Apology

Rulers of the Roman Empire, seated as you are for judgment in an open and lofty place, at almost the very summit of the state: if you are not permitted to examine openly and to inquire face to face what is clearly the truth in the case of the Christians; if in this kind of case alone your authority is afraid or ashamed to inquire in public with the care that justice requires; if, finally, as happened recently, hostility to this school, kept too busy in domestic tribunals, blocks the way to its defense, then let the truth be allowed to reach your ears at least by the hidden path of silent writing. It makes no plea for its cause, because it is not surprised at its condition either. It knows that it lives as a stranger on earth, that among foreigners it easily finds enemies, but that its race, its home, its hope, its favor, and its rank are in heaven. One thing only it sometimes longs for: not to be condemned unknown. What do the laws, ruling in their own realm, lose here if it is heard? Will their power boast the more because they condemn the truth even after hearing it? But if they condemn it unheard, besides the odium of injustice they will also earn the suspicion of some guilty knowledge, since they refuse to hear what, once heard, they could not condemn. This, then, is the first ground we lay before you: the injustice of the hatred of the name of Christians. And this injustice is both aggravated and refuted by the very plea that seems to excuse it, namely ignorance. For what is more unjust than for people to hate what they do not know, even if the thing deserves hatred? For it deserves it only when it is known whether it deserves it. But when knowledge of its desert is lacking, how is the justice of the hatred defended? That justice must be proved not from the outcome but from knowledge. Since, then, people hate because they do not know what kind of thing it is they hate, why may it not be the kind of thing they ought not to hate? So we refute them on both counts, each from the other: that they are ignorant while they hate, and that they hate unjustly while they are ignorant. It is a proof of an ignorance which condemns the injustice even while it excuses it, that all who formerly hated because they did not know what they hated cease to hate as soon as they cease to be ignorant. People who hated us become Christians once they learn the truth about us. and they begin to hate what they had been and to profess what they had hated; and they are as many as we are said to be. People cry out that the city is besieged; that there are Christians in the fields, in the forts, in the islands; they mourn, as if it were a loss, that every sex, age, condition, and even rank is going over to this name; and yet not even so do they rouse their minds to consider whether some hidden good is there. They will not allow themselves to suspect more rightly; they do not care to examine more closely. Here alone human curiosity grows sluggish. They love to be ignorant, while others rejoice to have learned. How much more would Anacharsis have censured these, the unwise judging the wise, than the unmusical judging musicians! They prefer not to know, because they already hate. So they prejudge that what they do not know is the very thing which, if they knew it, they could not hate; whereas, if no ground for hatred is found, it would surely be best to stop hating unjustly, and if the desert is established, not only would nothing be taken from the hatred, but more would be gained for persevering in it, with the authority of justice itself. “But,” someone says, “a thing is not good just because it converts many; for how many are trained for evil! how many desert to what is perverse!” Who denies it? Yet what is truly evil not even those whom it carries away dare to defend as good. Nature has steeped every evil in fear or in shame. Evildoers, in short, long to hide; they avoid appearing; they tremble when caught; they deny when accused; not even under torture do they confess easily or always; certainly when condemned they grieve. They reckon up against themselves the impulses of a bad mind, or they blame them on fate or the stars; for they do not want it to be their own, because they recognize it as evil. But what is there like this in a Christian? None of them is ashamed, none of them repents, except of not having been one earlier. If he is pointed out, he glories in it; if he is accused, he does not defend himself; when questioned he confesses, even of his own accord; when condemned he gives thanks. What sort of evil is this, which has none of the natural marks of evil, fear, shame, evasion, regret, lament? What! is this an evil, whose defendant rejoices? whose accusation is his prayer, and whose punishment his happiness? You cannot call it madness, you who stand convicted of not knowing it.

Again, if it is certain that we are the most guilty of people, why do you yourselves treat us differently from our peers, that is, from the other guilty, when the same guilt ought to meet the same treatment? Whatever we are charged with, when others are charged with it they use both their own mouths and hired advocates to commend their innocence. They are free to answer and to dispute, since it is not lawful for anyone to be condemned wholly undefended and unheard. But Christians alone are permitted to say nothing that clears their cause, that defends the truth, that keeps the judge from being unjust; all that is waited for is what public hatred needs: confession of the name, not investigation of the crime. Yet if you are trying any other guilty person, you are not at once satisfied to pronounce sentence when he confesses to the name of murderer, or temple-robber, or incestuous person, or public enemy (to speak of the charges laid against us), unless you also demand the particulars: the nature of the deed, how often, where, how, when, the accomplices, the partners. Nothing of the kind with us, though whatever is falsely spread abroad ought equally to be wrung out of us: how many murdered infants each had already tasted, how many acts of incest he had committed under cover of darkness, what cooks, what dogs were present. Oh, what glory for that governor, if he had unearthed someone who had already eaten a hundred infants! And yet we find that even inquiry into us has been forbidden. For Pliny the Younger, when he governed a province, having condemned some Christians and dislodged others from their stand, was nevertheless disturbed by their sheer number and consulted the emperor Trajan, then reigning, about what he should do for the future. He reported that, apart from their obstinate refusal to sacrifice, he had found out nothing else about their rites than meetings before dawn to sing to Christ and God and to bind themselves together in a discipline that forbids murder, adultery, fraud, treachery, and the other crimes. Trajan then wrote back that people of this kind were not to be sought out, but that if they were brought in they ought to be punished. sentence confounded by necessity! He says they must not be sought out, as innocent, and orders them punished, as guilty. He spares and rages; he overlooks and punishes. Why do you entangle yourself, judgment? If you condemn, why not also inquire? If you do not inquire, why not also acquit? A military post is assigned by lot throughout all the provinces to track down bandits. Against those guilty of treason and public enemies every man is a soldier; the inquiry is extended even to partners and accomplices. The Christian alone may not be sought out, but he may be brought in, as though an inquiry would aim at anything else than bringing him in. So you condemn a man brought in whom no one wished to have sought; he has deserved punishment, I suppose, not because he is guilty, but because, though not to be sought, he was found. In this too you do not deal with us according to the procedure for judging criminals: to others who deny you apply torture to make them confess, to Christians alone to make them deny; whereas, if it were an evil, we would deny it and you would compel us by torture to confess. For you would not think that the crimes need not be investigated by examination just because you were sure from the confession of the name that they were committed, you who today, with a confessed murderer, though you know what murder is, nevertheless extract the details of the deed. All the more perverse, then, that when you presume our crimes from the confession of the name, you force us by torture to withdraw the confession, so that by denying the name we may at the same time deny the crimes too, which you had presumed from the confession of the name. But, I suppose, you do not want us to perish, whom you believe the worst of men. For this is how you usually say to a murderer, “Deny it!” and order a temple-robber to be torn if he persists in confessing! If you do not deal with us like this as guilty, then you judge us most innocent, since, as with the most innocent, you do not want us to persist in a confession which you know you must condemn from necessity, not from justice. A man cries out, “I am a Christian.” He says what he is; you want to hear what he is not. Governors appointed to extort the truth, from us alone you labor to hear a lie. “I am,” he says, “what you ask whether I am. Why do you torture me to say the opposite? I confess, and you torture: what would you do if I denied?” Plainly, when others deny you do not readily believe them; us, if we deny, you believe at once. Let this perversity be suspect to you, in case some hidden power is at work in secret which employs you against the form, against the nature of judging, and even against the laws themselves. For, unless I am mistaken, the laws order the wicked to be brought to light, not hidden; they prescribe that those who confess be condemned, not acquitted. This the decrees of the senate, this the mandates of the emperors define. This empire, whose ministers you are, is a civil, not a tyrannical, rule. For under tyrants torture was applied even as punishment; with you it is limited to examination. Keep your law for it up to the point where confession is necessary; and if it is anticipated by confession, torture will have nothing to do: sentence is what is needed; the guilty man must be discharged by paying the penalty he owes, not exempted from it. In short, no one is eager to acquit him; it is not lawful to wish it, and so no one is forced to deny. A Christian you think guilty of every crime, an enemy of the gods, the emperors, the laws, morals, and all nature, and yet you force him to deny, so that you may acquit one whom you could not acquit unless he denied. You betray the laws. You want him, then, to deny that he is guilty, so that you may make him innocent, and that against his will, and no longer guilty of the past. Where does this perversity come from, that you do not even consider that one who confesses freely should be believed rather than one who denies under force? Or that one compelled to deny may not have denied in good faith, and, once acquitted, may at once, just behind the tribunal, laugh at your rivalry, a Christian again? Since, then, you deal with us differently from other guilty persons in everything, striving for one thing only, that we be excluded from that name (for we are excluded if we do what non-Christians do), you can understand that what is at issue is not any crime but the name, which a certain rival power at work pursues, aiming first of all at this: that people should not wish to know for certain what they know for certain they do not know. So they both believe things about us that are not proved and refuse to have them investigated, for fear that what they prefer people to believe might be proved untrue, so that the name hostile to that rival power may be condemned, with crimes presumed, not proved, on its own confession alone. That is why we are tortured when we confess, punished when we persevere, and acquitted when we deny: because the battle is over the name. Finally, why do you read out from your tablet that so-and-so is a Christian? Why not also a murderer? If a Christian is a murderer, why not also incestuous, or whatever else you believe us to be? With us alone are you ashamed or loath to pronounce the very names of crimes? If “Christian” is the name of no crime, it is a foul thing indeed if the only crime is the name.

What of this, that most people run blindly into hatred of the name in such a way that, even while giving someone a good testimony, they mix in a reproach for the name? “Gaius Seius is a good man, only he is a Christian.” Likewise another: “I am amazed that Lucius Titius, a wise man, has suddenly become a Christian.” No one stops to consider whether Gaius is good and Lucius prudent because he is a Christian, or a Christian because he is prudent and good. They praise what they know, they blame what they do not know, and they spoil what they know with what they do not know, when it would be more just to judge the hidden beforehand from the evident than to condemn the evident beforehand from the hidden. Others brand people whom they had known, before they took this name, as vagrant, worthless, and wicked, with the very thing they praise. In the blindness of hatred they stumble into commendation: “What a woman! how promiscuous, how lively! What a young man! how promiscuous, what a lover! They have become Christians!” So the name is blamed for the reform. Some even bargain with this hatred at the cost of their own interests, content to suffer loss so long as they do not have at home what they hate. A husband, no longer jealous, has cast out a wife now chaste; a father, once so patient, has disowned a son now obedient; a master, once mild, has banished from his sight a slave now faithful. As soon as anyone is reformed by this name, he gives offense. Good is not worth as much as hatred of Christians. Now, then, if the hatred is of a name, what guilt can there be in names? What charge can be brought against words, unless some sound of the name is barbarous, or ill-omened, or abusive, or indecent? But “Christian,” so far as its meaning goes, is derived from anointing. And even when it is wrongly pronounced by you “Chrestian” (for you do not have certain knowledge even of the name), it is formed from sweetness or kindness. So in harmless people even a harmless name is hated. “But the school is hated in the name, of course, of its founder.” What is new if a discipline gives its followers a surname from its teacher? Are not philosophers called after their founders Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? and from the places of their gatherings and stations Stoics and Academics? Likewise physicians from Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, even cooks from Apicius? Yet no one is offended by the profession of a name handed down with the teaching from its teacher. Certainly, if anyone has proved a school bad, and so its founder bad, he will prove the name too bad and worthy of hatred because of the guilt of the school and its founder; and so before hating the name it was proper first to examine the school from its founder, or the founder from the school. But as it is, both inquiry and knowledge of either are neglected; the name is seized, the name is attacked; and the mere word condemns beforehand an unknown school and an unknown founder, because they are named, not because they are convicted.

Having made these remarks by way of preface, as it were, to expose the injustice of the public hatred against us, I will now take my stand on the case for our innocence; and I will not only refute what is charged against us but turn it back on those who charge it, so that people may learn even from this that there is not in Christians what they do not know is in themselves, and at the same time may blush to accuse, I do not say the worst the best, but now, as they would have it, their own equals. We will answer each of the things we are said to commit in secret, which we find them committing openly, things for which we are considered criminal, or vain, or worthy of condemnation, or laughable. But since, when our truth meets every point, the authority of the laws is at last set against it, so that either it is said that nothing may be reconsidered after the laws have spoken, or the necessity of obedience is, against one's will, preferred to the truth, I will first contend with you about the laws, as with their guardians. First, then, when you harshly lay down, “You are not permitted to exist!” and prescribe this without any more humane reconsideration, you avow violence and an unjust domination from the citadel, if you deny that it is lawful because you so wish, not because it ought not to be lawful. But if you do not wish it to be lawful because it ought not to be, then without doubt what is done wrongly ought not to be lawful, and by this very fact it is decided beforehand that what is done rightly is lawful. If I find that what your law has forbidden is good, does it not follow from that prior judgment that it cannot forbid me something it would rightly forbid only if it were evil? If your law has erred, it was conceived, I suppose, by a man; for it did not fall from heaven. Are you surprised that a man could err in framing a law, or come to his senses in rejecting it? Did not the amendment by the Spartans of the laws of Lycurgus himself cause their author such grief that he condemned himself to starve to death in seclusion? Do not you yourselves every day, as experience lights up the darkness of antiquity, lop and fell that whole old and rough forest of laws with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts? Did not Severus, most steadfast of emperors, only yesterday abolish the most futile Papian laws, which compel people to have children before the Julian laws allow a marriage to be contracted, despite the authority of their great age? There were also laws that debtors who had been condemned might be cut into pieces by their creditors; but by public consent that cruelty was later erased, and the capital penalty was changed into a mark of disgrace: the confiscation of goods, once adopted, preferred to bring the blood into a man's face rather than to shed it. How many laws still lie hidden that you need to clean up, laws commended neither by the number of their years nor by the rank of their makers, but by equity alone! And so, when they are recognized as unjust, they are rightly condemned, even though they condemn. How do we call them unjust? Indeed, if they punish a name, even foolish; but if deeds, why do they punish deeds on the name alone in our case, when in others they establish them as proved from the act, not from the name? I am incestuous: why do they not investigate? A killer of infants: why do they not extract it? I commit some offense against the gods, against the Caesars: why am I not heard, who have the means to clear myself? No law forbids the examination of what it forbids to be committed, because neither does a judge punish justly unless he knows that what is unlawful has been committed, nor does a citizen obey the law faithfully if he does not know what kind of thing it is that the law punishes. No law owes the consciousness of its justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Besides, a law that does not wish to be examined is suspect, and wicked if it rules unexamined.

