|
After the death of Joshua the son of Nun, the people of God had
judges, in whose times they were alternately humbled by afflictions on
account of their sins, and consoled by prosperity through the
compassion of God. In those times were invented the fables about
Triptolemus, who, at the command of Ceres, borne by winged snakes,
bestowed corn on the needy lands in flying over them; about that beast
the Minotaur, which was shut up in the Labyrinth, from which men who
entered its inextricable mazes could find no exit; about the
Centaurs, whose form was a compound of horse and man; about
Cerberus, the three-headed dog of hell; about Phryxus and his
sister Hellas, who fled, borne by a winged ram; about the Gorgon,
whose hair was composed of serpents, and who turned those who looked on
her into stone; about Bellerophon, who was carried by a winged horse
called Pegasus; about Amphion, who charmed and attracted the stones
by the sweetness of his harp; about the artificer Daedalus and his son
Icarus, who flew on wings they had fitted on; about OEdipus, who
compelled a certain four-footed monster with a human face, called a
sphynx, to destroy herself by casting herself headlong, having solved
the riddle she was wont to propose as insoluble; about Antaeus, who
was the son of the earth, for which reason, on falling on the earth,
he was wont to rise up stronger, whom Hercules slew; and perhaps
there are others which I have forgotten. These fables, easily found
in histories containing a true account of events, bring us down to the
Trojan war, at which Marcus Varro has closed his second book about
the race of the Roman people; and they are so skillfully invented by
men as to involve no scandal to the gods. But whoever have pretended
as to Jupiter's rape of Ganymede, a very beautiful boy, that king
Tantalus committed the crime, and the fable ascribed it to Jupiter;
or as to his impregnating Dan e as a golden shower, that it means that
the woman's virtue was corrupted by gold: whether these things were
really done or only fabled in those days, or were really done by others
and falsely ascribed to Jupiter, it is impossible to tell how much
wickedness must have been taken for granted in men's hearts that they
should be thought able to listen to such lies with patience. And yet
they willingly accepted them, when, indeed, the more devotedly they
worshipped Jupiter, they ought the more severely to have punished
those who durst say such things of him. But they not only were not
angry at those who invented these things, but were afraid that the gods
would be angry at them if they did not act such fictions even in the
theatres. In those times Latona bore Apollo, not him of whose
oracle we have spoken above as so often consulted, but him who is
said, along with Hercules, to have fed the flocks of king Admetus;
yet he was so believed to be a god, that very many, indeed almost
all, have believed him to be the selfsame Apollo. Then also Father
Liber made war in India, and led in his army many women called
Bacchae, who were notable not so much for valor as for fury. Some,
indeed, write that this Liber was both conquered and bound and some
that he was slain in Persia, even telling where he was buried; and
yet in his name, as that of a god, the unclean demons have instituted
the sacred, or rather the sacrilegious, Bacchanalia, of the
outrageous vileness of which the senate, after many years, became so
much ashamed as to prohibit them in the city of Rome. Men believed
that in those times Perseus and his wife Andromeda were raised into
heaven after their death, so that they were not ashamed or afraid to
mark out their images by constellations, and call them by their names.
|
|