than the virtue of nature. I shall then think, with Epicurus and St.
Thomas, that men may have sprung from the slime of the earth and the rays of the sun--a noble origin, too, for beings so wretched and so wicked. Why should I admit a creating God, presented to me under so many contradictory and revolting aspects?" But at length physics arose, and with them philosophy. Then it was clearly discovered that the mud of the Nile produced not a single insect, nor a single ear of corn, and men were found to acknowledge throughout, germs, relations, means, and an astonishing correspondence among all beings. The particles of light have been followed, which go from the sun to enlighten the globe and the ring of Saturn, at the distance of three hundred millions of leagues; then, coming to the earth, form two opposite angles in the eye of the minutest insect, and paint all nature on its retina. A philosopher was given to the world who discovered the simple and sublime laws by which the celestial globes move in the immensity of space. Thus the work of the universe, now that it is better known, bespeaks a workman, and so many never-varying laws announce a lawgiver. Sound philosophy, therefore, has destroyed atheism, to which obscure theology furnished weapons of defence.
But one resource was left for the small number of difficult minds, which, being more forcibly struck by the pretended injustices of a Supreme Being than by his wisdom, were obstinate in denying this first mover. Nature has existed from all eternity; everything in nature is in motion, therefore everything in it continually changes. And if everything is forever changing, all possible combinations must take place; therefore the present combinations of all things may have been the effect of this eternal motion and change alone. Take six dice, and it is 46,655 to one that you do not throw six times six. But still there is that one chance in 46,656. So, in the infinity of ages, any one of the infinite number of combinations, as that of the present arrangement of the universe, is not impossible.
Minds, otherwise rational, have been misled by these arguments; but they have not considered that there is infinity against them, and that there certainly is not infinity against the existence of God. They should, moreover, consider that if everything were changing, the smallest things could not remain unchanged, as they have so long done. They have at least no reason to advance why new species are not formed every day. On the contrary, it is very probable that a powerful hand, superior to these continual changes, keeps all species within the bounds it, has prescribed them. Thus the philosopher, who acknowledges a God, has a number of probabilities on his side, while the atheist has only doubts.
It is evident that in morals it is much better to acknowledge a God than not to admit one. It is certainly to the interest of all men that there should be a Divinity to punish what human, justice cannot repress; but it is also clear that it were better to acknowledge no God than to worship a barbarous one, and offer Him human victims, as so many nations have done.
We have one striking example, which places this truth beyond a doubt.
The Jews, under Moses, had no idea of the immortality of the soul, nor of a future state. Their lawgiver announced to them, from God, only rewards and punishments purely temporal; they, therefore, had only this life to provide for. Moses commands the Levites to kill twenty-three thousand of their brethren for having had a golden or gilded calf. On another occasion twenty-four thousand of them are massacred for having had commerce with the young women of the country; and twelve thousand are struck dead because some few of them had wished to support the ark, which was near falling. It may, with perfect reverence for the decrees of Providence, be affirmed, humanly speaking, that it would have been much better for these fifty-nine thousand men, who believed in no future state, to have been absolute atheists and have lived, than to have been massacred in the name of the God whom they acknowledged.
It is quite certain that atheism is not taught in the schools of the learned of China, but many of those learned men are atheists, for they are indifferent philosophers. Now it would undoubtedly be better to live with them at Pekin, enjoying the mildness of their manners and their laws, than to be at Goa, liable to groan in irons, in the prisons of the inquisition, until brought out in a brimstone-colored garment, variegated with devils, to perish in the flames.
