The Apology

If it is certain, finally, that we are most criminal, why are we treated by you yourselves differently from our equals, that is, from other criminals? Since for the same offense the same treatment ought to be applied. Whatever we are called, when others are called the same, they use both their own voice and hired advocacy to commend their innocence. The opportunity to reply and to dispute is open, since it is not lawful to condemn anyone undefended and unheard. But to Christians alone nothing is permitted to be said that might clear the cause, that might defend the truth, that might keep the judge from being unjust.

That one thing alone is awaited which public hatred requires as necessary—confession of the name, not examination of the crime—whereas if you are trying some criminal, you are not content, once he has confessed the name of murderer, or of sacrilegious person, or of one guilty of incest, or of public enemy (to speak from our own indictments), to pronounce sentence, unless you also exact the consequent details: the quality of the deed, the number of instances, the place, the manner, the time, the accomplices, the associates. In our case nothing of the sort, though it ought equally to be wrung out—whatever is falsely alleged—how many infanticides each one had already tasted, how many acts of incest he had concealed in darkness, what cooks, what dogs had been present. O how great would be the glory of that governor who had ferreted out someone who had already eaten a hundred infants! And yet we find that even inquiry into our case is forbidden.

For Pliny Secundus, when he was governing a province, having condemned certain Christians and driven others away by degrees, was himself disturbed by the sheer multitude, and consulted the emperor Trajan at that time, alleging that apart from their obstinacy in not sacrificing, he had found nothing else in their sacraments concerning them, except assemblies before dawn for singing to Christ as to God, and for binding themselves by oath to a rule of life, forbidding murder, adultery, fraud, treachery, and the rest of the crimes. Then Trajan wrote back that this class of persons was indeed not to be sought out, but that when brought forward they ought to be punished. O sentence of necessity confused! He says they are not to be sought out, as though innocent, and orders them to be punished as though guilty. He spares and he rages, he overlooks and he takes notice. Why do you entangle yourself in your own judgment? If you condemn, why do you not also seek them out?

If you do not seek them out, why do you not also acquit them? Throughout all the provinces a military post is assigned to track down bandits; against those guilty of treason and public enemies every man is a soldier; inquiry extends even to associates and accomplices. The Christian alone may not be sought out, but may be brought forward—as though inquiry, once made, would produce any other result than the act of bringing forward. You condemn therefore one who was brought forward, whom no one wished to seek out—one who, I think, has by now merited punishment not because he is guilty, but because, not being one to be sought out, he was found. And so not even in that respect do you act toward us according to the rule for judging evildoers, in that you apply torture to others who deny in order to make them confess, but to Christians alone in order to make them deny; whereas, if it were an evil, we would deny it, and you would compel confession by torture.

For you would not think that crimes ought not to be investigated by questioning, on the ground that you were certain they were committed on the basis of a confession of the name—you who today, in the case of an avowed murderer, knowing what murder is, nonetheless wring out the details of the act committed: which makes it all the more perverse that, when you presume our crimes from a confession of the name, you compel by torture a withdrawal from the confession, so that by denying the name we likewise deny the crimes which you had presumed from the confession of the name. But I suppose you do not wish us to perish, whom you believe to be most wicked. For this is how you are accustomed to speak to a murderer; Deny: you order a sacrilegious person to be torn apart if he persists in confessing.

If you do not act thus toward the guilty, then you judge us most innocent, since as though most innocent you do not wish us to persist in that confession which you know must be condemned by you out of necessity, not out of justice. A man cries out: I am a Christian. He says what he is; you wish to hear what he is not. You who preside over the extortion of truth, from us alone you labor to hear a lie. This is what I am, he says, what you ask whether I am; why do you twist me the wrong way? I confess, and you torture me; what would you do if I denied? Plainly, when others deny, you do not readily give them credence; when we deny, you believe us at once. Let this perversity be suspect to you, lest some force lurk in the hidden, which ministers to you against the rule, against the nature of judging, and against the laws themselves.

For unless I am mistaken, the laws command that the wicked be dragged out, not concealed; they prescribe that those who confess be condemned, not acquitted. This is what senatorial decrees, this is what imperial mandates define, this is what the empire, of which you are ministers, ordains. Yours is a civil, not a tyrannical dominion your own. For among tyrants torture is applied even as punishment; among you alone it is moderated for the purpose of inquiry. Keep your law for them up to the point of confession; and if they are forestalled by confession, the torture will be unnecessary. Sentence is needed; the guilty man must be discharged by due process, not exempted. In short, no one is eager to acquit him, it is not lawful to wish this; and therefore no one is compelled to deny.

A Christian—a man guilty of every crime, the enemy of the gods, of the emperors, of the laws, of morality, of all nature, as you suppose—you compel to deny, so that you may acquit one whom you cannot acquit unless he has denied. You act corruptly against the laws. You wish him therefore to deny that he is guilty, so that you may make him innocent? And indeed against his will, and no longer guilty even of the past. Whence comes this perversity? So that you do not even reconsider this: that more credence ought to be given to one who confesses voluntarily than to one who denies under compulsion; or lest one compelled to deny may not have denied in good faith; and once acquitted, he may straightway after the tribunal laugh at your rivalry, being once again a Christian.

Since therefore in all things you deal with us differently from other criminals, pressing this one point—that we be excluded from that name (for we are excluded if we do what non-Christians do)—you can understand that it is not some crime that is at issue, but the name, which a certain principle of rival operation pursues, working to this end first: that men should be unwilling to know for certain what they know for certain they do not know. Therefore they also believe about us what is not proved, and are unwilling to inquire, lest it be proved that what they prefer to believe exists does not exist, so that the name of that rival principle's enemy may be condemned, on the basis of presumed and unproved charges, from its confession alone. Therefore we are tortured when we confess, and punished when we persist, and acquitted when we deny, because the battle is over the name. In short, why do you read out from the tablet that he is a Christian, and not also a murderer?

If a Christian is a murderer, why not also guilty of incest? Or whatever else you believe us to be? In our case alone are you ashamed or reluctant to pronounce the very names of the crimes? If a Christian is guilty of no crime, the name is exceedingly odious; if the crime is of the name alone, it is a very great crime.

What of the fact that so many with eyes shut rush into hatred of it, so that when bearing good testimony to someone they mix in a reproach of the name: Gaius Seius is a good man, only that he is a Christian. Likewise another: I marvel that Lucius, a wise man, has suddenly become a Christian. No one reflects: Is not Gaius therefore good, and Lucius prudent, because he is a Christian? Or is he therefore a Christian, because he is prudent and good? They praise what they know, they find fault with what they do not know, and what they know they corrupt by what they do not know; whereas it is more just to prejudge hidden things from manifest ones, than to pre-condemn manifest things from hidden ones. Others, who had known certain persons before as wanderers, base, and wicked, mark them out from the very thing by which they praise them; in the blindness of hatred they stumble into a vote of approval. What a woman! How wanton, how merry she was!

What a young man! How wanton, how amorous! They have become Christians. Thus the name is charged to their amendment. Some even make a bargain with this hatred for their own interests, content with the injury, provided they do not have at home what they hate. A husband, no longer jealous, has cast out a wife now chaste; a father, formerly patient, has disinherited a son now submissive; served, a lord once gentle has banished from his sight a servant now faithful: whoever is reformed by this name thereby gives offence. The good is not worth so much as the hatred of Christians. Now therefore, if the hatred is of the name, what guilt is there in names? What accusation lies against words, unless some sound of a name rings barbarous, or ill-omened, or abusive, or shameless?

But "Christian," as far as the interpretation goes, is derived from "anointing." And even when it is mispronounced by you as "Chrestian" (for you have no certain knowledge even of the name), it is formed from "sweetness" or "kindness." And so in innocent men even an innocent name is hated. But it is said that the sect is hated in the name of its founder. What is new in this, if some school of thought takes its designation for its followers from its teacher? Are not philosophers named after their founders—Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? And also from the places of their gatherings and stations—Stoics, Academics? And physicians from Erasistratus, and grammarians from Aristarchus, and cooks even from Apicius? Yet no one is offended by the profession of a name, when the teaching has been handed down from the teacher. Plainly, if anyone proves a sect to be evil and thus its founder evil, he will also prove the name evil and worthy of hatred on account of the guilt of the sect and its founder.

And therefore, before hating the name, it was fitting first to examine the sect by means of the founder, or the founder by means of the sect. But now, with inquiry into and recognition of both neglected, the name is seized upon, the name is attacked, and a mere word condemns beforehand a sect unknown and a founder unknown—because they are named, not because they are convicted.

And so, having as it were prefaced these remarks to expose the injustice of the public hatred toward us, I shall now take my stand on the cause of our innocence, and not only refute what is charged against us, but also turn it back upon those who charge it; so that from this too all may know that those things are not found in Christians which they do not fail to know are found in themselves, and at the same time that they may blush—those who accuse us—not, I say, as the worst accusing the best, but now, as they would have it, accusing their own equals. We shall answer each of the charges which they say we commit in secret, which we find them committing openly—charges by which we are reckoned criminal, by which vain, by which deserving of condemnation, by which deserving of ridicule.

But since, when our truth meets every charge, in the end the authority of the laws is set against it—so that either it is said that nothing is to be reconsidered after the laws, or that the necessity of obedience is to be preferred to truth against our will—I shall first join battle with you about the laws, as with the guardians of the laws. Now first, how harshly you define things by saying: "It is not lawful for you to exist!" And this you lay down without any more humane reconsideration; you profess force and unjust domination from on high—if you deny it to be lawful for that reason, because you will it so, not because it ought not to be lawful. But if because it ought not to be, therefore you do not will it to be lawful, without doubt that ought not to be lawful which is done ill, and by that very fact it is prejudged to be lawful which is done well.

If I find that to be good which your law has forbidden, does not that prejudgment prevent it from forbidding me—a law which, if it were evil, would rightly forbid it? If your law has erred, I suppose it was conceived by a man; for it did not fall from heaven. Do you marvel that a man could either err in framing a law, or come to his senses in rejecting it? Did not the very laws of Lycurgus, amended by the Lacedaemonians, cause their author such grief that he condemned himself by starvation in retirement? Do not you yourselves daily, as experiments illuminate the darkness of antiquity, cut down and hew away with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts all that old and overgrown forest of laws? Have you not excluded the most vain Papian laws, which compelled children to be received before the Julian laws ordained marriage to be contracted, after so great an age of authority, only yesterday Severus, most steadfast of princes?

But also there were laws that condemned men should be cut in pieces for their creditors; yet by public consent that cruelty was afterwards erased, and the capital penalty converted into a mark of shame, and the proscription of goods being introduced, it preferred to suffuse rather than to shed a man's blood. How many laws still lie hidden among you awaiting purging, which neither the number of years nor the dignity of their framers commends, but equity alone? And therefore when they are examined with an eye to injustice, they are rightly condemned, even though they condemn. How do we call them unjust? Nay, if they punish a name, they are also foolish. But if they punish deeds, why do they punish in our case deeds on account of the name alone, which in others they defend when proved by the act committed, not by the name? I am guilty of incest—why do they not inquire into it? Of infanticide—why do they not extort a confession?

Against the gods, against the Caesars I commit some offence—why am I not heard, when I have that by which I may clear myself? No law forbids the examination of what it forbids to commit; for neither does a judge justly avenge unless he has established that what is unlawful has been committed; nor does a citizen faithfully obey a law, being ignorant of the nature of what it avenges. No law owes the consciousness of its own justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Otherwise a law is suspect which does not wish to be proved, and wicked if it dominates without being proved.

That we may review something of the origin of laws of this kind: there was an ancient decree that no god should be consecrated by the emperor unless approved by the senate. M. Aemilius knows this concerning his god Alburnus. This also bears upon our cause, that among you divinity is weighed by human judgment. Unless a god pleases a man, he will not be a god; man will then need to be propitious to God. Tiberius therefore, in whose time the Christian name entered the world, having had reported to him from Syria Palestine that which had there revealed the truth of that divinity, brought the matter before the senate with the prerogative of his own vote in its favour. The senate, because it had not itself approved the matter, rejected it; Caesar held to his opinion, threatening danger to the accusers of Christians. Consult your own records; there you will find that Nero was the first to rage with the imperial sword against this sect when it was especially flourishing at Rome.

But we even glory in having such a dedicator of our condemnation. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing but something greatly good was condemned by Nero. Domitian also had made the attempt, being a portion of Nero in cruelty; but since he was also a human being, he easily checked what he had begun, even restoring those whom he had banished. Such have our persecutors always been—unjust, impious, base, men whom you yourselves have been accustomed to condemn, and from whose condemnations you have been accustomed to restore the condemned. But as for all the princes from that time to the present day, versed in divine and human wisdom, produce some one of them as a destroyer of Christians.

But we on the contrary produce a protector, if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most grave emperor, be sought out, in which he testifies that that Germanic thirst was dispelled by rain obtained through the prayers of Christian soldiers. And as he did not openly remove punishment from such men, so in another way he openly dispersed it, having also added condemnation for the accusers, and indeed a harsher one. What manner of laws are these, then, which only the impious, the unjust, the base, the savage, the vain, the mad execute against us?—laws which Trajan in part frustrated by forbidding Christians to be sought out, which no Hadrian, though an explorer of all curiosities, no Vespasian, though a conqueror of the Jews, no Pius, no Verus enforced. The worst would more readily be judged fit to be rooted out by all the best, as by rivals, than by their own associates.

Now I would have those most devout protectors and cultivators of the laws and ancestral institutions answer concerning their own fidelity and honour and obedience toward the decrees of their forebears—whether they have departed from none, whether they have deviated in nothing, whether they have not obliterated all those most necessary and most fitting elements of discipline. Where have those laws gone that restrained expenditure and ambition, which ordered that no more than a hundred asses be subscribed for a dinner, and that no more than one hen be brought in, and that one not fattened; which removed from the senate a patrician, because he had possessed ten pounds of silver, as a great mark of ambition; which immediately destroyed theatres rising up to corrupt morals; which did not permit the insignia of dignities and honourable birth to be usurped rashly or with impunity?

For I see both hundred-sesterce dinners, now to be called dinners of a hundred sesterces, and silver plate extended into dishes (it is too little if of senators and not of freedmen or those still breaking their stripes under the lash). I see also that theatres are not sufficient even singly, nor even uncovered. For lest even in winter immodest pleasure should grow cold, the Lacedaemonians first devised the hatred of the cloak for the games. I see also that between matrons and prostitutes no distinction of dress has been left. Concerning women indeed, even those ancestral institutions have fallen which were the patrons of modesty and sobriety, when no woman knew gold, except on the one finger which the betrothed had pledged with the betrothal ring; when women abstained from wine to such a degree that a matron, on account of having broken open the locks of the wine-cellar, was put to death by starvation by her own kinsmen.

Under Romulus indeed, a woman who had touched wine was slain with impunity by her husband Mecenius. For this reason also it was a necessity to offer kisses to kinsmen, so that they might be judged by the breath. Where is that happiness of marriages, prospering surely from good morals, by which for nearly six hundred years from the founding of the City no household wrote a bill of divorce?

But now among women, because of gold no limb is unencumbered; because of wine no kiss is free; and divorce is now even a vow, as though the fruit of marriage. Even concerning your very gods, what your fathers had wisely decreed, you most obedient ones have yourselves rescinded. Father Liber with his mysteries the consuls by authority of the senate had banished not only from the city but from all Italy. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates together with their Dog-headed one, having been forbidden entry to the Capitol—that is, having been expelled from the assembly of the gods—the consuls Piso and Gabinius, not Christians by any means, had rejected them, even overthrowing their altars, restraining the vices of base and idle superstitions. These you have restored and conferred upon them the highest majesty. Where is the reverence, where the veneration owed to your ancestors by you? In dress, in food, in furnishing, in thought, in speech itself you have renounced your forebears. You always praise antiquity, and yet you live in novelty from day to day.

