Le Nourry, Dissertatio in Apologeticum, ad Nationes et ad Scapulam, Cap. XXII-XXX

CHAPTER XXII.

That the Christians were neither public enemies nor factious, but rather the gentiles who accused them of these crimes.

ARTICLE I.

That the Christians were not public enemies, who never wished to avenge the injuries inflicted on them by the heathen, although they could very easily do so, either by setting a city on fire in secret, or by declaring war openly; or by separating themselves from those same heathen, whose number was smaller; or by not casting demons out of the bodies of the possessed.

With as great a rashness as the heathen [declared] the Christians [guilty] of injured majesty

human, so they blurted out, with just so great an impudence did they charge them with being public enemies, and enemies of the whole human race. For nothing more rotten than this calumny could ever have been invented. For by the divine law (Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:28) they were forbidden, as Tertullian says (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 36 ff., p. 460, and Ad Nationes I, ch. 17, p. 583), to wish evil to anyone, to do evil, to speak evil, to think evil of anyone, and to repay in kind one who harms them. And these precepts they obeyed most scrupulously, as is plain from what we said earlier about their most holy manners of life (above, ch. 12, art. 1 ff.). They were therefore not public enemies, nay, not enemies even of any man, much less of the emperor and of the whole human race. And certainly, although they were tortured by the emperors and the other heathen with every kind of insult and torment, yet among the very many who had conspired against those same emperors and against the commonwealth, of whom we must treat a little later, not one of them was ever found.

Yet this was not to be ascribed either to the weakness or to the powerlessness of those same Christians. For they could have avenged the injuries done them by the gentiles not only secretly and by hidden mines, but openly and in open warfare. And secretly indeed: since even a single night, as Tertullian says, with a few little torches could work vengeance in plenty (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 37, p. 462); that is, through the silences of the dark night they could have set cities on fire with very few little torches, bought at the smallest price. But far be it, he goes on, that either a divine sect should be avenged by human fire, or that it should grieve to suffer that by which it is proved (ibid.), or, as he himself wrote to Scapula: Far be it from us to take it ill that we suffer the things we long for, or that we should contrive by ourselves some vengeance which we await from God (the same, To Scapula, ch. 2). He therefore brings forward three reasons on account of which the Christians would not avenge their wrongs in secret, as was ready to their hand. First, because their sect is divine, and they held it impious not to obey its laws, which forbid vengeance. Secondly, they awaited that vengeance from their almighty God, the most just avenger of crimes. Thirdly, they suffered most willingly all the torments inflicted on them by the heathen, because they knew that by them they were not harmed, but proved, whether they were worthy of an eternal reward.

It was, then, for these reasons alone, and not from any weakness or powerlessness, that they abstained from taking vengeance on their heathen enemies. For nothing was easier or readier for them. For we showed above (above, ch. 22, art. 1) that they had filled every place in the whole world, the temples of the false gods alone excepted, and that their number was far greater than that of the gentiles. What, then, could have prevented them from declaring war, conquering the heathen, and visiting the conquered with the punishments they deserved (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 37, p. 462)? Suppose, however, if you will, that they were unequal to them both in number and in forces: were they for that reason less fit to wage war and to conquer enemies? Did not the heathen confess that death at

their hands was not feared (ibid.)? And certainly, the less they dreaded it, the more fiercely would they have fought it out, whatever the uncertain outcome of the war, and so they could have exacted from their enemies the punishments due. But, bound by their religion, they never chose to attempt it, whether armed or unarmed.

Besides, they needed no war and no force for their vengeance (ibid., p. 463). For their separation and withdrawal from the heathen sufficed for it. For these, then dumbfounded by their own desolation, would have had more enemies than citizens, and certainly very few over whom to rule: For as it is, says Tertullian, you have fewer enemies on account of the multitude of the Christians (almost all of the citizens; almost all the citizens to be reckoned Christians; and you have preferred to call them enemies of the human race rather than of human error) (ibid.). So indeed it stands in our manuscript codices and in the editions older than Rigault's, except that in some of them habendo is read for habendos, and these last words, rather than of human error, have been cut away. But Rigault, more boldly, lopped off everything which we have had enclosed in brackets. Yet of so great an amputation he said not a single word. Did he then suppose that its reason was known to all, because a little later Tertullian said: You have preferred to judge us enemies, who are plainly not, however, of the human race, but rather of error (ibid.)? But was an author never permitted to draw in the same words the same conclusion deduced from two arguments? Now Tertullian concludes that the gentiles had preferred that the Christians be judged enemies not of error, but of the human race, because they had not sufficiently observed that, first by withdrawing from them, and secondly by not casting out the demons, as will presently be said, they would have more enemies than citizens. And he said citizens deliberately, because by living a common life with them, as we have seen, they were their fellow citizens.

But someone will perhaps object to us that this whole argument of Tertullian rests on an intolerable exaggeration of the multitude of the Christians. But we ask of him what an ill-timed hyperbole could have profited Tertullian? For there he is addressing the heathen, to whom the number of the Christians was not unknown, and who, once he was convicted of a lie, would quicker than quick have withdrawn their belief from him in everything else. And then we showed above (above, ch. 12, art. 1) how true are the things which he related so expressly, both there and elsewhere, about the vast number of the Christians.

Lastly, by another argument he shows how easily the Christians could have avenged themselves. With them alone, he says, lay the power, as we saw before (above, ch. 8, art. 6), of casting demons out of the possessed bodies of the heathen (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 37, p. 463). And yet, if they had not driven them out: This alone would have sufficed for our vengeance, these are his very words, that the possession, thenceforth empty, would lie open to unclean spirits (Tertullian, loc. cit.). Here, however, Rigault seriously informs us that he had learned from others that in the Fulda codex pateretis is written for pateret. You will doubtless admire the consummate diligence of the man who notes this variant reading of so slight importance on the testimony of others, and an earlier

and other readings of far greater importance, although supported by the authority of all the codices, he passed over entirely. But that word pateretis, he says, smacks of Tertullian's style. Do all the other readings which he passed over, then, smack less of his style? No one, surely, not even Rigault himself, will dare to affirm that seriously. Besides, the common reading of all the books, the Fulda one alone excepted, is no less Tertullianic, and yields this same sense: Unless the Christians put the demons to flight, the bodies of the gentiles, as an empty possession, would lie open to them at their pleasure.

And what, moreover, was readier and easier than this way of avenging themselves? But they so shrank from all vengeance that they preferred to drive the demons out of the bodies of their gentile enemies rather than, by not driving them out, to deserve ill of them. Most ungrateful, therefore, were the gentiles, who, setting at naught, says Tertullian, so great a protection, kept crying out that the Christians, so necessary to them, were public enemies of the human race (ibid.).

ARTICLE II.

How absurdly the heathen alleged that the Christians were public enemies because they did not celebrate the solemnities of the emperors as they did, by bringing out hearths and couches into the open, feasting street by street, effacing the city under the guise of a tavern, making mud with wine, running about in troops to outrages, to shamelessness and the allurements of pleasure, and fixing laurels and lamps to the doorposts of their houses just as to those of a new brothel.

Since the Christians utterly shrank from all vengeance, and deserved well of all men, by what mad frenzy, you will ask, did the heathen so boldly shout that they were public enemies? Surely for no reason, unless a plainly absurd one, as you will understand from these words of Tertullian: The Christians are public enemies for this reason, that they dedicate to the emperors honours neither vain, nor lying, nor rash; because, as men of the true religion, they celebrate even their solemnities with conscience rather than with wantonness (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 452). The whole of that great crime of the Christians, then, was that they kept the solemnities of the emperors only by their own pious and holy rite, not by the most corrupt rite of the gentiles.

If anyone first wishes to know what those solemnities were, he must remember that by our Author himself they are called the solemn days of the Princes, and the vows and rejoicings of the Caesars (ibid.), which used to be celebrated at various times. For every year, on the third day after the Kalends of January, as Gaius says, vows are undertaken for the safety of the princes (Digest, book L, tit. 16, law 233); or, as Tertullian himself wrote, at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the month (Tertullian, To his Wife, ch. 6). Besides, they were kept every year on the birthday, that is, on the very day on which the emperors had been created, and above all in the fifth, tenth, fifteenth and twentieth year thereafter. These feasts were called the quinquennalia, decennalia, quindecennalia and vicennalia. Of these we have touched on something in another dissertation (Dissertation on Lucius Caecilius, ch. 11, art. 5).

where you will find Pagi (Pagi, in the Dissertation on the Consular Fasti, part 2, ch. 2) and others cited, who discuss these matters at greater length.

Now at those solemnities the heathen prayed to their feigned gods for the safety of the emperors and the citizens, for the eternity of the empire and its flourishing state, as has been observed by Pliny (Pliny the Younger, Letters 36, 37, 101, 106, and the Panegyric of Trajan, after the middle), by Brisson (Brisson, De formulis, book II, p. 110) and by others. The Christians, therefore, who worshipped the true and only God, and could pay the emperors no honours other than true ones, prescribed by the sacred laws of their religion, did indeed celebrate their solemnities, though certainly not with the same wantonness as the heathen, but with conscience, says Tertullian (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 452), that is, with a true and sincere disposition of mind, as they knew was required by God. Wherefore he says elsewhere: As regards the honours of kings and emperors, we have it sufficiently prescribed that we must be in all obedience, according to the Apostle's precept, subject to magistrates and princes and powers, but within the bounds of discipline, so far as we are kept apart from idolatry (the same, On Idolatry, ch. 15).

He acknowledges, therefore, that the solemnities of the emperors were celebrated by the Christians according to this law of the Apostle, with prayers poured out to God for the emperor and the empire from the inmost affection of the heart, as we saw above; but not after the manner of the gentiles, which, as he himself says in addressing them, neither modesty, nor bashfulness, nor chastity permit (but the occasion of pleasure rather than a worthy reason has persuaded you) to show your loyalty and truthfulness (the same, Apology, ch. 35, p. 454). All the words you see enclosed in brackets in this text, Rigault and his followers removed entirely, against the authority of the codices, both printed and unprinted. Yet you will find no reason given by them for this amputation, unless by their silence they wished to signify that these words seemed to them to have been added by some unskilled writer. But who will believe them when they are so silent? The common agreement of all the codices plainly proves them to be Tertullian's genuine words. Moreover, his whole cast of mind and manner of speaking are clearly discerned in them. And his sense is this: The Christians are proclaimed enemies of the emperors and of the commonwealth, because they do not keep the solemnities of those same emperors after the manner of the gentiles, which neither modesty, nor bashfulness, nor chastity permits them; and which the occasion of pleasure, rather than a worthy reason, persuaded those same gentiles to celebrate as a way of showing their loyalty and truthfulness towards the emperors. He openly asserts, then, that in these solemn feasts there was no loyalty or truthfulness in the heathen. For they then made the falsest vows for the safety of the emperors, whom, as we shall see in the following articles, they wished to die quickly, and often.

He also rightly complains that three virtues, modesty, bashfulness and chastity, were then trampled underfoot. For what is more contrary to these virtues than to hold magnificent and splendid banquets, not indeed in secret and in private houses, but openly and in the public streets, banquets which by the drunkenness of the feasters,

drunkenness, unchastity, wantonness, lust and other shameful deeds were defiled? But let us, if you please, hear Tertullian himself: A great thing, he says, that of the heathen keeping those solemnities of the princes, namely, a duty to bring out hearths and couches into the open (ibid.). In the older editions choros is read, but toros is without doubt better. For there he is speaking of the public banquets at which the heathen reclined at table. Wherefore a little later he added: With what most elegant and most proud couches they divided the forum among themselves (ibid.). They spread couches in the forum, then, with such magnificence and in such numbers, that they seemed to have divided it among themselves and filled it.

But because the forum, large as it was, did not suffice for all, others feasted street by street (ibid.), that is, in the quarters, the public ways and the crossroads of whatever city. Weigh, then, I beg you, whether these words of Cicero contribute something to this custom, in which he openly reports that Apronius had ordered couches to be spread for him in the middle of the forum: that he was accustomed every day to banquet not only in public but at the public's expense, with a band playing among them and service given in the largest cups (Cicero, Against Verres III, p. 136, line 43). Cornelius Tacitus too somewhere recorded of the emperor Nero that nothing anywhere was so pleasing to him as to lay out banquets in public places and to use the whole city as if it were his house (Tacitus, Annals XV, before the middle, p. 127). But the heathen, thinking everything permitted to them on these festal days of the princes, were then accustomed not only to use the whole city as if it were a house, but, says Tertullian, to efface the city under the guise of a tavern (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 452); so that the whole city had the look of a tavern and a cookshop. There are, moreover, some who, by way of explaining this passage, adduce these verses of Martial:

Barber, innkeeper, cook and butcher keep to their own thresholds; / now it is Rome, lately it was a great tavern. (Martial, Epigrams VII, 60.)

But others judge that the word taberna is taken there by Martial not for a cookshop, but for a market, or a place where wares used to be sold. But however it be taken, it is certain that the intemperance, shamelessness and wantonness of the gentiles at these public banquets was so great that they not only gorged themselves with food, but, as our Author says, with wine poured out through the midst of the city's streets and mingled with the earth, they made mud (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 452). Then indeed one could see tipsy and drunken men running about in troops to outrages, to shamelessness, to the allurements of lust, or, as he says later (ibid., ch. 39, p. 477), into troops of beaters, who struck others with lashes and whips, into bands of rioters, that is, of men who ran about the whole city in the manner of bacchants. How great, further, was the intemperance at these public banquets, judge from what Seneca wrote of private ones: You see, he says, these same men looking out from their couches upon their own cookshop, delighting their ears with the sound of voices, their eyes with spectacles, their palate with flavours. Their whole body is stimulated with soft and gentle fomentations; and

that the nostrils may not meanwhile be idle, the very place in which funeral rites are offered to luxury is steeped in various odours (Seneca, On the Happy Life, ch. 11, p. 624). For if such were their private banquets, how much more the public ones held in honour of the emperors, at which they believed everything, even the more atrocious and the more shameful, to be permitted them.

Rightly, then, and deservedly the Christians detested these things as utterly unworthy of a man in whom even the least remnant of shame and of true religion remained. Chaste and sober, therefore, they kept those festal and solemn days of the Caesars. Far removed, then, from the corrupt manners of the gentiles, we do not, says our Author, overshadow our doorposts with laurels, nor intrude upon the day with lamps (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 451). For the secret traitors, the more safely to hide their hatred and grudge against the emperor, then barricaded their doorposts with the freshest and most branching laurels, and befogged their entrances with the loftiest and brightest lamps (ibid.). Why he uses this last word may be understood from these verses of Persius about Herod:

Herod's days have come, and the lamps set out along every window / have vomited a greasy fog. (Persius, Satire 5, towards the end.)

And of those same lamps and the laurel with which the doorposts of houses were adorned, these are the lines of Juvenal:

All things shine; the door has set up long laurels, / and keeps the feast with lamps at morning. (Juvenal, Satire 12, v. 96 ff.)

