Notes 2"FRAGILIS et laboriosa mortalitas in partes ista digessit, infirmitatis suae memor, ut portionibus quisquis coleret, quo maxime indigeret." ['Frail, toiling mortality, remembering its own weakness, has divided such deities into groups, so as to worship in sections, each the deity he is most in need of.'] Pliny, Natural History, Bk. II, Ch. 5, Sect. 15. So early as HESIOD'S time there were 30,000 deities. Works and Days, Bk. I, Line 250. But the task to be performed by these seems still too great for their number. The provinces of the deities were so subdivided, that there was even a God of Sneezing. See ARISTOTLE, Problems, Bk. 33, Ch. 7 and 9. The province of copulation, suitably to the importance and dignity of it, was divided among several deities.
3Roman Antiquities, Bk. VIII, Ch. 2, Sect.
2.
4The following lines of EURIPIDES are so much to the present purpose, that I cannot forbear quoting them:
[Greek Quote]
HUCUBA, Lines 956 ff. "There is nothing secure in the world; no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss all life into confusion; mix every thing with its reverse; that all of us, from our ignorance and uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence."5Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Bk.
III, Ch. 47, Sect. 1.
6Geography, Bk. VII, Ch. 4.
7Pere* le Comte, Memoires and Observations...
made in a late Journey Through the Empire of China.
8Jean-Francois Regnard, Voiage* de Lapponie.
9Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Bk.
I, Ch. 86, Sect. 3. Lucian, "On Sacrifices," Sect. 14. Ovid alludes to the same tradition, Metamorphoses, Bk. V, Line 321 ff. So also Manilius, Astronomica, Bk. IV, Lines 580 and 800.
10Herodotus, History, Bk. I, Ch. 172.
11Caesar, Gallic War, Bk. IV, Sect. 7.
12Homer, Illiad, Bk. V, Line 382.
13On the Sublime, Ch. IX, Sect. 7.
14Pere Brumoy, Theatre* des Grecs, Bernard de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles.
15Arnobius, Seven Books Against the Heathen, Bk. VII, Ch. 33.
16Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, Ch. 13, Sect. 2-5.
17Moral Letters, letter 41.
18Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander, Bk. IV, Ch. 3, Sect. 22. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Bk. XVII, Ch. 41, Sect. 8.
19Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, Bk. II, "The Deified Augustus," Ch. 5.
20Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, Bk. IV, "Gaius Caligula," Ch. 5.
21Herodotus, History, Bk. II, Ch. 53. Lucian, "Zeus Catechized," Sect. 1; "On Funerals," Sect. 2.
22[Greek quote] ['How from one seed spring gods and mortal men.'] Hesiod, Works and Days, Line 108.
23Hesiod, Theogony, Line 570.
24Metamorphoses, Bk. I, Line 32.
25Library of History, Bk. I, Ch. 6-7.
26Ibid., Bk. III, Ch. 20.
27The same author, who can thus account for the origin of the world without a Deity, esteems it impious to explain from physical causes, the common accidents of life, earthquakes, inundations, and tempests: and devoutly ascribes these to the anger of JUPITER or NEPTUNE. A plain proof, whence he derived his ideas of religion. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Bk. XV, Ch. 48.
28It will be easy to give a reason, why THALES, ANAXIMANDER, and those early philosophers, who really were atheists, might be very orthodox in the pagan creed; and why ANAXAGORASand SOCRATES, though real theists, must naturally, in ancient times, be esteemed impious. The blind, unguided powers of nature, if they could produce men, might also produce such beings as JUPITER and NEPTUNE, who being the most powerful, intelligent existences in the world, would be proper objects of worship. But where a supreme intelligence, the first cause of all, is admitted, these capricious beings, if they exist at all, must appear very subordinate and dependent, and consequently be excluded from the rank of deities. PLATO (Laws, Bk. X, 886) assigns this reason for the imputation thrown on ANAXAGORAS, namely his denying the divinity of the stars, planets, and other created objects.
29Against the Physicists, Bk. II, Sect. 18-19.
30Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, Bk. VI, Ch. 54.
31Pliny, Letters, Bk. VI, Letter 20, Sect.
14-15.
32Hesiod, Theogony, Line 933 ff.
33Ibid. Plutarch, Lives, "Pelopidas," Ch. 19.
34Homer, Illiad, Bk. XIV, Line 264 ff.
35Herodian, History of the Empire, Bk. V, Ch.
3, Sect. 3-5. JUPITER AMMON is represented by CURTIUS as a deity of the same kind (History of Alexander, Bk. IV, Ch. 7, Sect.
23). The ARABIANS and PERSINUNTIANS adored also shapeless unformed stones as their deity (Arnobius, Seven Books Against the Heathen, Bk. VI., Ch. 11). So much did their folly exceed that of the EGYPTIANS.
36Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Bk. II, Ch. 11, "Stilpo," Sect. 116.
37See CAESAR of the religion of the GAULS, The Gallic War, Bk. VI, Sect. 17.
38Germany, Ch. 40.
39[This sentence is as it originally appeared in Hume's Five Dissertations which was printed but never distributed because of political pressures. For prudential reasons Hume rephrased this sentence which, in the first three distributed editions, reads, "Thus, notwithstanding the sublime ideas suggested by Moses and the inspired writers, many vulgar Jews seem still to have conceived the supreme Being as a mere topical deity or national protector." In the six succeeding editions of the Natural History the sentence appears again changed: "Thus, the God of ABRAHAM, ISAAC, and JACOB, became the supreme deity of JEHOVAHof the JEWS."]
40Compte Henri de Boulainvilliers, Abrege*Chronologique de l'histore de France, 499.
41[The preceding portion of this sentence (beginning with "sometimes degraded...") is as it originally appeared in Five Dissertations. All nine distributed editions of the Natural History read in its place, "sometimes degraded him nearly to a level with human creatures in his powers and faculties."]
42Thomas Hyde, Historia religionis veterum Persarum.
43Called the Scapulaire.
44Herodotus, History, Bk. IV, Ch. 95, 96.
45Ibid., Ch. 94.