8. If some one, despising
the deities, and furious with a savagely sacrilegious spirit, had set
himself to blaspheme your gods, would he dare to say against them
anything more severe than this tale relates, which you have reduced to
form, as though it were some wonderful narrative, and have
honoured without ceasing,4335
| 4335
i.e., in the ever-recurring festival of Cybele. |
lest the
power of time and the
remoteness
4336
of
antiquity should cause it to be forgotten? For what is there
asserted in it, or what written about the gods, which, if said with
regard to a man brought up with bad
habits and a pretty
rough training,
would not make you liable to be
accused of wronging and insulting him,
and expose you to
hatred and dislike, accompanied by implacable
resentment? From the
stones, you say, which Deucalion and Pyrrha
threw, was produced the mother of the gods. What do you
say, O theologians? what, ye
priests of the heavenly powers? Did
the mother of the gods, then, not exist at all for the sake of the
deluge? and would there be no cause or beginning of her
birth, had not
violent
storms of rain swept away the whole race of men? It is
through man, then, that she feels herself to exist, and she owes it to
Pyrrha’s
kindness that she sees herself addressed as a real
being;
4337
| 4337
So the edd., reading orari in alicujus substantiæ qualitate
for the ms. erari restored
by Oehler, num-erari—“numbered in the quality of
some substance,” from the reading of an old copy adopted by
Livineius. |
but if
that is indeed true, this too will of necessity not be false, that she
was human, not
divine. For if it is certain that men are sprung
originally from the casting of
stones, it must be believed that she too
was one of us, since she was produced by means of the same
causes. For it cannot be, for
nature would not
suffer
it,
4338
| 4338 Lit., “through the
resistance of nature.” |
that from
one
kind of
stones, and from the same mode of throwing
them,
some should be formed to rank among the immortals, others with the
condition of men. Varro, that famous
Roman, distinguished by the
diversity of his learning, and unwearied in his researches into ancient
times, in the first of four books which he has left in writing on the
race of the
Roman people, shows by careful calculations, that from the
time of the deluge, which we mentioned before, down to the consulship
of Hirtius and Pansa,
4339
there are not quite two
thousand
years; and if he is to be believed, the Great Mother, too, must be said
to have her whole life bounded by the limits of this number. And
thus the matter is brought to this issue, that she who is said to be
parent of all the deities is not their mother, but their daughter; nay,
rather a
mere child, a little girl, since we admit that in the
never-ending series of ages neither beginning nor end has been ascribed
to the gods.
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