Why, then, the Christians utterly rejected these superstitions, Tertullian gives this reason: They light lamps daily who have no light, namely that of the true religion; they fix to their doorposts laurels that will later burn, they over whom fires hang: to them belong both the testimonies of darkness and the auspices of punishments (Tertullian, On Idolatry, ch. 15), namely of the eternal fire by which impious men are to be punished after this life. Then he addresses the Christian thus: If you have renounced temples, do not make your door a temple, that is, of some false god (ibid.). For of the temple of Jupiter Ovid sang:

Yet why is the door veiled with laurel set before it, / and a shady tree girds the august house? / Is it because this house has earned perpetual triumphs? / Or because it is ever loved by the Leucadian god? / Is it because it is itself festive? or because it makes all things festive? / Or is this the mark of the peace which it has given to the lands? (Ovid, Tristia III, elegy 1, v. 41 ff.)

To reject this profane rite, then, this reason alone sufficed for the Christians. But Tertullian suggests yet another: If you have renounced brothels, do not put upon your house the face of a new brothel (Tertullian, On Idolatry, loc. cit.). For on the doors of such an infamous house not only laurels but lamps too used to be hung. Hence this complaint of the door in Propertius:

I, wounded by the nightly brawls of drinkers, / often complain of being beaten by unworthy hands: / nor do I lack shameful garlands hanging on me, / and torches lying about, ever the signs of the shut-out lover. (Propertius, book I, elegy 16.)

Tertullian therefore seriously warns his wife

that it is lawful neither for her nor for any Christian woman, at all the solemnities of the kings, to go out of a door hung with laurel and lamps, as out of a new meeting-house of public lusts (Tertullian, To his Wife I, ch. 6). Wherefore in his Apology he rightly concludes that it is neither honourable nor lawful, when a public solemnity requires it, to put upon your house the garb of some new brothel (the same, Apology, ch. 35, p. 451).

Further, we think there is no man of sound mind who does not understand from what has been said so far that certain heterodox men plainly and utterly abuse this testimony of our Author, who infer from it that the use of candles and lights in their churches was forbidden to those same Christians. For he is not disputing there about those of which we spoke above (ch. 15, art. 4, and Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 25, art. 2), but about other candles and lights customarily used in a profane and gentile rite. But certainly it is most manifestly gathered from this that the Christians were public enemies neither of the commonwealth nor of the emperors, because they celebrated the solemnities of the latter in their own pious manner, and not in that wholly damnable and detestable manner of the gentiles.

ARTICLE III.

It is shown that the heathen were in truth public enemies of the emperor, whom they openly harassed with gibes and abuse, of which the Tiber and the school of the beasts were witness; and who always longed for the scene of a new and yet another new Caesar, and that even when they acclaimed him: From our years may Jupiter add years to you.

Tertullian did not think it enough to have shown more clearly than daylight itself that the Christians were not public enemies either of the emperor or of the commonwealth: but he shows openly and plainly that the gentiles themselves had offended in this very kind in which they quite undeservedly blamed others. Nor indeed does he call foreign or far-distant witnesses: but I summon, he says, the citizens themselves, the Romans, the very home-born populace of the seven hills, that is, of the city of Rome, to say whether the Roman tongue spares any Caesar (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 454), that is, whether it spares the gibes, mockeries, abuse and insults with which they assailed their emperors. Of such great insults, he says, the Tiber and the school of the beasts are witness (ibid.). But what, someone will ask, could that testimony of the river Tiber have been? Some answer that by that name are designated the boatmen who lived along the bank of this river, fierce and insolent men, who in time of scarcity and when grain failed used to inveigh against Caesar himself with a most impudent tongue. But this explanation will scarcely satisfy anyone, nor does it seem to agree with Tertullian's meaning. Others think that by the name of the Tiber is denoted a bridge, or a certain place, from which slanderers and detractors were thrown into the Tiber; but this perhaps is no better. You will therefore more easily persuade us that Tertullian alludes to certain statues placed in public places of Rome and on the bank of the Tiber, to which biting lampoons of this kind were fixed. For elsewhere Tertullian himself says: I shall summon the sacrileges of vanity, and of the home-born

nation I shall review the irreverence, and the witty lampoons which the statues know, and those sometimes slanting sayings from the council, and the curses with which the circuses resound: if not with arms, with the tongue you are always rebels (the same, Ad Nationes I, ch. 17, p. 583). For does he not there indicate in other words those two things which in the Apology he calls the Tiber and the school of the beasts? For witty lampoons were hung, to the emperor's insult, on statues which had been set up in public places, doubtless near the Tiber. And hence the Tiber could be called the witness of these things said wittily and insultingly.

As for the school of the beasts, there will perhaps be some who think that by that name is designated their den, on whose door were inscribed those witty and sharp sayings with which they stung the emperors. Yet what if the school of the beasts, or perhaps of the beast-fighters, be taken for the whole circus, of which we have just heard Tertullian say: The curses with which the circuses resound? For scarcely anywhere else were the gentiles accustomed to wound their emperors with greater licence, more bitter gibes and more scurrilous raillery. Do you wish this, which is nevertheless well enough known, to be proved by some examples? Hear these words of Suetonius about Augustus Caesar, excellent prince though he was: Once on a day of the games the whole people both took as an insult to him, and approved with the loudest assent, a verse spoken on the stage about a priest of the Mother of the gods beating his drum (Suetonius, Life of Augustus, § 68):

Do you see how the catamite sways the world with his finger?

And afterwards, of the emperor Tiberius: Besides, abuse of every kind from every side burned his anxious mind, every one of the condemned heaping every kind of reproach on him, either to his face or by lampoons placed in the orchestra (the same, book III, Life of Tiberius, § 66). And Julius Capitolinus tells this of the emperor Verus: He took such care of the circus games that he frequently both sent and received letters to and from the provincials on account of the games. Finally, even when present and sitting with Marcus, he suffered many insults from the Venetians, because he behaved most shamefully against them (Julius Capitolinus, Life of Verus, p. 506). But what need is there to pursue at greater length these things, which happened so often?

Tertullian presses on: If some window of the human heart and mind lay open for searching out its inmost feelings, then surely we should recognize with what great vows all were longing for the scene of a new and yet another new Caesar, that is, the frequent death of Caesar, and the election of another presiding over the distribution of a largess (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 455). Some, however, would have praesiderantis read, but on a slight conjecture and against the authority of the codices. For Tertullian means that the heathen always longed for the scene of a new Caesar, who would preside over the distribution of a largess or gift, usually of money, to the people or the soldiers, or would order it to be distributed in his presence. For it was the custom for Caesars newly elected, or so that they might be elected, to bestow gifts of this kind on the people. Many examples of this largess are to be found here and there in the writers of Roman history. If, however, anyone wants some, we shall pick out a few of them. Claudius, on the day after he was seized for the empire by the soldiers rather than elected, allowed, says Suetonius, the armed men in assembly

to swear allegiance to his name, and promised each of them fifteen thousand sesterces, the first of the Caesars to secure the loyalty of the soldiery with a reward as well (Suetonius, Life of Claudius, § 10). And when Claudius died, Nero was brought into the camp, these are the words of Cornelius Tacitus, and, having first said what suited the occasion and promised a donative after the example of his father's largess, he is saluted as emperor (Tacitus, end of Annals XII). Spartianus, moreover, attests that a double largess was given to the soldiers by Hadrian for the auspicious beginning of his reign (Spartianus, Life of Hadrian, after the beginning), and Lampridius others by Macrinus, when he proclaimed Antoninus Diadumenus emperor (Lampridius, beginning of the Life of Antoninus Diadumenus). Whoever does not find this enough, let him consult Robortello (Robortello, On the Rewards and Gifts of the Soldiers), Panciroli (Panciroli, on the Notitia of the Eastern Empire, ch. 74), and others. The gentiles, then, ever led by gain, longed for the death of the reigning Caesar, and for the scene of a new one, who would nevertheless soon die, so that they might more often receive a donative.

Our Author presses further that this scene, and the death of Caesar, were most eagerly sought by them at the very time and in the very hour when they themselves were acclaiming:

From our years may Jupiter add years to you;

But in our codices and in the older editions we read, with the form of the metre broken: From..... may Jupiter add years to you (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 35, p. 456). But however it is read, Tertullian hints there that this acclamation of the gentiles was feigned and plainly lying, since they were then seeking Caesar's death with their whole heart. Nor does there seem to be any room for doubt that with a similar lie Ovid acclaimed Augustus Caesar in this verse:

May he increase the empire of our Leader, may he increase his years. (Ovid, Fasti I, v. 611.)

But if this acclamation of the gentiles was plainly feigned, it is certain that that vow of Ambrose for the emperor Valentinian, though dead, was most sincere: Nor do I deny that he died at an untimely age, whom we would have wished to prop up with the years of our own life, so that he might live on our years who could not enjoy his own (Ambrose, On the Death of Valentinian, § 43, p. 1186). We observed long ago that Ambrose in these words alluded to the solemn formula of acclamation noted by Tertullian. Many more like these, by which the heathen seemed to wish a long life to the Caesars, we read quite often in the books of those who wrote the lives of the emperors Commodus, Pertinax, Probus, Balbinus and others. But besides, you may consult Brisson (Brisson, De formulis, book I, p. 95 ff.) and the first book of Bernardino Ferrario on acclamations and applause (Ferrario, De acclamationibus, book II, ch. 19, 20 ff.). For the rest, Tertullian rightly gathers from what has been said that the gentiles who made vows of this kind about the emperor's speedy death were in fact public enemies both of him and of the commonwealth, as will be still clearer from what is to be said in the following article.

ARTICLE IV.

That the greater enemies of the emperors were the heathen traitors, the Cassii, the Nigri, the Albini, and others, who between two

laurels besieged Caesar; who practised wrestling on squeezing his throat; who burst into the palace, bolder than all the Sigeriuses and Partheniuses; who were daily being exposed as partners and applauders of criminal factions; and finally who consulted astrologers, haruspices, augurs and magi about the life of the emperors, and made vows for their safety as false as the Christians' were sincere.

If the pagans who demanded the death of the Caesars and emperors with such wicked vows were guilty of injury to human majesty, far more gravely beyond doubt did other traitors and base betrayers sin against them, who either deserted their side or, having taken their life, attempted to seize a tyranny. Of their number beyond doubt were those mentioned by Tertullian (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXV, p. 457), "the Cassiuses, and Nigers, and Albinuses", that is, Cassius Clemens, Pescenninus Niger and Albinus, who, as we saw above (above, ch. II, art. 1), strove to invade the empire of the emperor Severus. They were therefore public enemies, and guilty of injury to human majesty.

Of the same crime those too are openly convicted who "between two laurels", these are still Tertullian's words, "besiege Caesar, who practise wrestling on squeezing his throat" (Tertullian, loc. cit.). He seems to speak not obscurely of the emperor Commodus, against whose life plots were laid more than once. For first Pompeianus, or as others will have it, Quadratus, plotted against his life "in a certain narrow entrance", as one reads in Dio's Epitome (Dio, Epitome, p. 284), or, as Ammianus Marcellinus says, "in the seating of the amphitheatre" (Marcellinus, book XXIX, p. 550), or, as Herodian relates, "in the entrance of the amphitheatre, and in a dark place" (Herodian, History book I, p. 472). But if laurels had been planted at this entrance of the amphitheatre, it is not hard to understand why Commodus is said to have been besieged between two laurels. But since this is not easily proved to the more rigorous critics, Rigaltius was of the opinion that by these words of our Author is meant a laurel grove (the same, ibid.), planted, on Herodian's testimony, with various trees and with fine and abundant laurel, to which Commodus had withdrawn on the physicians' advice while the plague was raging at Rome. Not altogether ineptly perhaps, had Herodian not said that the plot against this same Commodus was prepared not there but in the entrance of the amphitheatre. Some therefore suspect that by the name of laurels are meant two palaces of Commodus, between which the plotter attacked him. For the laurel, as Pliny observes, "was the doorkeeper of the Caesars" (Pliny, Natural History book XV, ch. XXX). Weigh, I pray, which of these three explanations pleases you more, and we shall gladly hear you pronounce. Whichever it may be, it will most evidently follow from it that this plotter against Caesar's life was a public enemy.

More easily beyond doubt can these following words of Tertullian be explained: "Who practise wrestling on squeezing his throat" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXV, p. 457). For a plot was laid again against the same Commodus, in which by Narcissus, an athlete, as Xiphilinus says (Dio, Epitome, p. 384 and following), or as

Herodian writes (Herodian, History book I, p. 486 and following), "by Narcissus, a bold and vigorous young man", or as Aurelius Victor relates (Aurelius Victor, in the Life of Commodus), "by a very powerful athlete", or as Lampridius testifies, "by the athlete with whom he used to exercise" (Lampridius, in the Life of Commodus, p. 315), he was strangled, his throat squeezed shut.

Tertullian adds that other pagans too are public enemies and guilty of treason, "who burst into the palace" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXV, p. 457), namely those traitorous assassins by whom the emperor Pertinax was cruelly slain, as Herodian (Herodian, History book II, p. 598), Capitolinus (Capitolinus, in the Life of Pertinax, p. 318) and Xiphilinus (Dio, Epitome, p. 390) recorded in writing. "But these," says our Author, are "bolder than all the Sigeriuses and Partheniuses" (Tertullian, loc. cit.), by whom, that is, the emperor Domitian was slain, as we have shown elsewhere (Dissertation on Lucius Caecilius, ch. VI, art. 2). Wherefore nothing remains for us to observe, except that these words of Tertullian do not seem wholly uncorrupted. For in our older codices one has "so many Sigeriuses", in some editions "Stephanuses"; doubtless because Suetonius (Suetonius, book VIII, in the Life of Domitian, § 17), making no mention of Sigerius, relates that Domitian was first wounded by Stephanus, and afterwards killed by Clodianus, Parthenius and Saturius. But it is hard to say why the name of Sigerius was omitted there, whom not only Xiphilinus (Xiphilinus, Epitome of Dio, p. 335) but also Martial expressly mentions in these two verses:

And ten times you go back to the palace by the sacred slope,

and you sound the strains of Sigerius and of Parthenius.

(Martial, book IV, epigram 79.)

Farewell, then, to the conjecture of Herald, who at first suspected that in Tertullian's text one should read "Sergiuses", and then, better advised, as he himself says, "Chaereas's" or "Corneliuses". For against these readings stands the authority of our codices of better note, confirmed by the testimony of Martial and others.

