Octavius

As I was thinking, and going over in my mind the memory of Octavius, my good and most faithful companion, such sweetness and affection for the man clung to me that I seemed somehow to be going back into the past myself, and not merely to be calling back by recollection things already done and gone:

so much as the sight of him has been withdrawn from my eyes, so much has it been woven into my heart and almost into my inmost feelings.

And not without reason did that excellent and holy man, at his departure, leave us an immense longing for himself, since he himself always burned with such love for us that in play and in earnest alike he was in tune with me with an equal will, wanting and not wanting the same things: you would have thought that one mind had been divided between two.

So he alone was my confidant in my loves, my companion in my errors; and when, the mist dispelled, I was emerging from the depths of darkness into the light of wisdom and truth, he did not reject me as a companion, but, what is more glorious, he ran on ahead.

And so, while my thoughts were ranging over the whole span of our life together and our friendship, the attention of my mind settled above all on that conversation of his in which, by a most weighty argument, he brought back to the true religion Caecilius, who was still clinging to superstitious vanities.

For he had hurried to Rome on business and to visit me, leaving his home, his wife, his children, and, what is most lovable in children, children still in their innocent years and still attempting half-formed words, a speech made sweeter by the very stumbling of the faltering tongue.

At his arrival I cannot express in words with how great and how uncontainable a joy I leapt up, since the unexpected presence of my dearest friend most greatly increased my happiness.

So after a day or two, when constant companionship had satisfied the eagerness of our longing, and by telling each other in turn we had learned what we did not know about each other through our separation, we decided to go to Ostia, a most delightful town, because sea bathing would be a pleasant and suitable treatment for my body in drying up its humours; and besides, the vintage holidays had released me from my cares in the courts. For at that time, after the summer days, autumn was turning toward milder weather.

So when at daybreak we were walking along the shore toward the sea, so that the gently blowing breeze might refresh our limbs and the sand, yielding to our soft tread, might sink beneath us with exquisite pleasure, Caecilius, noticing a statue of Serapis, raised his hand to his mouth, as the superstitious common people do, and pressed a kiss upon it with his lips.

Then Octavius said: "It is not the part of a good man, brother Marcus, to abandon a man who clings to your side at home and abroad to this blindness of vulgar ignorance, so that on so bright a day you let him stumble against stones, carved, to be sure, and anointed and garlanded, when you know that the disgrace of this error redounds on you no less than on him."

With this talk of his we had crossed the middle of the town and were now on the open shore.

There a gentle wave, washing over the outermost sands, was stretching them smooth as if to lay out a promenade; and as the sea is always restless even when the winds have dropped, though it did not come up on the land in white and foaming breakers, still we were greatly delighted by its curling, winding wanderings there, as we dipped our feet at the very edge of the water, while the wave now struck against our feet and played about them, now slipped back and, drawing back our footprints, sucked itself in again.

So, advancing gradually and calmly, we followed the edge of the gently curving shore, beguiling the way with stories. These stories were Octavius's account of a sea voyage.

But when we had spent a fair distance of walking in conversation, we turned around and trod the same way back again; and when we came to the place where small boats, drawn up and resting on timbers laid beneath them, were raised off the dirt of the ground, we saw boys eagerly competing at a game of throwing shells into the sea.

The game is to pick up from the shore a shell made smooth by the tossing of the waves, to hold the shell flat in the fingers, and, bending oneself as low as possible, to send it spinning over the waves, so that the missile either skims the back of the sea while it glides with a gentle impetus, or, shaving the tops of the waves, flashes up and is lifted by continual leaps. That boy counted himself the winner among the boys whose shell both ran farthest and leapt most often.

So while all of us were taken with the pleasure of this spectacle, Caecilius paid no attention and did not laugh at the contest, but, silent, anxious, and apart, showed by his face that he was pained by something.

I said to him: "What is the matter? Why do I not recognize that liveliness of yours, Caecilius?

I miss too that cheerfulness of your eyes, even in serious matters." Then he said: "For some while now the speech of our Octavius has been sharply vexing and gnawing at me, in which he attacked you and rebuked you for negligence, so as indirectly to accuse me more seriously of ignorance.

So I will go further: my business is with Octavius, wholly and entirely. If he agrees, I will argue with him as a man of his own sect, and he will surely understand that it is easier to argue among companions than to join battle in wisdom.

Only let us sit down on these barriers of rocks thrown out to protect the baths and running out into the deep, so that we can both rest from our walk and argue more attentively."

And at his word we sat down, so that they placed me in the middle of the three, protecting me on either side; nor was this done out of deference or rank or honour, since friendship always either finds or makes men equal, but so that as arbiter, and nearest to both, I might give them my ears and, sitting in the middle, keep the two disputants apart.

Then Caecilius began thus: "Although for you, brother Marcus, the question we are chiefly inquiring into is not in doubt, since, having carefully lived in both ways of life, you have rejected the one and approved the other, still for the present you must so dispose your mind as to hold the balance of a most impartial judge and not lean inclined to one side, lest your verdict seem not so much born of our arguments as brought forth from your own feelings.

So if you sit by me as someone new, as it were, and ignorant of both sides, it is no trouble to show that everything in human affairs is doubtful, uncertain, in suspense, and that all things are more probable than true.

So it is the less surprising that some, out of weariness with searching thoroughly for the truth, rashly give in to any opinion whatever rather than persevere in investigating with persistent diligence.

So all should be indignant, all should be pained, that certain people, and those untrained in study, strangers to letters, without skill even in the meaner crafts, dare to decide anything certain about the universe and its majesty, about which philosophy itself, with its many sects, has been deliberating through all these ages up to now.

And not without reason, since human mediocrity is so far from the investigation of divine things that it is neither granted to know, nor permitted to search out, nor reverent to conjecture what is lifted up and hung in the heavens above us, or what is sunk deep below the earth; and we may rightly seem happy enough and wise enough if, according to that ancient oracle of the sage, we know ourselves more intimately.

But since, indulging in an insane and foolish labour, we wander beyond the bounds of our lowliness, and, cast down upon the earth, we climb with bold desire beyond heaven itself and the stars themselves, let us at least not entangle this error with vain and fearful opinions.

Suppose that in the beginning the seeds of all things were condensed by nature combining with itself: what god is the author here? Suppose that the members of the whole world were joined together, arranged, and formed by chance collisions: what god is the builder? Though fire may have kindled the stars, and the heaven may have been suspended by its own matter, and the earth founded by its own weight, and the sea flowed together from liquid, whence this religion, whence this fear?

What is this superstition? Man, and every animal that is born, receives breath, and grows up, is as it were a voluntary combination of the elements, into which man and every animal is again divided, dissolved, and dispersed: so all things flow back to their source and turn back into themselves, with no maker, no judge, no author.

So, by the gathering of the seeds of fire, other and yet other suns always shine; so, by the vapours breathed out from the earth, mists always grow; when these are condensed and compressed, clouds rise higher; when the same fall, rains flow, winds blow, hail rattles; or, when storm clouds collide, thunder roars, lightnings flash red, thunderbolts flash forth: so much do they fall at random, rush upon mountains, strike trees, touch without distinction places sacred and profane, strike guilty men and often religious ones too.

Why should I speak of the varied and uncertain storms, by which the onset of all things is tossed about without order or weighing? In shipwrecks, are not the fates of good and bad mixed together, their deserts confused? In fires, do not innocent and guilty meet the same death? And when a tract of the sky is infected with a pestilent plague, do not all perish without distinction? And when war rages hotly, do not the better men rather fall?

In peace too wickedness is not only put on a level with the better sort but even honoured, so that in many cases you do not know whether their depravity should be detested or their prosperity desired.

But if the world were ruled by divine providence and by the authority of some deity, Phalaris and Dionysius would never have deserved a kingdom, nor Rutilius and Camillus exile, nor Socrates poison.

See, the fruit-bearing trees, see, the crop already white, the vintage already heady, are spoiled by rain, cut down by hail. So either the truth is hidden and kept down, uncertain to us, or, what is more to be believed, Fortune, freed from laws, rules through varied and slippery chances."

"Since, then, either Fortune is blind or nature uncertain, how much more reverent and better it is to receive the teaching of our ancestors as the high priest of truth, to cultivate the religions handed down, to worship the gods whom you were trained by your parents to fear before you knew them more intimately, and not to pass judgment on the divine powers but to believe those before us, who in an age still rude, at the very birth of the world, were worthy to have gods either as kindly helpers or as kings? Hence, then, we see throughout all empires, provinces, and towns that each people has its own rites of worship and worships local gods: the Eleusinians Ceres, the Phrygians the Mother, the Epidaurians Aesculapius, the Chaldaeans Bel, the Syrians Astarte, the Taurians Diana, the Gauls Mercury, the Romans all the divinities.

So their power and authority has occupied the circuit of the whole world; so they have extended their empire beyond the paths of the sun and the bounds of Ocean itself, while they practise a religious valour in arms, while they fortify the city with the rites of sacred things, with chaste virgins, with many honours and titles of priests; while, besieged and captured except for the Capitol alone, they worship gods whom another would already have spurned as angry, and pass through the ranks of the Gauls, who marvel at the boldness of their superstition, unarmed with weapons but armed with the worship of religion; while, having taken the enemy's walls, with victory still raging, they venerate the conquered gods; while they seek out guest gods from everywhere and make them their own; while they build altars sometimes even to unknown divinities and to the shades of the dead.

