City of God (Penguin Classics) (133 page)

By charms transformed the comrades of Ulysses.
⁶¹

But the birds of Diomede are said to preserve their species through successive generations, and therefore I do not believe that they came into being by the transformation of men, but that they were substituted for the men who had been spirited away, as a doe was substituted for Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon.
⁶²
For conjuring tricks of this kind could have presented no difficulty for demons who were allowed, by God’s decision, to practise them; but because that maiden was afterwards found alive, it was easily realized that a doe had been substituted for her. The companions of Diomede, in contrast, suddenly disappeared from sight and did not later reappear anywhere, but were destroyed by the avenging evil angels; that is why it is supposed that they were transformed into those birds, which were secretly brought to that spot from other parts of the world where this species of bird is found, and suddenly substituted for them. While as for the story that the birds bring water in their beaks and sprinkle Diomede’s temple, and that they show deference to men of Greek blood, but attack foreigners, it is not to be wondered at that the demons prompt this behaviour; for it is to their advantage to promote the belief that Diomede became a god, so that they can deceive men in this way. Their purpose is that men should worship many false gods and thus insult the one true God, and should show their devotion to dead men (who were not truly living even when they were alive) by means of temples, altars, sacrifices, and priests – all of which belong of right solely to the one true and living God.

19.
The arrival of Aeneas in Italy at the time when Labdon was judge over the Hebrews

At that time, after the capture and demolition of Troy, Aeneas with twenty ships, in which the survivors of the Trojans were conveyed, arrived in Italy. Latinus was then reigning there, while Mnestheus was king of Athens, Polyphides of Sicyon, Tantanes of Assyria, and Labdon was judge of the Hebrews.† Then, after the death of Latinus, Aeneas reigned for three years, while the same kings continued in the places above-mentioned, except that Pelasgus was by now on the throne of Sicyon, and Samson was judge of the Hebrews;† Samson was so amazingly strong that he has been identified with Hercules. Now the Latins made Aeneas into one of their gods,
⁶³
since he was not seen after his death. The Sabines also enrolled their first king among the gods; he was called Sancus, or, according to some authorities, Sanctus.
⁶⁴
It was in the same period that Codrus, king of Athens, concealed his identity and exposed himself to the Peloponnesians, his city’s enemies, for them to kill him, and achieved his object. It is claimed that in this way he rescued his country. For the Peloponnesians had received an oracle that they would only gain the victory if they refrained from killing the Athenian king. Accordingly, he fooled them by appearing in the dress of a poor man and by provoking them to kill him in a quarrel. Hence Virgil says, ‘And the quarrel provoked by Codrus.’ The Athenians worshipped him too as a god, with sacrifices in his honour.
⁶⁵
When Silvius was on the throne as the fourth king of the Latins (he was the son of Aeneas, not by Creusa, the mother of Ascanius, the third king of that country, but by Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, a posthumous son, as they say, to Aeneas) Oneus was ruling as twenty-ninth king of Assyria, while Melanthus was sixteenth king of Athens, and Eli the priest was judge of the Hebrews; and it was then that the kingdom of Sicyon came to an end. Tradition says that it had lasted for 959 years.

20.
The regal succession in Israel after the period of the judges

Soon afterwards, while the same kings were reigning in the places just mentioned, the period of the judges reached its end and the kingdom of Israel made its beginning with King Saul, in the time of the prophet Samuel. Now at that time the kings called the Silvii began to reign in Latium. The first king to be called Silvius was the son of Aeneas, and after him his successors retained this cognomen in addition to the personal names they were given, in the same way as long afterwards the successors of Caesar Augustus were surnamed Caesar. Now after the rejection of Saul and the consequent exclusion from the throne of all his descendants, David succeeded to the kingdom on Saul’s death, forty years after Saul had come to power. At that time the Athenians finally dispensed with the monarchy after the death of Codrus, and began to have magistrates for the administration of their commonwealth. David also reigned forty years and after him his son Solomon was king of Israel. He founded that world-famous Temple of God in Jerusalem. In his time Alba was founded in Latium, and from that time onwards the kings began to be called ‘Kings of the Albans’, instead of ‘Kings of the Latins’, although they reigned in the same district of Latium. Solomon was succeeded by his son Rehoboam, under whom the people was divided into two kingdoms, and each part thereafter had its own succession of kings.

21.
The kings of Latium, among whom Aeneas and Aventinus were deified

After Aeneas, who was deified, Latium had eleven kings, none of whom was made into a god. But Aventinus, the twelfth successor of Aeneas, was cut down in battle, and was buried on that mountain still called by his name; and thereafter he was added to the number of that class of gods created for themselves by men. Some authorities, it is true, have refused to record that he was killed in battle, saying instead that he disappeared, and that the mountain was not named after Aventinus, but was so called from the advent of birds (
adventu avium
). After this king the only god created in Latium was Romulus, the founder of Rome. Now between these two we find two kings, of whom the first was, to quote a verse of Virgil,

Procus the next, the glory of Troy’s race.
⁶⁶

In his time Rome was already, in a manner of speaking, in the process of being born; and so Assyria, that greatest of all empires, reached the end of her long history. For the power passed over to the Medes after nearly 1,305 years, if we reckon in the time of Belus, father of Ninus, who as the first king was content with a small dominion in that part of the world.

