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

by Arnobius

20. And yet, O you—if it is plain and clear to you that the gods live, and that the inhabitants of heaven dwell in the inner parts of the images, why do you guard, protect, and keep them shut up under the strongest keys, and under fastenings of immense size, under iron bars, bolts,^[1] and other such things, and defend them with a thousand men and a thousand women to keep guard, lest by chance some thief or nocturnal robber should creep in? Why do you feed dogs in the capitols?^[2] Why do you give food and nourishment to geese? Rather, if you are assured that the gods are there, and that they do not depart to any place from their figures and images, leave to them the care of themselves, let their shrines be always unlocked and open; and if anything is secretly carried off by any one with reckless fraud, let them show the might of divinity, and subject the sacrilegious robbers to fitting punishments at the moment^[3] of their theft and wicked deed. For it is unseemly, and subversive of their power and majesty, to entrust the guardianship of the highest deities to the care of dogs, and when you are seeking for some means of frightening thieves so as to keep them away, not to beg it from the gods themselves, but to set and place it in the cackling of geese.

Footnotes

1. Claustris repagulis pessulis.
2. Cf. p. 481, n. 5. Geese as well as dogs guarded the Capitol, having been once, as the well-known legend tells, its only guards against the Gauls.
3. The ms., first four edd., and Elm. read nomine—“under the name of,” corrected momine by Meursius and the rest.