They who have maintained that a society of atheists may exist have then been right, for it is laws that form society, and these atheists, being moreover philosophers, may lead a very wise and happy life under the shade of those laws. They will certainly live in society more easily than superstitious fanatics. People one town with Epicureans such as Simonides, Protagoras, Des Barreux, Spinoza; and another with Jansenists and Molinists. In which do you think there will be the most quarrels and tumults? Atheism, considering it only with relation to this life, would be very dangerous among a ferocious people, and false ideas of the Divinity would be no less pernicious. Most of the great men of this world live as if they were atheists. Every man who has lived with his eyes open knows that the knowledge of a God, His presence, and His justice, has not the slightest influence over the wars, the treaties, the objects of ambition, interest or pleasure, in the pursuit of which they are wholly occupied. Yet we do not see that they grossly violate the rules established in society. It is much more agreeable to pass our lives among them than among the superstitious and fanatical. I do, it is true, expect more justice from one who believes in a God than from one who has no such belief; but from the superstitious I look only for bitterness and persecution. Atheism and fanaticism are two monsters which may tear society in pieces; but the atheist preserves his reason, which checks his propensity to mischief, while the fanatic is under the influence of a madness which is constantly urging him on.
SECTION II.
In England, as everywhere else, there have been, and there still are, many atheists by principle; for there are none but young, inexperienced preachers, very ill-informed of what passes in the world, who affirm that there cannot be atheists. I have known some in France, who were quite good natural philosophers; and have, I own, been very much surprised that men who could so ably develop the secret springs of nature should obstinately refuse to acknowledge the hand which so evidently puts those springs in action.
It appears to me that one of the principles which leads them to materialism is that they believe in the plentitude and infinity of the universe, and the eternity of matter. It must be this which misleads them, for almost all the Newtonians whom I have met admit the void and the termination of matter, and consequently admit a God.
Indeed, if matter be infinite, as so many philosophers, even including Descartes, pretend, it has of itself one of the attributes of the Supreme Being: if a void be impossible, matter exists of necessity; it has existed from all eternity. With these principles, therefore, we may dispense with God, creating, modifying, and preserving matter.
I am aware that Descartes, and most of the schools which have believed in the _plenum_, and the infinity of matter, have nevertheless admitted a God; but this is only because men scarcely ever reason or act upon their principles.
Had men reasoned, consequently, Epicurus and his apostle Lucretius must have been the most religious assertors of the Providence which they combated; for when they admitted the void and the termination of matter, a truth of which they had only an imperfect glimpse, it necessarily followed that matter was the being of necessity, existing by itself, since it was not indefinite. They had, therefore, in their own philosophy, and in their own despite, a demonstration that there is a Supreme Being, necessary, infinite, the fabricator of the universe.
Newton's philosophy, which admits and proves the void and finite matter, also demonstratively proves the existence of a God.
Thus I regard true philosophers as the apostles of the Divinity. Each class of men requires its particular ones; a parish catechist tells children that there is a God, but Newton proves it to the wise.
In London, under Charles II. after Cromwell's wars, as at Paris under Henry IV. after the war of the Guises, people took great pride in being atheists; having passed from the excess of cruelty to that of pleasure, and corrupted their minds successively by war and by voluptuousness, they reasoned very indifferently. Since then the more nature has been studied the better its Author has been known.
One thing I will venture to believe, which is, that of all religions, theism is the most widely spread in the world. It is the prevailing religion of China; it is that of the wise among the Mahometans; and, among Christian philosophers, eight out of ten are of the same opinion.
It has penetrated even into the schools of theology, into the cloisters, into the conclave; it is a sort of sect without association, without worship, without ceremonies, without disputes, and without zeal, spread through the world without having been preached. Theism, like Judaism, is to be found amidst all religions; but it is singular that the latter, which is the extreme of superstition, abhorred by the people and contemned by the wise, is everywhere tolerated for money; while the former, which is the opposite of superstition, unknown to the people, and embraced by philosophers alone, is publicly exercised nowhere but in China. There is no country in Europe where there are more theists than in England. Some persons ask whether they have a religion or not.
There are two sorts of theists. The one sort think that God made the world without giving man rules for good and evil. It is clear that these should have no other name than that of philosophers.
