The City of God: Book 3

On the subject of moral and spiritual evils, which are more to be feared than any others, I think enough has already been said to demonstrate that the false gods did nothing to protect their worshippers from being overwhelmed by such disasters, but instead made the ruin worse. I see that I must now turn to those evils which the pagans alone truly dreaded: famine, pestilence, war, pillage, captivity, massacre, and the other calamities already listed in the first book. Wicked people consider only those things evil which don't actually make people evil; and they feel no shame in praising good things while remaining wicked themselves in the midst of everything they praise. They are more troubled by owning a bad house than by living a bad life, as if a person's greatest good were to have everything fine except himself. But not even the evils that the pagans alone feared were kept at bay by their gods, even during the periods when those gods were worshipped most freely and fully. Long before the coming of our Redeemer, the human race was crushed under countless and sometimes almost unbelievable calamities; and throughout that time, what gods did the world worship except those very ones, if you set aside the single nation of the Hebrews, and beyond them, those individuals whom the most hidden and most just judgment of God counted worthy of divine grace? Rather than belabor the point, I will pass over in silence the terrible calamities suffered by other nations and speak only of what happened to Rome and the Roman empire, by which I mean Rome in the proper sense, along with those lands which, before the coming of Christ, had already become, through alliance or conquest, members of the body of the state.

To begin with, why was Troy (or Ilium, the cradle of Roman civilization, since I must not ignore what I touched on in the first book) conquered, sacked, and destroyed by the Greeks, even though it honored and worshipped the very same gods they did? Some answer that Priam paid the price for his father Laomedon's perjury. If that's the case, then it must be true that Laomedon once hired Apollo and Neptune as his laborers, since the story goes that he promised them wages and then broke the agreement. It strikes me as remarkable that the famous prophet Apollo would throw himself into such an enormous project without ever suspecting that Laomedon intended to cheat him out of his pay. And Neptune as well, his uncle, brother of Jupiter, king of the sea: it hardly seems fitting that he should have been blind to what was coming. After all, Homer (who lived and wrote before Rome was ever built) portrays Neptune predicting something great for the descendants of Aeneas, who would go on to found Rome. And according to Homer, Neptune even rescued Aeneas from Achilles' fury by wrapping him in a cloud, though as Virgil tells it:

"All his will was to destroy

His own creation, perjured Troy."

There is something deeply troubling about the idea that gods as great as Apollo and Neptune could be cheated out of their wages and left with nothing but ingratitude after building the walls of Troy. One might reasonably ask which is the greater offense: being deceived by such gods, or believing that such beings are gods at all. Even Homer himself wasn't fully convinced by the story, since he portrays Neptune as an enemy of Troy while making Apollo its defender, even though the tale implies both were wronged by the same fraud. So here is the challenge: if the Romans believe these myths, they should be ashamed to worship gods like these; if they don't believe them, then they should stop talking about "Trojan perjury." Or, better yet, let them explain how the gods could despise Trojan treachery while apparently embracing Roman treachery. Consider how Catiline's conspiracy, even in a city as large and morally compromised as Rome, managed to recruit so many men who made their living through perjury and civic violence. What else but perjury corrupted the verdicts handed down by so many senators? What else corrupted the votes of the people and the outcomes of every case brought before them? It seems that the ancient custom of taking oaths survived even the deepest moral rot, not because religious reverence held wickedness in check, but simply to add one more crime to the list: the crime of breaking the oath itself.

There is no basis, then, for claiming that the gods (by whose favor, as the Romans say, their empire stood, though those same gods are demonstrably shown to have been defeated by the Greeks) were outraged by Trojan treachery. Nor, as others argue in their defense, was it anger over Paris's adultery that caused the gods to abandon Troy. Their nature, after all, is to instigate and teach vice, not to punish it. "The city of Rome," writes Sallust, "was first built and inhabited, as I have heard, by the Trojans, who fled their homeland under the leadership of Aeneas and wandered without settling anywhere." If the gods truly believed that Paris's adultery deserved punishment, it was the Romans above all, or at the very least the Romans as well, who should have suffered for it, since that adultery was set in motion by the mother of Aeneas himself. But how could the gods condemn in Paris a crime they raised no objection to when their own sister Venus committed it? She, to name just one example, committed adultery with Anchises and became the mother of Aeneas. Is the difference simply that Menelaus was wronged in one case, while Vulcan quietly looked the other way in the other? The gods, it seems, are so unconcerned about their wives' fidelity that they have no trouble sharing them with mortal men. Perhaps I will be accused of mocking the myths and treating a serious subject too lightly. Very well, then: let us say that Aeneas was not the son of Venus. I am willing to grant that. But is Romulus any more truly the son of Mars? Why should one claim be accepted and not the other? Or is it that gods may sleep with mortal women, but men may not sleep with goddesses? That is a strange rule, and frankly an unbelievable one: that what Mars was permitted under Venus's own law should not be permitted to Venus herself under that same law. In any case, both claims carry the authority of Rome behind them, since Caesar in his own era believed himself descended from Venus no less firmly than ancient Romulus believed himself the son of Mars.

Someone will ask: do I actually believe all this? No, I don't. Even Varro, one of the most learned pagans of his time, comes close to admitting that these stories are false, though he lacks the courage to say so plainly. His argument, however, is that it serves the state for brave men to believe, even if wrongly, that they are descended from the gods. The reasoning is that a person who believes in his divine ancestry will approach great undertakings with more boldness, pursue them with more energy, and ultimately achieve more through sheer confidence. You can see how much room for deception this view of Varro's opens up. It also makes it entirely understandable that so many religious rites and sacred myths were invented in a society where it was considered beneficial for citizens to be told lies, even about the gods themselves.

But whether Venus could truly have borne Aeneas to the mortal Anchises, or Mars fathered Romulus on the daughter of Numitor, we leave those as open questions. Our own Scriptures raise a strikingly similar puzzle: whether the fallen angels had sexual relations with the daughters of men, which would explain why the earth was at that time populated by giants, meaning men of extraordinary size and strength. For now, I will confine myself to this dilemma. If what their books say about the mother of Aeneas and the father of Romulus is true, how can the gods be offended by human adultery when they themselves commit it without any apparent shame? If it is false, the gods still have no grounds for anger at men who actually commit adultery, since the gods apparently take pleasure in having such acts attributed to them, even when those attributions are invented. Furthermore, if we reject the story of Mars's adultery in order to spare Venus from a similar charge, then the mother of Romulus is left without even the excuse of divine seduction to protect her reputation. Sylvia was a vestal priestess, and the gods should have punished the Romans for that sacrilege far more severely than they punished the Trojans for Paris's adultery. The Romans themselves, in their earliest days, went so far as to bury alive any vestal virgin caught in adultery, while ordinary women, though punished for the same offense, were never put to death for it. In this way, the Romans guarded the purity of what they considered sacred shrines with far greater zeal than they guarded the sanctity of the marriage bed.

Here is another example worth considering. If human sin so greatly enraged those deities that they abandoned Troy to fire and slaughter as punishment for Paris's crime, then the murder of Romulus's brother should have provoked them far more against the Romans than the seduction of a Greek husband provoked them against the Trojans. Fratricide in a newly founded city should have stirred greater outrage than adultery in a city already thriving. For the purposes of this argument, it doesn't matter whether Romulus ordered his brother killed or struck him down with his own hand. Many shamelessly deny the latter; many doubt it out of shame; many conceal it out of grief. We won't stop here to sift through the testimonies of historians on the matter. What everyone agrees on is this: the brother of Romulus was killed, not by enemies, not by strangers. If it was Romulus who either commanded or carried out this crime, then Romulus was more truly the founder of Rome than Paris was of Troy. So why did the man who stole another man's wife bring the wrath of the gods down on the Trojans, while the man who took his own brother's life earned the protection of those same gods? If, on the other hand, Romulus had no hand in the crime and no part in willing it, then the entire city bears responsibility, because it failed to see justice done. In that case, Rome was guilty not merely of fratricide but of something worse: parricide. Both brothers were founders of that city, and one was prevented by treachery from ever ruling it. As far as I can see, no evil can be attributed to Troy that would justify the gods abandoning it to destruction, nor any virtue to Rome that would explain the gods rewarding it with prosperity. The more honest conclusion may be that the gods fled Troy because they were defeated there, and then took up residence in Rome to practice their characteristic deceptions on a grander stage. Even so, they kept a foothold in Troy, so they could go on deceiving the future inhabitants who resettled those lands. At Rome, with a wider field for their malicious arts, they reveled in far greater honors.

We might reasonably ask what crime poor Ilium had committed to deserve, at the very outbreak of Rome's civil wars, a destruction more savage and complete than anything the Greeks had inflicted. When the Greeks sacked the city, many residents escaped, and many who were captured were at least allowed to live, even if in chains. Fimbria, however, the most ruthless of all Marius' followers, issued orders from the start that no one was to be spared, and he burned the city together with every last soul inside it. This was Ilium's reward, not from the Greeks whom she had once wronged, but from the Romans, who traced their very origins back to her ruins, while the gods worshipped equally by both sides did absolutely nothing, or, to be more precise, could do nothing. Is it really the case, then, that even at this later moment, after Troy had rebuilt herself from the ashes left by Greek fire, all the gods on whose protection the kingdom depended "forsook each fane, each sacred shrine?"