By which it is shown that, while you depart from the good institutions of your ancestors, you retain and guard those things which you ought not to have retained, since you have not guarded those which you ought to have guarded. That very thing which you seem to guard most faithfully as handed down from your fathers—in which you chiefly designate Christians as guilty of transgression—I mean the zeal for worshipping the gods, in which antiquity chiefly erred, even though you have rebuilt altars to Serapis now Roman, even though you have sacrificed your frenzies to Bacchus now Italian—I shall show in its proper place that this too is despised and neglected and destroyed by you against the authority of your ancestors. For now I shall reply to that infamy of hidden crimes, so that I may clear the way for myself toward more manifest matters.

I mean the zeal for worshipping the gods, in which antiquity chiefly erred, even though you have rebuilt altars to Serapis now Roman, even though you have sacrificed your frenzies to Bacchus now Italian—I shall show in its proper place that this too is despised and neglected and destroyed by you against the authority of your ancestors.

We are called most wicked on account of the sacrament of infanticide, and the feast thereupon, and after the banquet incest, which dogs—the pimps, that is, of darkness and impious lusts—are said to procure by overturning the lights with shamelessness. Yet we are always so called, and you take no care to bring to light what you have so long been saying. Therefore either bring it to light, if you believe it, or cease to believe it, since you have not brought it to light. Your own dissimulation is used against you as a plea—that those things do not exist which you yourselves do not dare to bring to light. You impose a far different task upon the executioner against Christians: not that they should say what they do, but that they should deny what they are. The origin of this discipline, as we have already set forth, is from Tiberius. Truth began with hatred of itself, as soon as it appeared, being an enemy.

Its enemies are as many as its strangers, and indeed its own proper enemies—from rivalry the Jews, from extortion the soldiers, from nature even our own household members. Daily we are beset, daily we are betrayed, we are assailed most of all in our very assemblies and gatherings. Who has ever come upon an infant in the act of wailing thus? Who has reserved for the judge those mouths, bloody as he found them, of Cyclopes and Sirens? Who has detected any unclean traces even in wives? Who, when he had found such crimes, has concealed them, or sold them, dragging the very persons away? If we are always in hiding, when was that which we commit betrayed? Nay, by whom could it have been betrayed? By the accused themselves?

Certainly not, since even by the rule of all mysteries, the obligation of silence is owed. The rites of Samothrace and Eleusis are kept secret: how much more such things as these, which if disclosed in the meantime will also provoke human punishment, while the divine is being preserved? If, then, the Christians themselves are not their own betrayers, it follows that outsiders are. And whence do outsiders have knowledge of them? Since even pious initiations always shut out the uninitiated and guard against witnesses—unless the impious are less fearful? The nature of rumour is known to all. It is yours: Rumour, an evil than which nothing else is swifter. Why is rumour an evil? Because it is swift? Because it is an informer? Or because it is for the most part a liar?—which even when it brings something true is not without the fault of falsehood, taking away, adding, altering from the truth.

What of this, that its very condition is such that it persists only when it lies, and lives only so long as it does not prove? For when it has proved, it ceases to be, and having as it were discharged its duty of reporting, it hands over the matter, and thenceforth the matter is held fast, the matter is named. Nor does anyone say, for example: "This is said to have been done at Rome"; or: "There is a rumour that he has obtained a province"; but: "He has obtained that province," and: "This was done at Rome." Rumour, the name of the uncertain, has no place where there is certainty. But will anyone believe rumour, unless he be thoughtless? The wise man does not believe what is uncertain. It is for all to consider, however widely it may have spread with ambition, however firmly it may have been built up with assertion. Since it must have originated from some one person at some time, it necessarily creeps thence through the offshoots of tongues and ears.

And so the fault of that small seed obscures the rest of the rumour, so that no one reflects whether that first mouth may have sown a lie—which often happens either through the spirit of rivalry, or by the judgment of suspicion, or through the pleasure of lying, which is not new but innate in certain persons. It is well, however, that time reveals all things, with your own proverbs and maxims as witnesses, by the ordering of nature, which has so arranged that nothing remain hidden for long, even what rumour has not spread abroad. Rightly, therefore, is rumour for so long the sole witness to the crimes of Christians. This informer you bring forward against us—one which, for all that it once proclaimed and over so great a space of time has hardened into opinion, has up to this day been unable to prove anything.

That I may appeal to the testimony of nature itself against those who presume that such things are to be believed, behold, we set forth the reward of these crimes: they promise eternal life. Believe it for the moment. For this is what I ask, whether even if you believed it, you would think it worth so much to arrive at that life with such a conscience. Come, plunge the knife into an infant—the enemy of no one, guilty before no one, the child of all; or if that is another's office, do you only stand by as a man dies before he has lived; await the departing soul, new-born; catch the fresh blood; with it soak your bread; eat it freely. Meanwhile, as you recline at table, take note of the places where your mother is, where your sister is; mark them carefully, so that when the darkness has fallen and the dogs have done their work, you may not go astray. For you will have committed a sin if you have not committed incest.

Initiated and sealed by such rites, you live for ever. I desire you to answer whether eternity is worth so much, or if it is not, then neither is it to be believed. Even if you believed it, I deny that you would wish it; even if you wished it, I deny that you could do it. Why then can others do it, if you cannot? Why can you not, if others can? We are of a different nature, I suppose; dog-headed creatures, or shadow-footed ones? Different arrangements of teeth, different sinews for incestuous lust? You who believe these things of a human being can also do them. You are a human being yourself, just as the Christian is. You who cannot do it, ought not to believe it. For the Christian too is a human being, and the same as you.

But it is imposed upon and foisted upon those who do not know, for they did not know that such things were asserted of Christians—things which they would certainly have had to watch for and investigate with all vigilance. Yet for those wishing to be initiated, it is the custom, I suppose, first to approach that father of the sacred rites, to describe what preparations are to be made. Then he says: you will need an infant, still tender, one who does not yet know death, who will smile under the knife; likewise bread, with which to soak up the bloody broth; moreover candlesticks and lamps, and some dogs and scraps of food to make them overturn the lights; above all, you will have to come with your mother and your sister. What if they are unwilling, or there are none? What then of Christians who are alone? There will not be, I suppose, a proper Christian unless he has a brother or a son. What now, if all these things are prepared without the knowledge of those present?

Certainly they learn of it afterwards, and endure it and forgive it. They fear punishment—those who, if they were to cry out, would deserve to be defended, who would even prefer to perish of their own accord rather than live with such a guilty conscience. Come now, let them fear; why do they also persevere? For it follows that you should no longer wish to be what you are, since if you had known it beforehand, you would not have become it.

The more thoroughly to refute these charges, I shall show that they are committed by you—partly openly, partly in secret—through which perhaps you have also come to believe them of us. Infants were publicly sacrificed to Saturn in Africa right up to the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed the very priests on the votive crosses of those trees that shaded their temple—the shadows of their crimes—with the soldiers of our own country as witnesses, who performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this sacred crime persists in secret. Christians are not the only ones who despise you, nor is any crime ever wholly eradicated, nor does any god change his ways. Since Saturn did not spare his own children, he persisted in not sparing strangers—those whom indeed their own parents offered up, and willingly complied, and caressed their infants lest they be sacrificed in tears. And yet infanticide differs greatly from parricide. Among the Gauls, persons of greater age were slaughtered for Mercury. I pass over the Tauric tales for their theatres.

Behold, in that most religious city of the pious sons of Aeneas, there is a certain Jupiter whom they drench with human blood at his games. But they are beast-fighters, you say. That is, I suppose, less than a human being. Or is it more shameful because it is a wicked human being? Certainly, however, it is shed from murder. O what a Christian Jupiter, and the only son of his father in cruelty! But since in the matter of infanticide it makes no difference whether it is perpetrated as a sacred rite or at will (though parricide does differ from homicide), I shall turn to the people. How many of those standing around you, thirsting for the blood of Christians, even among your most just and severe governors against us, shall I challenge at their consciences—those who put to death the children born to them? For indeed the manner of death also differs—surely more cruel is that in which you wring out the breath, or expose them to cold and hunger and dogs.

For even a person of greater age would have preferred to die by the sword. But for us, murder being once forbidden, it is not lawful even to dissolve what has been conceived in the womb while the blood is still being drawn into a human being. To prevent birth is a hastening of murder; nor does it matter whether one takes away a soul already born or destroys one in the act of being born: it is a human being even who is going to be one; every fruit is already present in the seed. Read, concerning the nourishment of blood and tragic dishes of that kind, whether it is recorded anywhere it is in Herodotus, I think that certain nations have formed a covenant by tasting blood drawn from one another's arms and poured out. I know not what similar thing was also tasted under Catiline. They say also that among certain Scythian peoples the dead are eaten by their own kin. I range far afield.

Today, right here, the devotees of Bellona catch the blood flowing from a gash cut in the thigh with a small shield and give it to their fellows to drink as a seal of initiation. Likewise those who at the gladiatorial show, to cure epilepsy, greedily drink the fresh blood of criminals slaughtered in the arena, drawn straight from the throat—where are they? Likewise those who dine from the arena on wild-beast fare, who seek portions of boar, who seek portions of stag? That boar wiped off with his body the blood he had drawn in the struggle; that stag wallowed in the blood of a gladiator. The bellies of the very bears are sought after, still belching from human entrails. A man belches accordingly, flesh fed on man, from man. You who eat these things, how far are you from the banquets of Christians? And yet those do less who with savage lust gape after human limbs, because they devour the living?

Are they less consecrated to filth with human blood, because they lick up blood yet to come? They do not eat infants, plainly, but rather those of more mature age. Let your error blush before Christians, we who do not even count the blood of animals among our savoury dishes at table, who for that reason also abstain from things strangled and from carrion, lest we be contaminated by any blood even buried within the entrails. Finally, among the provisions set before Christians at their meals you place even sausages swollen with blood, being most certain, of course, that it is unlawful among those by means of which you wish them to transgress. Moreover, what kind of reasoning is it that those whom you are confident shudder at the blood of cattle, you believe to lust after human blood—unless perhaps they have found it sweeter by experience? This very blood ought likewise to be employed as a test of Christians, as a brazier, as a censer.

For they would be proved by craving human blood in the same way as by refusing sacrifice; otherwise, if they had tasted it, they would be condemned to death just as if they had not offered sacrifice. And certainly human blood would not be lacking to you in the hearing of prisoners and in the passing of sentence. Likewise, who are more guilty of incest than those whom Jupiter himself has taught? Ctesias reports that the Persians have intercourse with their own mothers. But the Macedonians too are suspect, because when they first heard the tragedy of Oedipus, laughing at the pain of the incestuous man, they said, drive into your mother. Now consider how much licence errors allow for the mingling of incest, with the materials supplied by the indiscriminate licence of lust. In the first place, you expose your children to be taken up by some passing stranger's compassion, or to be adopted by better parents once they have been emancipated.

The memory of an alienated lineage must at some point be scattered; and once error has struck, thenceforth the transmission of incest will advance, as the race creeps onward together with the crime. Then, wherever one may be—at home, abroad, across the seas—lust is a companion, whose leaps everywhere can easily somewhere beget children upon those who do not know them, or from some portion of seed; so that the race thus scattered through human intercourse may come together again into its own kindred, and the union of incestuous blood may not recognise them. From that outcome the most diligent and faithful chastity has fenced us off, and as much as we are safe from fornication and from every transgression after marriage, so also are we safe from the chance of incest. Some, much more secure, repel the whole force of this error by virgin continence—old men while yet boys. If you were to consider that these things exist among you, you would likewise perceive that they do not exist among Christians.

The same eyes would have reported both. But two kinds of blindness easily come together, so that those who do not see what is, seem to see what is not. Thus I shall demonstrate in all things. Now I shall speak of more manifest matters.

You do not worship the gods, you say, and you do not offer sacrifices on behalf of the emperors. It follows by the same reasoning that we do not sacrifice for others either, since we do not sacrifice even for ourselves, since we do not worship two gods at once. And so we are charged with sacrilege and treason. This is the sum of the case, or rather the whole of it, and certainly worthy of examination, if presumption or iniquity did not sit in judgment—the one despairing of, the other refusing, the truth. We have ceased to worship your gods from the time we recognised that they are no gods. This, therefore, is what you ought to require of us: that we prove they are not gods, and that for that reason they are not to be worshipped—since they ought to have been worshipped only if they had been gods.

Then too Christians would deserve punishment, if it were established that those whom they did not worship because they thought them not to be gods were in fact gods. But they are gods, you say to us. We appeal and call you yourselves as witnesses, before your own conscience; let that judge us, let that condemn us, if it can deny that all those gods of yours were human beings. But even if it should deny it, it will be refuted from its own records of antiquity, from which it learned of them, those records bearing witness to the present day both in the cities in which they were born, and in the regions in which they left traces of some activity, and in which they are also shown to be buried.

And I shall not run through them one by one, so many and so great—new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captive, adopted, native, common, male, female, rustic, urban, nautical, military; it would be tedious even to pursue their titles, so as to gather them into a summary—and this not that you may come to know them, but that you may recognise them again; for you are certainly pretending to have forgotten. Before Saturn there is no god among you; from him the reckoning of all your divinity, whether the greater part or the better known, begins. Therefore what shall be established concerning the origin will apply to the posterity.

As for Saturn, then, if the written records teach us—neither Diodorus the Greek, nor Thallus, nor Cassius Severus, nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any chronicler of such antiquities has proclaimed him as anything other than a man; and as for the evidence of facts, I find nothing more trustworthy than what Italy itself affords, where Saturn, after many wanderings and after sojourning in Attica, settled, received by Janus, or Janes, as the Salii prefer. The mountain he had inhabited was called Saturnius; the city he had marked out with stakes is called Saturnia to this day; and finally all of Italy, after the name Oenotria, was surnamed Saturnia. By him the coin was first stamped with a table and an image, and thence he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was a man, he was certainly born of man, and because he was born of man, he was assuredly not born of heaven and earth.

But since his parents were unknown, it was easy to call him the son of those of whom we can all appear to be sons. For who would not call heaven and earth mother and father, out of veneration and honor, or from the human custom by which those who are unknown or who appear unexpectedly are said to have come down from heaven? Accordingly it fell to Saturn, as one who appeared suddenly, to be called everywhere a heaven-dweller. For the common people also call those whose origin is uncertain sons of the earth. I say nothing of the fact that men were then so uncultured that they were stirred as if by something divine at the sight of any new man, whereas today, already refined, they consecrate as gods those whom a few days before they acknowledged as dead in public mourning. Enough now of Saturn, though briefly.

We shall show Jupiter likewise to be as much a man as born of man, and thereafter the whole progeny of the race as mortal as the seed from which it sprang.

And since, just as you dare not deny that those were men, so you insist on asserting that they were made gods after death, let us examine the reasons that required this. First of all, you must concede that there is some God more exalted and the master of divinity, who made gods out of men. For neither could those men have assumed for themselves a divinity which they did not possess, nor could another bestow it upon those who did not have it, except one who properly possessed it. Moreover, if there were no one to make gods, you presume in vain that gods were made, by removing the maker. Certainly, if they could have made themselves gods, they would never have been men, since they would have possessed within themselves the power of a better condition. Therefore, if there is one who makes gods, I return to examining the reasons for making gods out of men, and I find none, unless that great God desired their services and assistance for divine functions.

First, it is unworthy that he should stand in need of anyone's labor, and that of a dead man at that, when it would have been more fitting from the beginning to have made some god whose labor he was going to need after death. But I see no place for such labor either. For this whole body of the world, whether unborn and unmade according to Pythagoras, or born and made according to Plato, was at any rate once arranged in this structure and was found equipped and ordered with the helm of all reason. What perfected all things could not have been imperfect. Nothing was waiting for Saturn and the Saturnian race.

Men will be foolish unless they are certain that from the beginning rains fell from heaven, and stars shone, and lights flourished, and thunders roared, and that Jupiter himself feared the thunderbolts which you place in his hand; likewise that every crop abounded from the earth before Liber and Ceres and Minerva, indeed before any first man of note, since nothing that was provided for containing and sustaining man could have been introduced after man. Finally, they are said to have discovered these necessities of life, not to have established them. But what is discovered already existed; and what already existed will not be credited to the one who discovered it, but to the one who established it: for it existed before it was discovered. Moreover, if Liber is a god because he pointed out the vine, it went badly for Lucullus, who first introduced cherries from Pontus to Italy, in that he was not therefore consecrated as the author of a new fruit, since he was its finder and displayer.