To go back a little to the origin of laws of this kind: there was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by a general unless approved by the senate. Marcus Aemilius knows this, from his god Alburnus. This too tells in favor of our cause, that with you divinity is weighed by human judgment. Unless a god has pleased man, he will not be a god; man will now have to be gracious to god! Tiberius, then, in whose time the Christian name came into the world, when news was brought to him from Syria Palestine of events that had revealed there the truth of His divinity, referred the matter to the senate with his own vote in favor. The senate, because it had not itself approved it, rejected it; Caesar held to his opinion and threatened danger to the accusers of the Christians. Consult your records: there you will find that Nero was the first to rage with the imperial sword against this school, just then rising especially at Rome. But we even glory in such a dedicator of our condemnation. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing but some great good was condemned by Nero. Domitian too, a portion of Nero in cruelty, had tried it; but, being also something of a man, he soon checked what he had begun, even restoring those he had banished. Such have always been our persecutors: unjust, impious, base men, whom you yourselves are accustomed to condemn, and whose victims you have been accustomed to restore. But of all the emperors since then down to the present, men wise in things divine and human, show us one destroyer of Christians! We, on the contrary, show a protector, if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most serious emperor, are looked up, in which he testifies that the great drought in Germany was dispelled by rain obtained, as it happened, through the prayers of Christian soldiers. As he did not openly remove the penalty from such men, so in another way he openly set it aside, even adding a condemnation, and a harsher one, for their accusers. What kind of laws, then, are these, which only the impious, unjust, base, savage, vain, and insane enforce against us? which Trajan partly frustrated by forbidding Christians to be sought out; which no Hadrian, though an explorer of all curiosities, no Vespasian, though the conqueror of the Jews, no Pius, no Verus enforced? Surely the worst would more readily be judged fit to be rooted out by all the best, as by their opponents, than by their own allies.

Now I should like those most scrupulous protectors and avengers of the laws and of ancestral institutions to answer concerning their own faithfulness, honor, and obedience toward the decrees of their ancestors: whether they have departed from none, whether they have strayed in nothing, whether they have not erased things necessary and most fitting for discipline. Where have those laws gone that restrained expense and display? which ordered that no more than a hundred asses be spent on a dinner and no more than one hen be served, and that not fattened; which removed from the senate, as a great mark of ambition, a patrician who had owned ten pounds of silver; which pulled down theaters at once as they rose to corrupt morals; which did not allow the insignia of offices and of honorable birth to be usurped lightly or with impunity? For I see dinners that must be called “hundreds” now from a hundred thousand sesterces, and silver from the mines worked into platters (it would be little if for senators, and not for freedmen or for men still breaking whips with their backs). I see too that theaters are not enough when single, nor when uncovered; for it was the Spartans who first devised the cloak for the games, so that shameless pleasure would not be cold even in winter. I see also that between matrons and prostitutes no distinction of dress is left. With regard to women, indeed, even those institutions of the ancestors have fallen which protected modesty and sobriety, when no woman knew gold except on the one finger which her betrothed had pledged with the betrothal ring; when women were kept from wine to such a degree that her family starved a matron to death for unsealing the compartments of the wine cellar, while under Romulus a woman who had touched wine was killed with impunity by her husband Metennius. For that reason they were even required to offer kisses to their relatives, so that they might be judged by their breath. Where is that happiness of marriages, prospered of course by good morals, through which for nearly six hundred years from the founding of the city no household wrote a bill of divorce? But now in women no limb is light for the gold on it, no kiss is free for the wine; and divorce is now even prayed for, as though it were the fruit of marriage. Even concerning your gods themselves, you, most obedient people, have rescinded what your fathers had wisely decreed. Father Liber with his mysteries the consuls, by authority of the senate, banished not only from the city but from all Italy. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates with his dog-headed companion were forbidden to be brought into the Capitol, that is, were expelled from the senate-house of the gods: the consuls Piso and Gabinius, certainly not Christians, cast them off, even overturning their altars, to restrain the vices of base and idle superstitions. You have restored them and conferred on them the highest majesty. Where is your religion, where the veneration you owe your ancestors? In dress, food, furnishings, feelings, and even in your very speech you have renounced your great-grandfathers. You always praise antiquity, and you live in new ways from day to day. This shows that, while you depart from the good institutions of your ancestors, you retain and guard what you ought not, since what you ought you have not guarded. Even that which you seem to guard most faithfully as handed down from your fathers, the thing in which above all you have marked out Christians as guilty of transgression, I mean zeal for worshiping the gods, in which antiquity erred most: though you have now rebuilt altars to Serapis, now made Roman, though you offer up your frenzies to Bacchus, now made Italian, I will show in its place that it is likewise despised, neglected, and destroyed by you, against the authority of your ancestors. For now I will answer that infamy of secret crimes, to clear my way to things more open.

We are called the most wicked of people on account of a sacrament of infanticide and the feeding on it, and of incest after the banquet, which the dogs who overturn the lamps, panderers, of course, of darkness, procure, to the shamelessness of impious lusts. We are always called so, yet you take no care to bring to light what we have so long been called. Either bring it to light, then, if you believe it, or stop believing it, since you have not brought it to light. Your own failure to look into it makes the plea against you that there is nothing there which you yourselves do not dare to bring to light. You give the executioner a very different task against Christians: not to make them say what they do, but to make them deny what they are. The origin of this discipline, as we have already stated, dates from Tiberius. Truth began with hatred of itself; as soon as it appeared, it is an enemy. It has as many enemies as there are outsiders: the Jews indeed specifically from rivalry, the soldiers from extortion, and by nature even our own households. Daily we are besieged, daily betrayed; very often we are surprised in our very meetings and assemblies. Who ever came upon a crying infant in such a way? Who kept for the judge the bloody mouths of Cyclopes and Sirens, just as he had found them? Who has detected any impure traces even in the wives? Who, having discovered such crimes, concealed them, or sold his silence while dragging the very people to court? If we are always hidden, when was what we commit betrayed? Indeed, by whom could it have been betrayed? Certainly not by the guilty themselves, since by the very pattern of all mysteries a pledge of silence is owed. The mysteries of Samothrace and Eleusis are kept silent; how much more such things as, once betrayed, would provoke even human punishment at once, while the divine is reserved? If, then, they are not their own betrayers, it follows that outsiders are. And where would outsiders get knowledge, since even holy initiations always shut out the profane and beware of witnesses? Unless the impious are less afraid. The nature of rumor is known to all. It is your own poet's saying: “Rumor, an evil than which no other is swifter.” Why is rumor an evil? Because it is swift? Because it informs? Or because it is mostly a liar? It is not free from the fault of lying even when it brings something true, taking away, adding, changing the truth. What of this, that its condition is such that it lasts only while it lies, and lives only as long as it does not prove? For once it has proved, it ceases to be and, as though it had fulfilled the office of reporting, hands the matter over; from then on the thing is held as fact and called fact. No one says, for example, “They say this was done at Rome,” or, “The rumor is that he has drawn a province,” but, “He has drawn a province,” and, “This was done at Rome.” Rumor, the name for what is uncertain, has no place where there is certainty. Would anyone but a thoughtless person believe rumor? For a wise man does not believe what is uncertain. Anyone can reckon that, however widely it has spread, however confidently it has been built up, it must have arisen at some time from one originator. From there it creeps along the branches of tongues and ears, and the flaw of the little seed so obscures the rest of the report that no one considers whether that first mouth sowed a lie, which often happens, from a jealous disposition, or from a whim of suspicion, or from a pleasure in lying that in some people is not new but inborn. But it is well that time reveals all things, as even your proverbs and sayings testify, by the ordering of nature, which has so arranged it that nothing lies hidden long, even what rumor has not spread. Rightly, then, has rumor alone so long been privy to the crimes of Christians. This is the informer you bring against us; and what it once threw out and over so long a time hardened into opinion it has not been able to prove even until now, so that I appeal to the testimony of nature itself against those who presume such things are to be believed.

See, we set out the reward for these crimes: they promise eternal life. Believe it for the moment. For I ask you this: whether, even if you believed it, you would think it worth reaching with such a conscience. Come, plunge the knife into an infant, enemy of no one, guilty of nothing, everyone's child; or, if that is another's duty, you need only stand by a human being dying before he has lived, wait for the new soul as it flees, catch the fresh blood, soak your bread in it, eat with pleasure. Meanwhile, as you recline, count the places, where your mother is, where your sister; note them carefully, so that when the dogs' darkness falls you make no mistake. For you will have committed a sacrilege if you have not committed incest. Initiated and sealed with such things, you live forever. I want you to answer whether eternity is worth that much. Or if not, then it is not to be believed either. Even if you believed it, I deny that you would want it; even if you wanted it, I deny that you could. Why then could others, if you cannot? Why could you not, if others can? We are of another nature, I suppose: Dog-faces or Shade-feet? We have other rows of teeth, other sinews for incestuous lust? You who believe these things of a human being can also do them. You are a human being yourself, as the Christian is too. You who cannot do them ought not to believe them. For the Christian too is a human being, and what you are. “But they are imposed on the ignorant and slipped upon them.” For, they say, they did not know that anything of the kind was asserted of Christians, which they would surely have had to watch out for and investigate with all vigilance. Yet it is the custom, I suppose, for those who wish to be initiated first to go to the father of the rites and set down what must be prepared. Then he says: “You need an infant, still tender, that does not know death, that will smile under your knife; also bread, to gather up the gush of blood; besides that, lampstands and lamps and some dogs and scraps of food to make them stretch and overturn the lights; above all, you will have to come with your mother and your sister.” What if they will not, or you have none? What, in short, of Christians who are alone in the world? There will be no lawful Christian, I suppose, unless he is a brother or a son. And what if all these things are prepared for people who do not know? Surely they learn of them afterward, and they bear them and pardon them. “They fear punishment if they cry out.” People who will deserve to be protected, who would rather die of their own accord than live with such a conscience! Suppose, then, that they fear: why do they still persevere? For it follows that you would no longer wish to be what, had you known it before, you would not have become.

To refute these things the more, I will show that they are done by you, partly in the open, partly in secret, which is perhaps why you have believed them of us too. In Africa infants were sacrificed to Saturn openly until the proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed those same priests on the very trees of their temple that had overshadowed their crimes, as on votive crosses; witness the soldiery of our own country, which carried out that very task for that proconsul. But even now this sacred crime goes on in secret. Christians are not the only ones who defy you; no crime is rooted out forever, and no god changes his ways. Since Saturn did not spare his own children, he naturally persisted in not sparing others', whom their own parents offered, answering gladly and fondling the infants so that they would not be sacrificed in tears. And yet parricide differs greatly from homicide. Among the Gauls people of riper age are sacrificed to Mercury. I leave the Taurian tales to their own theaters. Look, in that most religious city of the pious descendants of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter whom they drench with human blood at his games. “But it is a beast-fighter's,” you say. Is it, I suppose, less than a man's? Or is it more shameful because it is a bad man's? Certainly it is shed from a killing. A Jupiter who is a Christian, and his father's only son in cruelty! But since in infanticide it makes no difference whether it is committed as a rite or at will, although parricide differs from homicide, I will turn to the people. How many of these who stand round gaping for Christian blood, how many even of you yourselves, governors most just and most severe toward us, shall I knock at the conscience of, as people who kill the children born to them? For if there is a difference too in the manner of death, you surely act more cruelly in choking out their breath in water, or exposing them to cold and hunger and dogs; even an older person would prefer to die by the sword. But for us, murder being once for all forbidden, it is not lawful to destroy even what is conceived in the womb, while blood is still being drawn into a human being. To prevent birth is a hastening of murder; it makes no difference whether one takes away a life already born or destroys one that is being born. He too is a human being who is to be one; the whole fruit is already in the seed. As for feeding on blood and such tragic dishes, read whether it is not related somewhere (it is in Herodotus, I think) that certain nations sealed a treaty by tasting from each other blood drawn from their arms. Something was tasted under Catiline too. They say also that among certain Scythian tribes every dead man is eaten by his own people. I digress too far. Today, here among us, blood consecrated to Bellona, caught in the palm from a gashed thigh and given to be eaten, seals her devotees. Again, where are those who at a gladiatorial show, as a cure for epilepsy, catch and carry off with greedy thirst the fresh blood of slain criminals as it runs from the throat? Where, again, are those who dine on wild-beast meat from the arena, who seek boar, who seek venison? That boar, in the struggle, wiped off the blood of the man he had bloodied. That stag wallowed in a gladiator's blood. The very bellies of the bears are sought, still undigested with human entrails. So flesh fed on man is belched up by man. You who eat these things, how far are you from the banquets of the Christians? And do those do less who with savage lust gape after human bodies, because they devour the living? Are they less consecrated to filth by human blood, because they lick up what is to become blood? They do not eat infants, plainly, but rather grown youths. Let your error blush before the Christians, who do not even have the blood of animals among our foods, who for that reason abstain also from things strangled and things that die of themselves, so that we are not in any way defiled by blood, even blood buried in the flesh. Indeed, among the tests of Christians you offer them sausages stuffed with blood, being quite sure, of course, that the very thing by which you want them to go astray is unlawful among them. Then how is it that you believe that those whom you are sure shudder at the blood of cattle gape after human blood, unless perhaps you have tried it and found it sweeter? It ought, then, to have been applied as a test of Christians, like the brazier, like the incense box. For they would be proved by craving human blood just as by refusing sacrifice; otherwise to be denied as Christians if they had not tasted it, just as if they had sacrificed; and surely you would have no lack of human blood at the hearing and condemnation of prisoners. Then again, who are more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself taught? Ctesias reports that the Persians have intercourse with their own mothers. The Macedonians too are suspect, because, when they first heard the tragedy Oedipus, they laughed at the grief of the incestuous man and said, “He drove on into his mother!” Now consider how much room there is for mistakes that bring about incest, the promiscuity of lust supplying the material. First of all you expose your children, to be taken up by some passing kindness of strangers, or you give them up to be adopted by better parents. The memory of a family so estranged must at some time be lost, and once a mistake has occurred, from then on the line of incest will spread, the family creeping on with the crime. Then, further, in whatever place, at home, abroad, across the seas, lust is your companion, and its leaps everywhere can easily beget children somewhere unknown to the father, even from some small portion of seed, so that a family thus scattered through human dealings runs into its own kin, and the blind man does not recognize them as of incestuous blood. From that outcome a most careful and faithful chastity has fenced us off; and as far as we are safe from sexual immorality and from every excess after marriage, so far are we safe from the chance of incest. Some, much more secure, drive off the whole force of this error by virgin continence: old men who are still boys. If you considered that these things are in you, you would likewise see that they are not in Christians. The same eyes would have reported both. But two kinds of blindness easily go together, so that those who do not see what is, seem to see what is not. So I will show in everything. Now I will speak of the more open charges.

