The City of God, Volume IIAugustine, of Hippo, Saint
ReligionChristian
The City of God, Volume II
Augustine, of Hippo, Saint
Apologetics -- Early works to 1800; Kingdom of God -- Early works to 1800
war in India, and led in his army many women called Bacchæ, who were
notable not so much for valour as for fury. Some, indeed, write that
this Liber was both conquered and bound; and some that he was slain
in Persia, even telling where he was buried; and yet in his name, as
that of a god, the unclean demons have instituted the sacred, or rather
the sacrilegious, Bacchanalia, of the outrageous vileness of which the
senate, after many years, became so much ashamed as to prohibit them in
the city of Rome. Men believed that in those times Perseus and his wife
Andromeda were raised into heaven after their death, so that they were
not ashamed or afraid to mark out their images by constellations, and
call them by their names.
14. _Of the theological poets._
During the same period of time arose the poets, who were also called
_theologues_, because they made hymns about the gods; yet about such
gods as, although great men, were yet but men, or the elements of
this world which the true God made, or creatures who were ordained as
principalities and powers according to the will of the Creator and
their own merit. And if, among much that was vain and false, they
sang anything of the one true God, yet, by worshipping Him along
with others who are not gods, and showing them the service that is
due to Him alone, they did not serve Him at all rightly; and even
such poets as Orpheus, Musæus, and Linus, were unable to abstain
from dishonouring their gods by fables. But yet these theologues
worshipped the gods, and were not worshipped as gods, although the
city of the ungodly is wont, I know not how, to set Orpheus over
the sacred, or rather sacrilegious, rites of hell. The wife of king
Athamas, who was called Ino, and her son Melicertes, perished by
throwing themselves into the sea, and were, according to popular
belief, reckoned among the gods, like other men of the same times,
[among whom were] Castor and Pollux. The Greeks, indeed, called her
who was the mother of Melicertes, Leucothea, the Latins Matuta; but
both thought her a goddess.
15. _Of the fall of the kingdom of Argos, when Picus the son of
Saturn first received his father's kingdom of Laurentum._
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