To the Nations 1.10

Pour out now all your poisons, hurl every dart of calumny at this name: I shall not stop to repel them any further; later they will be blunted by an account of our whole discipline. For now, I will turn back upon you these same darts plucked from our body; I will show the same wounds of crimes buried in yourselves, so that you may fall by your own swords and javelins. First, then, as to what you aim at us in a general accusation, desertion of the institutions of the ancestors, consider again and again whether you do not share that crime with us. For see: in every department of life and discipline I recognize that antiquity is corrupted, indeed destroyed, among you. Of the laws it has already been said above that you have buried them under new decrees and ordinances day by day. As for the rest of the ordering of human life, it lies open how much you have changed from your ancestors, in dress, bearing, furnishings, in food itself, in speech itself; for you banish what is old as stale. Antiquity is shut out everywhere, in business, in duties; your authority has thrown down the whole authority of your ancestors. Indeed, what is more to your disgrace, you always praise the olden times and nonetheless reject them. By what perversity did the vanities of your ancestors deserve to remain and be approved among you, when you reject the things you approve? But even that very thing which you appear to keep and defend most faithfully as handed down from the ancestors, the chief thing for which you arraign us for transgression, from which the whole hatred of the Christian name draws its life, I mean the worship of the gods: I will show that it is likewise destroyed and despised by you. Except that there is no reason why we should likewise be held despisers of the gods, since no one despises what he knows does not exist at all. What exists at all can be despised; what is nothing suffers nothing. So it must suffer from those for whom it exists. All the more are you weighed down, who believe they exist and despise them, worship them and spit on them, honor them and provoke them. One may recognize this at once from this: since you worship different gods, some one and some another, you surely despise those whom you do not worship. One cannot be preferred without insult to another, and no choice is made without rejection. He who takes up one out of many has looked down on the one he does not take up. But so many and so great gods cannot be worshipped by all. So you despised them already from the first, not afraid, of course, to arrange things so that not all could be worshipped. And indeed those most wise and prudent ancestors, whose institutions you do not know how to renounce, above all in the matter of your gods, are themselves also found guilty of impiety. I lie if they had not decreed that no general should dedicate a temple he had vowed in war before the senate had approved it, as happened to Marcus Aemilius, who had vowed one to the god Alburnus. Surely it is a most impious, nay a most insulting deed, to place the honor of divinity at the discretion and whim of human judgment, so that he is not a god unless the senate has allowed him to be. The censors have often razed shrines without consulting the people. Certainly the consuls, on the authority of the senate, banished Father Liber with his rites not only from the city but from all Italy. Moreover, Varro records that Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates and Anubis were kept out of the Capitol, and that their altars, thrown down by the senate, were rebuilt only by the violence of the populace. And yet the consul Gabinius, on the Kalends of January, when he could scarcely get the victims approved because of the throng of the populace, since he had made no decision about Serapis and Isis, held the senate's judgment weightier than the rush of the mob and forbade the altars to be set up. You have, then, among your ancestors, if not the name, yet the Christian sect, which neglects the gods. If at least you were blameless in your honors toward the gods, they would stand accused of injuring religion; but I find that among you the advance of superstition and of impiety have conspired together. For how much more irreligious you are found! The private gods whom you call Lares and Penates by a household consecration you trample with a household license too, selling them and pawning them as need or fancy takes you. Such sacrileges of contempt would indeed be more tolerable, except that they are the more insulting for being petty. But the complaints of the private and household gods are relieved by some comfort, in that you treat the public gods more shamefully and insultingly still. First, those whom you have put up at the auction spear and subjected to the tax-farmers, you knock down every five years, posted for sale among your revenues. So the Serapeum, so the Capitol is bid for, knocked down, and leased like the forum, under the same crier's voice and the same exaction of the quaestor. Yet lands burdened with tribute are the cheaper, and persons of men assessed for the poll tax are the less noble (for these are the marks of captivity); but the gods: the more tributary, the more holy; or rather, the more holy, the more tributary. Majesty is turned into a source of gain, trade is advertised through religion, holiness begs to be leased. You demand payment for the ground of the temple, for access to the rite, for offerings, for victims. You sell the whole of divinity. It may not be worshipped free of charge. In fact more is paid to the tax-farmers than to the priests. The insult of taxing the gods, which is surely to be reckoned as contempt, was not enough; you are not content to have withheld honor from the gods unless you also cheapen whatever honor you do give by some indignity. For what at all do you do to honor them that you do not offer equally to your dead? You build temples to the gods, and temples equally to the dead; you build altars to the gods, and altars equally to the dead; you inscribe the same titles, you give statues