Moreover Tertullian asserts that these too are public enemies: "Who are now daily revealed as partners or applauders of criminal factions" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXV, p. 458). And indeed it has already been noted by us above (above, ch. II, art. 2) that by these words are meant the accomplices and supporters of the Albinian faction, who had conspired for the ruin of the emperor Severus. There too we set out more fully what our Author added: "The same services are rendered also by those who consult astrologers and haruspices and augurs and magi about the life of the Caesars" (Tertullian, loc. cit.). For why did they consult them with such curiosity, unless because they were either thinking about the future death of the Caesars, which they certainly desired to come within a short time. For he said straight on: "One does not consult about dear ones", that is, kinsmen and parents, "in the same mind as about masters" (Tertullian, loc. cit., p. 459), whom we do not sincerely love. For about the first, he says, "the anxiety of blood is curious", that is, of those to whom

we are joined by blood, whom indeed we wish to be safe: but the other is the anxiety "of servitude", whose yoke any slave longs to shake off as quickly as may be once his master is removed. Yet do not take it into your mind that the first kind of consultation, about the safety of kinsfolk, is approved by Tertullian. For he means nothing else than that the latter, about the death of the Caesars, is far worse than this. For he condemns all consultations of magi plainly and utterly, since they were, he says (ibid.), "disclosed by the deserter Angels", as we saw above, "and forbidden by God" (above, art. 5).

Who, moreover, would not shudder at the monstrous perfidy of all these, who "right up to the very outbreak of their impiety both offered sacrifices for the emperor's safety.... so as to proclaim their own vows at another's", namely the emperor's, "solemnity, and to inaugurate the pattern and image of their own hope, changing the name of the prince in their heart" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXV, p. 459), that is, pronouncing vows that were wholly feigned for the emperor's safety and genuine for his death and for his next successor, they named the one with their lips only, but the other in their inmost heart? And what is more detestable than this perfidy?

We cannot therefore wonder enough at the rashness of the pagans, who, though by so many examples they were public enemies and guilty of injury to majesty, most shamelessly accused the Christians, wholly innocent, of this crime. For no Christian was ever caught among so many traitors and public enemies. Wherefore our Tertullian wrote to Scapula, governor of Africa, in these words: "We are defamed as regards the majesty of the emperor. Yet Christians could never be found to be Albinians, nor Nigrians, nor Cassians; but the very same men who, as we showed above, had sworn by their genii right up to the day before, who had both offered and vowed victims for their safety, who had often condemned Christians, were found to be their enemies. A Christian is no one's enemy, much less the emperor's, whom, knowing him to be appointed by God, he must needs both love and revere and honour, and wish safe together with the whole Roman empire" (the same, book to Scapula, ch. II). But these things have been sufficiently explained by us above.

As true, then, were the Christians' vows for the emperors' safety as those of the gentiles were false, and they honoured the emperors with as much zeal and respect as those same pagans pursued them with hatred. For "the piety and religion and loyalty", says our Author, "owed to the emperors does not consist in services of this kind, which hostility can rather use as a veil for itself" (the same, Apology, ch. XXXVI, p. 460), that is, by which religion can conceal a perfidious and hostile mind under the shadowy mask of false piety. But piety and religion reside "in those morals by which civility is bound to be shown as truly towards the emperor as towards all". So indeed from the Wouwer codex and some more recent editions. But in the older editions and in our manuscript codices one reads "in those morals which divinity commands, as truly as towards all", etc. (ibid.). And is not the authority of so many codices, older and of better note, of greater weight than that of the single Wouwer codex?

Nor should you say that the word "civility", by which the fellowship and concord of citizens is signified, better suits Tertullian's purpose. For he is speaking of the morals commanded by God, by which religion and piety ought to be shown towards the emperor and all others. For from this too it is shown more evidently that the Christians, who held it a sin not to obey the laws of their God, honoured the emperor with a sincere mind, and accordingly were neither public enemies nor guilty of injury to human majesty.

ARTICLE V.

What the unlawful factions are, and how far the devout manner of life of the Christians differs from them, who were undeservedly called factious because they shunned the pleasures of the shows, and pursued lawful pleasures as much as the Epicureans and others indulged in forbidden ones.

By no reasons ever, even the strongest, could the implacable hatred of the gentiles against the Christians be appeased: rather they cried out more and more that their faction, plainly opposed both to the emperors and to the commonwealth, must be torn out by the roots. Tertullian, however, hints not obscurely that the word faction is taken in a good and in a bad sense (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXVIII, p. 464). Festus too says: "Faction and factious were at first honourable words. Hence too one speaks of factions of actors and of four-horse chariots. But now sedition and arms are called by the name of faction" (Festus, On the Meaning of Words, ch. II, at the word Factio). Mention of the circus factions too, which the pagans did not think bad, is made quite often in the books of Suetonius (Suetonius, book V, on Claudius, § 5, and book VIII, on Domitian, ch. VII), of Cassiodorus (Cassiodorus, Variae book III, letter 41, p. 56, col. 2) and of others, and in various inscriptions.

Tertullian therefore rebukes the pagans in these most severe words: "Accordingly it was right that this sect" of the Christians "should be counted, not a little more leniently, among the lawful factions, since nothing is committed by it such as is usually feared from unlawful factions" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXVIII, p. 464). Herald, however, against the protest of all the codices, whether printed or manuscript, divines that one should read "unlawful", not "lawful" factions. For Tertullian, he says, meant nothing else than that the opinion of certain pagans seemed milder, who thought the sect of the Christians was forbidden by the laws promulgated against factions; yet that they erred in this, that they placed this sect among the number of unlawful factions. But what would you dare against the unanimous agreement of all the codices? What, indeed, if the particle "nec" were transposed, or referred to the word "lawful", so that our Author's sense here is: the pagans most falsely cried out that the Christians were public enemies. Nor did they deal any more leniently with them by whom they were enrolled in the number of factions that were not lawful, with which they had nothing in common, and "by whom nothing is committed such as is usually feared from unlawful factions" (ibid.).

Let us consider, then, in what way he proved that the sect of the Christians was not unlawful: "The reason for forbidding factions," he says, "rests on provision for public order, lest the city be split into parties" (ibid.). In the older

editions we read "of provision and of public order". But not so well, since our Author declares that this is the reason for forbidding factions, that public order may be provided and cared for. Now order [modestia] is defined thus by the Latin Orator: "The knowledge of placing in their proper place the things that are to be done or said. And so the force of order and of arrangement seems to be the same... So this order, as we interpret it, as I said, is the knowledge of the fit occasion of times suitable for acting" (Cicero, On Duties book I, p. 370, line 47 and following). In this sense the word modestia seems to be taken by our Tertullian, who for that reason asserts that bad factions were forbidden, lest, the order of things being disturbed, of things to be done or said in their place and time, the city be split into parties. For this division and dissension "unsettles", as he puts it, or disturbs "the comitia", that is, the general assemblies of all orders, "and the councils" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXXVIII, p. 464), that is, a part of them gathered together. For Laelius Felix, cited by Aulus Gellius, says: "He who bids not the whole people but some part to be present bids not a comitia but a council to be held" (Gellius, Attic Nights book XV, ch. VII, p. 847). It disturbs also "the curiae", in which formerly, as Varro observes (Varro, On the Latin Language book IV, p. 51), the priests took care of divine affairs and the senate of human ones; it disturbs "the public meetings", that is, the public speeches of advocates, and the gatherings of men to hear them; finally it disturbs "the shows", of the circus and of the other public games, as we were saying a little before.

But all these things, Tertullian goes on, were to be feared most of all "when they had now begun even to make a trade of the venal and hireling service of their violence" (Tertullian, loc. cit.), for stirring up disturbances and seditions against the emperor, as we have noticed. For those who had conspired against him drew other abandoned men to their side by price and hire.

But nothing of the kind, or anything in the least like it, was to be feared from the Christians. For first, in their public synaxes nothing was done but what was pious and holy; and there, as elsewhere, they prayed to God with their whole heart for the emperors, for a tranquil state of the empire, for their enemies, and for all others (ibid., ch. XXXIX, p. 468). All of which has already been abundantly shown by us (above, ch. XIV, art. 3, and ch. XXI, art. 1).

Secondly, since they utterly shrank from all ambition and from desire of dignities and honours, or, to use our Author's words, "for us, who are cold to all ardour for glory and dignity, there is no need of assembly" (Tertullian, ibid.), that is, that we should be present at the aforesaid assemblies of the pagans, where dignities, magistracies and the insignia of honours used to be bestowed on the covetous and ambitious. And besides, "strangers to public affairs, we acknowledge only one commonwealth of all men", namely "the world", which we wish to be tranquil and at peace. Inclined, therefore, to one side no more than to the other, we are far removed from every turbulent, seditious and unlawful faction whatever.

Moreover the public shows of the pagans, which were the most frequent incitements of factions, the Christians

shunned and detested utterly and entirely. For these have no other origin than "from superstition", as he says, that is, from the impious worship of false deities, as he himself shows more fully and point by point in another book. Rightly therefore in his Apology he draws from this the conclusion: "We have nothing to do, in speech, sight or hearing, with the madness of the circus, with the shamelessness of the theatre, with the cruelty of the arena, with the vanity of the xystus." And so it stands in all the manuscript codices and the old editions: but by Rigaltius and his followers these words "in speech, sight, hearing" were removed; whether rightly, I appeal to you as judge. For they are genuine, and were most deliberately added by him, to show that these shows were avoided by the Christians because, besides the crime of idolatry, they held it a sin to take unlawful pleasures in speech, sight and hearing (Tertullian, loc. cit., and On the Shows, ch. VI and VII and following). How harmful and pestilent these were you will learn from the words with which he names them elsewhere: "The solemn pleasures of the raging circus, and of the savage amphitheatre, and of the wanton stage" (the same, Against Marcion book I, ch. XXVII). And elsewhere: "The believer too perishes who has slipped into the spectacle of the charioteers' frenzy and the gladiators' gore, and of the stage's foulness and the xystus's vanity" (the same, On Modesty, ch. VII). But of these things more in the book On the Shows, and by us in this and in our other dissertations.

Yet the gentiles objected that the sect of the Christians should be forbidden and condemned on that very ground, that they spurned the gatherings of other men and avoided like a public plague the delights of the public shows, which the emperors and the older human laws favoured. But to these Tertullian replies: grant that these pleasures are as lawful as they are wicked: "In what do we offend you," he says, "if we take up other pleasures" and pursue them? And what "if we will not know how to be delighted", and reject every kind of pleasure? "Surely the injury is ours, if it is not yours" (the same, Apology, ch. XXXVIII, p. 467), that is, we do harm only to ourselves, and none at all to you, unless perhaps it is your harm too to give yourselves wholly to such wicked pleasures.

Nor should you press the point that we reject "the things that please you" (ibid.). For we do not deny it; rather we glory in it. But what does it matter to you? Do not "our things also fail to delight you"? If then you repudiate our lawful and chaste delights, why shall we not be allowed to reject yours, which are plainly lustful and wholly unworthy of a man possessed of reason?

Tertullian goes on, and confirms this by the example of the Epicureans, which he puts forward in just these words of our codices: "The Epicureans were permitted to decree some truth of pleasure", that is, equanimity of mind, "and the ample affairs of the Christian" (ibid.). The same stands also in the old editions, if you except the last word, "Christian"; which no one indeed will deny was added through the copyists' carelessness. But Rigaltius, as we noted above (ch. III, art. 1), kept only this: "The Epicureans were permitted to decree some truth of pleasure", and, moving these words from their place, set them before the words: "In what do we offend you". But he wanted us to be told there

that he had gathered this emendation from those who had seen the Fulda codex. But even if that is so, ought the authority of the single Fulda book on that account to have been preferred to all the others, many of which are far older? Do not these words, if you remove the word "Christian" as superfluous, as we said, suit our Author's purpose and mind quite nicely?

For he argues in this way: Why should Christians not be allowed to follow the pleasure they think honourable, when the Epicureans were allowed to choose the one that affords "equanimity of mind", or rather evenness and tranquillity, which is disturbed by no unpleasant movement nor by ample affairs? For "the highest pleasure," said Cicero, "is, as Epicurus holds, to feel no pain" (Cicero, On Ends book I, p. 45, line 28), or, as Theodoret related, that pleasure which excludes every kind of care and weariness, and accordingly ample affairs (Theodoret, sermon 12 On the Blessed Life, p. 675). But if this is Tertullian's very sense, one ought to write in his text "nec", not "et ampla negotia", unless by this word he meant those affairs which by their amplitude stir no disturbance of mind. Of that opinion of Epicurus and his followers we have argued elsewhere, and more than once. Tertullian, then, from all these weighty reasons rightly concludes that the sect of the Christians, who repudiated the unlawful pleasures of the gentiles, was not an unlawful faction to be forbidden, but the best indeed and more excellent than all others. On the contrary, the gentiles were plainly factious and seditious, who, as we saw in the preceding articles, openly assailed their emperors with scurrilous wit, with abuse and insults, desired their death, conspired against them, and laid violent hands on them.

CHAPTER XXIII.

That the Christians are not the cause of public disasters.

ARTICLE ONE.

What the public disasters are of which the pagans complained, as often as falsely, that the Christians were the authors, and how Tertullian refutes them.

It was observed by us in our earlier dissertations (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. VI, art. 1 and 2) that there was no accusation more often repeated than that by which the pagans complained that the Christians were, as Tertullian says, "the cause of every public disaster, of every popular misfortune". We should indeed be weary of cooking again cabbage so often re-cooked, by refuting once more this altogether witless argument, if the pagans had ever repented of thrusting it forward so ineptly. But these insane men, raging with monstrous hatred against the Christians, thought they could hardly have devised anything fitter than this calumny for destroying the Christians (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XL, p. 479, and To the Nations book I, ch. IX, p. 571). Let us therefore follow our Tertullian, and try to bring out what he said, in setting out and overturning it, that is either singular or somewhat obscure.

He begins, then, with the Romans thus: "If the Tiber

rises to the walls" (ibidem), or, as in another book, "If the Tiber has overflowed", that is, if flooding too much it has harmed the walls of the City and also the fertility of the lands; and on the contrary, "If the Nile does not rise to the fields", nor, with its accustomed flood, or as Virgil sings:

.... does not make the fields fertile with black sand.

(Virgil, Georgics book IV, line 290.)

Moreover, "if the sky", our Author adds, "has stood still", or, as later, "when the summers hold back the winters from rain" (Tertullian, loc. cit.); and if you ask what he means there by the name of sky, we shall answer you with these words of Tully: "This sky, in which clouds, rains and winds are gathered" (Cicero, Tusculans book II, p. 122, line 14); if rains do not flow from this sky at the fitting time of winter or summer, and do not make the earth fertile; which Cyprian, following Tertullian, expressed thus: "Since you say that very many complain that long fair weather holds back the showers and rains"; and elsewhere: "when fair skies hold back rain from the clouds" (Cyprian, treatise To Demetrianus; and the book On Mortality); likewise "if the earth has moved", and by its unusual movement towns have collapsed, or men have been swallowed by its chasm, as we shall see a little later; finally "if famine and plague" (there one must supply "rage and spread"); or, as elsewhere more clearly: "If famine has afflicted" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XL, p. 480, and To the Nations book I, ch. IX, p. 571); in all these public calamities, says Tertullian, with one voice of all the gentiles the cry goes up, "The Christians to the lion" (the same, Apology, ibid.). But this last word, which is found in our manuscript codices and the old editions, was cut off by Rigaltius. Yet even if it is absent, it must in any case be understood. That acclamation, which we dealt with above, used to be made chiefly in the circus. And by it alone, however grossly unjust, the Christians were seized and at once exposed to be devoured by lions and other beasts. Tertullian, however, explodes it with derision in just these three words: "So many to one?" (ibid.), as if he had said: Bless me! Do you suppose that an almost infinite multitude of Christians, as we were observing before, could have been exposed to a single lion and devoured by him?