But this raises an obvious question: why did the gods allow it? In my view, the gods deserve as much blame as the townspeople deserve praise. The citizens of Troy had closed their gates against Fimbria in order to preserve the city for Sulla, and Fimbria burned them alive for it. Up to that point, Sulla's cause was the more legitimate of the two; he was still using arms to restore the republic, and his good intentions had not yet been corrupted. What better course of action could the Trojans have taken, then? What could have been more honorable, more loyal to Rome, or more worthy of their ancient kinship with her, than to hold their city for the better faction and bar the gates against a man who had made himself the murderer of his own country? Let the defenders of the gods explain what their divine protectors accomplished by allowing Troy to be destroyed for this. The gods had once abandoned an adulterous people and left Troy to the Greek fires, so that from her ashes a purer Rome might be born. But why did they abandon this same city a second time, now that it was allied with Rome, not making war on its noble daughter but holding firm with admirable loyalty to Rome's most justifiable cause? Why did they surrender it to destruction, not at the hands of Greek heroes, but at the hands of the most contemptible of Romans? And if the gods did not actually favor Sulla's cause, the cause for which the Trojans had sacrificed themselves, then why had those same gods predicted and promised Sulla his victories? Should we call them flatterers of the powerful rather than defenders of the helpless? Troy was not destroyed, then, because the gods had abandoned it. The demons, ever watchful for an opportunity to deceive, did what they could. When every statue was toppled and burned along with the city, Livy tells us that only the image of Minerva was found standing unharmed among the ruins of her temple. This was not meant to inspire the praise, "The gods who made this realm divine," but to prevent the excuse, "They are gone from each shrine, each sacred place." That marvel was permitted to them not to prove their power, but to prove their presence.

Where, then, was the wisdom in entrusting Rome to Trojan gods who had already proven their weakness by failing to save Troy? Someone might argue that when Fimbria sacked Troy, the gods had already relocated to Rome. But then how did the statue of Minerva remain standing in Troy? And if they were in Rome when Fimbria destroyed Troy, perhaps they were back in Troy when Rome itself was captured and burned by the Gauls. To be fair, they do seem to have sharp hearing and quick reflexes: they came running at the sound of a cackling goose to defend the Capitol. Defending the rest of the city, however, apparently required more warning than they received.

It is also believed that Numa Pompilius, the successor of Romulus, enjoyed peace throughout his entire reign with the help of the gods, and that he shut the gates of Janus, which are traditionally kept open during wartime. The assumption is that this peace was his reward for establishing so many religious observances among the Romans. Certainly that king would have deserved our admiration for such a rare season of tranquility, had he been wise enough to spend it on worthwhile pursuits and, setting aside a dangerous curiosity, had sought the true God with genuine devotion. As it was, however, the gods were not responsible for his peace; and it is even possible they would have deceived him less had they found him more occupied. The more free time he had, the more they consumed his attention. Varro tells us all about his efforts and the methods he used to associate these gods with himself and the city; I will address those matters in their proper place, God willing. For now, since we are discussing the benefits supposedly granted by the gods, I will readily concede that peace is a great blessing. But it is a blessing that comes from the true God, who, like the sun and the rain and all the other supports of life, frequently grants it even to the ungrateful and the wicked. If this great gift was truly given to Rome and to Pompilius by their gods, why did those same gods never grant it to the Roman empire again, even during periods that seemed far more deserving? Were the sacred rites more effective when first established than they were in all the years that followed? In Numa's time, those rites did not yet exist until he introduced them; yet afterward they had already been performed and carefully maintained, so that their benefits might continue to flow. How is it, then, that the forty-three years of Numa's reign (or thirty-nine, as some prefer) passed in unbroken peace, and yet afterward, once the worship was firmly established and the gods themselves, invoked by those very rites, were recognized as the guardians and patrons of the city, we can barely find a single year throughout the entire span from the founding of Rome to the reign of Augustus in which the Romans were able to shut the gates of war? That one exception, notably, was the year following the close of the First Punic War, and even then it was treated as a remarkable curiosity.

Do they argue that the Roman empire could never have grown so vast or so glorious without constant, unrelenting war? What a convenient argument. Why must a kingdom tear itself apart in order to become great? Consider the human body as a small world of its own: isn't it better to have a moderate build and good health than to reach the towering size of a giant through unnatural suffering, only to find no rest once you get there, your pain growing in proportion to your size? What harm would have come, or rather what good would have flourished, if the age that Sallust described had simply continued? He writes: "At first the kings (for that was the earliest title of power in the world) were divided in their pursuits: some cultivated the mind, others the body. At that time men lived without greed; everyone was content with what he had." Was it really necessary, then, for Rome's prosperity, that the very condition Virgil condemns should take its place:

"At length stole on a baser age,

And war's indomitable rage,

And greedy lust of gain?"

The Romans do have a plausible defense for waging such devastating wars: they were driven to fight by the pressure of their enemies, compelled not by any hunger for glory but by the necessity of protecting their lives and freedom. Fair enough. Here is how Sallust describes it: "When their state, enriched with laws, institutions, and territory, seemed abundantly prosperous and sufficiently powerful, the ordinary law of human nature took hold, and wealth gave birth to envy. The neighboring kings and peoples took up arms and attacked them. A few allies offered help; the rest, paralyzed by fear, kept their distance from the danger. But the Romans, alert both at home and in the field, acted quickly, made preparations, encouraged one another, marched out to meet their enemies, and defended their liberty, their country, and their families with arms. Afterward, when their courage had driven back the threat, they came to the aid of their allies and friends, and won new alliances more by giving favors than by receiving them." That, at least, was building Rome's greatness through honorable means. But during the reign of Numa, I want to know whether the long peace was maintained despite the aggression of hostile neighbors, or whether those neighbors simply stopped attacking so that peace could be kept. If Rome was already being harassed by wars even then, and yet chose not to answer force with force, then whatever means she used at that time to pacify her enemies without defeating them in battle or frightening them with the threat of combat, she could have used those same means always, and reigned in peace with the gates of Janus closed. If that was not within her power, then Rome enjoyed peace not because her gods willed it, but because her neighbors willed it, and only for as long as those neighbors chose not to provoke her. In that case, these pitiful gods would be selling to one man, as though it were their gift, something that lay not in their power to grant but in the will of another man entirely. These demons, to the extent they are permitted, can certainly frighten or inflame the minds of wicked men through their own peculiar wickedness. But if they always possessed this power, and if no higher and more hidden power ever moved to check their efforts, they would be the supreme arbiters of peace and military victory. Yet such outcomes almost always turn on human emotion, and frequently run contrary to what the gods are said to want, as is demonstrated not only by the myths and legends that barely contain a grain of truth, but by Roman history itself.

This same divine weakness appears in the story of the Cuman Apollo, who reportedly wept for four days during the war with the Achaeans and King Aristonicus. The augurs were alarmed by this omen and had decided to throw the statue into the sea, but the elders of Cumae stepped in and recalled that the same thing had happened to the same statue during the wars against Antiochus and against Perseus, and that the Senate had afterward decreed gifts for Apollo because those wars had ended favorably for Rome. More experienced soothsayers were then brought in, and they declared that the weeping of Apollo's image was actually a good sign for the Romans. Since Cumae was a Greek colony, they argued, Apollo was mourning the grief and ruin about to fall on his native Greece, the land from which his statue had originally been brought. Not long after, word came that King Aristonicus had been defeated and captured, an outcome that clearly ran against Apollo's wishes, as the god had already signaled through the tears streaming from his marble face. This tells us something important: even the poets' myths, fanciful as they are, contain a kernel of truth, since they capture the character of these demonic beings with a certain accuracy. In Virgil, Diana mourns for Camilla, and Hercules weeps for Pallas on the eve of his death. This may well be the same logic that shaped the thinking of Numa Pompilius. He had enjoyed a long peace, though without knowing or even asking from whom it came. In his leisure he began to consider which gods he should entrust with the protection and governance of Rome. He had no sense that the true, almighty, and supreme God concerns Himself with earthly affairs. He only remembered that the Trojan gods Aeneas had carried to Italy had failed to preserve either the kingdom of Troy or the Lavinian kingdom Aeneas himself had founded. From this he concluded that Rome needed additional gods, guardians for the displaced and protectors of the vulnerable, to be added alongside those earlier divinities who had either arrived with Romulus or been absorbed when Alba was destroyed.

