To the Heathen

In this very matter you also judge contrary to the form of judging evil persons. For when guilty persons are brought in, if they deny the charge, you press them with torments to confession; but Christians who have confessed of their own will you crush with torments into denial. What great perversity it is, that you fight against confession, change the office of torments, compelling a guilty man to escape freely and an unwilling man to deny! Governors, you who extort truth, seek from us alone a lie, that we should say we are not what we are. I suppose you do not wish us to be evil, and therefore you are eager to exclude us from that name. To be sure, you stretch others to this point and put them to the executioner, that they may deny what they are said to be. And yet when they deny, you do not believe them; if we deny, you immediately believe us.

If you are certain that we are most guilty, why are we treated by you in this matter differently from the guilty? I do not say that you allow no space for accusation or defense—you are accustomed not to condemn rashly those who are unaccused and undefended—but, to take an example: if a man is consulted about as a murderer, it is not the case that as soon as he has confessed the name of murderer the case is disposed of or the inquiry satisfied. Although you believe with difficulty even those who confess, you moreover require the consequences: how many times he committed the slaughter, with what weapons, in what places, with what spoils, with what accomplices and receivers, lest anything of an evil man's deeds lie hidden or anything be lacking to the truth for framing a sentence. But concerning us, whom you reckon guilty of more atrocious and more numerous crimes, you draw up briefer and lighter indictments.

I believe you do not wish to burden those whom you wish to destroy by every means, or you do not think that what you know needs to be inquired into. This is therefore all the more perverse, if you compel to deny those about whom you know most certainly. Nay, the more it suited your hatred, setting aside the form of judging, by your own zeal not to strive for denial, lest you should free those you hate, but to strive for the confession of each individual crime, so that enmities might be the more satisfied by the accumulation of punishments, while it is examined how many times each one had already celebrated those banquets, how many times in the darkness he had rushed into incest? What of this—that the inquiry should have been spread abroad and the examination extended to associates and accomplices, for the purpose of rooting out the race? The infant-slaughterers and cooks should have been brought in, the very dogs that serve as panders; the matter would have been set right.

Even at the spectacles a crowd of grateful onlookers would have gathered. For with what eagerness would they have come together into the arena to see someone fight who had devoured a hundred infants? For if such horrible and monstrous things are reported of us, they ought certainly to have been brought to light, lest they should seem incredible and the public hatred against us should grow cold. For indeed many people moderate their belief in such things, shuddering to inquire into a nature that seeks bestial food, which nature has shut off from the human race by the prohibition of intercourse.

You therefore, who are otherwise most diligent and most persistent investigators of far lesser crimes, when you abandon that diligence in the face of such horrible things that surpass all impiety—neither receiving confession, which those who judge must always labor to obtain, nor conducting examination, which those who condemn must always consult—it is now apparent that every charge against us is directed not at any crime but at the name. So much so that, if the truth of the crimes were established, the very names of the crimes would condemn, if they were applied, so that sentence would be pronounced against us thus: It is resolved that such a one, a murderer, or an incestuous person, or whatever we are charged with, be led away, crucified, thrown to the beasts. But your sentences note nothing except a Christian who has confessed. No name of a crime appears, unless the crime is the name itself. For this in truth is the real reason for all the hatred against us.

The name is the cause, which some hidden force attacks through your ignorance, so that you are unwilling to know for certain what you are certain you do not know for certain, and therefore you do not believe what is not proved, and lest it be easily disproved, you are unwilling to inquire, so that the hostile name may be punished under the presumption of crimes. So much so that, in order to depart from the hostile name, we are compelled to deny; then, when we have denied, we are freed, with full impunity for all past acts, no longer blood-stained or incestuous, because we have lost that name. But while this reasoning is shown in its proper place, you who pursue the destruction of the name—declare what crime the name carries, what offense, what fault. For it is prescribed against you that you cannot allege crimes which neither the institution directs, nor the pronouncement assigns, nor the sentence enumerates.

What is offered to the governor, what is inquired about the accused, what is answered or denied, what is read out from the council—that I recognize as making a man guilty. And so, concerning the merit of a name, if there is any charge of names, any accusation of words, I judge there to be no complaint against a word or name, unless it sounds barbarous, or savors of ill omen, or of immodesty, or is otherwise than befits the one who utters it or pleases the one who hears it. These are the crimes of words or names, just as barbarism and solecism and a too-insipid figure are faults of words and speech. But the name Christian, as far as its meaning goes, is interpreted from anointing. Even when it is corruptly pronounced by you as Chrestiani—for you are not even certain of the name itself—even so it is modulated from sweetness or goodness.

You therefore detain in innocent men even our innocent name, not inconvenient to the tongue, not harsh to the ears, not evil to man, not hostile to the fatherland, but both Greek like others, and sonorous, and pleasant in its interpretation. And certainly names are not to be punished with the sword or the cross or the beasts.

But you say that a sect is punished by the name of its founder. First of all, it is certainly a proper and customary rule that a sect be designated by the name of its founder, since philosophers too are surnamed from their founders as Pythagoreans and Platonists, as physicians are called Erasistrateans and grammarians Aristarcheans. Therefore if on account of an evil founder the sect is evil, the offshoot of an evil name is punished. But this would be presumed rashly. It was first necessary to know the founder, so that the sect might be known, rather than to retain the examination of the founder from the sect. But now, necessarily ignorant of the sect because you are ignorant of the founder, or not reviewing the founder because you do not review the sect either, you stumble against the name alone, as though detaining in it the sect and the founder, both of whom you do not know at all.

And yet philosophers have the freedom to pass over from you into a sect bearing both their founders' name and their own, and no one stirs up hatred against them, though they openly and publicly bark out all the bitterness of their eloquence against your morals, rites, cults, and ways of life, with contempt of the laws, without respect of persons, so that some even hurl their freedom against the princes themselves with impunity. But the truth, most laborious for the age, philosophers indeed aspire to, yet Christians possess; and therefore those who possess it are more displeasing, because he who aspires to it plays with it, while he who possesses it defends it. Finally Socrates was condemned on that ground by which he had more closely attempted the truth, by destroying your gods. Although the Christian name was not yet on earth at that time, yet truth was always condemned. And so you will not deny him to be wise, to whom even your Pythian god had borne witness. Of all men, he said, Socrates is the wisest.

Truth overcame Apollo, so that he pronounced against himself; for he confessed that he was not a god, yet affirmed even him to be wisest who denied the gods. But among you he is the less wise for denying the gods, though he is wise for that very reason. After which manner you are also accustomed to say of us: Lucius Titius is a good man, only that he is a Christian. Likewise another: I marvel that Gaius Seius, a serious man, has become a Christian. O the blindness of folly—they praise what they know, they blame what they do not know, and what they know they corrupt by what they do not know. It occurs to no one that a man is therefore good and prudent because he is a Christian, or therefore a Christian because he is prudent and good, since it is more reasonable to adjudge hidden things by manifest ones than to prejudge manifest things from what is hidden.

Others who had known certain persons formerly, before this name, as wandering, base, and wicked, marvel at their sudden amendment, and yet they know how to marvel rather than how to follow; others contend with such obstinacy that they fight against their own interests, which they could gain from commerce with this name. I know one husband and another, who were formerly anxious about their wife's morals, who could not endure even mice creeping into the bedroom without a groan of suspicion, who, upon learning the cause of their wife's new diligence and unaccustomed restraint, offered all patience to their wife, denied themselves to be jealous, preferred to be the husband of a harlot rather than of a Christian woman; the man was allowed to change his own nature for the worse, but the woman was not permitted to be reformed for the better. A father disinherited a son about whom he had ceased to complain. A master put into the workhouse a slave whom he had moreover found indispensable.

As soon as anyone has recognized a Christian, he prefers him to be guilty. For even the discipline itself is traduced on its own account, and we are betrayed from no other source than from our own good, if even evil men shine by their own evil. Or are we alone, against the ordinances of nature, the worst of men, marked out for our good? For what notable thing do we display, except first wisdom, by which we do not adore the frivolous works of human hands; abstinence, by which we refrain from what belongs to others; chastity, which we do not defile even with our eyes; mercy, by which we are moved over the needy; truth itself, by which we give offense; liberty itself, for which we know how to die? Whoever wishes to understand who Christians are must necessarily use these marks.

As to what you say—that the worst and most shameful among us are guilty of greed, luxury, and wickedness—we will not deny that there are some such. This too suffices as testimony to our name, if not all, if not the majority, are such. It is necessary that in a body, however whole or pure you wish it to be, some blemish should sprout or a little wart arise or a freckle grow foul. The sky itself no serenity, however refined, so purges that it is not marked by some small fleck of cloud. A small stain on the brow, seen in some part of a model, from which the whole is clean. The greater portion of good makes use of a small evil as testimony to itself. Yet when you prove some of our number to be evil, by that very fact you do not prove them to be Christians. Inquire into the sect to which wickedness is attributed.

They themselves in conversation, whenever they speak against us, say: Why is that man a deceiver, if Christians are abstinent? Why is he harsh, if they are merciful? So greatly do you bear witness that Christians are not such, while you ask back why those who are called Christians are such. There is much distance between a crime and a name, between opinion and truth. For names too are so established that they have their own limits between being called and being. How many, finally, are called philosophers and yet do not fulfill the law of philosophy? All bear the name from their professions, but those who dishonor the truth by the surface of a word carry the name without the excellence of the profession. They are not straightway what they are called, but because they are not, they are called it in vain, and they deceive those who attach the thing to the name, since the standing of the name depends on the thing.

And yet persons of this kind neither assemble with us nor share with us, having become yours again through their misdeeds, since we do not even mingle with those whom your force and savagery has driven to denial. Certainly involuntary deserters from the discipline would be contained among us more easily than voluntary ones. Otherwise you call Christians without cause those whom the Christians themselves deny to be Christians, who do not know how to deny themselves.

By these propositions and our responses, which truth supplies from its own store, whenever your conscience is pressed and hemmed in—a silent witness to its own ignorance—you flee in agitation to a certain little altar, that is, the authority of the laws, on the ground that they would surely not punish this sect unless its merits had been established before the founders of the laws. What then prevented those merits from being equally established before the executors of the laws as well, seeing that in the case of other crimes which are similarly barred and punished by law, punishment is suspended unless inquiry is first made? Take, for example, a murderer or an adulterer under the law: the manner of the offence committed is nonetheless examined, even though the nature of the act is known to all. The laws punish a Christian. If there is any deed of a Christian, it ought to be drawn out. No law forbids inquiry; nay, inquiry serves the laws.

For how will you observe a law by avoiding what the law forbids, when the diligence of avoidance has been taken away through the failure to ascertain what you are to observe? No law owes to itself the consciousness of its own justice, but owes it to those from whom it seeks compliance. Moreover, a law is suspect if it is unwilling to prove itself. Rightly, therefore, are the laws against Christians deemed just and worthy of reverence and observance for so long as what they persecute remains unknown; rightly, after their injustice is discovered, are they spat upon together with their swords and gibbets and lions. An unjust law commands no honour. In my opinion, however, there is no doubt about the injustice of certain laws, since you daily temper their harshness and wickedness by new decrees and enactments.

Whence then, you say, was so much rumour about you permitted, whose testimony perhaps sufficed for the founders of the laws? Who, I ask, was the guarantor either for them at that time or for you thereafter regarding its trustworthiness? It is Rumour. Is this not that Rumour—"an evil than which nothing is swifter"? Why an evil, if it is always true? It does not cease from the lie, and very often not even when it conveys true things, from the desire of lying, so that it does not weave falsehoods in with truths, adding, subtracting, confounding by variety. What of this—that its condition is such that it persists only in what it fabricates?

For it lives only so long as it proves nothing; since once approved it falls, and having as it were discharged its duty of announcing, it departs; thenceforth the thing itself is held, the thing itself is named, and no one says, for example, "They say this was done at Rome," or "There is a rumour that he has obtained a province," but "He has obtained a province," and "This was done at Rome." No one names Rumour except one who is uncertain, because no one is made certain by Rumour but by personal knowledge; no one trusts Rumour except a fool, because a wise man does not trust what is uncertain.