Then after this he shows by weighty reasons that nothing more false could have been invented than that the Christians were the authors of public or other calamities: "For before Tiberius," he says, that is, before the coming of Christ, "what great disasters befell the world and its cities!" (ibid.). He did not say "before Tiberius" in the sense of meaning that Christ had not come into this world before, but that His coming was made manifest to the world when, in the reign of Tiberius, He wrought miracles and founded His Church. For in the book To the Nations he says: "Under the emperor Augustus this name arose; under Tiberius its teaching shone forth" (the same, To the Nations book I, ch. VII, p. 567). Wherefore he said later: "Our age is not yet three hundred years old: what disasters before that span fell upon the whole world, on individual cities and provinces? How many wars, foreign and civil? How many plagues, famines, fires, chasms and movements of the earth has the age passed through?

Where were the Christians then, when the Roman state furnished so many histories of its troubles?" (ibid., ch. IX, p. 571). And since we cannot pass over without some explanation the examples by which he demonstrated this, let us, if you please, set about expounding them one by one.

ARTICLE II.

How Tertullian shows that the Christians are not the authors of public disasters for this reason, that before the birth of Christ, through very many floods and earthquakes, Hiera, Anaphe, Delos, Rhodes and Cos went to ruin, likewise the greater part of Asia, or of Africa, and the Corinthian sea was drunk up, and Sicily was made by being cut off from Lucania in Italy, and all men perished in a deluge not merely of the plains but universal.

By no stronger argument, certainly, can it be proved that the Christians are not the authors of public disasters than by the examples of very many that happened before the birth of Christ. Yet no one who has touched the histories of ancient times even with his fingertips can be unaware how frequent a mention of them nearly all writers have made. It seemed scarcely necessary, then, for Tertullian to heap up more examples of this kind, had he not judged that they must be brought forward to crush the obstinacy of the gentiles. They must therefore be examined by us, both because of the various readings of the codices, by which the proper names are disfigured, and because of certain difficulties which may make trouble for some.

The first example is set out in Rigaltius's edition in these words: "We read that Hieranape and Delos and Rhodes and Cos, islands, went to ruin with many thousands of men" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XLV, p. 36). But in our copies it is written: "Hieranaupeam, et Delon, et Rhodon, et Cho", except for one copy, in which one has "Hierant pean"; in the Bongars copy "Iherrapean"; in one Vatican copy "Hieramapeam", and in another Vatican copy likewise "Hiera Niepaeam"; in the Fulda copy "Hierearrunda penes"; in the editions before Rigaltius "Hierapolis", but wrongly. For this city is not said to have fallen before the beginnings of the Christian religion. You see, surely, how much and for how long this passage has been corrupted. In the book To the Nations, however, one reads plainly: "Hierenaape and Delphi and Rhodes and Crete, islands, went to ruin with many thousands of men" (the same, To the Nations book I, ch. IX, p. 54, Rigaltius's edition). But these words neither remove the difficulty nor even lessen it. No sounder are these words of the same Tertullian in another book: "No longer is there Delos, Rhene, Samos" (the same, On the Pallium, ch. II). For several will have it that there, instead of "Rhene", one should read "Barenae", although Pliny (Pliny, Natural History book IV, ch. XII, p. 456) and others mention the island of Rhene. Let us see, then, whether we can borrow some light from elsewhere to explain that obscure and corrupt passage of Tertullian.

Pliny, just cited, meets us first, where [he discusses] the places from which the seas had withdrawn, and the islands that had arisen

came into being he discusses: "Long since," he says, "the famous islands of Delos and Rhodes are recorded to have arisen. Afterwards smaller ones: beyond Melos, Anaphe; between Lemnos and the Hellespont, Nea; between Lebedos and Teos, Halone; among the Cyclades, in the fourth year of the 135th Olympiad, Thera and Therasia; among the same, 130 years later, Hiera, which is also Automate" (Pliny, book II, ibid., ch. LXXXVII, p. 236). To this is added Ammianus Marcellinus, where he investigates the causes of earthquakes: "The brasmatiae," he says, "which, heaving the ground up more violently, thrust up enormous masses, as in Asia Delos emerged, and Hiera, and Anaphane" (Marcellinus, book XVII, ch. VII, p. 456). Do you see that in these passages Delos and Rhodes are mentioned, just as by Tertullian himself? And is there not ground for suspecting that from the two other islands, Hiera and Anaphe, as Pliny writes, or Hiera and Anaphane, as Marcellinus does, that corrupt word "Hierannapen" was made by unskilled copyists? But we shall readily yield to those who suggest something better.

There remains the last island named by Tertullian, "Co", or "Cho", as in our codices and in the first book To the Nations already cited, or "Coro", as in the old editions, or "Coon", as in Herald's edition. But Pamelius thinks it should be corrected to "Coo", because in Eusebius's Chronicle we read: "In the island of Cos very many things fell down in an earthquake" (Eusebius's Chronicle, at the 38th year of Augustus). Not altogether wrongly perhaps; for Strabo mentions the island Κῶς (Strabo, Geography book II, p. 124, and book X, p. 489), as do others too. But some have advised us that in the text of Eusebius's Chronicle "in Cyprus" is written, and they try to confirm this by the testimony of Seneca. Finally some have suspected that Tertullian wrote "Cea", and think this emendation can be proved by these words of Pliny: "From the island of Cea it carried off more than thirty thousand paces, suddenly torn away, with very many of its mortals" (Pliny, Natural History book II, ch. XCII, p. 239). And will not some strength accrue to this conjecture from the fact that the same Pliny later observes that Cos is called Cea by Staphylus (ibid., book V, ch. IX)? But it would doubtless be established more surely if it could be proved that Tertullian had looked to Pliny's books.

But certainly he seems to have aimed at him when he said: "Plato records that a land greater than Asia or Africa was snatched away by the Atlantic sea" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XL, p. 481). And again in another book: "Plato records that a greater Asia or Africa was sunk in the Atlantic sea" (To the Nations book I, ch. IX, p. 571). For we have seen it written by the same Pliny: "It has taken away lands entirely, first of all, if we believe Plato, where the Atlantic sea is, over an immense space" (Pliny, Natural History book II, ch. XC, p. 238). The passage of Plato cited by both, moreover, is found in his Timaeus (Plato, Timaeus, vol. III, p. 25), as we have observed elsewhere (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. VI, art. 3). For the rest, even if Tertullian had never thought of Pliny in writing these things, it is none the less confirmed by what he repeats elsewhere still: [a land] equal to Libya or Asia in the Atlantic sea.

But let us follow him further, unless with so many examples enough

you will say it already proven that the Christians were not the cause of the public calamities, and may it not weary you to have it proven to others as well. But he goes on, and says: "An earthquake drank up the Corinthian sea" (Tertullian, De pallio, ch. 2); and in the book To the Nations: "By an earthquake the Corinthian sea was snatched away." Some suppose that he there alluded to the ruin of the cities of Helice and Bura, of which Pliny again says: "The sea carried off Helice and Bura in the Corinthian gulf, whose traces appear in the deep" (Pliny, Natural History, book II, ch. 92, p. 259). If you want more, consult Strabo (Strabo, Geography, book I, p. 59), Pausanias (Pausanias, book VII, pp. 212 and 231), Seneca (Seneca, Natural Questions, book VI, ch. 23, p. 893), and, to pass over others, Ovid, who sang:

If you should seek Helice and Bura, Achaean cities, / you will find them under the waters; and still the sailors / are wont to point out the sunken towns with their walls' tops.

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, book XV, line 293 and following.)

But a little earlier he composed these verses, not indeed about cities, but about lands, which our Author named:

I myself have seen what had once been most solid earth / become sea; I have seen lands made out of the deep; / and far from the ocean sea-shells have lain, / and an old anchor has been found on the mountain-tops.

See what we noted in the previous dissertation, on Arnobius (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. 6, art. 3). But someone will argue that this does not suffice for Tertullian's purpose unless it be shown by some reasoning that the Corinthian sea was, as he says, snatched away and covered by an earthquake. But Callisthenes, already cited by us after Seneca, will fully satisfy him, who teaches that cities and lands can easily be swallowed up by overflowing waters when wind, having slipped in through hidden openings, shakes the earth (Seneca, Natural Questions, book VI, ch. 85, p. 895). For then a chasm is made, by which all things are consumed. Wherefore the same Seneca said again: "A vast shaking sank two cities, Helice and Buris." But Buris and Helice were cities of the Peloponnesian, or Corinthian, isthmus, which could not have been sunk in the waters without the Corinthian sea being swallowed up by a like mishap. Yet it was not swallowed up entire, but it made a double sea, of which Ovid says:

and the isthmus that holds apart the waters of the twin sea.

(Ovid, Heroides, letter 12, line 104.)

And Lucan:

. . . Just as the slender isthmus that cuts the waves / and separates the twin sea, and does not suffer the straits to meet; if the land should give way, / it would break the Ionian sea against the Aegean . . .

(Lucan, book II, line 99.)

Further, what Tertullian added is far easier for all to understand: "The force of the waves cut Lucania off from Italy and banished it to the name of Sicily" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40, p. 481). And a little more fully in another book: "A side of Italy once, cut off midway by the battering of the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian, makes its remnants Sicily, while that whole tract of severance, twisting back the quarrelsome meeting of the seas in a narrow strait, has put a new vice upon the sea, not of spitting out shipwrecks but of devouring them" (The same,

De pallio, ch. 2). These things indeed have been handed down to memory by very many geographers, poets and others. And Ovid, in the same place that we cited a little before, sang of Zancle, a city of Sicily:

. . . Zancle too is said to have been joined / to Italy, until the sea carried off the bordering land / and with its waves between drove the earth back.

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, book XV, line 290.)

Lucan too, cited by us, sang the same of the whole of Sicily, and indeed more than once (Lucan, book II, line 543, and book III, line 58 and following), as did Virgil in these verses:

These lands, they say, once torn apart by force and vast upheaval / (so much can the long age of time change), / leapt asunder, when the two lands had been / one unbroken; the sea came with force between, and with its waves / cut off the Hesperian side from the Sicilian, and fields and cities, / parted on their shores, it washes with a narrow tide.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book III, line 414 and following.)

And having cited these verses, Seneca added: "So by this inundation, which the greatest of the poets celebrate, Sicily was thrown off from Italy" (Seneca, Natural Questions, book IV, ch. 29, p. 898). See Pliny (Pliny, Natural History, book II, ch. 87, p. 235), Statius (Statius, Thebaid, book III, and Silvae, book I), Silius Italicus, Cluverius and others.

What more? Before Saturn and all the other gods of the Gentiles there had occurred that deluge which, as Tertullian says, "wiped out the whole world, or, as Plato thought, only the level land" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40, p. 481). More briefly in the book To the Nations: "The deluge wiped out the whole world" (To the Nations, book I, ch. 9, p. 571); but more fully in another book: "Still," he says, "shells and trumpet-shells of the sea sojourn as strangers on the mountains, eager to prove to Plato that even the heights were awash" (The same, De pallio, ch. 2). There is no one who does not understand that he there speaks of the universal flood which is described in the sacred book of Genesis (Genesis, chs VI and VII). But there he rebukes Plato, who supposed that the waters of this flood did not reach the highest peaks of the mountains, to which, as he had dreamed, very many shepherds flocking together did not suffer shipwreck with the rest (Plato, vol. II, Laws, book III, p. 677; and vol. III, Timaeus, p. 22). Our Author refutes this false opinion from the fact that shells and trumpet-shells were found on the mountains, or "buccina", as Pliny says, who observes in the same place that this is a smaller kind of shell, in the likeness of a horn or trumpet (Pliny, Natural History, book IX, ch. 36, p. 340, and ch. 33, p. 528). And a little earlier we cited Ovid, who testifies that shells and an anchor were found on the tops of mountains. Now at the time of that general flood Saturn and the other gods afterwards invented by the heathen did not yet exist, as is plainly shown by the cities founded by them, or in which they were born and died, or, as in the book To the Nations, "were born, dwelt and were buried" (Tertullian, in the place cited). Of these matters, moreover, and of the origin of the gods and of idolatry, we have disputed in the earlier dissertations, and something more will be said below.

ARTICLE III.

On the disasters which, before the beginnings of the Christian religion,

were stirred up by fire from heaven and by the arms of men: on Sodom and Gomorrah burnt up, and their land, where fruits make the attempt and then, once touched, turn to ash; on Volsinii, Pompeii or Tarpeii consumed by fire; on the disaster of Cannae, after which Hannibal measured the slaughter of the Romans by the peck of rings taken from them; and on the Capitol seized by the Senones.

Tertullian comes to other disasters stirred up by fire from heaven and by the arms of men: "A fiery rain," he says, "burnt up Sodom and Gomorrah" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40, p. 482), before the Israelites had migrated from Egypt into Palestine, and therefore very many centuries before the Christians, sprung from them, had come into the world. The ruin of both these cities is proven by the most certain testimony of sacred Scripture (Gen. 19:24). But even if that were lacking to us, the land itself would give no doubtful sign of that disaster, which, as Tertullian loves to put it: "The land still smells of the burning; and if any fruits of trees there make the attempt, it is only so far as the eye goes; for the rest, once touched, they turn to ash" (Tertullian, in the place cited). So it reads in our manuscript codices and in others. But in some it reads wrongly "arise" and "are seen". For there is an ellipsis, and one must understand there "make the attempt to ripen". And in another book: "Impiety," he says, "earned rains of fire. Henceforth there is no Sodom and no Gomorrah, and all is ash, and the neighbouring sea, like the soil, lives a death" (The same, De pallio, ch. 2). Indeed Josephus relates that there are still seen the remains of the divine fire, and the semblances of five towns, and ashes springing up again in the fruits, which, though like things fit to eat, yet when touched by the hands dissolve into smoke and ash (Josephus, The Jewish War, book V, ch. 5, p. 892). Augustine too asserts that this is confirmed by the authority of Gentile writers (Augustine, The City of God, book XXI, ch. 3, p. 629). If anyone wishes some author to be cited to him, we shall readily give Cornelius Tacitus, whose words are these: "Not far from there," namely from the Dead Sea, "are plains which they say were once fertile and inhabited by great cities, and were burnt by the stroke of lightning; and that the traces remain, and the earth, scorched in appearance, has lost its fruit-bearing power; for all things, whether sprung up of themselves or sown by hand, whether they have grown only to the blade or to the flower or to their usual form, become black and empty and vanish as it were into ash" (Tacitus, Histories, book V, a little after the beginning). But being a heathen, and ignorant of sacred Scripture, he supposes that this unripeness of the fruits arises from the exhalation of the lake, by which the air spread over the land is first corrupted, and then corrupts the land. Nor did Solinus err less, who likewise attributes this effect of divine vengeance to heavenly soil alone [sic], by which he thus relates that this land was struck: "At a long remove from Jerusalem a gloomy gulf opens, which the black ground, dissolved into ash, testifies to have been struck from heaven. There are two towns there, one named Sodomum, the other Gomorrhum, near which the fruit that grows, though it may have the look of ripeness, yet cannot be eaten; the mere wrapping of the outermost skin holds within a sooty, ashy matter, which, pressed even by a light touch, breathes out smoke and crumbles into loose dust" (Solinus, Polyhistor, ch. 35, p. 65).