Wherefore, if from the beginning the universe was established both equipped and dispensed with fixed principles for the exercise of its functions, the reason for alleging humanity's elevation to divinity falls away on this account, because the stations and powers you distributed to those gods existed from the beginning just as much as they would have existed even if you had never created those gods. But turn to another reason, answering that the conferral of divinity was the rationale for rewarding merits. And from this you will concede, I think, that that god-making God excels in justice, who dispensed so great a reward neither rashly, nor unworthily, nor lavishly. I wish therefore to review the merits, whether they are of such a kind as to have raised those men to heaven, and not rather to have plunged them into the lowest Tartarus, which you affirm along with many to be the prison of infernal punishments.

For there are wont to be confined all those who are impious toward parents, and those guilty of incest with sisters, and adulterers of wives, and ravishers of virgins and defilers of boys, and those who are savage, and those who kill, and those who steal, and those who deceive, and all who are like any god of yours, of whom you will be able to prove not one free from crime or vice, unless you deny he was a man. And yet, since you cannot deny that those were men, these marks also attach to them, which do not permit belief that they were made gods afterward. For if you preside over the punishment of such persons, if all upright people reject association, conversation, and companionship with the wicked and shameful, yet that God of majesty admitted their equals to share in his majesty, what then do you condemn in those whose colleagues you worship? Your justice is a reproach in heaven. Make gods of the most criminal of all, so that you may please your gods.

Their honor is the consecration of their equals. But to pass over the examination of this indignity—suppose they were upright and blameless and good. How many better men have you left among the shades below? Someone surpassing in wisdom Socrates, in justice Aristides, in military skill Themistocles, in greatness Alexander, in good fortune Polycrates, in wealth Croesus, in eloquence Demosthenes? Which of your gods is weightier and wiser than Cato, more just and more skilled in war than Scipio? Who is greater than Pompey, more fortunate than Sulla, wealthier than Crassus, more eloquent than Tullius? How much more worthily would that God have waited to take up those men, foreknowing as he surely was of better ones? He was in a hurry, I suppose, and shut heaven once for all, and now blushes at the better men muttering among the shades below.

I now leave off concerning these matters, as one who knows that I shall demonstrate from the truth itself what they are not, when I have shown what they are. As far then as concerns your gods, I see only the names of certain ancient dead men, and I hear fables, and I recognize rites derived from fables; but as for the images themselves, I find nothing other than that their materials are sister to those of common vessels and implements, or that they change from those same vessels and implements by a kind of fate through consecration, with the license of art transforming them, and indeed most insultingly and sacrilegiously in the very act of making, so that truly for us especially, who are punished on account of the gods themselves, it may be a consolation in our punishments that they themselves suffer the same things in order to be made. You fasten Christians to crosses and stakes: what image is not first shaped in clay mounted upon a cross and stake?

The body of your god is first dedicated upon a gibbet. You scrape the sides of Christians with claws; but upon your gods axes and planes and files press more heavily through every limb. We bow our necks; before that, lead and glue and nails hold your gods without a head.

We are driven to the beasts, certainly those which you assign to Liber, and Cybele, and Caelestis. We are burned with fire: this too they suffer from the very first mass of material. We are condemned to the mines: from there your gods are reckoned. We are banished to islands: it is customary also that some god of yours is either born or dies on an island. If by these things some divinity is established, then those who are punished are consecrated, and punishments will have to be called divine powers. But plainly your gods, being the product of their own manufacture, feel neither these injuries and insults, nor the acts of homage. O impious words, O sacrilegious reproaches! Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the same people who found fault with a certain Seneca speaking at greater length and more bitterly against your superstition.

Therefore, if we do not worship the cold statues and images most resembling their dead men, which kites and mice and spiders understand, would not the rejection of a recognized error deserve praise rather than punishment? For can we seem to injure those whom we are certain do not exist at all? That which does not exist suffers nothing from anyone, because it does not exist.

But they are gods to us, you say. And how are you on the contrary found to be impious and sacrilegious and irreligious toward your own gods—you who neglect those whom you presume to exist, destroy those whom you fear, mock those whom you even avenge? Consider whether I lie. First of all, since you worship some and not others, you assuredly offend those you do not worship. Preference for one cannot proceed without insult to another, since neither can choice proceed without rejection. Already then you despise those whom you reject, and in rejecting them you do not fear to offend them. For as we touched upon above, the standing of each god depended on the judgment of the senate. He was not a god whom a man, when consulted, had refused to will, and by refusing had condemned.

Your household gods, whom you call Lares, you handle with domestic authority, pledging them, selling them, sometimes changing them—now a Saturn into a cooking-pot, now a Minerva into a ladle—according to how worn and battered each one is from long worship, and according to how each master has found a more pressing domestic need. Equally you defile the public gods by public law, holding them as taxpayers at the auction block. So the Capitol, so the vegetable market is visited; under the same voice of the auctioneer, under the same spear, under the same notation of the quaestor, divinity is knocked down and leased out. But indeed fields burdened with tribute are cheaper, persons assessed with a poll-tax are of lower standing; for these are the marks of captivity. But the gods who are more tributary are more holy; or rather, the more holy they are, the more tributary they are. Majesty is made a source of revenue. Religion goes begging around the taverns.

You exact payment for the ground of the temple, for access to the sacred precinct; it is not permitted to know the gods free of charge, they are for sale. What do you do at all to honor them that you do not likewise bestow upon your dead? Temples likewise, altars likewise. The same appearance and insignia on the statues. As was the age, the trade, the occupation of the dead man, so is the god. In what does the funeral feast differ from the banquet of Jupiter, the funeral cup from the libation bowl, the undertaker from the soothsayer? For the soothsayer too attends the dead. But you fittingly dedicate the honor of divinity to deceased emperors, to whom you assign it even while they are living. Your gods will take it in good part, nay they will rejoice, that their masters are made their equals.

But when you worship Larentina, a common harlot—I would say at least a Lais or a Phryne—among your Junos and Ceres and Dianas; when you inaugurate Simon Magus with a statue and the inscription of a holy god; when you make some unknown person from the imperial pages a god of a guild: though the older gods may not be more distinguished, they will nonetheless count it an insult from you that what antiquity conferred on them alone has been permitted to others as well.

I am unwilling also to review your rites; I do not say what manner of men you are in sacrificing, when you slaughter whatever is diseased and wasted and mangy; when from the fat and whole animals you cut off as superfluous the heads and hooves, which you would have destined at home even for children or dogs; when from the tithe of Hercules you do not place even a third part upon his altar. I rather praise your wisdom, in that you rescue something from what is lost. But turning to your literature, by which you are formed in prudence and in the liberal arts, how many mockeries do I find!

The gods fighting one another on behalf of Trojans and Greeks like pairs of gladiators; Venus wounded by a human arrow, because she wished to snatch her son Aeneas, nearly slain by that same Diomedes; Mars nearly consumed in chains for thirteen months; Jupiter, lest he suffer the same violence from the other heavenly beings, freed by the aid of some monster, and now weeping over the fall of Sarpedon, now shamefully lusting after his sister while recalling loves long since enjoyed that were not so dear. After that, what poet is not found to be a defamer of the gods on the authority of his chief? Here one assigns Apollo to King Admetus to tend his flocks, there another hires out Neptune's building services to Laomedon. There is also among the lyric poets (I mean Pindar) one who sings that Aesculapius was justly punished by a thunderbolt for his greed, in that he practiced medicine harmfully. Evil Jupiter, if the thunderbolt is his, impious son, if it is his father's. Toward a grandson, envious toward a craftsman.

These things ought neither to be revealed as true, nor invented as false, among the most religious of peoples. Not even tragic or comic poets spare the gods, but set before us the afflictions or wanderings of some divine household. I say nothing of the philosophers, content with Socrates, who swore by an oak, a goat, and a dog in contempt of the gods. But Socrates was condemned for this very reason, that he was destroying the gods. Plainly, from of old—that is, always—truth is hated. Yet when the Athenians repented of their verdict and afterwards afflicted the accusers of Socrates, and placed his golden image in a temple, the annulled condemnation rendered testimony to Socrates. And Diogenes too makes sport of Hercules in some fashion, and Varro the Roman Cynic introduces three hundred Joves, or Jupiters as they should be called, without heads.

The other devices of wantonness work even upon your pleasures, through the dishonoring of the gods. Consider the witticisms of the Lentuli and the Hostilii, and judge whether it is the mimes or your gods that you laugh at in their jests and tricks: The adulterous Anubis, and The moon as a male, and Diana flogged, and The will of the dead Jupiter read aloud, and the three Hungry herculeses mocked. But also the scripts of the actors set forth all their foulness. The Sun mourns his son hurled from heaven, while you rejoice; and Cybele sighs for a shepherd who disdains her, without any blush from you. And you endure the praises of Jupiter to be sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva to be judged by a shepherd. What of the fact that the image of your god clothes a head of infamy and ill repute? That a body impure and made effeminate for that art represents some Minerva or Hercules? Is not the majesty violated and the divinity defiled, while you applaud?

You are surely more devout in the arena, where your gods dance over human blood, over the defilements of punishments, furnishing plots and stories to the condemned—unless indeed the condemned themselves often put on your very gods. We have seen at times a castrated Attis, that god from Pessinus; and one who was burning alive had put on Hercules.

We have laughed also, amid the playful cruelties of the midday shows, at Mercury examining the dead with his cautery. We have seen too the brother of Jupiter leading away the bodies of gladiators with his mallet. Who could still go on investigating each of these things one by one? If they disturb the honor of divinity, if they wear away the traces of majesty, they are reckoned as contempt, both on the part of those who habitually do such things, and of those for whom they do them. But these are mere entertainments. However, if I add what the conscience of all will no less recognize—that adulteries are arranged in the temples, that acts of procuring are transacted at the altars, that in the very booths of the temple-keepers and priests, beneath the same fillets and head-bands and purple robes, with incense burning, lust is discharged—I know not whether your gods have more cause to complain of you than of the Christians. Certainly, sacrilegious persons are always caught from among your own people.

For Christians do not even know the temples by day; they would perhaps plunder them too, if they too worshipped them. What then do they worship, who worship not such things? It is already plain enough to understand that they are worshippers of truth, who are not worshippers of falsehood; and that they no longer err in that wherein they have ceased to err by acknowledging it. From this first heading, draw out from it the whole order of our religion, having first, however, repelled the false opinions.

For, as some of you have dreamed, you imagined that our god is a head of an ass. Cornelius Tacitus inserted this suspicion of such a kind. For he, in the fifth book of his Histories, having begun the Jewish war from the origin of the nation, and having argued as he pleased both about the origin itself and about the name and religion of the nation, reports that the Jews, having made their way out of Egypt—or, as he supposed, having been driven out as exiles—in the vast and waterless regions of Arabia, when they were being worn down by thirst, used wild asses as guides to a spring, which were thought to be going from their pasture to seek water, and that out of gratitude for this they consecrated the likeness of a similar beast. And so from that point, I suppose, it was presumed that we too, as being close to the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image.

But indeed the same Cornelius Tacitus—that most loquacious of liars—in the same history reports that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and for that reason had entered the temple to inspect the secrets of the Jewish religion, found no image there. And certainly if that were worshipped which was represented by some effigy, it would be displayed nowhere more than in its own sanctuary, all the more so because it had no fear of outside observers, however vain the worship might be. For only the priests were permitted to enter, and the sight was forbidden to all others by a veil drawn across. Yet you will not deny that all manner of beasts and entire horses together with their Epona are worshipped by you. This perhaps is the charge against us, that among the worshippers of all cattle and beasts, we alone are worshippers of asses. But also he who thinks us devotees of the cross will be our fellow-initiate.

When some piece of wood is propitiated, let the shape be considered, so long as the material quality is the same; let the form be considered, so long as it is the very body of a god. And yet how far does the Attic Pallas, or the Pharian Ceres, who stands exposed without image on a rough stake and shapeless log, differ from a cross? Every strong beam that is fixed upright in a standing position is a part of a cross; we, if anything, worship a god that is whole and entire. We have said that the origin of your gods is derived from the modelers by way of the cross. But also the Victories you worship, since in trophies crosses are the inner framework of the trophies. The whole religion of the Romans in the camp venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards before all the gods. All those arrays of images upon the standards are necklaces of crosses. The siphara of the vexilla and cantabra—those robes are robes of crosses.

I commend your diligence: you were unwilling to consecrate bare and unadorned crosses. Others, more humanely and more plausibly, believe the Sun to be our god. We shall be reckoned among the Persians, perhaps—though we do not adore the sun painted on a linen cloth—having him everywhere in his own shield. The suspicion arises from the fact that it has become known that we pray toward the region of the east.

But also many of you, out of an affectation of worshipping the heavenly bodies at times, move your lips toward the rising of the sun. Likewise, if we devote the day of the sun to rejoicing, for a reason far different from any worship of the sun, we are second in this only to those who assign the day of Saturn to leisure and feasting, they too departing from the Jewish custom, which they do not know. But now a new edition of our god has recently been published in this city, ever since a certain hired criminal, in the business of cheating wild beasts, put up a picture with an inscription of this kind: The God of the Christians onokoites.

He had ass's ears, was hoofed on one foot, was carrying a book, and was dressed in a toga. We laughed at both the name and the form. But those people ought straightway to have worshipped that two-formed deity, since they have received gods with heads compounded of dog and lion, and horned from goat and ram, and goat-legged from the loins, and from the legs serpent-footed, and winged on foot or on back. These things I have said in abundance, lest we should seem to have passed over any rumor in silence, as though from a guilty conscience. All of which things, now that we have turned to the demonstration of our religion, we have cleared away.

What we worship is one God; who fashioned this whole mass of the world with all its apparatus of elements, bodies, and spirits, by the word by which he commanded, by the reason by which he disposed, by the power by which he was able, out of nothing, for the adornment of his majesty: whence also the Greeks have given the name cosmos to the world. He is invisible, though he be seen; incomprehensible, though he be made present by grace; inestimable, though he be estimated by human senses; therefore he is true and so great. For the rest, that which can commonly be seen, that which can be comprehended, that which can be estimated, is less than the eyes by which it is occupied, and the hands by which it is handled, and the senses by which it is found. But that which is immeasurable is known to itself alone. This is what makes God be estimated, while he cannot be grasped by estimation.

Thus the force of his greatness both presents him as known to men and as unknown. And this is the sum of the guilt of those who are unwilling to acknowledge him whom they cannot be ignorant of. Do you wish that we prove it from his own works, so many and so great, by which we are encompassed, by which we are sustained, by which we are delighted, by which also we are terrified? Do you wish that we prove it from the testimony of the soul itself? Which, though pressed by the prison of the body, though hemmed in by corrupt institutions, though enervated by lusts and concupiscences, though enslaved to false gods, yet when it recovers its senses, as from a debauch, as from sleep, as from some illness, and endures its own health, it names God, by this name alone, because it is the proper name of the true God: God is great, God is good, and What God shall grant, is the utterance of all.

It also calls him to witness as judge: God sees, and I commend to God, and God will repay me. O testimony of the soul, naturally Christian! Finally, in pronouncing these things, it looks not toward the Capitol, but toward heaven. For it knows the seat of the living God; from him and from thence it descended.

But that we might approach both himself and his dispositions and his will more fully and more deeply, he added the instrument of written literature, so that whoever wishes may inquire concerning God, and having inquired may find, and having found may believe, and having believed may serve him.

For he sent forth from the beginning into the world men worthy of knowing and making known God by reason of their justice and innocence, flooded with the divine spirit, to proclaim that God is one, who founded all things, who fashioned man from the earth—for this is the true Prometheus—who ordered the age with fixed arrangements and endings of times; and thereafter who gave forth signs of his judging majesty through rains, through fires; who determined the disciplines for winning his favor, which you either do not know or have abandoned; but also who destined rewards for those who observe them, as one who, when this present age has been brought forth, will judge his own worshippers unto the recompense of eternal life, and the profane unto fire equally perpetual and unceasing, all the dead from the beginning having been raised, and reformed and reviewed, for the reckoning of the merit of each. These things we too once laughed at. We were of your number. We are made, not born, Christians.

