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

by Arnobius

22. I do not think it necessary here also with many words to go through each part, and show how many base and unseemly things there are in each particular. For what mortal is there, with but little sense even of what becomes a man, who does not himself see clearly the character of all these things, how wicked they are, how vile, and what disgrace is brought upon the gods by the very ceremonies of their mysteries, and by the unseemly origin of their rites? Jupiter, it is said, lusted after Ceres. Why, I ask, has Jupiter deserved so ill of you, that there is no kind of disgrace, no infamous adultery, which you do not heap upon his head, as if on some vile and worthless person? Leda was unfaithful to her nuptial vow; Jupiter is said to be the cause of the fault. Danae could not keep her virginity; the theft is said to have been Jupiter’s. Europa hastened to the name of woman; he is again declared to have been the assailant of her chastity. Alcmena, Electra, Latona, Laodamia, a thousand other virgins, and a thousand matrons, and with them the boy Catamitus, were robbed of their honour and^[1] chastity. It is the same story everywhere—Jupiter. Nor is there any kind of baseness in which you do not join and associate his name with passionate lusts; so that the wretched being seems to have been born for no other reason at all except that he might be a field fertile in^[2] crimes, an occasion of evil-speaking, a kind of open place into which should gather all filthiness from the impurities of the stage.^[3] And yet if you were to say that he had intercourse with strange women, it would indeed be impious, but the wrong done in slandering him might be bearable. Did he lust^[4] after his mother also, after his daughter too, with furious desires; and could no sacredness in his parent, no reverence for her, no shrinking even from the child which had sprung from himself, withhold him from conceiving so detestable a plan?

Footnotes

1. Lit., “of.”
2. Lit., “that he might be a crop of”—seges, a correction in the margin of Ursinus for the ms. sedes—“a seat.”
3. So all edd., reading scenarum (ms. scr-, but r marked as spurious), except LB, followed by Orelli, who gives sentinarum—“of the dregs.” Oehler supplies e, which the sense seems to require. [Note our author’s persistent scorn of Jove Opt. Max.]
4. Lit., “neigh with appetites of an enraged beast.”