The others believe that God gave to man a natural law. These, it is certain, have a religion, though they have no external worship. They are, with reference to the Christian religion, peaceful enemies, which she carries in her bosom; they renounce without any design of destroying her. All other sects desire to predominate, like political bodies, which seek to feed on the substance of others, and rise upon their ruin; theism has always lain quiet. Theists have never been found caballing in any state.
There was in London a society of theists, who for some time continued to meet together. They had a small book of their laws, in which religion, on which so many ponderous volumes have been written, occupied only two pages. Their principal axiom was this: "Morality is the same among all men; therefore it comes from God. Worship is various; therefore it is the work of man."
The second axiom was: "Men, being all brethren, and acknowledging the same God, it is execrable that brethren should persecute brethren, because they testify their love for the common father in a different manner. Indeed," said they, "what upright man would kill his elder brother because one of them had saluted their father after the Chinese and the other after the Dutch fashion, especially while it was undecided in what way the father wished their reverence to be made to him? Surely he who should act thus would be a bad brother rather than a good son."
I am well aware that these maxims lead directly to "the abominable and execrable dogma of toleration"; but I do no more than simply relate the fact. I am very careful not to become a controversialist. It must, however, be admitted that if the different sects into which Christians have been divided had possessed this moderation, Christianity would have been disturbed by fewer disorders, shaken by fewer revolutions, and stained with less blood.
Let us pity the theists for combating our holy revelation. But whence comes it that so many Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Nestorians, Arians, partisans of Rome, and enemies of Rome, have been so sanguinary, so barbarous, and so miserable, now persecuting, now persecuted? It is because they have been the multitude. Whence is it that theists, though in error, have never done harm to mankind? Because they have been philosophers. The Christian religion has cost the human species seventeen millions of men, reckoning only one million per century, who have perished either by the hands of the ordinary executioner, or by those of executioners paid and led to battle--all for the salvation of souls and the greater glory of God.
I have heard men express astonishment that a religion so moderate, and so apparently conformable to reason, as theism, has not been spread among the people. Among the great and little vulgar may be found pious herb-women, Molinist duchesses, scrupulous seamstresses who would go to the stake for anabaptism, devout hackney-coachmen, most determined in the cause of Luther or of Arius, but no theists; for theism cannot so much be called a religion as a system of philosophy, and the vulgar, whether great or little, are not philosophers.
Locke was a declared theist. I was astonished to find, in that great philosopher's chapter on innate ideas, that men have all different ideas of justice. Were such the case, morality would no longer be the same; the voice of God would not be heard by man; natural religion would be at an end. I am willing to believe, with him, that there are nations in which men eat their fathers, and where to lie with a neighbor's wife is to do him a friendly office; but if this be true it does not prove that the law, "Do not unto others that which you would not have others do unto you," is not general. For if a father be eaten, it is when he has grown old, is too feeble to crawl along, and would otherwise be eaten by the enemy. And, I ask, what father would not furnish a good meal to his son rather than to the enemies of his nation? Besides, he who eats his father hopes that he in turn shall be eaten by his children.
If a service be rendered to a neighbor by lying with his wife, it is when he cannot himself have a child, and is desirous of having one; otherwise he would be very angry. In both these cases, and in all others, the natural law, "Do not to another that which you would not have another do to you," remains unbroken. All the other rules, so different and so varied, may be referred to this. When, therefore, the wise metaphysician, Locke, says that men have no innate ideas, that they have different ideas of justice and injustice, he assuredly does not mean to assert that God has not given to all men that instinctive self-love by which they are of necessity guided.
ATOMS.
Epicurus, equally great as a genius, and respectable in his morals; and after him Lucretius, who forced the Latin language to express philosophical ideas, and--to the great admiration of Rome--to express them in verse--Epicurus and Lucretius, I say, admitted atoms and the void. Gassendi supported this doctrine, and Newton demonstrated it. In vain did a remnant of Cartesianism still combat for the plenum; in vain did Leibnitz, who had at first adopted the rational system of Epicurus, Lucretius, Gassendi, and Newton, change his opinion respecting the void after he had embroiled himself with his master Newton. The plenum is now regarded as a chimera.