So, while they took up the sacred rites of all nations, they also won kingdoms. Hence the unbroken course of veneration has remained, which is not weakened by long ages but increased; for antiquity is accustomed to attribute to ceremonies and temples as much sanctity as it has added of age.

"Nor was it rashly (for I would venture for the moment to concede this myself, and so err the better) that our ancestors gave their effort to observing auguries, consulting entrails, instituting sacred rites, or dedicating shrines.

Look at the record in the books: you will find at once that they initiated the rites of all religions either that divine favour might be repaid, or that wrath impending might be averted, or, when already swelling and raging, might be appeased.

Witness the Idaean Mother, who by her arrival both proved a matron's chastity and freed the city from fear of the enemy; witness the statues of the horsemen brothers consecrated at the pool where they had shown themselves, who, panting, on foaming and steaming horses, announced the victory over Perseus on the same day they had won it; witness the repetition of the games, when Jupiter had been offended, from the dream of a man of the people; and the self-sacrifice of the Decii is a valid witness; witness too Curtius, who filled the chasm of a deep abyss with the bulk, or with the honour, of his rider's body.

Even more often than we wished, auspices despised have testified to the presence of the gods. So the Allia is an ill-omened name; so the affair of Claudius and Junius against the Carthaginians was not a battle but a deadly shipwreck; and so that the Trasimene might be both larger and discoloured with Roman blood, Flaminius spurned the auguries; and so that we must seek back our standards from the Parthians, Crassus both deserved and mocked the imprecations of the Furies.

I pass over the old stories, which are many; I neglect the poets' songs about the births, gifts, and rewards of the gods; I skip over even the fates foretold by oracles, lest antiquity seem to you too full of fables. Look at the temples and shrines of the gods, by which the Roman city is both protected and adorned: they are more august by their divine inhabitants, present and indwelling, than rich in worship, ornaments, and gifts.

Hence, then, prophets filled with and mingled with the god pluck the future beforehand, give warning of dangers, healing to diseases, hope to the afflicted, help to the wretched, comfort in calamities, relief in labours. Even in sleep we see, hear, and recognize the gods whom by day we impiously deny, refuse, and forswear.

"So, since among all nations there remains a firm agreement about the immortal gods, however uncertain their nature or origin may be, I cannot bear anyone swelling with such boldness and with some irreligious wisdom or other, as to strive to dissolve or weaken this religion, so ancient, so useful, so wholesome.

Let it be that famous Theodorus of Cyrene, or Diagoras of Melos before him, to whom antiquity gave the surname 'atheist', both of whom, by asserting that there are no gods, did away entirely with all the fear by which humankind is governed, and with veneration: yet never in this school of impiety will they prevail by the name and authority of a pretended philosophy.

When the men of Athens expelled Protagoras of Abdera from their territory and burned his writings in the assembly, because he argued about the divinity deliberately rather than profanely, is it not a matter for groaning that men (for you will bear with me as I give freer rein to the impetus of the case I have undertaken), men, I say, of a deplorable, unlawful, and desperate faction should rage against the gods?

They gather from the lowest dregs the more ignorant men and credulous women, who fall easily through the weakness of their sex, and establish a rabble of profane conspiracy, which is bound together by nocturnal gatherings, solemn fasts, and inhuman food, not by any sacred rite but by an abomination: a skulking, light-shunning tribe, silent in public, chattering in corners. They despise temples as tombs, spit upon the gods, laugh at sacred rites; wretched themselves, they pity, if it is lawful to say so,

the priests; they despise honours and purple robes, themselves half-naked. What wonderful folly, what incredible boldness! They spurn present torments while they fear uncertain future ones, and while they fear to die after death, they do not fear to die meanwhile: so deceitful hope soothes their fear with the comfort of coming back to life.

"And now, as the worse things grow more fruitfully, with corrupt morals creeping on daily, these most foul shrines of an impious assembly are growing up throughout the whole world. This confederacy must be utterly rooted out and cursed.

They know each other by secret marks and signs, and love one another almost before they know one another; everywhere also a kind of religion of lust is mingled among them, and they call one another brothers and sisters indiscriminately, so that even ordinary debauchery becomes incest by the use of the sacred name. So their vain and mad superstition glories in crimes.

Nor would shrewd rumour speak of the most wicked things about them, things to be mentioned only with an apology, unless truth lay beneath. I hear that, by some foolish persuasion or other, they worship the consecrated head of a most disgraceful beast: a religion worthy of such morals and born of them!

Others say that they worship the genitals of their very overseer and priest, and adore, as it were, the nature of their parent: I do not know whether this is false, but the suspicion certainly fits secret and nocturnal rites. And he who tells that their ceremonies involve a man punished with the supreme penalty for a crime, and the deadly wood of the cross, assigns to lost and wicked men altars that suit them, so that they worship what they deserve.

Now the story about the initiation of novices is as detestable as it is well known. An infant covered with meal, to deceive the unwary, is set before the one being initiated into the rites. This infant is killed with blind and hidden wounds by the novice, who is urged on to strike what seem harmless blows at the surface of the meal. Its blood (O horror!) they lick up thirstily; its limbs they eagerly divide among themselves; by this victim they are bound in league; by this complicity in crime they are pledged to mutual silence. These rites are fouler than all sacrileges.

And about their banquet it is well known; everyone speaks of it everywhere; the speech of our man from Cirta also testifies to it. On a solemn day they gather for a 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 flared up in the drunken, a dog that is tied to the lampstand is provoked to rush and leap by a morsel thrown beyond the length of the cord by which it is bound.

So, the light that would have been a witness being overturned and put out, in shameless darkness they entwine in the embraces of unspeakable lust as chance decides; and if not all in deed, yet all alike in complicity are guilty of incest, since whatever can happen in the act of individuals is sought by the wish of all.

"I pass over many things deliberately; for even these are too many, and the very secrecy of this depraved religion declares that all or most of them are true.

For why do they strive so hard to hide and conceal whatever it is they worship, when honourable things always rejoice in publicity while crimes are secret? Why do they have no altars, no temples, no known images? Why do they never speak openly, never assemble freely, unless what they worship and suppress is either punishable or shameful?

The Jews alone, a wretched people, also worshipped one God, but openly, with temples, altars, victims, and ceremonies; yet he has so little strength or power that he is a captive of the Roman divinities together with his own nation.

But now, what monsters, what prodigies the Christians invent! That God of theirs, whom they can neither show nor see, they say inquires diligently into the conduct of all, the acts of all, even their words and hidden thoughts; running about, of course, and present everywhere; they want him to be troublesome, restless, even shamelessly curious, since he stands by at all deeds and wanders among all places, although he can neither attend to individuals while distracted by the whole, nor suffice for the whole while occupied with individuals.

And whence, or who, or where is that one God, solitary, forsaken, whom no free nation, no kingdoms, not even Roman superstition has known?

"What of the fact that they threaten the whole earth and the world itself with its stars with a conflagration, and plan its ruin, as if either the eternal order of nature, established by divine laws, could be disturbed, or, the league of all the elements being broken and the heavenly framework split apart, this mass by which it is contained and girded could be overthrown?

And not content with this mad opinion, they build on and attach old wives' tales: they say that they are born again after death, from cinders and ashes, and with some confidence or other they believe one another's lies: you would think they had already come back to life.

A double evil and twin madness: to announce destruction to the sky and the stars, which we leave as we found them, and to promise eternity to themselves, dead and extinguished, who perish just as we are born!

Hence, of course, they curse funeral pyres and condemn burial by fire, as if every body, even if withdrawn from the flames, were not nevertheless dissolved into earth by years and ages; and it makes no difference whether wild beasts tear it apart or seas consume it or the ground covers it or flame takes it away, since for corpses every burial, if they feel, is a punishment, and if they do not feel, is a remedy in the very speed of its consuming.

Deceived by this error, they promise themselves, as good men, a blessed and everlasting life after death, and to others, as unjust, eternal punishment. Much comes to mind to say about this, but my speech is in haste. That they themselves are rather the unjust I need not labour to show; I have already shown it. And yet, even if I granted that they were just, it is the opinion of most that guilt or innocence is assigned by fate, and your agreement concurs.

For whatever we do, as others ascribe it to fate, so you ascribe it to God; so it is not those who are willing who desire your sect, but those who are chosen.

So you imagine an unjust judge, who punishes in men their lot, not their will. Yet I should like to ask whether the resurrection is with bodies or without bodies, and with which bodies, the same ones or renewed ones. Without a body? That, as far as I know, is neither mind nor soul nor life. With the same body? But it has already fallen to pieces. With another body? Then a new man is born, not the former one restored.

And yet so long a time has passed, countless ages have flowed by: what single person has come back from the underworld, even with the lot of Protesilaus, with leave granted for a few hours at least, so that we might believe by an example?

All these fictions of an unsound opinion, and foolish consolations, made up in play by lying poets for the sweetness of their verse, have been disgracefully refashioned by you, who are too credulous, to suit your God.

"You do not even take a lesson from present things, how the empty wishes of a vain promise deceive you: consider, wretched men, while you are still alive, what threatens you after death.

See, part of you, and the larger and better part, as you say, are in want, suffer cold, labour with toil and hunger; and your God allows it, pretends not to see; he does not wish or is not able to help his own: so he is either powerless or unjust.

