The City of God

C barbarians spared them: for this they should give thanks to God, for this they should truly run to His name, so that they may escape the pains of eternal fire. This name, many of them usurped mendaciously, so that they might escape the pains of present destruction. For those whom you see petulantly and impudently insulting the servants of Christ, there are many among them who would not have escaped that slaughter and ruin, had they not pretended to be servants of Christ. And now, with ungrateful pride and most impious madness, they resist His name with a perverse heart, so that they may be punished with eternal darkness, to which name they fled with even a deceitful mouth, so that they might enjoy temporal light.

Chap. II

Let them read all the wars that have been written about, whether before the founding of Rome or from its rise and empire, and let them bring forth any city captured by foreigners in such a way that the enemies who had captured it spared those whom they had discovered to have fled to the temples of their gods, or that any barbarian leader had commanded that, once the town was breached, no one should be struck who had been found in this or that temple.

Did not Aeneas see Priam, and through the altars
Staining with blood the fires he himself had consecrated?
Did not Diomedes and Ulysses, having slain the guards of the high citadel,
Seize the sacred image, and with bloodied hands
And yet what follows is not true dare to touch the virgin fillets of the goddess?
From that point the hopes of the Greeks ebbed, and being sucked back, turned away.

For they did conquer afterwards, afterwards they destroyed Troy with iron and fire, afterwards they slaughtered Priam fleeing to the altars. Nor did Troy perish because Minerva perished. For what had Minerva herself lost before, so that it might perish? Perhaps her guards? This is certainly true; for once they were killed, it could be taken away. For images were not guarded by men, but images were guarded by men. How, therefore, was she worshipped D to guard the fatherland and the citizens, when she could not guard her own guards?

Chap. III

Behold to which gods the Romans rejoiced that they had commended the city of Rome to be kept. O too miserable an error. And they are angry with us when we say such things about their gods, nor are they angry with their own authors, whom they paid a fee to learn thoroughly. And moreover, they held the teachers themselves to be most worthy of both public salary and honors. Indeed, in the case of Virgil, whom children read for this reason, so that the great poet, most famous and best of all, imbibed in tender years cannot easily be abolished by oblivion, according to that saying of Horace:

The jar will long retain the odor with which it was once steeped when new.

In this author, namely Virgil, Juno is introduced as hostile to the Trojans, inciting Aeolus, the king of the winds, against them, saying:

A race hostile to me sails the Tyrrhenian sea,
Carrying Ilium into Italy, and the conquered household gods.

Was it therefore to these conquered household gods that the wise ought to have commended Rome, so that it might not be conquered? But Juno was saying these things as if she were an angry woman, not knowing what she was saying. But Aeneas himself, called pious so often, does he not narrate it thus?

Panthus Otriades, priest of the citadel and of Phoebus,
With his hands draws the sacred rites, the conquered gods, and his small grandson,
And himself, distraught in his running, makes for the threshold.

Does he not show that the gods themselves, whom he does not hesitate to call conquered, were commended to him rather than he to them, when it is said to him:

Troy commends to you her sacred rites, and her own household gods.