So that is why Christians are public enemies: because they do not give the emperors vain or lying or reckless honors; because, as people of true religion, they celebrate even their festivals with conscience rather than with wantonness. A great service, of course, to bring out braziers and couches into public, to feast street by street, to wipe out the city under the look of a tavern, to make mud with wine, to run about in gangs to acts of violence, of shamelessness, to the allurements of lust! Is public joy expressed in this way, by public disgrace? Do these things befit the festival days of emperors, which do not befit other days? Those who observe discipline out of regard for Caesar desert it for Caesar's sake; and the license of bad morals will be piety, and an occasion for luxury will be counted religion? Oh, how rightly we deserve condemnation! For why do we, chaste and sober and upright, fulfill the vows and rejoicings for the Caesars? Why on a happy day do we not shade our doorposts with laurels nor encroach on the daylight with lamps? It is an honorable thing, when a public festival demands it, to dress your house up like some new brothel! I would like, however, in this religion of the second majesty too, in which we Christians are charged with a second sacrilege for not celebrating with you the festivals of the Caesars in a manner that neither modesty nor decency nor chastity permits, and to which the opportunity for pleasure rather than any worthy reason has persuaded you, to show up your loyalty and truthfulness, so that here too those people are not perhaps found worse than Christians who will not have us counted Romans, but enemies of the Roman emperors. I call the Quirites themselves, the native people of the seven hills themselves, to account: does that Roman tongue spare any Caesar of its own? The Tiber is witness, and the schools of the beasts. Now, if nature had covered our breasts with some kind of transparent material for seeing through, whose heart would not appear engraved with the scene of one new Caesar after another presiding over the distribution of a largess? and that in the very hour when they shout, “May Jupiter add to your years from ours!” A Christian no more knows how to utter these words than to wish for a new Caesar. “But that is the mob,” you say. Mob it may be, yet Romans, and none demand the death of Christians more than the mob. Plainly the other orders are religious, in proportion to their rank, out of loyalty! Nothing hostile breathes from the senate itself, from the knights, from the camp, from the palaces themselves! Where do the Cassiuses and Nigers and Albinuses come from? Where those who besiege Caesar between the two laurels? Where those who practice wrestling in order to throttle his throat? Where those who break into the palace in arms, bolder than all the Sigeriuses and Partheniuses? From among the Romans, unless I am mistaken, that is, from among the non-Christians. And indeed all of them, right up to the outbreak of their impiety, were both offering sacrifices for the emperor's welfare and swearing by his genius, some outside, some inside, and naturally were giving the name of public enemies to the Christians. And those too who are now daily being exposed as partners or applauders of the criminal faction, the gleaning left over after the vintage of parricides: with what fresh and leafy laurels they hedged their doorposts! with what lofty and brilliant lamps they clouded their porches with smoke! with what elegant and proud couches they divided the forum among themselves! not to celebrate public rejoicings, but to rehearse their own prayers already at another's festival, and to inaugurate the model and image of their hope, changing the emperor's name in their hearts. The same services are paid by those who consult astrologers and soothsayers and augurs and magicians about the life of the Caesars, arts which Christians, as revealed by the deserter angels and forbidden by God,⁠a do not use even in their own affairs. And who needs to inquire into Caesar's welfare except one who is plotting or wishing something against it, or hoping and waiting for something after it? For one does not consult about loved ones in the same spirit as about masters. The anxiety of kinship is curious in one way, that of servitude in another.