Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume VI/Arnobius/Adversus Gentes/Book V/Chapter VI

by Arnobius

6. Now, when it had been often considered in the councils of the gods, by what means it might be possible either to weaken or to curb his audacity, Liber, the rest hanging back, takes upon himself this task. With the strongest wine he drugs a spring much resorted to by Acdestis^[1] where he had been wont to assuage the heat and burning thirst^[2] roused in him by sport and hunting. Hither runs Acdestis to drink when he felt the need;^[3] he gulps down the draught too greedily into his gaping veins. Overcome by what he is quite unaccustomed to, he is in consequence sent fast asleep. Liber is near the snare which he had set; over his foot he throws one end of a halter^[4] formed of hairs, woven together very skilfully; with the other end he lays hold of his privy members. When the fumes of the wine passed off, Acdestis starts up furiously, and his foot dragging the noose, by his own strength he robs himself of his^[5] sex; with the tearing asunder of these parts there is an immense flow of blood; both^[6] are carried off and swallowed up by the earth; from them there suddenly springs up, covered with fruit, a pomegranate tree, seeing the beauty of which, with admiration, Nana,^[7] daughter of the king or river Sangarius, gathers and places in her bosom some of the fruit. By this she becomes pregnant; her father shuts her up, supposing that she had been^[8] debauched, and seeks to have her starved to death; she is kept alive by the mother of the gods with apples, and other food,^[9] and brings forth a child, but Sangarius^[10] orders it to be exposed. One Phorbas having found the child, takes it home,^[11] brings it up on goats’ milk; and as handsome fellows are so named in Lydia, or because the Phrygians in their own way of speaking call their goats attagi, it happened in consequence that the boy obtained the name Attis.^[12] Him the mother of the gods loved exceedingly, because he was of most surpassing beauty; and Acdestis, who was his companion, as he grew up fondling him, and bound to him by wicked compliance with his lust in the only way now possible, leading him through the wooded glades, and presenting him with the spoils of many wild beasts, which the boy Attis at first said boastfully were won by his own toil and labour. Afterwards, under the influence of wine, he admits that he is both loved by Acdestis, and honoured by him with the gifts brought from the forest; whence it is unlawful for those polluted by drinking wine to enter into his sanctuary, because it discovered his secret.^[13]

Footnotes

1. Lit., “him.”
2. Lit., “of thirsting.”
3. Lit., “in time of need.”
4. So the reading of the ms. and edd., unum laqueum, may be rendered; for which Canterus conjectured imum—“the lowest part of the noose.”
5. So the edd., reading eo quo (ms. quod) fuerat privat sexu; for which Hild. and Oehler read fu-tu-erat—“of the sex with which he had been a fornicator.”
6. Lit., “these (i.e., the parts and the blood) are,” etc.
7. The ms. here reads Nata, but in c. 13 the spelling is Nana, as in other writers.
8. Lit., “as if.”
9. The ms. reads t-abulis, corrected as above p- by Jos. Scaliger, followed by Hild. and Oehler. The other edd. read bacculis—“berries.”
10. So all the edd., except Hild. and Oehler, who retain the ms. reading sanguinarius—“bloodthirsty.”
11. So Salmasius, Orelli, and Hild., reading repertum nescio quis sumit Phorbas, lacte; but no mention of any Phorbas is made elsewhere in connection with this story, and Oehler has therefore proposed forma ac lacte—“some one takes the child found, nourishes it with sweet pottage of millet (forma) and milk,” etc.
12. [See vol. ii. p. 175.]
13. Lit., “his silence.”