Yet even though Pompilius established such an elaborate religious system, Rome was not content to leave it there. Jupiter himself still had no great temple at this point; it was King Tarquin who eventually built the Capitol. Aesculapius made his way from Epidaurus to Rome, so that in this greatest of cities he might have a grander stage for his celebrated medical arts. The mother of the gods, too, arrived from Pessinus (wherever exactly that was), since it would have been unseemly for her to remain hidden in obscurity while her son presided over the Capitoline hill. But if she truly is the mother of all the gods, then she didn't merely follow some of her children to Rome; she left others behind to follow her. I find myself wondering whether she was also the mother of Cynocephalus, who arrived from Egypt considerably later. Whether the goddess Fever was her offspring as well is a question perhaps best left to her grandson Aesculapius to settle. Whatever her lineage, I trust the foreign gods won't dare call a goddess base-born who has become a Roman citizen. Who could possibly count all the deities entrusted with Rome's protection? Indigenous and imported, drawn from heaven, earth, the underworld, the seas, fountains, and rivers; and, as Varro notes, gods certain and uncertain, male and female, since these distinctions exist among the divine just as they do among animals. With such a vast crowd of deities standing guard, one might reasonably expect Rome to have been spared at least some of those terrible and horrifying disasters, of which I can mention only a few. Through the great clouds of smoke rising from her altars, Rome called down divine protection like a beacon drawing ships to harbor, assembling a host of gods for whom she built and maintained temples, altars, sacrifices, and priesthoods, and in doing so she offended the one true and supreme God, to whom alone all such worship rightfully belongs. In fact, Rome was more prosperous when she had fewer gods. But as she grew greater, she assumed she needed more of them, much as a larger ship requires a larger crew. She apparently lost confidence in the smaller number of gods under whose protection she had enjoyed relatively peaceful days, doubting they could now defend an empire of such scale. Even under the kings (with the exception of Numa Pompilius, whom I have already discussed), what a dark and wicked rivalry must have existed to bring about the murder of Romulus's own brother.

How is it that neither Juno, who along with her husband Jupiter even then cherished "Rome's sons, the nation of the gown," nor Venus herself, could help the children of the beloved Aeneas find wives through some fair and legitimate means? The lack of any such means forced the Romans into the grim necessity of stealing their wives and then going to war against their own fathers-in-law, so that these wretched women, before they had even recovered from the wrong done to them by their husbands, found themselves dowried with their fathers' blood. "But the Romans conquered their neighbors." Yes, but at what cost in wounds on both sides, and in the bitter slaughter of relatives and neighbors! The war between Caesar and Pompey was a conflict between just one father-in-law and one son-in-law, and even before it began, Caesar's daughter, Pompey's wife, was already dead. Yet with what sharp and well-earned grief does Lucan cry out: "I sing that worse than civil war waged in the plains of Emathia, and in which the crime was justified by the victory!"

The Romans, then, conquered so that they could wrench these wretched girls from their fathers-in-law's arms with blood-stained hands. These young women dared not weep for their slaughtered parents, for fear of offending their victorious husbands; and while the battle still raged around them, they stood with prayers on their lips, not knowing for whom to pray. Nuptials like these were surely prepared for the Roman people not by Venus, but by Bellona; or perhaps the infernal fury Alecto had more freedom to harm them now that Juno was on their side than she had when that goddess's prayers had turned her against Aeneas. Even Andromache in captivity was better off than these Roman brides. She was a slave, yes, but once she became the wife of Pyrrhus, no more Trojans fell by his hand. The Romans, by contrast, slew in battle the very fathers of the women they embraced at home. Andromache, the conqueror's captive, could only mourn her people's deaths, not dread them. The Sabine women, bound by blood to men still fighting, feared for their fathers' lives every time their husbands marched out, and grieved those deaths when their husbands returned, yet could express neither their fear nor their sorrow openly. The victories of their husbands, which meant the destruction of neighbors, relatives, brothers, and fathers, produced either agonizing grief or a cruelty they could not admit to feeling. And since the fortune of war is fickle, some of these women lost their husbands to their fathers' swords, while others lost both husband and father in the same mutual slaughter. The Romans did not escape unscathed either; they were driven back behind their walls and forced to defend themselves with their gates shut. When those gates were opened by treachery and the enemy poured into the city, the Forum itself became the arena for a savage, bitter clash between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law. The original ravishers were thoroughly routed, fleeing in every direction to their houses and heaping fresh disgrace on top of their original shameful and wretched triumph. It was at this desperate moment that Romulus, no longer trusting in his citizens' courage, prayed to Jupiter that they would hold their ground, and from that occasion the god received the name Stator, meaning "the one who makes men stand." But even that would not have ended the catastrophe, had not the ravished women themselves rushed out with their hair loose and thrown themselves before their fathers, disarming their righteous fury not with weapons of war but with the pleas of daughters who still loved their parents. Then Romulus, who had been unable to tolerate even his own twin brother as a colleague, was forced to accept Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines, as his co-ruler. But how long could a man who resented sharing power with his own brother be expected to endure a stranger on the throne? Tatius was duly killed, and Romulus remained sole king, the better to become, in time, a greater god. Consider what kind of marriage rights these were, that stirred up unnatural wars and set kinsmen against each other. These were Rome's celebrated bonds of family, kinship, alliance, and religion. This was the life of a city so abundantly protected by its gods. One could say a great deal more on this subject, and much of it would be harsh, but our purpose carries us past it, and other matters require our attention.

What happened after Numa's reign, under the other kings, when the Albans were drawn into a war that proved disastrous not only for themselves but for Rome as well? The long peace of Numa had grown tiresome, and with what staggering bloodshed and mutual ruin did the Roman and Alban armies bring it to an end! Alba had been founded by Ascanius, son of Aeneas, and was more properly Rome's mother city than Troy itself. Yet Tullus Hostilius, king of Rome, provoked her to battle, and in the fighting both sides inflicted and absorbed such terrible losses that eventually both grew exhausted by the struggle. It was then decided that the war would be settled by single combat between three sets of twin brothers, one set from each army: from Rome, the three Horatii; from Alba, the three Curiatii. Two of the Horatii were cut down by the Curiatii, but the surviving Horatius then killed all three Curiatii in turn. Rome emerged victorious, but at such a cost that only one man came home alive. Who bore the losses on both sides? Who carried the grief, if not the children of Aeneas, the descendants of Ascanius, the offspring of Venus, the grandchildren of Jupiter? This, too, was a war worse than civil war, fought between a mother city and her daughter. And to this grim contest of brothers was added another catastrophe, both atrocious and heartbreaking. Because the two nations had long been friendly, being neighbors and kin, the sister of the Horatii had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii. When she saw her brother wearing the spoils stripped from her dead fiance, she broke into tears and was killed on the spot by her own brother in his fury. To my mind, that one girl showed more humanity than the entire Roman people. I cannot find fault with her for mourning the man to whom she had pledged herself, or perhaps for grieving that her brother had killed the very man to whom he had promised her. After all, why do we praise Aeneas in Virgil for weeping over enemies he himself had cut down? Why did Marcellus shed tears over the city of Syracuse, pausing just before he destroyed it to recall its splendor at its height and to reflect on the common fate of all things? In the name of our shared humanity, I insist: if men are praised for weeping over enemies they themselves have conquered, then a young woman should not be condemned as a criminal for mourning a lover killed by her own brother's hand. While that girl wept for her betrothed, slain by her brother, Rome was celebrating the devastation visited on her own mother city and congratulating herself on a victory purchased with the mingled blood of both peoples.

Why cite the mere names and words "glory" and "victory"? Strip away the disguise of wild delusion and look at the naked deeds: weigh them without ornament, judge them without flattery. Let Alba be charged as Troy was charged with adultery. No such charge exists, nor anything like it: that war was ignited for one reason alone, so that there

"Might sound in languid ears the cry

Of Tullus and of victory."

This vice of restless ambition was the sole motive behind that fratricidal war, and Sallust brands it in passing. After briefly but warmly praising those early times when life was lived without greed and everyone was content with what they had, he continues: "But after Cyrus in Asia, and the Lacedemonians and Athenians in Greece, began to subdue cities and nations, and to treat the lust for dominion as sufficient grounds for war, and to measure the greatest glory by the size of the greatest empire" and so on, which I need not quote in full here. This hunger for power disturbs and consumes the human race with terrible suffering. Rome herself was conquered by it even as she conquered Alba, and she praised her own crime by calling it glory. For, as our Scriptures say, "the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and blesseth the covetous, whom the Lord abhorreth" (Ps 10:3). Away, then, with these deceptive masks and these whitewashed illusions, so that things may be seen and judged as they truly are. Let no one tell me that this man or that was "great" because he fought and conquered such and such an enemy. Gladiators fight and conquer, and even that brutality earns its share of praise; but I think it far better to accept whatever comes from idleness than to seek the glory won by such means. Consider: if two gladiators entered the arena to fight, one a father and the other his son, who could bear to watch such a spectacle? Who would not be sickened by it? How, then, could a war be called glorious when a daughter-state took up arms against its own mother? Does it change anything that the battlefield was not an arena, that the wide plains were strewn not with the bodies of two gladiators but with the dead of two nations, the finest men of each, and that those contests were witnessed not by an amphitheatre but by the whole world, furnishing a profane spectacle both to those alive at the time and to every generation since, as long as the memory of it endures?

