Mattias Gassman (University of Oxford)
In De ciuitate dei 18, Augustine deviates sharply from his own earlier convictions on human religious history. From Ep. 17 to the grammar-teacher Maximus (ca. 390) to Ciu. 7 (415/416), Augustine consistently held that the gods, especially Jupiter and Saturn, had been mortal rulers. The authority, grasped through Cicero and Vergil, was the Ἱερὰ Ἀναγραφή of Euhemerus, translated (as Sacra Historia) by Ennius. In embracing a Euhemeristic understanding of traditional cult, Augustine was in full agreement with the fourth-century apologetic tradition, especially Eusebius and Lactantius, who had quoted extracts from the Sacra Historia in his Diuinae institutiones (Gassman 2020, ch. 1). In Ciu. 18, about eight years after book 7, Augustine drew explicitly on Lactantius for data on extrabiblical prophecies. Here, though he did note the deification of various minor figures, he refrained from inserting Jupiter directly into his narrative, disconnected Saturn from the early kingship of Italy, and even allowed that Jupiter’s alleged misdeeds were mere fictions. Now that Augustine had actually tried to write an account of early human history, he had ceased to be a consistent Euhemerist.
This paper traces this shift in Augustine’s thinking to two causes. One is a matter of sources, the other, of the preoccupations through which he interpreted them. The first half of Ciu. 18 describes the development of human civilization from the Assyrians onwards (on this much-neglected narrative, see still Frick 1886, Fraccaro 1907). Augustine is melding together an authoritative Roman and an authoritative Christian account: Varro’s now-lost De gente populi romani and Jerome’s translation of Eusebius’ Chronicon. Each had located the origin of Greco-Roman civilizations at Sicyon in the Peloponnesus. Augustine was thus able to blend them together; yet he knew, now that he had read Varro’s Antiquitates (Marshall 2016), that Varro, unlike Jerome, had not been a Euhemerist. He strives, throughout his narrative, to balance his sources’ conflicting methods, yet sides chiefly with Varro’s emphasis on historical reality. This he undercuts with ironizing, informed by the Antiquitates, about the stage-plays that, even if they were fictitious, nonetheless presented lies about the gods.
Augustine was fully able to distort Varro’s meaning if he wished (e.g., North 2014), and so the deeper reason for his choice to sideline the Euhemerist approach is to be sought in his overarching intellectual vision. In the earlier books, Augustine had not only given a metaphysical explanation of the gods as fallen angels; he had shifted his focus from idolatry—seen by earlier apologists as the central problem of human history—to the underlying motivations that shape human life. Idolatry is secondary to, and arises out of, the self-love that constitutes the terrena ciuitas, the earthly opponent of the ciuitas dei. Now that he had explained where the earthly “city” had come from, Augustine did not need to explain how cults had proliferated in early Mediterranean history. His approach therefore converged, despite their deep metaphysical differences, with Varro’s: minor figures might have been deified mortals, but the major gods need not have been.