wise: you will recognise the same things with me. Euhemerus relates that men were held to be gods for their deserts in valour or in benefit, and enumerates their birthdays, their countries, their tombs, and points them out through the provinces—of the Dictaean Jupiter, the Delphic Apollo, the Pharian Isis, the Eleusinian Ceres.

Prodicus says that those were taken up among the gods who, by wandering and discovering new fruits, served the welfare of men. To the same opinion Persaeus too philosophises, and links the discovered fruits and the very discoverers of the fruits by the same names, as the comic saying has it, that 'Venus is cold without Bacchus and Ceres.'

That great Alexander of Macedon wrote in a remarkable volume to his mother that, through fear of his power, the secret about the gods who were men was betrayed to him by a priest: there he makes Vulcan the first of all, and afterward the race of Jupiter.

For Saturn, the head of this race and swarm, all the writers of antiquity, Greek and Roman, have handed down as a man. Nepos knows this, and Cassius in his history, and Thallus and Diodorus say it.

This Saturn, then, a fugitive from Crete, had come to Italy through fear of his savage son, and, received in the hospitality of Janus, taught those rude and rustic men many things, being a Greek and polished—to imprint letters, to stamp coins, to make implements.

And so he chose that his hiding-place, because he had lain safely hidden, should be called Latium, and they left, both of them, for the memory of posterity, the city Saturnia, named after his own name, and the Janiculum so named by Janus.

A man, therefore, who certainly fled; a man who certainly hid; and the father of a man, and born of a man: for he was said to be the son of Earth or of Heaven, because among the Italians he was of unknown parentage—just as to this day we name those suddenly seen 'sent from heaven,' and the ignoble and unknown 'sons of earth.'

His son Jupiter reigned in Crete with his father shut out, died there, had children there: still the cave of Jupiter is visited, and his tomb is shown, and by his very rites he is convicted of humanity.

It is idle to go through them one by one and unfold the whole series of that race, since, the mortality of the first parents being proved, it has flowed down upon the rest by the very order of succession. Unless perhaps you feign gods after death, and by the perjury of Proculus Romulus is a god, and Juba is a god to the willing Moors, and the other deified kings, who are consecrated not in confidence of their godhead but in honour of merited power.

To these, in fine, this name is ascribed against their will: they wish to remain in their manhood, they fear to become gods, even if they are old men, they refuse it.

Therefore there are no gods of the dead, since a god cannot die, nor of the born, since everything born dies: but that is divine which has neither rising nor setting. For why, if they were born, are they not born today too? Unless perchance Jupiter has now grown old, and childbearing has failed in Juno, and Minerva grew grey before she gave birth. Or has that begetting ceased because no assent is now given to fables of this kind?

Moreover, if the gods could create, they could not perish, and we should have more gods than all mankind, so that now neither heaven could contain them, nor the air hold them, nor the earth bear them. Whence it is manifest that those were men whom we both read to have been born and know to have died.

Who, then, doubts that the common people pray to the consecrated images of these men and worship them publicly, while the opinion and mind of the ignorant is deceived by the neatness of the art, dazzled by the gleam of gold, blunted by the brightness of silver and the whiteness of ivory?

But if anyone should call to mind by what tortures and by what engines every image is fashioned, he will blush to fear a material made sport of by the craftsman to make a god.

For a wooden god, perhaps a piece of a pyre or of some unlucky log, is hung up, hewn, dressed, planed;

and a god of bronze or silver is melted from some filthy vessel, as was often done by the Egyptian king, beaten with hammers and shaped on anvils; and a god of stone is cut, carved, and smoothed by some unclean man, and feels no wrong of his own birth, just as afterward he feels nothing of your worship.

Unless perhaps the stone or wood or silver is not yet a god. When, then, is the god born? Behold, it is cast, wrought, sculptured: it is not yet a god; behold, it is soldered, built up, set up: it is not yet a god; behold, it is adorned, consecrated, prayed to: then at last it is a god, when a man has willed it and dedicated it.

How much more truly do the dumb animals naturally judge of your gods! Mice, swallows, kites know that they have no feeling: they gnaw them, trample them, sit upon them, and, unless you drive them off, they build their nests in the very mouth of your god; spiders, indeed, weave their webs across his face and hang their threads from his very head.

You wipe them, cleanse them, scrape them, and you protect and fear those whom you make, while each of you does not consider that he ought first to know a god before he worship one; while they rashly long to obey their parents, while they had rather become an addition to another's error than trust themselves, while they know nothing of the things they fear. So has avarice been consecrated in gold and silver, so has the shape of empty statues been sealed, so was Roman superstition born.

If you should run through their rites, how many things are laughable, how many also pitiable! Naked men run about in the raw cold; others march in felt caps, carry about old shields, beat hides, and, begging from street to street, lead their gods around: some shrines they permit to be approached only once a year, some it is wholly forbidden to visit; there is one which a man may not enter, and there are some rites without women; and to be present at certain ceremonies, even for a slave, is an outrage requiring expiation. Some rites a woman of one husband crowns, others a woman of many; and with great religion she is sought out who can number the more adulteries.