You who dream of immortality after death, when you are shaken by danger, burned with fever, torn with pain, do you not yet perceive your condition? Do you not yet recognize your frailty? Wretch, you are convicted of weakness against your will, and do not confess it.

But I pass over common things. See, threats, punishments, tortures are ready for you, and crosses now not to be worshipped but to be undergone, fires too, which you both predict and fear: where is that God who can help men when they come back to life but cannot help the living?

Do not the Romans, without your God, rule and reign, enjoy the whole world, and lord it over you? You, meanwhile, in suspense and anxiety, abstain from honourable pleasures: you do not attend the shows, you take no part in processions, public banquets are held without you; you shrink from the sacred games, from food of which a first portion has been taken and from drink poured in libation on the altars. So you dread the gods whom you deny.

You do not bind your heads with flowers, you do not grace your bodies with perfumes; you reserve ointments for funerals, you even refuse garlands to tombs, pale, trembling, worthy of pity, but the pity of our gods. So, wretched men, you neither rise again nor live in the meantime.

So if you have any wisdom or modesty, stop prying into the regions of the sky and the destinies and secrets of the world: it is enough to look at what lies before your feet, especially for the unlearned, unpolished, rude, and rustic, to whom it is not given to understand civil affairs, much less is it allowed to discuss divine things."

"Yet if you have a desire to philosophize, let any of you who is great enough imitate, if he can, Socrates, the prince of wisdom. That man's answer, whenever he was asked about heavenly things, is well known: 'What is above us is nothing to us.'

Rightly, therefore, he earned from the oracle the testimony of singular wisdom. He himself perceived that oracle's meaning: that he was set above all men not because he had discovered everything but because he had learned that he knew nothing. So the highest wisdom is the confession of ignorance.

From this source flowed the safe doubt of Arcesilaus, and much later of Carneades and most of the Academics, on the highest questions; in this manner the unlearned can philosophize cautiously, and the learned gloriously.

What of the lyric poet Simonides? Is not his hesitation to be admired and followed by all? When the tyrant Hiero asked this Simonides what he thought the gods were, and of what kind, he first asked for a day to consider; the next day he put it off for two days; then, when reminded, he added as many again. Finally, when the tyrant asked the reasons for so long a delay, he replied that the slower his inquiry went, the more obscure the truth became for him.

In my opinion too, what is doubtful should be left, as it is, doubtful; and when so many great men are deliberating, one should not rashly and boldly give a verdict for one side, lest either an old wives' superstition be introduced or all religion be destroyed."

So Caecilius spoke, and, smiling (for the flow of his outpoured speech had eased the swelling of his indignation), he said: "Does Octavius dare anything in reply to this, a man of the race of Plautus, as foremost of the Christians, so last of the philosophers?"

"Stop applauding yourself against him," I said; "for it is not fitting for you to exult in the elegance of your speech before both sides have been more fully argued, especially since your debate strives not for praise but for truth.

It is very well known that this happens through the easiness of hearers, who, while they are drawn away from the substance of things by the allurement of words, assent without discrimination to everything said and do not separate false from right, not knowing that there is truth even in the incredible and falsehood in the probable.

So the more often they believe assertions, the more frequently they are refuted by the more skilful; thus, constantly deceived by their rashness, they transfer the blame of their own judgment to a complaint about uncertainty, so that, having condemned everything, they prefer to suspend judgment on all things rather than judge between deceptive ones.

So we must take care not to suffer from a hatred of all arguments in such a way as many simpler people are carried into cursing and hatred of men. For, credulous without caution, they are cheated by those they thought good; soon, by a like error, now suspecting everyone, they fear as wicked even those whom they could have found to be the best.

Therefore let us, anxious because in every matter both sides are argued, and on one side the truth is often obscure, while on the other there is a wonderful subtlety which sometimes by its fullness of speech imitates the credibility of acknowledged proof, weigh each point carefully as far as possible, so that we may praise the cleverness, but choose, approve, and accept what is right.

And although your speech has delighted me very much with its subtle variety, yet I am more deeply moved, not about the present case, but about the whole manner of debating, because often, according to the strength of the speakers and the power of their eloquence, the status even of evident truth is changed."

"You are departing from the duty of a conscientious judge," said Caecilius; "for it is very unfair of you to weaken the force of my case by interposing a most weighty argument, when Octavius ought to refute each point, if he can, whole and untouched."

"What you accuse me of," I said, "I put forward for our common benefit, unless I am mistaken, so that by a scrupulous examination we might weigh our verdict not by the swelling of eloquence but by the solidity of the facts themselves. Nor should our attention be diverted longer, as you complain, since in complete silence we may now hear the reply of our Januarius, who is eager to begin."

And Octavius said: "I will speak, indeed, as well as I can with my strength, and you must strive with me to wash away the most bitter stain of these insults with a river of true words. Nor will I conceal at the outset that the opinion of my friend Natalis has wavered so erratically, so vaguely, so slipperily, that we must be in doubt whether it was confused by cunning or tottered through error.

For he varied, now believing in gods, now saying that he was deliberating, so that the aim of our answer might be laid on a foundation more uncertain than the uncertainty of his proposition. But in my Natalis I do not wish to assume cunning, I do not believe it: subtle sophistication is far from his simplicity. What then?

As a man who does not know the right road, when, as happens, one road splits into several, sticks there anxious and dares neither to choose any single one nor to approve them all: so for one who has no firm judgment of the truth, his opinion is scattered as his unreliable suspicion leads.

So his doubtful opinion is scattered. It is therefore no wonder if Caecilius is tossed again and again among contrary and conflicting ideas, if he seethes and wavers. That this may happen no longer, I will refute and disprove him. Although the things said are various, once one truth is established and proved, he need neither doubt nor wander any longer about the rest.

And since my brother has burst out that he takes it ill, is angry, indignant, and pained that the illiterate, the poor, the unskilled should discuss heavenly things, let him know that all human beings, without distinction of age, sex, or rank, are created capable and fit for reason and understanding, and that they have wisdom not acquired by fortune but implanted by nature. Indeed, even the philosophers themselves, or any others who have gone down in memory as discoverers of the arts, before they won a famous name by the skill of their minds, were counted common, unlearned, half-naked. So true is it that the rich, bound up in their wealth, have been accustomed to look up to gold rather than to heaven, while our kind of men, the poor, have both discovered wisdom and handed on its teaching to others. From this it is clear that talent is not given by wealth nor acquired by study, but is begotten with the very formation of the mind.

So there is nothing to be indignant or pained about if anyone at all who inquires about divine things puts forward what he thinks, since what is sought is not the authority of the one arguing but the truth of the argument itself. And indeed, the less skilled the speech, the clearer the reasoning, since it is not painted over with the pomp of eloquence and charm but is upheld, as it is, by the rule of what is right.

"Nor do I reject what Caecilius strove to assert among his chief points, that a man ought to know himself and look around to see what he is, whence he is, why he is: whether he is compounded of elements or put together from atoms, or rather made, formed, and given life by God.

This very thing we cannot explore and dig out without inquiring into the universe, since things are so coherent, connected, and linked together that unless you have carefully examined the nature of divinity you cannot know that of humanity; nor can you conduct civil affairs well unless you have come to know this common city of the whole world; especially since we differ from wild beasts in this, that they, bent forward and turned toward the earth, are born to look at nothing but their food. We, who have been given an upright face and a gaze toward heaven, speech and reason, by which we recognize, perceive, and imitate God, are neither permitted nor allowed to be ignorant of the heavenly brightness that thrusts itself upon our eyes and senses:

for it is like the greatest sacrilege to seek on the ground what you ought to find on high. So all the more do those seem to me to lack mind, sense, and even eyes themselves, who hold that this ordered beauty of the whole world was not perfected by divine reason but lumped together from certain fragments that happened to stick together.

For what can be so plain, so acknowledged, and so clear, when you have raised your eyes to heaven and surveyed what is below and around, as that there is some divine power of surpassing mind, by which all nature is inspired, moved, nourished, and governed?

Look at heaven itself, how widely it stretches, how swiftly it turns, whether at night it is studded with stars or by day lit by the sun: you will know at once how wonderful and divine is the balance of the supreme Ruler in it. Look too at the year, how the circuit of the sun makes it; and look at the month, how the moon drives it round by her waxing, waning, and eclipse.

Why should I speak of the recurring alternations of darkness and light, so that we have an alternate renewal of work and rest? A longer account of the stars must be left to the astronomers, whether how they guide the course of sailing or how they indicate the time of ploughing and reaping; each of which not only needed a supreme Maker and perfect reason in order to be created, made, and arranged, but also cannot be perceived, discerned, and understood without the greatest skill and reason.

What of this: when the order of the seasons and of crops is marked out by a constant variety, do not spring with its flowers and summer with its harvests, and the welcome ripeness of autumn and the necessary olive crop of winter, equally testify to their author and parent? This order would easily be disturbed unless it stood firm by the highest reason.

Then, how great the providence that, lest winter alone should burn with ice or summer alone scorch with heat, inserted between them the moderating mean of autumn and spring, so that by its own tracks the passages of the returning year might glide by unnoticed and harmless!

Consider the sea: it is bound by the law of the shore. See how every tree receives life from the bowels of the earth. Look at the ocean: it ebbs and flows with alternating tides. See the springs: they flow in perpetual veins. Look at the rivers: they always run in their accustomed courses.