Then Tertullian: "But neither Tuscany," he says, "nor Campania was then already complaining of the Christians, when fire from heaven drenched Volsinii, and fire from its own mountain Pompeii" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40, p. 485). And again in another book: "From a cloud of this kind Tuscany too, burnt out, [lost] its ancient Volsinii, and Campania, the more to hope [for the like] from its mountains, [was] robbed of Pompeii" (De pallio, ch. 2). But these things are not without their difficulty. For in the book To the Nations we read: "Fire from heaven drenched Volsinii, and fire from its own mountain the Tarpeians" (The same, To the Nations, book I, ch. 9, p. 54). For those who there are the Tarpeians are in the other two books called the Pompeians; although Tertullian seems to be speaking of the same peoples. But the Pompeians were not a little distant from the Tarpeians, who inhabited the Tarpeian, one of the seven hills of Rome. Of this hill Virgil sings:

From here he leads to the Tarpeian seat and the Capitol, / golden now, once rough with woodland thickets.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book VII, line 347.)

And again afterwards:

On the summit Manlius, guardian of the Tarpeian citadel, / stood before the temple and held the lofty Capitol.

(Ibid., line 652.)

There is no need at all to cite Ovid (Ovid, Fasti, book I, line 79) and others in a matter well enough known.

Pompeii was a town on the coast of Campania: "Not far off," says Pliny, "with Mount Vesuvius looking on, and the river Sarnus washing it" (Pliny, Natural History, book III, ch. 4, p. 327). Pomponius Mela supports Pliny with these words: "In view of Mount Vesuvius are Pompeii, Neapolis, Puteoli" (Mela, On the Situation of the World, book II, ch. 4, § 65). Strabo too (Strabo, Geography, book V, p. 247) and other geographers report the same. Seneca, moreover, described not only the site of this city but also its ruin, thus: "We have heard that Pompeii, a famous city of Campania, at which the Sabinian [shore] on the one side and the Herculanean shore on the other meet, and which the sea, drawn in from the open, encircles, sank in an earthquake, all the adjacent regions being shaken; and this quake was indeed in the winter days, on the Nones of February, in the consulship of Regulus and Virginius" (Seneca, Natural Questions, book VI, ch. 1, p. 881). Finally Cornelius Tacitus, in fewer words, where he treats of the emperor Nero: "By an earthquake Pompeii, a famous town of Campania, collapsed in great part" (Tacitus, Annals, book XV, long after the beginning). But these things do not altogether serve Tertullian's purpose, who asserts that the destruction of this city came about not by an earthquake but by fire, and not in Nero's reign but before the times of Christ. Wherefore if anyone shall show that he spoke not of this town of the Pompeians but of the Tarpeian citadel, overthrown by fire from heaven, we shall not indeed protest much. But observe, I pray, that the city of the Pompeians was situated on another [mountain] than Mount Vesuvius [sic]. And yet if, by flames bursting forth from that Mount Vesuvius, it was at some time burnt before the Christian religion was spread abroad, could not this have been noted by our Tertullian as an extraordinary event?

The difficulty about Vulsinii, or Volsinii, is smaller; elsewhere (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 24, p. 421), as we shall say below (below, ch. 27, art. 2), he called them the Volsinians. Of these indeed Juvenal sings:

Who fears, or ever feared, a house's fall in cool Praeneste, / or in Volsinii set among the wooded ridges?

Juvenal, Satire 3, line 181.)

Their town is called by Strabo Oulsinioi; and that it was, as Tertullian says, drenched with fire, Pliny records in these and as many words: "Volsinii, the most renowned town of the Etruscans, was burnt up by a thunderbolt" (Pliny, Natural History, book II, ch. 52, p. 207). Yet he is silent there about the time at which this happened; but nearly everyone is persuaded that both are to be understood of the same burning, which happened before the Christians arose.

Tertullian presses on still, and urges the heathen thus with another example very well known to all: "No one at Rome yet worshipped the true God, when Hannibal at Cannae was measuring his slaughters by the peck through the rings of the Romans" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40, p. 485). For to whom is the battle of Cannae unknown, after which the victorious Hannibal, as Livy relates, "ordered the gold rings to be poured out in the vestibule of the senate-house; and so great was the heap that some authorities say that, when measured, they filled three pecks and a half. The report has prevailed, which is nearer the truth, that it was not more than a peck" (Livy, book XXIII, § 12). But even if it had been only one peck, that undoubtedly suffices for these rings to have been measured, as our Author says, by the peck. Pliny, however, writes that three pecks of rings were sent by Hannibal to Carthage (Pliny, Natural History, book XXXIII, ch. 1, p. 12), and Augustine as many (Augustine, The City of God, book III, ch. 19).

But here we can by no means keep silent that in Rigault's edition, against the authority of our codices and of the old editors, "per" has been omitted from Tertullian's text, and "caede sua" written. For what reason, he has kept entirely silent. For what reason could he have? Is not Tertullian's style sufficiently detected there, and this his meaning: that Hannibal after the victory did not count one by one the number of the Romans killed in the battle, but measured it by the peck through their rings? Wherefore Augustine, already cited by us: "He sent three pecks of gold rings to Carthage," he says, "so that they might understand that so much Roman rank had fallen in that battle that a measure could grasp it more easily than a number; and that hence the slaughter of the rest of the throng, so much the more numerous as it was the more lowly," namely of men, "which lay without rings, should be thought a thing to be guessed rather than counted" (Augustine, in the place cited). But do not be loath to go to this book of Augustine, where he argues against the heathen from this and other disasters, as our Author does.

Older indeed, but no less famous and known to all, was another disaster of the Romans, "when the Senones seized the Capitol," as Tertullian again writes (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40), or, as we read in our codices, "had seized". But what does he mean, you will say, when he said "seized"? Do not Livy (Livy, book V, § 41 and following), Augustine (Augustine, book II

of The City of God, ch. 22, p. 51), and others, certainly very many, constantly assert that the Capitol was by no means stormed by the Senones, but only Rome taken by them? Nothing certainly is truer. Wherefore the word "had seized" is taken there for "had held under siege". And yet at that time Saturn and the other gods of the Gentiles, as Tertullian says, were worshipped by all, besiegers and besieged alike. The Christians, therefore, who did not then exist, could not have been the authors either of this calamity or of the others we have so far related.

ARTICLE IV.

How clearly Tertullian shows that the authors of the public calamities were not the Christians, who, when these threatened, implored the mercy of the true God with the hard labours of penance; but the Gentiles, who, drunken, while the baths, taverns and brothels were busy, sacrificed rain-rites to Jupiter, proclaimed barefoot processions to the people, and looked for clouds from the panelled ceilings.

When the heathen asked who, if not the Christians, the most bitter enemies of the gods, could be the cause of the public disasters, Tertullian answers that it must be thrown back on the Gentiles themselves alone (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40, p. 487). For: "The human race," he says, "has always deserved ill of God," the true and only God, for a twofold reason. And first indeed, "as undutiful towards Him, whom, though it understood Him in part, it did not seek out" (ibid.); that is, though by the light of nature alone it had known at least in part that He really exists, and that there can be no other God, it did not care to inquire further who He was, nor therefore to pay Him the duties owed Him and the honours owed.

Secondly, the same human race "devised for itself besides other gods, to worship." So, "no longer seeking the teacher of innocence" (ibid.) and the avenger of crimes, having forsaken Him it threw itself headlong into idolatry and every kind of wickedness. The heathen, therefore, experienced as angry because of their crimes the God whom, by acknowledging Him and worshipping Him as was fitting, they could have had gracious. It was not the Christians, then, who always worshipped the true God with due worship and with pious works, who were the cause of the public calamities, but the ungrateful race of the heathen themselves, which spurned Him and most grievously offended Him by idolatry and other crimes. And he strengthens this whole argument by what was done by both, Christians and Gentiles, when some disaster had arisen or was threatening. For "when," he says, "the summer withholds the rains from the winter" [months] — the fruitful rains, as we said a little before (ibid.), and greatly longed for — "and the year is a cause of anxiety," that is, when its barrenness is feared, or, as he himself puts it elsewhere, "when the sky is stupefied and the year is parched" (Tertullian, Apology, in the place cited, and On Fasting, ch. 16), then the Christians, with fasts and other most hard labours of penance, of which we treated above (above, ch. 14, arts 1 and 2; ch. 15, art. 1), prevailed upon the infinite mercy of God by a welcome force. Hence indeed it came about, as he quite rightly observes (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 40), that from the time when the Christians tempered the iniquities of the world by holiness of life and these pious works, much

lighter have been the misfortunes by which men used formerly to be afflicted and harassed.

But the heathen, on the contrary, when some more fearful calamity was impending or had broken out, provoked the true God with revellings, drunkenness, debauchery, adulteries, and the impious invocation of false gods. For then, as Tertullian says in addressing them, "fed every day, and about to lunch at once, while baths and taverns and brothels are busy, you sacrifice rain-rites to Jupiter" (ibid.). And these are indeed his very words in our manuscript books, except that in them is written "cauponiis", a name the historian Justin uses, though he added "artibus" (Justin, book I). We read the same in the old editions of the same Apology, except that "cauponis operati" is written; but in others, better, "operantibus", that is, providing their services. But Rigault, citing no codex and doubtless on his own authority, entirely deleted these first words, "fed every day, and about to lunch at once". Is an editor then allowed, giving no reason, to correct, or rather to corrupt, the text of his author? For Tertullian sets the Christians against the heathen, and shows in how different a way each sought to avert from themselves a public calamity bearing down on them. At that time, he says, the Christians, defiled with sackcloth and ashes, took no food for whole days. The heathen, on the contrary, not waiting for the hour of the midday meal, took a foretaste of food beforehand, being soon to lunch more sumptuously in the taverns. Afterwards they refreshed themselves with the pleasure of the baths, and wallowed in every debauchery in the brothels.

Moreover they provoked the true God by another crime, that of idolatry. For, having rejected Him, they sacrificed rain-rites to Jupiter. Now "aquilicium", or "aquaelicium", as Festus witnesses, "is said when rain-water is drawn out by certain remedies, as once, if it is believed, by the manalis stone being brought into the City" (Festus, On the Meaning of Words, ch. 20, under the word Aqualicium). And if you ask what that manalis stone is, the same Festus will answer you: "They called the manalis stone a certain rock which was outside the Capena gate near the temple of Mars; when, because of excessive drought, they dragged it into the City, rain followed at once; and because it made waters flow, they called it the manalis stone" (the same, under the word Manualis). So, in time of drought, dragging this stone out of the temple of Mars, they made sacrifice to Jupiter, doubtless Jupiter Pluvius, or Pluvialis, who is called by Pausanias Hyetios (Pausanias, book II, p. 61, line 44), by others Zeus Ombrios. Hence Tibullus sang this of Egypt:

Because of you your land asks for no rains, / nor does the parched grass make supplication to Jupiter the Rain-giver.

(Tibullus, book I, elegy 7, lines 25 and 26.)

Besides this, in that time of drought the heathen "proclaimed barefoot processions to the people". For it was their custom on certain feast-days or solemn days to go to the temples with bare feet. For Ovid celebrates the Vestalia in these verses:

By chance I was returning on the feast of the Vestalia by that way / where the New Way is now joined to the Roman forum. / Here I saw a matron coming down with bare foot. / I was struck dumb in silence and checked my step.

(Ovid, Fasti, book VI, § 9.)

And after the dead body of the emperor Augustus

was burnt with solemn pomp, "the leading men of the equestrian order," as Suetonius relates, "in their tunics and ungirt, and with bare feet, gathered up the remains and laid them in the mausoleum" (Suetonius, Life of Augustus, book II, § 100). Some have thought besides that Juvenal had this rite in view where he sang this of the Galli, the priests of the Mother of the gods:

. . . Then the whole field of the proud king / she will break through, bare and trembling, on bleeding knees . . .

(Juvenal, Satire 6, line 466.)

In like manner Seneca too has handed down in writing: "When someone shaking a sistrum lies at command, when someone skilled in cutting his own muscles bloodies his arms and shoulders with a light hand, when some woman creeping on her knees along the road howls" (Seneca, On the Happy Life, ch. 27, p. 640). But he, like Juvenal, discourses rather of those who went along leaning on their knees than of those who went with bare feet into the temple to pray to their gods. The words of Ovid cited, therefore, serve Tertullian's purpose better.

So the heathen, walking with bare feet, "came to the Capitol," says Tertullian, that is, to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and there "they sought the sky" for rain, and looked for "clouds" heavy with fruitful showers "from the panelled ceilings", that is, of that temple in which they wrongly thought their supreme Jupiter dwelt.

Although our Author said there that at this very time of calamity no crime of intemperance and lust was passed over by them, nevertheless in another book he testifies that some, not only with bare feet but also having laid aside the insignia of their offices, made a show of some kind of penance. For in another book: "When the sky is stupefied," he says, "and the year is parched, barefoot processions are proclaimed, the magistrates lay aside their purple, they turn the fasces backwards, they call upon [the gods] in prayer, they renew the victim" (Tertullian, On Fasting, ch. 16).

But by these works of idolatry they could never obtain anything at all, either from their gods, who were none, or from the true and almighty God, who alone is the giver of all good things. And who does not now understand how true and certain is the conclusion of our Tertullian, addressing these same Gentiles: "You, then, are the troublers of human affairs; you are the culprits of the public misfortunes; you are ever the enticers of evils, among whom God is spurned and statues are adored" (The same, Apology, ch. 41, p. 488). In some editions: "ilices semper". For with the utmost impiety you adore false gods and statues, and reject the true God, who deservedly chastises impious and wicked men with public calamities. The heathen themselves, therefore, were in truth the authors of the public calamities, and by no means the Christians, who, adoring the true God, could certainly obtain from Him what they asked.

ARTICLE V.

The reasons brought forward by Tertullian are examined, for which God suffers the Christians to be afflicted by public calamities, and why they cannot hold good for the heathen.