However widely Rumour may have spread with all its ambition, it must necessarily have originated from some single mouth; thence it creeps, as it were, through the offshoots of tongues and ears, and the small flaw of its origin is obscured by the noise of the report, so that no one reconsiders whether that first mouth may have sown lies—which often happens either through the impulse of rivalry, or by the judgment of suspicion, or even through a fresh pleasure in lying. But it is well that time reveals all things, by the testimony of your own maxims and proverbs and by nature itself, which is so ordered that nothing lies hidden, even what Rumour has not disclosed. See what a prodigy you have suborned against us, in that what it once reported and for so long a time confirmed to credibility has up to this day been unable to prove.

Under the Emperor Augustus this name arose; under Tiberius its teaching came to light; under Nero condemnation grew strong—so that from this point you may weigh the matter by the character of the persecutor: if he was a dutiful prince, then Christians are impious; if just, if chaste, then Christians are unjust and unchaste; if no public enemy, then we are public enemies; what we are, the condemner himself has shown, punishing, of course, what was akin to himself. And yet of all Nero's institutions this alone has survived, though all else has been erased—just at last, as being unlike its author. Therefore our age is not yet two hundred and fifty years old. So many unjust acts in the meantime, so many crosses have followed upon the divinity, so many infants slaughtered, so many loaves bloodied, so many massacres by lamplight, so many errors of marriage—and still Rumour alone decides against Christians. It has indeed a great foundation in the vice of human nature: it lies more successfully in harsh and atrocious matters.

For the more prone you are to malice, the more apt you are to believe in evil; more readily, in short, is a false evil believed than a true good. If, however, injustice had left any room for prudence among you, justice would surely have demanded, in order to test the trustworthiness of Rumour, that one examine from whom Rumour could have been given to the public, and so to the whole world. Not from the Christians themselves, I suppose, since even by the form and rule of all mysteries, fidelity of silence is owed. How much more in the case of such things as, if disclosed, would not for the time being escape immediate punishment? If then they themselves are not their own betrayers, it follows that outsiders are. I ask you, how could outsiders have knowledge, when even lawful and permitted mysteries guard against every outside witness—unless unlawful ones are less careful? Yet for outsiders it is more fitting to be ignorant than to fabricate. The curiosity of insiders has stolen in through chinks and crevices.

What then? When insiders betray these things to you? We are betrayed by none more than by our own, and how much more so if the atrocity be so great that the justice of indignation breaks every bond of familiarity? The mind could not contain what it shuddered at, nor the eye what it was terrified by. This too is remarkable—if even he who rushed forward with so great a right of impatience to denounce did not also eagerly desire to prove, and if he who heard did not also take care to see; since the profit is equal both for the informer, if he proves what he has reported, and for the hearer, if he also believes for himself what he hears. Then, you say, it was first reported and exhibited, heard and inspected, and thenceforth committed to Rumour. This indeed surpasses all wonder, if what is always being committed was detected only once—unless we have already ceased to do such things.

And yet we are called by the same name, and reckoned among the same, and we overflow day by day; the more numerous we are, the more odious to the more. Hatred grows greater as the material for it grows greater; as the number of the accused increases, why does the number of informers not likewise increase? As far as I know, our way of life has also become better known; you know even the days of our assemblies, and so we are both besieged and overwhelmed and detained in our very secret gatherings. Yet who has ever come upon a half-eaten corpse? Who has detected the marks of teeth in a bloodied loaf? Who, when darkness was suddenly broken by a burst of light, has recognized any foul—not to say incestuous—evidence? If we obtain by bribery that we not be dragged into public, why are we also overwhelmed? We could simply not be dragged out at all. For who either sells or buys the betrayal of some crime without the crime itself?

But why should I detract from outside spies and informers, when you cast up such charges as are not publicly proclaimed by the Christians themselves with the loudest outcry—either immediately upon being heard, if they are first demonstrated, or discovered afterward, if they are meanwhile concealed? For without doubt it is the custom for those wishing to be initiated first to go to the master of the rites or the father. Then he will say: "You need an infant, who is to be offered for this purpose, to be sacrificed; and some bread, to be broken in the blood; moreover, a lampstand, which a tethered dog may overturn; and scraps of food to do the same for the dogs; but you also need a mother or a sister." What if there are none? I suppose one cannot be a proper Christian. These things, I ask you, once announced by others, do they endure being betrayed? It is no different a task for those to know them.

The business of deception is first carried out: feasts and marriages are set before the unsuspecting; for they had never before heard anything of the mysteries of Christians. Yet afterward they must necessarily come to know, or must prepare these things in advance for others whom they bring in. But how vain it is for the uninitiated to know what the priest does not know! They are silent, therefore, and accept it as a favour, and nothing of the tragedy of Thyestes or Oedipus bursts forth, and they do not drag it before the people. The bites of fidelity from ministers and masters and from those already instructed carry off nothing more. If nothing of the sort is proved, I know not what great thing must be supposed, whose compensation consists in the endurance of such great atrocities. O wretched and pitiable nations—behold, we set before you the pledge of our teaching.

It promises eternal life to its followers and keepers; on the contrary, it threatens the profane and the hostile with eternal punishment in eternal fire; for both outcomes the resurrection of the dead is proclaimed. We shall see about the credibility of these things when they are set out in their proper place; for the present, believe, just as we do. For I wish to know whether you are prepared to approach such things through such crimes, as we are. Come, whoever you are, plunge the blade into the infant; or if it is another's office, then merely look upon the dying soul before it has lived; at any rate, catch the fresh blood in which to soak your bread, eat freely; meanwhile recline at table, count the places where mother or sister has pressed the couch; mark them carefully, so that when darkness rushes in—testing, of course, the diligence of each—you do not go astray and rush upon a stranger: you will have committed a sin unless it is incest.

When you have ticked off all these things, you will live forever. I desire you to answer whether you value eternity so highly? Nay, for that very reason you do not believe; and even if you believed, I deny that you would wish it; and even if you wished it, I deny that you could do it. But why should others be able, if you cannot? Why should you not be able, if others can? At what price do you wish impunity and eternity to be obtained? Or do these things seem to us to be redeemable at any cost? Or have Christians different sets of teeth, and different caverns of the throat, and different sinews for the lust of incest? I think not. For it is enough for us to be distinguished from your position by truth alone.

Plainly, we are called a third race. Dog-heads perhaps, or Shade-foots? Or some Antipodes from underground? If there is any reasoning among you on this point, I would like you to set forth the first and second race, so that the third may thereby be established. Psammetichus indeed thought he had discovered by his ingenuity the matter of the first-born. For he is said to have handed over infants fresh from birth to be reared apart from all human intercourse by a nurse whom he had also for that reason had her tongue cut out, so that, entirely exiled from the sound of human speech, they might not form language by hearing but, producing it from themselves, might designate that first nation whose sound nature had dictated. The first word reported back was BEKKOS; its interpretation is the Phrygian word for bread; the Phrygians are thenceforth held to be the first race.

But this one thing from the vanities of your fables is not to be idly reconsidered by us, since we are eager to demonstrate that your faith is devoted to vanities rather than to truths. Whether it is at all credible that, with that member cut off, the very organ of the soul laid waste and cut away at the root, the throat castrated—which is dangerously wounded even from the outside—and thereafter corruption flowing back into the vitals, and finally with nourishment ceasing for some time, life could have endured for that nurse? Come now—suppose she survived by the remedies of Philomela, whose silence wiser interpreters explain not as the cutting of the tongue but from the blush of shame. If then she lived, she could have blurted out something blunted. An inarticulate sound and ringing without modulation of the lips, from an open mouth, with the tongue numbed, can be forced from the throat alone.

This perhaps the infants at that time, because it was the only sound, having reproduced it somewhat more articulately, being after all tongue-equipped, may have hit upon it as the discovery of some interpretation. Let the Phrygians now be first—yet Christians are not therefore third. For how many other series of nations are there after the Phrygians? But reconsider, lest those whom you call the third race hold the first place, since there is no nation that is not Christian. Therefore whatever nation is first is nonetheless Christian. It is ridiculous madness to call us last and name us third. But we are reckoned a third race in respect of superstition, not of nation—so that there are Romans, Jews, and then Christians. But where are the Greeks? Or if they are counted among the superstitions of the Romans, since Rome indeed also solicited the gods of Greece, where at least are the Egyptians, who also, as I know, have a private and curious religion?

Furthermore, if those who are third are so monstrous, what must be thought of those who precede them in first and second place?

But why should I marvel at your vanities, when out of the natural form that is embodied and compacted together, malice and folly have intervened under the same master of error? Indeed, since I do not marvel, I must needs enumerate them, so that you, upon recognizing them, may marvel at the depth of folly into which you fall—you who wish us to be the causes of every public calamity or injury. If the Tiber has overflowed, if the Nile has not overflowed, if the sky has stood still, if the earth has quaked, if Libitina has ravaged, if famine has afflicted—straightway the cry of all is: "The Christians deserve it!" As though those who fear the true God have little else or anything else to fear. I suppose that, as despisers of your gods, we provoke these darts of theirs. As we have set forth above, our age is not yet three hundred years old: how many calamities, before that span of time, fell upon the whole world, upon individual cities and provinces?

How many foreign and civil wars, how many pestilences, famines, fires, gapings and quakings of the earth has the age digested? Where were the Christians then, when the Roman state furnished so many histories of its own sufferings? Where were the Christians then, when the islands of Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cea, together with many thousands of men, went to ruin—or when that land greater than Asia or Africa, which Plato mentions, was swallowed up in the Atlantic sea? When fire from heaven poured down upon Volsinii, and fire from its own mountain upon Pompeii? When the sea was snatched away by an earthquake from Corinth? When a deluge wiped out the entire world? Where then were, I will not say the Christians as despisers of the gods, but your very gods themselves—whom the destruction of those later places, towns, and settlements proves to have been born, dwelt, buried, and even founded there? For they could not otherwise have survived to the present day, unless they were born after that destruction.

If you do not care to read and review the testimonies of the ages, reported to you by other means, at least do not pronounce your gods most unjust, who on account of those who despise them also harm those who worship them; and then you do not prove yourselves to be in error, if you hand down gods who do not distinguish you from the deserts of the profane. But if, as one or another most vain person says, they are angry with you also for this reason—that you are negligent about our extermination—the conclusion is settled regarding their weakness and mediocrity: for they would not be angry with you for failing to punish us, if they could do anything of themselves. Although you also confess this in another way, whenever you seem to avenge them by our punishment. If one thing is defended by another, it is defended by something greater. Let the gods therefore be ashamed to be defended by a man.

Pour out now all your poisons, drive all the darts of calumny against this name—I will not cease to repel them further, but in time they will be blunted by the exposition of our whole discipline. But now I will turn those very same charges, torn from our body, back against you, and I will show the same wounds of crimes buried in you, so that you may fall by your own swords and your own arguments. First of all, that which you direct against us in a general accusation—departure from the institutions of the ancestors—consider again and again, lest we share that charge with you. For behold, I recognize that antiquity has been corrupted, nay rather destroyed, in you in every aspect of life and conduct. Concerning the laws, it has already been said above that you have buried them under new decrees and enactments made day by day.

But concerning the rest of the ordering of human life, it lies openly manifest how greatly you have changed from your ancestors in dress, in attire, in display, in food itself, in speech itself; for you relegate the old ways as rancid. Antiquity is shut out everywhere—in business, in offices; your authority has cast down the whole authority of the ancestors. To be sure, what is more to your reproach is that you always praise the old ways, and nonetheless reject them. By what perversity ought so many vain things of the ancestors to remain among you and be approved, when you reject those very things which you approve? But even that which you seem to guard and defend most faithfully as handed down from the ancestors, and by which you most of all charge us as guilty of transgression—from which the whole hatred of the Christian name is animated—I mean the worship of the gods—I will show to be equally destroyed and despised by you.

Except that there is no reason for us likewise to be held despisers of the gods, because no one despises what he knows to be altogether nonexistent. What altogether exists can be despised; what is nothing suffers nothing. Therefore by those for whom it exists, it must needs suffer. By this you are the more burdened, believing and despising, worshipping and spitting upon, honoring and provoking. It is possible also to recognize this first of all from the following: since you worship some gods and not others, you certainly despise those whom you do not worship. The preference of one cannot exist without the dishonor of another, nor is any choice composed without rejection. He who out of many takes up one has looked down upon the one he does not take up. But so many and so great gods cannot be worshipped by all. Already therefore from the very first you despised them, not fearing, of course, so to arrange things that all could not be worshipped.