Why should I speak of the fitting arrangement of the steep mountains, the curves of the hills, the stretches of the plains? Or why speak of the manifold defences of living creatures against one another: some armed with horns, some hedged with teeth and grounded on hooves and spiked with stings, or set free by speed of foot or by soaring on wings?

Above all, the very beauty of our own form declares God its craftsman: the upright posture, the raised face, the eyes placed at the top as in a watchtower, and all the other senses arranged as in a citadel.

"It would be long to go through the details. There is no member in man that is not there both for necessity and for beauty; and, what is more wonderful, all have the same shape, yet each has certain features of his own: so we all seem alike, and yet individually we are found unlike one another. What of the manner of birth?

What of the desire to beget? Is it not given by God, both that the breasts should fill with milk as the birth ripens, and that the tender offspring should grow by the abundance of the milky dew?

Nor does God care only for the whole, but also for the parts. Britain lacks sun, but is refreshed by the warmth of the sea that flows around it; the river Nile tempers the dryness of Egypt; the Euphrates makes up to Mesopotamia for rain; the river Indus is said both to sow and to water the East.

If, on entering some house, you saw everything well kept, arranged, and adorned, you would certainly believe that a master was in charge of it and that he was much better than those good things. So in this house of the world, when you see in heaven and earth ... providence, order, and law, believe that there is a Lord and Parent of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and the parts of the whole world.

Unless perhaps, since there is no doubt about providence, you think it must be asked whether the heavenly kingdom is governed by the command of one or the will of many; and this itself is no great labour to make plain for one who considers earthly empires, for which the examples surely come from heaven.

When did a partnership in kingship ever begin in good faith or end without bloodshed? I pass over the Persians, who took omens for the throne from the neighing of horses, and I skip the Theban pair, a dead fable. The story of the twins, over a kingdom of shepherds and a hut, is most famous. The wars of son-in-law and father-in-law were spread over the whole world, and the fortune of so great an empire could not hold two.

Look at the rest: bees have one king, flocks one leader, herds one ruler. Would you believe that in heaven the supreme majesty is divided, and the whole power of that true and divine rule split, when it is plain that God, the parent of all, has neither beginning nor end; who gives birth to all things and everlastingness to himself; who before the world was a world to himself; who commands all things whatever that exist by his word, arranges them by his reason, and perfects them by his power?

He cannot be seen: he is too bright for sight. Nor can he be grasped: he is too pure for touch. Nor can he be measured: he is greater than the senses, infinite, immeasurable, and known in his greatness, as great as he is, to himself alone. For us the heart is too narrow to understand him, and so we measure him worthily only when we call him beyond measure.

I will say what I think: he who thinks he knows the greatness of God diminishes it; he who does not wish to diminish it does not know it. Nor should you seek a name for God: God is his name.

There is need of words where a multitude must be distinguished into individuals by the proper marks of names; for God, who alone exists, the word 'God' is the whole. If I call him Father, you would think him fleshly; if King, you would suspect him earthly; if Lord, you would certainly understand him as mortal. Take away the additions of names and you will see his brightness.

What of the fact that I have the agreement of all about this? I hear the common people: when they stretch their hands to heaven they say nothing but 'God', and 'God is great', and 'God is true', and 'if God grants'. Is this the natural speech of the common people, or the prayer of a confessing Christian? And those who want Jupiter as chief are mistaken in the name, but agree about the one power.

"I hear the poets also proclaiming one father of gods and men, and that the mind of mortals is such as the parent of all has brought on the day. What of Maro of Mantua?

Does he not say, more openly, more nearly, and more truly: 'In the beginning a spirit within nourishes the heaven and the lands' and the other members of the world, 'and a mind infused moves' it; 'thence the race of men and beasts' and whatever other living creatures there are? In another place he names this mind and spirit God. For these are his words: 'For God goes through all the lands and the tracts of the sea and the deep heaven, whence men and beasts, whence rain and fire.'

What else is God proclaimed by us to be than mind and reason and spirit? Let us review, if you please, the teaching of the philosophers: you will find that, though in varied words, in substance they come together and agree in this one opinion.

I pass over those rude ancients who earned the name of wise men by their sayings. Let Thales of Miletus be first of all, who first of all discussed heavenly things. This Thales of Miletus said that the beginning of things was water, but that God was that mind which formed all things from water. You see that the opinion of the chief philosopher agrees completely with ours.

Next Anaximenes, and after him Diogenes of Apollonia, make air God, infinite and immeasurable: their view of the divinity is likewise in agreement.

Of Anaxagoras, God is said to be the ordering and motion of an infinite mind; and Pythagoras's God is a soul passing through and extending over the whole nature of things, from which the life of all living creatures is also received.

It is well known that Xenophanes teaches that God is the whole infinite with mind; and Antisthenes, that the gods of the people are many but the natural one is chief; and Speusippus, that God is a living force by which all things are governed.

What of Democritus? Though the first inventor of atoms, does he not often speak of nature, which pours out images, and of intelligence as God? Strato too says nature. Even that Epicurus, who imagines the gods either idle or non-existent, nevertheless places nature above them.

Aristotle varies, yet he assigns one power: for at one time he calls mind God, at another the world, at another he sets God over the world. Heraclides of Pontus too, though in various ways, ascribes a divine mind to God.

Theophrastus also varies, assigning supremacy now to the world, now to the divine mind. Zeno and Chrysippus and Cleanthes are themselves also manifold, but all come round to the unity of providence. For Cleanthes spoke of God now as mind, now as soul, now as ether, most often as reason. Zeno, his master, holds that the principle of all things is the natural and divine law, and sometimes ether, and at times reason; the same man, by interpreting Juno as air, Jupiter as the sky, Neptune as the sea, Vulcan as fire, and by showing likewise that the other gods of the common people are elements, gravely censures and refutes the public error.

Chrysippus says much the same: he believes God to be a divine force, a rational nature, and sometimes the world and fatal necessity; and he imitates Zeno with physical interpretation in the poems of Hesiod, Homer, and Orpheus.

Diogenes of Babylon also has a method of expounding and discussing according to which the birth of Jupiter, the origin of Minerva, and other things of this kind are names of natural things, not of gods.

For Xenophon the Socratic denies that the form of the true God can be seen and says that therefore it ought not to be sought; Ariston the Stoic says that he cannot be comprehended at all: both perceived the majesty of God through despair of understanding it.

Plato's discourse about God is more open both in substance and in names, and it would be wholly heavenly were it not sometimes soiled by an admixture of civic persuasion. So for Plato in the Timaeus God is, by his very name, the parent of the world, the craftsman of the soul, the maker of things heavenly and earthly; and he says at the outset that he is hard to find because of his exceeding and incredible power, and, when you have found him, impossible to speak of in public.

These are almost the same as our own views: for we both know God and call him the parent of all, and we never proclaim him publicly unless we are questioned.

"I have set out the opinions of almost all the philosophers of more illustrious fame: that they designated one God, though under many names; so that anyone might think either that Christians are now philosophers or that the philosophers were already then Christians.

But if the world is ruled by providence and governed by the will of one God, antiquity, which delighted in or was captivated by its own little fables of the ignorant, ought not to sweep us into the error of a shared agreement, since it is refuted by the opinions of its own philosophers, who have the support of the authority both of reason and of age.

For our ancestors were so ready to believe lies that they rashly believed even monstrous marvels like these: the many-shaped Scylla, the multiform Chimaera, the Hydra reborn from its fertile wounds, the Centaurs, horses intertwined with their men; and whatever rumour is free to invent, 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 these things had happened, they would still happen; because they cannot happen, therefore they have not happened.

Likewise, in the same way, our ancestors, improvident and credulous, believed with rude simplicity about the gods too: while they worshipped their kings religiously, while they longed to see them after death in images, while they were eager to keep their memory in statues, what had been taken up as consolations became sacred rites.

Indeed, before the world was opened up by trade and before the nations mixed their rites and customs, each nation venerated its founder, or a famous leader, or a chaste queen braver than her sex, or the discoverer of some gift or art, as a citizen of good memory: so 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 recognize the same things with me. Euhemerus sets out that men were counted gods for the merit of their valour or their gifts; and he lists their birthdays, native lands, and tombs, and points them out through the provinces: of Dictaean Jupiter, Delphic Apollo, Pharian Isis, and Eleusinian Ceres.

Prodicus says that those were taken up among the gods who, in their wanderings, benefited mankind by discovering new crops. Persaeus philosophizes to the same effect and links the crops discovered and the discoverers of the crops themselves under the same names, as the comic saying goes, 'Venus is cold without Liber and Ceres.'

Alexander the Great, in a remarkable book, wrote to his mother that a secret about the gods being men had been betrayed to him by a priest out of fear of his power: there he makes Vulcan the first of all, and afterwards the family of Jupiter.

For all the Greek and Roman writers of antiquity have recorded that Saturn, the head of this family and swarm, was 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 for fear of his raging son, and, received by Janus as a guest, as a clever and polished little Greek he taught those rude and rustic men many things: to print letters, to stamp coins, to make tools.

So he preferred that his hiding place, because he had lain hidden there safely, should be called Latium; and he left the city Saturnia from his own name, and Janus the Janiculum, both for the memory of posterity.

A man, then, certainly, who fled; a man certainly who hid; both the father of a man and born of a man. For he was called son of Earth or of Heaven because among the Italians he appeared with unknown parents; as to this day we call those who appear unexpectedly 'sent from heaven', and those of low and unknown birth 'sons of the earth'.