In this Epicurus and Lucretius appear to have been true philosophers, and their intermediaries, who have been so much ridiculed, were no other than the unresisting space in which Newton has demonstrated that the planets move round their orbits in times proportioned to their areas.
Thus it was not Epicurus' intermediaries, but his opponents, that were ridiculous. But when Epicurus afterwards tells us that his atoms declined in the void by chance; that this declination formed men and animals by chance; that the eyes were placed in the upper part of the head and the feet at the end of the legs by chance; that ears were not given to hear, but that the declination of atoms having fortuitously composed ears, men fortuitously made use of them to hear with--this madness, called physics, has been very justly turned into ridicule.
Sound philosophy, then, has long distinguished what is good in Epicurus and Lucretius, from their chimeras, founded on imagination and ignorance. The most submissive minds have adopted the doctrine of creation in time, and the most daring have admitted that of creation before all time. Some have received with faith a universe produced from nothing; others, unable to comprehend this doctrine in physics, have believed that all beings were emanations from the Great--the Supreme and Universal Being; but all have rejected the fortuitous concurrence of atoms; all have acknowledged that chance is a word without meaning. What we call chance can be no other than the unknown cause of a known effect.
Whence comes it then, that philosophers are still accused of thinking that the stupendous and indescribable arrangement of the universe is a production of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms--an effect of chance?
Neither Spinoza nor any one else has advanced this absurdity.
Yet the son of the great Racine says, in his poem on Religion: _O toi! qui follement fais ton Dieu du hasard,_ _Viens me développer ce nid qu'avec tant d'art,_ _Au même ordre toujours architecte fidèle,_ _A l'aide de son bee maçonne l'hirondelle;_ _Comment, pour élever ce hardi bâtiment,_ _A-t-elle en le broyant arrondi son ciment?_ Oh ye, who raise Creation out of chance, As erst Lucretius from th' atomic dance!
Come view with me the swallow's curious nest, Where beauty, art, and order, shine confessed.
How could rude chance, forever dark and blind, Preside within the little builder's mind?
Could she, with accidents unnumbered crowned, Its mass concentrate, and its structure round!
These lines are assuredly thrown away. No one makes chance his God; no one has said that while a swallow "tempers his clay, it takes the form of his abode by chance." On the contrary, it is said that "he makes his nest by the laws of necessity," which is the opposite of chance.
The only question now agitated is, whether the author of nature has formed primordial parts unsusceptible of division, or if all is continually dividing and changing into other elements. The first system seems to account for everything, and the second, hitherto at least, for nothing.
If the first elements of things were not indestructible one element might at last swallow up all the rest, and change them into its own substance. Hence, perhaps it was that Empedocles imagined that everything came from fire, and would be destroyed by fire.
This question of atoms involves another, that of the divisibility of matter _ad infinitum_. The word _atom_ signifies _without parts--not to be divided._ You divide it in thought, for if you were to divide it in reality it would no longer be an atom.
You may divide a grain of gold into eighteen millions of visible parts; a grain of copper dissolved in spirit of sal ammoniac has exhibited upwards of twenty-two thousand parts; but when you have arrived at the last element the atom escapes the microscope, and you can divide no further except in imagination.
The infinite divisibility of atoms is like some propositions in geometry. You may pass an infinity of curves between a circle and its tangent, supposing the circle and the tangent to be lines without breadth; but there are no such lines in nature.
You likewise establish that asymptotes will approach one another without ever meeting; but it is under the supposition that they are lines having length without breadth--things which have only a speculative existence.
So, also, we represent unity by a line, and divide this line and this unity into as many fractions as you please; but this infinity of fractions will never be any other than our unity and our line.
It is not strictly demonstrated that atoms are indivisible, but it appears that they are not divided by the laws of nature.
AVARICE.
Avarities, _amor habendi_--desire of having, avidity, covetousness.
Properly speaking, avarice is the desire of accumulating, whether in grain, movables, money, or curiosities. There were avaricious men long before coin was invented.
