The Temple of the Muses

Poets, is not found, and differed very much from their nature; and one finds more such things in Cicero On the Nature of the Gods original: de Nat. Deor. Lib. I. c. 49. Cicero's work De Natura Deorum (45 BC) explores the various philosophical views of the Roman and Greek deities. Book I, chapter 49, where the cited passage is found. However, although some of the sages were of that understanding, the common people nonetheless believed that which best agreed with their own inclinations; from which, besides the contempt for their Gods, there also arose an extreme unrestraint of life, because people eagerly followed that for which they could find examples in the Gods. Let us by no means be rebuked, says the Poet Euripides, if we follow those things which are judged not unbecoming for the Gods (a); and Plato and Apollonius of Tyana said: that those who heard that the Gods committed all sorts of shameful things must believe that there was no evil in wronging one another (b).

The fabricated stories of the Gods then, not only of themselves, gave occasion to men for similar crimes; but the Poets—a people who were very much given to love affairs and idleness—had also composed the Fables for that purpose, and even led others in that way of life. Under the pretext that the Gods had avenged the despised suits of lovers through the Furies original: Wraekgodinnen, the Eumenides or Erinyes of Greek myth, who punished crimes against the natural order. with unheard-of and supernatural punishments, they ignited a heavy passion in people, and sought thereby to better get their own mistresses to do their will. The Master of the Art of Love, Ovid, had no other purpose in having Anaxarete change into a rock In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Anaxarete was a girl who remained so cold to her lover that he hanged himself; as she watched his funeral with indifference, she was turned to stone. than to show his Mistresses that the Gods were accustomed to exercise a severe revenge over the despising of tender love; as our Author has well noted (c). Similar Fables are found in great numbers among the Poets, through which they then took away the shame from the weak vessels A traditional, though now archaic, term for women, derived from the New Testament (1 Peter 3:7)., and more easily got them to do their will. But since in such gardens one usually gathers bad fruit, they had to think further on how they might hide those foul and stinking flowers under beautiful leaves. And here it was again easy for them to blind the gullible. To cover their shame, they cast the guilt of those misdeeds upon the Gods, feigning how they, whether in a violent or a cunning manner, had dishonored this or that maiden or woman (d) or had taken her offspring as their own children; and thus they knew how to deceive original: mompen, meaning to trick or hoodwink. the parents or the husbands of the dishonored women, who were tremendously pleased with this visit from the Gods, and it was enough to say, A God has done it original: Deus fecit; of which one finds several other examples,

(a) In Grotius’s Excerpts from Stobaeus, p. 334. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a Dutch legal scholar; Joannes Stobaeus was a 5th-century compiler of Greek literature.
(b) See in Bayle, Historical Dictionary, Article Aesop original: Esope, Remark L. Pierre Bayle’s Dictionaire Historique et Critique (1697) was a massive, influential encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.
(c) Page 139.
(d) Page 110, 120.