The City of God, Volume I

He contrasts the Greek and Roman attitudes toward these performances to expose a logical inconsistency in the pagan position. The Greeks, believing that the gods loved the plays, honored the actors and even admitted them to offices of state, as in the case of Æschines and Aristodemus. The ancient Romans, however, possessed a greater sense of dignity regarding themselves than regarding their gods; they forbade poets from satirizing living citizens under penalty of death, yet allowed the gods to be lampooned without interference. Augustine argues that the Romans were inconsistent in degrading the actors while preserving the plays. If the plays are an honor due to the gods, then the actors who perform them should be honored; if the actors are infamous, then the gods who demand such service should be despised. He formulates this into a clear syllogism: The Greeks provide the major premise—if such gods are to be worshipped, then such men (the actors) may be honored. The Romans provide the minor—such men must by no means be honored. The Christian draws the conclusion—therefore, such gods must by no means be worshipped. This logical structure demonstrates the inherent absurdity of pagan worship.

Augustine heightens this contrast by comparing Plato with the pagan gods. Plato, in framing his ideal republic, banished poets entirely to prevent the depravity of the citizens and the besotting of their minds by fictions. He strove, though unsuccessfully, to persuade the Greeks to abstain from writing such plays. The pagan gods, conversely, used their authority to extort the acting of these same plays from the Romans, demanding that their own disgrace be celebrated in their honor. Augustine asks whether it is more becoming for a state to decree divine honors to Plato, who prohibited licentious plays, or to the demons who delighted in them. He notes that the laws of Rome, which prohibited actors from civic honors and even erased their names from the tribal rolls, actually surpassed the morality of the gods they worshipped, revealing the absurdity of expecting moral guidance from such deities. If the Romans had the sagacity to exclude players from their citizenship, why did they not also exclude the gods who commanded the plays? Their inconsistency betrays a deeper servitude to demonic deception.

Augustine then shifts to a survey of Roman history to demonstrate that the Republic was ruined by vice long before the advent of Christ. He begins by noting that if the gods had truly possessed a regard for righteousness, the Romans should have received good laws from them. Instead, Rome had to borrow laws from Solon of Athens, and even the laws of Numa Pompilius were insufficient and not divinely originated. The gods provided no legislative framework for justice; the Romans had to look to human wisdom. He challenges the notion that “equity and virtue prevailed by nature” in early Rome by citing the rape of the Sabine women—an act of violence and treachery that was commemorated in the games. He argues that there was no equity in carrying off by force girls who were strangers and guests, decoyed by a pretense of a spectacle. If the Sabines were wrong to deny their daughters, was it not a greater wrong in the Romans to steal them? He also cites the injustice done to Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, a good man forced into exile solely because of his name, and the ingratitude shown to Marcus Camillus, the savior of Rome, who was driven into exile by the envy of the tribunes and fined despite his unparalleled service. These early iniquities, far from being anomalies, were symptoms of a deeper moral sickness.

To further prove the moral corruption of the Republic, Augustine invokes the testimony of Sallust, whose own words in praise of the Romans (“equity and virtue prevailed among them not more by force of laws than of nature”) are turned against them. Sallust acknowledges that even in the brief period after the expulsion of the kings, fear of external war (the Tuscan war and Tarquin’s vengeance) was the cause of the interval of equity and good order. But after that, the patricians treated the people as slaves, and the people, oppressed by usury and forced into constant wars, eventually took arms and seceded. Sallust then laments that after the destruction of Carthage, discord, avarice, ambition, and other vices increased more than ever, sweeping away the primitive manners like a torrent. The youth became so depraved by luxury that no father had a son who could preserve his patrimony or keep his hands off other men’s property. Augustine stresses that these things happened not only before Christ taught, but before He was even born of the Virgin. He asks why the gods are not blamed for these evils, which they instilled into the minds of men through their corrupting worship, while every present affliction is furiously imputed to Christ, who teaches life-giving truth and forbids the worship of false gods.

Augustine reinforces this argument with the testimony of Cicero, who stated that the Republic had utterly ceased to exist before Christ came. He recounts Cicero’s definition that a republic is the “weal of the people,” and that a people is an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of law and a community of interests. Cicero argues that where justice has become extinct, a republic altogether ceases to be; it is no longer the people’s weal when a tyrant lords it over the state. In the dialogue, Scipio maintains that a republic can exist only under a just monarch, a just aristocracy, or a just people; any other form is a mere counterfeit. Cicero confesses that the Roman republic had long since lost the reality, retaining only the name, and that this loss was due to the vices of the citizens, not to any mishap. He laments that the primitive morality had become so obsolete that men no longer even knew it, and that the poverty of great men was a crime for which they must answer. Augustine argues that true justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ—the City of God. The Roman republic, even at its best, was a colored painting, not the living reality of justice.

Augustine identifies the pagan gods not as benevolent powers but as demons who actively incited men to wickedness. He argues that these demons did not merely neglect to correct the morals of the Romans but accelerated their destruction by increasing demoralization. He points to the civil wars that plagued Rome, noting that the demons were seen rehearsing battles in a wide plain in Campania shortly before a great and bloody conflict occurred there. Augustine interprets this as a demonic attempt to justify civil wars by showing that the gods themselves fought with one another, thereby lending a quasi-divine authority to human crimes and disguising the bitterness of fratricidal slaughter. The demons sought to make men think that if the gods quarrel, then human strife is permissible; indeed, it is a form of worship.