Yet those gods, guardians of the Roman empire and theatrical spectators of such contests, were not satisfied until the sister of the Horatii was added by her brother's sword as a third victim from the Roman side, so that Rome herself, though she won the day, had as many deaths to mourn. Afterwards, as a fruit of that victory, Alba was destroyed, even though it was there that the Trojan gods had established their third refuge after Ilium was sacked by the Greeks and after they had left Lavinium, where Aeneas had founded a kingdom in a land of exile. But Alba was probably destroyed because the gods had migrated from it too, in their usual fashion, as Virgil says:

"Gone from each fane, each sacred shrine,

Are those who made this realm divine."

Gone, indeed, and from what was now their third refuge, so that Rome might seem all the wiser for entrusting herself to gods who had already abandoned three other cities. Alba, whose king Amulius had banished his own brother, displeased them; Rome, whose king Romulus had killed his brother, pleased them. But before Alba was destroyed, its population was, by some accounts, merged with the inhabitants of Rome, making the two cities one. Even granting that this is true, the fact remains that the city of Ascanius, the third retreat of the Trojan gods, was destroyed by its own daughter-city. Beyond that, to bring about this sorry amalgamation of war's survivors, much blood was shed on both sides. And how can I begin to describe in detail those same wars, so often renewed under later kings, though they appeared to have been settled by great victories; wars that were repeatedly ended by massive slaughter, only to be started again by the descendants of those who had made peace and signed treaties? We have no small proof of how calamitous this history was in the simple fact that no subsequent king ever closed the gates of war. And so, for all their guardian gods, not one of those kings ever reigned in peace.

What became of the kings themselves? A flattering legend tells us that Romulus was taken up into heaven. But certain Roman historians report that he was torn apart by the senate because of his brutality, and that a man named Julius Proculus was paid to claim that Romulus had appeared to him and, through him, commanded the Roman people to worship him as a god. In this way, the people, who were beginning to resent what the senate had done, were calmed and pacified. A solar eclipse had also occurred around that time, and the ignorant masses attributed it to the divine power of Romulus, not knowing that it was caused by the fixed laws of the sun's movement. Yet that darkening of the sun might more reasonably have been taken as evidence that Romulus had been murdered, with the loss of sunlight serving as a sign of the crime, much as it truly was when the Lord was crucified through the cruelty and impiety of the Jews. We have sufficient proof that this latter darkening of the sun did not follow the natural laws of the heavenly bodies, because it occurred during the Jewish Passover, which falls only at the full moon, while natural solar eclipses happen only at the new moon. Cicero, too, makes it clear enough that the deification of Romulus was imaginary rather than real. Even while praising him through the voice of Scipio in the *De Republica*, he writes: "Such a reputation had he acquired, that when he suddenly disappeared during an eclipse of the sun, he was supposed to have been taken up among the gods, which could be supposed of no mortal who had not the highest reputation for virtue." The phrase "he suddenly disappeared" suggests that he was secretly done away with, either by the violence of a storm or by murder. Other writers speak not only of an eclipse but also of a sudden storm, which either provided cover for the crime or was itself the cause of Romulus's death. As for Tullus Hostilius, the third king of Rome, who was himself struck down by lightning, Cicero says in the same book that "he was not supposed to have been deified by this death, possibly because the Romans were unwilling to cheapen the honor they believed or had been persuaded was granted to Romulus, lest they bring it into contempt by handing it out freely to everyone." In one of his speeches, Cicero also says plainly: "The founder of this city, Romulus, we have raised to immortality and divinity by generously celebrating his services," implying that his deification was not real but merely a matter of reputation, a title given out of respect for his virtues. In the dialogue *Hortensius*, while discussing regular solar eclipses, he says that they "produce the same darkness as covered the death of Romulus, which happened during an eclipse of the sun." Notice that he has no hesitation at all in speaking of Romulus's "death," for Cicero was more of a reasoner than a flatterer.

Consider also the other kings of Rome. With the exception of Numa Pompilius and Ancus Marcius, who died peacefully, their ends were uniformly terrible. Tullus Hostilius, who conquered and destroyed Alba, was, as I mentioned, struck down by lightning along with his entire household. Priscus Tarquinius was assassinated by the sons of his predecessor. Servius Tullius was brutally murdered by his own son-in-law, Tarquinius Superbus, who then seized the throne. And yet this outrageous act of murder against Rome's finest king did nothing to drive away those gods who were supposedly so offended by Paris's adultery that they abandoned Troy to Greek fire and steel. On the contrary, the very man who committed the murder was permitted to succeed the father-in-law he had killed. This notorious parricide, having secured his reign through bloodshed, was then allowed to triumph in numerous wars and to build the Capitol from the spoils, while the gods stayed put, lending their support and permitting their king Jupiter to preside over them in that magnificent building, the work of a murderer. He did not build the Capitol during some earlier period of innocence, only to be punished for later crimes; he won the reign in which he built it through an act of monstrous violence. When he was eventually driven out by the Romans and barred from the city, it was not for his own crimes but for his son's assault on Lucretia, an act committed not only without his knowledge but during his absence. At the time, he was besieging Ardea, fighting on Rome's behalf, and we cannot know what he would have done had he learned of his son's crime. Even so, without his opinion being sought or established, the people stripped him of his crown. When he returned to Rome with his army, the troops were admitted but he was turned away, abandoned by his soldiers, with the gates shut in his face. He then appealed to neighboring states and tormented the Romans with a series of costly but unsuccessful wars. When the ally on whom he most depended finally deserted him and he gave up all hope of reclaiming the throne, he reportedly spent fourteen quiet years in retirement at Tusculum, a Roman town, growing old alongside his wife and dying in the end far more peacefully than his father-in-law, who had been killed by his own son-in-law with, if the reports are true, his own daughter's encouragement. The Romans did not call this Tarquin "the Cruel" or "the Infamous" but "the Proud," perhaps because his arrogance offended their own. They thought so little of his having murdered their greatest king, his own father-in-law, that they made him king themselves. One might reasonably ask whether it was not even more shameful on their part to reward so generously a man guilty of so grave a crime. And still there was no talk of the gods abandoning their altars, unless someone wishes to argue in the gods' defense that they remained in Rome not to help and protect the Romans but to punish them, luring them with hollow victories and grinding them down with brutal wars. Such was Roman life under the kings during that much-celebrated era of the state, stretching across 243 years to the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus. All those victories, purchased at such enormous cost in blood and suffering, had pushed Rome's dominion barely twenty miles beyond the city walls, a territory that would not have compared favorably even with the smallest Gaetulian state.

To this period we should add what Sallust describes as a time of justice and moderation, when the threat of Tarquin and a war with Etruria still loomed over Rome. As long as the Etruscans supported Tarquin's efforts to reclaim the throne, Rome was torn apart by brutal conflict. Sallust's point, then, is that the state was governed with justice and moderation not because of any genuine commitment to fairness, but because fear kept it in check. And even within this brief window of relative stability, what a disastrous year it was when the consulship was first established and the monarchy abolished. The first consuls didn't even complete their term. Junius Brutus stripped his colleague Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus of his office and drove him into exile; then, not long after, Brutus himself fell in battle, killing his enemy and being killed in the same moment. This came after he had already put to death his own sons and his brothers-in-law, having discovered they were plotting to restore Tarquin to power. It is this act that Virgil can barely bring himself to record, even as he seems to praise it. When he writes,

"And call his own rebellious seed

For menaced liberty to bleed,"

Virgil immediately pulls back with:

"Unhappy father! however

The deed be judged by after days;"

In other words, let posterity decide what to make of it; let them praise and celebrate the father who executed his own sons. He remains, for all that, a man to be pitied. Virgil then adds what reads almost like a consolation for so wretched a figure:

"His country's love shall all overbear,

And unextinguished thirst of praise."

In the tragic end of Brutus, who killed his own sons and yet could not outlive his enemy Tarquin's son, while being outlived by Tarquin the elder himself, doesn't the innocence of his colleague Collatinus seem vindicated? Collatinus was a good citizen who suffered the same punishment as the tyrant Tarquin when that tyrant was banished, and his only crime was bearing not just the blood but the very name of Tarquin. Brutus himself, after all, was reportedly a relative of Tarquin. The fitting penalty for Collatinus would have been to change his name, not lose his country; to shorten it and be known simply as L. Collatinus. Instead, he was not asked to give up something he could have surrendered without real harm. He was stripped of the honor of the first consulship and driven from the land he loved. Is this, then, the glory of Brutus? This injustice, equally contemptible and useless to the republic? Was it for this that he was driven by his country's love and his unquenchable hunger for praise?

When the tyrant Tarquin was expelled, L. Tarquinius Collatinus, the husband of Lucretia, was made consul alongside Brutus. How rightly the people acted, in judging a citizen by his character rather than his name. How wrongly Brutus acted, in stripping his colleague in that new office of both honor and homeland, when he could simply have stripped him of his name, if the name offended him so deeply. These were the troubles, these were the disasters, that unfolded when the government was supposedly ordered with justice and moderation. Lucretius, who succeeded Brutus, was carried off by illness before that same year was out. Then P. Valerius, who succeeded Collatinus, and M. Horatius, who filled the vacancy left by the death of Lucretius, completed that grim and mournful year, which saw no fewer than five consuls. Such was the year in which the Roman republic launched the new honor and office of the consulship.