But indeed those most wise and prudent ancestors, whose institutions you know not how to renounce—especially in the matter of your gods—are themselves also found to be impious. I lie, if they had never decreed that no general should dedicate a temple vowed in war before the senate had approved it; as happened to M. Aemilius, who had vowed one to the god Alburnus. Surely it was a most impious, nay most insulting act, to place the honor of divinity in the judgment and caprice of a human vote, so that a god is not one unless the senate has permitted him to be. The censors often demolished temples without consulting the people. Certainly the consuls, by authority of the senate, drove out Father Liber together with his rites not only from the city but from all of Italy. Moreover Varro records that Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates and Anubis were forbidden the Capitol, and that their altars were thrown down by the senate and rebuilt only by the violence of the populace.

Yet even the consul Gabinius, on the Kalends of January, when he could scarcely approve the victims on account of the crowd of the populace, because he had decided nothing concerning Serapis and Isis, held the decree of the senate of greater weight than the rush of the mob, and forbade the altars to be set up. You have therefore among your ancestors, if not the name, yet the sect of the Christian, which neglects the gods. If you were at least yourselves guiltless in your honors, you would be guilty of injured religion; but I find that among you the growth of both superstition and impiety has conspired together. For how much more irreligious are you found? The private gods whom you call Lares and Penates by domestic consecration, you trample upon by domestic license as well, selling them, pledging them, according to need and will. Such sacrileges of insolence would indeed be more tolerable, were they not all the more insulting for being petty.

But the complaints of private and domestic gods are aided by some consolation, in that you treat the public gods more shamefully and more insultingly. First of all, those whom you have driven into the auction-house you have subjected to tax-collectors, and every five years you list them among your revenues and assign them. Thus the Serapeum, thus the Capitol is sought, assigned, leased, like the forum, under the same voice of the auctioneer, under the same exaction of the quaestor. But indeed lands burdened with tribute are cheaper, persons assessed with a poll-tax are of less account—for these are the marks of the penalty of captivity—but the gods, the more they are tributaries, the more holy; nay rather, the more holy, the more tributary. Majesty is established for profit, commerce is prescribed by religion, sanctity begs for a lease. You exact payment for the ground of the temple, for access to the sacred precinct, for the offerings, for the sacrifices. You sell the whole of divinity. It is not permitted to worship her freely.

More in the end is nailed up for the tax-collectors than for the priests. The insult of the gods as tributaries was not enough—to be estimated, of course, from contempt—nor were you content with having shown no honor to the gods, unless you also depreciate whatever honor you do show by some indignity. For what do you do at all to honor them that you do not equally provide for your dead as well? You build temples for the gods, equally temples for the dead; you build altars for the gods, equally altars for the dead; you inscribe the same titles in letters, you impose the same forms upon statues, according to whatever was each one's craft or occupation or age: an old man is fashioned from Saturn, a beardless youth from Apollo, a maiden from Diana, a soldier is consecrated in Mars, and a smith in Vulcan. It is therefore no wonder if you slay the same victims for the dead as for the gods and burn the same incenses.

Who would excuse that insult, which, however it may reckon the dead alongside the gods, does so? To kings indeed priesthoods are also assigned, and sacred apparatus, and chariots and cars and solemn feasts and banquets, rejoicings and games. Plainly, since heaven is open to them, this too is not without insult to the gods: first, because it would not have been fitting for others to be numbered among them, if it be granted that men become gods after death; second, because the observer of a man received into heaven would not so freely and openly perjure himself before the people, unless he despised both those by whom he swears and those who permit him to swear. For they themselves agree that what they swear by is nothing, and moreover they even reward him, because he has publicly despised the avengers of perjury. Although among you, who is pure of perjury?

Nay, by now the danger of swearing falsely by the gods has vanished, the religion of swearing by Caesar being held of greater account—which itself also pertains to the obscuring of your gods; for those who perjure themselves by Caesar would be punished more readily than by any Jupiter. But contempt is more honorable, having a certain glory of pride; for it comes sometimes even from confidence, or from the security of a clear conscience, or from the natural loftiness of the soul. Mockery, however, the more wanton it is, the more marked it is for the bite of insult. Recognize therefore how you are found to be mockers of your own divinities. I will not say what you are like in sacrificing—that you slaughter whatever is diseased and decayed, while from the fat and whole animals you offer the superfluous parts unfit for eating: the heads and hooves, and what has been plucked from feathers and bristles, and whatever you would have thrown away even at home.

I pass over what will seem to the common people or to sacrilegious gluttony to accord nearly with the religion of the ancestors: but indeed the most learned and most grave men—insofar as gravity and prudence are believed to profit from learning—are always most irreverent toward your gods, and literature never ceases to pour upon them what is all the more shameful, whether vain or false, concerning the gods. I will begin from that very pursuit of yours from which every more worthless person dreams, to which the more honor you adjudge, the more you have detracted from your gods, by magnifying one who made sport of them. We still remember Homer.

He, I suppose, is the one who treated divine majesty with human condition, imbuing the gods with human accidents and passions, who in their favor composed something like gladiatorial pairs on different sides—he wounds Venus with a human arrow, keeps Mars in chains for thirteen months perhaps to perish, represents Jupiter as having nearly suffered the same at the hands of the mob of heaven-dwellers, or shakes tears from him over Sarpedon, or introduces him wantonly consorting with Juno most foully, with the desire of lust commended by the recollection and enumeration of his mistresses. Thence which of the poets has not been insolent toward the gods, following the authority of their chief, either by revealing true things or by inventing false ones? And did the tragedians or comedians spare them, so as not to preface their plays with the afflictions and punishments of a god?

I say nothing of the philosophers, whom the pride of severity and the harshness of discipline make secure from all fear, and whom a certain breath of truth also raises up against the gods. Finally even Socrates, to their insult, swears by an oak and a dog and a goat. For even if he was condemned for this reason, yet when the Athenians repented of the condemnation, so that they even inflicted punishment upon his accusers, testimony is restored to Socrates, and I can retort that it was proved in him what is now reproved in us. But also Diogenes made some sport of Hercules, and Varro, the Diogenes of Roman letters, introduces three hundred Joves—or Jupiters, as it should be said—without heads. The other wanton talents also minister to your pleasures through the dishonor of the gods.

Consider among yourselves the sacrilegious witticisms of the Lentuli and the Hostii—whether it is the mimes or your gods that you laugh at in their tricks and jests; but you also receive with great pleasure the theatrical writings which depict every foulness of the gods. Majesties are violated before you in an impure body. A notorious and diminished head clothes the image of some god of yours. The Sun mourns his son struck down by lightning while you rejoice; Cybele sighs for her disdainful shepherd without your blushing; and you endure the praises of Jupiter to be sung to music. You are plainly more devout in the gladiatorial arena, where over human blood, over the defilements of punishments, your gods' plots and stories dance in like manner, dispensed to the guilty, or where the guilty are punished in the very persons of the gods. We have often seen Attis, the god from Pessinus, castrated, and one who was burned alive had put on the role of Hercules.

We have laughed also at the sport made of the gods in the midday games—how Dis Pater, the brother of Jupiter, escorts the funeral procession of gladiators with a hammer, how Mercury, winged on his bald head, fiery-tipped on his caduceus, tests with a cautery the bodies already lifeless or feigning death. Who could still investigate each of these things individually, whether they disturb the honor of divinity, whether they level the height of majesty? They are reckoned as contempt, surely, both of those who habitually do such things and of those who thus receive them. Wherefore I know not but that your gods complain more of you than of us. Having despised them on the one hand, you flatter them on the other; you redeem whatever offenses you commit; and finally it is lawful for you to act as you will toward those whom you yourselves willed to exist. But we turn away from them altogether.

And not only on this account are we charged with having abandoned the common religion, but also with having introduced a monstrous superstition in its place. For as some of you have dreamed that an ass's head is our god, Cornelius Tacitus gave rise to this suspicion. For he, in the fourth book of his Histories, where he treats of the Jewish war, beginning from the origin of that nation, and arguing as he pleased both about the origin itself and about the name of their religion, relates that the Jews, on an expedition through vast desert regions, suffering from want of water, made use of wild asses as guides to a spring, which were thought to be seeking water after their grazing; and so, in gratitude for this service, a likeness of that same beast is worshipped by the Jews. From this, I suppose, it was assumed that we also, as being close to the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image.

But this same Cornelius Tacitus—that most loquacious of liars—forgetting his own assertion, relates in a later passage that Pompey the Great, after conquering the Jews and capturing Jerusalem, entered the temple and upon searching found no image there. Where then was that god? Surely nowhere more fittingly than in so famous a temple, especially one closed to all except the priests, where they would not fear a stranger. But why should I defend this, having meanwhile professed a temporary confession of all things to be transferred equally upon you? Let it be believed that our god is some asinine figure; surely you will deny that you have the same things in common with us? Indeed, you worship whole asses, and along with their Epona, and all beasts of burden and cattle and animals, which you likewise consecrate together with their stalls. And this perhaps you count as a crime against us, that among all the worshippers of everything, we alone are worshippers of asses.

But he also who affirms that we are priests of the cross will be our fellow-worshipper. The nature of the cross is a sign made of wood: you too worship things of wood in your own fashion, along with an image. Although just as your image is in human form, so also is ours in its own proper form. Let the lineaments be considered, so long as the nature is one; let the form be considered, so long as it is itself the body of a god. But if on this point there is a difference, by how much does the Attic Pallas or the Pharian Ceres differ from the stake of the cross—she who is represented without form by a rough pole and a mere wooden post? Every beam of timber that is fixed upright in position is a part of the cross, and indeed the greater part. But to us the whole cross is imputed, with its crossbeam of course and with that projection of the seat.

In this respect you are the more blameworthy, who have consecrated a mutilated and truncated piece of wood, while others have consecrated it complete and fully fashioned. And truly for the rest your religion of the whole cross is intact, as I shall show. But you are also ignorant that this very origin of your gods has come from that gibbet. For every image, whether carved in wood or stone, or cast in bronze, or produced in any other richer material, must necessarily be preceded by the hands of the modeller. Now the modeller first sets up the wood of the cross, because even in our own body there lies a silent and hidden outline of the cross. The head rises up, the spine is straight, the spread of the shoulders extends outward; if you set a man with arms outstretched, you will have made the image of a cross.

Upon this beginning, then, and as it were upon this framework, clay woven over it gradually fills out the limbs, and builds up the body, and imposes upon the clay within the cross whatever form it has pleased; thence the preparation of the image, by compass and leaden rules, passes over into marble, into clay, or bronze, or whatever it has pleased to make a god of. From the cross comes the clay, from the clay the god: in a manner the cross passes into the god through the clay. You consecrate therefore the cross, from which the consecrated thing begins. This will be said by way of example: from an olive stone and a peach nut and a pepper grain, buried in the earth and ripened, a tree rises up into branches, into foliage, into the appearance of its own kind. If you transplant it, or make use of shoots from its branches for another sapling, to whom will that which comes from the graft be attributed? Not to that grain or nut or stone?

For when the third degree is ascribed to the second, and equally the second to the first, so the third will be traced back to the first, transmitted through the second. Nor need we argue longer on this point, since by natural prescription every kind of thing whatsoever traces its lineage back to its origin, and the more a kind is reckoned by its origin, the more the origin is held accountable in the kind. If therefore in the kind of gods you worship the cross as the origin, this will be the kernel and the primordial grain from which the forests of images among you are propagated. But now it is manifest. You venerate Victories as divine powers, and indeed the more august the more joyful they are. The structures by which they are raised aloft will be crosses—a kind of trophy within. And so in the Victories the religion of the camp also worships crosses, adores the standards, swears by the standards, prefers the standards even to Jupiter himself.

But that whole array of images and all that worship of gold are the necklaces of crosses. So also in the military standards and banners, which the soldiery guards with no less sanctity, those draperies of cloth are the robes of crosses. You are ashamed, I suppose, to worship plain and naked crosses.

Others more charitably suppose that the sun is the Christians' god, because it has become known that we turn toward the east in prayer, or that we make the day of the sun a day of festivity. What? Do you do any less? Do not many of you, in the affectation of worshipping the heavenly bodies, sometimes also move your lips toward the sun at its rising? You certainly are the ones who have even received the sun into the list of the seven days, and have chosen from those days the very first for the day on which you either forgo bathing or defer it to the evening, or attend to leisure and feasting. In doing this you yourselves also stray from your own ways into foreign religions. For the Jews' festal sabbaths and the pure supper and the Jewish rites of lamps and the fasts with unleavened bread and the prayers on the shore—all these are surely foreign to your gods.