Overwhelmed by the very heavy weight of so many and such great arguments

the Gentiles, with astonishing obstinacy, were never willing to give way, but tried in every way to turn back against the Christians the weapons hurled at themselves. If the Christians, they said, are not really the authors of the public disasters, why does their God, if He is almighty and just, so calmly suffer them to be harassed, hurt and crushed by the same calamities as the rest of guilty and wicked men? Tertullian answers that this weapon is turned back by the plainly leaden and dull hand of blind men, who were wholly ignorant of the eternal dispositions of the supreme God (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 41). For He, at the final judgement after the end of the world, will separate the good from the wicked, and will visit them according to their deserts either with everlasting punishments or with everlasting rewards. But meanwhile He willed the advantages and disadvantages of this life to be common to all, "so that all," he says, "might experience in equal fellowship" (ibid.) either His gentleness or His severity, and might love the one and fear the other. The public calamities, therefore, were for the Christians an admonition of their duty, but for the heathen a chastisement of their crimes. Nor could these urge that this was wrongly made up by the Christians themselves. For "these things," he goes on, "we have so learned from God Himself" (ibid.), that is, in the sacred books of the Old and New Testament (Matt. 5:45, and 13:49, and 25:32 and following), whose supreme authority, as we saw above (above, ch. 8, arts 1 and 5), he had demonstrated.

Secondly, he answers that the Christians are not distressed by any adversities in this world, but rather rejoice (Tertullian, in the place cited); since they held nothing more welcome and dear than to go out of this world, so as to attain the sooner that eternal happiness which they knew most surely had been promised by most certain and divine oracles to themselves and not to others. But the heathen could never in like manner weaken the force of this argument, which held against them alone. For if their gods were pressing the world with public calamities on account of the Christians, their enemies, it was not without the fault of an ungrateful mind that they suffered those worshippers of theirs to be involved in the same disasters: "whom," as Tertullian rightly says, "they ought to separate from the deserts of the Christians" (Tertullian, ibid.). And after he had brought forward the reasons we have set out in favour of these same Christians, he addresses the heathen in these words: "But if all evils befall you from those whom you worship on our account, why do you persevere in worshipping beings so ungrateful, so unjust, who ought rather to have helped and championed you to the grief" (our manuscripts: "in the grief") "of the Christians, whom they ought to separate from the deserts of the Christians" (ibid.). You see that these latter words are repeated twice, which is why Rigault, as if they had been added out of place, entirely removed them in his edition against the testimony of all the codices, whether printed or manuscript. But what, pray, prevented Tertullian, in disputing against the heathen, from repeating again, after bringing forward the reasons to prove it, the same words in which he had set out his thesis?

But these things, someone will say, are not of so much moment as it matters to know from what he could conclude that the gods of the Gentiles, if there had been in them any sense of a grateful and fair mind, ought in the public calamities to have separated those [worshippers of theirs]

from the Christians. But this is rightly gathered by him from the fact that the heathen had no certain ground at all on which they could hope that, after they had departed from this life, they would receive an eternal reward of their virtues from their gods, who were none. But the Christians, as we have said, most surely expected that reward from their almighty God. The heathen, therefore, ought not to have worshipped these gods, if they were persuaded that they were harassed by them with public calamities on account of the Christians. For if they can bestow nothing after death on their worshippers, who have suffered public calamities in this life for the sake of others, they are utterly ungrateful and unjust, or at least powerless, and therefore wholly without divinity. Tertullian therefore rightly concludes that the worshippers of these gods, and by no means the Christians, are the authors of the public calamities. We have made plain elsewhere (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. 6, art. 4 and following) how this charge, repeated by the heathen as often as foolishly, was refuted by Arnobius, and how Minucius Felix and Lactantius show that the arguments of those who tried on that ground to shake divine providence are plainly feeble and futile (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. 6, art. 3, and on Lactantius, ch. 14, art. 3). But let us now come to the last argument of these same Gentiles against the truth of the Christian religion.

CHAPTER XXIV.

How absurdly the heathen complained that the Christians were useless to the commonwealth, and for that reason to be exterminated.

ARTICLE I.

How Tertullian proved that the Christians were not Brahmans, nor gymnosophists of the Indians, nor forest-dwellers, but most useful to the commonwealth.

The heathen, leaving no stone unturned against the Christians, objected further that they were wholly useless to the commonwealth, and on that ground alone to be utterly exterminated. "But these," says Tertullian, "are not Brahmans, or gymnosophists of the Indians, dwellers in the forests and exiles from life" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42). But who, someone will perhaps say, were those Brahmans and gymnosophists? Were they the same peoples, or different from one another? For Apollonius of Tyana and Damis, cited by Philostratus (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, book III, ch. 4, p. 119, and book VI, ch. 4, p. 265), assert that the Brahmans were inhabitants of India, and that the "naked ones" (nudos), as he said elsewhere, or gymnosophists, dwelt on a hill not far from the banks of the Nile. By Jerome, moreover, they are called in one place "the Brahmans of the Indians and the gymnosophists of the Egyptians" (Jerome, Letter 57, to Laeta, and Against Jovinian, book I), but elsewhere, both by him and by others whom we cited in another dissertation, "gymnosophists of India" (vol. I of the Apparatus, book III, dissertation 2, ch. 19, art. 1, p. 1160 and following). And there we noted besides that there were at least two kinds of them. If anyone, then, should prove that they had their seats not only in India but in Egypt as well, he will easily reconcile Tertullian and the others cited by Philostratus with one another. For the rest, they, just as also

the Brahmans, cut off from other men, followed a most harsh manner of living and of abstaining from foods, which we explained in the place already cited.

But far different, as our Tertullian rightly asserts, was the abstinence of the Christians, who took the foods given them by God with thanksgiving, yet always keeping the laws of temperance. For we reject no fruit, he says, of the works of God; we plainly moderate our use, lest we use them beyond measure or wrongly (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XLII). Nor again were these same Christians dwellers in the woods, and, like the Brahmans and gymnosophists, exiles from common life (ibid.), and wholly separated from the company of other men. For they lived mingled with the heathen in towns and cities, as we have already said, and everywhere shared common labours with them, in the forum, the meat-market, the fairs, the fields, the baths, the taverns (ibid.): not wine-shops, indeed, but buildings which, as Festus says (Festus, under the word Tabernacula), were built of planks and were, on the witness of Nonius, for the use of the people (Nonius, under the word Taber.). They also practised their crafts in workshops open to anyone, and lodged in stables (Tertullian, ibid.), that is, in inns and guest-houses, where they received guests and strangers, or rather in dwellings and the private houses of certain people, such as farmers, of which Virgil sings thus:

She makes for the steep roof of the stable, and from its topmost ridge sounds the shepherds' signal.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book VII, line 512.)

And so the Christians, says our Author, dwelt together in "this world", or, as is read in our manuscripts, "in this world".

Therefore he presses the gentiles themselves thus: We too sail with you, and with you (this last word is absent from our manuscript books) we serve as soldiers, and we farm, and we trade; likewise we share our crafts, we lay out our labours (the manuscripts and the copies printed before Rigault have "our works") for your use; and so we help one another by mutual labours. Yet all these things brought so much the greater benefit to the whole commonwealth as the number of these same Christians was then greater, as we saw earlier. Nothing, therefore, further from the truth could be devised than that the Christians are useless to public affairs.

ARTICLE II.

That no harm is done to the commonwealth by the Christians, who did not frequent the ceremonies of the heathen, nor bathed at daybreak at the Saturnalia but at the proper hour, nor reclined at table in public at the Liberalia, as is the custom of beast-fighters taking their last supper.

However clearly and certainly Tertullian showed that the Christians were of the greatest usefulness to public affairs, the gentiles nevertheless did not shrink from crying out against it that they were for that reason not profitable to the commonwealth, because, scorning all their ceremonies and the more sacred acts of religion, they utterly and entirely refused to be present at them. But Tertullian, granting this, flatly denies that these same Christians were on that account of no use or profit to the commonwealth.

So he addresses any gentile you please thus: If I do not frequent your ceremonies, still on that day too I am a man (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42); who indeed, as was said just now, by living together with the heathen and sharing my crafts, so supply to you and to others very many things that are necessary for your life and society and that of other men, that each one gains the greatest profit from my works.

There is no one, moreover, who does not admit that by this wedge the wholly senseless accusation of the gentiles is overturned from its foundations. Nevertheless Tertullian, beyond what would be enough, makes it plain to anyone by several examples that from the Christians, even if they were not present at the mysteries of the gentiles, either no harm was thereby brought upon public affairs, or, if any was brought, it was abundantly made good by them from another quarter.

But let us hear him, if you please, beginning with the Saturnalia, the festivals of the heathen: I do not bathe, he says, at daybreak at the Saturnalia, lest I lose both the night and the day (ibid.). And so indeed these words are presented in our manuscript copies and in the older printed ones. But Rigault rejected the adverb "at daybreak", and ordered "I bathe towards nightfall" to be written: but he is selling us mere trifles, at odds with the genuine text of our Author (the same, On Idolatry, ch. 10) and with his meaning. In order that this may be more easily discerned by all, it must be observed that the festival of the Saturnalia, as he himself elsewhere, and Varro (Varro, On the Latin Language, book V, p. 51) and Festus (Festus, under the word Saturnia) testify, was instituted in honour of Saturn, the guardian, as they supposed, of the fields. Livy indeed sets out their origin and the day appointed for celebrating them in these words: Now in the month of December sacrifice was offered at the temple of Saturn at Rome, and a lectisternium was ordered, and the senators spread that couch, and a public banquet was held, and "Saturnalia" was cried through the City day and night, and the people were ordered to keep and observe that day as a festival for ever (Livy, book II, § 1). But Macrobius (Macrobius, Saturnalia, book I, ch. 8 and 10), and afterwards Lipsius (Lipsius, Saturnalia, book I, ch. 3, vol. III) debated whether these were kept on one day only or, as they think more probable, on seven successive days. At that time, moreover, on the witness of Lucian (Lucian, Dialogue on the Saturnalia, p. 1021), it was not permitted to transact any serious private or public business, but only to drink, get drunk, shout, play, compete at dice, sing naked, dance with wanton movement of the body, sometimes to plunge into water with one's face smeared with soot, and to admit servants to the banquet, as Accius sang in these verses transcribed by Macrobius:

The greatest part of the Greeks, and Athens most of all, perform rites to Saturn, which they keep as the Cronia; and when they celebrate the day, through the fields and nearly all the cities they hold glad feasts, and each attends to his own servants; and likewise from there this custom was handed down to us, that the servants then feast in the same place with their masters.

(Macrobius, Saturnalia, book I, ch. 7.)

It is no wonder, then, if the Christians condemned these wicked acts of idolatry, wantonness and drunkenness, and the other detestable ones which we have recounted from the writers cited above, and refused to lose night and day

by celebrating such impious festivals. Therefore, says Tertullian, I do not bathe at daybreak at the Saturnalia (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42, p. 482), so as to prepare myself for performing those rites. For who does not know that it was the custom of the heathen to bathe before a banquet? But the Christians did not believe it lawful for them to prepare themselves at daybreak, when winter was raging, in an untimely bath, for performing those abominable banquets and mysteries.

Yet they did not on that account bring any harm upon public affairs. For I bathe, says our Author, at a decent and wholesome hour. Rigault, however, preferred to have "proper" written rather than "decent hour": but against the protest of all the manuscripts. And could not our Author say that the Christians did not spurn the baths, but went off to bathe at a decent and wholesome hour, namely the one at which everyone was accustomed to bathe with decency and with health? This, as Pliny says, was in winter the ninth hour, in summer the eighth (Pliny, Letters, book III, letter 1, p. 90), or, as others observe, from midday to evening. And Horace sang:

But when the fiercer sun has warned me, weary, to go and bathe, I flee the season of the raging sign.

(Horace, Satires, book I, satire 6, line 125.)

Does not Tertullian, then, seem to mean the midday hour, which in the month of December, when the Saturnalia were kept, was decent and wholesome: so that, he says, it may keep my warmth and my blood? So, he goes on, I do not bathe at daybreak on these cold days of the impious Saturnalia, since I can grow stiff and pale after a washing when I am dead. By these words he alludes beyond doubt to another ancient custom, of washing the dead bodies of men, and perhaps to these lines of Virgil on the funeral of Misenus:

Some make ready warm waters and bronze cauldrons boiling over the flames, and they wash and anoint the body of the cold dead.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book VI, line 217 and following.)

Servius, moreover, in his remarks on these lines cites this line composed by Ennius:

A good woman washed the body of Tarquinius, and anointed it.

(Servius, p. 411.)

Tertullian says, then, that after death he can indeed grow stiff and pale from that washing, but that while he lives he will not anticipate it by the untimely winter bath with which the Saturnalia began. And although this reason is merely natural, it stung the heathen all the more sharply the more absurdly they charged that the Christians were for that reason useless to the commonwealth, because they shunned and abhorred, with the fullest right, this bath and the impious ceremonies that followed it.

He then passes to the Liberalia, that is, to the days and games dedicated to Liber, or Bacchus, thus: I do not recline at table in public at the Liberalia (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42, p. 492). If you ask him for the reason, you will see it given in another book in these words: Since the games were indiscriminately called Liberalia, they plainly proclaimed the honour of Father Liber. For they were first held by country people for Liber, on account of the benefit which they ascribe to him, the delight of wine having been shown them (the same, On the Shows, ch. 5). On which matter we have indeed discoursed more than once. Since, then, these festivals

were celebrated in honour of a false god, not without the crimes of idolatry and others besides, above all of gluttony and drunkenness, they were held in the utmost horror by the Christians. Our Author added: I do not recline at table in public at the Liberalia, as is the custom of beast-fighters taking their last supper (the same, Apology, in the place cited). So we read in the Puteanus manuscript and the first Colbertinus; but in the Harleianus and the second Colbertinus, "last" [supremam]. Junius, however, suspects that "towards the first" [sub primam] was written, because the beast-fighters, of whom we treated earlier, fought, he says, at midday. But Bulenger hoots this conjecture off the stage, not without laughter (Bulenger, On the Hunts of the Circus, ch. 34), because the beast-fighters fought not only at midday but also in the morning. For what is clearer than these words of Suetonius about the emperor Claudius: He so delighted in beast-fighters and midday fighters that he would go down to the show even at first light, and at midday, when the people had been dismissed, he would sit on (Suetonius, book V, Life of Claudius, § 34). And Seneca: In the morning men are thrown to lions and bears, at midday to their spectators (Seneca, Letter 70, p. 295). Would you have other words of his no less clear? Here they are: By chance I came upon the midday show, expecting games.... In the morning men are thrown to lions and bears, at midday to their spectators. The killers are ordered to be thrown to those who will kill them, and they keep the victor for another death (On Anger, book III, ch. 43, p. 583). Again elsewhere: Lately, in the school of the beast-fighters, one of the Germans, when he was being made ready for the morning shows, withdrew (the same, Letter 7, pp. 172 and 173). Lastly, more than once he calls them the morning shows of the arena (On Anger, ch. 43, p. 583). Nor would it be hard to heap up many more things here; but since these suffice, we shall add nothing else except this verse of Martial:

Mucius, lately seen in the morning arena.

(Martial, book X, epigram 25.)