What of this? He who pours libation with his own blood and supplicates with his own wounds—would he not be better profane than thus religious? And he whose obscene parts are cut off—how does he not outrage the god whom he so appeases, since, if god wished eunuchs, he could beget them, not make them?

Who does not perceive that men of unsound and vain and abandoned mind play the fool in these things, and that the very crowd of the erring lend one another mutual protection? Here the defence of the common madness is the multitude of the mad.

Consider, finally, the very rites and the very mysteries: you will find mournful endings, the fates and deaths and grief and wailing of wretched gods. Isis, with her Cynocephalus and her bald priests, mourns, laments, and seeks her lost son, and the wretched Isiacs beat their breasts and imitate the grief of the most unhappy mother; soon, the little one found, Isis rejoices, the priests exult, Cynocephalus the finder boasts, and they cease not, year after year, either to lose what they find or to find what they lose. Is it not ridiculous either to mourn what you worship or to worship what you mourn? These things, once Egyptian, are now Roman rites too, that you may dote over the swallow and sistrum of Isis, and the scattered limbs and empty tomb of your Serapis or Osiris.

Ceres, with torches kindled and a serpent girt about her, anxious and troubled, tracks the stolen and ravished Proserpina: these are the Eleusinian rites.

And what are the rites of Jupiter? A she-goat is his nurse, and the infant is withdrawn from his greedy father, lest he be devoured; and the clashing of the cymbals of the Corybantes, lest the father hear his wailing, drowns the cries.

Of the Dindyma of Cybele I am ashamed to speak: who, since she could not, being herself misshapen and aged, allure to lust her unhappily favoured paramour, as mother of many gods, gelded him, that, forsooth, she might make a god a eunuch. For this fable the Galli worship her even with the torment of their own half-manhood. These are no longer rites, they are tortures.

What of this? Do not the very forms and habits convict the absurdities and disgraces of your gods? Vulcan a lame and crippled god; Apollo through so many ages smooth-cheeked; Aesculapius well-bearded, though the son of the ever-youthful Apollo; Neptune with sea-green eyes, Minerva with grey, Juno with the eyes of an ox, Mercury with winged feet, Pan with hooves, Saturn in fetters. Janus indeed wears two foreheads, as if he walked also backward; Diana is at one time a high-girt huntress, and as the Ephesian is piled up with many breasts and udders, and as Trivia is horrible with three heads and many hands.

What of this? Your very Jupiter is now set up beardless, now placed bearded; and when he is called Hammon, he has horns; when Capitoline, then he carries thunderbolts; when Latiaris, he is drenched with gore; when Feretrius, he is decked with a crown. And, not to go through many Jupiters at length, there are as many monsters of Jupiter as there are names.

Erigone is hanged from a noose, that as a virgin she may be set fiery among the stars; the Castors die by turns that they may live; Aesculapius is struck by lightning that he may rise into a god; Hercules is burned up in the fires of Oeta, that he may put off his manhood.

These fables and errors we both learn from our ignorant parents, and—what is more grievous—we elaborate by the very studies and disciplines, especially by the songs of the poets, who in the greatest measure have harmed truth itself by their authority.

And Plato therefore admirably cast that famous Homer, praised and crowned, out of the city which he was framing in his discourse.

For this poet above all, in the Trojan war, mingled your gods—though he makes sport of them—in the affairs and acts of men; he matched them in pairs, wounded Venus, bound Mars, wounded him, put him to flight.

He tells that Jupiter was freed by Briareus, lest he be bound by the other gods, and that he wept bloody showers for his son Sarpedon because he could not snatch him from death, and that, caught by the girdle of Venus, he lay with Juno his wife more ardently than he is wont to do with adulteresses.

Elsewhere Hercules cleans out dung, and Apollo pastures the herds for Admetus. For Laomedon Neptune built the walls, and the unhappy builder received no wage for his work.

There the thunderbolt of Jupiter is forged on the anvil with the arms of Aeneas, though heaven and thunderbolts and lightnings existed long before Jupiter was born in Crete; and the flames of the true thunderbolt neither could the Cyclops imitate nor Jupiter himself fail to fear.

Why should I speak of the adultery of Mars and Venus caught in the act, and of Jupiter's lust upon Ganymede consecrated in heaven? All which were set forth for this end, that some authority might be provided for the vices of men.

By these and suchlike figments and sweeter lies the minds of boys are corrupted, and, with the same fables clinging to them, they grow up to the strength of full age, and in the same opinions, wretches, they grow old, though truth is obvious, but to those who seek it.

But yet that very superstition gave, increased, and established the empire to the Romans, since they were strong not so much by valour as by religion and piety. Doubtless the famous and noble Roman justice took its first auspices from the very cradle of the rising empire!

Were they not, at their origin, gathered by crime and fortified by the terror of their own savagery? For the first commons were assembled in an asylum: the lost, the criminal, the incestuous, assassins, traitors had flocked together; and that Romulus himself, the commander and ruler, might surpass his own people in crime, he committed parricide. These are the first auspices of the religious state!

Soon, contrary to all custom, he seized, violated, and mocked the maidens of strangers, already betrothed, already destined, and some women too from their marriages, and waged war with their parents, that is, with his own fathers-in-law, and shed kindred blood. What is more irreligious, what bolder, what safer in the very confidence of crime?