Wherefore, to return from this digression, you who reproach us with the sun and its day, acknowledge the closeness: we are not far from your Saturn and your sabbaths.

A new rumour has lately been put about concerning our god—and not so very recently either—by a certain most abandoned person in this city, also a deserter of his own religion, a Jew only by the loss of his foreskin, and certainly more so after the bites of beasts, since he hires himself out to them daily and must now be shaken off with his whole body, who posted a picture against us with this inscription: ONOCOETES. It was a figure with the ears of an ass, wearing a toga, with a book, and one foot hoofed. And the crowd believed the infamous Jew. For what other kind of sowing is there of our infamy? And so throughout the whole city Onocoetes is proclaimed. But this too, as something of yesterday, lacking the authority of age and weakened by the character of its author, I will gladly take up with the eagerness of turning it back. Let us see therefore whether here too you are caught out along with us.

For it matters not in what form, so long as we are concerned with misshapen images. Among you there are gods with a dog's head, and a lion's head, and those horned from an ox and a ram and a goat, goat-born or serpent-formed, and winged on foot, on brow, and on back. Why then do you single out our one? More Onocoetae are found among you.

If we meet on equal terms in the matter of gods, it follows that there should likewise be no difference between us in sacrifice or sacred rite, so that the comparison may be satisfied from another aspect. We make atonement or initiation with infanticide. You, if the things you have transacted with the slaughter of a man and with infanticides have passed from memory, will recognize them in their proper order; for we are deferring most things for now, lest we seem to be going over the same ground everywhere. Meanwhile, as I said, from another side the equalization is not lacking. For even if we do so differently, yet you also are no less infanticides, you who kill infants after they are born—though you are indeed forbidden by the laws, yet no laws are more impunely, more securely, under the full knowledge of all, evaded by the tablets of a single age. But neither does it differ in this, that you kill them not by the rite of a sacred act nor for a god.

Nay, this is the harsher, that you expose them to cold and hunger or to beasts, or drown them in a longer death in water. But even if it is done among you in some manner more unlike ours, add to it this, that you destroy your own offspring, and whatever has been lacking from the other account will be supplied, nay heaped up, against you. But we are said to feast upon that impious victim. While this too is recognized among you, where it is more fittingly placed, we are not much separated from your voracity. If that is shameless, ours indeed is cruel; we are joined, if by chance, by a nature whereby cruelty always goes hand in hand with shamelessness. And yet what less—nay, what not more—do you do? You gape insufficiently at human entrails, because you devour the living and the grown? You lap insufficiently at human blood, because you draw forth blood yet to be? You feed insufficiently on an infant, because you drain off a whole premature infant?

We have come to the hour of the lamps and the canine service and the contrivances of darkness. At this point I fear lest I yield. For what such thing shall I detain in you? But now praise the plan of our modest incest, that we have devised an adulterous night, lest we should defile either the light or the true night, that we have thought even earthly lights should be spared, that we deceive even our own conscience; for whatever we do, if we wish it, we suspect it. But your incestuous acts, in their own freedom, enjoy every light and every night and the full knowledge of the whole sky, and that they may succeed the more happily, since you mingle your incests openly with the whole sky as witness, you alone are ignorant of it; whereas we can recognize our crimes even in the darkness. Plainly the Persians, as Ctesias records, live freely with their mothers, knowingly and without horror.

But also the Macedonians, as is evident from what they showed, were accustomed to do this openly, since when Oedipus first entered their stage with his eyes put out, they received him with laughter and mockery. The actor, dismayed, drew back his mask and said: Have I displeased you, my lords? The Macedonians answered: Not you indeed—you played beautifully—but the author is most foolish if he invented it, or Oedipus most mad if he did it: and thereupon one said to another, He was driving toward his mother. But one or another nation—how small a stain upon the whole world? For we have infected every sun, we have polluted every ocean. Give therefore some nation free from those things which draw the whole human race toward incest. If any nation lacks intercourse itself and the necessity of age and sex—not to speak of lust and licentiousness—that will be the one which will lack incest.

If any is removed from the human condition by some peculiar nature set apart, so as to be exposed neither to ignorance nor to error nor to chance, that will be the one which alone can answer the Christians more steadfastly. Look therefore upon licentiousness fluctuating among errors like winds, if there are lacking peoples upon whom the broad and rough waters of error rush for this crime. First of all, when you expose your infants to the mercy of strangers or give them to better parents in adoption, you forget how great a supply of material for incest is furnished, how great an occasion is opened to chance. Plainly by some stricter discipline or by a certain regard you restrain yourselves from lust of this kind of outcome in whatever place, at home or abroad, so that the scattering of seed and the leaping of licentiousness everywhere does not produce children unknown to their parents, whom either those parents themselves or other children may afterwards encounter, since even the moderation of ages is excluded by lust.

However many adulteries, however many fornications, however many wanderings of publicized lust, whether of a fixed or a roving kind, so many minglings of blood, so many joinings of kindred, so many lines of descent thence leading to incest; from which the veins of plots flow so abundantly to mimes and comedies, from which also such a case as this before the prefect of the city Fuscianus erupted. A boy of noble birth, by the chance negligence of his attendants, having gone beyond the door, was seized by passers-by and taken from his home. A little Greek who had reared him, or had caught him at the threshold in the Greek fashion as he entered, then changed him and brought him back to Rome in a slave-market at a mature age in Asia. His father, not knowing, bought him and made use of the Greek; then, as was his custom, the master sent the young man to the country and to chains. There the tutor and nurse had long since been paying the penalty.

The whole matter is laid before them; they recount to one another their respective fates: those, that their nursling had perished in childhood; he, that he too had perished from childhood; but with the same outcome—born at Rome in a respectable house; perhaps he also unfolded certain tokens. Therefore, by the will of God, that so great a stain might be reproached upon the age, a spirit shook him by day, the features corresponded with the age, something also the eyes recalled from the lineaments, certain peculiarities of the body were reviewed. The diligence of the inquiry brought to light drove the masters—nay, now the parents—on. The slave-dealer was traced, and unhappily found. The crime being revealed, the parents cured themselves with a noose, and the prefect assigned the goods to the son who had survived to his misfortune—not as an inheritance, but as compensation for the outrage and incest. One such example of the public eruption of crimes of this kind lurking among you was enough. Nothing happens only once in human affairs.

It can plainly be drawn out only once from the mysteries of our religion, I suppose. You press the charge, and they are equal to your things even apart from mysteries.

Concerning your stubbornnesses or presumptions, if you put any forward, not even these stand apart from the fellowship of comparison. The first stubbornness is that which is established as second only to the religion of God—namely, that of the Caesarean majesty—in that we are called irreligious toward the Caesars, neither propitiating their images nor swearing by their genii. We are proclaimed enemies of the people. Let it be so indeed, when from among you nations Caesars are made daily, and Parthici and Medici and Germanici. At this point let the Roman people see in whom lie the untamed and foreign nations. Yet you conspire from among our own against our own. We acknowledge, to be sure, Roman loyalty toward the Caesars. No conspiracy has ever broken out, no blood of a Caesar in the senate or in the very palaces has left a mark, no usurpation of majesty has been attempted in the provinces. Still Syria breathes with the odors of corpses, still the Gauls do not wash in their own Rhône.

But I pass over the crimes of madness, because not even these are admitted under the Roman name. I shall address the sacrileges of vanity, and I shall take note of the irreverence of that very home-born people, and the festive pamphlets which the statues know, and those oblique words sometimes uttered in the assembly and the curses that ring out in the circus. If not with arms, at least with your tongue you are always in rebellion. But it is another matter, I suppose, not to swear by the genius of Caesar; for doubt is rightly cast on perjurers, since you do not even swear faithfully by your own gods. But we do not call the emperor a god; for on this point, beyond what the common people say, we make a jest. Nay rather, you who call Caesar a god both mock him, by saying what is not so, and speak ill of him, because he does not wish to be what you say. For he prefers to live rather than to be made a god.

The remainder of the stubbornness you place in that charge, that we refuse neither your swords nor your crosses nor your beasts, neither fire nor torments, by reason of hardness and contempt of death. But indeed all these things, among your forebears and ancestors, virtue taught should not only be despised but even weighed with great praise. The sword—how many and how great men it made voluntary! It is tedious to pursue the matter. As for the novelty of the cross, your Regulus gladly dedicated it in its many and obscure forms; the queen of Egypt made use of her own beasts; fires, after the Carthaginian woman, Dido herself had taught to invade them, more steadfast than her husband Hasdrubal in the last extremity of her country. But also a woman of Attica exhausted torments in denying the tyrant, and at last, lest her body and sex should yield, she spat out her own tongue, having fed it, cutting off the entire instrument of a confession that had been torn out.

But these things you count to the glory of your own, to hardness in ours. Destroy now the glory of your ancestors, so that you may destroy us as well. Be content to detract even from the praise of your parents for the present, lest you give us ground on these matters. Perhaps also the character of those times demanded the more robust minds of a sturdier antiquity. But now in the tranquility of peace both minds are gentler and the thoughts of men are milder even toward strangers. Be it so, you say; compare yourselves to the ancients; it is necessary for us to pursue with hatred in you what is not approved by us, because it is not found among us. Answer then to each particular case. I do not demand examples in the same voice.

If contempt of death made the sword produce legends from your ancestors, surely it is not from love of life that you indenture yourselves to gladiators with the sword, nor is it from fear of death that you give your names to military service. If a famous death by beasts belongs to some woman, in the midst of daily peace you go voluntarily and freely to the beasts. If no one among you has yet matched Regulus in the cross, the machine for nailing the body, nevertheless contempt of fire has already gone beyond him, since a certain man recently contracted to dress himself in the incendiary tunic up to a fixed spot all around. If a woman made sport of the lashes, this too was recently traversed in order among the ranks of the beast-hunters and retraced, to say nothing of the Laconian glory.

Thus far, I think, extend the dreadful stubbornnesses of the Christians. If we share these with you, it remains that we compare the things to be ridiculed in our persons. Although all our stubbornness is grounded beforehand in our convictions; for we presume the resurrection of the dead. The hope of resurrection is the disdain of death. Laugh therefore as much as you like at minds most stupid that die in order to live; but that you may laugh the more easily and burst into laughter more freely, take up a sponge or meanwhile your tongue and erase meanwhile your own writings, which likewise assert that souls will return into bodies. And yet how much more acceptable is our presumption, which maintains that they will return into the same bodies? But how much more vainly has it been handed down to you that the spirit of a man will return into a dog or a mule or a peacock? Likewise we announce a judgment appointed by God after death according to the merits of each.

This you ascribe to Minos and Rhadamanthus, with the juster Aristides meanwhile set aside. By that judgment we say the wicked will spend eternity in eternal fire, and the pious and innocent will pass their perpetuity in a pleasant place. Among you also the condition of Pyriphlegethon and Elysium is arranged in no other way. And not only mythographers and poets sing such things, but philosophers also confirm them concerning the transmigration of souls and the distribution of judgment.

How long then, most unjust nations, do you not acknowledge—nay, do you moreover execrate—your own, if diversity holds nothing between us, if we are one and the same? Because you do not hate what you are, give rather your right hands, press kisses, mingle embraces—the bloodstained with the bloodstained, the unchaste with the unchaste, the conspirators with the conspirators, the stubborn and vain with their equals. Equally we have offended the divine powers of the gods, equally we provoke their indignation. You also have a third kind, if not of a third rite, yet of a third sex—that one more fittingly joined of man and woman to men and women. Or do we offend you by that very fellowship? Equality is accustomed to furnish material for rivalry. Thus potter envies potter, craftsman envies craftsman. Nay, cease now the feigned confession! Conscience has returned to truth and to the constancy of truth.

For all these things will be found in us alone and are refuted by us alone upon whom they have been inflicted, by the acknowledgment, that is, of the opposing party, whence knowledge, once instructed, inspires counsel and governs judgment. Your own maxim is that no one should judge a case unless both sides have been heard—which in our case alone you neglect. You satisfy the fault of nature, so as to condemn in others what you do not refute in yourselves, or to cast upon others the guilt which you remember in yourselves. You will be occupied with contrary work: chaste toward strangers, unchaste toward yourselves, more unbridled abroad, submissive at home. This is the injustice: that we who are knowing are judged by the ignorant, we who are acquitted by the guilty. Remove the splinter from your own eye, or the beam from your own eye, that you may extract the splinter from another's. Correct yourselves first, that you may punish Christians.

