The City of God, Volume I

The multiplication of deities in subsequent centuries further demonstrates the futility of pagan worship. Rome imported gods from every conquered people—the Great Mother from Pessinus, Aesculapius from Epidaurus, and countless others from Egypt, Greece, and the East. Augustine observes the absurd logic: Rome believed that as her empire expanded, she required more gods to protect it, as if a larger ship needs a larger crew. But if any single god possessed genuine power, one would suffice; if many are needed, it proves that none possesses adequate strength. The arrival of each new deity coincided not with increased security but with escalating calamities. Aesculapius, imported as a healer during a plague, failed to prevent subsequent pestilences. The Great Mother, installed with great ceremony, brought no improvement to Rome’s fortunes. The cloud of deities surrounding the city offered no more protection than the smoke rising from their altars.

The history of the Roman kings demolishes any notion that the gods rewarded piety or punished wickedness during this formative period. Romulus’s death remains shrouded in suspicious circumstances—torn apart by the senate, according to some accounts, with his supposed ascension to heaven a political fabrication designed to placate an angry populace. Tullus Hostilius, the destroyer of Alba, perished with his entire household when lightning struck his palace. Tarquin Priscus fell to assassins, the sons of the king he had supplanted. Most damningly, Servius Tullius, widely regarded as Rome’s best monarch, was murdered by his own son-in-law Tarquin the Proud, who then seized the throne and ruled successfully for years. The gods did not abandon Rome when a parricide sat on the throne; they did not prevent the murderer from building the Capitol, their own temple, from the spoils of his wars. Jupiter himself presided over a sanctuary constructed by a king whose hands were stained with his father-in-law’s blood. The eventual expulsion of Tarquin came not through divine intervention but through human outrage at his son’s violation of Lucretia—and even then, the gods offered no assistance to either side.

The early republic proved no less violent than the monarchy it replaced. The first year of consulship saw five men hold the office, most dying or being driven into exile. Brutus, celebrated as a liberator, executed his own sons for conspiring to restore the Tarquins—a deed that even Virgil could only praise with ambivalent sorrow. His colleague Collatinus, the husband of the violated Lucretia, was banished for the crime of bearing the Tarquin name, though he had committed no offense against the state. The republic’s founding was stained with family blood and political persecution. The subsequent decades brought constant warfare abroad and bitter class conflict at home. The patricians oppressed the plebeians, reducing them to practical servitude through debt and arbitrary punishment. The people seceded to the Sacred Mount and the Aventine, forcing concessions through the threat of abandonment rather than through any divine concern for justice.

Augustine catalogs the disasters that afflicted the republic throughout its history: famines that reduced the city to desperation; pestilences that carried off citizens by thousands; military catastrophes like the Caudine Forks, where a Roman army was forced to pass under the yoke after a humiliating surrender; the invasion of Pyrrhus, whose ambiguous oracle from Apollo demonstrated how pagan divination served to cover all outcomes rather than reveal truth; the constant drain of war that forced Rome to enroll even the poorest citizens, the proletarii whose only contribution to the state was producing offspring. Through all these calamities, the gods remained silent or absent. When plague struck, the Romans imported new deities and established new rites, but the diseases raged on. When the Tiber flooded and fire swept the city, the sacred images in the temple of Vesta had to be rescued by a mortal priest, who suffered burns in the process—a man saving gods who could not save themselves.

The Punic Wars against Carthage stand as a monumental testament to the gods’ indifference, marked by catastrophic defeats that should have destroyed Rome had her destiny been truly guided by benevolent deities. Augustine draws particular attention to the disaster at Cannae, where Hannibal annihilated the Roman legions with such thoroughness that the slaughter defied description. The carnage was so immense that Hannibal, known for his cruelty, was sated with blood, and the rings of the Roman equestrians were gathered by the bushel to be sent to Carthage as proof of the massacre. In the wake of this devastation, Rome was forced to arm slaves and criminals, stripping the temples of their metal to equip these desperate defenders. If the gods were truly Rome’s guardians, why did they permit an enemy to come so close to annihilating the state, and why did the Romans have to plunder the very shrines of the gods to find the means of survival? The cruelty of Regulus offers another indictment. This great Roman general, captured by the Carthaginians, was sent to Rome to negotiate a peace exchange but, bound by his oath to return if he failed, advised the senate to reject the terms. He returned to Carthage knowing he faced a torture more horrible than death, eventually being encased in a spiked box and perishing in agony. The gods, to whom he was devout, offered him no protection from this excruciating end, nor did they intervene to prevent the breaking of faith by his enemies. Even more lamentable was the fate of Saguntum, a city allied to Rome. When Hannibal besieged this faithful ally, the gods did nothing to preserve a city that was perishing specifically for its loyalty to Rome. The Saguntines, abandoned by the divine powers they shared with their patrons, destroyed themselves in a mass suicide rather than fall to the enemy. The gods’ failure to protect a friend of Rome for the sake of that very friendship demonstrates that they are neither just guardians nor reliable allies.

The civil strife that eventually destroyed the republic began with the Gracchi brothers, whose attempt to redistribute land from the wealthy to the poor provoked murderous resistance from the senatorial class. Both brothers fell to violence, and their deaths unleashed a torrent of blood. The consul Opimius, having defeated Gaius Gracchus in street fighting, conducted a judicial massacre that claimed three thousand lives. The head of Gracchus was sold for its weight in gold. On the site of this slaughter, the senate decreed a temple to Concord—a monument to hypocrisy that Augustine savages with bitter irony. If Concord had truly dwelt in Rome, she would have prevented such discord; if she had abandoned the city, then building her temple on the scene of her absence was an act of derision rather than devotion. The Romans, who worshipped both good and evil deities, had neglected to honor Discord, and she repaid the slight by tearing their city apart. The temple to her rival, erected on ground soaked with civil blood, could only provoke her to greater fury.