His son Jupiter reigned in Crete after shutting out his father; there he died, there he had sons. To this day the cave of Jupiter is visited and his tomb is shown, and he is convicted of humanity by his very rites.

It is idle to go through them one by one and unfold the whole series of that family, since the mortality proved in the first parents has flowed into the rest by the very order of succession; unless perhaps you invent gods after death, and Romulus is a god by the perjury of Proculus, and Juba is a god because the Moors wish it, and the other kings are deified, who are consecrated not to profess belief in their divinity but to honour the power they have held.

In fact, this name is given to them against their will: they wish to go on being men; they fear being made gods, and, though already old, they do not want it. So gods do not come from the dead, since God cannot die, nor from the born, since everything that is 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 perhaps Jupiter has now grown old, and childbearing has failed in Juno, and Minerva has gone grey before giving birth. Or has that begetting stopped because no assent is now given to fables of this kind?

Besides, if gods could beget and could not perish, we would have more gods than all mankind, so that heaven could not contain them, nor air hold them, nor earth bear them. From this it is plain that those were men whom we both read were born and know died. And look at Isis with her swallow and her sistrum, and at the empty tomb of your Serapis, or Osiris, his limbs scattered.

"Consider, then, the sacred rites and the mysteries themselves: you will find sad endings, deaths, funerals, mourning and lamentations of wretched gods. Isis mourns, laments, and searches for her lost son with her Dog-headed companion and her bald priests, and the wretched worshippers of Isis beat their breasts and imitate the grief of that most unhappy mother; soon, the little boy found, Isis rejoices, the priests exult, Dog-head the finder boasts; and every year they never cease 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? Yet these rites, once Egyptian, are now Roman too. Ceres, with lighted torches and girt with a serpent, anxiously and fearfully tracks Libera, stolen away and defiled in her wandering: these are the Eleusinian rites. And what are the rites of Jupiter?

A she-goat is his nurse, and the infant is stolen from his greedy father so as not to be devoured, and the clash of the Corybants' cymbals is beaten out so that the father may not hear his wailing.

Of Cybele of Dindymus I am ashamed to speak: she castrated her lover, who pleased her unhappily, because, being ugly and old herself, as the mother of many gods, she could not entice him to debauchery; so as, of course, to make a god a eunuch. Because of this fable the Galli worship her by mutilating their own bodies, and are half-men. These are no longer rites; they are tortures.

What? Do not the very shapes and appearances of your gods expose their absurdities and disgraces? Vulcan a lame and crippled god; Apollo beardless through so many ages; Aesculapius well bearded, though the son of the ever-youthful Apollo; Neptune with sea-green eyes, Minerva with grey ones, Juno with ox-eyes, Mercury with winged feet, Pan with hooves, Saturn in fetters. Janus bears two faces, as if to walk backwards too; Diana is now a huntress girt high, and as the Ephesian one built up with many breasts and teats, and as the goddess of the crossroads horrible with three heads and many hands.

What of your Jupiter himself? Now he is set up beardless, now placed with a beard; when he is called Hammon he has horns; when Capitoline, then he carries thunderbolts; when Latiaris, he is drenched with blood; when Feretrius, he is not heard. And not to go further round many Jupiters, there are as many monstrosities of Jupiter as there are names.

Erigone was hanged from a noose, so that as a virgin she might be set on fire among the stars; the Castors die by turns so as to live; Aesculapius is struck by lightning so as to rise to be a god; Hercules is burned up in the fires of Oeta so as to put off the man.

"These fables and errors we both learn from ignorant parents and, what is more serious, we ourselves work them up in our studies and schooling, above all in the songs of the poets, who by their authority have done the greatest possible harm to the truth.

And so Plato did well to expel from the city he was founding in his dialogue that famous Homer, praised and crowned.

For he above all, in the Trojan War, though he makes sport of them, mixed your gods into human affairs and actions; he matched them in pairs; he wounded Venus, bound, wounded, and put Mars to flight.

He tells that Jupiter was freed by Briareus so as not to be bound by the other gods; that he wept tears of blood for his son Sarpedon, because he could not snatch him from death; and that, enticed by the girdle of Venus, he lay with his wife Juno more ardently than he is wont with adulteresses.

Elsewhere Hercules clears out dung, and Apollo feeds the flock for Admetus. Neptune builds walls for Laomedon, and the unhappy builder does not receive the wages for his work.

There Vulcan forges Jupiter's thunderbolt on the anvil together with the arms of Aeneas, though the sky and thunderbolts and lightnings existed long before Jupiter was born in Crete, and neither could the Cyclops imitate the flames of the true thunderbolt nor Jupiter himself fail to fear them.

Why should I speak of the adultery of Mars and Venus caught in the act, and of Jupiter's lust for Ganymede consecrated in heaven? All these things were published for this purpose: that a certain authority might be provided for the vices of men.

By these and similar fictions, and by sweeter lies, the minds of boys are corrupted; and with the same fables clinging to them they grow up to the full strength of mature age, and in the same opinions the wretches grow old, though the truth is ready at hand, but for those who seek it.

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

But if anyone considers with what tortures and what machines every image is formed, he will blush to fear material mocked by the craftsman in order to make a god.

For a wooden god, perhaps a piece of a pyre or of an ill-omened log, is hung up, cut, hewn, and planed.

And a god of bronze or silver is melted down, as we have learned was done for an Egyptian king, from an unclean little vessel, beaten with hammers, and shaped on anvils; and a stone god is cut, carved, and polished by some defiled man, and he does not feel the injury of his birth, any more than he afterwards feels worship from your veneration: unless perhaps the stone or wood or silver is not yet a god.

When, then, is this god born? See, it is cast, fabricated, sculpted: it is not yet a god. See, it is soldered with lead, put together, set up: it is still not a god. See, it is adorned, consecrated, prayed to: then at last it is a god, when man has willed it and dedicated it.

"How much more truly do dumb animals judge naturally about your gods! Mice, swallows, and kites know that they have no feeling: they gnaw them, trample them, sit on them, and unless you drive them off they build their nests in your god's very mouth; and spiders weave over its face and hang their threads from its very head.

You wipe, clean, and scrape them, and you protect and fear those whom you make; while none of you considers that he ought to know God before he worships him; while they are rashly eager to obey their parents; while they prefer to become an addition to another's error rather than trust themselves; while they know nothing of what they fear. So in gold and silver avarice has been consecrated; so the form of empty statues has been set up; so Roman superstition was born. If you review its rites, how many are ridiculous, how many even pitiable!

What of him who makes libation with his own blood and supplicates with his own wounds: would he not be better profane than religious in this way? Or he whose private parts are cut off: how does he not outrage God who appeases him in this way, since if God wanted eunuchs he could have them born so, not make them? Who would not see that those of unsound, vain, and ruined mind are raving in these things, and that the very crowd of the erring provides mutual protection for itself? Here the defence of the common madness is the multitude of the mad.

Naked, they run about in the raw winter; others go about wearing felt caps, carry around old shields, beat hides, lead gods begging from street to street. Some shrines they allow to be visited once a year, some it is altogether unlawful to see; there is one where a man may not go; some rites are without women; for a slave even to be present at certain ceremonies is an offence needing expiation. Some rites are crowned by a woman married once, others by a woman married many times, and with great religious care they seek out the one who can count the most adulteries.

"'But still, this very superstition gave, increased, and established empire for the Romans, since they were strong not so much by valour as by religion and piety.' No doubt the distinguished and noble justice of Rome was inaugurated from the very cradle of the infant empire!

Did they not at their origin gather together in crime and grow strong, protected by the terror of their own savagery? For the first populace was assembled in an asylum: the ruined, the criminal, the incestuous, assassins, traitors had flowed together; and, so that Romulus himself, their commander and ruler, might surpass his people in crime, he committed fratricide. These are the first auspices of the religious city.

Soon he carried off, violated, and mocked other men's maidens, some already betrothed, some promised, and some young wives out of their marriages, against all custom; and he stirred up war with their parents, that is, with his own fathers-in-law, and shed kindred blood. What is more irreligious, more audacious, more shameful than this very confidence in crime?

Then to drive neighbours from their land, to overthrow nearby cities with their temples and altars, to force captives into submission, to grow by others' losses and their own crimes: this is the common practice of Romulus, of the other kings, and of the generals after them.

So whatever the Romans hold, cultivate, and possess is the plunder of audacity: all their temples come from the spoils of war, that is, from the ruins of cities, the plunder of gods, the slaughter of priests. This is to insult and mock, to serve conquered religions, to adore them as captives after victories. For to adore what you have taken by force is to consecrate sacrilege, not divinities.

So as often as the Romans triumphed, so often they committed impiety; there are as many spoils taken from gods as trophies taken from nations. The Romans, then, are not so great because they are religious, but because they are sacrilegious with impunity.

For in the wars themselves they could not have as helpers the gods against whom they took up arms; but those whom they had overthrown they began to worship once triumphed over. And what can these gods do for the Romans, who had no power for their own people against Roman arms? For we know the native gods of the Romans: Romulus, Picus, Tiberinus, and Consus, and Pilumnus and Volumnus are gods.

Tatius both discovered and worshipped Cloacina; Hostilius Fear and Pallor; then Fever was dedicated by someone or other. This is the superstition nursed by that city: diseases and ill health. Surely Acca Larentia and Flora too, shameless prostitutes, must be counted among the diseases and the gods of the Romans.