Unless you have corrected yourselves, you will not punish them—nay, you will be Christians; nay, if you shall be Christians, you will be corrected. Learn what you accuse in us, and you will not accuse it; recognize what you do not accuse in yourselves, and you will accuse it. The inspection of error and the recognition of truth are now open to you from this point, as much as we have been able to open from these few little books. Condemn the truth, but having examined it, if you can; and prove the error, but having found it, if you think so. But if it is prescribed for you to love error and hate truth, why should you not know what you love and what you hate?

Now our defense desires to engage with you, pitiable nations, concerning your gods, challenging your own conscience to judge whether they are truly gods, as you wish, or falsely so, as you do not wish to know. For this is the material of human error through its artificer, lest ignorance of the error be wanting, whereby you may be the more guilty. Eyes are open and yet do not see; ears gape and yet do not hear; the leaping heart is stupefied; the mind does not know what it recognizes. Finally, if so great a perversity could be dispelled by a single prescription, the announcement would be ready at hand, since we know that all those gods were instituted by men—from which point alone the claim of true divinity falls away, because nothing that was ever at some time begun can rightly be seen as divine. But indeed there are many things by which the tenderness of conscience is hardened into the callousness of voluntary error.

Truth is besieged by a mighty host, and is itself secure in its own strength! Why not? Whomever it wishes, it takes from among the very adversaries as allies and protectors for itself, and lays low all that multitude of assailants. Against these things therefore we have our business: against the institutions of ancestors, the authorities of received traditions, the laws of rulers, the arguments of the wise, against antiquity, custom, necessity, against examples, portents, miracles—all of which have confirmed that adulterous divinity. Wherefore, following your own commentaries, which you have gathered from every kind of theology, advancing step by step, since among you the authority of writings in such matters is greater than that of facts, I have chosen for brevity the works of Varro, who, having commented upon divine matters from all the digests of former times, has set himself before us as a fitting target. If I question him as to who are the introducers of the gods, he designates either philosophers or peoples or poets.

For he distinguished the census of the gods under a threefold kind: one being the physical, which philosophers treat, another the mythical, which is tossed about among the poets, the third the civil, which individual peoples have adopted for themselves. Therefore since philosophers have fashioned the physical by conjectures, poets have drawn the mythical from fables, peoples have presumed the civil of their own accord, where is truth to be placed? In conjectures? But that is an uncertain conception. In fables? But that is a shameful account. In adoptions? But that is a passive and municipal adoption. Finally, among philosophers it is uncertain because it is varied; among poets everything is unworthy because it is base; among peoples everything is passive because it is voluntary. Moreover, divinity, if you examine it truly, is of such a definition that it is neither gathered by uncertain arguments, nor contaminated by unworthy fables, nor judged by passive adoptions; for it ought to be held, as it is, certain, whole, and universal, because it belongs to all. Otherwise, what god shall I believe?

One whom suspicion has estimated? Whom history has boasted? Whom a city has willed? It is far more worthy to believe in none than in one who is doubtful, or shameful, or adoptive.

But the authority of the physical philosophers serves as a slave of wisdom to patronize the matter. Indeed the pure wisdom of the philosophers, whose weakness this very variety of opinions first attests, comes from ignorance of the truth. But what wise man is without truth—one who is ignorant of God, the father and lord of wisdom itself and of truth? For also the divine utterance of Solomon elsewhere says: The beginning of wisdom is fear in God. Moreover the origin of fear is knowledge; for who will fear what he does not know? Thus he who fears God, most unknown of all things, having attained the knowledge of God and of all truth, will obtain full and perfect wisdom. But this has not clearly succeeded in philosophy.

For although through curiosity of inspecting every kind of literature they may seem to have made incursions also into the divine scriptures, as being more ancient, and to have taken something from them, yet since they have adulterated them, they prove themselves either to have despised everything or not to have believed everything (for also otherwise the simplicity of truth wavers through the scrupulosity of passive faith), and so, with the lust for glory added, to have changed what they found into the works of their own intellect, through which even what they had found passed into uncertainty, and a flood of arguments was made from one or another drop of truth.

For having found God only, they did not set forth what they found as they found it, so that they dispute about his quality and his nature and even his abode: the Platonists indeed holding him as caring for things, as arbiter and judge; the Epicureans as idle and unoccupied and, so to speak, nobody, placed moreover outside the world; the Stoics inside the world; the Platonists inside the world. Him whom they had not fully admitted, they could neither know nor fear, nor thereby be wise, straying of course from the beginning of wisdom, that is, from fear toward God. Testimonies of divinity both unknown and doubted among the philosophers are extant. Diogenes, when asked what goes on in the heavens, said: I have never ascended there. Likewise, when asked whether gods existed, he said: I do not know, except that it is expedient that they exist. Thales of Miletus, when Croesus inquired what he thought about the gods, after several intervals of deliberation, reported back: Nothing. Socrates himself denied those gods as if certain of it.

The same Socrates ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius as if certain of that. And therefore since philosophy is found to be so uncertain and inconsistent in defining about God, what fear could it have of him whom it was not clearly able to determine? We have learned of God from the world. For they are compelled into this physical kind of theology, since they have handed down the gods in such a way that Dionysius the Stoic divides them into three. He holds one kind to be that which is manifest, such as the Sun, Moon, and Stars; another, which does not appear, such as Neptune; the remaining one, which is said to have passed from men to divinity, such as Hercules and Amphiaraus. Likewise Arcesilaus draws a threefold form of divinity: the Olympians, the Stars, and the Titanians, from Heaven and Earth; from these, from Saturn and Ops, Neptune, Jupiter and Orcus, and the rest of the succession. Xenocrates the Academic makes it twofold: the Olympians and the Titanians, who are from Heaven and Earth.

Most of the Egyptians believe in four gods: the Sun and Moon, Heaven and Earth. Democritus supposes that gods arose together with the remaining celestial fire, whose nature Zeno wishes to be of the same kind. Whence also Varro makes fire the soul of the world, so that likewise fire governs all things in the world as the soul does in us. But most vainly. For when it is in us, he says, we ourselves exist; when it has departed, we die. Therefore also when fire departs from the world through lightning bolts, the world dies.

These matters having been thus set out, we see that this physical interpretation has been contrived to this end: that it may contend the elements are gods, while it also alleges that other gods were born from them; for gods could only be born from gods.

Since we shall examine these more fully in their proper place under the mythical heading among the poets, yet what must be reconsidered about them in the meantime, as it bears on the present category, we shall perhaps at the same time, turning from the present category to those gods themselves, show that those who are said to have been born from the elements cannot in any way be regarded as gods—so that it may already be prejudged from this point that the elements are not gods, since those who are said to have been born from the elements are not gods—and equally, by demonstrating that the elements are not gods, we shall lay the groundwork for that category of their offspring, rightly showing that those cannot be defended as gods whose parents, that is the elements, are not gods. It is well established that a god is born from a god, just as a non-god from a non-god.

Therefore, as regards what this world contains in the way of elements—to treat the whole summarily, ministering to its parts (for whatever is the condition of the whole will certainly be the same for the elements and members as well)—it must either have been established by someone, after the manner of Plato's humaneness, or by no one, after the manner of Epicurus's harshness; and if it was established, by having a beginning it will also have an end. Thus that which at some point did not exist before its beginning, and at some point will not exist after its end, cannot in any way be regarded as god, lacking the substance of divinity, that is eternity, which is reckoned to be without beginning and end.

But if it was not established at all, and on that account must be held to be god, because like god it admits neither beginning nor end of itself—how do certain persons assign generation to the elements, which they wish to be gods, when the Stoics deny that anything is born from god? Likewise, how do they wish those whom they report to have been born from the elements to be held as gods, when they deny that god is born? And so what applies to the world will be attributed to the elements—to heaven, I mean, and earth and the stars and fire—which Varro vainly proposed to you to be believed as gods and parents of gods, against the denied generation and birth of god; as the same Varro had indicated that heaven and the stars are living creatures.

But if that is so, they must also be mortal, in accordance with the nature of a living creature; for even if the soul is established to be immortal, this will be permitted to the soul alone, not also to that to which it is joined, that is the body. No one, however, will deny that the elements have a body, since we both touch them and are touched by them, and we see that definite bodies fall from them. Therefore if, setting aside the principle of the soul by which the condition of bodies is governed, they are living creatures, they are mortal, not immortal. And yet why do the elements seem to Varro to be living creatures? Because the elements are moved.

And lest it be objected from the other side that many other things are moved—wheels, wagons, and other machines—he anticipates this by saying that they were believed to be living creatures for this reason, that they move of themselves, with no mover or impeller of them appearing from outside, as one appears who drives a wheel and rolls wagons and governs a machine. Therefore, unless they are living creatures, they are not self-moving. Furthermore, by alleging what does not appear, he shows what he ought to have sought, that is, the maker and director of the motion; for that which, because we do not see it, we do not believe to exist, does not therefore straightway not exist. On the contrary, what is not seen must be investigated all the more deeply, so that we may be able to know the nature of what is seen. Otherwise, if only those things which are visible are believed to exist because they are visible, how do you also receive those gods who are not visible?

But if those who are not seen are held to exist, why should those also not exist who are not seen? I mean the mover of heavenly things. Let them therefore be living creatures, because self-moving, and also self-moving because not moved by another—yet just as they are not straightway gods because they are living creatures, so neither for that reason because they are self-moving: or what prevents all living creatures, as self-moving, from being held as gods? And this the Egyptians are indeed permitted by another kind of folly.

Some say that gods were called gods for this reason, that theein, to run and seiesthai, to be moved is the interpretation of running and being moved. Therefore that word is not one of any majesty; for it was formed from running and motion, not from the dominion of divinity over them. But since even that one God whom we worship is called theos, and yet no motion or running of his appears, because he is not visible to anyone, it is plain that this word was taken from elsewhere, and found as the proper name—because native to itself—of divinity. And so, with the cleverness of that interpretation set aside, it is more probable that the theoi were not called so from running and motion, but that the name was borrowed from the appellation of the true God, so that those whom you had likewise fashioned as gods you might call theoi.

Finally, the proof of this is at hand, since you also call all your gods collectively theoi, among whom no function of running or motion is denoted. Therefore if equally theoi and equally immovable, one departs both from the interpretation of the word and equally from the notion of divinity, which, having been modeled on running and motion, is cut away. But if that name is the proper name of divinity, and simple and non-interpretive in that God, then, as it is found fault with in the rest of those whom you wish to be gods, show that there is also a fellowship of quality among them, so that the fellowship of the name may rightly stand by the communion of substance. Furthermore, that theos, already by this alone—that he is not at hand—is free from comparison with those things which are at hand and visible and perceptible to the senses (but to the senses sufficiently), which is the testimony of the difference between the hidden and the manifest.

If the elements are openly set before all, if on the contrary God is before no one, how will you be able to bring into conjunction from that side what you have not seen with what you see? Since therefore you have no means of joining them by sense or by reason, why do you join them by name, so as to join them also in power? For behold, even Zeno separates worldly matter from God, or says that he passed through it as honey through honeycombs. Therefore matter and God are two words, two things. In accordance with the distinction of the words the things also are separated, and the condition of matter follows the word. But if matter is not God, as the very appellation prescribes, how shall those things which are in matter, that is the elements, be held as gods, since members cannot be of alien nature from the body? But why do I deal with physiological arguments? The mind ought to have ascended upward from the condition of the world, not descended into uncertainties.

Plato's form of the world is round. The notion of it as square and angular, devised by others, was gathered, I suppose, by that round compass from the fact that it is hard to believe it to be alone without a head. But Epicurus, who had said, "What is above us is nothing to us," when he too desires to inspect the heaven, finds the orb of the sun to be a foot in diameter. Evidently frugality was still at work even in the heavens. Finally, as ambition advanced, the sun also extended its gaze; and so the Peripatetics marked out that orb as larger. I ask you, what does the lust for conjectures amount to? What does such great leisure of assertion, adorned with the artifice of affected moroseness of speech, prove by so great a presumption?

Rightly therefore did Thales of Miletus, while he was examining the whole heaven and walking with his eyes upward, fall shamefully into a well, much mocked by that Egyptian: "You could see nothing on the ground," said he, "and you think the heaven is for you to survey?" And so his fall marks out by way of figure the philosophers—namely those who exercise a stupid curiosity about the things of nature rather than first about its maker and governor—as destined to find their study vain.

