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

by Arnobius

20. It was our purpose to leave unnoticed those mysteries also into which Phrygia is initiated, and all that^[1] race, were it not that the name of Jupiter, which has been introduced by them, would not suffer us to pass cursorily by the wrongs and insults offered to him; not that we feel any pleasure in discussing^[2] mysteries so filthy, but that it may be made clear to you again and again what wrong you heap upon those whose guardians, champions, worshippers, you profess to be. Once upon a time, they say, Diespiter, burning after his mother Ceres with evil passions and forbidden desires, for she is said by the natives of that district to be Jupiter’s mother, and yet not daring to seek by open^[3] force that for which he had conceived a shameless longing, hits upon a clever trick by which to rob of her chastity his mother, who feared nothing of the sort. Instead of a god, he becomes a bull; and concealing his purpose and daring under the appearance of a beast lying in wait,^[4] he rushes madly with sudden violence upon her, thoughtless and unwitting, obtains his incestuous desires; and the fraud being disclosed by his lust, flies off known and discovered. His mother burns, foams, gasps, boils with fury and indignation; and being unable to repress the storm^[5] and tempest of her wrath, received the name Brimo^[6] thereafter from her ever-raging passion: nor has she any other wish than to punish as she may her son’s audacity.

Footnotes

1. So the ms. and edd., reading gens illa, for which Memmius proposed Ilia—“and all the Trojan race.”
2. Lit., “riding upon”—inequitare.
3. Lit., “most open.”
4. Subsessoris.
5. Lit., “growling”—fremitum.
6. The ms. reads primo, emended as above by the brother of Canterus, followed by later edd.