Now to drive the neighbours from their fields, to overthrow the nearest cities with their temples and altars, to drive the captives together, to grow by the losses of others and their own crimes—this was the common discipline of Romulus and the rest of the kings and the later leaders.

So whatever the Romans hold, worship, possess, is the spoil of audacity: all their temples are from plunder, that is, from the ruins of cities, from the spoils of gods, from the slaughter of priests.

This is to insult and mock—to serve the conquered religions, to adore them as captives after the victories. For to adore what you have taken with the hand is to consecrate sacrilege, not divinities. As often, then, as the Romans triumphed, so often did they pollute themselves; they had as many spoils from the gods as trophies from the nations.

Therefore the Romans were not so great because they were religious, but because they were sacrilegious with impunity: for in their very wars they could not have the gods for helpers, against whom they had snatched up arms. But those whom they had laid low, when triumphed over, they began to worship: yet what can these gods avail for the Romans, who availed nothing for their own against the arms of the Romans?

For we know the homebred gods of the Romans: Romulus, Picus, Tiberinus, and Consus, and Pilumnus and Volumnus are gods; Tatius both found and worshipped Cloacina; Fear and Pallor were dedicated to the enemy; soon Fever was dedicated by I know not whom: these are the nurslings of this city's superstition, diseases and ill-health! Indeed Acca Larentia and Flora, shameless harlots, are to be reckoned among the diseases and gods of the Romans.

These, forsooth, against the rest who were worshipped among the nations, extended the empire of the Romans: for neither against their own countrymen did Thracian Mars, or Cretan Jupiter, or Juno—now Argive, now Samian, now Punic—or Tauric Diana, or the Idaean Mother, or that Egyptian, who are no divinities but portents, aid them.

Unless perhaps among them there was greater chastity of virgins or holier religion of priests, when, while in most of the virgins—as having too rashly mingled with men, Vesta indeed not knowing it—incest was punished, in the rest it was not safer chastity but luckier unchastity that procured impunity.

And where more than among the priests, amid the altars and shrines, are debaucheries arranged, pandering practised, adulteries plotted? Indeed, more often in the cells of the temple-keepers than in the very brothels is burning lust satisfied.

And yet, before them, by god's dispensing, the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks too, and the Egyptians long held empire, though they had no Pontiffs, nor Arval brothers, nor Salii, nor vestals, nor Augurs, nor chickens shut up in a cage, by whose feeding or fastidiousness the highest affairs of state should be governed.

For now I come to those auspices and auguries of the Romans, which you have testified were gathered with the utmost labour, and to your sorrow both neglected and observed with good fortune.

Clodius, forsooth, and Flaminius and Junius lost their armies for this, that they thought the most assured tripudium of the chickens need not be awaited.

What of this? Did not Regulus observe the auguries, and was he not taken? Mancinus held to the religion, and was sent under the yoke and surrendered. Paulus too had greedy chickens, yet at Cannae he was laid low with the greater part of the commonwealth.

Gaius Caesar, that he might not send his ships over into Africa before midwinter, scorned the resisting auguries and auspices: thereby the more easily he both sailed and conquered.

But what and how much shall I pursue concerning oracles? After his death Amphiaraus answered things to come, who knew not that he would be betrayed for a necklace by his wife. The blind Teiresias saw the future, who did not see the present.

Concerning Pyrrhus, Ennius forged the answers of Pythian Apollo, when Apollo had already ceased to make verses: whose then cautious and ambiguous oracle failed, when men began to be both more polished and less credulous. And Demosthenes, because he knew the answers feigned, complained that the Pythian priestess 'Philippised.'

Yet sometimes auspices or oracles touched the truth. Although among many lies chance may seem to have imitated skill, I will nevertheless approach the very fountain of error and depravity, whence all this darkness has flowed, and dig it up more deeply and lay it open more plainly.

There are spirits insincere and wandering, weighed down from their heavenly vigour by earthly stains and lusts. These spirits, therefore, after, burdened and plunged in vices, they lost the simplicity of their substance, do not cease, now themselves lost, to ruin others as a solace of their own calamity, and, depraved, to instil the error of their depravity, and, estranged from god, to estrange men from god by bringing in depraved religions.

That these spirits are demons the poets know, the philosophers argue, Socrates knew, who, at the nod and will of the demon that sat by him, either declined affairs or sought them.

The Magi too not only know demons but also do, through demons, whatever marvel they sport with: with these inspiring and infusing, they produce their tricks, making either what is not seem to be, or what is seem not to be.

The first of these Magi, both in eloquence and in deed, Hostanes, both attends the true god with the majesty he deserves, and knew that the angels, that is, the ministers and messengers of god, guard the throne of god and stand by for his veneration, so that, terrified at the very nod and countenance of the lord, they tremble. The same too declared that there are demons earthly, wandering, enemies of mankind.

What of this? Plato, who thought it a task to find god, does he not without difficulty tell of angels and of demons? And in his Symposium too does he not endeavour to express the nature of the demons? For he would have it a substance between the mortal and the immortal, that is, midway between body and spirit, compounded of a mingling of earthly weight and heavenly lightness, from which he warns us that love too is formed and glides into human breasts and stirs the senses and shapes the affections and pours in the heat of desire.

