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But if any one says that it is not of all the demons, but only of the
wicked, that the poets, not without truth, say that they violently
love or hate certain men, for it was of them Apuleius said that they
were driven about by strong currents of emotion, how can we accept this
interpretation, when Apuleius, in the very same connection,
represents all the demons, and not only the wicked, as intermediate
between gods and men by their aerial bodies? The fiction of the
poets, according to him, consists in their making gods of demons, and
giving them the names of gods, and assigning them as allies or enemies
to individual men, using this poetical license, though they profess
that the gods are very different in character from the demons, and far
exalted above them by their celestial abode and wealth of beatitude.
This, I say, is the poets' fiction, to say that these are gods who
are not gods, and that, under the names of gods, they fight among
themselves about the men whom they love or hate with keen partisan
feeling. Apuleius says that this is not far from the truth, since,
though they are wrongfully called by the names of the gods, they are
described in their own proper character as demons. To this category,
he says, belongs the Minerva of Homer, "who interposed in the ranks
of the Greeks to restrain Achilles." For that this was Minerva he
supposes to be poetical fiction; for he thinks that Minerva is a
goddess, and he places her among the gods whom he believes to be all
good and blessed in the sublime ethereal region, remote from
intercourse with men. But that there was a demon favorable to the
Greeks and adverse to the Trojans, as another, whom the same poet
mentions under the name of Venus or Mars (gods exalted above earthly
affairs in their heavenly habitations), was the Trojans' ally and
the foe of the Greeks, and that these demons fought for those they
loved against those they hated, in all this he owned that the poets
stated something very like the truth. For they made these statements
about beings to whom he ascribes the same violent and tempestuous
passions as disturb men, and who are therefore capable of loves and
hatreds not justly formed, but formed in a party spirit, as the
spectators in races or hunts take fancies and prejudices. It seems to
have been the great fear of this Platonist that the poetical fictions
should be believed of the gods, and not of the demons who bore their
names.
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