Why then do we not turn to a somewhat more humane opinion, one which seems to be derived from the common sense of all and from simple conjecture?

For Varro also mentions it, saying moreover that the divinity of the elements was believed in because nothing whatsoever can be born, nourished, or brought forward for human life and the sowing of the earth without their support, since not even bodies or souls themselves could have sufficed without the tempering of the elements, by which this habitation of the world is maintained, bound together by the conditions of its circles—except that the enormity of cold or heat has denied it to human habitation—and therefore the sun is believed to be a god, who heaps up the day from his own store, ripens crops with his heat, and preserves the year with his stations; the moon, the solace of nights and the patroness of the governance of months; likewise the stars, certain markers of seasons to be noted for agriculture; and finally heaven itself, beneath which all things are, and earth, upon which all things are, and whatever among these conspires together for human benefit.

And not only does the evidence of divinity befit the elements by reason of their benefits, but also by reason of the various things which are wont to befall as if from their anger and offense—such as thunderbolts, hailstorms, burning heats, pestilential breezes, likewise floods, likewise the gaping and shaking of the earth—and that those are rightly believed to be gods whose nature must be honored in prosperity and feared in adversity, being, of course, mistress of helping and harming. Furthermore, if things are thus perceived in the intercourse of citizens, men do not in like manner render thanks or direct complaints to the very things by which they are helped or harmed, but to those under whose force and power the operation of things runs its course. For in pleasures too you do not adjudge the crown as a prize to the flutes or the lyre, but to the artist who tempers the flute and lyre with the force of sweetness.

Equally, when someone is in poor health, you do not remember to give thanks to the wool or the antidotes or the poultices themselves, but to the physicians, through whose work and prudence the remedies come about. Likewise in adversities, those who are wounded by the sword do not accuse the sword itself or the lance, but the enemy or the robber; and those whom roofs crush do not blame the tiles or the roof-tiles, but old age, just as the shipwrecked do not impute it to rocks and waves, but to the storm. Rightly so.

For it is certain that whatever happens must be attributed not to that through which it happens, but to that by which it happens, because that is the head of the deed which both ordains that it be done and through what it be done (and in all things there are these three titles: what it is, through what it is, and by whom it is), because prior is he who both wills what is to be done and finds the means by which it can be done. And so you act rightly in other matters, considering the author; but in physical matters, contrary to your own rule by which you judge wisdom in other matters, you remove the highest rank of the author, and consider not by whom the things that happen are brought about. Thus it comes about that you believe the powers and decisions of the elements to be what are in fact their servitudes and offices.

Do we not in this investigation show the art of some inward craftsman and lord of the servitude from the definite works of the elements which you make into powers? But gods do not serve; therefore those things which serve are not gods. Or let them show that it commonly happens that from the license of passivity freedom is approved, from freedom dominion, from dominion divinity is understood. For if all these things above us, set in order after the manner of a law with fixed courses, lawful progressions, proper spaces, equal turns, have been mindful to present themselves for the rolling of the seasons and the conducting of the seasons' leadership, do they not by that very observance of their conditions, and by the faithfulness of their works, and by the constancy of their courses, and by the care of their changes, and by the memory of their alternations, persuade you that some dominion presides over them, to which the entire worldly business seems to present itself, arriving at the benefit and harm of the human race?

For you cannot say that they do these things for themselves and care for themselves and arrange nothing for the sake of men, since you defend the divinity of the elements on the ground that you feel yourself to be either helped or harmed by them. For if they render service to themselves, you owe them nothing.

Come now, do you grant that divinity ought not only not to run in servile fashion, but first of all to stand whole and neither be diminished nor intercepted nor corrupted? Otherwise all its felicity is gone, if it ever suffers anything. But behold, even the stars fall and attest by falling that they have fallen. The moon also confesses how much she has lost, when she resumes it. Already you are accustomed to consider her greater losses in the mirror of water—so that I believe nothing further of what the magi know in any quarter. The sun itself too has often been assailed by eclipse. Devise whatever explanations you will for the celestial failures: a god will not wish either to become less or to cease to be. Let the defenses of human learning therefore look to themselves—learning which counterfeits wisdom and truth by the artifice of conjecture. For otherwise nature is such that he who has spoken better seems to have spoken more truly, not he who has spoken more truly to have spoken better.

But he to whom the matter shall be examined will more probably say that these elements are governed by someone than that they move of their own accord: therefore those things which are under someone are not gods. But if one errs in this matter, it is better to err simply than to err carefully as the natural philosophers do. Yet if you look to the mythical, the natural philosopher already errs better in attributing divinity to those things which he supposes to be felt as above man in position and force and magnitude and divinity. For what is above man, you may believe to be nearest to God.

But to pass on to the mythical class, which is attributed to the poets, I do not know whether it is fitting for our modest station to inquire so much, or whether such great things are confirmed by the proofs of divinity, as in the case of Mopsus the African and Boeotian Amphiaraus. For this class must now be briefly touched upon, of which an account will be rendered in its proper place. In the meantime, it is at least plain that these were men, for the very reason that you do not consistently call them gods, but heroes. What then do we contend? If divinity was to be assigned to the dead, certainly not to such as these.

Behold, when you, with the same license of presumption, dishonor heaven with the tombs of your kings, do you not honor with this consolation of consecration those who have been approved in justice, virtue, piety, and every good quality, content even to be mocked on behalf of such men, swearing falsely, while on the contrary you strip the impious and the base even of their former rewards of human glory, tear apart their decrees and titles, pull down their images, strike out their coinage? But shall that one who beholds all things, who approves, nay who bestows good things, prostitute the ordering of his great indulgence to the common crowd, and shall men be permitted to exercise more diligence and justice in distributing divinities? Shall the companions of kings and princes be more refined than those of the supreme god? And yet you shudder at and turn away from vagabonds, exiles, the poor, the crippled, those of base birth, those dishonorably raised, while on the other hand you adorn with laws even the incestuous, adulterers, ravishers, and parricides.

Whether one should laugh or be angry that such beings are believed to be gods as men ought not to be! But indeed in that mythical class, which the poets purvey, how uncertainly you move in a circle between the shame of conscience and the defense of shame! For as often as we reproach the gods with wretched or base or atrocious deeds, you defend them as fictions by pleading poetic license; as often as such poetry is passed over in silence of its own accord, not only do you not shudder at it, but you moreover honor it and hold it among the necessary arts, and finally through it as the initiator of letters you advance the studies of the freeborn. Plato judged that poets who slander the gods should be expelled, and that Homer himself, duly crowned, should be driven from the city. But since you receive and retain them, why do you not believe those who, by means of these same poets, recount such things about your gods?

Therefore if you believe the poets, why do you worship such gods? If you worship them because you do not believe the poets, why do you bestow praise upon liars, and do you not take care lest you offend those whose detractors you honor? Granted, faith is not to be demanded from poets. Do you not, who say that gods were made after death, confess that they were men before death? What wonder then if those who were men are defiled by human misfortunes, crimes, or fables? You do not believe the poets, even though you have arranged certain sacred rites also on the basis of their accounts? Why is the priest of Ceres ravished, if Ceres did not suffer such a thing? Why are the children of others sacrificed to Saturn, if he spared his own? Why is the male attendant of the Idaean goddess mutilated, if no youth more hateful to her was castrated in the pain of frustrated lust?

Why do the women of Lanuvium not taste the food offered to Hercules, if he did not set the precedent on account of women? Let the poets lie, to be sure! But it is not for that reason that your gods, when they were men, did such things, nor that they ascribed divine foulnesses to divinity, since in the meantime it seemed more credible to you that they were gods but not such as described, than that they were such as described but not gods.

There remains that gentile class of gods among the peoples, those taken up out of caprice, not from knowledge of truth, as private acquaintance teaches. I therefore hold that God is known everywhere, present everywhere, lord everywhere, to be worshipped by all, to be propitiated by all. But indeed since even those whom the whole world worships in common fall short of the proof of true divinity, how much more do these, whom not even their own fellow-townsmen know? For what adequate authority preceded a theology of this kind, which even common report has abandoned? How many are there who know by sight or by hearing of Atargatis of the Syrians, Caelestis of the Africans, Varsutina of the Moors, Obodas and Dusares of the Arabs, Belenus of the Norici, or those whom Varro mentions: Deluentinus of the people of Casinum, Visidianus of the Narnienses, Numiternus of the Atinenses, Ancharia of the Asculani, and Nortia whom the Volsinienses have received, whose very names do not differ in dignity from human surnames?

I laugh enough also at the gods who are town-councillors of each municipality, whose honor is bounded within their own walls. How far this freedom of adopting gods has advanced, the superstitions of the Egyptians teach, who worship even private beasts—cats, crocodiles, and their own serpent. It is not enough if they have also consecrated a man—I mean him whom not Egypt or Greece alone, but the whole world worships, and by whom the Africans swear—concerning whose condition what may be conjectured from our writings, so as to appear probable, is set forth. For that Serapis was once called Joseph, of the race of the holy ones. The youngest among his brothers, but surpassing them in intelligence, he was sold by those same brothers out of envy and came to Egypt, where he served in the household of Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians. Desired by the queen, who was less than chaste, but because he did not comply, denounced on the contrary by that same woman to the king, he was cast into prison.

There he interpreted the dreams of certain persons not without result, and showed the power of his spirit. Meanwhile the king also dreamed certain terrible things. Joseph, summoned for this purpose, was able to expound what had baffled those who had been called in; he demonstrated his experience from prison, and disclosed the dream to the king: those seven very fat, sleek oxen signified an abundance of as many years, while the latter seven, wasted away, foretold the want of the seven years following. He therefore advised that provisions be stored up against the coming famine from the earlier plenty. The king believed him; the outcome of events proved him always prudent, holy, and indispensable. And so Pharaoh set him over all Egypt both for the distribution of grain and for its management thereafter.

They called him Serapis from the modius with which his head was adorned; the modius-shaped figure of that headdress seals the memory of his grain-distribution, and it is apparent that the care of crops rested upon his head, from the very ears of grain by which it is marked around the rim. For this reason also they dedicated the dog, which they assign to the underworld, at his right hand, because under his hand the care of the Egyptians was kept in check. And they add Pharia, whom the derivation of the name shows to be the daughter of king Pharaoh. For at that time Pharaoh had also given him his daughter in marriage among the other honors and rewards.

But because they had undertaken to worship both beasts and men, they combined both faces into one in Anubis, in whom that quarrelsome nation, which rebels against its own kings and is abject before foreigners, may be seen to have consecrated rather the proofs of its own nature and condition—indeed canine also in gluttony and filthiness, even in its very servitude.

These things we have arranged according to Varro's threefold classification of divinity, selecting the more notable or more remarkable, so that it may now seem that sufficient answer has been given concerning the physical class, the poetic, and the gentile. But since every substitution no longer derives from philosophers, poets, or peoples, by whom it was handed down, but from the ruling Romans, by whom it was seized upon, by whom it built up authority for itself, another expanse of human error must now be entered by us—nay, a forest must be felled—which, having drawn in from every side the seeds of superstitions, has overshadowed the childhood of vice. But Varro also arranged the gods of the Romans in three groups: the certain, the uncertain, and the select. Such great vanity! For what had they to do with the uncertain, if they had the certain? Unless perhaps they wished to receive them out of Attic stupidity. For at Athens too there is an altar inscribed: To unknown gods. Does anyone then worship what he does not know?

Then if they had the certain, they ought to have been content, and not to have desired the select. In this also they are found to be irreligious. For if gods are chosen as bulbs are, those who are not chosen are pronounced worthless. We for our part recognize the gods of the Romans in two groups: the common and the proper—that is, those they share with all peoples and those they themselves have devised. And are not these perhaps called the public and the adventitious? For so the altars teach: of the adventitious, at the shrine of Carna; of the public, on the Palatine. Wherefore, since the common gods are comprehended both in the physical and in the mythical class, the matter of these has already been dealt with. It now pleases me to speak of the species of the proper gods. Concerning the Romans, let us be astonished at that third class of hostile gods, for the reason that no other nation has invented so much superstition for itself.

The rest we divide into two classes: some assumed from men, others conceived in another manner. Therefore, since the same color of consecration of the dead is available to them, as though on account of the merits of life, it is necessary that we oppose the same answer: that none of these either was of such great worth. They believed Aeneas to be a devoted father—a soldier never glorious, weakened by a stone. How common and dog-like a weapon, and so ignoble a wound! But Aeneas is also found to be a traitor to his fatherland, both Aeneas and Antenor alike.