“You do not worship the gods,” you say, “and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.” It follows that for the same reason we do not sacrifice for others, since we do not even for ourselves, once we do not worship the gods. So we are charged with sacrilege and treason. This is the chief point of the case, indeed the whole of it, and certainly worth examining, if neither presumption nor injustice is the judge, the one despairing of the truth, the other refusing it. We stopped worshiping your gods from the time we came to know that they are not gods. This, then, is what you ought to demand: that we prove that they are not gods, and therefore not to be worshiped, because they ought to have been worshiped only if they had been gods. Then Christians too would deserve punishment, if it were established that those whom they did not worship, because they thought they did not exist, were gods. “But to us,” you say, “they are gods.” We appeal from you to your conscience: let it judge us, let it condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were men. If even it denies it, it will be refuted by its own documents of antiquity, from which it learned about them; witness to this day the cities in which they were born and the regions in which they left traces of things they did, in which their graves too are shown. Shall I now run through them one by one, so many and so great, new, old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign, captured, adopted, private, common, male, female, rustic, urban, naval, military? It is idle even to pursue their titles; let me gather them into a summary, and that not so that you may learn but so that you may recall; for you certainly act as if you had forgotten. Before Saturn there is no god among you; from him dates the origin of all divinity, or at least of the more powerful and better known. So what is established about the origin will hold for the descendants too. As for Saturn, then: so far as literature teaches, neither Diodorus the Greek nor Thallus, neither Cassius Severus nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any writer on antiquities of that kind has declared him anything but a man; so far as material evidence goes, I find it nowhere more trustworthy than in Italy itself, where Saturn settled after many expeditions and after enjoying hospitality in Attica, received by Janus, or Janes, as the Salii prefer. The hill he had lived on was called Saturnius; the city he had marked out is still Saturnia; in short, all Italy, after being called Oenotria, was named Saturnia. From him first came writing tablets and coin stamped with an image, and so he presides over the treasury. Yet if Saturn was a man, he was certainly born of a man; and because from a man, certainly not from heaven and earth. But since his parents were unknown, it was easy to call him the son of those whose children we all may seem to be. For who would not, out of veneration and honor, call heaven and earth his father and mother? Or it came from human custom, by which people who are unknown, or who appear unexpectedly, are said to have come down from heaven. So it happened that Saturn, appearing suddenly everywhere, was called heavenly; for the common people also call those whose ancestry is uncertain sons of earth. I say nothing of the fact that people were then still so rude that they were moved by the sight of any new man as by something divine, when today, polished as they are, they consecrate as gods those whom a few days before they acknowledged dead with public mourning. Enough now of Saturn, though briefly. We will show that Jupiter too was as much a man as born of a man, and then the whole swarm of the family as mortal as its seed.

And since, just as you do not dare deny that they were men, so you have taken to asserting that they became gods after death, let us examine the reasons that required this. First of all, you must grant that there is some higher god, a kind of contractor of divinity, who made gods out of men. For they could not have taken divinity on themselves, since they did not have it, nor could anyone else give it to those who lacked it except one who possessed it properly. But if there were no one to make gods, you presume in vain that gods were made, while you remove their maker. Certainly, if they could have made themselves, they would never have been men, since they would have possessed the power of a better condition. If, then, 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 wanted servants and helpers for his divine duties. First, it is unworthy of him to need anyone's help, and a dead man's at that, when, if He was going to want a dead man's help, it would have been more worthy to make some god from the beginning. But I see no room for help either. For this whole body of the world, whether unborn and unmade according to Pythagoras, or born and made according to Plato, was certainly found, once for all in its construction, arranged, equipped, and ordered with every guidance of reason. What has perfected all things could not have been imperfect. It waited for nothing from Saturn and the race of Saturn. People will be foolish unless they are sure that from the beginning rains fell from heaven, and stars shone, and lights blazed, and thunders roared, and Jupiter himself feared the thunderbolts you put in his hand; likewise that every crop sprang abundantly from the earth before Liber and Ceres and Minerva, indeed before that first man, whoever he was, because nothing provided to maintain and sustain man could have been brought in after man. In short, they are said to have discovered these necessities of life, not to have established them. But what is discovered existed, and what existed will be credited not to the one who discovered it but to the one who established it; for it was there before it was discovered. Besides, if Liber is a god because he showed the vine, Lucullus has been badly treated, who first brought cherries from Pontus to Italy, because he has not been consecrated for it as the author of a new fruit, being the one who showed it. Therefore, if the universe has stood from the beginning both equipped and arranged with fixed principles for carrying out its functions, there is on this side no reason for enrolling humanity into divinity, since the stations and powers you have assigned to them existed from the beginning just as they would have existed even if you had not created these gods. But you turn to another reason, answering that the conferring of divinity was a way of rewarding merits. And here, I suppose, you grant that the god who makes gods excels in justice, since he has not dispensed so great a reward rashly, unworthily, or lavishly. I want, then, to review their merits, whether they are such as to have raised them to heaven and not rather to have plunged them into the depths of Tartarus, which you affirm, when you choose, to be the prison of infernal punishments. For there are usually thrust down those who are impious to their parents, and incestuous with their sisters, and adulterers with wives, and ravishers of virgins, and corrupters of boys, and those who rage, and those who kill, and those who steal, and those who deceive, and all who resemble some god of yours, none of whom you will be able to prove free of crime or vice unless you deny he was a man. And yet, so that you cannot deny they were men, these marks are added too, which do not allow us to believe that they became gods afterward either. For if you preside over punishing such people, if all the upright among you reject dealings, conversation, and life in common with the wicked and base, while that god has admitted their equals to share His majesty, why then do you condemn those whose colleagues you adore? Your justice is an affront to heaven. Make gods of all the most criminal, so as to please your gods. It is an honor to them to have their equals consecrated. But to set aside further treatment of this unworthiness, suppose they were upright and blameless and good. Yet how many better men you have left in the underworld! a Socrates for wisdom, an Aristides for justice, a Themistocles for war, an Alexander for greatness, a Polycrates for good fortune, a Croesus for wealth, a Demosthenes for eloquence. Which of those gods of yours is graver and wiser than Cato, more just and more warlike than Scipio? Who is greater than Pompey, more fortunate than Sulla, richer than Crassus, more eloquent than Tullius? How much more worthily would that god have waited to take these as gods, since he certainly foreknew the better ones! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and closed heaven once for all, and now surely blushes while the better men grumble in the underworld.

I stop here, knowing that I shall show from the truth itself what they are not, when I have shown what they are. As far as your gods are concerned, then, I see only the names of certain men long dead, and I hear stories, and I recognize rites based on the stories. As for the images themselves, I find nothing else to object to than that their materials are sisters of common vessels and implements, or come from those very vessels and implements, changing their destiny, as it were, by consecration, while the license of art transforms them, and that most insultingly and sacrilegiously in the very working; so that for us especially, who are punished on account of these very gods, it can truly be a comfort in our punishments that they themselves suffer the same things in order to come into being. You put Christians on crosses and stakes. What image is not first modeled in clay laid over a cross and a stake? It is on a cross that the body of your god is first dedicated. You scrape the sides of Christians with claws. But on your gods axes and planes and rasps work harder over every limb. We lay down our necks. Before the lead and glue and pegs, your gods are headless. We are driven to the beasts: certainly to those you attach to Liber and Cybele and Caelestis. We are burned with fire: so are they, from their first lump. We are condemned to the mines: that is where your gods come from. We are banished to islands: some god of yours is often born or to die on an island. If any divinity is established by these things, then those who are punished are consecrated, and tortures will have to be called divine powers. But plainly your gods do not feel these injuries and insults of their manufacture, any more than they feel acts of homage. “impious words! sacrilegious abuse!” Gnash your teeth, foam at the mouth! You are the same people who rebuked a Seneca, of course, when he declaimed at greater length and more bitterly against your superstition! If, then, we do not adore statues and cold images, so very like their dead originals, which kites and mice and spiders understand well enough, did not the rejection of an error once recognized deserve praise rather than punishment? For can we be thought to injure those whom we are sure do not exist at all? What does not exist suffers nothing from anyone, because it does not exist.

“But to us they are gods,” you say. And how is it that you, on the contrary, are found impious, sacrilegious, and irreligious toward your gods, you who neglect those you presume to exist, destroy those you fear, and mock those you even avenge? Check whether I am lying. First, since you worship different gods, you certainly offend those you do not worship. Preferring one cannot proceed without insulting another, because there is no choosing without rejecting. So you already despise those you reject, and in rejecting them you do not fear to offend them. For, as we touched on above, the status of each god depended on the senate's estimate. He was no god whom a man, when consulted, did not want and, by not wanting, condemned. Your household gods, which you call Lares, you treat with household authority, pawning them, selling them, changing them sometimes from a Saturn into a cooking pot, sometimes from a Minerva into a ladle, as each was worn out and battered by long worship, or as each master found his household need holier. Your public gods you likewise defile by public law, holding them as sources of revenue at the auction. So the Capitol is bid for, so the vegetable market: under the same cry of the auctioneer, under the same spear, under the same entry of the quaestor, divinity is knocked down and leased. But fields burdened with tax are cheaper, and persons assessed for poll tax less noble (for these are marks of captivity); yet gods, the more tributary they are, the holier, or rather, the holier, the more tributary. Majesty is made a source of profit. Religion goes begging round the taverns. You demand a fee for the ground of a temple, for entry to the rite. It is not lawful to know the gods for nothing; they are for sale. What do you do at all to honor them that you do not also bestow on your dead? Temples just the same, altars just the same. The same dress and insignia on the statues. As the dead man's age, art, or business was, so is the god. How does Jupiter's banquet differ from the funeral meal? the sacrificial ladle from the jug for the dead? the soothsayer from the undertaker? For the soothsayer too attends the dead. But you do well to give the honor of divinity to dead emperors, since you assign it to them even while they live. Your gods will take it kindly, indeed will congratulate themselves, that their masters become their equals. But when you adore Larentina, a public prostitute (I could at least wish it were Lais or Phryne), among your Junos and Cereses and Dianas; when you consecrate Simon Magus with a statue and the inscription “Holy God”; when you make some boy from the palace schools a god of the assembly: then, though the old gods are no nobler, they will still count it an insult from you that what antiquity granted to them alone has been allowed to others too.

I want to review your rites too. I do not speak of how you behave in sacrificing, when you slaughter every worn-out, wasted, and mangy beast; when from the choice and sound ones you cut off all the useless parts, the heads and hooves, which at home you would have given to the slave boys or the dogs; when of the tithe owed to Hercules you do not put even a third on his altar (I will rather praise your wisdom in rescuing something from what is lost). But turning to your literature, by which you are trained in wisdom and the liberal duties, what mockeries I find! That the gods fought one another over the Trojans and the Achaeans, matched like pairs of gladiators; that Venus was wounded by a human arrow because she wanted to snatch away her son Aeneas, who had almost been killed by the same Diomedes; that Mars was almost worn away by thirteen months in chains; that Jupiter, so that he would not suffer the same violence from the other heavenly beings, was set free by the help of some monster; and that he now weeps for the fall of Sarpedon, now lusts foully for his sister, recalling mistresses of long ago not so dearly loved. After that, what poet is not found, on the authority of his chief, to be a dishonorer of the gods? One assigns Apollo to King Admetus to pasture his flocks; another hires out Neptune's labor as a builder to Laomedon. There is also that one among the lyric poets (I mean Pindar) who sings that Aesculapius was deservedly judged with a thunderbolt for his greed, because he practiced medicine harmfully. A bad Jupiter, if the thunderbolt is his: impious toward his grandson, jealous of a craftsman. Such things, if true, ought not to have been divulged, nor, if false, invented, among the most religious of people. Nor do the tragic or comic poets spare them either, but they set out in their prologues the troubles or wanderings of some god's house. I say nothing of the philosophers, content with Socrates, who to insult the gods swore by an oak, a goat, and a dog. “But Socrates was condemned for that very reason, because he was destroying the gods.” Plainly, long ago, that is, always, truth is hated. Yet since the Athenians later, repenting of the sentence, punished Socrates' accusers and set up a golden image of him in a temple, the rescinding of the condemnation restored Socrates' testimony. Diogenes too makes some jest or other against Hercules, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings in three hundred Joves, or Jupiters as they should be called, without heads.

Other wanton talents also serve your pleasures through the dishonor of the gods. Examine the elegant pieces of the Lentuli and the Hostilii, whether in their jokes and tricks you are laughing at the mimes or at your gods: Anubis the Adulterer, Luna as a Man, Diana Flogged, the Reading of the Will of the Dead Jupiter, and Three Starving Herculeses Mocked. The literature of the actors too depicts all their foulness. The Sun mourns his son thrown down from heaven, while you rejoice; Cybele sighs for a disdainful shepherd, and you do not blush; you endure the scandals of Jupiter being sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva being judged by a shepherd. When the image of your god covers an infamous and disgraceful head, when a body impure and trained for that art by effeminacy represents some Minerva or Hercules, is not majesty violated and divinity defiled while you applaud? You are plainly more religious in the amphitheater, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance in the same way, supplying plots and stories for the condemned, except that the condemned often wear the costumes of your gods themselves. We have seen at times Attis, that god from Pessinus, castrated, and a man who was being burned alive had been dressed as Hercules. Among the ludicrous cruelties of the midday show we have also laughed at Mercury testing the dead with a branding iron; we have seen Jupiter's brother, too, dragging off the corpses of gladiators with a hammer. Who could track down every one of these things? If they disturb the honor of divinity, if they wear away the traces of majesty, they are surely to be put down to contempt, both of those who do such things and of those for whom they do them. Still, people will say that these are merely performances. If, however, I add what the consciences of all will recognize no less, that adulteries are arranged in temples, that pimping is done among the altars, that very often in the very lodgings of the temple-keepers and priests, under the same fillets and caps and purple, with the incense burning, lust is satisfied, I do not know whether your gods do not complain more of you than of the Christians. Certainly temple-robbers are always caught among your own. For Christians do not know the temples even by day; perhaps they too would rob them, if they too adored them. What, then, do those worship who do not worship such things? It is now open to understand that those are worshipers of the truth who are not worshipers of falsehood, and that they no longer err in that in which, by recognizing that they had erred, they have ceased to err. Take this in first, and from here draw the whole order of our religion, though only after false opinions have first been refuted.

For, like some others, you have dreamed that an ass's head is our god. Cornelius Tacitus planted this suspicion of such a god. For in the fifth book of his Histories, beginning the Jewish war from the origin of the nation, and arguing as he pleased about both the origin and the name and the religion of the nation, he relates that the Jews, set free from Egypt or, as he thought, expelled, were wasting away with thirst in the vast and waterless regions of Arabia, and used as guides to a spring some wild asses that were thought to be going from pasture to drink; and in gratitude for this they consecrated the likeness of that beast. And so from this, I suppose, it was presumed that we too, as near relations of the Jewish religion, are initiated into the same image. But that same Cornelius Tacitus, truly the most talkative of liars, relates in the same history that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and had therefore entered the temple to inspect the secrets of the Jewish religion, found no image there. And surely, if what was worshiped was represented by some likeness, it would be displayed nowhere more than in its sanctuary, all the more because, however vain the worship, it had no fear of outside witnesses there. For only the priests were allowed to approach; even the sight of it was forbidden to others by a curtain drawn across. You, however, will not deny that you worship all beasts of burden and whole stables of nags, together with their Epona. Perhaps we are blamed for this, that among worshipers of all cattle and beasts we are worshipers of asses only. And whoever thinks us devotees of the cross will be our fellow-devotee. When some piece of wood is propitiated, never mind its appearance, since the quality of the material is the same; never mind its shape, so long as it is the very body of the god. And yet how far is the Attic Pallas, or the Pharian Ceres, which are set up without form as a rough stake and shapeless wood, from the stake of a cross? Every timber fixed in an upright position is part of a cross. We, if it comes to that, worship a god complete and whole. We have said that your gods take their origin from the modelers on a cross. But you also adore Victories, though in trophies crosses are the inner frames of the trophies. The religion of the Romans, a camp religion through and through, venerates the standards, swears by the standards, sets the standards before all the gods. All those masses of images on the standards are necklaces of crosses; those hangings of the banners and flags are robes of crosses. I praise your care: you did not want to consecrate crosses unadorned and bare. Others, plainly more humanely and more plausibly, believe that the sun is our god. We shall be grouped with the Persians, perhaps, though we do not adore the sun painted on linen, having it everywhere in its own disk. In fact the suspicion comes from its being known that we pray toward the region of the east. But many of you too, affecting sometimes to adore even the heavenly bodies, move your lips toward the sunrise. Likewise, if we give the day of the sun to rejoicing, for a reason far different from worship of the sun, we stand second to those who set apart the day of Saturn for rest and feasting, themselves too departing from the Jewish custom, of which they are ignorant. But a new representation of our god has lately been published in this city, ever since a certain criminal, hired to dodge the beasts, put up a picture with an inscription of this kind: THE GOD OF THE CHRISTIANS, ONOKOITES. He had ass's ears, was hoofed in one foot, carried a book, and wore a toga. We laughed at both the name and the form. But they ought to have adored at once a two-formed deity, since they have accepted gods compounded with dog's heads and lion's heads, horned like goats and rams, goats from the loins, serpents from the legs, winged on the foot or the back. We have said these things more than was needed, so that we do not seem to pass over any rumor unrefuted, as if from a guilty conscience. Having cleared all these away, we turn now to the demonstration of our religion.