Those whom we have called preachers are called prophets from their function of foretelling. Their utterances and likewise the mighty works which they performed as evidence of the divine nature are preserved in the treasuries of literature, nor are these now hidden. The most learned of the Ptolemies, surnamed Philadelphus, most keen in all learning, while he was rivaling, I think, Pisistratus in his zeal for libraries, among other records which either their antiquity or some curiosity commended to fame, also requested books from the Jews, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, then the most approved of grammarians, to whom he had entrusted the oversight—their own native literature, which they alone possessed. For the prophets had always spoken from them and to them, that is, to the household nation of God by the grace of the fathers. Hebrews of old, who are now called Jews; and so also the Hebrew letters and language.

But lest knowledge should be lacking, this too was agreed to by the Jews for Ptolemy, seventy-two interpreters being granted, whom the philosopher Menedemus also, a champion of providence, regarded with respect as sharing his own view. Aristeas has confirmed this for you as well. Thus it left the records openly in the Greek style. Today at the Serapeum the libraries of Ptolemy are displayed together with the Hebrew writings themselves. But the Jews also read them publicly; it is as it were the tribute of a religion that is taxed, to assert the faith from the times.

For the first prophet, Moses, who began from the past with the creation of the world and the multiplication of the human race and then the avenging force of the flood upon the wickedness of that age, set forth through prophecy images of things to come down to his own time and beyond through his own deeds, in whose writings also the order of times arranged from the beginning furnished a reckoning of the age: he is found to be earlier by about three hundred years than that most ancient figure among you, Danaus, who crossed over to Argos; For the Trojan war is a thousand years before him, and hence Saturn himself is earlier. For according to the history of Thallus, in which the war of the Assyrians and Saturn king of the Titans fighting against Jupiter is recorded, it is shown that the Trojan destruction was preceded by three hundred and twenty-two years. Through this same Moses also that law proper to the Jews was sent by God.

Thereafter many other prophets also are more ancient than your writings. For even he who prophesied last either ran somewhat ahead, or at least ran level in age with the authors of wisdom, and even with the givers of the law. For Zechariah lived in the reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales, the chief of the natural philosophers, gave no certain answer about the Divinity to Croesus when he inquired, being confounded, no doubt, by the voices of the prophets; Solon declared to that same king that the end of a long life must be looked to, in no other way than the Prophets did; so much so that it may be seen that both your laws and your studies drew their conception from the law and from divine teaching. What is earlier must of necessity be the seed. Hence you have certain things in common with us or near to us. From wisdom, the love of it was called philosophy; from prophecy, the imitation of it was reckoned as poetic divination.

Men of vainglory, in order to make whatever they had found their own, adulterated it; it has also happened that fruits degenerate from the seed. I could dwell on many further proofs of the antiquity of the divine writings, if a greater authority had not been available to them for credibility from the strength of their own truth than from the annals of their age. For what will more powerfully serve as testimony to them than the daily reckoning of the whole world, when the dispositions of kingdoms, the falls of cities, the ends of nations, the conditions of the times, answer to all things just as they were foretold thousands of years before? Hence also our hope, which you mock, is animated, and our confidence, which you call presumption, is strengthened. For the recognition of past things is sufficient to dispose confidence in future things: the same voices foretold both parts, the same writings recorded them. There is one time in those writings which among us appears to be divided.

Thus all things that remain are established as certain to us, because they were foretold as future together with those things which have been proved. You have, as I know, your Sibyl too, inasmuch as by that title the true prophetesses of the true God were everywhere called, being used in preference to all others who seemed to prophesy, just as your Sibyl's name falsely claimed the truth, as did your gods also. All the substances, therefore, and all the materials, the origins, orders, veins of every ancient writer of yours, and also very many nations and famous cities, the hoary records of histories and memories, the very forms of letters themselves, the indices and guardians of things, and (I think we still say too little) your very gods themselves, I say, your very temples and oracles and sacred rites—the archive of a single prophet meanwhile surpasses all these through the ages, in which the treasure of the entire Jewish mystery, and thence also of ours, is seen to be deposited.

If you have heard of Moses at all, he is of equal age with Argive Inachus; he precedes Danaus, himself the most ancient among you, by nearly four hundred years—indeed seven less—and precedes the fall of Priam by about a thousand; I could also say by more than five hundred years before Homer, having those whom I may follow. The other prophets also, even if they come after Moses, yet the last of them are found to be no later than the earliest of your wise men and lawgivers and historians. By what methods these things can be proved, it is not so difficult for us to set forth as it is enormous, nor arduous, but for the present lengthy. One must sit down with many instruments, with the counting gestures of the fingers.

The archives of the most ancient nations also must be opened—of the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, the Phoenicians; their fellow-citizens too must be summoned, through whom the knowledge has been supplied; among others Manetho the Egyptian, and Berosus the Chaldaean, and also Hirom the Phoenician, king of Tyre; and their followers likewise, Ptolemy of Mendes, and Menander of Ephesus, and Demetrius of Phalerum, and king Juba, and Apion, and Thallus, and he who either confirms or refutes these, the Jew Josephus, the native defender of Jewish antiquities. The census-records of the Greeks also must be compared, and what events occurred at what time, so that the chains of periods may be opened through which the numbers of the annals may shine forth. One must travel through the histories and writings of the world. And yet we have already introduced, as it were, a part of the proof, in that we have touched upon the means by which it can be proved.

But it is better to defer it, lest we either pursue it too briefly by haste, or wander too long by pursuing it. And he who either confirms or refutes these, the Jew Josephus, the native defender of Jewish antiquities.

We now offer more in exchange for that deferral: the maj­esty of the Scriptures, if not their antiquity; we prove them divine, if it is doubted that they are ancient. Nor is this to be learned more slowly or from another source: the things that will teach are present—the world, and the age, and its outcomes. Whatever is done was foretold; whatever is seen was heard. That cities are swallowed by the earth, that seas defraud islands, that foreign and civil wars tear apart; that kingdoms jostle kingdoms; that famine and pestilence and local disasters of every kind and the frequent upheavals of mountains lay waste; that the lowly are changed by exaltation, the exalted by humiliation; that justice grows rare, iniquity increases, care for all good disciplines grows torpid; that even the duties of the seasons and the functions of the elements go astray; that even the form of natural things is disturbed by monsters and portents—all these things were written down by providence.

While we suffer them, they are read; while we recognize them, they are proved. The truth of divination is, I think, a fitting testimony to divinity. Hence therefore among us faith in future things also is secure, already proved, that is, because they were foretold together with those things which are proved day by day. The same voices sound, the same writings record, the same spirit impels; there is one time for the divination that foretells future things among men, if perchance it is distinguished while it is being expunged, while from future it is reckoned present, and then from present it is reckoned past. In what do we err, I ask you, in believing future things also, we who have already learned to believe those things through two degrees?

But since we have declared that this sect is supported by the most ancient records of the Jews, which many know to be somewhat recent, as belonging to the time of Tiberius, as we ourselves also profess; perhaps on this account a reconsideration of its standing may be made, as though under the shadow of a most distinguished religion, certainly a lawful one, it conceals some presumption of its own; or because, apart from its age, we do not observe the same distinctions of food, nor the solemnities of days, nor the bodily seal itself, nor the sharing of the name with the Jews, which would certainly be required if we were bound to the same God. But the common people already know that Christ is some man at any rate, such as the Jews judged him to be, whereby someone might more readily suppose us to be worshippers of a man. Yet we are not ashamed of Christ, since it is our joy to be reckoned and condemned under his name, nor do we presume otherwise concerning God.

It is necessary therefore to say a few things about Christ as God. So great was the favor of the Jews with God, where also the distinguished justice and faith of their original founders flourished, whence also the greatness of their race and the sublimity of their kingdom and such great happiness flourished, that they were forewarned by the voices of God, by which they were taught, concerning how to merit God and not to offend him. But how greatly they sinned, puffed up with confidence in their fathers, turning aside from discipline into a profane manner—even if they themselves did not confess it—their present outcome would prove. Scattered, wander­ing, exiles from their sky and their soil, they wander through the world without a man, without God as king, to whom it is not granted even by the right of strangers to greet their ancestral land with so much as a footstep.

When the holy voices threatened these things against them, those same voices almost always declared throughout that in the last courses of the age God would gather to himself from every nation and people and place worshippers far more faithful, upon whom he would transfer his grace, and indeed a fuller grace, on account of the greater capacity of the author of the discipline. There came therefore he who was foretold by God as about to come to reform and illuminate it, Christ that Son of God. The arbiter and master, therefore, of this grace and discipline, the illuminator and guide of the human race, was announced as the Son of God, not indeed begotten in such a way as to be ashamed of the name of son or of the seed of a father; he did not suffer God the father through incest with a sister, nor through the violation of a daughter or another's wife, as a scaly, or horned, or feathered lover, or one transformed into gold: for these are the divine powers of your Jupiter.

But the Son of God has no mother tainted with unchastity—even she whom he appears to have had had not married. But let me first set forth his substance, and so the nature of his birth will be understood. We have already declared that God fashioned this whole universe by Word and Reason and Power. Among your wise men too it is agreed that the Logos, that is, the Word and Reason, is seen as the artificer of the universe. For Zeno defines him as the maker who has formed all things in their arrangement, and calls him fate and god and the soul of Jupiter, and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes gathers all this into spirit, which he affirms to be the pervader of the universe. We also assign to the Word and Reason and likewise to the Power, through which we have declared God fashioned all things, their own substance—spirit—in which the Word also resides as it speaks, and Reason is present as it disposes, and Power presides as it accomplishes.

We have learned that this was brought forth from God, and generated by being brought forth, and therefore called Son of God and God from unity of substance. For God also is spirit. And when a ray is stretched forth from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; but the sun will be in the ray, because it is a ray of the sun, nor is the substance separated, but extended. So Spirit from Spirit, and God from God, as light kindled from light. The matrix of the material remains whole and undiminished, even if you borrow from it many offshoots of qualities. So also that which has gone forth from God is God, and the Son of God, and both are one. So also he made Spirit from Spirit, and God from God, the other in measure, not in number, in degree, not in state, and did not withdraw from the matrix but proceeded from it.

This ray of God, therefore, as was always foretold of old, descended into a certain virgin, and formed as flesh in her womb, is born a Man mingled with God. Flesh furnished with spirit is nourished, grows up, speaks, teaches, works, and is Christ. Accept this story for the present; it is like your own, while we show how Christ is proved. Those also who among you prepared such rival stories for the destruction of this truth knew it. The Jews also knew that Christ was to come, namely those to whom the prophets spoke. For even now they await his coming, and there is no greater contention between us and them than that they do not believe he has already come.

For since two comings of his were signified—the first, which has already been accomplished in the lowliness of the human condition; the second, which impends at the close of the age in the sublimity of his divinity made manifest—by not understanding the first, the second, which they hope was foretold more plainly, they took to be one. For lest they should understand the former—they would have believed had they understood, and would have obtained salvation had they believed—their sin was their just desert. They themselves read that it is thus written that they have been punished with blindness of wisdom and understanding and the fruit of eyes and ears.

He therefore whom they had presumed to be merely a man on account of his lowliness, it followed that they should esteem him a magician on account of his power, when he cast out demons from men by a word, gave sight again to the blind, cleansed lepers, bound up paralytics, and finally restored the dead to life by a word, made the very elements serve him, calming storms and walking upon the sea, showing himself to be the Logos of God, that is, that primordial Word, the firstborn, accompanied by power and reason, and sustained by spirit, the same who both made and had made all things by a word. But as to his teaching, by which the teachers and chief men of the Jews were refuted, they were so enraged, especially because an immense multitude was turning to him, that at last, when he was brought before Pontius Pilate, who was then administering Syria in part on behalf of Rome as procurator, they extorted by the violence of their votes that he be given over to the cross.

He himself had foretold that they would do so. Too little this, if the prophets had not also foretold it long before. And yet, when fixed to the cross, he voluntarily dismissed his spirit together with the word, anticipating the office of the executioner. At that same moment the day was withdrawn, the sun marking the middle of the earth. They supposed it an eclipse, of course, who did not know that this too had been foretold concerning Christ; the reason not being grasped, they denied it; and yet you have that calamity of the world recorded in your own secret archives. Then the Jews, when he had been taken down and laid in a tomb, surrounded it with great diligence of military guard as well, lest, since he had foretold that he would rise again from death on the third day, his disciples might remove the body by stealth and deceive those who were suspicious.

But behold, on the third day, the earth suddenly shaken, and the mass rolled away that had blocked the tomb was sealed, and the guard scattered by fear, and no disciples were found, nothing was discovered in the tomb except the grave-clothes of the buried man. Nevertheless the chief men, whose interest it was both to spread the crime abroad and to call back the people, tributary and subservient to themselves, from the faith, kept spreading the story that he had been stolen away by the disciples. For he did not show himself to the common people, lest the impious should be freed from their error, so that faith, destined for no small reward, might be established through difficulty. But with certain of his disciples he spent up to forty days in Galilee, a region of Judaea, teaching them what they should teach.

Then, having appointed them to the office of preaching throughout the world, he was caught up into heaven, wrapped in a cloud, far more truly than what among you they are wont to assert of Romulus through Proculus. These things concerning Christ, Pilate—himself already a Christian in his own conscience—reported to Caesar, then Tiberius. But even the Caesars would have believed concerning Christ, if either Caesars were not necessary to the world, or if Christians too could have been Caesars. The disciples likewise, dispersed throughout the world, obeyed the command of their master God; they themselves also, having suffered many things at the hands of persecuting Jews—willingly, of course, for the sake of their confidence in the truth—at Rome at last, through the savagery of Nero, sowed the blood of Christians. But we shall show you fitting witnesses to Christ, those very ones whom you worship. It is much, if I bring them forward that you may believe Christians, on account of whom you do not believe Christians.

Meanwhile this is the order of our teaching; this is the account we have given of the sect and the name together with its author. Let no one henceforth cast infamy upon it, let no one think otherwise, since it is not right for anyone to lie about his own religion. For by saying that he worships something other than what he worships, he denies what he worships, and transfers the worship and honour to another, and by transferring it he no longer worships what he has denied. We say, and we say openly, and we cry out to you while you torture us, torn and bleeding: We worship God through Christ. Think him a man—through him and in him God wills to be known and worshipped.

But that I may answer the Jews: they too learned to worship God through the man Moses; that I may meet the Greeks: Orpheus at Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia, bound men by initiations; that I may look also to you, the lords of the nations: Pompilius Numa was a man, who burdened the Romans with most laborious superstitions. Let it have been permitted to Christ also to introduce divinity as his own proper concern; not to stupefy with the multitude of so many deities to be propitiated those who were still rough and savage men, and so to temper them toward civilization, as Numa did; but to open the eyes of men already refined and deceived by their very culture to the knowledge of truth. Inquire therefore whether this divinity of Christ be true.

If it is such that by knowing it one is reformed toward good, it follows that every other contrary thing found out must be declared false; above all that which, lurking under the names and images of the dead, works belief in divinity by certain signs and miracles and oracles.

And so we say that there exist certain spiritual substances; nor is the name a new one. The Philosophers know of demons—Socrates himself waiting upon the decision of a demon. Why not? Since he too is said to have had a demon attached to him from boyhood, plainly a dissuader from good. The Poets know of demons; even the unlearned common people use the word habitually as a term of abuse; for they also pronounce the name of Satan, the prince of this evil race, with the same word of execration, from their own innate knowledge of the soul. Even Plato did not deny the existence of angels. Witnesses to both names are vouched for even by the magicians. But how from certain angels who corrupted themselves of their own will there emerged a more corrupt race of demons, condemned by God together with the authors of their kind and with that prince of whom we spoke, is learned in order from the holy scriptures. Now it will be sufficient to set forth their mode of operation.

Their operation is the overthrow of man: thus the malice of the spiritual being took its beginning from the first age for the destruction of man. And so upon bodies they both inflict diseases and certain bitter calamities, and upon the soul sudden and extraordinary departures by violence. Their wonderful subtlety and tenuousness serves them to penetrate both substances of man.