After this, as fears gradually subsided (not because the wars ended, but because they became less intense), the period that Sallust described as one of justice and moderation came to a close. What followed, he sketches briefly: "Then the patricians began to oppress the people like slaves, condemning them to death or flogging as the kings had done, driving them from their land, and tyrannizing over those who had nothing left to lose. The people, crushed by these abuses and above all by usury, and forced to contribute both money and military service to endless wars, finally took up arms and withdrew to the Aventine and Sacred Hills, where they secured for themselves tribunes and protective laws. But it was only the second Punic War that finally ended the discord and strife on both sides." Why should I spend time writing all this, or ask others to spend time reading it? Let Sallust's brief summary stand as a testament to the misery of the republic throughout that long stretch leading up to the second Punic War: constantly battered from outside by unrelenting wars, and torn apart from within by civil unrest and faction. Those victories they boast of were not the genuine joys of a happy people, but the hollow consolations of a miserable one, and dangerous temptations that drew restless men into piling disaster upon disaster. Let the good and thoughtful Romans not be offended by this observation, though in truth we need neither fear nor provoke their anger, since we are confident they will feel none. We speak no more harshly than their own historians do, and with far less rhetorical force; yet those historians are read eagerly and assigned to their children as required study. But those who might be angry with us: what would they do if I said what Sallust himself says? "Frequent riots, seditions, and finally civil wars became commonplace, while a handful of powerful men on whom the masses depended pursued supreme power under the respectable pretense of serving the senate and the people. Citizens were judged good or bad not by their loyalty to the republic (since all were equally corrupt), but by their wealth and dangerous influence; those who upheld the existing order were considered good citizens." Now, if those historians believed that honest writing required them not to stay silent about the flaws of their own state (which they praised loudly in many places, unaware of that other and true city where citizenship carries eternal dignity), what should we do? Our freedom to speak should be far greater, since our hope in God is stronger and more certain. And yet our critics blame our Christ for the calamities of this age, hoping to turn the less informed and more vulnerable away from the only city where eternal and blessed life can be found. We say nothing more damning about their gods than their own authors do, the very authors they read and circulate. Everything we have said here we have drawn from those sources, and there is much more of an even darker kind that we have chosen not to say.

Where, then, were those gods who are supposedly worth worshipping for the thin and deceptive prosperity they offer in this world, when the Romans, seduced into their service by lies, were suffering such disasters? Where were they when the consul Valerius was killed while defending the Capitol, which had been set on fire by exiles and slaves? He was better able to defend Jupiter's temple himself than that whole crowd of divinities, along with their great and mighty king, whose temple he had rushed to protect, were able to defend him. Where were they when the city, exhausted by endless civil unrest, was waiting in an uneasy calm for the return of ambassadors sent to Athens to study their laws, and was meanwhile being devastated by terrible famine and plague? Where were they when the people, once again crushed by famine, appointed a market prefect for the first time; and when Spurius Melius, who had been distributing grain to the starving population as the famine worsened, was accused of aiming at kingship and, at the urging of this same prefect and on the authority of the elderly dictator L. Quintius, was executed by the master of the horse Quintus Servilius, an event that sparked a serious and dangerous uprising? Where were they when a particularly severe plague struck Rome, prompting the people, after long and exhausting and utterly fruitless prayers to their powerless gods, to introduce the practice of Lectisternia, something never done before: they set out couches in honor of the gods, which is how this sacred rite, or rather this act of sacrilege, got its name? Where were they during ten consecutive years of military failure, when the Roman army suffered repeated and heavy losses against the Veians, and would have been completely destroyed had it not been for Furius Camillus, who was later banished by the very country he had saved? Where were they when the Gauls captured, looted, burned, and laid waste to Rome? Where were they when that notorious plague caused such destruction, during which Furius Camillus himself died, the man who had first defended an ungrateful republic against the Veians and then rescued it from the Gauls? And during that same plague, they introduced a new infection in the form of theatrical entertainments, which spread a far more deadly contagion, not to the bodies, but to the moral character of the Romans. Where were they when yet another terrible plague struck the city, by which I mean the poisonings attributed to a staggering number of noble Roman women, whose characters were corrupted by a sickness more deadly than any epidemic? Or when both consuls, leading their army, were trapped by the Samnites at the Caudine Forks and forced into a humiliating treaty, with 600 Roman knights held as hostages, while the troops, stripped of their weapons and everything else, were made to pass under the yoke with nothing but a single garment each? Or when, in the middle of a serious plague, lightning struck the Roman camp and killed many soldiers? Or when Rome, driven by the force of yet another unbearable epidemic, was compelled to send to Epidaurus for Aesculapius as a god of medicine, since Jupiter's frequent adulteries in his youth had perhaps left this king of all gods, who had reigned so long on the Capitol, no time to study the healing arts? Or when the Lucanians, Brutians, Samnites, Tuscans, and Senonian Gauls all conspired against Rome at once, first killing her ambassadors, then routing an army under the praetor and putting 13,000 men to the sword, along with the commander and seven tribunes? Or when the people, after prolonged and serious unrest in Rome, finally plundered the city and withdrew to the Janiculum, a crisis so severe that Hortensius was appointed dictator, an office reserved only for the most extreme emergencies; and he, having brought the people back, died while still holding that office, something that had never happened to any dictator before, and which was a disgrace to those gods who now counted Aesculapius among their number?

At that time, so many wars were being fought simultaneously that, due to a shortage of soldiers, Rome began drafting the *proletarii* into military service. These men had earned that name precisely because they were too poor to equip themselves for war, and so had little to do but father children. Pyrrhus, king of Greece and a figure of enormous reputation at the time, was invited by the Tarentines to take up arms against Rome. When he consulted Apollo about the outcome of his campaign, the god responded with a cleverly ambiguous oracle, designed so that whichever side won, Apollo could still claim to have prophesied correctly. The oracle was worded so carefully that whether Pyrrhus defeated the Romans or the Romans defeated Pyrrhus, the god could sit back and wait for the result without any risk to his divine credibility. What followed were horrific losses on both sides. Pyrrhus emerged victorious from the first engagement and might have declared Apollo a true prophet, at least by his own reading of the oracle, had the Romans not won the next battle. And while these devastating wars ground on, a terrible disease struck the women of Rome. Pregnant women were dying before they could give birth. Aesculapius, I imagine, excused himself on the grounds that he was a physician, not a midwife. Cattle were dying in similar numbers, leading people to fear that the entire animal kingdom was headed for extinction. Then there was that notorious winter, when the cold was so extreme that deep snow blanketed the Forum for forty consecutive days and the Tiber itself froze solid. Had anything like that happened in our own time, we would never have heard the end of it from our critics. And what of that great plague that raged for so long and claimed so many lives? Despite every remedy Aesculapius had to offer, it only worsened in its second year, until the authorities finally turned to the Sibylline books, a kind of oracle that, as Cicero notes in his *De Divinatione*, derives whatever meaning it has entirely from its interpreters, who make uncertain guesses as best they can, or as suits their purposes. On this occasion, the cause of the plague was declared to be that so many temples had been converted into private residences. This conveniently allowed Aesculapius to escape any charge of negligence or incompetence. But why had so many people been permitted to occupy sacred buildings in the first place, without anyone intervening? Surely because prayers had been addressed for so long, and so fruitlessly, to such a vast crowd of gods that the sacred sites had gradually been abandoned by worshippers, and once empty, were put to at least some practical human use. The temples that were laboriously identified and restored at that time in hopes of ending the plague later fell back into neglect and were once again turned to the same secular purposes. Had they not faded into such obscurity, Varro could never have cited so many forgotten sacred sites in his work on the subject as evidence of his remarkable learning. In the end, restoring the temples did nothing to cure the plague; it only gave the gods a convenient excuse.

During the Punic Wars, when victory hung in the balance between two great powers for so long, when two mighty nations were pouring every resource and every ounce of strength into destroying each other, consider what was lost along the way: smaller kingdoms crushed, large and flourishing cities demolished, entire states overwhelmed and ruined, vast stretches of land near and far left desolate. The victors on both sides were themselves defeated time and again. Countless men, soldiers and civilians alike, were killed. Enormous fleets were crippled in battle or swallowed by the sea in every kind of maritime disaster. To recount all of these calamities in detail would be to write a full history of the period. Rome, deeply shaken, turned to desperate and frankly absurd remedies. On the authority of the Sibylline books, the secular games were revived; they had been established a century earlier but had quietly faded from memory during more peaceful times. The pontiffs also restored the games consecrated to the gods of the underworld, which had similarly fallen into disuse during better days. And no wonder they had been neglected: when they were finally renewed, the sheer abundance of dying men gave the underworld cause to celebrate its sudden wealth and indulge in festivity. The savage wars, the ruinous conflicts, the bloody victories shifting from one side to the other, however catastrophic for human beings, provided the demons with rich entertainment and a lavish feast. Yet even within all this devastation, nothing in the first Punic War proved more disastrous than the Roman defeat in which Regulus was captured. We mentioned him in the two preceding books as an unquestionably great man who had previously conquered and subdued the Carthaginians, and who might well have ended the first Punic War entirely, had an excessive hunger for praise and glory not driven him to impose conditions on the exhausted Carthaginians that were simply too harsh to accept. If the shocking and unexpected captivity of this man, his degrading imprisonment, his unwavering fidelity to his oath, and his extraordinarily cruel death do not bring a blush to the faces of the gods, then those gods are truly shameless and without feeling.

