34.

But what is all this to us? ¹ Let them assert that they worship Jupiter, and not a dead man; let them maintain that they have dedicated their Capitol not to a dead man, but to the Spirit that vivifies all things and fills the world. And as to that shield of his, which was made of the skin of a she-goat in honour of his nurse, let them put upon it whatever interpretation they please. What do they say, however, about Saturn? ² What is it that they worship under the name of Saturn? Is not this the deity that was the first to come down to us from Olympus (of whom the poet sings):

"Then from Olympus' height came down

Good Saturn, exiled from his crown

By Jove, his mightier heir:

He brought the race to union first

Erewhile, on mountain-tops dispersed,

And gave them statutes to obey,

And willed the land wherein he lay

Should Latium's title bear."

--Virgil's AEneid, viii. 320-324, Conington's trans.

Does not his very image, made as it is with the head covered, present him as one under concealment? ³ Was it not he that made the practice of agriculture known to the people of Italy, a fact which is expressed by the reaping-hook? ⁴ No, say they; for you may see whether the being of whom such things are recorded was a man, ⁵ and indeed one particular king: we, however, interpret Saturn to be universal Time, as is signified also by his name in Greek: for he is called Chronus, ⁶ which word, with the aspiration thus given it, is also the vocable for time: whence, too, in Latin he gets the name of Saturn, as if it meant that he is sated ⁷ with years. But now, what we are to make of people like these I know not, who, in their very effort to put a more favourable meaning upon the names and the images of their gods, make the confession that the very god who is their major deity, and the father of the rest, is Time. For what else do they thus betray but, in fact, that all those gods of theirs are only temporal, seeing that the very parent of them all is made out to be Time?