Nothing, therefore, is to be changed in the text of Tertullian, who aptly calls the supper of the beast-fighters the "last", that is, the final one; because, being about to fight on the next day with other gladiators or with beasts, they had to expect death rather than victory. For the outcome of those who fight, as the Seneca already cited reminds us, is death (Seneca, Letter 7, p. 173). And if any did escape from it unharmed, yet, not daring to hope for this, they thought that they were taking their last supper on the day before. From the author of the Acts of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, moreover, we learn that this supper was called "free", no doubt because it was most lavish, and the gladiators gorged themselves on the foods set before them at will.

The Christians, then, rightly rejected those public suppers, inasmuch as they were given in honour of Bacchus, and intemperately. Yet no harm came to public affairs from it. For wherever I am, so Tertullian addresses any heathen you please, I dine from your stores, that is, from the foods which I am accustomed to buy from your gentiles in any public place not consecrated to false gods.

ARTICLE III.

How senselessly the heathen objected that the Christians were for that reason not profitable to the commonwealth, because they did not buy garlands, did not gather at the shows, and did not purchase incense, although they spent more of it, and more costly, bought from the Sabaeans, on the burial of the dead than the gentiles did on fumigating their gods.

The use of garlands was without doubt frequent in Tertullian's time, since the heathen made a particular complaint of its rejection by the Christians, as a great loss to the commonwealth. But he answers any heathen thus: I do not buy a garland for my head; but what does it matter to you? For what harm comes from it to public affairs? Plainly none. For I do use flowers that are bought, he says, but in a way that is, I think, more pleasing, free and loose and straying everywhere (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42, p. 493), and not bound together into a garland. For the scent of flowers is perceived not by the hair at all, but only by the nostrils. We, however, have pursued these matters at greater length in another dissertation, where we showed besides that the use of garlands of this kind was rejected by the Christians for this reason, that it had drawn its origin from idolatry (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. 13, art. 3).

The heathen pressed the charge that the Christians, to the great harm of the commonwealth, did not attend the public shows (Tertullian, in the place cited). A great evil, no doubt, it was to flee those things which Tertullian in another book proves to have sprung from the general guilt of idolatry, their mother (the same, On the Shows, ch. 7). And in other dissertations we have noted that these shows were defiled not by idolatry alone but by many other crimes besides, which the Christians rightly and deservedly fled no differently from a public plague. What loss to the public good came from this, then? A great one indeed, said the gentiles. For those shows were drawn out over a long time, and for that reason the spectators bought several kinds of eatables at the entrance of the amphitheatre, with which they might refresh themselves now and then. The Christians, therefore, incurred no expenses of this kind at all.

But if we buy nothing there, says Tertullian, Yet the things that are put up for sale at those gatherings, if I want them, I shall more gladly take from their proper places (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42, p. 493). Some ancient editions have "I take"; some other, more recent ones, "they will be taken". Better, in our manuscripts and the other editions, "I shall take". Nothing, therefore, was lost from the public good if the Christians bought, in other places lawful for them, the things that were put up for sale at the unlawful gatherings of the heathen.

Nothing, moreover, whatever these same people might still allege, is lost to the commonwealth if, says Tertullian, we do not buy incense, which the heathen burned to false gods. For that was altogether forbidden to us, and the price of incense was too small for the heathen ever to have had to complain of this loss. For the Arabias, he goes on, complain with better right. But if there is any complaint of the Arabs about their more costly incense going unsold, they will know, he says, or they will answer for us: that the Sabaeans' wares, of greater value and greater price, are spent more on burying Christians than on fumigating gods (ibid.). Of Sabaean incense Virgil says:

India sends ivory, the soft Sabaeans their incense.

(Virgil, Georgics, book I, line 57.)

And in another book, of Venus:

. . . where she has a temple, and a hundred altars glow with Sabaean incense.

(The same, Aeneid, book I, line 420.)

On these verses Servius notes the following: The Sabaeans are peoples next to Syria and Arabia, called Sabaeans from sebesthai [to worship], because among them grows the incense with which we appease the gods.

Nor, moreover, did Tertullian speak only of this Sabaean incense, of which Pliny records a good deal (Pliny, Natural History, book VI, ch. 28, p. 726), but also, as will be plain from what is to be said shortly, of their other wares, that is, their spices. For so great was the abundance of these in their region that, as Strabo relates (Strabo, Geography, book XVI, p. 776), they used cinnamon, cassia and other sweet-smelling things of this kind in place of brushwood and fuel for making fire. We also read it written by Pliny: The Sabaeans cook their food with the wood of the incense tree (Pliny, Natural History, book XII, ch. 17, p. 32). But our Tertullian, not only in his Apology but in another book also, openly declares that the incense of the Sabaeans was used by the Christians above all for burying the bodies of the dead: Bodies, he says, embalmed with spices, are set apart for burial, in mausoleums and monuments, to go forth thence to the second life when the Lord shall command (Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, ch. 27). And elsewhere, still more to our purpose: Let the heathen see to it, he says, whether the same wares, I mean incense and the other foreign goods, used for the sacrifice of idols, serve men also for medicinal ointments, and us besides for the comforts of burial (the same, On Idolatry, ch. 11).

Granted, someone will argue, and let it be held proved, clearer than the midday light, that the Christians used Sabaean incense, the most precious of all, to bury the bodies of the dead; could Tertullian, without great exaggeration, assert that the Sabaeans sold their wares of incense, of greater value and greater price, for the burial of Christians more than to the gentiles for fumigating their gods? Did not very many gentiles, he will say, burn Sabaean incense to their gods with a full and lavish hand? But whoever raises this objection must notice that these were richer than the others and far fewer in number than the rest, the poorer sort, who burned incense either with three fingers only or to the value of a single as, as will be said below (below, ch. 29, art. 2). Besides this, we have observed that the multitude of the Christians was greater than that of the gentiles. If, then, the Christians embalmed the bodies of the dead with Sabaean incense, the Sabaeans must have sold more of their incense to them for this office of piety than to the gentiles, the greatest part of whom were accustomed to give their gods a very few grains of a cheaper and common sort.

ARTICLE IV.

How undeservedly the heathen complained that the revenues of their temples were wasting away since the Christians had arisen, who could not provide for their gods as well as for men who begged, and who paid the taxes with as much care as the heathen themselves used tricks to cheat them: that no one could complain of the unprofitableness of the Christians except infamous pimps, procurers, bath-attendants, assassins, poisoners, magicians, soothsayers, diviners and astrologers; and that if perhaps some harm had been done to the commonwealth by the Christians, it was made good by them from another quarter with interest.

The things we have related so far, however clear and plain to all they may be, could not, however, check the blind onslaughts of the heathen nor quench their unbridled fury against the Christians. For they still cried out everywhere with a great clamour that these had arisen for the ruin of the commonwealth. For ever since their religion was spread abroad in the world: The revenues of our temples, they said, are wasting away daily (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42, p. 493), that is, are diminished little by little. For every Christian, as Tertullian himself admits, was forbidden to take charge of the business of the temples or to manage their revenues (the same, On Idolatry, ch. 17). Since, then, as we have said rather often, the number of the Christians was greater than that of the heathen, far fewer, to be sure, paid the revenues of the temples.

But even if the matter stands so, the heathen ought to have complained not of the Christians only but of their own followers too. For Tertullian asks them: How few now toss in a coin? A stips, moreover, was a stamped coin. For those who give asses to the gods with treasure-boxes, says Varro, call it a stips (Varro, On the Latin Language, book IV, near the end). For this reason Ovid sang:

The people brought together bronze, from which Metellus built the shrines, she says; thence remains the custom of giving the coin.

(Ovid, Fasti, book IV, § 3.)

If, then, the heathen did not give the coin to the temples, they certainly did them no less harm than the Christians did.

The gentiles pressed on, and, as Arnobius says, interpreters of dreams, diviners, seers and others most bitterly lamented the scarcity in their temples (Arnobius, Against the Gentiles, book II), and that not even small coins could be wrung from their very few consulters. We know indeed that Pliny the Younger, in his letter to the emperor Trajan, wrote that the temples and the solemn rites had begun in his time to be taken up again. For we read these words of his, word for word: It is certainly quite clear that the temples, by now almost deserted, have begun to be frequented, and the solemn rites, long discontinued, to be taken up again, and that sacrificial victims are being sold everywhere, for which until now a buyer was very rarely found (Pliny, Letters, book X, letter 101, p. 376). But what he admits, that the temples and rites of the heathen had been almost deserted, is most true. What he adds, however, that they had begun to be taken up again, is foolish flattery of Trajan in these words, whose clemency he wished to extol by fair means and foul. For as the number of the Christians grew, the temples of the heathen were less frequented and the revenues less paid.

Tertullian, then, freely admits this, and to the gentiles

answers that, however great that loss may have been, it was abundantly made good by the Christians. For we are not able, he says, to bring help both to men and to your gods when they beg (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42, p. 494); that is, all our goods and all our means are not enough for us to bring help to your beggars, both gods and men, of whom we have treated elsewhere (Apparatus, vol. I, p. 784). So, though we toss no coin into the treasury of your temples, in which it is unlawful for us to gather with you, yet elsewhere we bestow it on any who ask, more often and far more abundantly (Dissertation on the Octavius of Minucius, ch. 20, art. 30). For our mercy, he says, spends more street by street, that is, it gives more to any who beg through the streets and roads of the cities, than your religion does temple by temple (Tertullian, in the place cited), that is, than it grants in each of your temples.

Then, moreover, the Christians paid the taxes imposed by the emperors with much greater care and better faith than the gentiles. Indeed, these taxes, he says, will give thanks to the Christians, who pay what is owed in good faith, in that we abstain from defrauding another (ibid.). For they knew that precept of Christ: Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's (Matt. 22:21). And hence Justin Martyr said openly to the heathen: Taxes and contributions we strive, before all men, to bring everywhere to those appointed by you, and then the Latin, Taxes indeed and contributions we strive, before all men, everywhere to bring in to those who have been appointed by you as collectors (Justin, Apology to Antoninus). The heathen, however, defrauded them in such a way that, if a reckoning were made (these are Tertullian's words) of how much is lost to the taxes through the fraud and falsehood of your returns, the account could easily be settled, the complaint on one head being offset by the advantage on the other accounts (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 42, p. 495). There, certainly, the word "return" is taken for the public statement or declaration of all the goods that each man possessed. But the whole difficulty of this rather obscure phrase is not thereby removed; it is explained in two ways by the more sagacious. For some think this is Tertullian's meaning: if it is weighed how much harm the gentiles bring upon the commonwealth by the fraud and falsehood of their returns (ibid.), that is, by false declaration of their goods, at once by this head, that is, by this single example, it will be recognized that this harm is greater than whatever good they bring on other accounts. Others, however, explain Tertullian's mind thus: the Christians pay the tributes with as much care and as much faith as the gentiles use tricks and lies to cheat them; and by this single example it is plainly established that their complaint about the uselessness of the Christians is most unjust, because the Christians paid the taxes more exactly than all the rest, and if they brought any harm from another quarter, it was abundantly made up by the advantage on the other accounts that have been pointed out. But surely, if Tertullian there is not setting the heathen side by side with the Christians, the first interpretation seems preferable, by which it is inferred that they complained quite undeservedly of the harm brought upon the commonwealth by these, since they conferred another, greater good. If, however, he there compared both together, Christians and gentiles

with one another, you may prefer the second explanation, for all we care.

But to press the heathen more closely (the same, ibid.), our Author freely grants them that some were to be found among them who complained of the unprofitableness, as he himself calls it, of the Christians. But who, good God, were these? None other, surely, than abandoned men, infamous for their vices and crimes, whom neither to please nor to favour is the greatest benefit to the commonwealth. He divides them into three classes, the first of which was that of the basest ministers of abominable lust, whom he calls pimps, procurers and bath-attendants. The first two Cicero mentions where he inveighs against Verres thus: Let nothing be said of his nightly revels and vigils; let no mention be made of pimps, gamblers, procurers (Cicero, Against Verres, book II, p. 68, line 3). Between pimps and procurers there was this difference, that the former brought women who did not resist to debauchery, the latter women against their will. Wherefore Horace sang:

Praise him, says the whoremonger; take care he need not ask you further; hand Penelope over readily to the better man. Do you think she could be led astray, so virtuous and so chaste?

(Horace, Satires, book II, satire 5, line 75 and following.)

Of the same stamp were the bath-attendants, who, as Festus says, were called the sordid hangers-on of unchaste women (Festus, On the Meaning of Words, book XX, under the word Aquarioli). Hence Apuleius mentions an embittered bath-attendant of his own unchaste and harlot wife (Apuleius, Apology, before the middle, p. 366). Most filthy men of this kind carried water to women for washing away their uncleanness. But see, I pray you, whether the emperor Commodus is not to be numbered with this most impure herd of men, of whom Lampridius recorded this: He lived with gladiators; he carried water like a pimps' servant (Lampridius, Life of Commodus). Some, however, are of the opinion that by the name aquariolus is meant a bath-keeper, who guarded the clothes of the bathers and played the pimp. Hence Martial sang:

When the bath-keeper, his lamp put out, admits you among the graveyard harlots.

(Martial, book III, epigram 62.)

But surely the complaint of such men about the unprofitableness and uselessness of the Christians was a commendation and a proclamation of the Christians' virtue and usefulness alike.

Nor indeed can any other judgement be passed on the assassins, poisoners and magicians, who make up Tertullian's second class (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 43). For these lay in wait for the lives of others, and very often took them. Assassins [sicarii] were so named from the sica, that is, a shorter sword, which they carried for killing men from ambush. How often others were killed by these savage men secretly and treacherously you will learn from these few words of Cicero: These things are of every day, daggers, poisons (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book III, p. 251, line 15). But to come nearer to Tertullian's times: Hence, says Cyprian, the poisoners, hence the assassins, as headlong in sinning as they are unpunished in their sins (Cyprian, book To Demetrianus).

Now you already perceive why our Author next names the poisoners, who give poison to others to drink, or prepare it, or sell it. Nor, beyond doubt, were the magicians unlike these, to whom the third place in this class is given. For by devilish arts, sorceries and conjuring tricks they strove to harm others and to kill them. And these are the ones whom Horace brands in these lines:

What witch, what wizard with Thessalian poisons, what god will be able to set you free?

(Horace, Odes, book I, ode 27, lines 21 and 22.)

Lastly, in the third class Tertullian places soothsayers, diviners and astrologers (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 43), whom Arnobius, cited by us a little before, calls vain interpreters. For they boasted that by their execrable arts, tricks and conjurings they could foretell the future. The diviners, or fortune-tellers, of whom we treated above, pretended to prophesy by divine inspiration, and the soothsayers by inspecting victims. But Terence pricks both with the stings of these verses:

A hen crowed: the diviner forbade it; the soothsayer forbade beginning any new business before midwinter.

(Terence, Phormio, Act IV, Scene 4.)

Nor indeed did Cicero spare these and others any more when he wrote this: Your mantike, which in Latin is called divination, with which we should be steeped in so great a superstition, if we were willing to listen to you, that soothsayers, augurs, diviners, seers and interpreters of dreams would have to be revered by us (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book I, p. 203, line 36). But of these things we have spoken elsewhere, and must speak again later.

