Chapter VII. What Plato Thought of the Theology of the Ancients

[PLATO] ‘To tell of the other divinities and to learn their origin is beyond our power; but we must give credence to those who have spoken in former times, who being, as they said, the offspring of gods had, I suppose, a clear knowledge of their own ancestors. It is impossible therefore to disbelieve children of the gods, even though they speak without certain or probable proofs; but as they assert that they are reporting family histories, we must, in obedience to the law, believe them.

‘On their authority then let the origin of these gods be admitted and stated by us as follows. The children of Earth and Heaven were Oceanus and Tethys; and their children Phorcys, and Kronos, and Rhea, and the rest of them: and from Kronos and Rhea sprang Zeus and Hera, and all whom we know as their reputed brethren, and still others who were their offspring.’ [1]

These things, says Plato, ‘we must in obedience to the law believe,’ even though, he admits, they are stated ‘without certain or probable proofs.’ And we must observe how he indicates that the names and genealogies of the so-called gods have no hidden meaning to be explained by physical theories.

But again, in another place the same author, laying open his own deliberate opinion, has used these words:[2]

‘In the first place, said I, the author of that greatest lie about the greatest gods told a bad lie, how Uranus did the deeds which Hesiod says he did, and how Kronos took revenge upon him.

‘Again, even if the doings of Kronos and his treatment by his son were true, I should not have thought that they ought to be thus lightly told before young and thoughtless persons, but that they should be buried in silence, as the best thing; or if there were any necessity to tell them, then as few as possible should hear them in secret, after sacrificing no mere pig, but some great and scarce victim, so that very few might have a chance of hearing them.

‘Why yes, said he, these stories certainly are mischievous.

‘Aye, and they must not be told in our city, Adeimantus; nor must a young hearer be told that he would be doing nothing remarkable in committing the worst injuries nor in inflicting every kind of punishment upon his father for injuring him, but would be doing just what the first and greatest of the gods did.

‘Nor do I myself think that such stories are fit to be told.

‘Nor yet, said I, about gods going to war with gods and plotting and fighting (untrue as such things are) ought anything at all to be said, if at least the future guardians of our city are to regard it as very disgraceful to be lightly quarrelling one with another. Much less must we invent fables about wars of the giants, and work them in embroidery, with numberless other quarrels of all kinds of gods and heroes against their own kith and kin. But if there were any chance of our persuading them, that no citizen was ever at enmity with a fellow citizen, and that such a thing was unholy, rather should tales of this kind be told to children from the first by old men and old women and by those of mature age, and the poets should be compelled to make their tales like these.

‘The chaining, too, of Hera by her son, and the hurling of Hephaestus out of heaven by his father, when he was going to defend his mother from a beating, and all the battles of the gods that Homer has invented, must not be admitted into the city, whether they are composed with or without allegorical meanings.’

By these words, then, the philosopher clearly teaches that both the legends of the ancients concerning the gods, and the physical explanations of these legends supposed to be expressed in allegories are to be rejected; so that it can no longer be denied that there is good reason for our Saviour’s teaching in the Gospel, which bids us to abandon these legends, seeing that they have been rejected even by their own friends.

Hence it comes that I admire the ancient Romans for the manner in which, when they perceived that all the physiological theories of the Greeks concerning the gods were absurd and unprofitable, or rather were forced and inconsistent, they excluded them, legends and all, from their own theology. This too you may learn from the Roman Archaeology of Dionysius of Halicarnassus: for he, in his second book, when relating the history of Romulus, the first founder of the city of Rome, while recounting his other good deeds, writes on this point especially in the following manner: [3]