Lactantius, Divine Institutes 22

Among the Romans the author and founder of these empty rites was King Sabinus. He tangled the rough, unlearned minds of men with new superstitions, and to give his deception some authority he pretended to hold nocturnal meetings with the goddess Egeria. A pitch‑dark cave lay in the Aricinian forest, fed by a never‑failing spring. Sabinus used to slip there after dismissing his attendants, so he could claim the goddess had told him to hand the people those sacred rites most acceptable to the gods. He was clearly copying the cunning of Minos, who hid himself in the cave of Jupiter, stayed there a long time, then produced laws as if delivered by Jupiter himself, thereby binding men to obedience not only by command but by religion. Persuading shepherds was no great feat. Accordingly he created pontiffs, flamens, Salii, and augurs; he assigned the gods to families. Thus he softened the fierce temper of the new people and turned them from war to the pursuits of peace. Yet while he fooled others, he did not fool himself. Many years later, in the consulship of Cornelius and Baebius, diggers on the scribe Petilius' land beneath the Janiculum uncovered two stone chests. One held the body of Numa; the other held seven Latin books on pontifical law and seven Greek books on the discipline of wisdom. These writings dissolved not only the rites Numa had instituted but all the rest as well. The senate decreed that the books be destroyed, and the urban praetor Quintus Petilius burned them in a public assembly. That was a foolish act: what good did burning them do, when the very fact that they were burned because they undermined religion has been preserved in memory? No one in that senate escaped utter folly: they could have abolished the books and still kept the matter from ever coming to light. In trying to prove to posterity how devoutly they defended religion, they testified against the authority of religion itself.

Just as Pompilius founded foolish religions at Rome, so before him Faunus did the same in Latium. He established impious rites for his grandfather Saturn, honored his father Picus as a god, and consecrated his sister and wife Fenta Fauna. Gaius Bassus calls her Fata because she sang fates to women as Faunus did to men. Varro writes that her modesty was such that no man but her husband ever saw her or heard her name while she lived. Therefore women sacrifice to her with covered heads and call her the Good Goddess. Sextus Clodius, in his Greek book, says she was Faunus' wife. She secretly drank a jar of wine, became drunk, and was beaten to death with myrtle rods by her husband. Later, when he repented and could not bear his longing for her, he paid her divine honors; hence a covered jar of wine is placed in her rites. Faunus too left posterity no small error, though every prudent man sees through it. Lucilius mocks the folly of those who think statues are gods, writing: "He trembles at the terriculae, the Lamiae, which Faunus and Numa Pompilius established." As infant children believe every bronze statue lives and is a man, so these men take all fictions for truth, believing a heart beats inside the bronze. A painter's canvas — nothing true, all fiction! The poet compared foolish men to infants, but I say they are far more imprudent. The children think statues are men; these men think statues are gods. Age deceives the children; folly deceives these men. The children will soon stop being deceived; the vanity of these men endures and grows.

Orpheus first introduced the sacred rites of Father Liber into Greece and first celebrated them on Mount Cithaeron in Boeotian Thebes, where Liber was born. Because he often sang to the cithara, the mountain was named Cithaeron. Those rites are still called Orphic; in them Orpheus himself was later torn limb from limb. He lived at nearly the same time as Faunus. Which of them was older is doubtful, since Latinus and Priam reigned in the same years, as did their fathers Faunus and Laomedon; during Laomedon's reign Orpheus reached the Ilian shore with the Argonauts. Let us go further, then, and ask who was the very first author of the worship of the gods. Didymus, in his books of the Explanation of Pindar, says that Melisseus, king of the Cretans, first sacrificed to the gods and introduced new rites and solemn processions. He had two daughters, Amalthea and Melissa, who fed the child Jupiter with goat's milk and honey — whence the poetic fable arose that bees swarmed and filled the boy's mouth with honey. Melissa was appointed by her father as the first priestess of the Great Mother; therefore the priests of that Mother are still called Melissae. The Sacred History testifies that Jupiter himself, after gaining power, sank into such insolence that he founded temples to himself in many places. As he traveled the lands, he bound the kings and princes of each region to himself by hospitality and friendship; when he departed, he ordered a temple built in his host's name, as if to preserve the memory of the friendship and pact. Thus arose the temples of Jupiter Ataburius, Jupiter Labrandius — Ataburus and Labrandius had been his hosts and allies in war — and likewise Jupiter Laprius, Jupiter Molion, Jupiter Casius, and others of the same sort. He devised this cleverly, so as to win divine honor for himself and give his hosts a perpetual name linked with religion. They rejoiced, obeyed his command willingly, and celebrated annual rites and festivals for the sake of his name. Aeneas did something similar in Sicily: he founded the city of Acesta and gave it his host's name, so that Acestes would afterwards love, enlarge, and adorn it with joy. In this way Jupiter sowed the worship of himself throughout the world and set an example for others to imitate. Whether the rites of worship flowed from Melisseus, as Didymus reports, or from Jupiter himself, as Euhemerus says, the time when gods began to be worshiped is at least certain. Melisseus preceded Jupiter by a great span, having reared him as a grandson. It is therefore possible that he instituted the worship of the gods either before or while Jupiter was still a boy — that is, the worship of his foster‑child's mother Opis, his grandmother Tellus (wife of Uranus), and his father Saturn — and that by this example and institution he drove Jupiter to such pride that he afterward dared to assume divine honors for himself.