At that same time, the city itself was suffering from disasters of its own. The Tiber flooded with extraordinary force, destroying nearly all the lower districts. Some buildings were swept away by the rushing current; others were left to rot where they stood, waterlogged long after the flood had receded. This catastrophe was followed by a fire even more destructive, which consumed several of the taller buildings around the Forum and spared not even the Temple of Vesta itself, where virgins chosen for this honor (or rather, this burden) had been tasked with keeping the sacred flame alive by feeding it endlessly with fresh fuel. But on this occasion, the fire was not content to be tended. It raged out of control. The virgins, terrified by its ferocity, were unable to save those fateful images that had already brought ruin on three cities foolish enough to receive them. Metellus the priest, throwing caution aside, rushed into the inferno and rescued the sacred objects, though he was half-burned in the process. Either the fire did not recognize him, or the goddess of fire was simply absent, since any goddess of fire worth the title would hardly have fled from flames. What this episode reveals is striking: a mortal man was able to do more for Vesta than she could do for him. And if these gods could not protect themselves from fire, what possible help could they offer the state they were supposedly guarding against flood and flame? The facts speak for themselves: they were useless.

Our objections here would carry no weight if our opponents argued that their idols are consecrated as symbols of eternal realities rather than as guarantors of earthly blessings, and that therefore, even if the symbols perished (as all material and visible things eventually do), no harm came to the eternal truths they represented, while the images themselves could simply be remade and returned to their former purpose. But instead, these people labor under a tragic blindness, believing that through the intervention of perishable gods, the earthly welfare and temporal prosperity of the state can somehow be kept safe from ruin. And so, when they are reminded that this very welfare and prosperity crumbled even while the gods were still present among them, they have the grace to blush, but not the courage to abandon a position they cannot defend.

The disasters of the second Punic war are almost too numerous to recount, given how long and unpredictable that conflict was. Even writers whose primary aim was not to narrate the wars but to celebrate Rome's greatness have admitted that the victorious people looked less like conquerors than like the conquered. When Hannibal swept out of Spain, crossed the Pyrenees, swept through Gaul, forced his way through the Alps, and all along the way grew stronger by plundering and subjugating everything in his path, he flooded into Italy like a burst dam. The wars that followed were soaked in blood, and the fighting never stopped. How many times were the Romans defeated? How many towns defected to the enemy, and how many were captured and crushed? How terrible those battles were, and how often did Roman losses only add to Hannibal's glory? And what can one say about the catastrophic defeat at Cannae, where even Hannibal, ruthless as he was, finally had his fill of his enemies' blood and ordered that survivors be spared? From that battlefield he sent three bushels of gold rings back to Carthage, a gesture meant to show how much of Rome's nobility had fallen that day: the losses were easier to measure by volume than to count by number. The slaughter of the common soldiers, whose bodies lay in anonymous heaps, was so vast that it could only be estimated, never accurately tallied. After this, Rome faced such a desperate shortage of fighting men that the state pressed criminals into service with promises of amnesty and bought slaves with the promise of freedom, building an army not so much from recruits as from the dregs of society. But these slaves, or rather these newly freed men who were now being asked to fight for the Roman republic, had no weapons. So the Romans took arms from the temples, as if saying to their gods: Put down those weapons you have held so long to no effect, and perhaps our slaves will manage to use them better than you, our gods, ever could. At that same time, the public treasury was so depleted that it could no longer pay the soldiers, and private wealth had to fill the gap. Citizens gave so generously that no senator, let alone anyone of lower rank, kept any gold for himself beyond the ring and the bulla he wore as the bare token of his status. Now, if Romans today were reduced to that same poverty, who could bear their complaints, barely tolerable as those complaints already are, when more money is spent on stage performers for the sake of idle entertainment than was ever paid out to the legions in those desperate days?

Among all the disasters of the Second Punic War, none was more heartbreaking or more deserving of outrage than the fate of the Saguntines. This Spanish city, deeply loyal to Rome, was destroyed precisely because of that loyalty. When Hannibal broke his treaty with the Romans, he went looking for a pretext to provoke them into war, and so he launched a fierce assault on Saguntum. News of the attack reached Rome, and ambassadors were dispatched to Hannibal demanding he lift the siege. When he ignored them, they traveled on to Carthage, lodged a formal complaint about the broken treaty, and returned to Rome having accomplished nothing. Meanwhile the siege continued, and within eight or nine months this prosperous, ill-fated city, beloved by both its own people and by Rome, was taken and subjected to treatment that is horrifying to read about, let alone describe. Yet because it speaks directly to the matter at hand, I will touch on it briefly. First, famine reduced the Saguntines to such desperation that some reportedly ate human corpses. Then, utterly exhausted and determined to avoid the humiliation of falling into Hannibal's hands, they publicly built an enormous funeral pyre and threw themselves into the flames, while simultaneously killing their children and themselves with the sword. And what did the gods do? These gluttons and pleasure-seekers, whose mouths water at rich sacrifices and whose lips pour out false prophecies: could they do nothing in a moment like this? Could they not act to preserve a city that was a close ally of the Roman people, or at least prevent it from being destroyed for honoring the very alliance these gods had supposedly witnessed and guaranteed? Saguntum kept faith with the treaty it had sworn before these gods, binding itself firmly by oath, and was besieged, captured, and annihilated by a man who had broken his own oath. Later, when Hannibal stood at the very walls of Rome, it was supposedly the gods who frightened him off with lightning and storms. Why, I ask, did they not intervene before that? I will say plainly: that display of divine power through the storm would have been far more honorably directed toward defending Rome's allies, who were in danger precisely because they refused to betray Rome and had no resources of their own to draw on, than toward defending the Romans themselves, who were fighting for their own survival and had ample means to resist Hannibal. If these gods had truly been the guardians of Roman prosperity and honor, they would have protected that honor from the stain of the Saguntine catastrophe. It is absurd to believe that Rome was saved from Hannibal by the protective care of gods who could not save Saguntum from being destroyed for its faithfulness to Rome. If the people of Saguntum had been Christians suffering as they did for the Christian faith (though, of course, Christians would not have turned fire and sword on themselves), they would have endured it with the hope that comes from faith in Christ: not the hope of a brief earthly reward, but of unending and eternal life. What, then, can the defenders and apologists of these gods possibly say in their defense, when confronted with the blood of the Saguntines? After all, these gods are supposedly worshipped and invoked for the very purpose of securing prosperity in this brief and passing life. The only answer available is the same one offered in the case of Regulus's death. The two situations differ in scale, one involving a single man and the other an entire community, but the cause of destruction was identical in both cases: keeping their word. It was faithfulness to his oath that made Regulus willing to return to his enemies, and faithfulness to theirs that made the Saguntines unwilling to defect to theirs. Does keeping faith, then, provoke the gods to anger? Or is it possible that not only individuals but entire communities can perish while the gods look on with favor? Let our opponents choose whichever option they prefer. If the gods are angered by faithfulness, then let them recruit oath-breakers as their worshippers. If, on the other hand, people and nations can suffer terrible calamities and ultimately perish even while enjoying divine favor, then worshipping these gods does not actually produce happiness. Those who assume they have fallen into misfortune because traditional religious worship has been set aside should therefore put aside their resentment, because even if the gods had not only remained with them but actively favored them, they might still find themselves mourning a wretched fate, or might, like Regulus and the Saguntines, be horribly tormented and finally perish in misery.