We do not call a man avaricious who has four and twenty coach horses, yet will not lend one to his friend: or who, having two thousand bottles of Burgundy in his cellar, will not send you half a dozen, when he knows you to be in want of them. If he show you a hundred thousand crowns' worth of diamonds you do not think of asking him to present you with one worth twenty livres; you consider him as a man of great magnificence, but not at all avaricious.
He who in finance, in army contracts, and great undertakings gained two millions each year, and who, when possessed of forty-three millions, besides his houses at Paris and his movables, expended fifty thousand crowns per annum for his table, and sometimes lent money to noblemen at five per cent, interest, did not pass, in the minds of the people, for an avaricious man. He had, however, all his life burned with the thirst of gain; the demon of covetousness was perpetually tormenting him; he continued to accumulate to the last day of his life. This passion, which was constantly gratified, has never been called avarice. He did not expend a tenth part of his income, yet he had the reputation of a generous man, too fond of splendor.
A father of a family who, with an income of twenty thousand livres, expends only five or six, and accumulates his savings to portion his children, has the reputation among his neighbors of being avaricious, mean, stingy, a niggard, a miser, a grip-farthing; and every abusive epithet that can be thought of is bestowed upon him.
Nevertheless this good citizen is much more to be honored than the Crœsus I have just mentioned; he expends three times as much in proportion. But the cause of the great difference between their reputations is this: Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because there is nothing to be gained by him. The physician, the apothecary, the wine-merchant, the draper, the grocer, the saddler, and a few girls gain a good deal by our Croesus, who is truly avaricious. But with our close and economical citizen there is nothing to be done. Therefore he is loaded with maledictions.
As for those among the avaricious who deprive themselves of the necessaries of life, we leave them to Plautus and Molière.
AUGURY.
Must not a man be very thoroughly possessed by the demon of etymology to say, with Pezron and others, that the Roman word _augurium_ came from the Celtic words _au_ and _gur_? According to these learned men _au_ must, among the Basques and Bas-Bretons, have signified _the liver_, because _asu_, which, (say they) signified _left_, doubtless stood for the liver, which is on the _right_ side; and _gur_ meant _man_, or _yellow_, or _red_, in that Celtic tongue of which we have not one memorial. Truly this is powerful reasoning.
Absurd curiosity (for we must call things by their right names) has been carried so far as to seek Hebrew and Chaldee derivations from certain Teutonic and Celtic words. This, Bochart never fails to do. It is astonishing with what confidence these men of genius have proved that expressions used on the banks of the Tiber were borrowed from the patois of the savages of Biscay. Nay, they even assert that this patois was one of the first idioms of the primitive language--the parent of all other languages throughout the world. They have only to proceed, and say that all the various notes of birds come from the cry of the two first parrots, from which every other species of birds has been produced.
The religious folly of auguries was originally founded on very sound and natural observations. The birds of passage have always marked the progress of the seasons. We see them come in flocks in the spring, and return in the autumn. The cuckoo is heard only in fine weather, which his note seems to invite. The swallows, skimming along the ground, announce rain. Each climate has its bird, which is in effect its augury.
Among the observing part of mankind there were, no doubt, knaves who persuaded fools that there was something divine in these animals, and that their flight presaged our destinies, which were written on the wings of a sparrow just as clearly as in the stars.
The commentators on the allegorical and interesting story of Joseph sold by his brethren, and made Pharaoh's prime minister for having explained his dreams, infer that Joseph was skilled in the science of auguries, from the circumstance that Joseph's steward is commanded to say to his brethren, "Is not this it (the silver cup) in which my lord drinketh?
and whereby indeed he divineth?" Joseph, having caused his brethren to be brought back before him, says to them: "What deed is this that ye have done? Wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?"
Judah acknowledges, in the name of his brethren, that Joseph is a great diviner, and that God has inspired him: "God hath found out the iniquity of thy servants." At that time they took Joseph for an Egyptian lord. It is evident from the text that they believe the God of the Egyptians and of the Jews had discovered to this minister the theft of his cup.