Much is permitted to spiritual powers, so that, being invisible and imperceptible, they appear rather in their effect than in their action: just as some hidden blight of the air casts down fruits and crops in the blossom, kills them in the bud, wounds them in their prime, as if the air, assailed by some blind force, spreads abroad its pestilential exhalations—so likewise by the same obscurity of contagion the breath of demons and angels works also the corruptions of the mind, in foul or savage fits of madness and lunacy, or in various lusts with their errors; of which the chief is that by which they commend these gods to the captive and circumscribed minds of men, so as both to procure for themselves their proper nourishment of smoke and blood through offerings made to idols and images, and—which is their more refined pasture—to turn man away from the thought of the true divinity by the impostures of false divination. How they accomplish these very things I will explain. Every spirit is winged.

This is true of both angels and demons. Therefore they are everywhere in a moment: the whole world is one place to them; what is happening anywhere they know as easily as they report it. Velocity is believed to be divinity, because their substance is not known. So also they sometimes wish to appear as the authors of the things they announce: and they are plainly sometimes the authors of evils, yet never of good things. They have also caught up the dispensations of God, both when the prophets were proclaiming them in former times, and now when they resound in the readings, and they snatch at them. Thus, taking from this source certain forecasts of the times, they rival divinity while they steal divination. As for the skill with which they adjust ambiguities in oracles to match events, the men of Croesus know it, the men of Pyrrhus know it.

For the rest, the Pythian oracle reported the boiling of a tortoise together with the flesh of a sheep in the manner we described above; he had been at Lydia in a moment. They have from their dwelling in the air and from their proximity to the stars and from their commerce with the clouds the means to know the heavenly preparations, so as to promise even rains which they already feel coming. They are plainly sorcerers also in the matter of curing diseases. For they first inflict harm, then prescribe remedies—novel to the point of wonder, or contrary ones—after which they cease to harm, and are believed to have effected a cure. What need then for me to set forth the other devices or even the powers of spiritual deceit: the phantoms of the Castors, and water carried in a sieve, and a ship moved by a girdle, and a beard reddened by a touch, so that stones might be believed to be divine powers, and the true God not be sought?

Furthermore, if magicians also produce phantoms, and now defame the souls of the dead; if they crush boys to serve as the mouthpiece of an oracle; if they make sport of many miracles by the tricks of mountebanks; if they also send dreams, having once invited the assistance of angels and demons whose power attends them, through whom even goats and tables have been accustomed to divine—how much more does that power strive with all its might to accomplish of its own will and for its own business what it performs for another's enterprise? Or if the same things are accomplished by both angels and demons as by your gods also; where then is the pre-eminence of divinity, which must surely be believed to be superior to every power? Will it not therefore be more worthily presumed that those very beings make themselves gods, since they produce the same things that cause gods to be believed in, than that gods are the equals of angels and demons?

The distinction is made by difference of place, I suppose, so that you esteem them gods in temples, whom elsewhere you do not call gods; so that one who flies over sacred towers seems to rave in one way, and one who leaps over the rooftops of the neighbourhood in another; and a different power is pronounced in one who mutilates his genitals or his arms, and a different one in one who cuts his own throat. The outcome of the frenzy is the same, and the reason for the instigation is one. But enough of words; henceforth comes the demonstration of the matter itself, by which we shall show that the quality of both names is one. Let there be produced here before your tribunals someone who is known to be driven by a demon. That spirit, commanded by any Christian whatsoever to speak, will confess itself a demon in truth, just as elsewhere it falsely confesses itself a god.

Likewise let there be brought forward one of those who are thought to suffer from a god—who inhale divinity from the altars by the smoke, who are cured by belching, who utter prophecies by panting. That very Heavenly Virgin, the promiser of rains, that very Aesculapius, the revealer of medicines, the supplier of life to Socordius and Thanatius and Asclepiodotus who were to die on another day—unless they confess themselves demons, not daring to lie in the face of a Christian, shed on the spot the blood of that most impudent Christian. What is plainer than this work? What more trustworthy than this proof? The simplicity of truth stands in the open; its own power attends it; there will be nothing to suspect. You will say it is done by magic or some such trick, if your eyes and ears allow you. But what can be urged against that which is shown in naked sincerity? If on the one hand they are truly gods, why do they lie and call themselves demons? Is it to oblige us?

Then your divinity is already subject to Christians; nor is that to be reckoned divinity at all which is subject to a man, and if it does anything to its own dishonour, to its rivals. If on the other hand they are demons or angels, why do they answer that elsewhere they act as gods? For just as those who are held to be gods would not have wished to call themselves demons, if they were truly gods—lest, that is, they should lower themselves from their majesty—so also those whom you know directly to be demons would not dare elsewhere to act as gods, if there were any gods at all whose names they use; for they would fear to abuse the majesty of superiors who are without doubt also to be feared. So utterly non-existent is that divinity which you hold, because if it existed, it would neither be claimed by demons nor denied by gods.

Since therefore both parties concur in the confession, denying that they are gods, acknowledge that there is one kind, that is, demons. But now on both sides seek gods; for those whom you had presumed to be gods you recognize to be demons. By these same works of ours, by your very gods themselves not only revealing this—that neither they themselves are gods nor are any others—you also learn at the same time who is truly God, and whether he is the one, and whether he is the one whom Christians profess, and whether he is to be believed and worshipped in the manner in which the faith and discipline of Christians is ordered. They will say on the spot: who then is this Christ with his story?

If a man of common condition, if a magician, if after death stolen from the tomb by his disciples, if now among the dead below, if not rather in the heavens, and thence to come with the convulsion of the whole world, with the terror of the earth, with the lamentation of all—but not of Christians—as the Power of God and the Spirit of God and the Word and Wisdom and Reason and the Son of God. Whatever you laugh at, let them laugh at it with you; let them deny that Christ will judge every soul from all ages past with the body restored.

Let them say, if they dare, before the tribunal, that Minos and Rhadamanthus have been allotted that role according to the common opinion of Plato and the poets; let them at least repudiate the mark of their own shame and condemnation: let them deny that they are unclean spirits—as ought to have been understood even from their very food of blood and smoke and the putrid pyres of cattle and the most impure tongues of their own seers; let them deny that they are pre-condemned on account of their wickedness to the same day of judgment together with all their worshippers and servants. Yet all this our dominion and power over them avails by the naming of Christ, and by the recalling of those things which they await as impending upon themselves from God through Christ as arbiter. Fearing Christ in God, and God in Christ, they submit themselves to the servants of God and Christ.

Thus, seized by the touch and breath of our command at the contemplation and representation of that fire, they depart even from bodies at our command, unwilling and grieving, and blushing before you in your presence. Believe them when they speak the truth about themselves—you who believe them when they lie. No one lies to his own dishonour, but rather to his own honour. Faith is more readily inclined toward those who confess against themselves than toward those who deny in their own favour. These testimonies of your gods, finally, have been accustomed to make Christians, because by believing them greatly we believe in Christ the Lord. They themselves kindle the faith of our scriptures, they themselves build up the confidence of our hope. But you worship them, as I know, even with the blood of Christians.

They would therefore be unwilling to lose you, so profitable, so serviceable to themselves, lest they should at some time be driven away from you by Christians, if it were permitted them to lie in the presence of a Christian who wishes to prove the truth to you.

All that confession of theirs, by which they deny that they are gods, and by which they answer that there is no other God but the one to whom we are bound, is fully sufficient to repel the charge of injury to the public and especially to the Roman religion. For if they are certainly not gods, neither is there certainly any religion; if there is no religion, because there is no God either with certainty, neither are we certainly guilty of injured religion. But on the contrary the reproach will rebound upon you, who, worshipping a lie, and not only neglecting but moreover assailing the true religion of the true God, commit the true crime of true irreligion. Now, granting that those gods exist, do you not concede, from common estimation, that there is one who is higher and more powerful, as it were the prince of the world, of perfect power and majesty?

For even thus do most people arrange divinity, wishing the sovereignty of supreme dominion to belong to one, and its functions to belong to many; as Plato describes the great Jupiter in heaven attended by an army of gods and demons alike. And so they hold that administrators and prefects and governors alike must be received. And yet what crime does he commit who, the more to win Caesar's favour, transfers both his effort and his hope to him, and does not acknowledge the title of god in any other as he does in the emperor, since it is judged a capital offence to say and to hear that anyone is emperor besides Caesar? Let one man worship God, another Jupiter; let one stretch suppliant hands to heaven, another to the altar of Fides; let another, if you think fit, count the clouds while praying, another the ceiling panels; let another vow his soul to his god, another a he-goat.

For consider whether this too may not contribute to the charge of irreligion: to take away freedom of religion and to forbid free choice in the matter of divinity, so that it is not lawful for me to worship whom I will, but I am compelled to worship whom I will not. No one will wish to be worshipped by an unwilling person, not even a man; and so even to the Egyptians full power of so vain a superstition is permitted, of consecrating birds and beasts, and of condemning to death those who kill any god of that kind. To each province and city likewise there is its own god: as to Syria, Atargatis; as to Arabia, Dusares; as to Noricum, Belenus; as to Africa, Caelestis; as to Mauretania, their own Reguli.

I have named, as I think, Roman provinces, yet not the Roman gods of those provinces, since they are no more worshipped at Rome than those who throughout Italy itself are reckoned by municipal consecration: the Delventinus of the Casinians, the Visidianus of the Narnians, the Ancharia of the Aesculans, the Nortia of the Volsinians, the Valentia of the Ocriculans, the Hostia of the Sutrians, the Juno of the Faliscans, honoured in the name of the Father Curis, from whom she received her surname. But we alone are barred from the right of our own religion. We injure the Romans, and are not counted as Romans, because we do not worship the god of the Romans. It is well that the God of all exists, of whom we all are, whether we will or not. But among you it is lawful to worship anything, except the true God, as though he were not rather the God of all, of whom we all are.

I seem to myself to have sufficiently proved the matter of false and true divinity, having shown how the proof stands, not only by disputations and arguments, but also by the testimonies of those very beings whom you believe to be gods, so that nothing need now be reconsidered for this cause. Yet since mention of the Roman name specifically presents itself, I will not omit the encounter which that presumption provokes, of those who say that the Romans have been raised to such a height of greatness by merit of most diligent religiosity, that they have taken possession of the world, and that the gods are such that those flourish beyond others who render them service beyond others. Forsooth this reward was paid out to the Romans by the gods in return for their gratitude: Sterculius, and Mutunus, and Larentina advanced their empire.

For I should not think that foreign gods wished to favour a foreign people more than their own, and gave their native soil, in which they were born, grew up, became famous, and were buried, to those from across the sea. Let Cybele see to it, if she fell in love with the city of Rome as a memorial of the Trojan race, her own native stock protected against the arms of the Achaeans, if she looked forward to passing over to avengers whom she knew would subdue Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia. And so she set before our own age a great proof of her majesty bestowed upon the city, when, upon Marcus Aurelius being taken from the state at Sirmium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of April, that most holy Archigallus, on the ninth day before the Kalends of the same month, on which he used to offer his impure blood and even his arms by castration, issued his customary commands equally for the safety of the emperor Marcus, already taken away.

O slow messengers, O drowsy dispatches, through whose fault Cybele did not learn of the emperor's death sooner, lest Christians should mock such a goddess. But Jupiter would not straightway allow his Crete to be shaken by Roman fasces, forgetting that Idaean cave, and the Corybantic cymbals, and the most pleasant smell there of his nurse.

Would he not have preferred that mound of his to all the Capitol, so that rather that place might excel the whole world, which covers the ashes of Jupiter? Would Juno have wished the Punic city, beloved above Samos, to be destroyed by the race of Aeneas' descendants?

That wretched wife and sister of Jupiter plainly could not prevail against the fates: Jupiter himself stands by fate. And yet the Romans dedicated no such honour to the fates, who gave them Carthage against the fixed purpose and vow of Juno, as they did to the most debauched harlot Larentina. It is certain that several of your gods have reigned. If therefore they hold the power of conferring empire, when they themselves were reigning, from whom had they received that favour? Whom had Saturn and Jupiter worshipped? Someone, I suppose, like Sterculius but at Rome afterwards, together with their own native gods. Even if some did not reign, yet others were reigning who were not yet their worshippers, as those who were not yet held to be gods. Therefore it belongs to others to give kingdoms, since men were reigning long before these gods were carved.

But how vain it is to attribute the greatness of the Roman name to the merits of religion, when, as we have suggested, religion either advanced by injuring as they grew, or was injured by their growing. For even if under Numa the curious superstition was conceived, yet at that time divine worship among the Romans was not yet established either with images or with temples; the religion was frugal and the rites poor, and no Capitols rivalling the sky, but rude altars of turf, and vessels still of Samian ware, and the smoke from them, and God himself nowhere. For as yet the talents of the Greeks and Etruscans for fashioning images had not flooded the city. Therefore the Romans were not religious before they were great; and therefore they are not great on account of being religious. But how are they great on account of religion, when their greatness came from irreligion? For unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is sought by wars and extended by victories.

Moreover wars and victories consist chiefly in the capture and overthrow of cities. That business is not without injury to the gods. The same destructions of walls and temples, the equal slaughters of citizens and priests, and no different plunderings of sacred and profane wealth. As many sacrileges of the Romans therefore as trophies; as many triumphs over gods as over nations; as many spoils as there yet remain images of captive gods. And do those gods endure being worshipped by their very enemies, and decree for them empire without end, when they ought rather to have requited their injuries than their flatteries? But those who feel nothing are as harmlessly injured as they are fruitlessly worshipped. Certainly it cannot accord with reason that those should be seen to have grown by the merits of religion, who, as we have suggested, either grew by injuring religion, or injured it by growing. Even those whose kingdoms were melted together into the sum of the Roman empire, when they lost them, were not without their religions.

Consider therefore whether it is not he who dispenses kingdoms, to whom belongs both the world that is ruled and the man himself who rules; whether it is not he who has ordained the changes of dominions in their very times in the age, who existed before all time and made the age the body of times; whether it is not he who raises up or casts down cities. Under whom was there ever a time when the human race was without cities? Why do you err? Rome is older in the forest than some of her gods; she reigned before she built so great a circuit of the Capitol. The Babylonians also reigned before the pontiffs, and the Medes before the quindecimviri, and the Egyptians before the Salii, and the Assyrians before the Luperci, and the Amazons before the Vestal virgins.

Finally, if Roman religions bestow kingdoms, Judaea, which despised those common divinities, would never have reigned in former times—Judaea whose God, and temple with gifts, and people with treaties, you Romans for a time honoured—nor would it ever have submitted to your dominion, had it not in the end sinned against Christ.

This is sufficient against the charge of injured religion and divinity, so that we may not seem to injure that which we have shown does not exist. Therefore, when challenged to sacrifice, we plant ourselves firm in the faith of our conscience, being certain to whom those services reach under the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names. But some consider it madness that, when we could both sacrifice in the present moment and depart unharmed while keeping our purpose in our minds, we prefer obstinacy to safety. You are giving counsel, of course, by which we may abuse you; but we recognise whence such suggestions come, who sets all this in motion, and how he works now by the cunning of persuasion, now by the harshness of savagery, to cast down our constancy.

That spirit, namely, of demonic and angelic nature, who is our rival on account of estrangement and envious on account of God's grace, wages war against us from your minds, by secret inspiration, with minds shaped and suborned to every perversity of judging and iniquity of raging, which we set out at the beginning. For although the whole force of demons and spirits of that kind is subject to us, yet as wicked servants they sometimes mingle contumacy with fear, and are eager to injure those whom at other times they revere; for fear also inspires hatred, besides the fact that their desperate condition, arising from prior condemnation, counts the enjoyment of malice in the meantime as a consolation for the delay of punishment. And yet when seized they are subdued and sink down under their condition, and those whom they assail from afar they supplicate from near.

And so while, after the manner of rebellious prison-slaves or prisoners, or those in mines, or this kind of penal servitude, they break out against us in whose power they are, certain both that they are unequal and that they are the more lost for their ingratitude, we resist them as equals and fight back persevering in that which they assail, and we triumph over them most of all when we are condemned for the obstinacy of faith.