What we worship is the one God, who by the word by which he commanded, the reason by which he arranged, and the power by which he was able, brought forth from nothing this whole mass with all its equipment of elements, bodies, and spirits, as an adornment of His majesty; which is why the Greeks too gave the world the name kosmos (“adornment”). He is invisible, though He is seen; incomprehensible, though He is made present by grace; beyond reckoning, though he is understood by human senses. That is why he is true and so great. Whatever can be seen, comprehended, and understood in the ordinary way is less than the eyes by which it is taken in, the hands by which it is soiled, and the senses by which it is found; but what is immeasurable is known to itself alone. This is what makes God to be understood, that he cannot be grasped by reckoning. So the force of his greatness presents him to men as both known and unknown. And this is the sum of the guilt of those who will not acknowledge him whom they cannot fail to know. Do you want us to prove him from His own works, so many and so great, by which we are held together, sustained, delighted, and even terrified? Do you want us to prove him from the testimony of the soul itself? Though it is pressed down in the prison of the body, though hemmed in by perverse teachings, though enfeebled by lusts and desires, though enslaved to false gods, yet when it comes to its senses, as from drunkenness, as from sleep, as from some illness, and enjoys its health, it names God, by this name alone, because this is properly the one true God. “Good God,” “Great God,” and “May God grant it” are on everyone's lips. It also calls him to witness as judge: “God sees,” and “I commend it to God,” and “God will repay me.” testimony of the soul naturally Christian! Finally, as it says these things, it looks not to the Capitol but to heaven. For it knows the seat of the living God; from Him and from there it came down.

But so that we might approach more fully and more forcefully both him and His dispensations and will, he added the provision of writings, for anyone who wishes to inquire about God, and having inquired to find, and having found to believe, and having believed to serve. For from the beginning He sent into the world men worthy, by their righteousness and innocence, to know God and to make Him known, flooded with the divine Spirit, so that they might proclaim that God is one, who created all things, who formed man from the ground (for He is the true Prometheus), who ordered the world with fixed dispensations and ends of the times; and then what signs of His judging majesty he has given through floods and fires; what disciplines he has laid down for winning His favor; what rewards he has appointed for those who ignore and abandon them and for those who keep them; seeing that at the end of this age he will judge His worshipers for the reward of eternal life, and the profane for a fire equally perpetual and unceasing, when all who have died from the beginning have been raised, re-formed, and reviewed for the settling of either desert. These things we too once laughed at. We are from among you. Christians are made, not born. Those whom we have called preachers are called prophets, from their office of foretelling. Their words, and likewise the miracles they performed to win faith in the Godhead, remain in the treasuries of literature, and these are not hidden. The most learned of the Ptolemies, whom they surname Philadelphus, and most skilled in all literature, when in his zeal for libraries he was emulating Pisistratus, I suppose, among other records that antiquity or some curiosity commended to fame, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, the most esteemed scholar of the time, to whom he had entrusted the charge, asked the Jews too for their books, their own native literature, which they alone had. For it was from among them and to them that the prophets had always spoken, namely to the household nation of God, by the favor shown to the fathers. Those who are now Jews were formerly Hebrews; hence both the Hebrew literature and speech. But so that knowledge of it would not be lacking, this too was granted to Ptolemy by the Jews: seventy-two translators were provided, whom Menedemus too, the philosopher who championed providence, admired for their agreement in meaning.⁠a Aristeas too has affirmed this to you. So he left these records opened up in the Greek language. Today the libraries of Ptolemy at the Serapeum display them, together with the Hebrew texts themselves. The Jews too read them openly. Their liberty pays a tax; they are visited by the public every Sabbath. Whoever listens will find God; whoever also takes pains to understand will be compelled to believe as well.

Supreme antiquity first claims authority for these writings. With you too it is almost a matter of religion to establish credibility from dates. [Their supreme antiquity gives these writings authority. For Moses was the first prophet; he began from the past with the founding of the world, the sprouting of the human race, and soon the avenging force of the flood upon the wickedness of that age; by prophecy he set out events down to his own time, and then, through his own history, images of things to come; and with him the order of times, arranged from the beginning, furnished a reckoning of the world's age. He is found to be about three hundred years earlier than the time when that most ancient of yours, Danaus, crossed over to Argos; and he is about a thousand years before the Trojan war, and so before Saturn himself. For according to the history of Thallus, in which it is related that the Assyrians' war took place, and that Saturn, king of the Titans, fought with Jupiter, that war is shown to have preceded the fall of Ilium by three hundred and twenty-two years. Through this Moses also that law proper to the Jews was sent by God. After him many other prophets too are older than your literature. For even the one who prophesied last either preceded a little or at least was contemporary with your authors of wisdom, and even with your lawgivers. For Zechariah lived in the reign of Cyrus and Darius, at which time Thales, the first of the natural philosophers, gave Croesus no certain answer about divinity when asked, disturbed, no doubt, by the words of the prophets. Solon told the same king to look to the end of a long life, just as the prophets did. So it can be seen that both your laws and your studies were conceived from the law and from divine teaching. What is earlier must be the seed. Hence you have certain things in common with us, or near to us. From sophia (wisdom), love of it was called philosophia; from prophetia, the imitation of it produced poetic soothsaying. Men eager for glory, if they found anything, adulterated it to make it their own. Even fruits come to degenerate from their seed. I would still dwell in many ways on the antiquity of the divine writings, if they did not have a greater authority for belief from the power of their truth than from the annals of their age. For what will plead more powerfully for their testimony than the daily fulfillment throughout the whole world, when the dispositions of kingdoms, the falls of cities, the ends of nations, the states of the times all correspond just as they were foretold thousands of years before? From this our hope, which you mock, is enlivened, and our confidence, which you call presumption, is strengthened. For the recognition of the past is a fit basis for confidence about the future. The same voices foretold both parts; the same writings recorded them. With them there is one time, which with us seems to be divided. So all that remains unproved has been proved to us, because it was foretold together with what has been proved, when that was still future. You too, so far as I know, have a Sibyl, inasmuch as this name of a true prophet of the true God has been usurped here and there for others who seemed to prophesy. Your Sibyls have falsely borne a name taken from the truth, just as your gods have.] So all the substances and all the materials, origins, orders, and veins of every ancient writing of yours, even most nations and cities famous in history and hoary in memory, the very forms of letters themselves, the guides and guardians of things, and (I think we still say too little) your very gods, I say, your very temples and oracles and rites, are surpassed by ages by the book-chest of a single prophet, in which seems to be stored the treasure of the whole Jewish religion, and from it of ours too. If you have heard of Moses meanwhile, he is of the same age as Inachus of Argos. By nearly four hundred years (seven fewer, in fact) he precedes Danaus, himself the most ancient among you; he comes about a thousand years before the fall of Priam; I could even say five hundred more before Homer, having authorities to follow. Are not the other prophets too, though later than Moses, found, even the last of them, to be no later than your first wise men, lawgivers, and historians? By what lines of proof these things could be shown is not so much difficult for us to set out as enormous; not hard, but for now long. One would have to sit down with many documents, with gestures of finger-reckoning; the archives of even the most ancient nations would have to be unlocked, of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Phoenicians; their own citizens through whom the knowledge has been supplied would have to be called on, such as Manetho the Egyptian and Berosus the Chaldean, and also Hieromus the Phoenician, king of Tyre; their followers too, Ptolemy of Mendes, Menander of Ephesus, Demetrius of Phalerum, King Juba, Apion, and Thallus; and, whoever proves or refutes these, the Jew Josephus, native champion of Jewish antiquities; the Greek registers too would have to be compared, so that what was done when, and the links of the times, might be laid open, through which the numbers of the annals might shine; one must travel through the histories and literature of the world. And yet we have already brought in part of the proof, as it were, in sprinkling in the means by which it could be proved. But it is better to defer it, so that we neither pursue it less fully by hurrying nor wander too long in pursuing it.

In return for this postponement we now offer something more: the majesty of the Scriptures, if we do not prove them divine by their age, if their antiquity is doubted. You can see this immediately, without looking elsewhere. Before your eyes are the things that will teach it: the world, the age, and events. Whatever happens was foretold; whatever is seen was heard before. That the earth swallows cities, that seas rob us of islands, that foreign and civil wars tear things apart, that kingdoms clash with kingdoms, that famine and plague and local disasters of every kind and frequent heaps of deaths lay waste, that the lowly are exchanged for exaltation and the exalted for lowliness, that justice grows rare and iniquity increases, that care for all good disciplines grows sluggish, that even the duties of the seasons and the functions of the elements go astray, that the form of natural things is disturbed by monsters and portents: all this was written with foresight. While we suffer it, it is read; while we recognize it, it is proved. A fit testimony to divinity, I suppose, is the truth of its foretelling. Here, then, among us faith in future things too is secure, as things already proved, because they were foretold together with those that are proved daily. The same voices sound, the same writings record, the same Spirit drives them; one time belongs to the prophecy that foretells the future. Among men, perhaps, time is divided as the prophecy is fulfilled, as the future is considered present, and then the present past. What wrong do we do, I ask you, in believing also the future, we who have already learned to believe in it by two steps?

But since we have stated that this school rests on the very ancient writings of the Jews, whereas most people know it to be rather new, as dating from the time of Tiberius (and we ourselves admit it), perhaps on this ground a question may be raised about its standing, as though it were hiding some presumption of its own under the shelter of a most distinguished religion, one at any rate permitted by law; or because, apart from age, we have nothing in common with the Jews in the restrictions on food, or the solemnities of days, or the very sign on the body, or in sharing their name, which surely ought to be the case if we were in service to the same God. But the common people too already know of Christ, as some man, such as the Jews judged him, so that anyone may the more easily have thought us worshipers of a man. But we are neither ashamed of Christ, since we rejoice to be identified under His name and condemned for it, nor do we think otherwise about God. We must therefore say a few things about Christ as God. Long ago the Jews enjoyed favor with God, when there was outstanding righteousness and faith in the founders of their race; from this there flourished for them both the greatness of their race and the loftiness of their kingdom, and so great a happiness that by the words of God by which they were taught they were warned beforehand how to win God's favor and not offend him. But how greatly they sinned, puffed up by confidence in their fathers to the point of turning aside, departing from the discipline into a profane way, their present outcome would prove, even if they did not themselves confess it. Scattered, wandering, exiled from their own soil and sky, they roam the world without a man or God as king, not allowed even by the right of strangers to greet their native land with so much as a footstep. When the holy voices threatened them with this beforehand, all of them always pressed the same point: that in the last courses of the age God would choose for himself, from every nation and people and place, worshipers much more faithful, to whom He would transfer His favor, and that more fully, because of their capacity for a fuller discipline. He came, then, who was foretold as coming from God to reform and enlighten it: that Christ, the Son of God. Of this favor and discipline, then, the Son of God was announced as the arbiter and teacher, the enlightener and guide of the human race; not, however, born in such a way that he need blush at the name of son or at His father's seed. It was not through incest with a sister, nor the violation of a daughter or another man's wife, that he had for father a god scaled or horned or feathered, or a lover turned into gold for Danaë. These divinities of yours are Jupiter's doings. But the Son of God has no mother from unchastity; even the one he seems to have had never married. But first I will explain His substance, and so the nature of His birth will be understood. We have already said that God fashioned this universe of the world by word and reason and power. Among your wise men too it is agreed that the Logos, that is, word and reason, seems to be the craftsman of the universe. For Zeno defines him as the maker who formed all things in their arrangement; the same, he says, is called fate and god and the mind of Jupiter and the necessity of all things. Cleanthes gathers these into spirit, which he affirms pervades the universe. And we too ascribe to the word and reason, and likewise to the power, through which we have said God fashioned all things, spirit as their proper substance: in it is the word when it speaks, reason is present when it arranges, and power presides when it accomplishes. This, we have learned, was brought forth from God, and in being brought forth was generated, and is therefore called Son of God and God, from unity of substance. For God too is spirit. When a ray is extended from the sun, it is a portion from the whole; but the sun will be in the ray, because it is the sun's ray, and the substance is not separated but extended. So from spirit comes spirit and from God God, as light is lit from light. The source of the material remains whole and undiminished, even if you borrow from it many offshoots of its quality: so too what has come forth from God is God and God's Son, and both are one. So also, spirit from spirit and God from God, He made a second in mode, in number, in rank, not in condition, and He did not withdraw from the source but went out from it. This ray of God, then, as was always foretold in the past, descended into a certain virgin and, formed as flesh in her womb, is born man mixed with God. The flesh, furnished with spirit, is nourished, grows up, speaks, teaches, works, and is Christ. Accept this story for now (it is like yours) while we show how Christ is proved, and who those are among you who put about rival stories of this kind beforehand to destroy the truth of this one. The Jews too knew that Christ would come, being those to whom the prophets spoke. For even now they await his coming, and there is no greater clash between us and them than that they do not believe he has already come. For two comings of his were signified: the first, already fulfilled in the lowliness of the human condition; the second, which hangs over the close of the age, in the loftiness of divinity made manifest. Not understanding the first, they thought that the second, which they hope for as more clearly foretold, was the only one. That they should not understand the former was the desert of their sin; for if they had understood it they would have believed, and if they had believed they would have obtained salvation. They themselves read that it is written that they are punished by the loss of wisdom and understanding, and of the use of eyes and ears. Since, then, they had presumed him only a man from his lowliness, it followed that they should think Him a magician from his power, when with a word He cast demons out of men, gave light again to the blind, cleansed lepers, braced up paralytics, finally restored the dead to life with a word, and made the very elements serve Him, calming storms and walking on the sea, showing that He was the Word of God, that is, the Logos, that primordial, first-begotten Word, accompanied by power and reason and supported by spirit, the same who by His word both made and had made all things. But at his teaching, by which the teachers and leaders of the Jews were refuted, they were so exasperated, especially because a huge multitude turned aside to Him, that at last they brought Him before Pontius Pilate, then governing Syria on behalf of Rome, and by the violence of their votes extorted that Jesus be handed over to them to be crucified. He Himself had foretold that they would do this; that would be little, if the prophets had not also done so long before. And yet, fastened to the cross, He showed many signs proper to that death. For he dismissed his spirit with a word, of His own accord, anticipating the executioner's office. At the same moment the daylight was withdrawn, while the sun was marking the middle of its circuit. Those who did not know that this too had been foretold about Christ certainly thought it an eclipse. And yet you have that world-portent recorded in your archives. Then the Jews, when he had been taken down and laid in a tomb, surrounded it with great care, even with a large military guard, for fear that, since He had foretold that he would rise from death on the third day, His disciples should remove the corpse by stealth and deceive those already suspicious. But see, on the third day the earth was suddenly shaken, the mass that had blocked the tomb was rolled back, the guard was scattered in terror, and, with no disciples appearing, nothing was found in the tomb but the wrappings of the one buried. Nevertheless the leaders, whose interest it was both to spread a crime abroad and to recall from the faith a people tributary and subservient to them, put it about that he had been stolen by the disciples. For he did not show himself to the crowd, so that the impious would not be freed from their error, so that faith too, destined for no small reward, might stand firm through difficulty. But with certain disciples He spent forty days in Galilee, a region of Judea, teaching them what they were to teach. Then, having appointed them to the office of preaching throughout the world, He was enveloped in a cloud and taken up into heaven, much more truly than your Proculuses often assert of Romulus. All these things about Christ Pilate, himself already a Christian in his conscience, reported to Tiberius, then Caesar. And the Caesars too would have believed in Christ, if either Caesars had not been necessary to the world, or Christians could also have been Caesars. The disciples too, spread through the world, obeyed the precept of their divine master; they too suffered much from the Jews who pursued them, and gladly, out of confidence in the truth, at last at Rome, through Nero's cruelty, sowed Christian blood. But we will show you as fit witnesses of Christ those very beings whom you adore. It is much if I call on those to make you believe the Christians on whose account you do not believe the Christians. Meanwhile, this is the order of our institution; we have set out the origin of both the school and the name, together with its founder. Let no one now cast infamy on it; let no one think otherwise, for it is not right for anyone to lie about his own religion. For by saying that he worships something other than he worships, he denies what he worships, and transfers worship and honor to another, and by transferring it no longer worships what he has denied. We say, and say openly, and while you torture us, torn and bloody, we cry out: We worship God through Christ. Think him a man, if you like; through Him and in Him God wills to be known and worshiped. To answer the Jews: they too learned to worship the Lord through a man, Moses. To meet the Greeks: Orpheus in Pieria, Musaeus at Athens, Melampus at Argos, Trophonius in Boeotia bound men by initiations. To look to you too, rulers of the nations: Numa Pompilius was a man, and he loaded the Romans with most laborious superstitions. Let Christ too have been allowed to set forth a divinity, a thing His own, not to soften rude and still savage men into civilization by stunning them with the multitude of so many divinities to be won over, as Numa did, but to open the eyes of men already polished, and deceived by their very refinement, to the knowledge of the truth. Inquire, then, whether this divinity of Christ is true. If it is the one by whose knowledge a person is reformed to the good, it follows that the false one should be renounced, once all that system is found out which, lurking under the names and images of the dead, produces belief in divinity through certain signs and miracles and oracles.