Here, then, we have auguries or divination clearly established in the Book of Genesis; so clearly that it is afterwards forbidden in Leviticus: "Ye shall not eat anything with the blood; neither shall ye use enchantment nor observe times. Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard."
As for the superstition of seeing the future in a cup, it still exists, and is called seeing in a glass. The individual must never have known pollution; he must turn towards the east, and pronounce the words, _Abraxa per dominum nostrum_, after which he will see in a glass of water whatever he pleases. Children were usually chosen for this operation. They must retain their hair; a shaven head, or one wearing a wig, can see nothing in a glass. This pastime was much in vogue in France during the regency of the duke of Orleans, and still more so in the times preceding.
As for auguries, they perished with the Roman Empire. Only the bishops have retained the augurial staff, called the crosier; which was the distinctive mark of the dignity of augur; so that the symbol of falsehood has become the symbol of truth.
There were innumerable kinds of divinations, of which several have reached our latter ages. This curiosity to read the future is a malady which only philosophy can cure, for the weak minds that still practise these pretended arts of divination--even the fools who give themselves to the devils--all make religion subservient to these profanations, by which it is outraged.
It is an observation worthy of the wise, that Cicero, who was one of the college of augurs, wrote a book for the sole purpose of turning auguries into ridicule; but they have likewise remarked that Cicero, at the end of his book, says that "superstition should be destroyed, but not religion. For," he adds, "the beauty of the universe, and the order of the heavenly bodies force us to acknowledge an eternal and powerful nature. We must maintain the religion which is joined with the knowledge of this nature, by utterly extirpating superstition, for it is a monster which pursues and presses us on every side. The meeting with a pretended diviner, a presage, an immolated victim, a bird, a Chaldæan, an aruspice, a flash of lightning, a clap of thunder, an event accidentally corresponding with what has been foretold to us, everything disturbs and makes us uneasy; sleep itself, which should make us forget all these pains and fears, serves but to redouble them by frightful images."
Cicero thought he was addressing only a few Romans, but he was speaking to all men and all ages.
Most of the great men of Rome no more believed in auguries than Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X., believed in Our Lady of Loretto and the blood of St. Januarius. However, Suetonius relates that Octavius, surnamed Augustus, was so weak as to believe that a fish, which leaped from the sea upon the shore at Actium, foreboded that he should gain the battle. He adds that, having afterwards met an ass-driver, he asked him the name of his ass; and the man having answered that his ass was named Nicholas, which signifies conqueror of nations, he had no longer any doubts about the victory; and that he afterwards had brazen statues erected to the ass-driver, the ass, and the jumping fish. He further assures us that these statues were placed in the Capitol.
It is very likely that this able tyrant laughed at the superstitions of the Romans, and that his ass, the driver, and the fish, were nothing more than a joke. But it is no less likely that, while he despised all the follies of the vulgar, he had a few of his own. The barbarous and dissimulating Louis XI. had a firm faith in the cross of St. Louis.
Almost all princes, excepting such as have had time to read, and read to advantage, are in some degree infected with superstition.
AUGUSTINE.
Augustine, a native of Tagaste, is here to be considered, not as a bishop, a doctor, a father of the Church, but simply as a man. This is a question in physics, respecting the climate of Africa.
When a youth, Augustine was a great libertine, and the spirit was no less quick in him than the flesh. He says that before he was twenty years old he had learned arithmetic, geometry and music without a master.
Does not this prove that, in Africa, which we now call Barbary, both minds and bodies advance to maturity more rapidly than among us?
These valuable advantages of St. Augustine would lead one to believe that Empedocles was not altogether in the wrong when he regarded fire as the principle of nature. It is assisted, but by subordinate agents. It is like a king governing the actions of all his subjects, and sometimes inflaming the imaginations of his people rather too much. It is not without reason that Syphax says to Juba, in the Cato of Addison, that the sun which rolls its fiery car over African heads places a deeper tinge upon the cheeks, and a fiercer flame within their hearts. That the dames of Zama are vastly superior to the pale beauties of the north: The glowing dames of Zama's royal court Have faces flushed with more exalted charms; Were you with these, my prince, you'd soon forget The pale unripened beauties of the north.