the same forms, according to each one's art or business or age: an old man is figured as Saturn, a beardless youth as Apollo, a maiden as Diana, a soldier is consecrated in Mars, and a smith in Vulcan. No wonder, then, if you slaughter the same victims for the dead as for the gods and burn the same incense. Who could excuse this insult, which in whatever way ranks the dead with the gods? To kings, indeed, priesthoods have also been assigned, and sacred equipment, sacred wagons and chariots, couches for goddesses and banquets for gods, festivals and games. Plainly, since heaven lies open to them, this too is not without insult to the gods: first, because it would not be fitting for others to be numbered among them, even if it were granted to become gods after death; second, because the man who saw someone received into heaven would not perjure himself so freely and openly before the people unless he despised those by whom he swore, as do those who permit him to perjure himself. For they themselves agree that what they swear by is nothing; indeed they even reward him besides, because he has publicly despised the avengers of perjury. And yet how few among you are clean of perjury? Indeed the danger of swearing by the gods has now vanished, since swearing by Caesar is held the weightier religious act, which itself tends to eclipse your gods; for those who perjure themselves by Caesar would be punished more readily than those who swear by any Jupiter. But contempt is the more honorable, having a certain glory of pride; for it sometimes comes from confidence, or from a secure conscience, or from a natural loftiness of mind. Derision, however, the more wanton it is, the more marked is its bite of insult. Recognize, then, how you are found to be deriders of your divinities. I do not speak of how you behave in sacrificing: that you slaughter every animal that is worn out and wasting, and of the fat and sound ones offer the parts useless for eating, heads and hoofs, feathers and bristles plucked off, and whatever you would have thrown away at home too. I pass over what the common people or sacrilegious gluttony will think fits the religion of your ancestors; yet the most learned and most weighty, in so far as they believe that weight and prudence advance through learning, are always the most irreverent toward your gods, and their literature never stops, except to bring in the more shamefully vain or false things about the gods. I will begin with that very study of yours from which every worthless fellow gets his dreams: as much honor as you award him, so much you have taken from your gods, by glorifying the one who made sport of them. We still remember Homer. He, I think, is the one who treated divine majesty on the terms of the human condition, steeping the gods in human mishaps and passions; who, setting them at odds in their favors, matched them in pairs like gladiators; who wounds Venus with a human arrow, keeps Mars in chains for thirteen months, perhaps to perish there, parades Jupiter as having nearly suffered the same at the hands of the heavenly rabble, or wrings tears from him over Sarpedon, or presents him most foully in lust with Juno, recommending his lustful desire by recalling and listing his mistresses. After that, which of the poets, on the authority of their chief, was not insolent toward the gods, either by revealing what was true or by inventing what was false? And did the tragic or comic poets spare them, so as not to set forth the troubles and punishments of a god? I say nothing of the philosophers, whom pride of severity and hardness of discipline, secure from all fear, and some breath of truth as well, raise up against the gods. In fact Socrates, to insult them, swears by an oak, a dog, and a goat. For though he was condemned for this, yet since the Athenians repented of the condemnation, so far as even to punish his accusers, testimony is restored to Socrates, and I can retort that what is now condemned in us was approved in him. Diogenes too made some jest or other at Hercules, and the Diogenes of the Roman pen, Varro, brings in three hundred Joves, or Jupiters as they should be called, without heads. Other wanton wits even serve up your pleasures through the disgrace of the gods. Examine among yourselves the sacrilegious elegances of your Lentuli and Hostii, whether in their tricks and jokes you laugh at the mimes or at your gods. You also receive with great pleasure the writings of actors, which depict every foulness of the gods. Majesties are debauched before your eyes in an impure body. The mask of some god or other covers a disreputable and degraded head. The Sun mourns his son struck down by the thunderbolt, while you rejoice; Cybele sighs for a disdainful shepherd, and you do not blush; and you endure the recital of Jupiter's charges set to music. Plainly you are more religious in the gladiators' arena, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance out plots and stories for the dispatch of the guilty, or else the guilty are punished in the person of the gods themselves. We have often seen Attis, the god from Pessinus, castrated, and a man who was being burned alive had been dressed as Hercules. We have laughed, too, at the midday games' sport with the gods, when Father Dis, Jupiter's brother, leads away the gladiators' corpses with a mallet, and when Mercury, with his little wings on his bald head and his caduceus heated red, tests with the branding iron bodies already lifeless or feigning death. Who could track down every one of these things further, whether they disturb the honor of divinity, whether they bring the summit of majesty to the ground? Surely they are reckoned as contempt, both on the part of those who do such things and of those who accept them. So I do not know whether your gods do not complain more of you than of us. Having despised them on the one side, you flatter them on the other; you buy them off if you commit any offense; and in the end you may do as you please with those whom you willed to exist. We, however, turn away from them altogether.