Passing over many things to keep within the scope of this work, I turn to the period between the Second and Third Punic Wars, which Sallust describes as the time when Romans lived with the greatest virtue and unity. Yet during this very era of supposed virtue and harmony, the great Scipio, liberator of Rome and Italy, was driven into exile. He had brought the Second Punic War to a close with remarkable skill, that horrifying, destructive, and desperately dangerous conflict; he had defeated Hannibal, subdued Carthage, and reportedly devoted his entire life to the gods, spending much of it in their temples. After all of this, he was forced to yield to the accusations of his enemies and abandon the country his courage had saved and freed, spending his final days in the town of Liternum. So indifferent was he to any prospect of recall that he reportedly left instructions for his remains not to be buried in the ungrateful land he had once defended. It was also during this period that the proconsul Gnaeus Manlius, after conquering the Galatians, brought the luxury of Asia back to Rome, a corruption more destructive than any enemy army. Iron bedsteads and expensive carpets made their first appearance then; female singers were introduced at banquets, and other licentious indulgences followed close behind. For now, though, I intend to speak not of the evils people choose for themselves, but of those they suffer against their will. The case of Scipio, who was broken by his enemies and died in exile from the very country he had rescued, is directly relevant here: this was the reward he received from those Roman gods whose temples he had saved from Hannibal, gods who are worshipped solely for the sake of securing earthly happiness. But since Sallust, as we have seen, declares that Roman morals were never better than during this period, I thought it worth noting the Asiatic luxury that crept in at the same time, so that the reader can see his claim is only true in a relative sense, when that era is compared to others in which morals were clearly worse and factional violence more intense. For it was during this very interval, between the Second and Third Punic Wars, that the notorious Lex Voconia was passed, which prohibited a man from naming a woman as his heir, even if she was his only daughter. I struggle to imagine a more unjust law than that. It is true that in the years between these two Punic Wars, Rome's misery was somewhat reduced. Abroad, her armies were worn down by war but consoled by victories; at home, the disturbances were not as severe as in other periods. But once the Third Punic War ended in the complete destruction of Rome's great rival, which fell quickly to the other Scipio (who thereby earned the surname Africanus), the Roman republic was overwhelmed by a flood of evils that grew directly from the corrupt habits bred by prosperity and security. The sudden fall of Carthage, it turns out, damaged Rome more seriously than all those years of Carthaginian hostility combined. Through the entire period that followed, down to the time of Caesar Augustus, who appears to have stripped the Romans of their liberty entirely (a liberty that, by their own reckoning, was no longer glorious but filled with strife and danger, and had by then grown weak and listless), who brought everything back under the will of a single ruler and breathed new life into the republic's ailing old age, inaugurating a fresh order of things: throughout all of that long stretch, I say, Rome suffered many military disasters on various occasions, all of which I pass over here. One episode stands out in particular, the treaty of Numantia, stained as it was with profound disgrace. The sacred chickens, we are told, flew out of their cage and thereby foretold disaster for the consul Mancinus, as though, during all those years in which that small city of Numantia had held out against Rome's besieging armies and become a source of dread to the republic, every other general who had marched against it had done so under favorable auspices.

These things I pass over in silence, but I cannot stay silent about the order given by Mithridates, king of Asia, commanding that on a single day all Roman citizens living anywhere in Asia (where great numbers of them were conducting private business) should be put to death. And the order was carried out. What a wretched spectacle that must have been, when men were suddenly and treacherously murdered wherever they happened to be: in the field or on the road, in the town, in their own homes, in the street, in the marketplace or the temple, in bed or at the dinner table. Consider the groans of the dying, the tears of those who watched, and even of the killers themselves. What a terrible position those hosts were forced into, compelled not only to witness these horrific slaughters in their own houses, but to carry them out with their own hands, suddenly shifting from the warm familiarity of friendship to the brutal work of war, giving and receiving wounds in the midst of peace, the slain pierced in body, the slayer pierced in spirit. Had all these murdered people, then, ignored the auguries? Did they have no public or household gods to consult before they left their homes and set out on that fatal journey? If they didn't, then our opponents have no grounds to complain about the Christian era on this particular point, since the Romans had long since dismissed auguries as worthless. If, on the other hand, they did consult the omens, let our opponents tell us what good it did them, even in a time when such practices were not forbidden but actively sanctioned by human law, if not by divine.

Let me now turn, as briefly as I can, to those disasters that were even more distressing precisely because they struck so close to home: the internal conflicts that are mistakenly called "civil" wars, since they tore apart the very society they were named after. These seditions had grown into full-scale urban warfare, with blood flowing freely and factions turning not to argument and debate but to brute force and weapons. Consider the ocean of Roman blood that was spilled, and the ruin and devastation that swept across Italy through the social wars, the slave wars, and the civil wars. Before the Latins launched their social war against Rome, something deeply unsettling occurred: all the animals that served humanity, dogs, horses, asses, oxen, and every other creature under human dominion, suddenly turned wild. They forgot their domesticated natures, abandoned their stalls, roamed freely, and could not be safely approached by anyone, whether strangers or their own masters. If this was an omen, then what catastrophe must it have been pointing toward? And the plague that followed was itself a catastrophe, whether or not it carried any prophetic meaning. Had something like this happened in our own time, the pagans would have turned on us with more fury than their animals turned on them.

A good case can be made that the civil wars grew out of the seditions stirred up by the Gracchi over the agrarian laws, since they intended to distribute among the common people the lands that the nobility had wrongfully seized. Reforming an abuse so deeply entrenched was a dangerous undertaking, or rather, as events would prove, a fatal one. Consider the disasters that followed the death of the elder Gracchus, and the slaughter that came shortly after when his younger brother met the same end. Noble and commoner alike were cut down indiscriminately, not through any legal process or proper authority, but by mobs and armed rioters. After the death of the younger Gracchus, the consul Lucius Opimius, who had fought him within the city itself and defeated him, putting both him and his allies to the sword, went on to massacre many citizens, then convened a judicial inquiry into others, reportedly executing as many as 3,000 men. From this alone one can judge how many fell in the street violence, given that even a formal legal process produced results so drenched in blood. The man who killed Gracchus himself sold his head to the consul for its weight in gold, as had been agreed in advance. In that same massacre, Marcus Fulvius, a man of consular rank, was put to death along with all his children.

What a remarkable decree of the senate that was: a temple to Concord built on the very spot where that catastrophic uprising had taken place and so many citizens of every rank had been killed. The idea, I suppose, was that the monument to the Gracchi's punishment would catch the eye of those who passed by and keep the memory alive. But what was this if not mockery of the gods? They built a temple to a goddess who, had she actually been present in the city, would never have allowed it to be torn apart by such bitter conflict. Or perhaps the reasoning was that Concord bore responsibility for the bloodshed, having abandoned the minds of the citizens, and was therefore being imprisoned in that temple as punishment. If they had any concern for consistency, why didn't they build a temple to Discord on that site instead? Or is there some reason Concord qualifies as a goddess while Discord does not? Does Labeo's distinction apply here, the one where he would have made Concord a benevolent deity and Discord a malevolent one? That distinction seems to have been suggested to him simply by the fact that he observed at Rome a temple to Fever alongside one to Health. But by that same logic, Discord deserves to be deified just as much as Concord does. The Romans took a dangerous gamble in provoking so wicked a goddess and forgetting that the destruction of Troy had been caused by her taking offense. Furious at not being invited along with the other gods to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, she sowed conflict among three goddesses by introducing the golden apple, which set off a quarrel in heaven, gave victory to Venus, led to the abduction of Helen, and ended in the ruin of Troy. If she was perhaps already offended that the Romans had not seen fit to give her a temple among the other gods in their city, and had therefore thrown the state into such turmoil, how much more furious would she have been when she saw a temple to her rival erected on the very scene of that massacre, which is to say, on the scene of her own finest work? Those wise and learned men grow angry when we laugh at these absurdities, and yet, since they worship good and evil divinities alike, they cannot escape this dilemma regarding Concord and Discord: either they neglected the worship of these goddesses and gave preference to Fever and War, to whom shrines of considerable antiquity had been erected, or they did worship them, and Concord abandoned them anyway while Discord hurled them headlong into civil war.

Those who built the temple of Concord in sight of the public speakers' platform, as a monument to the punishment and death of the Gracchi, believed they were erecting a permanent barrier against civil unrest. How well that worked is made clear by the even more devastating wars that followed. Rather than being deterred by the fate of the Gracchi, later agitators tried to outdo them: Lucius Saturninus, a tribune of the people, Caius Servilius the praetor, and later Marcus Drusus all stirred up rebellions that first drew blood and then ignited the social wars, which left Italy badly damaged and reduced to a pitiful state of ruin and desolation. After that came the servile war and the civil wars, with battles so fierce and bloodshed so vast that nearly all the peoples of Italy, who formed the backbone of Roman power, were crushed as though they were foreign enemies. Even the historians struggle to convey how the servile war began with just a handful of men, certainly fewer than seventy gladiators; how enormous numbers of brutal and ruthless fighters rallied to their cause; how many Roman generals this force defeated; and how it ravaged entire regions and cities. Nor was that the only servile war: the province of Macedonia, and later Sicily and the coastlands, were also laid waste by bands of slaves. And who could possibly do justice to the full horror of the atrocities the pirates first committed, or the wars they subsequently waged against Rome?

But when Marius, stained with the blood of his fellow citizens whom factional rage had sacrificed, was himself defeated and driven from the city, Rome barely had time to catch its breath before, in Cicero's own words, "Cinna and Marius together returned and took possession of it. Then, indeed, the foremost men in the state were put to death, its lights extinguished." Sulla later avenged this brutal victory, though at a cost in lives and damage to the republic that hardly needs elaboration. As for that vengeance, which proved more destructive than if the original crimes had simply gone unpunished, Lucan writes: "The cure was excessive, and too closely resembled the disease. The guilty perished, but only when none but the guilty survived; and then private hatred and anger, no longer restrained by law, were given free rein." In the war between Marius and Sulla, beyond those who died on the battlefield, the city itself was filled with corpses in its streets, squares, markets, theatres, and temples, making it nearly impossible to determine whether the victors killed more before or after their victory, whether to secure it or to celebrate it. The moment Marius triumphed and returned from exile, slaughter broke out everywhere. The head of the consul Octavius was displayed on the rostrum; Caesar and Fimbria were assassinated in their own homes; the two Crassi, father and son, were killed in each other's sight; Bebius and Numitorius were torn apart by iron hooks; Catulus cheated his enemies by drinking poison; and Merula, the flamen of Jupiter, opened his veins and poured out his own blood as an offering to his god. Beyond all this, anyone whose greeting Marius failed to acknowledge by extending his hand was cut down on the spot, right before his eyes.