These, of course, extended the Roman empire against the others that were worshipped among the nations! For neither Thracian Mars, nor Cretan Jupiter, nor Juno, now of Argos, now of Samos, now of Carthage, nor Taurian Diana, nor the Idaean Mother, nor those Egyptian not divinities but monstrosities, helped them against their own people.

Unless perhaps among these Romans the virgins are more chaste or the priests holier in religion, when in very many of the virgins (those, that is, who had rather incautiously had relations with men), Vesta certainly not knowing, unchastity has been punished, while in the rest it was not safer chastity but luckier unchastity that brought impunity.

And where are debaucheries arranged by priests, pimping transacted, and adulteries plotted more than among the altars and shrines? In fact, burning lust is satisfied more often in the little rooms of the temple-keepers than in the brothels themselves.

And yet before them, by God's ordering, the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, and also the Greeks and Egyptians held kingdoms for a long time, though they did not have Pontiffs and Arval Brothers and Salii and Vestals and Augurs, nor chickens shut up in a coop, by whose eating or refusing to eat the highest affairs of state were governed.

"Now I come to those Roman auspices and auguries which you have collected with the greatest labour and declared to have been neglected to men's regret and observed with good fortune.

Clodius, of course, and Flaminius and Junius lost their armies because they did not think they should wait for the favourable omen of the chickens' feeding. What of Regulus?

Did he not observe the auguries, and was captured? Mancinus kept 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 Roman people.

Gaius Caesar, when the auguries and auspices opposed his sending ships across to Africa before the winter solstice, spurned them: all the more easily he both sailed and won.

What, and how many, things shall I recount about the oracles? Amphiaraus gave answers about the future after his death, who did not know that he would be betrayed by his wife for a necklace. Tiresias, blind, saw the future, who did not see the present.

Ennius invented the answers of Pythian Apollo about Pyrrhus, when Apollo had already stopped making verses; that cautious and ambiguous oracle of his failed at the time when men began to be both more refined and less credulous. And Demosthenes, because he knew the answers were feigned, complained that the Pythia was 'philippizing'.

'But sometimes auspices or oracles have touched the truth.' Although among many lies chance may seem to have imitated design, yet I will approach the very source of error and depravity, from which all this darkness has flowed, and dig it out more deeply and lay it open more plainly. There are spirits, impure and wandering, weighed down from heavenly vigour by earthly stains and desires.

These spirits, then, after they lost the simplicity of their substance, burdened and sunk in vices, do not cease, for the consolation of their calamity, being ruined themselves, to ruin others, and, being depraved, to pour in the error of depravity, and, estranged from God, to separate others from God by introducing depraved religions.

The poets know that these spirits are demons, the philosophers discuss it, Socrates knew it, who at the nod and will of the demon attending him either declined or pursued affairs.

The magicians too not only know demons, but whatever marvel they perform in sport, they do through demons: by their breathing upon them and pouring in, they produce illusions, making what is not appear to be, or what is appear not to be.

Of these magicians, the first both in eloquence and in practice, Hostanes, both honours the true God with the majesty due him and knows that angels, that is, ministers and messengers of the true God, stand by to venerate him, so that they tremble, terrified at the very nod and look of their Lord. The same man also made known that demons are earthly, wandering, enemies of humanity.

What of Plato, who thought it a labour to find God? Does he not also speak of angels and demons without labour? And in his Symposium too does he not strive to express the nature of demons? For he holds it to be a substance between mortal and immortal, that is, midway between body and spirit, compounded of a mixture of earthly weight and heavenly lightness; from which he also warns us of the desire of love, and says that it is formed and slips into human hearts, moves the senses, shapes the affections, and pours in the ardour of desire.

"These impure spirits, then, the demons, as the magicians, the philosophers, and Plato have shown, lurk under consecrated statues and images, and by their breath gain the authority of a divinity as it were present, while they sometimes inspire prophets, dwell in shrines, sometimes animate the fibres of entrails, govern the flights of birds, direct the lots, and produce oracles wrapped in many falsehoods.

For they are both deceived and deceive, being both ignorant of the pure truth and, what truth they know, not confessing it, to their own ruin. So they drag men down from heaven and call them away from the true God to material things; they disturb life, trouble sleep; creeping secretly into bodies too, as subtle spirits, they feign diseases, terrify minds, twist limbs, so as to force men to worship them; so that, fattened by the smoke of altars and the victims of cattle, when they have loosed what they had bound, they may seem to have cured it.

From them come also the raving people whom you see rushing out in public, prophets too, though without a temple; so they rave, so they revel like Bacchants, so they whirl about: in them too there is the same incitement of the demon, but a different occasion for their frenzy.

From them also come those things that were told you a little earlier: that Jupiter demanded the repetition of the games through a dream, that the Castors were seen with their horses, that the little ship followed a matron's girdle.

Most of you know all this: that the demons themselves confess about themselves whenever they are driven out of bodies by us with the torments of our words and the fires of our prayer.

Saturn himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatever demons you worship, overcome by pain, speak out what they are; and they certainly do not lie to their own disgrace, especially when some of you are standing by.

Believe them when they confess, on their own testimony, that they are demons: for when adjured by the true and only God, they shudder unwillingly in the wretched bodies, and either leap out at once or vanish gradually, as the faith of the sufferer helps or the grace of the healer breathes upon them. So they flee Christians close at hand, whom at a distance, in your assemblies, they harassed through you.

So, planted in the minds of the ignorant, they secretly sow hatred of us through fear; for it is natural both to hate one whom you fear and to attack, if you can, one whom you dread. So they take possession of souls and block up hearts, that men may begin to hate us before they know us, lest, knowing us, they either be able to imitate us or be unable to condemn us.

"But how unjust it is to judge about things unknown and unexamined, as you do, believe us who ourselves repent of it.

For we too did the same and once thought the same as you, while still blind and dull: that Christians worshipped monsters, devoured infants, and joined in incestuous banquets. Nor did we understand that these fables were always being bandied about by them and never either investigated or proved; that in so long a time no one had come forward to betray them, though he would have obtained not only pardon for the deed but even a reward for informing; and that it was so far from being evil that a Christian on trial neither blushed nor feared, and repented of one thing only, that he had not been one before.

Yet when we undertook to defend and protect some who were sacrilegious and incestuous, even parricides, we thought these people should not be heard at all; sometimes even, pitying them, we raged more cruelly, so as to torture those who confessed into denying, that is, so that they would not perish, exercising on them a perverse inquiry, not one that would dig out the truth but one that would compel a lie.

And if anyone weaker, pressed and overcome by suffering, denied that he was a Christian, we favoured him, as if, the name abjured, he had cleansed all his deeds by that denial.

Do you recognize that we thought and did the same things that you think and do? Whereas, if reason and not the incitement of a demon were judging, they should rather have been pressed, not to deny that they were Christians, but to confess about incestuous debaucheries, impious rites, and infants sacrificed.

For with these and similar fables the same demons had filled the ears of the ignorant against us, to make them shudder with abhorrence. Nor is this surprising, since rumour, which is always nourished by lies scattered abroad, is consumed when the truth is shown.

Such is the business of demons; for false rumour is both sown and cherished by them. Hence comes what you say you hear, that an ass's head is a sacred thing to us. Who is so foolish as to worship this? Who more foolish than to believe it is worshipped? Unless it is that you consecrate whole asses in stables together with your, or their, Epona, and religiously decorate the same asses along with Isis; you also sacrifice and worship the heads of oxen and of rams; you dedicate gods mixed of goat and man, and gods with the faces of lions and dogs.

Do you not, with the Egyptians, worship and feed the bull Apis? And you do not condemn their rites established for serpents, crocodiles, other beasts, and birds and fish; if anyone kills one of these gods, he is even punished with death.

The same Egyptians, along with many of you, fear Isis no more than the sharpness of onions, and tremble at Serapis no more than at the noises expelled through the shameful parts of the body.

Also he who tells fables against us about the worship of the priest's genitals tries to transfer to us what is his own. For these things may perhaps be the sacred rites of the impurity of those among whom every sex is prostituted in every member, among whom all impurity is called refinement, who envy the licence of harlots, who lick men in the middle, who cling with lustful mouth to the groin, men of evil tongue even if they were silent, who grow weary of their impurity before they are ashamed of it.

O horror! They allow in themselves such wicked deeds as neither a softer age can bear nor the harshest slavery be forced to endure.

"These and similar shameful things we are not allowed even to hear; even to defend ourselves is disgraceful to many. For you invent about chaste and modest people things we would not believe could happen, unless you proved them about yourselves.

For when you attribute to our religion a guilty man and his cross, you wander far from the neighbourhood of the truth, in thinking that a guilty man deserved, or an earthly man could have, to be believed God.

Wretched indeed is he whose whole hope rests on a mortal man; for all his help comes to an end with the man's death.

The Egyptians, to be sure, choose a man for themselves to worship: him alone they propitiate, him they consult about everything, to him they slay victims. Yet he who is a god to others is certainly a man to himself, whether he will or not; for he does not deceive his own conscience, even if he deceives another's.

Even to princes and kings false flattery shamefully fawns, not as to great and chosen men, as is right, but as to gods, although honour is more truly given to a distinguished man and love more sweetly to the best. So they call upon their divinity, make supplication to their images, implore their genius, that is, their demon; and it is safer for them to swear falsely by the genius of Jupiter than by that of the king. Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for.