And so we say that there exist certain spiritual substances. Nor is the name new. Philosophers know of demons, Socrates himself waiting on the decision of his daimonion. Why not? since a daimonion is said to have clung to him from boyhood, one that plainly dissuaded him from good. All the poets know of them; even the unlearned crowd uses the word often in cursing. For it also pronounces Satan, the prince of this evil race, with the same word of execration, from the soul's own awareness. Even Plato did not deny angels. The magicians too are at hand as witnesses to both names. But how from certain angels, corrupted of their own will, a more corrupt race of demons arose, condemned by God together with the authors of their race and with that prince we have named, is explained in sequence in the holy writings.⁠a For now it will be enough to set out their activity. Their activity is the ruin of man. So spiritual malice began from the first with the destruction of man. Therefore on bodies they inflict diseases and certain bitter mishaps, and on the soul sudden and extraordinary violent derangements. Their subtlety and fineness give them access to both parts of man's substance. Spiritual powers can do much, so that, being invisible and imperceptible, they appear in their effect rather than in their action: as when some hidden blight in the air casts down fruit or grain in flower, kills it in the bud, wounds it in its ripening, and as when the air, tainted by some unseen cause, pours out its pestilential breaths. With the same obscurity of contagion, then, the breath of demons and angels also works corruption of the mind, with frenzies and foul madness, or savage lusts together with various errors, the chief of which is the one by which it commends these gods to the captured and deceived minds of men, so as to procure for itself its own food of savor and blood offered to statues and images. And what more choice pasture is there for it than to turn man from the thought of the true divinity by false deceptions? How it works these too I will explain. Every spirit is winged: angels and demons are so. So in a moment they are everywhere; the whole world is one place to them; what is done where they know as easily as they report it. Their speed is believed to be divinity, because their substance is unknown. So they sometimes want to be thought the authors of what they report. And they plainly are sometimes the authors of evils, but never of goods. They even picked up the dispositions of God when the prophets preached them, and they glean them now as the readings resound. So, taking from here certain fortunes of the times, they imitate divinity while they steal divination. As for oracles, with what skill they adjust their ambiguities to the outcome the Croesuses know, the Pyrrhuses know. Besides, the Pythian reported that a tortoise was being boiled with the flesh of a sheep in the way we have described: in a moment he had been in Lydia. From living in the air, near the stars, and in contact with the clouds, they can know the preparations of the sky, so that they promise rains they already feel. They are plainly beneficent too in the care of health. For first they injure, then they prescribe remedies, new or contrary, to produce a miracle, after which they stop injuring and are believed to have cured. Why should I go on about the other tricks, or even the powers, of spiritual deceit? the apparitions of the Castors, water carried in a sieve, a ship drawn along by a girdle, a beard turned red by a touch, so that stones might be believed gods and the true God not be sought?

Further, if magicians too produce apparitions and dishonor the souls of the dead, if they strike down boys to make them utter oracles, if they perform many marvels by juggling tricks, if they even send dreams, having the assisting power of angels and demons once invited, through whom even goats and tables are accustomed to divine, how much more would that power strive with all its strength to do of its own will and for its own business what it provides for another's trade! Or if angels and demons do the same as your gods, where then is the superiority of divinity, which must surely be believed higher than every power? Will it not, then, be more worthily presumed that it is they who make themselves gods, since they produce the same things that cause gods to be believed in, than that the gods are equal to angels and demons? They are distinguished by a difference of place, I suppose, so that because of their temples you think those gods whom elsewhere you do not call gods; so that one who flies over the sacred towers seems mad in one way, and one who leaps over the roofs of the neighborhood in another, and one power is declared in the man who cuts his genitals or his arms, another in the man who cuts his own throat. The outcome of the frenzy is the same, and the method of instigation is one. But enough of words; from here on, a demonstration of the thing itself, by which we will show that the quality of both names is one. Let someone be brought forward here, right before your tribunals, who is agreed to be driven by a demon. Ordered by any Christian to speak, that spirit will confess himself a demon as truly as elsewhere he calls himself a god falsely. Likewise let one be brought forward of those thought to be possessed by a god, who, breathing over the altars, conceive the deity from the fumes, who are cured by belching, who prophesy by panting. That very Virgin Caelestis, the promiser of rains, that very Aesculapius, the discoverer of medicines, who supplied another day to Socordius and Tenatius and Asclepiodotus when they were about to die: if they do not confess themselves demons, not daring to lie to a Christian, then and there shed the blood of that most impudent Christian! What is clearer than this deed? What more trustworthy than this proof? The simplicity of truth is in the open. Its own power stands by it; there will be no room for suspicion. Do you say it is done by magic or some such deceit? You will not say so, if your eyes and ears allow you. And what can be objected against what is shown with naked sincerity? If on the one side they really are gods, why do they lie that they are demons? Is it to oblige us? Then your divinity is already subject to Christians, and that cannot be counted divinity which is subject to man, and, if it adds anything to the disgrace, to its rivals. If on the other side they are demons or angels, why do they answer elsewhere that 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 really gods, for fear of removing themselves from their majesty, so too those whom you know outright as demons would not dare elsewhere to act as gods, if those whose names they use were gods at all. For they would fear to abuse the majesty of beings undoubtedly superior and to be feared. So this divinity that you hold is nothing, because, if it existed, it would neither be claimed by demons in confession nor denied by gods. Since, then, both parties agree in confessing, denying that they are gods, recognize that there is one kind, namely demons, truly on both sides. Now look for gods; for those you had presumed to be gods you know to be demons. And by the same work of ours, since these same gods of yours reveal not only that neither they themselves are gods nor any others, you learn at once also who is truly God, and whether it is He, and whether He alone, whom we Christians profess, and whether he is to be believed and worshiped as the faith and discipline of Christians are arranged. They will say then and there: “And who is that Christ with his story? Was he a man of the common condition? A magician? Was he stolen from the tomb by his disciples after death? Is he, in short, now among the dead below? Is he not rather in heaven, and coming from there with the shaking of the whole world, with the horror of the globe, with the lamentation of all, but not of Christians, as the power of God and the Spirit of God, the Word and Wisdom and Reason and Son of God?” Whatever you laugh at, let them laugh at it with you; let them deny that Christ will judge every soul from the beginning of time, with its body restored; let them say before the tribunal, if they like, that Minos and Rhadamanthus have been allotted this task, as Plato and the poets agree; let them at least refute the mark of their own disgrace and condemnation. They declare that they are unclean spirits, which ought to have been understood even from their foods, blood and smoke and the stinking pyres of cattle, and from the most impure tongues of their prophets themselves; let them deny that for their wickedness they are condemned in advance to that same day of judgment with all their worshipers and works. But all this mastery and power of ours over them is effective from naming Christ and from recalling what they expect to come upon them from God through Christ the judge. Fearing Christ in God and God in Christ, they are subjected to the servants of God and of Christ. So at our touch and breath, seized by the contemplation and representation of that fire, they depart even from bodies at our command, unwilling and grieving and blushing 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 disgrace, but rather for his honor. Credibility is nearer to those who confess against themselves than to those who deny in their own favor. Such testimonies of your gods, in short, often make Christians; by believing them as fully as possible we believe in Christ the Lord. They themselves kindle faith in our writings; they themselves build up the confidence of our hope. You worship them, so far as I know, even with the blood of Christians. They would not, then, wish to lose you, so profitable, so dutiful to them, nor to be put to flight some day by you when you become Christians, if they were allowed to lie under questioning by a Christian who wishes to prove the truth to you.

This whole confession of theirs, in which they deny that they are gods and answer that there is no other god but the one to whom we belong, is quite sufficient to repel the charge of injuring religion, above all the Roman religion. For if they are certainly not gods, then certainly there is no religion; if there is no religion, because there are certainly no gods, then certainly we are not guilty of injuring religion. On the contrary, the reproach has rebounded on you, who, worshiping a lie, and not only neglecting the true religion of the true God but even attacking it, commit the real crime of true irreligion. Now, even supposing it were agreed that they are gods, do you not grant, by common estimation, that there is someone higher and more powerful, a kind of prince of the world, of perfect power and majesty? For most people arrange divinity so that they would have the command of supreme dominion rest with one and its offices with many, as Plato describes great Jupiter in heaven accompanied by an army of gods and demons alike. So, they say, the procurators and prefects and governors too must likewise be looked up to. And yet what crime does he commit who, the better to win Caesar's favor, directs his effort and his hope to Caesar himself, and does not grant the title of god to any subordinate chief, any more than that of emperor, since it is judged a capital offense to call anyone but Caesar by it, or to hear him so called? Let one worship God, another Jupiter; let one stretch suppliant hands to heaven, another to the altar of Faith; let one, if you think so, count the clouds as he prays, another the panels of the ceiling; let one vow his own life to his god, another a goat's. For see whether this too does not contribute to the charge of irreligion: to take away freedom of religion and forbid choice of divinity, so that I may not worship whom I will but am compelled to worship whom I will not. No one will wish to be worshiped by an unwilling worshiper, not even a man. And so even the Egyptians have been granted the right to so vain a superstition, to consecrate birds and beasts and to condemn to death anyone who kills a god of this kind. Every province and city also has its own god: Syria Astarte, Arabia Dusares, the Norici Belenus, Africa Caelestis, Mauretania its own princes. I have named Roman provinces, I think, and yet not Roman gods of theirs, because they are no more worshiped at Rome than those who are ranked as gods by local consecration throughout Italy itself: Delventinus of the Casinians, Visidianus of the Narnians, Ancharia of the Asculans, Nortia of the Volsinians, Valentia of the Ocriculans, Hostia of the Sutrians; and among the Faliscans Juno too received a surname in honor of Father Curis. But we alone are kept from a religion of our own. We offend the Romans and are not held to be Romans, because we do not worship the god of the Romans. It is well that there is a God of all, whose we all are, whether we will or not. But with you it is lawful to worship anything except the true God, as though He were not rather the God of all, whose we all are.

I think I have proved enough about false and true divinity, having shown how the proof stands, not only by disputations and arguments but even by the testimony of the very beings you believe to be gods, so that nothing further needs to be reconsidered on this question. Since, however, the Roman name in particular has come up, I will not pass over the contest provoked by the presumption of those who say that the Romans, as the reward for their most careful religiousness, have been raised to such heights that they have seized the world, and that the gods are so real that those who serve them beyond all others flourish beyond all others. This reward, of course, has been paid out by the Roman gods in gratitude: Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina have advanced the empire! For I would not think that foreign gods wished to favor a foreign nation more than their own, and handed over to people from across the sea the native soil in which they were born, grew up, became famous, and were buried. Let Cybele see to it, if she loved the city of Rome as a memorial of the Trojan race, her own native people, protected of course against the arms of the Achaeans; if she foresaw that she would pass over to the avengers who she knew would subdue Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia. And so she gave a great proof of her majesty conferred on the city even in our own age: when Marcus Aurelius had been taken from the state at Sirmium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of April, that most holy chief Gallus, on the ninth day before the same Kalends, as he poured out his impure blood, castrating his arms too, issued the usual commands for the welfare of the emperor Marcus, who had already been cut off. slow messengers! sleepy dispatches! through whose fault Cybele did not learn of the emperor's death sooner, so that the Christians might not laugh at such a goddess. But Jupiter would not at once have let his Crete be shaken by the Roman fasces, forgetting that cave on Ida, and the bronze cymbals of the Corybants, and the most delightful fragrance of his nurse there. Would he not have preferred that tomb of his to the whole Capitol, so that the land that covered the ashes of Jupiter might rather excel over the world? Would Juno wish the Punic city, loved more than Samos, to be destroyed by the race of Aeneas? So far as I know, “here were her arms, here her chariot; that this should be a kingdom for the nations, if the fates allow, the goddess even then intends and cherishes.” That wretched wife and sister of Jupiter could do nothing against the fates! Plainly “Jupiter himself stands by fate.” And yet the Romans did not give as much honor to the fates, who handed Carthage over to them against the purpose and prayer of Juno, as to that most prostituted she-wolf Larentina. It is certain that many of your gods were kings. If, then, they hold the power of conferring empire, from whom had they received that favor when they themselves reigned? Whom had Saturn and Jupiter worshiped? Some Sterculus, I suppose. But afterward, did the Romans worship, along with their native gods, even some who had never reigned? Yet these were ruled by others who were not yet their worshipers, since they were not yet held to be gods. So giving a kingdom belongs to others, since there was reigning long before these gods were carved. But how vain it is to credit the height of the Roman name to the merits of religiousness, when religion advanced after the empire, or rather the kingdom, was established! Come now, did religion advance their affairs? For although a superstitious meticulousness was conceived by Numa, yet divine worship among the Romans did not yet consist of images or temples. Religion was frugal, the rites were poor; there were no Capitols vying with heaven, but makeshift altars of turf, vessels still of Samian clay, savor rising from them, and the god himself nowhere. For the talents of the Greeks and the Etruscans had not yet flooded the city with the making of images. So the Romans were not religious before they were great, and therefore they were not great because they were religious. Indeed, how could they be great because 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. And wars and victories consist mostly of cities captured and overthrown. That business is not without injury to the gods. The same destruction of walls and of temples, equal slaughter of citizens and of priests, similar theft of sacred and of secular wealth. So the Romans have as many sacrileges as trophies, as many triumphs over gods as over nations, as many captured treasures as there are images of captive gods still remaining. And so the gods allow themselves to be adored by their enemies, and decree empire without end to those whose injuries rather than flatteries they ought to have repaid. But those who feel nothing are injured as safely as they are worshiped in vain. Certainly it cannot be credible that those grew 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 into the whole of the Roman empire were not without religions when they lost them.

