Chapter XXIII.—Of the Follies Which the Pagans Have Indulged in Regarding Jupiter and Saturn. 31. These narratives of yours, say they, are but fables which have to be interpreted by the wise, or else they are fit only to be laughed at; but we revere that Jupiter of whom Maro says that “All things are full of Jove,” —Virgil’s Eclogues, iii. v. 60; that is to say, the spirit of life577 that vivifies all things. It is not without some reason, therefore, that Varro thought that Jove was worshipped by the Jews; for the God of the Jews says by His prophet, “I fill heaven and earth.”578 But what is meant by that which the same poet names Ether? How do they take the term? For he speaks thus: “Then the omnipotent father Ether, with fertilizing showers, Came down into the bosom of his fruitful spouse.” —Virgil’s Georgics, ii. 325. They say, indeed, that this Ether is not spirit,579 but a lofty body in which the heaven is stretched above the air.580 Is liberty conceded to the poet to speak at one time in the lan- guage of the followers of Plato, as if God was not body, but spirit, and at another time in the language of the Stoics, as if God was a body? What is it, then, that they worship in their Capitol? If it is a spirit, or if again it is, in short, the corporeal heaven itself, then what does that shield of Jupiter there which they style the Ægis? The origin of that name, indeed, is explained by the circumstance that a goat581 nourished Jupiter when he was concealed by his mother. Or is this a fiction of the poets? But are the capitols of the Romans, then, also 90 the mere creations of the poets? And what is the meaning of that, certainly not poetical, but unmistakeably farcical, variability of yours, in seeking your gods according to the ideas of philosophers in books, and revering them according to the notions of poets in your temples? 32. But was that Euhemerus also a poet, who declares both Jupiter himself, and his father Saturn, and Pluto and Neptune his brothers, to have been men, in terms so exceedingly plain that their worshippers ought all the more to render thanks to the poets, because their inventions have not been intended so much to disparage them as rather to dress them up? Albeit Cicero582 mentions that this same Euhemerus was translated into Latin by the poet 577 Or, the breathed air—spiritum. 578 Jer. xxiii. 24. 579 Spiritum, breath. 580 Aërem. 581 Alluding to the derivation of the word Ægis = αἰγίς, a goatskin, from the Greek αἴξ = goat. 582 See the first book of his De Natura Deorum, c. 42. Compare also Lactantius, De Falsa Religione, i. 11; and Varro, De Re Rustica, i. 48. Of the Follies Which the Pagans Have Indulged in Regarding Jupiter and Saturn. 196 Of the Follies Which the Pagans Have Indulged in Regarding Jupiter and …