The gods are judged by animals and their rites are absurd
Octavius is continuing his attack on the pagan gods, now arguing that even animals treat the idols as lifeless matter and that the rites of Roman worship are ridiculous or shameful.
How much more truly do mute animals judge your gods by nature! Mice, swallows, and kites know that the gods feel nothing: they gnaw them, trample them, sit on them, and unless you drive them away, they build nests in the very mouth of your god. Spiders weave over his face and hang their threads from his very head.
You wipe them, clean them, scrape them, and you protect the gods you make, and you fear them—while each of you does not think that he ought to know God before he worships him, while you are eager to obey your parents without thought, while you prefer to become an addition to another's error rather than trust yourselves, while you know nothing of the things you fear. So greed has been consecrated in gold and silver, so the form of empty statues has been sealed, so Roman superstition was born. If you review their rites, how many are laughable, how many are also pitiable!
Some run about naked in the raw winter, others walk wearing felt caps, carry old shields around, beat hides, and lead gods begging through the streets. Some shrines they allow to be entered once a year, some it is forbidden to visit at all. There is one where no man may go, some rites are closed to women, and for a slave even to be present at certain ceremonies is a crime requiring expiation. Other rites a one-husband woman crowns, others a many-husband woman, and with great religiosity the woman who can count more adulteries is sought out.
What of the man who pours a libation with his own blood and prays with his own wounds? Would he not be better off profane than religious in this way? Or the man whose testicles are cut off—how does he not violate the god whom he placates in this manner, since if God wanted eunuchs, he could create them, not make them? Who does not understand that the unsound and those of empty and ruined mind are raving in these practices, and that the crowd of the erring itself offers mutual defense to one another? Here the common defense of madness is the multitude of the mad.
Latin
Quanto uerius de diis uestris animalia muta naturaliter iudicant! mures, hirundines, milui non sentire eos sciunt: rodunt, inculcant, insident, ac nisi abigatis, in ipso dei uestri ore nidificant: araneae uero faciem eius intexunt et de ipso capite sua fila suspendunt.
uos tergetis, mundatis, eraditis et illos, quos facitis protegitis, et timetis, dum unusquisque uestrum non cogitat prius se debere deum nosse quam colere, dum inconsulte gestiunt parentibus oboedire, dum fieri malunt alieni erroris accessio quam sibi credere, dum nihil ex his quae timent norunt. sic in auro et argento auaritia consecrata est, sic statuarum inanium consignata forma, sic nata Romana superstitio: quorum ritus si percenseas, ridenda quam multa, quam multa etiam miseranda sunt !
nudi cruda hieme discurrunt, alii incedunt pilleati, scuta uetera circumferunt, pelles caedunt, mendicantes uicatim deos ducunt: quaedam fana semel anno adire permittunt, quaedam in totum nefas uisere: est quo uiro non licet, nonnulla absque feminis sacra sunt, etiam seruo quibusdam caerimoniis interesse piaculare flagitium est: alia sacra coronat uniuira, alia multiuira, et magna religione conquiritur quae plura possit adulteria numerare.
quid, qui sanguine suo libat et uulneribus suis supplicat, non profanus melius esset quam sic religiosus? aut cui testa sunt obscena demessa, quo modo deum non uiolat qui hoc modo placat, cum si eunuchos deus uellet, posset procreare, non facere? quis non intellegat male sanos et uanae et perditae mentis in ista desipere et ipsam errantium turbam mutua sibi patrocinia praestare? hic defensio communis furoris est furentium multitudo.