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

by Arnobius

51.^[1] But suppose that the deity was present in that very stone, as you demand should be believed: and what mortal is there, although he may be credulous and very ready to listen to any fictions you please, who would consider that she either was a goddess at that time, or should be now so spoken of and named, who at one time desires these things, at another requires those, abandons and despises her worshippers, leaves the humbler provinces, and allies herself with more powerful and richer peoples, truly^[2] loves warfare, and wishes to be in the midst of battles, slaughter, death, and blood? If it is characteristic of the gods—if only they are true gods, and those who it is fitting should be named according to the meaning of this word and the power of divinity—to do^[3] nothing wickedly, nothing unjustly, to show^[4] themselves equally gracious to all men without any partiality, would any man believe that she was of divine origin, or showed^[5] kindness worthy of the gods, who, mixing herself up with the dissensions of men, destroyed the power of some, gave and showed favour to others, bereft some of their liberty, raised others to the height of power,—who, that one state might be pre-eminent, having been born to be the bane of the human race, subjugated the guiltless world?

Footnotes

1. 48 in Orelli.
2. All edd., except Hild. and Oehler, begin a new sentence here, and change the construction, seemingly following the mistake of the 1st ed.
3. “To do…to show;” so the edd., dropping -nt from the ms. facere-nt…præbere-nt.
4. “To do…to show;” so the edd., dropping -nt from the ms. facere-nt…præbere-nt.
5. Lit, “showed.” Ursinus and Heraldus supposed that some paragraphs are now wanting which were originally found here. It should be noticed that in the ms. the usual subscription is found denoting the end of a book. “The seventh book of Arnovius (sic) ends, the eighth (i.e., Octavius of Minucius Felix) begins,” so that the present arrangement is not due to the binder, nor clearly to the copyist who wrote these words. Nothing can be more certain than that we do not have these chapters as Arnobius intended to leave them; but there is not the slightest reason to suppose that he actually left them otherwise than they have come down to us. Remembering this, we may well suppose that we have only the first draught of them. If so, the difficulties vanish, for nothing would be more natural than that, when Arnobius was drawing near the close of his work, the ideas of the conclusion in which the discussion was to be fairly summed up should force themselves upon his attention, and that he should therefore turn aside at once to give them expression roughly, without seeking completeness and elaboration, and should then hastily resume his argument, of course with the intention of afterwards revising and re-arranging the whole. We may infer that the re-arrangement was never effected, as there are sufficient proofs that the revision was never accomplished, whatever may have been the reason.