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Arnobius
21. Jupiter is troubled enough, being overwhelmed with fear, and cannot find means to soothe the rage of his violated mother. He pours forth prayers, and makes supplication; her ears are closed by grief. The whole order of the gods is sent to seek his pardon; no one has weight enough to win a hearing. At last, the son seeking how to make satisfaction, devises this means: Arietem nobilem bene grandibus cum testiculis deligit, exsecat hos ipse et lanato exuit ex folliculi tegmine. Approaching his mother sadly and with downcast looks, and as if by his own decision he had condemned himself, he casts and throws these[4398] into her bosom. When she saw what his pledge was,[4399] she is somewhat softened, and allows herself to be recalled to the care of the offspring which she had conceived.[4400] After the tenth month she bears a daughter, of beautiful form, whom later ages have called now Libera, now Proserpine; whom when Jupiter Verveceus[4401] saw to be strong, plump, and blooming, forgetting what evils and what wickedness, and how great recklessness, he had a little before fallen into,[4402] he returns to his former practices; and because it seemed too[4403] wicked that a father openly be joined as in marriage with his daughter, he passes into the terrible form of a dragon: he winds his huge coils round the terrified maiden, and under a fierce appearance sports and caresses her in softest embraces. She, too, is in consequence filled with the seed of the most powerful Jupiter, but not as her mother was, for she[4404] bore a daughter like herself; but from the maiden was born something like a bull, to testify to her seduction by Jupiter. If any one asks[4405] who narrates this, then we shall quote the well-known senarian verse of a Tarentine poet which antiquity sings,[4406] saying: “The bull begot a dragon, and the dragon a bull.” Lastly, the sacred rites themselves, and the ceremony of initiation even, named Sebadia,[4407] might attest the truth; for in them a golden snake is let down into the bosom of the initiated, and taken away again from the lower parts.
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 <page 498>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[4408] 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[4409] crimes, an occasion of evil-speaking, a kind of open place into which should gather all filthiness from the impurities of the stage.[4410] 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[4411] 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?
23. I should wish, therefore, to see Jupiter, the father of the gods, who ever controls the world and men,[4412] adorned with the horns of an ox, shaking his hairy ears, with his feet contracted into hoofs, chewing green grass, and having behind him[4413] a tail, hams,[4414] and ankles smeared over with soft excrement,[4415] and bedaubed with the filth cast forth. I should wish, I say,—for it must be said over and over again,—to see him who turns the stars in their courses, and who terrifies and overthrows nations pale with fear, pursuing the flocks of wethers, inspicientem testiculos aretinos, snatching these away with that severe[4416] and divine hand with which he was wont to launch the gleaming lightnings and to hurl in his rage the thunderbolt.[4417] Then, indeed, I should like to see him ransacking their inmost parts with glowing knife;[4418] and all witnesses being removed, tearing away the membranes circumjectas prolibus, and bringing them to his mother, still hot with rage, as a kind of fillet[4419] to draw forth her pity, with downcast countenance, pale, wounded,[4420] pretending to be in agony; and to make this believed, defiled with the blood of the ram, and covering his pretended wound with bands of wool and linen. Is it possible that this can be heard and read in this world,[4421] and that those who discuss these things wish themselves to be thought pious, holy, and defenders of religion? Is there any greater sacrilege than this, or can any mind[4422] be found so imbued with impious ideas as to believe such stories, or receive them, or hand them down in the most secret mysteries of the sacred rites? If that Jupiter of whom you speak, whoever he is, really[4423] existed, or was affected by any sense of wrong, would it not be fitting that,[4424] roused to anger, he should remove the earth from under our feet, extinguish the light of the sun and moon; nay more, that he should throw all things into one mass, as of old?[4425]
24. But, my opponent says, these are not the rites of our state. Who, pray, says this, or who repeats it? Is he Roman, Gaul, Spaniard, African, German, or Sicilian? And what does it avail your cause if these stories are not yours, while those who compose them are on your side? Or of what importance is it whether you approve of them or not, since what you yourselves say[4426] are found to be either just as foul, or of even greater baseness? For do you wish that we should consider the mysteries and those ceremonies which are named by the Greeks Thesmophoria,[4427] in which those holy vigils and<page 499>solemn watchings were consecrated to the goddess by the Athenians? Do you wish us, I say, to see what beginnings they have, what causes, that we may prove that Athens itself also, distinguished in the arts and pursuits of civilization, says things as insulting to the gods as others, and that stories are there publicly related under the mask of religion just as disgraceful as are thrown in our way by the rest of you? Once, they say, when Proserpine, not yet a woman and still a maiden, was gathering purple flowers in the meadows of Sicily, and when her eagerness to gather them was leading her hither and thither in all directions, the king of the shades, springing forth through an opening of unknown depth, seizes and bears away with him the maiden, and conceals himself again in the bowels[4428] of the earth. Now when Ceres did not know what had happened, and had no idea where in the world her daughter was, she set herself to seek the lost one all over the[4429] world. She snatches up two torches lit at the fires of Ætna;[4430] and giving herself light by means of these, goes on her quest in all parts of the earth.
25. In her wanderings on that quest, she reaches the confines of Eleusis as well as other countries[4431]—that is the name of a canton in Attica. At that time these parts were inhabited by aborigines[4432] named Baubo, Triptolemus, Eubuleus, Eumolpus,[4433] Dysaules: Triptolemus, who yoked oxen; Dysaules, a keeper of goats; Eubuleus, of swine; Eumolpus, of sheep,[4434] from whom also flows the race of Eumolpidæ, and from whom is derived that name famous among the Athenians,[4435] and those who afterwards flourished as caduceatores,[4436] hierophants, and criers. So, then, that Baubo who, we have said, dwelt in the canton of Eleusis, receives hospitably Ceres, worn out with ills of many kinds, hangs about her with pleasing attentions, beseeches her not to neglect to refresh her body, brings to quench her thirst wine thickened with spelt,[4437] which the Greeks term cyceon. The goddess in her sorrow turns away from the kindly offered services,[4438] and rejects them; nor does her misfortune suffer her to remember what the body always requires.[4439] Baubo, on the other hand, begs and exhorts her—as is usual in such calamities—not to despise her humanity; Ceres remains utterly immoveable, and tenaciously maintains an invincible austerity. But when this was done several times, and her fixed purpose could not be worn out by any attentions, Baubo changes her plans, and determines to make merry by strange jests her whom she could not win by earnestness. That part of the body by which women both bear children and obtain the name of mothers,[4440] this she frees from longer neglect: she makes it assume a purer appearance, and become smooth like a child, not yet hard and rough with hair. In this wise she returns[4441] to the sorrowing goddess; and while trying the common expedients by which it is usual to break the force of grief, and moderate it, she uncovers herself, and baring her groins, displays all the parts which decency hides;[4442] and then the goddess fixes her eyes upon these,[4443] and is pleased with the strange form of consolation. Then becoming more cheerful after laughing, she takes and drinks off the drought spurned before, and the indecency of a shameless action forced that which Baubo’s modest conduct was long unable to win.
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