have portended disaster to the Greeks, whom the god was unable
to succour._
And it is still this weakness of the gods which is confessed in the
story of the Cuman Apollo, who is said to have wept for four days
during the war with the Achæans and King Aristonicus. And when the
augurs were alarmed at the portent, and had determined to cast the
statue into the sea, the old men of Cumæ interposed, and related
that a similar prodigy had occurred to the same image during the
wars against Antiochus and against Perseus, and that by a decree of
the senate gifts had been presented to Apollo, because the event had
proved favourable to the Romans. Then soothsayers were summoned who
were supposed to have greater professional skill, and they pronounced
that the weeping of Apollo's image was propitious to the Romans,
because Cumæ was a Greek colony, and that Apollo was bewailing (and
thereby presaging) the grief and calamity that was about to light
upon his own land of Greece, from which he had been brought. Shortly
afterwards it was reported that King Aristonicus was defeated and
made prisoner,--a defeat certainly opposed to the will of Apollo;
and this he indicated by even shedding tears from his marble image.
And this shows us that, though the verses of the poets are mythical,
they are not altogether devoid of truth, but describe the manners of
the demons in a sufficiently fit style. For in Virgil Diana mourned
for Camilla,[131] and Hercules wept for Pallas doomed to die.[132]
This is perhaps the reason why Numa Pompilius, too, when, enjoying
prolonged peace, but without knowing or inquiring from whom he
received it, he began in his leisure to consider to what gods he
should entrust the safe keeping and conduct of Rome, and not dreaming
that the true, almighty, and most high God cares for earthly affairs,
but recollecting only that the Trojan gods which Æneas had brought
to Italy had been able to preserve neither the Trojan nor Lavinian
kingdom founded by Æneas himself, concluded that he must provide
other gods as guardians of fugitives and helpers of the weak, and add
them to those earlier divinities who had either come over to Rome
with Romulus, or when Alba was destroyed.