But since it would easily seem unjust that free men should be compelled against their will to sacrifice (for in other matters too a willing spirit is required for the performance of a divine act): it would certainly be thought absurd if anyone were compelled by another to honour gods whom he ought of his own accord to propitiate for his own sake, so that it would not be at hand by right of liberty to say: I do not wish Jupiter to be propitious to me; what is it to you if Janus meets me angry, from whatever face he pleases? What have you to do with me? You have been shaped by those same spirits to compel us to sacrifice for the safety of the emperor, and the necessity of compelling has been imposed upon you just as the obligation of being endangered has been imposed upon us.

We have come therefore to the second charge of injured and more august majesty, since you observe Caesar with greater dread and more cunning timidity than Jupiter himself from Olympus, and rightly so, if you did but know. For who among the living is not superior to any dead man of yours? But neither do you do this by reason so much as by regard for present power, so that even in this you are found irreligious toward your gods, in that you devote more fear to human dominion. More readily, in the end, is perjury committed among you by all the gods together than by the single genius of Caesar.

Let it first be established, then, whether those to whom sacrifice is offered can bestow safety upon the emperor or upon any man, and so charge us with the crime. If angels or demons, spirits of the worst substance, perform any benefit, if the lost preserve, if the condemned set free, if finally (as is in your own conscience) the dead protect the living, then surely they would first protect their own statues and images and temples, which, I think, the soldiers of the Caesars keep safe by their own watches. I think moreover that these very materials come from the mines of the Caesars, and that whole temples stand by the nod of Caesar. Many gods, in the end, have had Caesar angry with them. It bears on the case whether he has also been propitious to them, conferring upon them some liberality or privilege.

Thus those who are in Caesar's power, and are wholly his, how shall they have Caesar's safety in their power, so as to seem able to bestow what they themselves more easily obtain from Caesar? Therefore we commit treason against the majesty of the emperors because we do not subject them to their own possessions; because we do not make sport of the duty of safety of those of us who do not think it is in leaden hands. But you, the religious, who seek it where it is not, ask it of those who cannot give it, passing over him in whose power it lies. Moreover, you make war upon those who know how to ask for it, and who can even obtain it, since they know how to ask.

For we invoke on behalf of the safety of the emperors the eternal God, the true God, the living God, whom even the emperors themselves prefer to have propitious to them above all others. They know who has given them the empire; they know, as men, who has given them their soul as well; they perceive that he is the only God, in whose sole power they are, from whom they are second, after whom they are first, before and above all gods. Why not? Since above all men, who at any rate are alive and take precedence over the dead. They reflect how far the strength of their empire avails, and thus they understand God; they know that they prevail through him against whom they cannot prevail. Let the emperor then conquer heaven, let him lead heaven captive in his triumph, let him post sentinels to heaven, let him impose tribute upon heaven. He cannot; and therefore he is great, because he is less than heaven.

For he himself belongs to him to whom heaven also belongs, and every creature. He is emperor from the same source from which he is also a man before he is emperor; from the same source comes his power as his spirit. Looking up thither, Christians with hands spread out, because innocent, with head uncovered, because we are not ashamed, and finally without a prompter, because we pray from the heart. We are all praying always for all emperors, for a long life for them, a secure empire, a safe household, strong armies, a faithful senate, an upright people, a peaceful world, and whatever else a man and a Caesar may wish for.

These things I cannot ask of any other than him from whom I know I shall obtain them, since he is the one who alone grants them, and I am one to whom obtaining them is owed, as his servant, who observes him alone, who am slain on account of his discipline, who offer to him the rich and greater sacrifice which he himself has commanded—prayer proceeding from a chaste body, from an innocent soul, from a holy spirit. Not grains of incense worth a penny, tears of an Arabian tree, nor two drops of wine, nor the blood of a worthless ox that wishes to die, and after all its defilements also a foul conscience: so that I marvel, when victims are approved among you by the most vicious of priests, why the entrails of the victims rather than those of the sacrificers themselves are examined.

So then, let claws dig into us as we are thus stretched out toward God, let crosses suspend us, let fires lick us, let swords sever our throats, let beasts leap upon us; the very posture of the praying Christian is ready for every punishment. Do this, good governors, wring out the soul that is supplicating God on behalf of the Emperor. Here will be the crime, where the truth of God and devotion are.

We have now flattered the emperor; and the vows we have spoken are lies, forsooth, to escape violence. Clearly this deceit is profitable. For you allow us to prove whatever we defend. Whoever therefore has thought that we care nothing for the safety of the Caesars, let him inspect the words of God, our writings, which we ourselves do not suppress, and which many a chance conveys to outsiders. Let him learn from them that it has been enjoined upon us, in the abundance of our benevolence, even to pray to God for our enemies and to call down blessings upon our persecutors. Who are greater enemies and persecutors of Christians than those on account of whose majesty we are charged with crime? But also expressly and plainly: Pray, he says, for kings, and for princes, and for powers, that all things may be tranquil for you. For when the empire is shaken, and its other members are shaken with it, we too, though strangers to the tumults, are found in some place of the disaster.

There is also another and greater necessity for us to pray for the emperors, and even for the whole state of the empire and the affairs of Rome—we who know that the great calamity threatening the whole world, and the very end of the age threatening horrible afflictions, is being retarded by the respite of the Roman empire. Thus, since we do not wish to experience those things, in praying that they be deferred we favour the long continuance of Rome. But we also swear, not by the genii of the Caesars, but by their safety, which is more august than all genii. Do you not know that genii are called demons, and hence by the diminutive word daemonia? We look up to the judgment of God in the emperors, since he has set them over the nations. That which is in them we know to be what God has willed, and therefore we wish that to be preserved which God has willed, and we hold this as a great oath.

But demons, that is genii, we are accustomed to adjure, so as to drive them out of men, not to swear by them, so as to confer upon them the honour of divinity.

But why should I say more about the Christian religion and piety toward the emperor? Whom we must needs look up to as one whom our Lord has chosen. And I may rightly say, Caesar is more ours, as being established by our God. Therefore also in this I do more for his safety, not only because I ask it of him who is able to grant it, or because I ask it as one who deserves to obtain it, but also because, moderating the majesty of Caesar below God, I commend him the more to God, to whom alone I subject him. I subject him, moreover, to one to whom I do not make him equal. For I will not call the Emperor God, either because I do not know how to lie, or because I dare not mock him, or because he himself will not wish to be called God. If he be a man, it concerns a man to yield to God; let it suffice him to be called emperor.

That too is a great name, which is given by God. He who calls him God denies that he is emperor. Unless he be a man, he is not emperor. Even in his triumph on that most lofty chariot he is reminded that he is a man. For it is whispered to him from behind: Look behind thee, remember thou art a man. And surely he rejoices all the more to shine with such great glory, in that an admonition of his condition is necessary for him. He would be less, if he were then called God, because it would not be said truly. He is greater who is called back lest he think himself God.

Augustus, the founder of the empire, did not even wish to be called lord; for that too is a name of God. I will plainly call the emperor lord, but in the common manner of speaking, but only when I am not compelled to call him lord in the place of God. For the rest I am free toward him; for my Lord is one, God almighty and eternal, the same who is his Lord also. He who is father of his country, how is he lord? But the name of piety is more pleasing than that of power; even in households men are called fathers rather than lords. So far is it from being the case that the emperor ought to be called God, which cannot be believed to be anything but the most base and also the most pernicious flattery; just as if, having an emperor, you were to call another by that name, would you not incur the greatest and inexorable offence of him whom you had, even to be feared by him whom you called?

Be devout toward God, you who wish him to be propitious to the emperor. Cease to worship or believe in another God, and thus to call this man God, who has need of God. If flattery of this kind is not ashamed of its lie in calling a man God, let it at least fear the ill omen. It is a curse to call Caesar God before his apotheosis.

Therefore Christians are public enemies for this reason, because they pay emperors neither vain nor lying nor rash honours, because as men of true religion they celebrate even their solemn days with conscience rather than with wantonness. A fine duty indeed, to bring out hearths and couches into public, to feast street by street, to make the city reek with the appearance of a tavern, to make mud with wine, to run about in crowds to insults, to impudences, to the enticements of lust. Is public joy thus expressed through public disgrace? Do these things befit the solemn days of princes, which do not befit other days? Those who observe discipline out of regard for Caesar, will they abandon it for Caesar's sake, and will licence of evil conduct be counted as piety, and an occasion for luxury be reckoned as religion? O we are justly condemned! For why do we, chaste and sober and upright, cancel the vows and joys of the Caesars?

Why on a joyful day do we not shade our doorposts with laurels nor break the daylight with lamps? It is an honourable thing, when a public solemnity demands it, to give your house the appearance of some new brothel. I would like, however, even in this matter of loyalty to the secondary majesty, on account of which we Christians are charged with a secondary sacrilege—in not celebrating with you the solemn days of the Caesars, in a manner which neither modesty nor shame nor chastity permits, but which an occasion for pleasure rather than any worthy reason has persuaded—to demonstrate your own faithfulness and truth; lest perhaps even here those be found worse than Christians who do not wish us to be counted as Romans, but as enemies of the Roman princes. I appeal to the Quirites themselves, to the native plebs of the seven hills: does that Roman tongue spare any of its Caesars?

The Tiber is witness, and the schools of the beasts. Now if nature had overlaid our breasts with some transparent material so as to let the light through, whose heart would not appear engraved with the scene of a new Caesar after new Caesar presiding over the distribution of a largess? Even at that very hour when they shout: From our years may Jupiter add years to thine. A Christian knows no more how to utter these words than to wish them for a new Caesar. But the common people, you say. As common people, yet Romans, and none more clamorous in demanding the blood of Christians than the common people. Plainly the other orders, being religious by virtue of their authority and in good faith, breathe nothing hostile from the senate itself, from the equestrian order, from the camps, from the very palaces. Whence come the Cassii, and the Nigri and the Albini? Whence those who beset Caesar between two laurel trees? Whence those who practise the wrestler's art for the purpose of strangling his throat?

Whence those who burst into the palace armed, bolder than all the Sigerii and Parthenii? From Romans, unless I am mistaken, that is from non-Christians. And indeed all those men, even up to the very outbreak of their impiety, were both performing sacred rites for the safety of the Emperor and swearing by his genius, some outside, some within; and they were assuredly giving the name of public enemies to Christians. But also those who are daily revealed as associates or applauders of criminal factions, the gleaning that survives after the vintage of parricides—with how fresh and most branching laurels did they build up their doorposts! With how lofty and brilliant lamps did they cloud over their vestibules! With how elaborate and magnificent couches did they divide the forum among themselves! Not to celebrate the public rejoicings, but to proclaim their own private wishes already, and in another's solemnity to inaugurate the pattern and image of their own hope, changing the name of the prince in their heart.

The same services are rendered also by those who consult astrologers and haruspices and augurs and magicians concerning the life of the Caesars—arts which, as having been disclosed by apostate Angels and forbidden by God, Christians do not employ even in their own affairs. But who has need to inquire concerning the safety of Caesar, except one by whom something against it is being plotted or wished, or who hopes and waits for something after it? For inquiry is not made concerning those dear to us with the same mind as concerning masters. The anxious concern of kinship is one thing, that of servitude another.

If these things are so, that those are found to be enemies who were called Romans, why are we, who are reckoned enemies, denied to be Romans? We cannot be both Romans and not enemies, when those who were held to be Romans are found to be enemies. So much so that piety and religion and faithfulness devoted to the emperors does not consist in services of this kind, with which hostility too can more readily serve as a cover for itself, but in those moral qualities which civic life toward the emperor, as truly as toward all men, is bound to display. Nor indeed are these duties of a good mind owed by us to emperors alone. We administer no good thing with exception of persons, because we render it to ourselves, who seek no return of praise or reward from man, but from God, the exactor and rewarder of impartial benevolence. We are the same toward emperors as toward our neighbours.

For we are equally forbidden to wish ill, to do ill, to speak ill, to think ill of anyone. Whatever is not lawful against the emperor, is not lawful against anyone; and what is not lawful against anyone, is perhaps for that very reason all the less lawful against him, who is so great through God.

If we are commanded to love our enemies, as we said above, whom do we have to hate? Likewise, if we are forbidden to return injury for injury, so that we cannot even be equal in deed, whom are we able to harm? For on this very point, examine the matter yourselves. How often do you rage against Christians, partly following your own inclinations, partly obeying the laws? How often also does the hostile mob, passing you by, attack us with its own right, with stones and fires? With the very frenzy of Bacchanals they do not even spare dead Christians, but tear them from the rest of the tomb, from that certain asylum of death, now one, now not even whole, rending, cutting, dragging them apart. Yet what have you ever noted against such a conspiracy, against men so animated as to repay injury even unto death, when even a single night with a few torches could accomplish ample vengeance, if it were permitted among us to repay evil with evil?

But far be it that divine religion be avenged by human fire, or that it grieve to suffer, in which it is proved. For if we wished to act as open enemies, not merely as secret avengers, would we lack the strength of numbers and resources? The Moors and Marcomanni and the Parthians themselves, or whatever nations, however great, of a single place and within their own borders, are surely more numerous than the whole world. We are of yesterday, and we have filled all your places—cities, islands, fortresses, towns, councils, your very camps, tribes, decuries, the palace, the senate, the forum; we leave you only the temples. For what war would we not have been fit, would we not have been ready, even if unequal in forces, we who so willingly are slaughtered—if it were not that in this discipline it is more permitted to be killed than to kill? We could also, unarmed and without rebellion, but merely by withdrawing and by the ill-will of separation alone, have fought against you.

For if so great a multitude of men had broken away from you into some corner of a remote world, the loss of so many citizens of whatever kind would surely have covered your dominion with shame, and indeed would have punished you by that very desertion. Without doubt you would have been terrified at your own solitude, at the silence of affairs and a certain stupor as of a dead world; you would have sought whom to rule. More enemies than citizens would have remained to you. For now you have fewer enemies in proportion to the multitude of Christians, since you have nearly all the citizens of nearly all cities as Christians. But you have preferred to call us enemies of the human race. Yet who would snatch you from those hidden enemies who everywhere lay waste your minds and your health?—I speak of the assaults of demons, which we drive away from you without reward, without pay.

This alone would have sufficed for our vengeance, that you should thereafter lie open as an empty possession to unclean spirits. But giving no thought to the recompense of so great a protection, you have preferred to judge as enemies a race not only not troublesome to you, but even necessary—we who are indeed enemies, yet not of the human race, but rather of its error.

Accordingly, and with no less leniency, this sect ought to be counted among lawful associations, since it commits nothing of the kind that is usually feared from unlawful factions. For unless I am mistaken, the reason for prohibiting factions is established by the provision for public order, lest the state be split into parties—a thing which could easily disturb assemblies, councils, curiae, public meetings, and even spectacles, through the clashing rivalries of competing factions, since men had already begun to make a trade of their violence, hiring it out for pay and wages. But as for us, who are cold to all ambition for glory and rank, there is no need for us to gather together, nor is anything more foreign to us than public affairs. We acknowledge one commonwealth for all: the world. Equally we renounce your spectacles, to the same degree as we renounce their origins, which we know to have been conceived in superstition, and we pass by the very things with which they are conducted.

We have nothing to do in word, sight, or hearing with the madness of the circus, with the immodesty of the theatre, with the cruelty of the arena, with the vanity of the gymnasium. It was permitted to the Epicureans to determine some truth of pleasure. In what do we offend you, if we assume other pleasures? If we are unwilling to know how to be entertained, the injury is ours, if at all, not yours. But we disapprove of what pleases you, and our things do not delight you.

Now I myself will set forth the actual affairs of the Christian faction, so that, having refuted the evil charges, I may show the good. We are a body united by the consciousness of religion, by divine discipline, and by the bond of hope. We assemble in a gathering and congregation, so that we may besiege God with prayers, as it were, with united force. This violence is pleasing to God. We pray also for emperors, for their ministers and powers, for the state of the age, for the peace of affairs, for the delay of the end. We are gathered for the recollection of the divine writings, if the character of present times compels either to forewarn or to call to mind anything. At any rate we nourish faith with holy words, we raise up hope, we fix confidence, and we no less strengthen discipline by the precepts in exhortations; there also are exhortations, rebukes, and divine censure.