These impure spirits, then, the demons, as has been shown by the Magi and the philosophers, lurk beneath the consecrated statues and images, and by their breath obtain the authority of a present deity, while at times they inspire seers, while they linger in shrines, while sometimes they animate the fibres of the entrails, govern the flight of birds, rule the lots, and produce oracles wrapped up in many falsehoods.

For they both are deceived and deceive, so that they both know not the sincere truth and confess not, to their own destruction, that which they know. Thus they weigh men down from heaven and call them away from the true god to material things; they disturb life, trouble sleep, and, creeping secretly even into bodies, since they are subtle spirits, they feign diseases, terrify minds, distort limbs, that they may force men to their worship; so that, fattened by the steam of altars or the victims of cattle, when they have loosed what they had bound, they may seem to have healed.

Hence too are those raving men whom you see rush forth in public, themselves seers and without a temple, who thus madden, thus rave, thus whirl: in them too is the same instigation of the demon, but the cause of the frenzy is unlike.

From these come also those things which were told you a little while ago: how Jupiter sought the renewal of the games out of a dream, how the Castors were seen with their horses, how a little boat followed the girdle of the matron.

All these things very many of you know, that the demons themselves confess about themselves, as often as by us they are driven out of bodies by the torments of words and the fires of prayer.

Saturn himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatever demons you worship, overcome by pain, declare what they are; nor surely do they lie to their own shame, especially with some of you standing by.

Believe these demons themselves, witnesses confessing the truth about themselves, that they are demons: for, adjured by the true and only god, unwilling and wretched, they shudder in the bodies, and either leap out at once or vanish gradually, according as the faith of the sufferer aids or the grace of the healer breathes upon them. So they flee the Christians at close quarters, whom from afar they harried in the assemblies through you.

Therefore, inserted into the minds of the unlearned, they secretly sow hatred of us through fear: for it is natural both to hate whom you fear, and, if you can, to assail whom you dread. So they take possession of minds and block up hearts, that men may begin to hate us before they know us, lest, having known us, they should either be able to imitate us or be unable to condemn us.

But how unjust it is to judge of things unknown and unexplored, as you do, believe us, who once repented of it ourselves.

For we too were the same, and once felt the same with you, blind and dull as we were, as though the Christians worshipped monsters, devoured infants, mingled incestuous banquets; nor did we understand that these tales were always being fanned about by these very demons and never either investigated or proved, and that in so long a time no one had come forward to betray them, who would have obtained not only pardon for the deed but even favour for the disclosure: that the evil, moreover, was so far from being real, that the Christian accused neither blushed nor feared, and repented of one thing only, that he had not been one before.

We, nevertheless, when we undertook the defence and protection of some sacrilegious men and incestuous men, and even parricides, thought that these men should not be heard at all, so that we tortured those who confessed in order to make them deny—plainly that they might not perish—exercising on them a perverse inquisition, not one that should dig out the truth, but one that should compel a lie.

And if anyone, weaker, pressed and overcome by the suffering, had denied that he was a Christian, we favoured him, as though, the name forsworn, he had now by that denial purged all those deeds of his.

Do you recognise that we felt and did the same things which you feel and do? Whereas, if reason and not the instigation of the demon were the judge, they ought rather to be pressed, not to disavow themselves Christians, but to confess about incestuous debaucheries, about unhallowed rites, about infants immolated.

For with these and suchlike tales the same demons have stuffed the ears of the ignorant against us, to the horror of execration. Nor is it any wonder, since the rumour of all things, which is always fed by scattered lies, is consumed when the truth is shown: this too is the work of the demons; for by them a false report is both sown and fostered.

Hence it is that you say you hear that the head of an ass is a sacred thing to us. Who is so foolish as to worship this? Who more foolish as to believe this worshipped? Save that you both consecrate whole asses in your stables, with your own or their Epona, and religiously deck the same asses with Isis; likewise you both immolate and worship the heads of oxen and the heads of wethers; you dedicate gods mixed of a goat and a man, and gods with the faces of lions and of dogs.

Do you not, with the Egyptians, both adore and pasture the bull Apis? Nor do you condemn their rites instituted for serpents, crocodiles, the rest of the beasts, and birds and fishes, any of which gods if a man have slain, he is even punished with death.

The same Egyptians, with very many of you, fear no more Isis than the pungency of onions, nor dread Serapis more than the noises expressed through the shameful parts of the body.

He too, who tells the tale against us about the adored privy parts of the priest, tries to transfer to us what are his own. For these things are perhaps the sacred rites of their unchastity, among whom every sex with every member prostitutes itself, among whom all unchastity is called urbanity, who envy the licence of harlots—men of evil tongue even if they were silent, whom their unchastity wearies before it shames them.

O horror! they admit upon themselves that wicked deed, which neither a softer age can endure nor a harder slavery be forced to.

These and suchlike disgraces it is not lawful for us even to hear, and for very many it is shameful to defend them: for you feign of the chaste and modest those things which we should not believe could be done, did you not prove them of yourselves.