See, then, whether it is not he who dispenses kingdoms, whose is both the world that is ruled and the man himself who rules; whether it is not He who has ordered the succession of dominions in the world according to their times, who was before all time and made the world a body of times; whether it is not he who raises up or casts down cities, under whom the human race once existed without cities. Why do you go astray? Rome in its woodland days is older than some of her gods; she reigned before she built so great a circuit of the Capitol. The Babylonians too had reigned before the pontiffs, the Medes before the Fifteen, the Egyptians before the Salii, the Assyrians before the Luperci, the Amazons before the Vestal Virgins. Finally, if Roman religions grant kingdoms, Judea would never in the past have reigned, despiser as she was of these common divinities of yours; Judea, whose God you Romans for some time honored with victims, and her temple with gifts, and her nation with treaties; and you would never have ruled her, had she not finally sinned against God in regard to Christ.

Enough of this against the charge of injuring divinity, so that we do not seem to injure what we have shown does not exist. So, when called on to sacrifice, we refuse to take the step, out of loyalty to our conscience, by which we are sure to whom those services go under the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names. But some think it madness that, when we could both sacrifice on the spot and go away unharmed, keeping our resolve in our minds, we prefer obstinacy to safety. You give us advice, of course, by which we might take advantage of you; but we recognize where such suggestions come from, who is stirring all this up, and how he works, now by cunning persuasion, now by harsh cruelty, to throw down our constancy. It is that spirit, of course, of demonic and angelic make, who, our rival because of our separation from him and envious because of God's grace, fights against us from within your minds, which by secret inspiration he has tuned and suborned to all that perversity in judging and injustice in cruelty with which we began. For although the whole force of demons and spirits of that kind is subject to us, yet like worthless slaves they sometimes mix insolence with fear and long to harm those whom at other times they dread. For fear too breathes hatred. Besides, their condition, made desperate by their prior condemnation, counts it a comfort to enjoy their malice meanwhile, while the punishment is delayed. And yet, when caught, they are subdued and sink to their condition, and those whom they attack from afar they beg close at hand. So when, like rebels breaking out of the workhouses or prisons or mines or penal slavery of that kind, they burst out against us, in whose power they are, certain that they are no match for us and all the more desperate for it, we resist them, unwillingly, as though they were equals, and we fight back by persevering in what they attack, and we never triumph over them more than when we are condemned for the obstinacy of our faith.

But since it would easily seem unjust that free people should be forced against their will to sacrifice (for elsewhere too a willing mind is prescribed for performing divine worship), it would surely be thought absurd that anyone should be compelled by another to honor gods whom he ought to appease of his own accord for his own sake, so that he does not have ready to hand the right of liberty to say: “I do not want Jupiter to be gracious to me; who are you? Let Janus meet me angry, with whichever of his faces he likes; what have you to do with me?” You have been shaped, of course, by those same spirits to force us to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare; and on you has been laid the necessity of compelling, as on us the obligation of facing the danger. We come, then, to the second charge, that of injuring a more august majesty, since you watch over Caesar with greater dread and more cunning timidity than Olympian Jupiter himself. And rightly, if you only knew it. For which of the living, whoever he is, is not better than any dead man? But you do not do this from reason so much as from regard for a power that is present: so in this too you will be found irreligious toward your gods, since you devote more fear to a human lordship. In short, among you people perjure themselves more readily by all the gods than by the single genius of Caesar.

Let it first be established, then, whether these to whom sacrifice is offered can bestow welfare on the emperors or on any man at all, and then assign us to the crime of treason: if angels or demons, in substance the worst of spirits, do any good; if the lost preserve, if the damned set free; if, finally, as you know in your own conscience, the dead protect the living. For surely they would first protect their own statues and images and temples, which, I believe, Caesar's soldiers keep safe by their watches. And I think those very materials come from Caesar's mines, and whole temples stand at Caesar's nod. Many gods, in short, have had Caesar angry with them. It helps our case if they have also had him gracious, when he confers on them some liberality or privilege. So how will those who are in Caesar's power, and wholly his, have Caesar's welfare in their power, so as to seem able to grant him what they more easily obtain from Caesar themselves? This, then, is why we are said to offend against the majesty of the emperor: because we do not subject the emperors to their own possessions, because we do not make a game of the duty of praying for their welfare, since we do not think it lies in hands soldered with lead. But you are the irreligious ones, who seek it where it is not and ask it from those who cannot give it, passing over Him in whose power it is. Besides, you make war on those who know how to ask for it, who can also obtain it, since they know how to ask.

For we invoke for the welfare of the emperors the eternal God, the true God, the living God, whom the emperors themselves prefer above all others to have gracious to them. They know who gave them their empire; they know, as men, who gave them their soul too; they feel that He is the only God in whose power alone they are, from whom they are second, after whom they are first, before all and above all gods. Why not? since they are above all men, who at least live and are superior to the dead. They reflect how far the forces of their empire reach, and so they understand God: against him they cannot prevail; through Him they know that they prevail. Let the emperor make war on heaven, lead heaven captive in his triumph, post guards on heaven, impose taxes on heaven! He cannot. He is great because he is less than heaven. For he himself belongs to him to whom heaven and every creature belongs. He is emperor from the same source from which he was a man before he was emperor; he has his power from the same source from which he has his breath. Looking up there, we Christians, with hands spread out because they are harmless, with head bare because we do not blush, finally without a prompter because we pray from the heart, are always praying for all emperors: for a long life for them, a secure empire, a safe household, brave armies, a faithful senate, an upright people, a quiet world, whatever are the prayers of a man and of a Caesar. These things I cannot ask from any other than from him from whom I know I shall obtain them, since it is He who alone grants them, and I am one to whom it is due that I should obtain them: His servant, who alone observe him, who am put to death for His discipline, who offer him the rich and greater sacrifice which he himself commanded, prayer proceeding from chaste flesh, from an innocent soul, from the Holy Spirit; not grains of incense bought for one as, tears of an Arabian tree, nor two drops of unmixed wine, nor the blood of a rejected ox longing to die, and, after all the defilements, a filthy conscience as well; so that I wonder, when victims are approved among you by most vicious priests, why the entrails of the victims are examined rather than those of the sacrificers themselves. So, then, while we are spread out toward God, let the claws dig into us, the crosses hang us up, the fires lick us, the swords cut our throats, the beasts leap upon us: the very posture of a Christian at prayer is prepared for every punishment. Do this, good governors: wring out the soul that is praying to God for the emperor. This will be the crime, where there is the truth of God and devotion to him.

Now we have flattered the emperor, and lied in the prayers we have mentioned, to escape violence, of course! Plainly this deceit succeeds; for you allow us to prove whatever we defend. You, then, who think that we care nothing for the welfare of the Caesars, look into the words of God, our writings, which we ourselves do not suppress and which many chances transfer to outsiders. Know from them that we are commanded, out of overflowing kindness, to pray to God even for our enemies and to ask blessings for our persecutors. Who are greater enemies and persecutors of Christians than those against whose majesty we are charged with crime? But also by name and openly: “Pray,” it says, “for kings and for princes and powers, that all may be peaceful for you.” For when the empire is shaken, and its other members are shaken with it, we too, though we are thought to be strangers to disturbances, are surely found in some place of the calamity.

There is also another, greater necessity for us to pray for the emperors, and indeed for the whole standing of the empire and for Roman affairs: we know that the mighty force hanging over the whole world, and the very close of the age, which threatens horrible afflictions, is held back by the respite granted to the Roman empire. So we do not wish to experience it, and while we pray that it may be put off we favor Rome's long continuance. We also swear, not by the genii of the Caesars, but by their welfare, which is more august than all genii. Do you not know that genii are called daemones, and from that, with a diminutive word, daemonia? We look up to the judgment of God in the emperors, who has set them over the nations. We know that there is in them what God has willed, and so we want what God has willed to be safe, and we hold that a great oath. But demons, that is, genii, we are accustomed to exorcise, so as to drive them out of people, not to swear by them, so as to confer on them the honor of divinity.

But why should I say more about Christian religion and piety toward the emperor? We must look up to him as the one whom our Lord has chosen, so that I might rightly say: Caesar is more ours, appointed by our God. So, as he is mine, I do more for his welfare, not only because I ask it from Him who can give it, or because I who ask am such as to deserve to obtain it, but also because, by setting the majesty of Caesar below God, I commend him the more to God, to whom alone I subject him. And I subject him to one with 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 do not dare to mock him, or because he himself will not wish to be called God. If he is a man, it is in a man's interest to yield to God. Let him be content to be called emperor. This too is a great name, which is given by God. He who calls him God denies that he is emperor: unless he is a man, he is not emperor. Even when triumphing in that most lofty chariot he is reminded that he is a man. For it is whispered to him from behind: “Look behind you! Remember you are a man!” And surely he rejoices all the more that he shines with such glory that a reminder of his condition is necessary for him. He would be less if he were then called a god, because he would not truly be so called. He is greater who is called back so that he does not think himself a god.

Augustus, the founder of the empire, did not even want to be called lord; for this too is a surname of God. I will indeed call the emperor lord, but in the ordinary way, and only when I am not forced to call him lord in place of God. Otherwise I am free with respect to him. For my Lord is one, God almighty and eternal, the same who is his Lord too. He who is father of the fatherland, how is he lord? A name of affection is also more pleasing than one of power. Even heads of households are called fathers rather than lords. So far is it from right that the emperor should be called God, a thing that cannot be believed except as the most shameful, and even pernicious, flattery. If, having one emperor, you called another so, would you not incur the greatest and most implacable offense from the one you had, an offense that even the one you so called would have to fear? Be religious toward God, you who want Him to be gracious to the emperor. Stop believing in another god, and so also calling this one god, who has need of God. If flattery of this sort, calling a man god, does not blush for the lie, let it at least fear the ill omen. It is a curse to call Caesar a god before his apotheosis.

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.

If this is so, that those turn out to be enemies who were called Romans, why are we, who are thought enemies, denied to be Romans? We cannot be counted non-Romans just because we are counted enemies, when those turn out to be enemies who were held to be Romans. So the piety and religion and loyalty owed to the emperors do not consist in services of this kind, which hostility can perform all the more as a cover for itself, but in the conduct that divinity commands to be shown to them as truly as it must be shown to all. For these works of good will are not owed by us to the emperors alone. We do no good with respect of persons, because we do it for our own sake, seeking the payment of praise or reward not from man but from God, the exactor and rewarder of an impartial kindness. We are the same toward the emperors as toward our neighbors. For we are forbidden equally 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; what is not lawful against anyone is perhaps all the less lawful against him who is so great through God.

If we are commanded, as we said above, to love our enemies, whom have we to hate? Likewise, if when injured we are forbidden to retaliate, so that the deed does not make us equal to them, whom can we injure? For about this, judge for yourselves. How often do you rage against Christians, partly following your own feelings, partly obeying the laws? How often too does the hostile mob, passing you over, attack us on its own authority with stones and fire? In the very frenzies of the Bacchanals they do not spare even dead Christians, but tear them from the rest of burial, from a kind of asylum of death, already changed, already not even whole, cut them up and pull them apart. Yet what retaliation for injury have you ever observed from people so united, so courageous even to death, when a single night with a few little torches could work abundant vengeance, if it were lawful among us to repay evil with evil? But far be it that a divine school should avenge itself by human fire, or grieve to suffer that by which it is proved. For if we wished to act as open enemies, not merely as secret avengers, would we lack strength of numbers and forces? The Moors, no doubt, and the Marcomanni and the Parthians themselves, or any nations, however great, confined to one place and their own borders, are more numerous than those of the whole world! We are but of yesterday, and we have filled everything of yours: cities, islands, forts, towns, market-places, the camps themselves, tribes, decuries, the palace, the senate, the forum; we have left you only the temples. For what war would we not have been fit and ready, even if unequal in forces, we who are so willingly slaughtered, if in this discipline it were not more lawful to be killed than to kill? Even unarmed and without rebellion, merely by being at odds with you, we could have fought you by the odium of separation alone. For if so great a force of people as we are had broken away from you into some remote corner of the world, the loss of so many citizens, of whatever sort, would surely have shamed your dominion, indeed would have punished it by the very desertion. Without doubt you would have been terrified at your solitude, at the silence of affairs, and at a kind of stupor as of a dead world. You would have looked for people to rule. More enemies than citizens would have remained to you. For now you have fewer enemies because of the multitude of Christians, since almost all the citizens of almost all cities are Christians. But you have preferred to call us enemies of the human race rather than of human error. And who would rescue you from those hidden enemies that everywhere lay waste your minds and your health, I mean the assaults of demons, which we drive away from you without reward, without payment? This alone would have sufficed for our revenge: that from then on the possession would lie open, empty, to unclean spirits. Yet, without a thought for the reward for such protection, you have preferred to judge as enemies a race not only not troublesome to you but even necessary; for we are plainly enemies, not of the human race, but rather of its error.

Should not this school, then, have been ranked, with somewhat more leniency, among the lawful associations, since it commits nothing of the kind usually feared from unlawful associations? For unless I am mistaken, the reason for prohibiting associations rests on care for public order, so that the city is not split into parties, which would easily disturb elections, assemblies, councils, meetings, and even the shows with rival clashes of partisanship, especially since men had already begun to treat the service of their violence as something for sale and for hire. But we, cold to every passion for glory and rank, have no need for combination, nor is anything more foreign to us than public affairs. We recognize one commonwealth for all: the world. We likewise renounce your shows, as far as we renounce their origins, which we know were conceived in superstition, and we stand apart from the very things with which they deal. We have nothing to do, by word, sight, or hearing, with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theater, the savagery of the arena, the vanity of the athletes' colonnade. How do we offend you if we prefer other pleasures? If we refuse to know how to be entertained, the loss is ours, if anyone's, not yours. “But you reject what pleases us.” Nor do our pleasures delight you. But the Epicureans were allowed to decide on some truth of pleasure, namely calmness of mind; and the Christian way has ample business of its own.