For judgment is also passed with great weight, as among those certain of God's presence, and it is the highest anticipation of the future judgment, if anyone has so sinned as to be banished from the communion of prayer and assembly and all holy intercourse. The elders who are approved preside, having obtained that honour not by payment but by testimony; for no matter of God is obtained by price. Even if there is something like a treasury, it is not gathered from an honorary sum as though religion were being bought; each person places a small contribution on a fixed day each month, or whenever he wishes, and only if he wishes and only if he is able: for no one is compelled, but contributes freely. These are, as it were, deposits of piety.

For from them nothing is dispensed for feasts or drinking-bouts or thankless eating-houses, but for feeding and burying the poor, and for boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and now for aged household servants, likewise for the shipwrecked, and for any who are in the mines, and for any who are in the islands, or in custody, provided it be for the cause of God's sect—they become the nurslings of their confession. But this very practice of so great love brands us with a mark of infamy in the eyes of some. "See," they say, "how they love one another"—for they themselves hate one another—"and how they are ready to die for each other"—for they themselves will be readier to kill one another. And also that we are designated by the name of brothers—this, I suppose, they find no less infamous, because among them every name of blood is feigned by affectation.

But we are also your brothers by right of the one mother nature, even if you are scarcely human, because you are bad brothers. But how much more worthily are those both called and held to be brothers, who have acknowledged one Father God, who have drunk of one Spirit of holiness, who from one womb of the same ignorance have trembled forth into one light of truth. But perhaps we are considered less legitimate brothers because no tragedy cries out about our brotherhood, or because we are brothers in family substance, which among you generally breaks brotherhood. And so we who are mingled in soul and spirit have no doubt about sharing material things.

All things are undivided among us, except our wives: in this one matter we dissolve partnership, in which alone other men practise partnership, who not only make use of the marriages of their friends, but most patiently supply their own to their friends—following, I believe, the teaching of those great and most wise men, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared with their friends the wives whom they had taken in marriage for the sake of bearing children and creating them elsewhere—whether against the wives' will, I know not; for what care would they have for chastity, which their husbands had so easily given away? O example of Attic wisdom, O example of Roman gravity! The philosopher and the censor is a pimp. What wonder then if so great charity feasts together? For you also attack our little suppers as not only infamous for crime but also as extravagant.

Of us, no doubt, was Diogenes' saying spoken: "The Megarians feast as though they will die tomorrow, but build as though they will never die." But a splinter in another's eye is more easily seen than a beam in one's own. So many tribes and curiae and decuries belch until the air turns sour. The Salii will need a creditor when they are to dine. The accountants used to reckon up the cost of the tithes of Hercules and the sacrificial feasts. For the Apaturia, the Dionysia, the Attic mysteries, let the selection of cooks be announced. At the smoke of the Serapic supper the sparteoli will be roused. Only the dining-room of the Christians is called into question. Our supper shows its rationale by its very name; it is called by what is "love" among the Greeks.

Whatever its cost, it is gain to incur expense in the name of piety, since we aid the needy with this refreshment, not in the way that among you parasites aspire to glory, serving their freedom for hire under the bond of their belly, to be fattened amid insults, but in the way that before God the regard for the humble is greater. If the cause of the banquet is honourable, estimate the remaining order of discipline, which proceeds from religious duty: it admits nothing base, nothing immodest; the guests do not recline before prayer to God is first tasted; as much is eaten as satisfies the hungry; as much is drunk as is fitting for the chaste. They are so satisfied as those who remember that even through the night they must worship God; they converse as those who know that the Lord is listening.

After water for the hands and lights, each one is called forth into the midst to sing to God as he is able, either from the holy scriptures or from his own talent—from this it is proved how he has drunk. Prayer likewise closes the banquet. Thence they depart not into bands of murderers, nor into companies of wanderers, nor into outbreaks of licentiousness, but to the same care of modesty and chastity, as those who have dined not so much on a supper as on discipline. This gathering of Christians is rightly indeed unlawful, if it is to be condemned on equal grounds with unlawful ones, if it is not unlike those that are to be condemned, if anyone complains of it on the same grounds as the complaint against factions. For whose destruction have we ever assembled? We are the same when gathered as when dispersed; the same as a whole as individually; harming no one, grieving no one.

When the upright, when the good assemble, when the pious, when the chaste congregate, it ought not to be called a faction, but a senate.

But on the contrary, the name of faction is to be applied to those who conspire in hatred of the good, who cry out against innocent blood, using as a pretext for the defence of their hatred that vanity also, of thinking that Christians are the cause of every public calamity, of every popular misfortune. If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields, if the sky has stood still, if the earth has moved, if there is famine, if there is plague, straightway: "The Christians to the lion." So many to one? I ask you, before Tiberius, that is before the coming of Christ, how many calamities fell upon the world and the city? We read that Hiera, Anaphe, and Delos and Rhodes and Cos, islands with many thousands of men, have perished utterly. And Plato records a greater matter: that the land of Asia and Africa was snatched away by the Atlantic sea.

But also the sea of Corinth was swallowed up by an earthquake, and the force of the waves cut off Lucania from Italy and banished it under the name of Sicily. These things surely could not have happened without injury to the inhabitants. But where then, I will not say the Christians who despise your gods, but your very gods themselves, when the flood destroyed the whole world, or, as Plato thought, only the level plain? For those gods are shown to be later than the disaster of the flood by the very cities in which they were born and died, and which they also founded; for otherwise they would not remain to this day, unless they too were born after that calamity. Not yet had Palestine received the swarm of Jews from Egypt, nor had the origin of the Christian sect yet settled there, when the neighbouring regions of Sodom and Gomorrah were burned by a shower of fire.

It smells of still the land smokes with fire, and if any fruits of trees there attempt to grow, they are fair to the eye, but when touched they crumble to ashes. But neither was Tuscany nor Campania yet complaining of Christians, when fire poured down from heaven upon the men of Volsinii, and upon the men of the Tarpeian rock from their own hill. No one at Rome yet worshipped the true God, when Hannibal at Cannae was measuring the Romans' rings—the tokens of his slaughter—by the bushel. All your gods were being worshipped by all, when the Senones themselves occupied the Capitol. And it is well that, if any calamity befell cities, the same disasters fell upon temples as upon walls, so that I may now refute this point: that these things do not come from the gods, because they befall the gods themselves as well.

The human race has always deserved ill of God: first indeed as ungrateful toward him, whom, though it understood him in part, it not only did not seek out as one to be feared, but also more quickly invented other gods for itself to worship; then because, by not seeking out the teacher of innocence and the judge and exactor of guilt, it grew entangled in all vices and crimes.

But if it had sought him out, it would follow that it would come to know him, and having known him would acknowledge him, and having acknowledged him would observe him, and by observing him would find him more propitious than wrathful. Therefore it ought to know that the same God is wrathful now as well, as he always was before, even before Christians were named. Why does it not understand that evils also come from him whose blessings it did not perceive to be his, whose blessings it enjoyed before they were published, before it fashioned gods for itself? It is guilty before him to whom it is also ungrateful. And yet if we compare the calamities of former times, lighter things befall now, since the world received Christians from God. For from that time the innocence of the age has tempered iniquities, and men have begun to be intercessors with God.

Finally, when summer and winter rains are withheld and the year is a matter of concern, you indeed—who feast every day and are about to dine again straightway, who are busy with baths and taverns and brothels—sacrifice aquilicia to Jupiter, proclaim barefoot processions to the people, seek the sky at the Capitol, await clouds from your gilded ceilings, turning your backs on God himself and on the sky. But we, dried out by fasts and wrung by every kind of abstinence, withdrawn from every fruit of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, assail heaven with our earnestness, touch God, and when we have wrested his mercy from him, Jupiter receives the honour from you, and God is disregarded.

You, therefore, are the troublesome ones in human affairs, you are always the enticers of public misfortunes, you are the enticers of evils, among whom God is spurned and statues are adored. For it must surely be held more credible that he is angry who is neglected, than those who are worshipped: or else those gods are most unjust, if on account of Christians they harm even their own worshippers, whom they ought to separate from the deserts of Christians. This, you say, is to turn the argument back against your God as well, who himself also suffers his own worshippers to be harmed on account of the profane. First accept his dispensations, and you will not twist the argument back. For he who once appointed an eternal judgment after the end of the age does not hasten the separation—which is the condition of judgment—before the end of the age.

He is meanwhile equal toward the whole human race, both indulgent and reproving; he willed that both the comforts and the discomforts should be common to the profane and to his own people, so that by equal fellowship all might experience both his gentleness and his severity. Because we have learned these things thus from him, we love his gentleness and fear his severity; you on the contrary despise both; and it follows that all the plagues of the age come upon us, if at all, as a warning, but upon you as a chastisement from God. And yet we are in no way harmed: first because nothing concerns us in this age except to depart from it as quickly as possible; then, because if any adversity is inflicted, it is charged to your deserts. But even if some things touch us as well, being joined to you, we rejoice the more at the recognition of the divine predictions, which confirm, of course, the confidence and faith of our hope.

But if all evils come upon you from those whom you worship, on our account, why do you persist in worshipping those who are so ungrateful, so unjust, who ought rather to have helped and defended you against the grief of Christians? Who ought rather to have helped and defended you against the grief of Christians?

But under another title of injuries we are also charged, and we are called unprofitable in business. In what way, when we live among you as men of the same food, the same dress, the same equipment, the same necessities of life? For we are not Brahmans or Indian gymnosophists, dwellers in the woods and exiles from life. We remember that we owe gratitude to God the Lord the Creator; we reject no fruit of his works; we are plainly temperate, lest we use them beyond measure or wrongly. And so we dwell in this age together with you, not without the forum, not without the market, not without the baths, taverns, workshops, stables, fairs, and your other places of commerce. We sail with you and serve in the army with you, and we farm and trade; likewise we mix our skills and publish our labours for your use. How we may seem unprofitable to your affairs, seeing that we live with you and from you, I do not know.

But if I do not frequent your ceremonies, yet even on that day I am a man. I do not bathe at nightfall on the Saturnalia, lest I lose both night and day; yet I do bathe, and at the proper and wholesome hour, which preserves both warmth and blood for me; I can grow stiff and pale after bathing when I am dead. I do not recline at table in public at the Liberalia, as is the custom for those who dine their last meal with the beast-fighters; yet wherever I dine from your provisions. I do not buy a garland for my head. What does it matter to you, seeing that I buy the flowers nonetheless, however I use them?

I think they are more pleasing when free and loose and wandering everywhere; but even if they are bound into a garland, we know the garland by the nose—let those see to it who smell through their hair. We do not attend the spectacles; yet whatever is sold at those gatherings, if I desire it, I will more readily take it from its own places. I do not buy incense; if the Arabians complain, the Sabaeans will know that their wares are spent more abundantly and at greater cost on the burial of Christians than on fumigating the gods. At any rate, you say, the daily revenues of the temples are diminishing, and how few now toss an offering.

For we are not able to give aid both to men and to your begging gods, nor do we think that anything is to be given except to those who ask. Let Jupiter then stretch out his hand and receive, while in the meantime our charity spends more street by street than your religion does temple by temple. But the other revenues will give thanks to Christians for paying their dues in good faith, in that we refrain from defrauding what belongs to another, so that, if one reckons how much is lost to the public treasury through the fraud and deceit of your professions, the calculation can easily be made, with the complaint about one item compensated by the advantage of the remaining accounts.

I will frankly confess who, if any, can truly complain of the unfruitfulness of Christians. First will be pimps, procurers, water-sellers, then cut-throats, poisoners, magicians, likewise soothsayers, haruspices, astrologers. To be unprofitable to these is a great profit. And yet whatever loss there is to your affairs through this sect can at any rate be compensated with some advantage. How many do you have—I do not say who already cast out demons from among you, I do not say who already spread prayers to the true God on your behalf as well, because perhaps you do not believe this—but from whom you can fear nothing. But from whom you can fear nothing.

But indeed no one looks around at that loss to the commonwealth, as great as it is true, no one weighs that injury to the state, when so many just men are spent, when so many innocent men are consumed. For we now call your own acts to witness—you who preside daily over the judging of those in custody, who go through the charges in your sentences. So many guilty men are reviewed by you under various charges of crimes; what cut-throat, what pickpocket, what sacrilegist, or corrupter, or robber of bathers, is likewise enrolled as a Christian? Or when Christians are brought forward under their own title, who among them is also such as so many guilty men are? The prison always seethes with your people, the mines always groan with your people, the beasts are always fed with your people, the givers of games always pasture their herds of condemned men from your people. No one there is a Christian, except for that charge alone, or if also something else, then no longer a Christian.

We therefore are the only innocent ones. What wonder, if it is necessary? Indeed it is necessary. Having been taught innocence by God, we both know it perfectly as revealed by a perfect master, and guard it faithfully as enjoined by an ever-watchful overseer. But to you human estimation has handed down innocence, and human dominion likewise has commanded it; hence your discipline is neither complete nor sufficiently to be feared for the truth of innocence. How great is the wisdom of man for showing what is truly good? How great his authority for exacting it? The former is as easily deceived as the latter is despised. And so, which is more fully stated: thou shalt not kill, or: thou shalt not even be angry? Which more perfectly forbids adultery, or also to keep away from the solitary lust of the eyes? Which is more instructive about evil-doing, or also to forbid evil-speaking?

Which is more instructive, not to permit injury, or not to allow even the return of injury?—while yet you should know that your own laws too, which seem to tend toward innocence, have borrowed their form from the divine law as the more ancient. We have already spoken of the age of Moses. But how great is the authority of human laws, when it happens that a man can both evade them, and for the most part hide in admitted offences, and sometimes despise them by the will or necessity of sinning, bearing in mind also the brevity of any punishment whatsoever, which will not last beyond death? Thus also Epicurus depreciates all torment and pain, pronouncing the moderate kind contemptible, and the great kind not lasting.

But we indeed, who are examined under God the observer of all things, and who look forward to eternal punishment from him, rightly alone have recourse to innocence, both for the fullness of our knowledge, and for the difficulty of concealment, and for the greatness of the torment—not lasting, but everlasting—fearing him whom even he who judges those who fear must fear, fearing God, not the proconsul.

We have taken our stand, I think, against the charge of all the crimes which demands the blood of Christians. We have shown our whole manner of life, and by what means we can prove it to be as we have shown, namely from the faith and antiquity of the divine scriptures, and likewise from the confession of spiritual powers. Who will dare to refute us, not by skill of words, but by the same method by which we have established our proof, from the truth? But while our truth is being made manifest to each individual, meanwhile unbelief, being hardened against the good of this sect—which has already become known by use and by commerce—does not at all regard it as a divine matter, but rather as a kind of philosophy. The philosophers too, it says, teach and profess the same things: innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, chastity. Why then are we not equally matched with those with whom we are compared in discipline, as regards the licence and impunity of that discipline?

Or why are they too, as our equals, not pressed to the duties which we are in danger for not performing? For who compels a philosopher to sacrifice, or to swear falsely, or to set out vain lamps at midday? Nay, they even openly destroy your gods, and in their writings too they attack your superstitions, and you applaud them. Many of them even bark at the emperors, and you endure it. And they are more readily rewarded with statues and salaries than sentenced to the beasts. But rightly so; for philosophers are not called Christians.

This name of philosophers does not put demons to flight. And why should it, when philosophers reckon demons as next to gods? It is the saying of Socrates: if his daemon permit. He too, even when he had some wisdom about the truth and denied the gods, nevertheless at the very end ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius—in honour of his father, I suppose, because Apollo had proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men. O inconsiderate Apollo! He bore witness to the wisdom of a man who denied that the gods exist. In proportion as truth blazes with hatred, so he who presents it from faith gives offence; but he who adulterates and affects it, by this very title wins favour with the persecutors of truth, who are also its mockers and despisers. Philosophers affect truth in a mimicking fashion and by affecting it corrupt it, as those who seek glory; Christians pursue it of necessity and present it whole, as those who care for their salvation.