For as to your ascribing to our religion a man punished as guilty, and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of truth, who think that a god could either have deserved to be guilty or could be earthly.

Wretched indeed is he whose whole hope rests in a mortal man: for all his help is ended with the death of the man!

The Egyptians, indeed, choose a man for themselves to worship: him alone they propitiate, him about all things they consult, to him they slay victims. But he who is a god to the rest, is certainly a man to himself, will he, nill he: for he does not deceive his own conscience, even if he deceive another's.

To princes and kings too, not as to great and chosen men, as is right, but as to gods, false flattery shamefully fawns, when honour is more truly paid to a distinguished man, and love more sweetly to the best. So they call their divinity, supplicate before their images, implore the Genius, that is, the demon, and it is safer for them to swear falsely by the Genius of Jupiter than of the king.

The cross too we neither worship nor desire. You, plainly, who consecrate wooden gods, perhaps adore wooden crosses as parts of your gods.

For your very standards and ensigns and banners of the camp—what else are they but gilded and adorned crosses? Your victorious trophies imitate not only the figure of a simple cross, but also of a man fastened to it.

We see, of course, the sign of the cross naturally in a ship, when it is borne along with swelling sails, when it glides with outspread oars; and when the yard-arm is set up, it is the sign of a cross, and when a man with hands outstretched worships god with a pure mind. So the sign of the cross either underlies natural reason or is figured in your religion.

I should now like to meet that man who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant. Do you think it can be done, that so soft, so tiny a body can take the doom of wounds? That anyone should cut, pour out, drain that raw blood of a new and scarcely yet a man? No one can believe this but he who can dare it.

For you, I see, now expose your begotten children to wild beasts and birds, now strangle them and crush them out by a wretched kind of death: there are women who, by potions of drugs drunk in their very bowels, extinguish the beginning of the future man and commit parricide before they bring forth.

And these things assuredly descend from the teaching of your gods: for Saturn did not expose his children, but devoured them. With reason, in some parts of Africa, infants were immolated to him by their parents, who hushed their wailing with caresses and a kiss, lest a weeping victim be offered.

Among the Tauric Pontians too, and the Egyptian Busiris, it was a rite to immolate guests; and to Mercury the Gauls slew human or rather inhuman victims; the Romans buried alive a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gaul and a Gaulish woman, in sacrifice; and to this day Latian Jupiter is worshipped among them with homicide, and—what is worthy of the son of Saturn—he is glutted with the blood of an evil and guilty man.

I believe it was he himself who taught Catiline to conspire by a covenant of blood, and Bellona to steep her rite in a draught of human gore, and to heal the epileptic disease with the blood of a man, that is, with a worse disease.

Not unlike these are they who devour the wild beasts from the arena, smeared and infected with gore, or fattened on the limbs and entrails of a man. For us it is not lawful either to see or to hear of homicide, and so far do we beware of human blood that we do not even know the blood of edible cattle in our food.

And of the incestuous banquet a great tale the conspiracy of demons has lied against us, that it might stain the glory of chastity by the besmearing of a foul infamy, that, before the truth were explored, it might turn men away from us by the terror of an unspeakable opinion.

Of this your Fronto too gave testimony, not as an affirmer, but, as an orator, sprinkled abuse: for these things rather were born among your own nations.

It is lawful among the Persians to lie with their mothers; among the Egyptians and at Athens marriages with sisters are lawful; your records and your tragedies glory in incests, which you both read and hear with pleasure; so too you worship incestuous gods, joined with mother, with daughter, with sister.

With reason, then, is incest often detected among you, always allowed. Even unwitting, wretches, you may rush into things unlawful: while you scatter your seed promiscuously, while everywhere you beget children, while you often expose even those born at home to another's mercy, you must needs come back upon your own, and stray among your own children. Thus you weave the tale of incest, even when you have no consciousness of it.

But we keep our modesty not in our face but in our mind: we gladly cling to the bond of one marriage; in the desire of begetting we know one wife or none. Our banquets we keep not only chaste but sober: for we do not indulge in feasts nor draw out our banquet with wine, but we temper mirth with gravity, with chaste speech; and being still more chaste in body, very many enjoy, rather than boast of, the perpetual virginity of an inviolate body: so far, in fine, is the desire of incest from us, that with some even a chaste union brings a blush.

Nor do we straightway stand among the lowest of the people, if we refuse your honours and purple; nor are we factious, if we all relish one good, gathered together in the same quiet as we are singly; nor are we chatterers in corners, if you either blush or fear to hear us in public.

And that our number increases day by day is not a proof of error, but a testimony of praise; for in a fair way of life one's own both persevere and others are added.

Thus, in fine, we recognise one another easily, not by a mark of the body, as you think, but by the sign of innocence and modesty: thus we love one another, which grieves you, with mutual love, since we know not how to hate: thus we call one another brothers, which you envy, as men of one god and parent, as partners of faith, as co-heirs of hope; for you neither recognise one another and rage in mutual hatreds, nor know yourselves brothers save indeed for parricide.