I will now myself set out the business of the Christian association, so that, having refuted the evil, I may show the good. We are a body knit together by a shared religious conviction, by unity of discipline, and by the bond of hope. We come together in a meeting and congregation, so that, as if forming a band, we may besiege God with our prayers. This violence is pleasing to God. We pray also for the emperors, for their ministers and authorities, for the state of the world, for the peace of affairs, for the delay of the end. We come together to call the divine writings to mind, if the nature of the present times compels us to forewarn or to recognize anything. Certainly with the holy words we nourish our faith, raise our hope, fix our confidence, and no less strengthen discipline by inculcating precepts; there too are exhortations, rebukes, and divine censure. For judgment is passed with great weight, as among people sure that they are in God's sight; and it is the greatest foretaste of the judgment to come if anyone has so sinned as to be banished from sharing in prayer and assembly and all holy fellowship. Approved elders preside, having obtained that honor not by payment but by testimony; for nothing of God's is obtained by payment. Even if there is a kind of treasury, it is not collected from entrance fees, as if religion were bought. Each one deposits a modest contribution on the monthly day, or when he wishes, and only if he wishes, and only if he can; for no one is compelled, but gives voluntarily. These are, as it were, deposits of piety. For they are not spent from there on banquets and drinking bouts and thankless eating-houses, but on feeding and burying the poor, on boys and girls without means and without parents, and on old people now confined to the house, and on the shipwrecked; and if any are in the mines, or on islands, or in prisons, provided it is for the cause of God's school, they become wards of their confession. But it is precisely the working of such love that brands us in the eyes of some. “See,” they say, “how they love one another” (for they themselves hate one another), “and how ready they are to die for one another” (for they themselves will be more ready to kill one another). And that we call ourselves brothers: they rage at this, I suppose, for no other reason than that among them every name of kinship is feigned in affection. But we are your brothers too, by the law of nature, our one mother, though you are hardly men, because you are bad brothers. But how much more fittingly are they both called and held brothers who have acknowledged one Father, God, who have drunk one Spirit of holiness, who from one womb of the same ignorance have come out trembling into the one light of truth! But perhaps we are thought less legitimate because no tragedy cries out about our brotherhood, or because we are brothers in the family property, which among you generally breaks up brotherhood. So we who are mingled in mind and soul have no hesitation about sharing property. All things are held in common among us except our wives. In this one point we dissolve partnership, the only point in which other men practice partnership: they not only usurp the marriages of their friends, but also most patiently supply their own to their friends, following, I suppose, that teaching of their ancestors and wisest men, the Greek Socrates and the Roman Cato, who shared with their friends the wives they had married for the sake of bearing children, so that children might be begotten in other homes as well; whether against the wives' will I do not know. For why should the wives care for a chastity which their husbands had so easily given away? example of Attic wisdom and Roman gravity: a philosopher and a censor as pimps! What wonder, then, if such love as ours is defamed? For you also disparage our little suppers, apart from their being infamous for crime, as extravagant too. It was of us, no doubt, that Diogenes' saying was spoken: “The Megarians feast as though they would die tomorrow, but build as though they would never die.” But one sees a straw in another's eye more easily than a beam in his own. With so many tribes and curiae and decuries belching, the air turns sour; when the Salii are to dine, a creditor will be needed; the accountants will reckon up the cost of the tithes and feasts of Hercules; for the Apaturia, the Dionysia, and the Attic mysteries a levy of cooks is proclaimed; at the smoke of a dinner of Serapis the firemen will be roused. Only about the dining room of the Christians is there complaint. Our supper shows its reason by its name: it is called by the word for love among the Greeks. Whatever it costs, it is gain to spend in the name of piety, since with that refreshment we help all the needy; not as among you, where parasites strive for the glory of selling their liberty, hired out to their bellies to be fattened amid insults, but because with God there is greater regard for the lowly. If the cause of the banquet is honorable, judge the rest of the order of its discipline by its cause. Being a duty of religion, it admits nothing base, nothing immodest. We do not recline before prayer to God has been tasted first. As much is eaten as the hungry need; as much is drunk as is good for the chaste. They are satisfied as people who remember that even during the night they must worship God; they converse as people who know that the Lord is listening. After water for the hands and the lamps, each is invited into the middle to sing to God, as he can, from the holy Scriptures or of his own composing; from this it is proved how much he has drunk. Prayer likewise closes the banquet. From there we depart, not into gangs of brawlers, nor into bands of roamers, nor into outbursts of wantonness, but to the same concern for modesty and chastity, as people who have dined not so much on a supper as on discipline. This gathering of Christians would rightly be unlawful if it were like the unlawful ones; it would rightly be condemned if anyone could complain of it on the grounds on which complaint is made about factions. To whose ruin have we ever come together? We are the same when assembled as when dispersed, the same all together as individually, injuring no one, grieving no one. When the upright, when the good come together, when the pious, when the chaste assemble, it is not to be called a faction but a council.

On the contrary, the name of faction should be applied to those who conspire in hatred of the good and upright, who cry out against the blood of the innocent, putting forward as a defense of their hatred that further folly too, that they think the Christians are the cause of every public disaster and every popular misfortune. If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile does not rise over the fields, if the sky stands still, if the earth moves, if there is famine, if plague, at once the cry goes up: “The Christians to the lion!” So many to one? I ask you, before Tiberius, that is, before the coming of Christ, how great were the disasters that struck the world and its cities! We read that the islands of Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes, and Cos sank with many thousands of people. Plato too records that a land larger than Asia or Africa was snatched away by the Atlantic sea. An earthquake drank up the Corinthian sea too, and the force of the waves cut off a part of Lucania and banished it under the name of Sicily. These things certainly could not have happened without harm to the inhabitants. But where then were, I will not say the Christians, despisers of your gods, but your gods themselves, when the flood wiped out the whole world, or, as Plato thought, only the lowlands? For that they are later than the disaster of the flood is attested by the very cities in which they were born and died, and even those which they founded; for these would not remain today unless they too were later than that disaster. Palestine had not yet received the swarm of Jews from Egypt, nor had the origin of the Christian school yet settled there, when a rain of fire burned up its neighboring regions, Sodom and Gomorrah. The land still smells of burning, and if any fruits of trees are there, they make a show only to the eyes, but turn to ashes when touched. Nor were Etruria and Campania complaining about Christians then, when fire from heaven drenched Volsinii, and fire from its own mountain Pompeii. No one at Rome yet worshiped the true God when Hannibal at Cannae measured his slaughter by the bushel of Roman rings. All your gods were worshiped by all, when the Senones occupied the Capitol itself. And it is well that, if any adversity happened to cities, the disasters of the temples were the same as those of the walls, so that I may refute the idea that these things come from the gods, since they happened to the gods too. The human race has always deserved ill of God: first, as undutiful toward Him, since, though it understood Him in part, it did not seek Him, but even invented others besides to worship; then because, by not seeking the teacher of innocence and the judge and avenger of guilt, it grew into every vice and crime. But if it had sought him, it would have followed that it would know him once sought, observe him once known, and find him, once observed, gracious rather than angry. So it ought to know now too that he is angry, the same God who always was, before Christians were named. Whose benefits it enjoyed, bestowed before it fashioned gods for itself, why should it not understand that evils too come from him whose goods it did not recognize as his? It is guilty toward Him to whom it is also ungrateful. And yet, if we compare former disasters, lighter ones happen now, since the world received Christians from God. For from that time innocence has tempered the iniquities of the age, and there have begun to be intercessors with God. Finally, when summer holds back the winter rains and the year is a worry, you indeed, fed daily and ready to dine again at once, with baths and taverns and brothels busy, offer rain-sacrifices to Jupiter, proclaim barefoot processions to the people, seek heaven at the Capitol, expect clouds from the ceiling panels, turned away from God himself and from heaven; but we, dried up with fasting and wrung out by every kind of continence, kept from every enjoyment of life, rolling in sackcloth and ashes, beat upon heaven with reproach, touch God, and when we have wrung mercy from him, Jupiter is honored!

You, then, are the troublemakers in human affairs; you are always the ones who draw public misfortunes on yourselves, you among whom God is despised and statues are adored. For it ought to be held more credible that he is angry who is neglected than they who are worshiped; or else they are most unjust indeed, if on account of the Christians they harm their own worshipers too, whom they ought to separate from the deserts of the Christians. “This,” you say, “rebounds on your God too, if He also allows His own worshipers to be harmed on account of the profane.” Admit His dispensations first, and you will not turn it back on us. For He who has once for all appointed an eternal judgment after the end of the age does not hasten the separation, which is the condition of the judgment, before the end of the age. Meanwhile He deals equally with the whole human race, both indulgent and rebuking. He willed that both benefits should be common to the profane and misfortunes to his own, so that in equal fellowship we might all experience both His gentleness and his severity. Because we have learned this 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 from God to us, if at all, for admonition, to you for chastisement. And yet we are in no way harmed: first, because nothing matters to us in this age except to leave it as quickly as possible; then, because if any adversity is inflicted, it is put down to your deserts. But even if some things graze us too, as people bound up with you, we rejoice rather in recognizing the divine predictions, which confirm, of course, the confidence and faith of our hope. But if all evils come upon you from those you worship because of us, why do you persist in worshiping beings so ungrateful, so unjust, who ought rather to help and champion you in making the Christians suffer, and to separate you from the deserts of the Christians?

But we are also charged under another head of injury: we are said to be unprofitable in business. How so, people who live with you, with the same food, dress, and furnishings, 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 thanks to God, our Lord and Creator; we reject no fruit of His works; we plainly use moderation, so that we do not use them excessively or wrongly. So we live with you in this world, not without the forum, not without the meat market, not without baths, shops, workshops, inns, your markets, and other dealings. We too sail with you, and serve as soldiers, and farm, and trade with you likewise; we make our crafts and our works public for your use. How we seem unprofitable to your business, with whom and on which we live, I do not know. But if I do not frequent your ceremonies, I am nonetheless a man on that day too. I do not bathe at dawn at the Saturnalia, so that I do not lose both night and day; yet I bathe at a decent and healthy hour, which preserves my warmth and my blood; I can be stiff and pale after a bath when I am dead. I do not recline in public at the Liberalia, as is the custom for beast-fighters having their last meal; yet wherever I dine, I dine from your supplies. I do not buy a garland for my head. What does it matter to you how I use the flowers, which I buy all the same? I think they are more pleasing free and loose and straying everywhere. But even if they are bound into a garland, we know a garland with the nose; let those see to it who smell through their hair. We do not come together at the shows; yet if I want the things that are sold at those gatherings, I will take them more freely from their own places. We certainly do not buy incense. If Arabia complains, let the Sabaeans know that more of their wares, and more costly, are spent on burying Christians than on fumigating gods. “Certainly,” you say, “the revenues of the temples dwindle daily: how few now throw in a coin!” For we are not able to bring help both to men and to your begging gods, nor do we think it should be given to any but those who ask. In short, let Jupiter hold out his hand and receive, while meanwhile our mercy spends more street by street than your religion temple by temple. But the other revenues will give thanks to the Christians, who pay what is owed in good faith, by which we abstain from defrauding others; so that, if it were counted how much the revenues lose through the fraud and lying of your declarations, the account could easily be settled, the complaint about one kind of revenue being offset by the gain to all the other accounts.

I will plainly admit who, if any, can truly complain of the unprofitableness of Christians. First will be the pimps, procurers, and bath-attendants; then assassins, poisoners, magicians; likewise soothsayers, diviners, astrologers. It is a great benefit that Christians give no benefit to people like these. And yet whatever loss your affairs suffer through this school can be offset by some protection. How much do you value, I do not say those who now drive demons out of you, I do not say those who also pour out prayers for you to the true God, since perhaps you do not believe it, but those from whom you can fear nothing?

But that loss to the state, as great as it is real, no one considers; that injury to the city no one weighs, when so many of us just people are spent, when so many innocent are paid out. For we now call your own records to witness, you who daily preside over the trials of prisoners and settle the charge sheets by your sentences. So many guilty people are listed by you under various charges: which of them, the assassin, the pickpocket, the temple-robber or seducer or thief of bathers' clothes, is also entered as a Christian? Or when Christians are brought forward under their own title, which of them is also such as so many of the guilty are? It is always with your people that the prison seethes, with yours that the mines sigh, with yours that the beasts are fattened, with yours that the producers of shows feed their herds of condemned criminals. No one there is a Christian, unless plainly only a Christian; or if he is something else as well, he is no longer a Christian.

We alone, then, are innocent. What wonder, if it must be so? And indeed it must. Taught innocence by God, we both know it perfectly, as revealed by a perfect teacher, and keep it faithfully, as commanded by an inspector who is not to be despised. Your ideas of innocence come from human judgment and are enforced by human authority. Your moral teaching is therefore incomplete and lacks the force needed to produce true innocence. Man's wisdom in showing the good is as great as his authority in demanding it; the one is as easily deceived as the other is despised. And so which is fuller: to say, “You shall not kill,” or to teach, “Do not even be angry”? Which is more perfect: to prohibit adultery, or to restrain even from the solitary lust of the eyes? Which is more learned: to forbid evildoing, or evil-speaking too? Which is better instructed: not to permit injury, or not even to allow retaliation for injury? Yet you should know that even those laws of yours which seem to lead toward innocence were borrowed from the divine law, as the older pattern. We have already spoken of the age of Moses. But how great is the authority of human laws, when a man may both escape them, often lying hidden in his crimes, and sometimes despise them, offending by choice or by necessity? Consider them also in view of the brevity of any punishment, which will not remain beyond death. So too Epicurus makes light of all torment and pain, declaring a small one contemptible and a great one not lasting. But we, who are judged under God, the watcher of all, and who foresee an eternal punishment from Him, rightly alone attain innocence, because of the fullness of our knowledge, the difficulty of hiding, and the greatness of a torment not lasting but everlasting, fearing Him whom even the judge who judges us, the fearers, must fear: fearing God, not the proconsul.

