Life & Wisdom Quote by Lactantius

A pagan punchline dressed up as antiquarian trivia, this anecdote lets Lactantius do what early Christian polemic does best: make Rome look ridiculous while pretending to simply report its own history. The story hinges on a grotesque chain of substitutions. Under siege, the state literally consumes feminine adornment, turning women’s hair, a symbol of beauty and status, into weaponry. Then, having survived, Rome sanctifies the loss by inventing a cult title: “Bald Venus.” It’s darkly clever: the goddess of erotic allure becomes the patron of involuntary disfigurement, as if the empire can alchemize humiliation into holiness by slapping a divine label on it.

The intent isn’t admiration for civic sacrifice; it’s exposure of a cultural reflex. Rome can’t just endure crisis. It must mythologize it, build a temple, and call the wound a virtue. Lactantius wants the reader to feel the moral sleight of hand: an act of desperation gets retrofitted as piety, and a god’s portfolio gets stretched to accommodate an embarrassment. That’s the subtextual indictment of pagan religion as infinitely pliable, a system that sanctifies whatever happened to occur, however absurd.

Context matters: Lactantius writes as a Christian critic with an insider’s education in Roman letters. He doesn’t need to refute paganism abstractly; he can win by showing it at its most self-parodying. “Bald Venus” is theology as coping mechanism, civic propaganda masquerading as devotion.