But do you think we conceal what we worship, if we have no shrines and altars? For what image shall I fashion of god, when, if you judge rightly, man himself is the image of god? What temple shall I build for him, when this whole world, made by his work, cannot contain him? And when I, a man, dwell more widely, shall I shut up the power of so great a majesty within one little chapel?

Is he not better dedicated in our mind? Is he not to be consecrated in our inmost heart? Shall I offer to god victims and sacrifices, which he has produced for my use, that I should reject to him his own gift? It is ungrateful, when the acceptable victim is a good spirit and a pure mind and a sincere thought.

Therefore he who cultivates innocence supplicates god; he who cultivates justice pours libation to god; he who abstains from frauds propitiates god; he who snatches a man from peril slays the best victim. These are our sacrifices, these are the sacred rites of god: so with us he is the more religious who is the more just.

But, you say, the god whom we worship we neither show nor see. Nay, for this very reason we believe him to be god, that we can perceive him though we cannot see him. For in his works and in all the motions of the world we behold his power ever present, when it thunders, lightens, smites, and when it makes clear weather.

Nor wonder if you do not see god: by wind and blasts all things are driven, shaken, agitated, and yet the wind and blast come not under the eyes. At the sun, indeed, which is the cause of seeing to all, we cannot look: the sight is repelled by the rays, the gaze of the beholder is blunted, and if you look too long, all vision is extinguished.

What? Could you endure the artificer of the sun himself, that fountain of light, when you turn away from his brightness, hide yourself from his lightnings? Do you wish to see god with carnal eyes, when you can neither behold nor hold your own soul, by which you are made to live and to speak?

But, you say, god is ignorant of man's act, and, set in heaven, cannot either be present to all or know individuals. You err, O man, and are deceived: for whence is god far off, when all things heavenly and earthly, and what are beyond this province of the world, are full of god? Everywhere he is not only nearest to us, but infused into us.

Look again at the sun: fixed in the heaven, yet scattered over all the lands; equally present everywhere, he enters into and mingles with all things, and nowhere is his brightness violated.

How much more does god, the author of all and the watcher of all, from whom there can be no secret, enter into the darkness, enter into our thoughts, as into a second darkness! Not only do we act beneath him, but, I had almost said, we live with him.'

Nor let us flatter ourselves about our numbers: we seem many to ourselves, but to god we are very few. We distinguish nations and peoples: to god this whole world is one house. Kings, indeed, know all of their kingdom through the offices of their ministers; god has no need of informers: not only do we live in his eyes, but in his bosom.

But it profited the Jews nothing that they too worshipped one god with altars and temples and the utmost superstition. You slip through ignorance if, either forgetful or ignorant of what went before, you remember only what came after.

For they too forsook our god—for the god of all is the same—so long as they worshipped him chastely, harmlessly, and religiously, so long as they obeyed his wholesome precepts, they were made of few innumerable, of needy rich, of slaves kings: a small band overwhelmed many, the unarmed the armed, by god's command and with the elements striving for them, as they fled overwhelming their pursuers.

Read over their writings, or, to pass over the ancients, consult Flavius Josephus, or, if you delight more in the Romans, Antonius Julianus on the Jews: you will then know that by their own wickedness they earned this fortune, and that nothing befell them which had not been foretold beforehand, if they should persevere in their stubbornness.

Thus you will understand that they deserted before they were deserted, and were not, as you impiously say, taken captive with their god, but given up by god as deserters from his discipline.

But concerning the conflagration of the world, to disbelieve that an unforeseen fire may fall or the moisture fail is the part of vulgar error.

For what wise man doubts, who is ignorant, that all things which have arisen perish, that things which have been made decay, that the heaven too, with all things contained in the heaven, ceases just as it began. To the Stoics it is a constant opinion that the whole world, if the sweet water of the springs and the sea-water cease to nourish the sun, moon, and the rest of the stars, will pass into the force of fire, because, the moisture consumed, all this world will take fire.

And the Epicureans have this very same opinion concerning the conflagration of the elements and the ruin of the world.

Plato says that the parts of the world are now flooded, now by alternate turns set ablaze; and though he said that the world itself was framed perpetual and indissoluble, he yet adds that to its very artificer, god, it alone is both dissoluble and mortal. So it is no wonder if that mass should be destroyed by him by whom it was built up.

You note that the philosophers argue the same things which we say, not that we have followed in their footsteps, but that they have imitated a shadow of interpolated truth from the divine predictions of the prophets.

So too the more illustrious of the wise, Pythagoras first and chiefly Plato, handed down the condition of being born again with a corrupted and halved faith: for, the bodies dissolved, they would have the souls alone both abide perpetually and pass often into other new bodies.

They add to these also those things, to wrest the truth aside, that the souls of men return into cattle, birds, and beasts. Such an opinion is worthy, in truth, not of a philosopher's zeal, but of a mime's gibe.

But for our purpose it is enough that in this too your wise men in some measure agree with us.

For the rest, who is so foolish or so brutish as to dare to gainsay that man, who could at first be fashioned by god, can likewise be refashioned anew? That after death he is nothing, and before his birth was nothing? That, as it was possible to be born from nothing, so it is possible to be repaired from nothing? Moreover, it is harder to begin that which is not, than to repeat that which has been.