22.
Rome’s foundation coincides with the end of the Assyrian kingdom, and with the reign of Hezekiah in Judah

Not to spend time over a multitude of detail, the city of Rome was founded to be a kind of second Babylon, the daughter, as it were, of the former Babylon. It was God’s design to conquer the world through her, to unite the world into the single community of the Roman commonwealth and the Roman laws, and so to impose peace throughout its length and breadth. For there were at this time powerful and
valiant peoples, trained in arms, nations who would not lightly yield, whose conquest entailed enormous risks and no little devastation, with fearful hardships besides. Now at the time when the Assyrian Empire subjugated almost the whole of Asia, although this conquest was effected by war, it could be achieved without a great deal of cruel and difficult fighting, because the nations were still untrained to resist, and were not yet so numerous or so powerful. For we must remember that at the time when Ninus subdued the whole of Asia except India, not much more than a thousand years had elapsed after that great and world-wide Flood, when a mere eight souls escaped in Noah’s ark. Rome, on the contrary, did not so speedily and easily subdue all those nations of the East and the West which we now see beneath her imperial sway, since her growth was a gradual process, and by the time she encountered them the nations were vigorous and warlike, in whatever direction she expanded. At the time of Rome’s foundation the people of Israel had spent 718 years in the land of the promise, twenty-seven of which belong to Joshua’s time, the following 329 to the period of the judges. Then, after the beginning of the monarchy in that country, 362 years had gone by. The king of Judah at this time was called Ahaz, or, according to another reckoning, it was his successor, Hezekiah. By common consent he was an excellent and extremely religious monarch, and his reign was contemporary with Romulus. Meanwhile Hoshea began to rule over the part of the Hebrew people which was called Israel.

23.
The Erythraean Sibyl and her prophecies of Christ

It was at this same time, according to some accounts, that the Erythraean Sibyl made her predictions. Varro, we note, informs us that there were a number of Sibyls, not only one.
⁶⁷
This Sibyl of Erythraea certainly recorded some utterances which are obviously concerned with Christ. I read these first in a Latin translation, in verses of bad Latinity and shaky metre, faults due, as I learned later, to the
incompetence of some unknown translator. This I discerned in conversations with that eminent man Flaccianus, who was, amongst other things, proconsul, a man of most ready eloquence and profound learning. We were talking about Christ, and he produced a Greek manuscript, saying that it was the poems of the Erythraean Sibyl. He showed me that in the manuscript the order of intial letters in one passage was so arranged as to form these words:
IÊSOUS CHREISTOS THEOU UIOS SÔTÊR
, the translation of which is ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour.’ These verses, which form an acrostic giving this meaning, run as follows, in a verse translation made by someone in good Latin and sound metre;

In token of the judgement day the earth shall drip with sweat
Eternally to reign, a king shall come from heavenly seat,
Strictly to judge all flesh in power, to judge the world in might
On this, belief and unbelief shall have our God in sight,
Uplifted with his saints on high when this world’s end has come
So shall all souls in flesh attend before his throne of doom.

CHoked with thick briars and all untilled the earth now lies forlorn:
Rejected all man’s idols now, his treasures turned to scorn:
Each land shall be consumed by flames that search both sea and sky,
Infernal gates of loathsome hell in fiery ruin lie.
Salvation’s light shall be shed forth on saints exempt from blame:
To guilty men that day shall bring the everlasting flame.
Obscurest acts shall be revealed, his secrets each impart,
So shall God bring all thoughts to light, unlocking every heart.

THen all shall gnash their teeth, the sound of wailing shall arise,
Extinct the sun’s bright ray, the dance of planets in the skies.
O’erhead the sky shall roll away, quenched be the moon’s bright glow;
Uplifted shall the valleys be, the hills shall be laid low,

Until in all the world remains no eminence or height;
Into the plains subside the hills; the seas of azure bright
On a sudden cease; the earth itself shall perish, riven and rent,
Springs shall likewise be parched by fire, the streams by heat be spent.

Sadly the trumpet then shall blare, and sound its mournful strains
On high, lamenting deed of woe and mortals’ varied pains.
Tartarus shows its vast abyss, as earth gapes open wide.
Enthroned sits God, and kings shall stand for judgement side by side;
Rivers of fire and brimstone stream from heaven, a fearful tide.
⁶⁸

In the Latin, these verses, translated, in a fashion, from the Greek,
could not completely convey the sense of the initial letters of the original lines read in sequence; where the letter
upsilon
occupied that position in the original Latin, words could not be found which began with the equivalent letter and also suited the sense. There are three such lines, the fifth, the eighteenth and the nineteenth.
⁶⁹
The result is that if one reads in sequence the initial letters of the verses, ignoring the first letters of these three lines and substituting
upsilon
, as if it were found in those places, a phrase of five words appears: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour; but this is only when it is read as Greek instead of Latin.