ending up with the indication that worshiping municipal gods is limited to within
the city walls.
This freedom to adopt gods, enjoyed by the inhabitants of municipalities in the
Roman empire, has absurd consequences, which Tertullian illustrates using Egypt as
an example, since they deify and worship animals. Following the standard pattern of
deifying, he shows that the god Serapis is a transformation of the biblical character
Joseph (Nat.2.8 –19). Tertullian’s argument likens the Roman religious system to
an endless sum of local religions, so that Roman religion is nothing but a complex
conglomerate of divinities unknown to the very citizens of the empire.
The second part of the book ranges from chapter 9 to 17 and refers to Roman
national gods that are either deified men or inventions or personifications. In this
he follows the Greek apologists who had already referred to gods as deified men,
except that Tertullian uses classical authors, mostly Roman, like Varro, Cassius Hemina,
Cornelius Nepos, Tacitus, Diodorus Siculus, and Pliny the Elder. From these
origins of the relevant deities Tertullian deduces that it is not the gods that have
made the Roman state great, nor, therefore, can the fall of the Roman state be a
consequence of its abandoning its cult. In this second part of the second book Tertullian
continues the polemic with Roman religion and especially with Varro’s system but
in another dimension (Rüpke 2005b, 2006a). The object of Tertullian’s confronta-
tion is no longer Varro’s tripartition, nor civil theology, but Rome itself, the dom-
inant city which legitimates itself as such by means of this theology and spreads
absurdity. Here appears the political dimension of theology and its relationship with
a system of dominance:Since, however, it is no longer to the philosophers, nor the poets, nor the nations that
we owe all superstition, although they transmitted it, but to the dominant Romans,
who received the tradition and gave it wide authority, another phase of the widespread
error of man must now be encountered by us; nay, another forest must be felled by
our axe, which has obscured the childhood of the degenerate worship with germs of
superstitions gathered from all quarters. (Nat.2.9.2)Returning to Varro, he discusses Varro’s distinctions, for example between dei
certi, incerti, and gods of certain or unknown function. Next Tertullian refers to
Roman gods as dei hostilesand identifies two specifically Roman types of gods: those
that derive from men and those simply devised, that is to say, divinities that are the
personification of virtues or abstract powers. Once again Tertullian introduces a
catalogue of controversial, ironic examples, loaded with sarcasm, in chapters 9–11
quoting such Roman figures as the unsuccessful Eneas, the fratricidal Romulus, and
divinities like Sterculus, the hetaeraLaurentia, the lover Antinous, and the abstract
divinities of Varro, of feeding, birth, and marriage, which are ridiculed and reduced
to absurdity in chapter 12. But it is not the divinities but the Varronian and Roman
classifications that are reduced to absurdity. After detailed proof that Saturn, the
oldest god, had been a man, and hence all the later gods share this characteristic,
he broaches the issue of the credibility of those who have become gods after death
and returns to the controversy with Varro. The lists of divinities seem never-ending:
464 Cecilia Ames