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Now, who does not hereby comprehend, unless he has preferred to
imitate such gods rather than by divine grace to withdraw himself from
their fellowship, who does not see how eagerly these evil spirits
strive by their example to lend, as it were, divine authority to
crime? Is not this proved by the fact that they were seen in a wide
plain in Campania rehearsing among themselves the battle which shortly
after took place there with great bloodshed between the armies of
Rome? For at first there were heard loud crashing noises, and
afterwards many reported that they had seen for some days together two
armies engaged. And when this battle ceased, they found the ground
all indented with just such footprints of men and horses as a great
conflict would leave. If, then, the deities were veritably fighting
with one another, the civil wars of men are sufficiently justified;
yet, by the way, let it be observed that such pugnacious gods must be
very wicked or very wretched. If, however, it was but a
sham-fight, what did they intend by this, but that the civil wars of
the Romans should seem no wickedness, but an imitation of the gods?
For already the civil wars had begun; and before this, some
lamentable battles and execrable massacres had occurred. Already many
had been moved by the story of the soldier, who, on stripping the
spoils of his slain foe, recognized in the stripped corpse his own
brother, and, with deep curses on civil wars, slew himself there and
then on his brother's body. To disguise the bitterness of such
tragedies, and kindle increasing ardor in this monstrous warfare,
these malign demons, who were reputed and worshipped as gods, fell
upon this plan of revealing themselves in a state of civil war, that no
compunction for fellow-citizens might cause the Romans to shrink from
such battles, but that the human criminality might be justified by the
divine example. By a like craft, too, did these evil spirits command
that scenic entertainments, of which I have already spoken, should be
instituted and dedicated to them. And in these entertainments the
poetical compositions and actions of the drama ascribed such iniquities
to the gods, that every one might safely imitate them, whether he
believed the gods had actually done such things, or, not believing
this, yet perceived that they most eagerly desired to be represented as
having done them. And that no one might suppose, that in representing
the gods as fighting with one another, the poets had slandered them,
and imputed to them unworthy actions, the gods themselves, to complete
the deception, confirmed the compositions of the poets by exhibiting
their own battles to the eyes of men, not only through actions in the
theatres, but in their own persons on the actual field.
We have been forced to bring forward these facts, because their
authors have not scrupled to say and to write that the Roman republic
had already been ruined by the depraved moral habits of the citizens,
and had ceased to exist before the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now this ruin they do not impute to their own gods, though they impute
to our Christ the evils of this life, which cannot ruin good men, be
they alive or dead. And this they do, though our Christ has issued
so many precepts inculcating virtue and restraining vice; while their
own gods have done nothing whatever to preserve that republic that
served them, and to restrain it from ruin by such precepts, but have
rather hastened its destruction, by corrupting its morality through
their pestilent example. No one, I fancy, will now be bold enough
to say that the republic was then ruined because of the departure of the
gods "from each fane, each sacred shrine," as if they were the
friends of virtue, and were offended by the vices of men. No, there
are too many presages from entrails, auguries, soothsayings, whereby
they boastingly proclaimed themselves prescient of future events and
controllers of the fortune of war, all which prove them to have been
present.
And had they been indeed absent the Romans would never in these civil
wars have been so far transported by their own passions as they were by
the instigations of these gods.
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