We have taken our stand, I think, against the charge of all the crimes on which the blood of Christians is demanded. We have shown our whole position, and the ways in which we can prove it to be as we have shown, namely from the trustworthiness and antiquity of the divine writings, and also from the confession of the spiritual powers. Who will dare to refute us, not by verbal art, but in the same form in which we have established our proof, from the truth? But while our truth is made plain to everyone, unbelief meanwhile, though convinced of the good of this school, which has now become known from experience and dealings, does not think it a divine thing at all, but rather a kind of philosophy. “The philosophers too,” it says, “teach and profess the same things: innocence, justice, patience, sobriety, chastity.” Why, then, if we are compared to them in discipline, are we not likewise made equal to them in the freedom and impunity of our discipline? Or why are they too, as our peers, not pressed to the duties for not performing which we are endangered? For who compels a philosopher to sacrifice, or to swear, or to put out useless lamps at noon? On the contrary, they openly destroy your gods and accuse your superstitions in their writings too, while you praise them. Many of them even attack your emperors openly, with your approval, and receive statues and salaries instead of being sentenced to the beasts. And that is entirely appropriate. For they are called philosophers rather than Christians. This name of philosophers does not put demons to flight. Why should it? since the philosophers count demons next to the gods. It is Socrates' saying: “If the daimonion permits.” The same man, though he had some taste of the truth in denying the gods, yet at the very end ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Aesculapius, I suppose in honor of his father, because Apollo proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men. Thoughtless Apollo! He bore witness to wisdom for the man who denied that the gods exist. As much as truth burns with hatred, so much does he who presents it faithfully give offense; but he who adulterates and affects it wins favor on this very ground with the persecutors of truth. The truth which the philosophers, its mockers and corrupters, affect with hostility and corrupt by affecting, as men seeking glory, Christians both seek of necessity and present whole, as men caring for their salvation. So we are not equal, as you think, either in knowledge or in discipline. For what certain answer did Thales, that chief of the natural philosophers, give Croesus when he asked about divinity, after the extensions of time for deliberation had so often come to nothing? Any Christian craftsman both finds God and shows Him, and from then on assigns to Him in fact everything that is sought concerning God; though Plato affirms that the maker of the universe is neither easy to find nor, once found, easy to explain to all. Further, if we make the challenge about chastity, I read part of the Athenian sentence pronounced against Socrates as a corrupter of youths. The Christian does not even exchange the female sex for the other. I know too of the prostitute Phryne inflaming the lust of Diogenes as he lay upon her, and I hear that a certain Speusippus of Plato's school died in adultery. The Christian is born male for his own wife alone. Democritus, by blinding himself because he could not look at women without lust and was pained if he did not possess them, confesses his incontinence by his cure. But the Christian, with his eyes unharmed, does not see women; in mind he is blind against lust. If I defend our uprightness, see, Diogenes with muddy feet tramples on Plato's proud couches with another pride: the Christian is not proud even toward the poor. If I contend about modesty, see, Pythagoras among the Thurians and Zeno among the Prienians aspire to tyranny: but the Christian does not aspire even to the aedileship. If I meet you on equanimity, Lycurgus chose death by starvation because the Spartans had amended his laws: the Christian gives thanks even when condemned. If I compare faithfulness, Anaxagoras refused to return a deposit to his enemies: the Christian is called faithful even by outsiders. If I take my stand on simplicity, Aristotle shamefully made his friend Hermias leave his position: the Christian does not harm even his enemy. The same Aristotle flatters Alexander as shamefully, instead of guiding him, as Plato is sold by Dionysius for his belly's sake. Aristippus plays the profligate in purple under a great show of gravity, and Hippias is killed while laying plots against his city. No Christian ever attempted this on behalf of his own, though they were scattered with every atrocity. But someone will say that some of ours too depart from the rule of discipline. Yet they cease to be counted Christians among us, while those philosophers, with such deeds, continue in the name and honor of wisdom. So what is there alike in a philosopher and a Christian? in a disciple of Greece and a disciple of heaven? in a trafficker in reputation and one in life? in a worker in words and one in deeds? in a builder and a destroyer of things? in a friend and an enemy of error? in a falsifier of truth and its restorer and expounder, its thief and its guardian?

Truth is older than all things, unless I am mistaken; and the antiquity of the divine literature, established above, helps me in this, so that it may readily be believed that it was the treasure-house of all later wisdom. And if I were not now restraining the bulk of this volume, I would range into this proof too. Which of the poets, which of the sophists, has not drunk entirely from the fountain of the prophets? From there, then, the philosophers watered the thirst of their talent, so that it is what they have from ours that makes people compare us with them. Hence, I suppose, philosophy was even expelled by some, I mean by the Thebans and the Spartans and the Argives. While they strove after our things, being men, as we said, greedy for glory and for eloquence alone, if they came upon anything in the holy Scriptures set out in order, they turned it to their own works according to their own fondness for curiosity, neither believing sufficiently that it was divine, so as to refrain from falsifying it, nor understanding it sufficiently, since it was still somewhat clouded then, obscured even to the Jews themselves, whose own property it seemed to be. For even where truth was simple, all the more did human fastidiousness, scorning faith, change it, and in this way they mixed into uncertainty even what they had found certain. For having found God, merely that, they did not discuss Him as they had found him, but went on to dispute about His quality, His nature, and His dwelling place. Some assert he is incorporeal, others corporeal, as the Platonists and the Stoics respectively; some that He is made of atoms, others of numbers, as Epicurus and Pythagoras; another of fire, as Heraclitus thought; and the Platonists hold that He cares for things, while the Epicureans hold He is idle and inactive and, so to speak, a nobody in human affairs; the Stoics place Him outside the world, turning this mass from outside like a potter; the Platonists within the world, remaining, like a pilot, within what he governs. So too about the world itself, whether it was born or unborn, whether it will pass away or remain, they vary. So too about the state of the soul, which some contend is divine and eternal, others dissoluble; as each one thought, so He introduced or remodeled. No wonder if the talents of the philosophers perverted the old document. From their seed certain men have also adulterated this newer provision of ours with their own opinions, to suit philosophical views, and from the one way have cut many crooked and inextricable paths. I mention this so that the known variety of this school does not seem to anyone to make us equal to the philosophers in this too, and so that he does not judge the truth from the variety of its defenders. But we readily lay down against our adulterers the prescription that the rule of truth is the one that comes from Christ, handed down through His companions, to whom these various commentators will be proved to be somewhat later. Everything against the truth has been built from the truth itself, the spirits of error working this rivalry. By them adulterations of this saving discipline have been suborned; by them certain fables too have been put about, which might weaken faith in the truth by their likeness, or rather win it over to themselves, so that one might think Christians are not to be believed because poets and philosophers are not, or rather think poets and philosophers are to be believed because Christians are not. So we are laughed at when we preach that God will judge; for the poets and philosophers too set up a tribunal in the underworld. And if we threaten Gehenna, which is a store of secret fire under the earth for punishment, we are likewise laughed to scorn; for there is also a river Pyriphlegethon among the dead. And if we name Paradise, a place of divine delight appointed to receive the spirits of the saints, separated from the knowledge of the common world by a kind of wall, that fiery zone, the Elysian Fields have already taken hold of belief. Where, I ask you, do the philosophers or poets get these things, so very like ours? Only from our mysteries. If from our mysteries, as being earlier, then ours are more trustworthy and more to be believed, since even their copies find belief. If from their own minds, then our mysteries will be held to be copies of later things, which the order of things does not allow. For a shadow never precedes the body, nor a copy the truth.

Come now, if some philosopher were to affirm, as Laberius says following the opinion of Pythagoras, that a man is made from a mule and a snake from a woman, and were to twist every argument to that opinion by the power of his eloquence, would he not win assent and fix belief, even to the point of abstaining from animals on that account? Would anyone be persuaded of it, for fear that he might dine on beef from some great-grandfather of his? But if a Christian promises that a man will return from a man, and Gaius himself from Gaius, he will be driven out by the people with stones rather than be granted even a hearing. If any reasoning governs the return of human souls into bodies, why should they not return into the same substance, since this is to be restored, to be what one had been? Otherwise they are no longer the same as they had been, because they could not be what they were not unless they ceased to be what they had been. We would also need much leisure in many places if we wished to make sport of this subject: who seemed to be re-formed into which beast. But rather for our own defense: we propose that it is much more worthy of belief that a man will return from a man, any given man as himself, so long as a man, so that the same quality of soul may be restored to the same condition, even if not to the same appearance. Certainly, since the reason for restoration is the appointment of judgment, the very same one who had been will necessarily be presented, to receive from God the judgment of good or contrary desert. And therefore bodies too will be brought back, both because the soul alone can suffer nothing without stable matter, that is, flesh, and because what souls must suffer at all from God's judgment they did not deserve without the flesh, within which they did everything. “But how,” you say, “can matter that has been dissolved be presented?” Consider yourself, man, and you will find belief in the thing. Recall what you were before you were. Nothing. For you would remember if you had been anything. You, then, who were nothing before you were, and will become the same nothing when you cease to be, why could you not be again from nothing by the will of the 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 are not, you will be made. Give, if you can, the reason by which you were made, and then ask the reason by which you will be made. And yet you will surely be made more easily what you once were, since you were made with equal ease what you never were before. There will be doubt, I suppose, about the powers of God, who set up this great body of the world from what had not been, no less than from a death of emptiness and void, animated by the Spirit who animates all souls, itself stamped as an example of human resurrection, as a testimony to you. Light, slain daily, shines again, and darkness, by equal turns, departs and comes after; the stars that have died come to life again; the seasons begin where they end; fruits are consumed and come back; seeds certainly do not rise more fruitfully unless corrupted and dissolved; all things are preserved by perishing, all are re-formed from destruction. Will you, man, so great a name, if you understand yourself, learning it even from the inscription of the Pythian, lord of all things that die and rise, die for this, that you may perish? Wherever you have been dissolved, whatever matter has destroyed you, swallowed you, abolished you, squandered you into nothing, it will give you back. Nothingness itself belongs to him to whom the whole belongs. “So,” you say, “we shall always have to die and always rise again?” If the Lord of things had so appointed, you would experience the law of your condition against your will. But in fact He has appointed nothing other than He has proclaimed. The reason that composed the universe from diversity, so that all things should stand together in unity from rival substances, from void and solid, from animate and inanimate, from comprehensible and incomprehensible, from light and darkness, from life itself and death, that same reason has also joined the ages together by a condition so appointed and distinguished that this first part, which we inhabit from the beginning of things, flows down through a temporal age to an end, while the following one, which we await, extends into infinite eternity. When, therefore, the end and the boundary that gapes between them has come, so that even the form of the world itself, equally temporal, which is spread like a curtain before that dispensation of eternity, is changed, then the whole human race will be restored to settle the account of what it has deserved in this age, good or evil, and from then on to be paid out into the boundless perpetuity of eternity. And so there will be no more death, nor resurrection again and again, but we shall be the same as now, and not others afterward: the worshipers of God always with God, clothed over with the proper substance of eternity; but the profane, and those not wholly given to God, in the punishment of fire equally unceasing, having from its very nature, of course, a divine supply of incorruptibility. The philosophers too know the difference between secret and common fire. So the fire that serves human use is very different from the one that appears at God's judgment, whether striking thunderbolts from heaven or belching from the earth through the peaks of mountains; for it does not consume what it burns, but restores while it spends. So the mountains remain always burning, and one who is struck from heaven is safe, so that he is no longer reduced to ashes by any fire. And this will be a testimony to eternal fire, an example of the unceasing judgment that keeps its punishment alive. The mountains burn and endure. What of the guilty and the enemies of God?

These are the things that in us alone are called presumptions, but in philosophers and poets the highest knowledge and remarkable genius. They are wise, we foolish; they are to be honored, we to be laughed at, indeed, more than that, to be punished. Suppose now that what we defend is false and rightly called presumption: yet it is necessary; foolish, yet useful; since those who believe it are compelled to become better, by fear of eternal punishment and hope of eternal refreshment. So it is not expedient that things should be called false or held foolish which it is expedient to presume true. By no title is it lawful to condemn at all what is beneficial. In you, then, is this very presumption, which condemns what is useful. So they cannot be foolish either; certainly, even if false and foolish, yet harmful to no one. For they are like many other things on which you inflict no penalties, vain and fabulous, unaccused and unpunished as harmless. But in such matters, if at all, the judgment is ridicule, not swords and fires and crosses and beasts; at the injustice of this cruelty not only does this blind mob exult and insult, but some of you too boast, who court the favor of the mob by injustice. As if all that you can do against us were not at our own choice! Certainly I am a Christian if I will. So you will condemn me only if I will to be condemned; and since what you can do against me you cannot do unless I will, what you can do is a matter of my will, not of your power. So too the mob rejoices in vain over our harassment. For the joy it claims for itself is ours, 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, since we have obtained what we chose.

“Then why,” you say, “do you complain that we persecute you, if you want to suffer, when you ought to love those through whom you suffer what you want?” Plainly we want to suffer, but in the way a soldier wants war. No one indeed suffers willingly, since he must fear and face danger. Yet he fights with all his strength, and, winning in battle, he rejoices who complained of battle, because he gains both glory and booty. It is our battle that we are summoned to the tribunals, to contend there for the truth at the risk of our lives. And victory is to obtain that for which you have contended. That victory has both the glory of pleasing God and the booty of living forever. “But we are executed.” Certainly, when we have won. So we have conquered when we are killed; in short, we escape when we are executed. Call us now, if you like, faggot-men and half-axle men, because we are burned, bound to a stake half an axle long, surrounded by bundles of brushwood. This is the dress of our victory, this our palm-embroidered robe; in such a chariot we triumph. Rightly, then, we do not please the conquered; for that is why we are thought desperate and lost. But this desperation and lostness among you raise the banner of virtue in the cause of glory and fame. Mucius willingly left his right hand on the altar: loftiness of soul! Empedocles gave his whole self to the fires of Aetna at Catana: vigor of mind! A certain foundress of Carthage gave herself to the pyre rather than to a second marriage: glorious proclamation of chastity! Regulus, so that he alone would not live in exchange for many enemies, suffered crosses over his whole body: brave man, a conqueror even in captivity! Anaxarchus, as he was being pounded to death with a pestle like barley, said, “Pound, pound the bag of Anaxarchus; for Anaxarchus you are not pounding”: magnanimity of the philosopher, who even joked about such a death! I pass over those who have bargained for praise with their own sword or with some gentler kind of death. For see, even contests of torture are crowned by you. An Athenian courtesan, when the executioner was already tired, at last spat her bitten-off tongue into the face of the raging tyrant, so as to spit out her voice too, so that she would not be able to betray the conspirators even if, overcome, she should wish to. Zeno of Elea, asked by Dionysius what philosophy provided, answered, contempt of death; and, exposed unflinching to the tyrant's scourges, he sealed his opinion even to death. Certainly the scourgings of the Spartans, made harsher under the eyes of their relatives, who even urged them on, confer as much honor of endurance on their house as they have shed blood. glory that is lawful because it is human, to which neither lost presumption nor desperate conviction is imputed in its contempt of death and of every kind of atrocity, which is permitted to suffer as much for fatherland, for empire, for friendship, as is not lawful for God! And yet for all these you cast statues, inscribe images, and cut inscriptions for eternity. As far as you can by monuments, you yourselves grant the dead a kind of resurrection. One who hopes for the true resurrection from God is insane if he suffers for God! But go on, good governors; you will be much better in the people's eyes if you sacrifice Christians to them: crucify, torture, condemn, grind us down; for your injustice is the proof of our innocence. That is why God allows us to suffer these things. For recently, by condemning a Christian woman to the pimp rather than to the lion, you confessed that among us a stain on chastity is considered more terrible than any punishment and any death. Yet none of your more refined cruelty accomplishes anything; it is rather an enticement to our school. We become more numerous every time we are mown down by you: the blood of Christians is seed. Many among you urge endurance of pain and death, like Cicero in the Tusculans, Seneca in the Chances, Diogenes, Pyrrho, Callinicus. Yet their words do not find as many disciples as Christians do by teaching with deeds. That very obstinacy that you reproach is a teacher. For who, contemplating it, is not shaken to inquire what is really inside the matter? who, when he has inquired, does not come over? and when he has come over, does not long to suffer, so that he may purchase the whole grace of God, so that he may obtain from him full pardon at the price of his blood? For all sins are forgiven to this deed. That is why we give thanks for your sentences on the spot. As there is a rivalry between divine and human things, when we are condemned by you, we are acquitted by God.