Do you believe that anything perishes even for god, if it be withdrawn from our dull eyes? Every body, whether it dries into dust, or is dissolved into moisture, or is pressed into ashes, or is rarefied into vapour, is withdrawn from us, but is reserved for god in the keeping of the elements. Nor, as you believe, do we fear any loss from burial, but we practise the old and better custom of inhumation.

See, indeed, how, for our consolation, all nature meditates a future resurrection. The sun sinks and is born again, the stars set and return, the flowers die and revive, the shrubs after their decline put forth leaves, the seeds grow green again only when they have rotted: so the body in the tomb, as the trees in winter, hide their greenness under a feigned dryness.

Why do you hasten that it should revive and return while the winter is yet raw? We must wait also for the spring of the body. Nor am I ignorant that very many, from a consciousness of their deserts, rather wish than believe that they shall be nothing after death: for they prefer to be utterly extinguished than to be restored to punishment. Their error is increased both by the licence allowed in this world and by the very great patience of god, whose judgement, the slower it is, is by so much the more just.'

And yet men are warned by the books of the most learned and by the songs of the poets of that fiery river, and of the heat from the Stygian marsh ever circling round, which, prepared for eternal torments, and known both by the disclosures of demons and from the oracles of the prophets, they have handed down.

And therefore among them even king Jupiter himself swears religiously by the burning banks and the black gulf: for, foreseeing it, he shudders at the punishment destined for him with his worshippers.

Nor is there to the torments any measure or end. There the wise fire both burns the limbs and renews them, gnaws and feeds them. As the fires of the thunderbolts touch bodies and consume them not, as the fires of Etna and Vesuvius and of burning lands everywhere flame and are not spent: so that penal conflagration is fed not by the wasting of those who burn, but is nourished by the unconsumed laceration of their bodies.

But that those are deservedly tormented who know not god, as impious, as unjust, none but the profane doubts, since it is no less a crime to be ignorant of the parent of all and lord of all than to wrong him.

And although ignorance of god suffices for punishment, just as knowledge profits for pardon, yet, if we Christians be compared with you, although in some things our discipline is the lesser, we shall be found far better than you.

For you forbid adulteries and commit them; we are born men for our own wives only: you punish crimes committed; with us even to think of sinning is to sin: you fear those who are privy to the deed; we fear even conscience alone, without which we cannot be: in fine, from your number the prison overflows, but there is no Christian there unless he be either accused for his religion or an apostate.'

Nor let anyone either take comfort from fate or excuse his outcome by it: let the lot be of fortune, yet the mind is free, and therefore the act of a man, not his rank, is judged. For what else is fate than what god has spoken concerning each one of us?

He, since he can foreknow the matter, determines the very fates of individuals according to their deserts and qualities. So in us not our nativity is smitten, but the nature of our character is punished. And concerning fate enough, if but a little, for the time; we shall dispute of it elsewhere more freely and more fully.

For the rest, that very many of us are called poor is not our reproach but our glory: for the mind, as it is loosened by luxury, so is armed by frugality.

And yet who can be poor who lacks nothing, who gapes not after another's goods, who is rich toward god? Rather is he poor who, though he have much, desires more.

Yet I will say as I feel: no one can be so poor as he was born. Birds live without patrimony, and the cattle are fed for the day: and yet these things were made for us, all of which, if we do not covet them, we possess.

Therefore, as he who treads the road is the happier the lighter he goes, so happier on this journey of life is he who lightens himself with poverty, who sighs not under the burden of riches.

And yet, if we thought wealth useful, we would ask it of god: surely he could grant somewhat, whose is the whole. But we choose rather to despise riches than to keep them; we covet innocence the more, we demand patience the more, we choose rather to be good than prodigal.

And that we feel and suffer the human ills of the body is no punishment, it is warfare. For courage is strengthened by infirmities, and calamity is often the discipline of virtue; the powers, in fine, both of mind and of body, grow torpid without the exercise of labour. So all those brave men of yours whom you proclaim for an example flourished, famous, by their afflictions.

And so god both can succour us and does not despise us, since he is both the ruler of all and the lover of his own; but in adversities he tries and tests each one, weighs the disposition of individuals by their perils, and questions the will of man even unto the last death, secure that nothing can perish to him. And so, as gold is by fires, so are we proved by dangers.

How fair a spectacle to god, when a Christian grapples with pain, when he is set against threats and punishments and torments, when, mocking the din of death and the horror of the executioner, he treads them down, when he raises his liberty against kings and princes, and yields to god alone, whose he is, when, a triumpher and victor, he insults the very man who pronounced sentence against him! For he has conquered who has obtained what he strove for.

What soldier, under the eyes of his commander, would not more boldly provoke danger? For no one receives the reward before the trial. And yet the commander gives not what he has not: he cannot prolong life, but he can ennoble the warfare.

But god's soldier is neither forsaken in pain nor ended by death. So a Christian may seem wretched, but cannot be found so. You yourselves exalt to heaven men of calamity, as Mucius Scaevola, who, when he had erred against the king, would have perished among the enemy, had he not lost his right hand.

And how many of ours have endured not their right hand only, but their whole body, to be burned, to be consumed, without any wailings, when especially they had it in their own power to be released!

