CHAP.11.--OF THE STATUE OF APOLLO AT CUMAE, WHOSE TEARS ARE SUPPOSEDTO HAVE
PORTENDED DISASTER TO THE GREEKS, WHOM
THE GOD WAS UNABLE TO SUCCOR.
And it is still this weakness of the gods which is confessed in the story of the Cuman Apollo, who is said to have wept for four days during the war with the Achaeans and King Aristonicus.And when the augurs were alarmed at the portent, and had determined to cast the statue into the sea, the old men of Cumae interposed, and related that a similar prodigy had occurred to the same image during the wars against Antiochus and against Perseus, and that by a decree of the senate, gifts had been presented to Apollo, because the event had proved favorable to the Romans.Then soothsayers were summoned who were supposed to have greater professional skill, and they pronounced that the weeping of Apollo's image was propitious to the Romans, because Cumae was a Greek colony, and that Apollo was bewailing (and thereby presaging) the grief and calamity that was about to light upon his own land of Greece, from which he had been brought.Shortly afterwards it was reported that King Aristonicus was defeated and made prisoner,--a defeat certainly opposed to the will of Apollo; and this he indicated by even shedding tears from his marble image.And this shows us that, though the verses of the poets are mythical, they are not altogether devoid of truth, but describe the manners of the demons in a sufficiently fit style.For in Virgil, Diana mourned for Camilla,(1) and Hercules wept for Pallas doomed to die.(2) This is perhaps the reason why Numa Pompilius, too, when, enjoying prolonged peace, but without knowing or inquiring from whom he received it, he began in his leisure to consider to what gods he should entrust the safe keeping and conduct of Rome, and not dreaming that the true, almighty, and most high God cares for earthly affairs, but recollecting only that the Trojan gods which AEneas had brought to Italy had been able to preserve neither the Trojan nor Lavinian kingdom rounded by AEneas himself, concluded that he must provide other gods as guardians of fugitives and helpers of the weak, and add them to those earlier divinities who had either come over to Rome with Romulus, or when Alba was destroyed.
CHAP.12.--THAT THE ROMANS ADDED A VAST NUMBER OF GODS TO THOSE INTRODUCEDBY
NUMA, AND THAT THEIR NUMBERS HELPED THEM NOT AT ALL.
But though Pompilius introduced so ample a ritual, yet did not Rome see fit to be content with it.For as yet Jupiter himself had not his chief temple,--it being King Tarquin who built the Capitol.
And AEsculapius left Epidaurus for Rome, that in this foremost city he might have a finer field for the exercise of his great medical skill.(3) The mother of the gods, too, came I know not whence from Pessinuns; it being unseemly that, while her son presided on the Capitoline hill, she herself should lie hid in obscurity.But if she is the mother of all the gods, she not only followed some of her children to Rome, but left others to follow her.I wonder, indeed, if she were the mother of Cynocephalus, who a long while afterwards came from Egypt.Whether also the goddess Fever was her offspring, is a matter for her grandson AEsculapius(4)to decide.But of whatever breed she be, the foreign gods will not presume, I trust, to call a goddess base-born who is a Roman citizen.Who can number the deities to whom the guardianship of Rome was entrusted? Indigenous and imported, both of heaven, earth, hell, seas, fountains, rivers;and, as Varro says, gods certain and uncertain, male and female: for, as among animals, so among all kinds of gods are there these distinctions.Rome, then, enjoying the protection of such a cloud of deities, might surely have been preserved from some of those great and horrible calamities, of which I can mention but a few.For by the great smoke of her altars she summoned to her protection, as by a beacon-fire, a host of gods, for whom she appointed and maintained temples, altars, sacrifices, priests, and thus offended the true and most high God, to whom alone all this ceremonial is lawfully due.And, indeed, she was more prosperous when she had fewer gods; but the greater she became, the more gods she thought she should have, as the larger ship needs to be manned by a larger crew.I suppose she despaired of the smaller number, under whose protection she had spent comparatively happy days, being able to defend her greatness.
For even under the kings (with the exception of Numa Pompilius, of whom I have already spoken), how wicked a contentiousness must have existed to occasion the death of Romulus' brother!
CHAP.13.--BY WHAT RIGHT OR AGREEMENT THE ROMANS OBTAINED THEIR FIRSTWIVES.