And if they do not wish this to be true, Aeneas at least, while his fatherland was in flames, abandoned his comrades, destined to be subjected to a Punic woman; whereas that woman did not accompany her husband Hasdrubal as he humbly supplicated the enemy after the manner of Aeneas's timidity, but snatching her children with her, she judged it better to have beauty and a father not in flight but in the flames of burning Carthage, as though in the embrace of a perishing fatherland. Pious Aeneas—for the sake of a single boy and a decrepit old man, having abandoned Priam and Astyanax? And yet he is all the more to be detested by the Romans, who swear against their children and wives and every pledge of their own for the safety of their princes and their household. They consecrate the son of Venus, and Vulcan knowing this endures it, and Juno concedes it.

If sons sit in heaven by the piety of their parents, why were not the Argive youths rather held to be gods, because they drew their mother, yoked more than humanly, lest she commit a sacrilege in the sacred rites? Why is she not rather a goddess who was more pious—that daughter who nourished with her own breasts her father wasting away from hunger in prison? What else is glorious about Aeneas, except that he was nowhere to be found in the battle at Laurentum? Perhaps again he fled from the battle in his customary manner, as a deserter. Romulus likewise became a god after death. If because he founded a city? Why not others, down even to women, who founded cities? Indeed Romulus both killed his brother and carried off the maidens of others by deceit. He is therefore a god, therefore he is Quirinus, because at that time parents raised a quiritation on his account. What did Sterculus deserve toward divinity? If he was diligent in benefiting the fields with dung, Augeas contributed more manure.

If Faunus the son of Picus was driven to law on account of being struck in his mind, it was more fitting to cure him than to consecrate him. If the daughter of Faunus excelled in chastity, so that she did not even associate among men—whether from rusticity, or consciousness of ugliness, or shame at her father's madness—how much more worthy of the title Bona Dea is Penelope, who, dwelling among so many most worthless suitors, kept and protected her besieged chastity? There is also Sanctus, who obtained a shrine on account of his hospitality from king Plotius: Ulysses too could have contributed to you one more god from the most hospitable Alcinous.

I hasten to more shameful matters. Your authors were not ashamed to make Larentina publicly known. She was a common harlot—whether as the nurse of Romulus, and therefore called a she-wolf because she was a harlot, or as the mistress of Hercules, and of Hercules already dead, that is, already a god. For they relate that his temple-keeper, happening to be alone in the temple playing at dice, in order to provide himself with an opponent he did not have, played with one hand in the name of Hercules and with the other in his own person, on the condition that if he himself won, he would take a little supper and a little harlot from the offerings of Hercules, but if Hercules—that is, the other hand—won, he would furnish the same to Hercules. The hand of Hercules won. This too could have been added to his twelve labors.

The temple-keeper paid out the supper to Hercules and hired the harlot Larentina; the fire dines, which dissolved the very body of Hercules himself, and the altar consumed everything. Larentina sleeps alone in the temple, and the woman boasts from the brothel's game that she experienced Hercules in her dreams—and she could, while contemplating him in her mind, have suffered it in a dream. As she was going out of the temple early in the morning, a certain young man—the third Hercules, as they say—desired her, invited her to himself. She complied, mindful that it had been said to her by Hercules that it would be to her advantage; she obtained, at any rate, that they should be joined in lawful wedlock (for it was not permitted without penalty to have had intercourse with a god's harlot); her husband also wrote her as his heir. Soon thereafter, near death, she bequeathed to the Roman people a sufficiently large field which she had pursued through Hercules.

Hence she sought divinity also for her daughters, whom divine Larentina ought also to have instituted as heirs. The divine powers of the Romans were augmented by her dignity. She alone of so many wives of Hercules was dear to him—she alone, because she was rich—and far more fortunate indeed than Ceres, because she pleased him when dead. With so many examples and names, who among you could not be affirmed a god? Who in the end contested the divinity of Antinous? How much more beautiful is Ganymede, or more dear to his lover? Heaven lies open among you to the dead. You force a way from the underworld to the stars. Harlots ascend everywhere—do not think yourselves much superior to your kings.

Nor are you content to assert as gods those who were formerly seen, heard, and handled, whose likenesses have been described, whose deeds have been set in order, whose memory has been handed down; but you also demand from heaven and consecrate certain incorporeal, inanimate shadows, and mere names derived from things, dividing every condition of man among individual powers from the very conception in the womb—so that there is a certain god Consevius, who presides over the unions of intercourse, and Fluviona, who retains the infant in the womb; then Vitumnus and Sentinus, through whom the infant first lives and perceives; then Diespiter, who leads the child forth to birth. When they were giving birth, there was also Candelifera, since they gave birth by the light of a candle, and other goddesses named from the duties of childbirth. They decreed that it was the province of Postvertae to aid those born feet-first, and of Prorsa Carmenta to aid those born head-first. A god was also named from speech, Farinus, and by others from speaking, Locutius.

Cunina is at hand to guard against the evil eye and to provide rest. There is also a nurse, Levana, and likewise Rumina. It is remarkable that no gods were provided for washing away the filth of infants. Then there are Potina and Edula for the taking of first food and drink, and Statina for setting the infant upright. Adeona is for approaching, Abeona for departing. They have also Domiducа, and the goddess Mens, who produces both a good and a bad mind, and likewise Volumnus and Voleta for the will. They have also Paventina of fear, Venilia of hope, Volupia of pleasure, Praestita of excellence, and likewise Peragenor from action, Consus from counsels, Iuventa for those newly donning the toga, and for men already grown, Fortuna Barbata. If I were to speak of nuptial matters, Afferenda must be brought in from the bringing of dowries in due order; but there are—for shame!—also Mutunus and Tutunus, and the goddess Pertunda, and Subigus, and the goddess Prema, and Perfica. Spare us, ye shameless gods!

No one intervenes while the bride and groom struggle. Even those whose desire it is, rejoicing outside, blush.

And how far shall I go on enumerating gods, since I must discuss what sort of gods you have received? How greatly ought you to blush! Whether I should laugh at the vanity or reproach the blindness is quite uncertain. For how many gods, and which ones in particular, shall I bring forward? The greater or also the lesser? The old or also the new? The male or also the female? The unmarried or also those joined in wedlock? The skilled or also the unskilled? The rustic or also the urban? The citizens or also the foreigners? For so many households, so many nations seek an honest accounting, that they cannot be distinguished, separated, and catalogued.

But however widely the matter is spread, so much the more must we compress it; and therefore, since in this kind of inquiry we pursue the single aim of demonstrating that all of them were human beings—not indeed that you may come to know it, for you act as though you had forgotten—let us take a shortcut from the very method of examination, by tracing back the origin of their race. For the origin is the source of all that follows. That origin of your gods is marked, I think, by Saturn. For even if Varro records Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva as the most ancient gods, we must not forget that every father is more ancient than his sons—Saturn more ancient than Jupiter, just as Caelus is more ancient than Saturn; for Saturn is from Caelus and Terra. Yet I pass over the origin of Caelus and Terra. They were long unmarried and childless before they became husband and wife and parents. Over a long age, of course, they had to grow to such great stature.

At last Caelus began to find his voice, and the breasts of Terra to harden with pebbles; they make a marriage between themselves. I suppose either Caelus descended to his bride, or Terra ascended to her bridegroom. Yet Terra conceived by Caelus and, after the year had run its course, bore Saturn—a remarkable circumstance. To which of the parents was he like? But even if she did bear him, certainly before Saturn they had produced no one, nor anyone afterward except Ops alone; after that, offspring ceased. For Saturn castrated Caelus while he slept. We read that Caelus is of the masculine gender. But how could he be a father unless masculine? Yet whence was he to be castrated? With a sickle. In that age, forsooth? For Vulcan, the craftsman of iron, did not yet exist. And Terra, bereft, deferred marrying another, even though still of youthful age. But neither did she have another Caelus. What then but the Sea embraces her? But he smells of brine; she is accustomed to fresh waters.

Thus Saturn was the only male offspring of Caelus and Terra. But he himself, on reaching manhood, is joined to his own sister. As yet there were no laws to forbid incest, nor any to punish parricide. And so he devoured his male children; better he than wolves, had he exposed them. He feared, of course, lest one of them should have learned from his father's sickle. When Jupiter was born and taken away, he swallowed a stone presented in place of the infant. By this device long secure, he was at last overcome by the son whom he had not digested, grown up in the darkness, and was deprived of his kingdom. Such is the patriarch of the gods whom Caelus and Terra, with poets as midwives, brought forth.

But some think themselves clever in interpreting Saturn by physical allegory, saying he is Time—and therefore Caelus and Terra are his parents as being themselves without origin, and therefore he is sickle-bearing because time cuts all things apart, and therefore he devours his own offspring because he consumes within himself all things that have issued from him. They also press the testimony of his name: that he is called Cronus in Greek as Chronos. Likewise the Latins derive the rationale of the word from sowings, those who conjecture him to be the begetter, through whom the seeds of heaven are conveyed to earth. They add Ops, because seeds confer the aid of living, and also because seeds emerge through labor. What, I ask, is the point of this allegory? I would like you to explain it. Either Saturn existed, or he is Time. How is he Saturn, if he is Time? If he is Saturn, how is he Time? For you cannot regard both as corporeal in that one being.

But what prevented Time from being worshipped in its own quality? What prevented a human body or a human story from being worshipped in its own form, not as Time? What does this interpretation amount to, except coloring foul material with false arguments? You do not wish Saturn to be Time even because you call him a man, or while you make him Time, you no longer wish him to have been a man either. Plainly your god Saturn in every respect is recorded in the ancient records as being of human quality on earth. Whatever has no existence at all may be fashioned in incorporeal form; there is room for fiction where there is no truth. But since it is established that Saturn lived, you change him in vain; you are not permitted to deny that he was a man—he who can be defended neither as a god nor as Time. The record of Saturn's life is found throughout your literature.

We read of him in Cassius Severus, in Cornelius Nepos and Tacitus, and among the Greeks in Diodorus, and in others who have gathered the grey antiquities. Nor are the traces of him more trustworthy than those stamped in Italy itself. For after many lands and sojourns in Attica, he settled in Italy—or as it was then called, Oenotria—received by Janus, or Iane, as the Salii call him. The mountain he had inhabited was called Saturnius; the city he had marked out is Saturnia to this day; and all of Italy was once called after Saturn. With such a witness as the land that now rules the world, even if the origin of Saturn is disputed, it is at least established from his deeds that he was a man.

Thus if Saturn was a man, then without doubt from a man—indeed because he was a man, not from Caelus and Terra—but since his parents were unknown, it was easy for some to say he was the son of gods, of whom all men may seem to be children. For who does not call heaven and earth father and mother by way of reverence? Or does it come from the human custom by which unknown persons appearing suddenly out of nowhere are said to have come from heaven? Likewise, because he had come as a stranger, it spread everywhere at once that he was called a heavenly being. For we commonly say that those of uncertain birth are sons of the earth. I allege nothing about the condition of that ancient time, when the eyes and minds of men were so unformed that they were moved as if by something divine at the sight of any remarkable man—much more so at that of a king, and indeed the first king.

I will linger a little longer on Saturn, so as to lay the groundwork of a shortcut for the rest, once the discussion of origins is satisfied, and I will not pass over the weightier testimonies of the divine scriptures, to which greater credence is owed by reason of their antiquity. For the Sibyl existed before all other literature—that Sibyl, the true prophetess of truth, from whose name you have clothed the prophets of demons. She sets forth in hexameter verse, to this effect, concerning the lineage of Saturn and his deeds: The tenth generation of men, she says, from the time the flood came upon the former ones, Saturn and Titan and Iapetus reigned, the mightiest sons of Earth and Heaven. If, therefore, any credence attaches even to your own writers or to your earlier—and for that reason more nearly contemporary—records, it is sufficiently proved from Saturn and his lineage that they were human beings. We hold our shortcut: the prescription of origin against the rest, lest we wander through them one by one.

The character of the posterity is shown by the founders of the race—mortal from mortal, earthly from earthly; degree is compared with degree; marriages, conceptions, births have run their course; homelands, abodes, kingdoms, monuments are plain. Therefore, those who cannot deny that they were born should believe that they died; those who acknowledge that they died should not think them gods.