So neither in knowledge nor in discipline, as you suppose, are we made equal. For what certain answer did that Thales, the foremost of natural philosophers, give to Croesus when he inquired about divinity, having been repeatedly baulked in his delays for deliberation? Any Christian craftsman both finds God and shows, and thereupon assigns by fact as well all that is sought in God; although Plato affirms that the maker of the universe is neither easy to find, nor, once found, easy to set forth to all. But if we challenge on the score of chastity, I read that part of the Attic verdict was pronounced against Socrates as a corrupter of youth.

A Christian changes not even the female sex. I know too of Phryne the harlot submitting herself to the lust of Diogenes as he lay above her. I hear also that a certain Speusippus of Plato's school perished in adultery. A Christian is born male for his wife alone. Democritus, by blinding himself, because he could not look upon women without desire, and grieved if he had not possessed them, confesses his incontinence by the remedy he applied. But the Christian, with eyes unharmed, looks upon woman, and is blind in his mind against lust. If I defend on the score of integrity, behold Diogenes with muddy feet tramples down the proud couches of Plato with another kind of pride. A Christian is not proud even toward a poor man. If I contend on the score of modesty, behold Pythagoras among the Thurians, Zeno among the Prienians, aspire to tyranny: but a Christian aspires not even to the office of aedile.

If on the score of equanimity of mind I engage, Lycurgus chose death by starvation because the Lacedaemonians had amended his laws: a Christian, even when condemned, gives thanks. If I compare on the score of good faith, Anaxagoras denied a deposit to his guests: a Christian is called faithful even among outsiders. If I stand firm on the score of sincerity, Aristotle basely caused his friend Hermias to be removed from his place: a Christian does not even harm his enemy. The same Aristotle so basely flatters Alexander in governing him, rather than Plato sells himself to Dionysius for the sake of his belly. Aristippus in purple, beneath a great surface of gravity, lives dissolutely, and Hippias is slain while laying plots against his city. No Christian has ever attempted this against his own people, scattered as they are with every kind of cruelty.

But someone will say, even from among our own some depart from the rule of discipline; they then cease to be counted Christians among us, whereas those philosophers, with such deeds, persist among you in the name and honour of wisdom. How alike then is the philosopher and the Christian, the disciple of Greece and of Heaven, the dealer in reputation and in salvation, the worker of words and of deeds, the builder and destroyer of things, the adulterator of error and the restorer of truth, the thief of it and its guardian.

For the antiquity of the divine writings, already set forth, still profits me, so that it may readily be believed that it was the treasury from which every later wisdom drew. And if I were not already moderating the burden of this volume, I would also run out into this proof as well. What poet, what sophist, who has not drunk from the fountain of the prophets?

From that source, therefore, the philosophers slaked the thirst of their genius; for because they have certain things from our writings, on that account they are compared with us. From that source, I think, philosophy was also expelled by laws in certain places, by the Thebans I mean, by the Spartans and the Argives. While men of glory, as we have said, and greedy of eloquence alone, striving toward our writings, if they encountered anything in the holy scriptures laid out in order, they then took it up and turned it to their own purposes according to the practice of their curiosity, neither believing sufficiently that it was divine, lest they should adulterate it, nor understanding sufficiently, since it was still then somewhat obscure, overshadowed even for the Jews themselves, to whom it seemed to belong. For even if there was any simplicity of truth, the more did human scrupulosity, spurning faith, waver, through which they mixed into uncertainty even what they had found certain.

For having found God alone, they did not dispute as they had found him, but so as to dispute about his quality and his nature and his abode. Some assert him incorporeal, others corporeal, as the Platonists on the one hand, and the Stoics on the other; some make him of atoms, others of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras; others of fire, as seemed good to Heraclitus; and the Platonists indeed hold that he cares for things; the Epicureans on the contrary that he is idle and unoccupied, and, so to speak, nobody in human affairs; placed outside the world by the Stoics, who, after the manner of a potter, turns this mass from without; within the world by the Platonists, who, after the example of a helmsman, remains within that which he governs.

They also vary as to whether the world itself was born or unborn, whether it will pass away or endure; and likewise concerning the state of the soul, which some contend is divine and eternal, others that it is dissoluble: as each has thought, so has he introduced or reformed it. Nor is it any wonder if the ingenuity of philosophers has perverted the ancient instrument. From this seed certain men have also corrupted this our new little preparation with their own opinions toward philosophical tenets, and from the one way have cut many oblique and inextricable by-paths. I mention this lest the well-known variety of this sect should seem to anyone to put us on a level with the philosophers in this respect as well, and from the variety of defences should indicate the truth. But we readily prescribe to our adulterators that the rule of truth is that which comes from Christ, transmitted through his own companions, in comparison with whom all these later commentators will be proved considerably more recent.

All things against the truth have been constructed out of the truth itself, these emulations being wrought by the spirits of error. By these the adulterations of this kind of saving discipline have been contrived; by these also certain fables have been introduced, which by their resemblance might weaken faith in the truth, or rather claim it for themselves, so that someone might therefore not believe Christians, because he does not believe poets or philosophers either, or might therefore the more think poets and philosophers worthy of belief, because he does not believe Christians. And so we are also laughed at for proclaiming that God will be a judge. For so too poets and philosophers place a tribunal among the dead. If we threaten Gehenna, which is the underground treasury of a secret fire for punishment, we are straightway laughed to scorn. For so too Pyriphlegethon is a river among the dead.

And if we name Paradise, the place of divine pleasantness destined to receive the spirits of the saints, separated from the knowledge of the common world by a kind of wall of that fiery zone, the Elysian fields have anticipated belief in it. Whence come these things, I ask you, so similar to those of the philosophers or poets? From none other than our own sacred mysteries: if from our sacred mysteries, as from prior ones, then ours are more trustworthy and more to be believed, whose very images also find credence; if from their own thoughts, then our sacred mysteries will now be held to be images of later things, which the nature of things does not allow; for a shadow never precedes a body, nor an image the truth.

Come now, if some philosopher affirms, as Laberius says from the opinion of Pythagoras, that a man is made from a mule, a serpent from a woman, and has bent all the arguments of his eloquence's power toward that opinion, will he not move assent and fix belief, even to the point of abstaining from animals? And on that account let someone be persuaded of this, lest perchance he serve up beef from some ancestor of his. But if a Christian promises the return of a man from a man, and of Caius himself from Caius, straightway a bladder is called for there, and he is driven out by the people with stones rather, and not even with fists.

As though whatever reason presides over human souls being received back into bodies does not itself require that they be recalled into the same bodies, because this is what being recalled means, to be what they were. For if they are not what they were, that is, clothed in a human and that same body, they will no longer be themselves what they were. Furthermore, those who will no longer be themselves, how will they be said to have returned? Or having become something else they will not be themselves, or remaining themselves they will not be from elsewhere. Many jests and much leisure will also be needed, if we wish to sport on this point, as to who would seem to be transformed into what beast.

But for our defence rather, who propose that it is by far more worthy of belief that a man will return from a man, any one for any one, provided he be a man, so that the same quality of soul may be restored to the same condition, if not the same outward form, yet certainly because the reason of restitution is the appointment of judgment, necessarily that very same person who had existed will be presented, so that he may receive from God the judgment of good or contrary desert. Therefore bodies also will be presented, because the soul alone without stable matter, that is flesh, can suffer nothing; and what souls ought altogether to suffer from the judgment of God, they did not deserve without the flesh, within which they did all things. But how, you say, can dissolved matter be presented? Consider yourself, O man, and you will find faith in the matter. Recall what you were before you existed: nothing, surely; for you would remember, if you had been anything.

He therefore who was nothing before you existed, the same having been made nothing when you shall have ceased to be, why can you not be again from nothing, by the will of that same author who willed you to be from nothing? What new thing will happen to you? You who were not, were made; when again you shall not be, you will be made. Render, if you can, the reason by which you were made, and then inquire by which you will be made. And yet you will more easily become what you once were, because it was equally not difficult for you to be made what you never once were. Doubt will be entertained, I suppose, concerning the powers of God, who composed this great body of the world from that which had not existed, no less than from the death of vacancy and emptiness, animated by the spirit who is the animator of all souls, marked and through himself as an example of human resurrection for your testimony.

Light, slain daily, shines again, and darkness in like alternation withdraws and succeeds; the stars, having died, revive, the seasons begin where they end, fruits are consumed and return; seeds certainly do not spring up more fruitfully unless they have first rotted and dissolved; all things are preserved by perishing, all things are reformed from destruction. You, O man, so great a name, if you understand yourself, even learning from the title of the Pythian, lord of all things dying and rising, will you die for this, that you may perish? Wherever you shall have been dissolved, whatever matter shall have destroyed, swallowed, abolished, reduced you to nothing, it will restore you. The very nothing belongs to him to whom the whole belongs. Therefore, you say, there will always be dying and always rising again. If the Lord of things had so appointed, you would experience the law of your condition, ungrateful as you are. But now he has appointed it in no other way than he has proclaimed.

The reason which composed the universe out of diversity, so that all things might consist of rival substances in unity, out of void and solid, out of animate and inanimate, out of comprehensible and incomprehensible, out of light and darkness, out of life itself and death; the same reason has also joined the age together, appointed and distinguished by this condition, so that this first part, which we inhabit from the beginning of things, flows down through a temporal age to its end; but the following part, which we await, is extended into infinite eternity. When therefore the end and the middle boundary, which yawns between, shall have come, so that even the outward form of the world itself is transferred, equally temporal, which has been spread out like a curtain before that arrangement of eternity, then all the human race will be restored, to have expunged what it has deserved of good or evil in this age, and thenceforth to have it paid out into the immense perpetuity of eternity.

Therefore neither death any more, nor resurrection again and again, but we shall be the same as we now are, and no others afterward: the worshippers of God indeed, always with God, clothed over with the proper substance of eternity; but the profane and those who have not come whole to God, in punishment of equally unceasing fire, which has from its very nature, divine of course, the supply of incorruptibility. The philosophers also know the difference between hidden and common fire. So far is that which appears for human use different from that which appears for the judgment of God, whether darting lightnings from heaven, or belching forth from the earth through the summits of mountains; for it does not consume what it burns, but while it spends, it repairs. So the ever-burning mountains endure forever, and he who is struck from heaven is unharmed, so as to be reduced to no ash by any fire. And this will be the testimony of eternal fire, this the example of perpetual judgment nourishing its punishment.

Mountains burn and endure: what then of the guilty and the enemies of God?

These are the things which among us alone are called presumptions, but among Philosophers and Poets are the highest knowledge and marks of distinguished genius. They are wise, we are foolish; they are to be honored, we are to be mocked, and moreover even punished. Let what we uphold now be false, and rightly presumed upon; yet it is necessary; let it be foolish, yet it is useful; inasmuch as those who believe it are compelled to become better through fear of eternal punishment and hope of eternal refreshment. Therefore it is not expedient that these things be called false, nor held to be foolish, which it is expedient to presume true. Under no title may those things be condemned at all which are profitable. In you, therefore, this very presumption which condemns what is useful is itself the fault.

Accordingly, neither can they be foolish; certainly even if false and foolish, they are yet harmful to no one; for there are many other things similar to them among you, upon which you impose no penalties, vain and fabulous things, unaccused and unpunished, as being harmless. But errors of this kind (if indeed they are such) ought to be judged with ridicule, not with swords and fires and crosses and beasts; concerning which iniquity of cruelty not only does this blind common crowd exult, but even certain of your own number, who seek the favour of the crowd through iniquity, glory in it, as though all the power you have over us were not subject to our own will. Certainly, if I choose, I am a Christian: then will you condemn me, if I choose to be condemned; but since you cannot do against me what you are able to do unless I consent, what you are able to do is already a matter of my will, not of your power.

Accordingly the common crowd also vainly rejoices over our affliction; for that joy is ours which they claim for themselves, since we prefer to be condemned rather than to fall away from God: on the contrary, those who hate us ought to grieve, not rejoice, when we have obtained what we chose.

But indeed, while they expose themselves to torments, while they willingly cast away their life, they do this not after the manner of the Gentiles, for whom despair and an itch for glory paves that path of despising pain and death, but after the manner of the bravest soldier, who takes up war though he does not love it, and rejoices in the victory, yet trembled in the pursuit of it. It must therefore be confessed that that constancy is true which manifests itself in deeds, not in words, which seeks grace before God, not praise before men, and by the contemplation and example of its unshaken steadfastness daily begets more who embrace it than ever came forth as disciples from all the schools of all the philosophers, captivated by the enticements of words.

Therefore, you say, why do you complain that we persecute you, if you wish to suffer, since you ought to love those through whom you suffer what you wish? We do indeed wish to suffer, but in that manner in which no one willingly endures war either, when it is necessary both to tremble and to be in peril; yet he fights with all his strength, and the victor in battle rejoices, who had complained of the battle, because he also gains glory and spoil. Our battle is this: that we are summoned before tribunals, that there, at the risk of our lives, we may contend for the truth. And victory is to obtain that cause for which you contended. That victory has both the glory of pleasing God and the reward of living for eternity.

But we are put down, you say, when we have prevailed: therefore we have conquered when we are slain; and finally we escape when we are put down: though you now call us sarmentitii and semaxii, because, bound to a half-axle stake, we are burned in a surrounding bundle of faggots. That is the array of our victory; that is our embroidered robe; in such a chariot we triumph. Rightly therefore we do not please the vanquished; for this reason we are reckoned desperate and lost. But this desperation and perdition among you, in a cause of glory and fame, raise high the standard of virtue. Mucius willingly left his right hand upon the altar: O loftiness of soul! Empedocles gave his whole self to the Aetnaean fires of the Catanians: O vigour of mind! A certain foundress of Carthage gave a second marriage to the funeral pyre: O proclamation of chastity! Regulus, lest one man should live in exchange for many enemies, endures the cross with his whole body: O brave man and victor even in captivity!

Anaxarchus, when he was being pounded after the fashion of barley-groats with a pestle, said: Pound, pound, he said, the sack of Anaxarchus.

For it is not Anaxarchus you are pounding: O the magnanimity of the philosopher, who even jested about such an end of his! I pass over those who bargained for renown with their own sword or some other milder kind of death. For behold, even contests of torments are crowned by you. An Attic courtesan, when the executioner was already wearied, at last bit off her own tongue and spat it in the face of the raging tyrant, that she might spit away also her voice, lest she might be able to confess the conspirators, even if overcome she had wished to. Zeno of Elea, when asked by Dionysius what philosophy afforded, and when he had answered, contempt of death, was subjected to the tyrant's scourges and sealed his maxim unto death. Certainly the floggings of the Lacedaemonians, made more bitter under the eyes of even their encouraging kinsmen, bring as much honour of endurance to their house as the blood they have shed.

O glory that is lawful, because it is human, to which neither a desperate presumption nor a despairing persuasion is imputed in the contempt of death and of every kind of atrocity, to which it is permitted to suffer as much for country, for land, for empire, for friendship, as it is not permitted to suffer for God! And yet to all those men you pour out statues, and inscribe images, and engrave titles for eternity; as much as you can by means of monuments, you yourselves also in a manner provide resurrection for the dead. He who hopes for this truly from God, if he suffers for God, is he mad? But do this, good Governors, much better in the eyes of the people if you sacrifice Christians to them. Crucify, torture, condemn, grind us down: the proof of our innocence is your iniquity. Therefore God suffers us to suffer these things.

For even recently, by condemning a Christian woman to the brothel rather than to the lion, you confessed that among us a stain upon chastity is reckoned more atrocious than any punishment and any death. Nor does your more exquisite cruelty avail anything at all: it is rather an enticement to the sect. We become more numerous whenever we are mown down by you: the blood of Christians is seed. Many among you exhort to the endurance of pain and death, as Cicero in the Tusculans, as Seneca in the works On Fortune, as Diogenes, as Pyrrho, as Callinicus. Yet words do not find so many disciples as Christians find by teaching through deeds. That very obstinacy which you reproach is a teacher. For who is not struck, upon contemplating it, to inquire what is within the matter?

Who, when he has inquired, does not draw near; and when he has drawn near, does not desire to suffer, that he may purchase the whole grace of God, and may obtain full pardon from Him by the compensation of his own blood? For all sins are forgiven to this work. Hence it is that in that very place we give thanks to your sentences; as there is a rivalry between the divine and the human, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted by God.