Lactantius, Divine Institutes 2.13

Later, when God saw the earth filled with malice and crimes, He decided to destroy the human race with a flood. Still, to restore the multitude, He chose one man, because among all the corrupted a singular example of justice remained. When he was six hundred years old, he built an ark, just as God had commanded him, and in it he himself was preserved with his wife, three sons, and three daughters-in-law, after water had covered all the highest mountains (Genesis 6:9–9:29).

After the earth dried, God cursed the injustice of the former age so that the length of life would not again become a cause for devising evils; He gradually diminished the span of human life through successive generations and set the limit at one hundred twenty years, which may not be exceeded (Genesis 6:3). When he came out of the ark, the man diligently cultivated the ground and planted a vineyard with his own hand, as the Holy Scriptures teach (Genesis 9:20). From this it is argued that those who consider Liber the author of wine are mistaken; for he preceded not only Liber but also Saturn and Uranus by many ages.

When his vineyard first bore fruit, he rejoiced, drank to drunkenness, and lay naked. One of his sons, whose name was Ham, saw his father's nakedness but did not cover it; instead he went out and told his brothers. The brothers, taking a cloak, entered with faces turned away and covered their father. When the father learned what had been done, he disowned and expelled the son (Genesis 9:21–27). The fugitive settled in the part of the earth now called Arabia, and that land was named Canaan after him, and his descendants were called Canaanites. This was the first nation to ignore God, because its leader and founder did not receive the worship of God from his father, having been cursed by him; thus he bequeathed ignorance of the divine to his offspring.

From this nation the nearest peoples spread as their numbers increased. The man's own descendants, however, were called Hebrews, and with them the religion of God remained. Later, when these Hebrews had multiplied immensely and the narrowness of their land could not contain them, young men — whether sent by their parents or acting on their own, driven by scarcity — scattered as fugitives here and there; they filled all the islands and the whole world, and, torn from the holy root, established new customs and institutions according to their own will.

The first who occupied Egypt began to observe and worship celestial bodies. Because they were not sheltered by houses on account of the climate, nor was the sky ever veiled by clouds in that region, they noted the courses of the stars and their effects while they frequently venerated them, watching them more curiously and freely. Afterwards they invented portentous animal figures to worship, led by certain prodigies, whose authors we will soon reveal. The other peoples dispersed through the land, admiring the elements of the world — heaven, sun, earth, sea — venerated them without images or temples and offered sacrifices to them in the open, until the passage of time brought the most powerful kings to build temples and statues and to institute their worship with victims and incense.

Thus the nations began to stray from the knowledge of God. They are wrong, therefore, who contend that the worship of gods existed from the beginning of things and that paganism is prior to the religion of God, which they think was invented later, because they ignore the source and origin of truth. Now we return to the beginning of the world.