It is you, plainly, who consecrate wooden gods, who perhaps adore wooden crosses as parts of your gods.

For what else are your standards themselves, and the banners and flags of the camps, than crosses gilded and adorned? Your victory trophies imitate the shape not only of a simple cross but also of a man fixed to it.

We see the sign of the cross naturally in a ship, when it is carried with swelling sails, when it glides with outspread oars; and when a yoke is raised it is the sign of the cross; and when a man worships God with a pure mind, with hands outstretched. So either natural reason rests on the sign of the cross, or your religion is shaped by it.

"Now I should like to meet the man who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant. Do you think it possible that so tender, so tiny a body could receive fatal wounds? That anyone could slay, shed, and drain the fresh blood of a new-born and scarcely human being? No one can believe this except one who could dare to do it.

For I see you exposing your begotten sons now to wild beasts and birds, now strangling and crushing them by a wretched kind of death; there are women who, by drinking drugs, extinguish in their very wombs the beginning of the future human being and commit parricide before they give birth.

And these things surely come down from the teaching of your gods: for Saturn did not expose his sons but devoured them. Fittingly, in some parts of Africa infants were sacrificed to him by their parents, their crying stifled with caresses and kisses so that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed.

Among the Taurians of Pontus too, and for the Egyptian Busiris, it was the rite to sacrifice strangers; and among the Gauls to slay human, or rather inhuman, victims to Mercury; among the Romans to bury alive a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman, in place of a sacrifice; and to this day Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with homicide, and, as befits the son of Saturn, is fattened with the blood of a wicked and guilty man.

I believe it was he who taught Catiline to conspire by a covenant of blood, and Bellona to steep her rites with a draught of human gore, and men to cure epilepsy with human blood, that is, with a worse disease.

Not unlike them are those who devour the beasts from the arena, smeared and stained with blood or fattened on the limbs and entrails of men. For us it is not lawful either to see or to hear of homicide; and we so shun human blood that we do not use even the blood of edible animals in our food.

"And about the incestuous banquet, the conspiracy of demons has told a great fable against us, to stain the glory of our chastity with the sprinkling of foul infamy, to turn men away from us by the terror of an unspeakable opinion before the truth was examined.

So on this point your Fronto too did not give testimony as one making an affirmation, but scattered abuse as an orator; for these things have rather arisen from your own nations.

Among the Persians it is lawful to have intercourse with mothers; among the Egyptians and Athenians marriages with sisters are legitimate; your histories and tragedies glory in incests, which you gladly read and hear; so too you worship incestuous gods, joined with mother, with daughter, with sister.

Rightly, then, incest is often detected among you and always committed. Even without knowing it, wretches, you can rush into what is unlawful: while you scatter your lusts promiscuously, while you beget children everywhere, while you often expose even those born at home to the mercy of others, you must necessarily come back upon your own and stray into your own children. So you weave the story of incest even when you are not conscious of it.

But we show modesty not in appearance but in mind: gladly bound by the tie of a single marriage, in the desire for children we know either one woman or none; we keep banquets not only modest but also sober: for we do not indulge in feasts or prolong a banquet with wine, but temper cheerfulness with gravity. With chaste speech, and chaster body, very many enjoy, rather than boast of, the perpetual virginity of an unviolated body; indeed, so far is the desire for incest from us that for some even a chaste union is a cause of blushing.

Nor are we straightway the lowest rabble if we refuse your honours and purple robes; nor are we a faction if we all think the one good, gathered in the same quiet as when alone; nor chattering in corners, if you either blush or fear to hear us in public.

And that our number increases daily is not a charge of error but a testimony of praise; for in a beautiful way of life its own member both stands firm and perseveres, and the stranger grows into it.

So, finally, we easily recognize one another not by a mark on the body, as you think, but by the sign of innocence and modesty; so we love one another with mutual love, which pains you, since we do not know how to hate; so we call one another brothers, which you envy, as men of one God and Parent, as sharers in faith, as co-heirs of hope. For you neither recognize one another and you rage in mutual hatreds, nor do you acknowledge yourselves as brothers, except indeed for fratricide.

"But do you think that we hide what we worship because we have no shrines and altars? For what image shall I fashion for God, when, if you think rightly, man himself is the image of God? What temple shall I build for him, when this whole world, fashioned by his work, cannot contain him? And when I, a man, dwell more spaciously, shall I shut up the power of such great majesty within one little building?

Is he not better dedicated in our mind? Rather, consecrated in our heart? Shall I offer to God sacrifices and victims which he brought forth for my use, so as to throw his own gift back at him? That is ungrateful, since the acceptable sacrifice is a good spirit, a pure mind, and a sincere conscience.

So he who cultivates innocence makes supplication to God; he who cultivates justice makes libation to God; he who abstains from frauds propitiates God; he who snatches a man from danger slays the richest victim. These are our sacrifices, these are God's rites: so among us the more religious is he who is the more just.

'But the God we worship we neither show nor see.' On the contrary, we believe him to be God precisely because we can perceive him but cannot see him. For in his works and in all the movements of the world we behold his power ever present, when he thunders, lightens, strikes with thunderbolts, when he makes the sky clear.

Nor should you wonder if you do not see God: by the wind and the blasts all things are driven, shaken, stirred, and yet wind and blast do not come before our eyes. Indeed, we cannot look at the sun, which is the cause of seeing for all: the eye is driven back by its rays, the gaze of the beholder is dulled, and if you look too long all sight is extinguished.

What? Could you bear the very maker of the sun, that fountain of light, when you turn yourself away from its brightness and hide from its lightnings? Do you wish to see God with fleshly eyes, when you can neither see nor hold your own soul, by which you are given life and speak? 'But God

is ignorant of man's doings, and, being placed in heaven, cannot visit all or know individuals.' You err, O man, and are deceived: for how is God far off, when all things heavenly and earthly, and those beyond this province of the world, are full of God? Everywhere he is not only very near us but poured into us.

Consider the sun again: it is fixed in the sky, but spread over all lands; present everywhere alike, it takes part in and mingles with all things, and nowhere is its brightness violated.

How much more is God, the author of all and the watcher of all, from whom nothing can be secret, present in darkness, present in our thoughts, as in another darkness! We not only act under him but, I might almost say, live with him.

"Nor should we flatter ourselves about our numbers: we seem many to ourselves, but to God we are very few. We distinguish peoples and nations: to God this whole world is one house. Kings know the state of their kingdom through the services of various ministers: God has no need of informers; for we live not only before his eyes but in his bosom.

'But it did the Jews no good that they too worshipped one God with altars and temples and the greatest superstition.' You slip through ignorance, if you remember later events while forgetting, or not knowing, the earlier ones.

For they too experienced our God, for he is the same God of all: as long as they worshipped him chastely, innocently, and religiously, as long as they obeyed his wholesome precepts, from few they became countless, from poor rich, from slaves kings; few overwhelmed many, the unarmed the armed, while fleeing they overwhelmed their pursuers by God's command and with the elements striving on their side.

Read their writings again, or, if you prefer Romans, to pass over the ancients, look up what Antonius Julianus wrote about the Jews: you will know at once that they deserved this fortune by their own wickedness, and that nothing happened to them that had not been foretold before, if they persisted in their stubbornness.

So you will understand that they deserted before they were deserted, and that they were not captured with their God, as you impiously say, but handed over by God as deserters from his discipline.

"As for the conflagration of the world, not to believe that an unforeseen fire will fall, or that it is difficult ..., is the part of vulgar error.

For which of the wise doubts, which is ignorant, that all things that have arisen fall, that all things made perish? That heaven too, with all that heaven contains, will pass, as it began, into the force of fire, if the sweet water of the springs ceases to nourish the seas, is the constant opinion of the Stoics, because, the moisture being consumed, this whole world will take fire.

And the Epicureans hold the very same opinion about the conflagration of the elements and the ruin of the world.

Plato speaks of it: he says that parts of the world are now flooded, now burn by alternating turns; and though he said that the world itself was fashioned perpetual and indissoluble, he added nevertheless that to God its maker alone it is both dissoluble and mortal.

So it is no wonder if this mass is destroyed by him by whom it was built. You notice that the philosophers argue the same things that we say: not because we have followed in their footsteps, but because they, from the divine predictions of the prophets, imitated a shadow of the truth, distorted.

So too the more famous of the wise, Pythagoras first and Plato chief, have handed down the condition of being born again with a corrupted and halved faith: for when bodies are dissolved,

they hold that the souls alone both remain forever and pass again and again into other new bodies.

To these they add also this, to twist the truth: that the souls of men return into cattle, birds, and beasts. That opinion is surely worthy not of a philosopher's study but of a mime's buffoonery.

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

Besides, who is so foolish or stupid as to dare to deny that man, as he could first be formed by God, can be formed anew? That he is nothing after death, and was nothing before birth? That as he could be born from nothing, so he can be restored from nothing? Moreover, it is harder to begin what does not exist than to repeat what has existed. Do you think that anything perishes for God too, if it is withdrawn from our dull eyes? Every body, whether it dries up into dust, or is dissolved into moisture, or is compressed into ashes, or thinned into smoke, is withdrawn from us, but is kept for God, the guardian of the elements. Nor, as you believe, do we fear any loss from the manner of burial; but we keep to the old and better custom of burying in the earth.