Do I compare men with Mucius, or with Aquilius or Regulus? Our boys and little women, with inspired endurance of pain, mock crosses and torments, wild beasts and all the terrors of punishments.

And do you not understand, O wretches, that there is no one who would either without reason wish to undergo punishment, or could without god sustain torments?

Unless perhaps it deceives you that those who know not god abound in riches, flourish in honours, are strong in powers. Wretches, they are raised the higher in this, that they may fall the lower. For these, as victims, are fattened for the slaughter, as offerings are crowned for punishment: to this end indeed some are raised to commands and lordships, that the genius of their lost mind may freely traffic in the licence of power.

For without the knowledge of god what solid happiness can there be, since death is at hand? Like a dream, before it is grasped, it slips away.

Are you a king? Yet you both fear as much as you are feared, and however thronged you be with a great retinue, in danger you are nevertheless alone. Are you rich? But fortune is ill trusted, and the brief journey of life is not furnished but burdened by a great viaticum.

Do you glory in fasces and purple? An empty error of man and a vain cult of dignity, to shine in purple while you are foul in mind. Are you nobly born by your descent? Do you praise your parents? Yet we are all born of one lot, and are distinguished by virtue alone.

We, therefore, who are esteemed by our morals and our modesty, with reason abstain from your evil pleasures and pomps and shows, of which we both know the origin from sacred things, and condemn the hurtful allurements. For in the games of the circus, who would not shudder at the madness of the brawling people? In the gladiatorial shows, at the discipline of homicide?

In the stage-plays too there is no less frenzy and a more prolonged foulness: for now the mime either sets forth or shows adulteries, now the unmanned actor, while he feigns love, inflicts it: the same dishonours your gods by putting upon them debaucheries, sighings, hatreds; the same, with feigned griefs, provokes your tears by empty gestures and nods: thus you demand homicide in reality, and weep at it in falsehood.

But that we despise the leavings of sacrifices and the cups from which libation has been poured is no confession of fear, but an assertion of true liberty. For although everything that is born, as an inviolable gift of god, is corrupted by no act, we yet abstain, lest anyone suppose either that we yield to the demons to whom the libation was made, or that we are ashamed of our religion.

But who is he who doubts that we indulge in the flowers of spring, when we pluck both the rose of spring and the lily and whatever else in flowers is of pleasing colour and odour? For these we both use scattered loose, and embrace our necks with soft garlands. Pardon us, indeed, that we do not crown the head: we are wont to draw in the good fragrance of a flower by the nostrils, not to drink it in by the back of the head or the hair.

Nor do we crown the dead. I wonder at you in this the more, in what way you assign to the lifeless either a torch if it feels, or a garland if it feels not, since the blessed needs not and the wretched rejoices not in flowers.

But we adorn our funerals with the same tranquillity with which we live, and we bind on no withering garland, but await from god one lively with eternal flowers: at rest, modest, secure in the bounty of our god, we quicken the hope of future felicity by faith in his present majesty. So we both rise again blessed and already live in the contemplation of the future.

Therefore let Socrates the Attic buffoon look to it, who confessed that he knew nothing, glorying though it be in the testimony of a most lying demon; let Arcesilas too, and Carneades, and Pyrrho, and all the multitude of the Academics deliberate; let Simonides also adjourn for ever: we despise the lifted brows of the philosophers, whom we know to be corrupters and adulterers and tyrants, and ever eloquent against their own vices.

We display wisdom not in our garb but in our mind; we do not utter great things but live them; we glory that we have attained what they sought with the utmost effort and could not find.

Why are we ungrateful, why grudge ourselves, if the truth of the divinity has ripened in the age of our own time? Let us enjoy our good and temper our verdict to the right: let superstition be checked, let impiety be expiated, let true religion be preserved."

When Octavius had finished his pleading, for some while we held our faces fixed, struck dumb to silence; and, as for me, I lost myself in the greatness of my admiration, that he had adorned with arguments and examples and the authorities of his reading those things which it is easier to feel than to speak, and that he had beaten back the malevolent with those very weapons, the darts of the philosophers, with which they arm themselves, and had shown truth to be not only easy but also winning.

While, therefore, I was silently turning these things over within me, Caecilius burst out: "I congratulate my Octavius most heartily, and myself too, and I do not wait for the verdict. We have conquered, and—yet so that I improperly usurp the victory—for as he is my conqueror, so I am the triumpher over error.

And so, as for the sum of the question, I both confess concerning providence and yield concerning god, and I now consent concerning the sincerity of our sect. Yet even now some things still remain, not striving against the truth, but necessary to a perfect instruction; about which, since the sun is now sloping to its setting, we shall, agreeing about the whole, inquire more readily tomorrow."

"But I," said I, "rejoice more largely on behalf of us all, in that Octavius has conquered even for me, since the great odium of judging has been taken from me. Nor yet can I requite the merit of his words with praises: the testimony of a man, and of one man, is weak: he has the surpassing gift of god, by whom both, inspired, he pleaded, and, aided, he prevailed."

After this we departed glad and cheerful: Caecilius, that he had believed; Octavius, that he had conquered; and I, both that this one had believed and that that one had conquered.