representing them as distracted by party feeling, to which the
demons, and not the gods, are subject._
But if any one says that it is not of all the demons, but only of the
wicked, that the poets, not without truth, say that they violently
love or hate certain men,--for it was of them Apuleius said that they
were driven about by strong currents of emotion,--how can we accept
this interpretation, when Apuleius, in the very same connection,
represents all the demons, and not only the wicked, as intermediate
between gods and men by their aerial bodies? The fiction of the
poets, according to him, consists in their making gods of demons,
and giving them the names of gods, and assigning them as allies
or enemies to individual men, using this poetical licence, though
they profess that the gods are very different in character from the
demons, and far exalted above them by their celestial abode and
wealth of beatitude. This, I say, is the poets' fiction, to say that
these are gods who are not gods, and that, under the names of gods,
they fight among themselves about the men whom they love or hate
with keen partisan feeling. Apuleius says that this is not far from
the truth, since, though they are wrongfully called by the names
of the gods, they are described in their own proper character as
demons. To this category, he says, belongs the Minerva of Homer, "who
interposed in the ranks of the Greeks to restrain Achilles."[340]
For that this was Minerva he supposes to be poetical fiction; for he
thinks that Minerva is a goddess, and he places her among the gods
whom he believes to be all good and blessed in the sublime ethereal
region, remote from intercourse with men. But that there was a demon
favourable to the Greeks and adverse to the Trojans, as another,
whom the same poet mentions under the name of Venus or Mars (gods
exalted above earthly affairs in their heavenly habitations), was the
Trojans' ally and the foe of the Greeks, and that these demons fought
for those they loved against those they hated,--in all this he owned
that the poets stated something very like the truth. For they made
these statements about beings to whom he ascribes the same violent
and tempestuous passions as disturb men, and who are therefore
capable of loves and hatreds not justly formed, but formed in a
party spirit, as the spectators in races or hunts take fancies and
prejudices. It seems to have been the great fear of this Platonist
that the poetical fictions should be believed of the gods, and not of
the demons who bore their names.