1 Earliest Rome

Arnobius, Against the Gentiles n.37
9.5 Sickness and trouble
If souls were, as the story runs, the offspring of the Lord, generated by the supreme
power, they would in no way fall short of perfection themselves, being born of the most
perfect virtue. They would all have shared a single mind, and a single accord. They would
always have lived in the royal palace and never have given up the seats of bliss, in which
they had learned and retained the most divine teachings; 1
never rashly have sought out
instead these earthly regions, where they are twisted up in gloomy bodies all amongst the
phlegm and the blood, the bags of shit and filthy urine-pots. But you might say that it
was necessary for these areas to be inhabited and so that was why the omnipotent god
sent out the souls, as though on a colonial venture. So, what good are human beings to
the world? and what is this cause for which they are so necessary that it provides the
reason why they have to live here and be tenants of an earthly body? Well, they bring
some contribution to the completion of the whole mass; if they had not been added in,
then the whole sum of the universe would have been incomplete and imperfect. So what?
If there were no human beings, would the world cease to fulfil its functions? would the
stars not go through their courses? would summer and winter not happen? would the
winds' blasts die down and the rain not fail from the clouds, gathered and hanging above,
so as to temper the droughts? In fact, all these things would run in their own courses and
not depart from their normal order, even if the name of humankind had never been
heard in the world and the whole orb of the earth still dwelt in the silence of an empty
desert.
1. He is referring to the idea of Plato, much debated in this period, that the soul comes to
earth already having memories of earlier experience.
9.5 Sickness and trouble
The Roman gods offered help to the individual in times of sickness or trouble.
Although rhe main focus of Roman religion (at leasr as it is represented to us in
surviving literary texts) was not on the personal or emotional life of the worshipper,
it could nonetheless be a resource for the private man or woman at
times of crisis. One of the most enduring religious customs of the Graeco-
Roman world (attested in literally thousands of surviving inscriptions) was the
making of a vow, or promise to a god, to be fulfilled in rerurn for divine aid,
when the crisis had passed away.
See further: Vol. I, 34-5; Versnel (1981a).
9.5a A tenth for Hercules
The vow here fulfilled is a particularly striking one, because it involved spending
a tenth of the family fortune on a single vow to Hercules; the dedicants, the
sons of the vower, are unspecific as to the troubles that led to the vow being
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