See, then, how all nature rehearses the future resurrection for our comfort. The sun sets and is born, the stars sink and return, flowers die and revive, after their old age the shrubs put forth leaves, seeds do not grow green again unless they have decayed: so the body in the grave is like trees in winter; they hide their green under a feigned dryness.

Why do you hurry for it to revive and return while winter is still raw? We must wait for the spring of the body too. Nor am I unaware that most people, conscious of what they deserve, wish rather than believe that they will be nothing after death; for they prefer to be utterly extinguished rather than to be restored for punishment. Their error is increased both by the liberty allowed them in this world and by the very great patience of God, whose judgment is the more just the slower it is.

"And yet men are warned by the books of the most learned and the songs of the poets about that fiery river and the burning that flows around many times from the Stygian marsh, which, prepared for eternal torments and known through the disclosures of demons and the oracles of the prophets, they have handed down.

And so among them even King Jupiter himself swears religiously by the burning banks and the black abyss; for, knowing beforehand the punishment destined for himself with his worshippers, he shudders at it.

Nor is there any measure or end to the torments. There a wise fire burns and restores the limbs, consumes and nourishes them. As the fires of thunderbolts touch bodies and do not consume them, as the fires of Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius and of burning lands everywhere blaze and are not used up: so that penal fire is not fed by the loss of those who burn but is nourished by an unconsuming tearing of their bodies.

That those are rightly tormented who do not know God, as impious, as unjust, no one but a profane man doubts, since it is no less a crime to be ignorant of the parent of all and lord of all than to injure him.

And although ignorance of God suffices for punishment, as knowledge of him avails for pardon, yet if we Christians are compared with you, though in some respects our discipline falls short, we shall be found much 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 is to sin. You fear those who know of your deeds; we fear even conscience alone, without which we cannot exist. Finally, the prison is crowded with your number; there is no Christian there, unless he is either accused because of his religion or a deserter.

"Nor let anyone either seek comfort from fate or excuse what happens: let chance belong to fortune, yet the mind is free, and therefore it is a man's actions, not his station, that are judged.

For what else is fate than what God has spoken of each one of us? Since he can foreknow the material, he determines fates too according to the deserts and qualities of individuals. So in us it is not our birth that is punished but the nature of our disposition. And enough about fate, even if little for the present; we shall discuss it elsewhere more fully and at greater length.

Moreover, that most of us are called poor is not our disgrace but our glory; for as the mind is weakened by luxury, so it is strengthened by frugality.

And yet who can be poor who does not want, who does not covet another's goods, who is rich toward God? He is rather poor who, though he has much, desires more.

Yet I will say what I think: no one can be as poor as he was born. Birds live without patrimony and are fed day by day; and yet these things were made for us, and we possess them all if we do not covet them.

So, as one who travels a road is happier the lighter he walks, so in this journey of life he is more blessed who lightens himself by poverty and does not groan under the burden of riches.

And yet, if we thought riches useful, we would ask them of God: surely he to whom the whole belongs could grant some part. But we prefer to despise wealth rather than to touch it; we desire innocence more, we beg more for patience; we prefer to be good rather than lavish; and that we feel and suffer the human frailties of the body is not punishment, it is military service.

For strength is made strong in weaknesses, and calamity is very often the training school of virtue. Indeed, strength of both mind and body grows sluggish without the exercise of toil: all your brave men, whom you proclaim as examples, flourished famous through their hardships.

So God is neither unable to help us nor does he despise us, since he is both ruler of all and lover of his own; but in adversity he tests and examines each one, weighs the character of each by dangers, questions the will of man even to the point of death, secure that nothing can be lost to him. So, as gold by fire, we are proved by trials.

"How beautiful a spectacle for God, when a Christian grapples with pain, when he is matched against threats and punishments and tortures, when he tramples, laughing, on the din of death and the horror of the executioner, when he raises up his liberty against kings and princes and yields to God alone, whose he is, when, triumphant and victorious, he insults the very man who pronounced sentence against him! For he has conquered who has obtained what he strove for.

What soldier would not challenge danger more boldly under the eyes of his general? For no one receives the reward before the trial. And yet a general does not give what he does not have: he cannot prolong life, he can only honour military service.

But the soldier of God is neither deserted in pain nor ended by death. So a Christian can seem wretched, but cannot be found so. You yourselves extol to the skies men in calamity, Mucius Scaevola, who, when he had failed against the king, would have perished among the enemy had he not sacrificed his right hand.

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

Do I compare men with Mucius or with Aquilius or Regulus? Our boys and our weak women mock crosses and tortures, wild beasts and all the bugbears of punishment, with a patience in pain that is inspired.

And you do not understand, O wretched men, that there is no one who would either wish to undergo punishment without reason or could endure tortures without God:

unless perhaps you are deceived because those who do not know God abound in riches, flourish in honours, are strong in power. The wretches are lifted higher for this, that they may fall lower. For these are fattened like victims for slaughter, crowned like sacrifices for punishment: some are raised to empires and dominions for this very reason, that their ruined minds may freely put their character up for sale through the licence of power.

For without the knowledge of God what solid happiness can there be, since death exists? Like a dream, it slips away before it is held. Are you a king?

But you fear as much as you are feared; and however large a retinue surrounds you, in danger you are alone. Are you rich? But fortune is badly trusted, and the short journey of life is not equipped but burdened by great provisions.

Do you glory in the fasces and the purple? It is a vain error of man and an empty worship of rank to shine in purple and be sordid in mind. Are you noble by birth? Do you praise your parents? Yet we are all born with equal lot; we are distinguished by virtue alone.

We, therefore, who are judged by our conduct and modesty, rightly abstain from your evil pleasures and processions and shows, whose origin we know to be from sacred rites, and whose harmful allurements we condemn. For at the chariot races who would not shudder at the madness of the people brawling among themselves? At the gladiatorial shows, at the training in homicide?

In the theatrical shows too there is no less madness and more extended shamefulness: for now a mime either expounds or displays adulteries, now an effeminate actor, while he feigns love, inflicts it; the same man dishonours your gods by attributing to them debaucheries, sighs, hatreds; the same man, by feigned sorrows, provokes your tears with vain gestures and nods. So you demand homicide in reality and weep at it in fiction.

"That we despise the remains of sacrifices and the cups from which libations have been poured is not a confession of fear but an assertion of true liberty. For although everything that comes into being, as an inviolable gift of God, is not corrupted by any act, we abstain nonetheless, lest anyone should think either that we yield to the demons to whom the libation was made or that we are ashamed of our religion.

And who is he who doubts that we enjoy the flowers of spring, since we pluck both the rose of spring and the lily and whatever else among flowers is of pleasing colour and scent? For we use these both scattered loose and soft, and we clasp our necks with garlands. Pardon us, indeed, that we do not crown the head: we are accustomed to draw in the pleasant scent of a flower with our nostrils, not to inhale it with the back of the head or the hair.

Nor do we crown the dead. I wonder rather at you in this, how you give to a lifeless man either a torch, if he feels, or a garland, if he does not feel, since if he is blessed he does not need flowers, and if wretched he does not rejoice in them.

But we adorn our funerals with the same tranquillity with which we live; nor do we bind on a withering garland, but we await one living with eternal flowers from God. Quiet, modest, secure in the generosity of our God, we quicken the hope of future happiness by faith in his present majesty. So we both rise again blessed and already live in the contemplation of the future.

So let Socrates, the Attic buffoon, see to it, who confessed that he knew nothing, though he boasted of the testimony of a most deceitful demon; let Arcesilaus too, and Carneades, and Pyrrho, and the whole multitude of the Academics deliberate; let Simonides also postpone for ever: we despise the haughty brows of the philosophers, whom we know to be corrupters, adulterers, and tyrants, and always eloquent against their own vices.

We, who show our wisdom not in our dress but in our mind, who do not speak great things but live them, glory that we have attained what they sought with the utmost effort and could not find. Why are we ungrateful, why do we begrudge ourselves, if the truth about God has ripened in the age of our time? Let us enjoy our good and moderate the judgment of what is right: let superstition be restrained, impiety be expiated, true religion be preserved."

When Octavius had finished his speech, for some time we kept our faces fixed in silence, struck dumb, and as for me, I was lost in the greatness of my admiration, because he had adorned with arguments, with examples, and with the authority of readings what it is easier to feel than to say; and because he had beaten back the ill-disposed with those same weapons of the philosophers with which they arm themselves; and because he had shown that the truth is not only easy but also attractive.

While, then, I was silently turning these things over in my mind, Caecilius burst out: "I congratulate my Octavius exceedingly, but myself too, and I do not wait for the verdict. We have both conquered, and so I claim the victory, shameless though that may be: for as he is my conqueror, so I triumph over error.

So, as regards the main question, I confess about providence, I yield about God, and I agree about the purity of the sect that is now ours. Still, even now some things remain beneath, not opposed to the truth but necessary for a complete instruction; about these we will inquire tomorrow, since the sun is already sinking to its setting, so that, agreeing on the whole, we may inquire more readily."

"But I," I said, "rejoice more fully on behalf of us all, because Octavius has conquered for me too, since the very great odium of judging has been taken from me. Yet I cannot repay his merit with praises in words: the testimony of a man, and of one man, is weak; he has the excellent gift of God, inspired by whom he spoke, and helped by whom he prevailed."

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