On the Crown

​Therefore, let those wearers of crowns in the meantime acknowledge the authority of nature in the name of common wisdom, as men, and by the pledges of their own religion, as those who worship the God of nature from nearby, and thus, as if from superabundance, let them also discern the other reasons which privately forbid our head from crowns, and indeed from all of them. For we are also urged to turn from the commonality of natural discipline to the ownership of the Christian, which is now to be defended as a whole through the other kinds of crowns too, which seem to be provided for other uses, as they are constructed from other substances, lest, because they do not consist of flowers, whose use nature has marked out—as is this very military laurel—they should be believed not to admit the prohibition of our sect because they have escaped the prescription of nature. I see therefore that we must act both more carefully and more fully, from the origins to the progress and excesses of the matter. Secular literature is necessary for this. For it is necessary that secular things be proved from their own instruments. What little I have touched upon will, I believe, suffice. If there was any Pandora, whom Hesiod mentions as the first of women, this head was first crowned by the Graces, when she was gifted by all, whence Pandora. But to us, Moses, a prophetic, not a poetic shepherd, describes Eve, the first woman, as girt about her shameful parts with leaves rather than her temples with flowers. Therefore, there is no Pandora. But also, from falsehood, the origin of the crown is to be blushed at. Now indeed, let us also speak of their truths. For indeed it is agreed that there were certain authors of the matter, or its expanders. Pherecydes reports that Saturn was crowned before all; Diodorus reports that Jupiter, after defeating the Titans, was honored with this gift by the others. The same author also gives fillets to Priapus, and to Ariadne a garland of gold and Indian gems, the gift of Vulcan and afterwards of Liber, which afterwards became a constellation; Callimachus introduced a vine-garland for Juno. So also at Argos her statue, crowned with a vine shoot, with a lion’s skin placed under her feet, displays the stepmother insulting over the spoils of both her stepsons; Hercules now displays poplar on his head, now wild olive, now parsley. You have the tragedy of Cerberus; you have Pindar and Callimachus, who also mentions that Apollo, after killing the dragon Delphyne, put on a laurel crown, as a suppliant. For suppliants were crowned among the ancients. Harpocration argues that Liber, the same as Osiris among the Egyptians, was intentionally crowned with ivy, because the nature of ivy is to protect the brain from hangover. But also on other grounds, even the common people acknowledge Liber as the chief of the crown, specifically the laurel one, in which he triumphed over the Indians, when they call his solemn days “the Great Crown.” If you also turn over the writings of Leo the Egyptian, Isis was the first to carry around her head the discovered ears of corn, a matter rather of the belly. To those seeking more, Claudius Saturninus, a most outstanding commentator in this matter also, will exhibit everything. For there is his book on crowns, so discussing both their origins and causes and kinds and solemnities, that you will find no beauty of a flower, no joy of a leaf, no turf or vine-shoot not consecrated to someone’s head; by which it may be sufficiently taught how alien we ought to judge the institution of the crowned head, brought forward by those and thenceforth dispensed in honor of those whom the world believed to be gods. For if the devil, a liar from the beginning, works the falsehood of divinity also in this kind, without doubt he had himself foreseen those in whom the falsehood of divinity would be acted out. What sort of thing, then, must that be held among the men of the true God which was introduced by the candidate gentiles of the devil and dedicated to themselves from the beginning, and which even then was initiated into idolatry by idols, and that too in idols still living? Not as if an idol is anything, but because the things which others do to idols belong to demons. Furthermore, if the things which others do to idols belong to demons, how much more that which the idols themselves did for themselves when they were alive? Indeed, the demons had procured these things for themselves through those in whom they had hungered before for what they procured.