To the Nations 2.12

And how far am I to go in bringing out the gods, since we must discuss what kind of gods you have received? How much you ought to blush! Whether I should laugh at your vanity or reproach your blindness is quite uncertain. For how many gods shall I bring forward, and which? The greater, or the lesser too? The old, or the new too? Male, or female too? Unmarried, or joined in wedlock too? Skilled, or idle too? Rustic, or urban too? Citizens, or foreigners too? For so many families and so many nations are seeking in good faith to be enrolled that they cannot be surveyed, distinguished, and described. But the more widespread the matter is, the more tightly we must draw it in; and so, since in this class we keep to one aim, to show that they were all men (not indeed so that you may learn it, for you behave as though you had forgotten it), let us take a shortcut from the very method of inquiry, by going back over the origin of their race. For the origin determines all the posterity. That origin of your gods is marked, I think, by Saturn. For even if Varro reports Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva as the most ancient gods, it should not escape us that every father is older than his sons, Saturn than Jupiter, as Heaven than Saturn; for Saturn is from Heaven and Earth. And yet I pass over the origin of Heaven and Earth. From wherever they came, they were for a long time unmarried and childless before they became husband and parents. They had, of course, to grow for a long age to reach such great stature. At length, as soon as Heaven's voice began to break and Earth's breasts to harden, they made a marriage between them. I suppose either Heaven came down to his bride or Earth went up to her groom. At any rate Earth conceived by Heaven and, when the year was out, bore Saturn, in a marvelous way. Which parent did he resemble? But even if she bore him, certainly they begot no one before Saturn, and afterwards only Ops; after that there was no more offspring. For Saturn castrated Heaven as he slept. We read Caelum as masculine; and how could he be a father unless masculine? But with what was he castrated? With a sickle. In that age? For Vulcan was not yet a smith of iron. Earth, bereaved, though still of youthful age, put off marrying another. But then there was no other Heaven for her. What, though, if not the Sea, embraces her? But he smells of brine; she is used to fresh waters. So Saturn was the only male child of Heaven and Earth. But when he reached puberty, he was joined to his sister. There were not yet laws to forbid incest, nor to punish parricide. So he devoured his male children; better that he should do it himself than the wolves, if he exposed them. He was afraid, no doubt, that one of them might have learned the use of his father's sickle. When Jupiter was born and soon carried off, he swallowed a stone in place of the infant. Secure for a long while by this device, he was at last overpowered by a son he had not digested, who had grown up in hiding, and he was deprived of his kingdom. This is the patriarch of the gods whom Heaven and Earth begot for you, with the poets for midwives. But some think themselves elegant in interpreting Saturn physically, by allegorical argument, as time: that Heaven and Earth are his parents because they too have no origin; that he bears a sickle because all things are cut off by time; that he devours his own because time consumes in itself everything produced from itself. They also press the testimony of the name: that he is called Kronos in Greek as being Chronos, “time.” Likewise, those who conjecture him to be a begetter derive the Latin name from sowings (sationes), since through him the seeds of heaven are brought down to earth. They join Ops to him, because seeds bestow the means (ops) of life, and also because seeds come up by work (opus). Explain to me, I pray, what this transference means. Either he was Saturn or he was time. How Saturn, if time? If Saturn, how time? For you cannot think both are bodily in one and the same being. What prevented time from being worshipped in its own character? What prevented the body of a man, or the fable of a man, from being worshipped in its own form and not as time? What does this interpretation aim at, except to color foul matters with false arguments? You do not want Saturn to be time because you call him a man; or, while you make him time, you no longer want him to have been a man. Plainly your god Saturn is recorded in the ancient memorials as a being of human character on earth. Anything whatever that never existed can be imagined as bodiless; there is no room for imagining where there is truth. But since it is established that Saturn lived, you transform him in vain; he whom you will not deny was a man is not conceded to you as either god or time, for he can be defended as neither. The record of Saturn is found everywhere in your literature. We read of him in Cassius Severus, in Cornelius Nepos and Tacitus, and among the Greeks in Diodorus and the others who have collected the hoary tales of antiquity. Nor are his traces marked more faithfully anywhere than in Italy itself. For after very many lands and a sojourn in Attica, he settled in Italy, or Oenotria as it was then called, received by Janus, or Janes as the Salii call him. The hill he had inhabited was called Saturnian; the city he had marked out is Saturnia to this day; indeed all Italy was once called after Saturn. On the witness of such a land, the land that now rules the world, even if there is doubt about Saturn's origin, it is established from his deeds that he was a man. So if Saturn was a man, he was without doubt born of a man; indeed, because he was a man, he was surely not born of Heaven and Earth; but since his parents were unknown, it was easy for some to call him the son of those whose sons all may seem to be. For who would not call heaven and earth father and mother out of veneration? Or did it come from the human custom by which unknown persons who appear unexpectedly are said to have come from heaven? So, because he had come as a stranger, it became established everywhere that he should be called heaven-sent, for he had appeared suddenly. For we also commonly call people of uncertain birth sons of earth. I say nothing of the state of antiquity, when men's eyes and minds were so rude that they were moved at the sight of any new man as at something divine, still more at a king, and indeed the first. I will dwell a little longer on Saturn, so as to lay down a shortcut for the others too, now that I have had enough of the dispute about origins; and I will not pass over the weightier testimonies of the divine writings, to which greater credit is owed for their antiquity. For the Sibyl existed before all literature: that Sibyl, of course, the true prophetess of the truth, whose name you have put on the prophets of the demons. She, in six-foot verse, sets forth to this effect the lineage of Saturn and his deeds: “In the tenth generation of men,” she says, “since the flood befell the former ones, Saturn and Titan and Iapetus reigned, the mightiest sons of Earth and Heaven.” If, then, any credit attaches either to your own writers or to your earlier literature, which is all the nearer to the facts because it belongs to that age, it has been proved enough about Saturn and his lineage that they were men. We hold a shortcut, a prescription from origin against the rest, so as not to wander through them one by one. The character of the posterity is shown by the founders of the race: mortal from mortal, earthly from earthly; stage is matched to stage; marriages, conceptions, and births have run their course; their countries, seats, kingdoms, and monuments are plain to see. So let those who cannot deny that they were born believe that they died; and let those who confess that they died not think them gods.