Where shall we find in Paris, Strasburg, Ratisbon, or Vienna young men who have learned arithmetic, the mathematics and music without assistance, and who have been fathers at fourteen?
Doubtless it is no fable that Atlas, prince of Mauritania, called by the Greeks the son of heaven, was a celebrated astronomer, and constructed a celestial sphere such as the Chinese have had for so many ages. The ancients, who expressed everything in allegory, likened this prince to the mountain which bears his name, because it lifts its head above the clouds, which have been called the heavens by all mankind who have judged of things only from the testimony of their eyes.
These Moors cultivated the sciences with success, and taught Spain and Italy for five centuries. Things are greatly altered. The country of Augustine is now but a den of pirates, while England, Italy, Germany, and France, which were involved in barbarism, are greater cultivators of the arts than ever the Arabians were.
Our only object, then, in this article is to show how changeable a scene this world is. Augustine, from a debauchee, becomes an orator and a philosopher; he puts himself forward in the world; he teaches rhetoric; he turns Manichæan, and from Manichæanism passes to Christianity. He causes himself to be baptized, together with one of his bastards, named Deodatus; he becomes a bishop, and a father of the Church. His system of grace has been reverenced for eleven hundred years as an article of faith. At the end of eleven hundred years some Jesuits find means to procure an anathema against Augustine's system, word for word, under the names of Jansenius, St. Cyril, Arnaud, and Quesnel. We ask if this revolution is not, in its kind, as great as that of Africa, and if there be anything permanent upon earth?
AUGUSTUS (OCTAVIUS).
_The Morals of Augustus._ Manners can be known only from facts, which facts must be incontestable.
It is beyond doubt that this man, so immoderately praised as the restorer of morals and of laws, was long one of the most infamous debauchees in the Roman commonwealth. His epigram on Fulvia, written after the horrors of the proscriptions, proves that he was no less a despiser of decency in his language than he was a barbarian in his conduct. This abominable epigram is one of the strongest testimonies to Augustus' infamous immorality. Sextus Pompeius also reproached him with shameful weaknesses: _"Effeminatum infectatus est."_ Antony, before the triumvirate, declared that Cæsar, great-uncle to Augustus, had adopted him as his son only because he had been subservient to his pleasures; _"Adopt ionem avunculi stupro meritum."_ Lucius Cæsar charged him with the same crime, and even asserted that he had been base enough to sell himself to Hirtius for a very considerable sum. He was so shameless as to take the wife of a consul from her husband in the midst of a supper; he took her to a neighboring closet, staid with her there for some time, and brought her back to table without himself, the woman, or her husband blushing at all at the proceeding.
We have also a letter from Antony to Augustus, couched in these terms: _"Ita valeas ut hanc epistolam cum leges, non inieris Testullam, aut Terentillam, aut Russillam, aut Salviam, aut omnes. Anne refert ubi et in quam arrigas?"_ We are afraid to translate this licentious letter.
Nothing is better known than the scandalous feast of five of the companions of his pleasures with five of the principal women of Rome.
They were dressed up as gods and goddesses, and imitated all the immodesties invented in fable--_"Bum nova Divorum cœnat adulteria."_ And on the stage he was publicly designated by this famous line: _Videsne ut cinaedus orbem digito temperet?_ Almost every Latin author that speaks of Ovid asserts that Augustus had the insolence to banish that Roman knight, who was a much better man than himself, merely because the other had surprised him in an incest with his own daughter Julia; and that he sent his daughter into exile only through jealousy. This is the more likely, as Caligula published aloud that his mother was born from the incest of Augustus with Julia.
So says Suetonius, in his life of Caligula.