Sylla's victory followed, celebrated as revenge for the cruelties of Marius. Yet that victory came at an enormous cost in blood, and when the fighting ended, the hatred did not. The peace that followed was every bit as bloody as the war itself. To the earlier massacres carried out by the elder Marius, the younger Marius and Carbo, members of the same faction, added even greater horrors. As Sylla advanced and they lost hope not only of winning but of surviving, they began slaughtering indiscriminately, killing friends and enemies alike. Not content with soaking every corner of Rome in blood, they surrounded the senate and dragged senators out of the curia to their deaths as if it were a prison. Mucius Scaevola, the pontiff, was killed at the altar of Vesta, to which he had clung because no place in Rome was more sacred than her temple; his blood nearly extinguished the flame that the Vestal Virgins had tended without ceasing. Then Sylla entered the city in triumph, having already massacred seven thousand men in the Villa Publica, not in battle but by direct order. These men had surrendered and were unarmed, yet the fury of peace proved just as savage as the fury of war had been. Throughout the entire city, every one of Sylla's supporters killed whoever they pleased, and the death toll grew beyond counting, until someone pointed out to Sylla that he ought to let some people survive, or the victors would have no one left to rule. Only then was this wild, unchecked license to kill brought under control, and there was genuine relief when the proscription list was published, even though it carried the death sentences of two thousand men from the highest ranks of Roman society, both senatorial and equestrian. The sheer number was devastating, but at least a limit had been set; the grief over those condemned was somewhat eased by the knowledge that everyone else was now safe. Yet even that cold comfort could not silence the horror at the particular tortures inflicted on some of those who had been marked for death. One man was literally torn apart by the bare hands of his executioners, who treated a living human being more savagely than wild animals would treat an abandoned carcass. Another had his eyes gouged out and his limbs cut away piece by piece, and was forced to endure this agony not for a moment but for a prolonged stretch of time, dying slowly rather than living at all. Entire celebrated cities were auctioned off like farmland, and one was condemned to collective slaughter just as a single criminal might be condemned to death. All of this happened in peacetime, after the war was over, not to hasten victory but to ensure that victory, once won, would never be taken lightly. Peace competed with war in cruelty and surpassed it: war cut down armed soldiers, while peace killed the defenseless. War at least gave the man under attack the freedom to strike back if he could; peace offered the survivors not life, but a death they could not resist.

What foreign fury, what barbarian savagery, could possibly compare with the spectacle of citizens slaughtering citizens? Which was more catastrophic, more horrifying, more devastating to Rome: the recent Gothic invasion and the ancient Gallic one, or the cruelty that Marius, Sylla, and their followers unleashed on men who were their own countrymen? The Gauls, it's true, massacred every senator they found anywhere in the city outside the Capitol, which was the only part that held out against them. But even they were willing to sell safe passage to those sheltering on the Capitol, despite having the option to simply starve them into submission. The Goths, for their part, spared so many senators that the few they did kill seem almost anomalous. Sylla, however, while Marius was still alive, planted himself as conqueror in the very Capitol the Gauls had never violated, and from there issued his death warrants. When Marius fled into exile (though he would return more savage and bloodthirsty than before), Sylla went so far as to push through senate decrees ordering the execution and confiscation of property of countless citizens. Then, after Sylla's departure, what did the Marian faction consider sacred or worth protecting? They showed no mercy even to Mucius, a citizen, a senator, and a pontiff, who clung in desperate supplication to the very altar said to hold the destiny of Rome. And Sylla's final proscription list, to say nothing of the countless other massacres he orchestrated, sent more senators to their deaths than the Goths ever managed to plunder.

With what audacity, then, with what confidence, with what shamelessness, with what foolishness, or rather madness, do they refuse to blame their own gods for these disasters and instead lay the present calamities at the feet of our Christ! These bloody civil wars, which their own historians freely admitted were more devastating than any foreign conflict, and which were judged to be not merely catastrophic but utterly ruinous to the republic, began long before Christ ever came, each one spawning the next in a chain of unjustifiable causes. That chain ran from the wars of Marius and Sulla to those of Sertorius and Catiline (one of whom had been proscribed by Sulla, the other raised up by him); from there to the war of Lepidus and Catulus (one wanting to undo Sulla's legacy, the other to preserve it); and from there to the war of Pompey and Caesar, in which Pompey had once been Sulla's ally and had risen to a power equal to or even greater than his patron's, while Caesar resented that power precisely because it wasn't his own, and then surpassed it once Pompey was defeated and killed. From Caesar, the chain of civil wars stretched to the second Caesar, later known as Augustus, in whose reign Christ was born. Augustus himself waged numerous civil wars, and in those conflicts many of Rome's greatest figures perished, among them Cicero, that shrewd and tireless servant of the republic. Gaius Julius Caesar, after defeating Pompey, exercised his victory with notable restraint, sparing his opponents and granting them both their lives and their honors. Yet he was suspected of reaching for a crown, and was assassinated in the senate house by a group of noble senators who had conspired together in the name of republican liberty. His power was then coveted by Antony, a man of an entirely different character: corrupt and degraded by every kind of vice, and vigorously opposed by Cicero on the same grounds of defending the republic's freedom. It was at this moment that the other Caesar, the adopted son of Gaius and later known, as I mentioned, as Augustus, made his entrance as a young man of extraordinary ability. Cicero threw his support behind this young Caesar, hoping his influence would counteract Antony's; he believed Caesar would crush and destroy Antony's power and restore a free state. How blind Cicero was, how utterly unaware of what was coming: the very young man whose rise he was nurturing allowed Cicero to be killed as the price of his alliance with Antony, and then subjected to his own rule the very liberty of the republic that Cicero had spent so many speeches defending.

Let those who feel no gratitude toward Christ for His great gifts go ahead and blame their own gods for these heavy disasters. When those disasters struck, after all, the altars of the gods were burning bright, the air was thick with the scent of Sabaean incense and fresh garlands, the priests were honored, the shrines were kept in splendor, and sacrifices, games, and sacred rituals filled the temples, all while the blood of citizens was being shed freely, not only in distant places but right beside those very altars. Cicero himself refused to seek sanctuary in a temple, because Mucius had tried that and it had done him no good. And yet the people who most shamelessly attack this Christian era are the very ones who either fled to places dedicated to Christ for their own protection, or were brought there by the barbarians so they could be kept safe. I won't rehearse all the examples I've already cited, nor pile on the many others that would take too long to list. But I am convinced of this one thing, and any fair-minded person will readily agree: if the human race had embraced Christianity before the Punic Wars, and if those same devastating calamities that those wars brought upon Europe and Africa had followed Christianity's arrival, every one of our current accusers would have laid the blame squarely on our religion. How unbearable their accusations would have been, at least where Rome is concerned, if Christianity had been established and widespread before the Gauls invaded, or before the catastrophic floods and fires that ravaged Rome, or before those most ruinous of all events, the civil wars. And those other disasters, so strange in character that they were counted as omens: if they had occurred after the rise of Christianity, who else but the Christians would have been blamed? I'm not referring to things that were more astonishing than harmful, such as oxen that supposedly spoke, unborn children said to have uttered words in the womb, serpents seen flying, or hens and women reported to have changed sex. These things, whether true or invented, appear not in works of mythology but in historical records, and they disturb the imagination without causing real harm. But when it rained earth, when it rained chalk, when it rained actual stones (not hailstones, but real stones), that was something capable of causing serious damage. We read in their own books that the fires of Etna, pouring down from the mountain's summit to the shore below, caused the sea itself to boil, burning up rocks and melting the pitch from ships' hulls, a phenomenon as astonishing as it was destructive. The same volcanic fury, they tell us, on another occasion buried Sicily in ash so thick that the houses of Catina were crushed and swallowed under it, a catastrophe that moved the Romans to pity and led them to cancel the city's tribute for that year. One can also read that Africa, by then a Roman province, was struck by a staggering swarm of locusts that stripped the fruit and leaves from every tree before being swept out to sea in one vast, immeasurable cloud. When they drowned and washed ashore, the rotting mass poisoned the air and produced a pestilence so severe that in the kingdom of Masinissa alone, 800,000 people are said to have died, with far greater numbers perishing in the surrounding regions. At Utica, we are told, of 30,000 soldiers then stationed there, only ten survived. And yet, if any of these catastrophes were to happen today, which of them would our thoughtless accusers fail to pin on the Christian religion? We are compelled to answer them, and still they attribute none of these ancient horrors to their own gods, even though they claim to worship those gods precisely to escape lesser versions of the same misfortunes, never stopping to notice that the people who worshipped those gods in former times were not spared from disasters far worse.