But indeed their own force attaches to manifest facts. Those whom from the beginning they can assert to have been nothing but men, they receive into divinity, affirming that they were made gods after death—as Varro, and those who dreamed along with him. Here, therefore, I take my stand: if your gods have been admitted to this name and divine power as into the senatorial order, your wisdom must now necessarily concede that there is some supreme ruler possessing the power of admission, a kind of Caesar; nor can anyone confer upon others what he himself does not hold from one who rules over him. But if they were able to make themselves gods after death, come now—why did they choose to be of inferior condition from the beginning? Or if there is no one who made them gods, how shall they be said to have been made, since they could only have been made by another? Thus no place is left you to deny that there is a certain master of divinity.

Let us therefore examine the reasons for admitting mortals to heaven. Of these I believe you will offer a twofold account. Either he who grants this does so in order to have supports or defenses or even ornaments for his own exalted station, or it is the necessity of merits, conferring upon each according to their worth. No other supposition is possible. No one in giving anything to another does so except for his own sake or for the other's sake. But neither can this befit a divine power—that one of such great power as to make gods should have such great condescension imposed upon him as to stand in need of the work or assistance of certain persons, and those dead, which is remarkable, when from the beginning he could have established immortals for himself. Nor will one who has compared human things with divine things need to argue longer on these points. Certainly the latter opinion must be examined—whether god has bestowed divinity in remembrance of merits.

But if it was so bestowed, if heaven was opened to men of old on account of their merits, one must reflect that since then no one has been found worthy of that honor. Unless perhaps the place can no longer hold more. So greatly, it seems, did antiquity merit the privileges of heaven. Let us then examine whether it did merit them. Let him who says they merited it set forth the merits themselves. If anything done in the cradle of time has weight toward the claim of divinity, you have received Ops and Saturn, brother and sister, defiled by incest. Your Jupiter, a stolen infant, was unworthy even of a human roof and a human breast, and rightly did so wicked an offspring remain in Crete.

Grown to manhood, he deprives his father—however such a father—of his kingdom, that most fortunate king of the golden age, forsooth, under whom peace, knowing nothing of toil or want, rested in joy; under whom, No farmers subdued the fields; and the earth herself brought forth all things with none to ask. But he hated his father, who had committed incest with him and had once castrated his grandfather. And behold, he himself also mingles with his sister—so that I think this saying was first spoken of him: Like father, like son. As pious a father as a pious son. If even then the laws of justice had been in force, Jupiter deserved to be sewn into two sacks. After this, what wonder if, with lust emboldened by incest, he spread himself into lesser things—that is, adulteries and defilements?

Concerning him, poetry has played as it usually does when a runaway slave is publicly exposed—we are wont to put his services up for hire to anyone who asks, now figuring him in the guise of the price of lust, as though he had weighed out a bull or the price of a bull, and poured rain through the roof-tiles, or broken in with money, now in the very likenesses of his acts—as an eagle that carried off, as a swan that had sung. Are not these stories composed about the most fastidious filthiness and the greatest crimes? Or do not the morals and characters of men become more wanton thereby? How the demons, the offspring of evil angels, have long since striven to turn men away from faith through unbelief and similar fables—this is not the place for us to treat at greater length. For even if the common people, following their kings and princes and founders, were not of the same nature, authority elsewhere demanded the likeness of morals.

But how much worse are those who are no better than they? For you call Jupiter Optimus by a private title in common usage, and there is Virgil's "impartial Jupiter." All of them, then, incestuous toward their own, shameless toward strangers, impious, unjust. He upon whom legend has left no notable infamy was not worthy to become a god.

But since they wish certain others to have been received into divinity from among men separately, and to be distinguished between those born gods and those made gods according to Dionysius the Stoic, I shall add something on this kind as well. The chief point of the reply will concern Hercules himself—whether he is worthy of heaven and divinity; for it is according to their will that they assign divinity on the basis of merits. If it is on account of virtue, because he steadfastly dispatched wild beasts, what is so memorable in that? Do not those punished in sport, or even those given over to the cheapness of arena service, dispatch very many beasts at once, and indeed more eager ones? If it is on account of his wandering the world, how many wealthy men has sweet liberty, or philosophers their servile begging, achieved the same?

They do not remember that Asclepiades the Cynic, with a single little cow on whose back he rode and from whose udder he was sometimes fed, subdued the whole world with his eyes. If Hercules also descended to the underworld, who does not know that the road to the underworld lies open to all? If you have consecrated him on account of his many slaughters and battles, that great Pompey, conqueror of the sea-pirates who had not even left Ostia safe, produced a far greater number; and how many thousands, I ask, were slain by Scipio in that one corner of Carthage's Byrsa, down to the last man? By which reasoning Scipio rather than Hercules ought to be assigned to divinity. Add rather to the titles of Hercules the defilements of maidens and wives, and the girdles of Omphale, and the shamefully abandoned service among the Argonauts on account of the loss of a fair boy.

Add to his glory, after the mark of his disgrace, also his fits of madness; worship the arrows that slew his sons and wife. He who then would more fittingly have cast himself upon the pyre out of grief for his parricides, who, ensnared by his wife's poisons, more deserved to die a dishonorable death—him you have lifted from the pyre to heaven, with the same ease with which you also lifted another consumed by divine fire, who was said to have devised a few ingenious experiments and to have restored the dead to life. He was a son of Apollo, as much a man as a grandson of Jupiter, a great-grandson of Saturn (or rather a bastard, as of uncertain father, as the Argive Socrates reported, since he was found exposed, reared more shamefully than Jupiter, namely at a dog's teat)—and deservedly, as no one can deny, he was struck by lightning. Jupiter is again a bad Optimus here, impious toward his grandson, envious toward the craftsman.

Yet Pindar did not conceal his desert: he says that greed and the lust for gain were punished in him, by which he was driving the living to death, not the dead to life, through the corruption of his venal medicine. His mother also is said to have perished by the same fate, and deservedly she who had brought so dangerous a monster into the world burst forth to heaven by the same steps, as it were. And yet the Athenians will know to sacrifice to gods of this kind. For they offer funeral rites to Aesculapius and his mother among the dead. As if they themselves did not also worship their own Theseus, deservedly a god. Why not? If he abandoned his preserver on a foreign shore, with the same forgetfulness—or rather madness—that was the cause of his father's death?

It would take long to review also those whom you bury among the stars and boldly assign as servants to the gods. Such, I suppose, are the Castors and Perseus and Erigone worthy of heaven, just as also the catamite of Jupiter. But what wonder? You have also transferred dogs and scorpions and crabs to heaven. I defer the matter of those whom you worship in oracles; this has the testimony of the divine. What then? You also wish the gods to be arbiters of grief, so that there is Viduus, who bereaves the soul of the body—whom you have condemned by not allowing him to be shut within the walls—likewise Caeculus, who deadens the eyes of their sense, likewise Orbana, who extinguishes the seeds into bereavement; and there is even a goddess of death itself. To pass over the rest in flight, you also reckon the gods of places and the localities of the city as gods: Father Janus (and the divine Jana is of the arches), and the Seven-hills' seven minds.

Those who have altars or shrines in those same places make offerings to the same Genii, and besides to others who dwell in another's place or as tenants. I say nothing of Ascensus from climbing and Clivicola from the slopes; I say nothing of the gods Forculus from doors and Cardea from hinges and Limentinus of thresholds, or whatever other divine doorkeepers among neighbors are worshipped among you. For what great thing is it? When even brothels, kitchens, and even the prison have their own divine powers? Heaven is thus filled with innumerable proper gods, both these and other Roman gods, among whom the duties of the whole of life are distributed, in such a way that there is no need of other gods.

Indeed, since those whom we have noted above are assigned privately among the Romans and are not easily known abroad, how do all those things over which they wished them to preside come to pass in every race of men and in every nation, where their sureties lack not only honor but even knowledge of them?

But indeed some have pointed out fruits and things necessary for sustenance. I ask you: when you say that those persons discovered them, do you not confess that the things to be discovered existed beforehand? Why then do you not rather honor the author, whose gifts these are, but transfer the authorship to the discoverers? Before the one who discovered it, he surely gave thanks to the author, he surely recognized him as the god whose ministry is truly that of the founder, from whom both the one who discovered was himself founded and that very thing which was to be discovered. No one at Rome knew the African green fig until Cato brought it into the senate, in order to show how near was the hostile province whose subjugation he was always pressing for. Cn. Pompeius first made the cherry known to Italy from Pontus. These discoverers of new fruits among the Romans could have earned from me the proclamation of divinity. This is as vain as also being held gods on account of the inventions of the arts.

If the craftsmen of our own age be compared with those, how much more fittingly would consecration have belonged to the later than to the earlier? I ask you, has not antiquity already grown obsolete in all the arts, with daily use everywhere instructing novelty? And so those whom you sanctify on account of the arts you injure in those very arts and challenge them in rivals who surpass them.

Finally, to the guardians of your religion you deny none of all those whom antiquity wished to be gods and posterity believed to be gods; there still remains for us that great and overweening presumption of Roman superstitions, against which we must contend with you, O nations—namely that the Romans were made lords and arbiters of the whole world because they merited dominion by the services of their religions, so that they fall but little short of prevailing over their own gods. No doubt Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina advanced this empire. The Roman people alone destined by their own gods for dominion. For I should not think that foreign gods wished dominion to be made for a foreign people rather than for their own, so that they became deserters and abandoners—nay, betrayers—of their native soil, in which they were born, grew up, were ennobled, and were buried.

Thus not even Jupiter would allow his own Crete to be shaken by Roman fasces, forgetting that Idaean cave and the Corybantic bronzes and the most pleasant smell of his nurse there. Would he not have preferred that hill of his to every Capitol, so that that land rather should reign which covers the ashes of Jupiter? Would Juno have wished the Punic city, beloved before Samos, to be burned by the fires of the sons of Aeneas? As far as I know, here were her arms, here was her chariot, this was the kingdom the goddess strove even then to make for the nations, if the fates would allow, and she cherished it. Wretched woman, she prevailed not against the fates! Yet the Romans decreed not so much honor to the fates, even when surrendering Carthage to them, as to Larentina. But these gods are not in a position to confer dominion. For if Jupiter reigned in Crete and Saturn in Italy and Isis in Egypt, men also reigned, by whom many are even said to have been served.

Thus he who serves also makes masters, and the surrendered servant of Admetus augments Roman citizens with empire, while he destroyed his generous worshipper Croesus by deceiving him with ambiguous oracles. Why did the god fear to announce plainly and steadfastly that his kingdom was to fall? Those who were increased in the power of reigning could never have protected their own cities as well! If they were able to have bestowed this on the Romans, why did Minerva not defend Athens from Xerxes? Or why did Apollo not rescue Delphi from the hand of Pyrrhus? They preserve the city of Rome who lost their own—if Roman piety merited this. And yet was not superstition sought out after the height of empire, when affairs were already enlarged? Even if sacred rites were introduced by Numa, yet at that time neither images nor temples were deluding your affairs with the divine. A frugal religion and a poor superstition; rash altars and dirty vessels, and a small smoke from them, and the god himself nowhere.

Therefore they were not religious before their ancestors, because they were religious. But yet how can it appear that empire was sought for the Romans on account of the highest religion and the most profound care of the gods, when it was rather increased by the injuring of gods? For unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is sought by wars and enlarged by wars. Moreover, the gods of a city are injured by its conquerors. For the same destruction falls upon walls and temples alike, the same slaughter upon citizens and priests alike, the same plundering of profane and sacred things alike. The sacrileges of the Romans are as many as their trophies, and thereafter the triumphs over gods are as many as over nations. The images too remain as captives, and if they have any feeling, they surely do not love their conquerors. But because they feel nothing, they are injured with impunity, and because they are injured with impunity, they are worshipped in vain.

And so those whose greatness has grown through victories cannot be seen to have increased by the merits of religion—whether they injured religion in growing, or grew by injuring it. All nations have had dominion each in their own times, as the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Egyptians; some still hold it, and yet those who have lost it were dwelling not without religions and worship and the propitiation of their gods, until at last nearly universal dominion passed to the Romans. The lot of the ages has thus rolled kingdoms about. Seek who has ordered the changes of the ages. The same one dispenses kingdoms, and has now gathered that sum among the Romans, as money collected from many accounts into one treasury. What he has decreed concerning it, those nearest to him know.