The Anatomy of Melancholy

Read more of their follies in Cyprian, the fourth treatise, On the Variety of Idols; Chrysostom, Against the Gentiles; Arnobius, Against the Gentiles; Augustine, The City of God; Theodoret, The Cure of Greek Affections; Clement of Alexandria, Minucius Felix, Eusebius, Lactantius, Stucki, and others.

Lamentable, tragic and fearful are these symptoms: that they should be so terrified of their imaginary gods as to spend their goods, lives, fortunes, precious time and best days in their honour; to sacrifice to them, at incalculable loss, such hecatombs, so many thousands of sheep, oxen with gilded horns, and goats. So Croesus, king of Lydia, Marcus Julianus—nicknamed “the sacrificial slaughterer and bull-burner, for his frequent sacrifices”—and the other Roman emperors regularly did, at such labour and expense.

Nor was this expense borne only by emperors and great men “for the public good,” but by private people for their everyday concerns. Pythagoras offered a hundred oxen on discovering a geometrical proposition. In Lucian’s time it was commonplace to sacrifice a heifer for good health, four oxen for wealth, a hundred for a kingdom, nine bulls for a safe return from Troy to Pylos, and so on.

Almost every god had a particular sacrifice: horses for the Sun, fire for Vulcan, a white hart for Diana, a turtledove for Venus, a pig for Ceres, a black lamb for Proserpina, a bull for Neptune—read more at length in Stucki. Besides these came sheep, cocks, corals and frankincense, to the worshippers’ ruin, as though their gods took pleasure in blood or smoke.

And surely, he says, if anyone merely recounted mortal people’s follies in their sacrifices, feasts and worship of the gods; their rites and ceremonies; what they think about the gods, their food, houses and arrangements; what prayers and vows they make—if anyone merely observed their absurdity and madness, he would burst out laughing and pity their folly.

For what could be more absurd than their ordinary prayers, petitions, requests, sacrifices, oracles and devotions? We get a taste of them in Maximus of Tyre’s discourse 1, Plato’s Second Alcibiades, Persius’s Satire 2 and Juvenal’s Satire 10, where they are likewise exposed to ridicule.

“They slaughter rich, fat victims for a god as though he were hungry, pour out wine as though he were thirsty, and light lamps as though he lived in darkness”—Lactantius, book 2, chapter 6. As though their gods were hungry, thirsty or in the dark, they light candles and offer food and drink.

And what could be more degrading than to reveal their counsels and deliver oracles “from the dung-heaps of entrails”—from the bowels and excretory parts of animals? Varro therefore truly calls them “filthy gods,” and well he might. I say nothing of their magnificent and sumptuous temples, those majestic structures. A thousand oaks did not suffice for the roof of Apollo Didymeus’s temple “at Branchidae,” Strabo writes.