That wicked column, hostile to the commonwealth and altogether ruinous, is brought up at the rear by the astrologers. These, says Aulus Gellius, whom one ought to call Chaldaeans by the name of their nation, the common people call mathematici (Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, book I, ch. 9). And before him Cicero had explained their art and profession in these words: Named not from their art but from their nation, they are thought by long observation of the stars to have produced a science, so that it could be foretold what would happen to each man, and under what destiny each was born (Cicero, On Divination, book I, at the beginning, p. 255, line 4). Hence Juvenal:

Your nativity is known to the astrologers.

(Juvenal, Satire 14, after the middle.)

But this same Cicero calls them and their science the monstrosities of the Chaldaeans, and reminds us that Eudoxus, their own standard-bearer, left it in writing that the Chaldaeans are by no means to be believed in their prediction and their reckoning of each man's life from his birthday (Cicero, On Divination, book II, p. 291, line 49). But to let more pass, our Tertullian in another book asserts without hesitation that wicked angels, that is, demons, were the teachers of this impious art, and then he added this: Let the astrologers be expelled, like their angels: the same penalty of exile is for the disciples and the masters (Tertullian, On Idolatry, ch. 9). Suetonius, moreover, relates that these astrologers were driven from the City and Italy by the emperor Vitellius, and afterwards condemned to death (Suetonius, book VII, § 14). But earlier, on the witness of Tacitus,

decrees of the senate had been made concerning this exile of the astrologers (Tacitus, Annals II, before the middle). Ulpian, finally, records more about them, and you may consult him (Ulpian, On the Office of the Praetor VII).

And these were the men of the three classes who complained that the Christians were useless to the commonwealth precisely because they shrank from their wicked works and brought them no profit. But to be unprofitable to the most abandoned men, says Tertullian, is without doubt a great profit to the commonwealth (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 43).

Finally, he shows by this further argument that the Christians were of the greatest benefit to the heathen: At what value (the old editions read "How many", La Cerda "When") do you hold those, I do not say who now drive demons out of you, I do not say now who also pour out prayers to the true God for you, since perhaps you do not believe it, but from whom you can fear nothing? (ibid.). Rigault, however, on his own authority and against the witness of the manuscript and printed copies, removed these words, "since perhaps you do not believe it", as superfluous or as not to his liking. But what harm, pray, did those words do, by which the Author indicates that the heathen were not at all persuaded that the Christians prayed to the true God for them? And yet, he says, this was as certain as it was plainly established that demons had been cast out by them from the bodies of those same gentiles, as has been most clearly proved by us.

At what value, then, Tertullian argues, do you heathen hold it, that is, at what price do you reckon this, certainly the greatest benefit, which the Christians bestow on you? Were they not, on that ground alone, of the very highest use to you, as we said above (above, ch. XXII, art. 1)?

But he presses on still, and by turning back upon the heathen the weapon they had hurled, he plainly shows that the greatest harm to the commonwealth was done by them. For since the number of the Christians, as we have said more than once, was far greater than theirs, did not the commonwealth suffer certainly the greatest loss from those very men by whose cruelty so many of us righteous Christians, as our Author says, are spent, that is, are consumed and slain? For in that sense the Latin interpreter of Paul's epistles wrote: But I will most gladly spend, and be spent myself for your souls (2 Cor. 12:15). Tertullian adds, moreover: When we, the innocent, are paid away (Tertullian, Prescription, ch. 2). Pamelius, however, would prefer "are gnawed away"; but our Author uses the verb erogare too often for it to be believed, against all the manuscripts, that it is corrupt there. It is therefore taken there in the same meaning as where he said elsewhere, "a fever assigned for paying away a man". And indeed a man is paid away to a fever whose outcomes are deadly. Elsewhere too he wrote that gladiators, who had learned to be killed, were paid away on the day proclaimed for the rites of the dead (On the Shows, ch. 12). Finally, as we noted (above, ch. XI, art. 4), it is said by him of the fire of hell: While it pays out, it restores.

Moreover, what, I ask, could turn to the greater harm of the commonwealth than, against human and divine

laws, to harass countless Christians, useful to the commonwealth not only by their number but also citizens of the best kind, worthy of reverence for the integrity of their morals and life, enemies of no one, guilty of no crime, solely on account of their name, as we showed above (above, ch. XIV, art. 3), and to torture them to death with every most refined torment and to kill them? The heathen, then, for this reason alone if for no other, were certainly inflicting a great evil on the whole commonwealth. The Christians, on the contrary, brought in none at all; or if any could ever be pointed out as done by them, it was surely made good by them from other quarters, and in various ways, with great interest.

And thus far we have set out and explained each and every one of the arguments by which Tertullian demonstrates the truth and holiness of the Christian religion, the soundness of its teachings, and the most unjust harassment of the Christians. It now remains, therefore, to examine how he proved the religion of the gentiles to be false.

CHAPTER XXV.

By what arguments Tertullian demonstrates that the religion of the gentiles is false, and all their gods false.

ARTICLE I.

How plainly the falsity of the religion of the heathen is demonstrated from the truth of the Christian religion, from demons cast out of the body of the possessed, from the sure conscience of men; from the divinity of Saturn, more eminent and better known, but plainly false, who was a man and, received by Janus in Italy, gave his name to the city which he had staked out and to the whole of Italy, which was formerly called Oenotria; likewise from the testimony of Thallus, Cassius and Nepos; and that consequently the divinity of Jupiter himself and of the others, vaunted by the heathen, is also false.

By the same weight of reasons by which we saw the truth of the Christian religion most invincibly asserted and vindicated by Tertullian, all the gods of the gentiles and their superstitious religions are overthrown from the foundations. For if the divinity of Christ is true, as our Tertullian shrewdly observes, it follows that any other found contrary to it be declared false (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXI, p. 404). Moreover, we have shown most clearly with him (above, ch. VII, art. 1) that there can be only one God, and consequently that all the others, however many could be invented by the heathen, are false.

Nor has it been less clearly demonstrated by us (above, ch. VIII, art. 1) that demons were cast out by the Christians from the bodies which they possessed, and that they were then forced to confess openly that they were not gods, as the heathen supposed, but unclean spirits; and that the one whom the Christians preached is the only God, and that Christ is His Power, Wisdom, Reason and Son, by whose name and power they were put to flight. There was therefore no need for many other arguments to be heaped up by Tertullian (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIII) by which to prove further that the gods of the heathen were plainly invented and fictitious, and consequently their religion false. But so that the same heathen might at long last, of the impious worship of their gods and of their perverse religion,

be thoroughly ashamed, if that could be, he makes it most evident to anyone by various further weighty reasons that such plain marks of the falsity of that religion are to be detected, that whoever does not see them must wish to blind himself completely.

First, then, he calls as witness the very conscience of the gentiles, constrained by which they were compelled, as we saw above, to confess that there is one only God, and that all those whom they called and worshipped as gods had in truth been men. And if any wicked man had dared to resist the most certain testimony of his own conscience, he was plainly refuted by the outcry, tongueless indeed but most eloquent, of all the cities in which these gods, as we have more than once observed (above, ch. VII, art. 1), were born, lived, died and were buried. But since their multitude was beyond number, and to review them one by one or even to call them by their names would take too long, Tertullian goes for their very head, and the origin best known to all (ibid., ch. 11, p. 12 and following, ch. 29, p. 438; and To the Nations II, ch. 1).

He therefore presses the heathen thus and addresses them: Before Saturn there is no god among you; from him is reckoned the whole divinity, either the more eminent or the better known (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 11, p. 332; and To the Nations I, ch. 12, p. 578). He said "the more eminent or the better known" (ibid.), or, as in our handwritten copies, "and the better known", and not at all badly. For he means that he takes the beginnings of the gods not from the first origin of idolatry, which we have seen elsewhere to be obscure and not assigned alike by all (vol. I of the Apparatus, p. 717 and following; and the dissertation above, ch. 30 and following), but from the very divinity of Saturn, who was held more eminent and better known than all the other gods. And what wonder that he begins with him, since Varro, who had composed so many books on his gods, vaunts Jupiter, Juno and Minerva as the most ancient of all the gods (Tertullian, To the Nations II, ch. 12)? But Jupiter was said to have been begotten by Saturn, who was therefore more ancient than he. He did not think he should begin from Saturn's parents, Heaven, or Chronos, and Earth, both because Saturn, their only son, was better known than they and all the other gods and was believed more eminent, and because these tales of his birth from Heaven and Earth are ridiculous inventions and fables of the poets. For he was feigned to be born of them because his parents were unknown. For by human custom, says Tertullian, those who are unknown, or who appear unexpectedly, are said to have come down from heaven (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 10, p. 331; and To the Nations II, ch. 12), just as the common people also call those whose lineage is uncertain sons of the earth. But we have explained all this in our earlier dissertations (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 15, art. 1; and dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 30, art. 1, and ch. 31, art. 2).

Moreover, we made it plain to anyone in the same place how rightly he asserted that Saturn was a man, who after many voyages put in to Italy, and after he had been received there by Janus, the hill, he says, on which he lived was called the Saturnian; the city which he had staked out is Saturnia to this day. In the old edition, and in another

more recent edition, we read debellaverat ("had subdued"); but the Tertullianic word is depalaverat ("had staked out") (Tertullian, place cited). For where he argues against Hermogenes about the creation of the world, he says: God completed all His works in order, first, as it were, staking out the world with the elements still untilled (the same, Against Hermogenes, ch. 29). And again against Marcion: That he declares himself a wise master builder, we find this to mean one who stakes out the divine discipline, from the Creator (the same, Against Marcion V, ch. 6). So he said that the city was staked out by Saturn, that is, founded, or established by setting stakes, or, as others prefer, furnished with stakes. And these try to confirm their explanation by these words of Hermas: When he had staked out the vineyard (Hermas, book III, Similitude 5, § 2, p. 61).

Then next Tertullian: Saturn settled, received by Janus, or Jana (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 10); our manuscripts have "by Jana, as the Salii will have it". But in two of our copies written in a more recent hand, and in the first book To the Nations, where the same things are repeated: "even if others call her" (To the Nations I, ch. 12, p. 578); better perhaps "as others do". For to what purpose is the mention of the Salii there? Was Saturn said by them alone, or by them first, to have been received by Jana and not by Janus? But we leave this to the judgement of others.

And after Saturn had fixed the seat given him by Janus: The whole of Italy, says our Author, after being Oenotria, was named Saturnia (Tertullian, ibid.); and in the book To the Nations: The whole of Italy was named after Saturn. That Italy's first name was Oenotria Virgil teaches plainly in these verses:

There is a place, the Greeks call it by the name Hesperia, / an ancient land, mighty in arms and in richness of soil; / Oenotrian men tilled it; now report has it that their descendants / have called the nation Italy after the name of their leader. (Virgil, Aeneid I, line 534 and following.)

Nor content to have sung it once, he repeats it in the same words in another book (book III, line 163 and following). See Servius's notes on these verses, Antiochus as cited by Strabo (Strabo, Geography III, p. 254), and others. Italy, then, was first called Saturnia after Saturn, as is clear from these verses of Ovid:

I remember that Saturn was received in this land; / he had been driven by Jupiter from the heavenly realms. / Hence the name Saturnia long remained to the people; / the land too was called Latium, because the god lay hidden there. (Ovid, Fasti II, § 3, line 235.)

For this reason, as we have seen (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. 16, art. 1), the land and earth is called Saturnian by the poets, and by Virgil, where he sang:

Hail, great mother of harvests, Saturnian land! (Virgil, Georgics II, line 174.)

Do not all these things prove clearly enough that Saturn was a man? Tertullian confirms it further, both in the Apology and in the second book To the Nations, by the testimony of Diodorus, Thallus, Cassius Severus and Cornelius Nepos, of whom we have treated elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius, last ch., art. 2, and on Lactantius, ch. 31, art. 3). Yet we can pass over only with some remark the fact that in the former book there is written Cassius

Severus. Now two men were distinguished by that name: one, as we read in Eusebius's Chronicle, an outstanding orator (Chronicle of Eusebius, at the year 2047), who was sent into exile in the time of the emperor Augustus; the other a poet of Parma, who was one of those who killed Julius Caesar with Brutus, about whom Lilius Giraldus says more (Giraldus, Dialogue IV, On the History of the Poets, p. 160), as do Vossius (Vossius, On the Latin Poets, ch. 2), Scaliger (Scaliger, on the Chronicle of Eusebius cited), and others (Fabius, book X, and Seneca, Letter 79). Both, moreover, are called Cornelius Severus by some. But in Tertullian's text the surname Severus has perhaps been added, being omitted, as we have seen elsewhere, by Minucius Felix and Lactantius. For what he relates of Saturn seems rather to have been handed down in the writings of Cassius Hemina, as we have also noted, than in those of Cassius Severus. In his book To the Nations too a drowsy copyist has written: "the Cornelii Nepotes and Tacitus". For to what purpose is the mention of Tacitus there, of whom none is made in the Apology, nor by Minucius and Lactantius (Dissertation on Minucius, last ch., art. 2)? Should we not read there, as in their books, "the Greek Thallus"?

But whatever those more learned pronounce on this matter, by whose judgement we shall always abide, Tertullian affirms without hesitation that no author can be found or cited by any gentile who ever denied that Saturn was a man, who received both life and kingdom from another man, and who therefore cannot be God (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 10, p. 331, and To the Nations II, ch. 12, p. 578). For the true God, as we have often said (Dissertation on Minucius, last ch., art. 2), is from Himself alone, and therefore almighty, Who created men and all other things, Who rules over all, Who dispenses all kingdoms.

After this he says: Enough now about Saturn (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 10, p. 331), enough to demonstrate to anyone, however dull and obstinate, that his divinity is altogether false. He added "though in few words" there on purpose. For in the second book To the Nations he demonstrates its falsity by various arguments (To the Nations II, ch. 7 and ch. 16), which, having been explained in our earlier dissertations, need not be repeated here.

Further, if Saturn neither was a god nor could be, because he was a man like other men, much more are they without divinity, Jupiter his son and the whole throng of others almost beyond number, who are agreed to have sprung from that same Saturn, or at least after him (the same, Apology, ch. 10, p. 333). For who does not know that Jupiter, whom the heathen called the best and greatest god, is said to have been born of the marriage, or rather the incest, of that same Saturn with Ops, or Rhea, his sister? And when grown, having driven out his father, he seized his kingdom, and, taking on, as Tertullian says, the shapes of a scaly, a horned, a feathered creature and of a golden shower, he begot sons in infamous debaucheries and adulteries (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 21, p. 396, and To the Nations II, ch. 13).

Who, then, having weighed all these things, which we have explained in other dissertations of ours (Dissertation on

Minucius, ch. 15, art. 1, and dissertation on Arnobius, ch. 11, art. 4, and on Lactantius, ch. 3, art. 1 and following), will ever be able to deny that he was no god, but a wicked man who had cast off all sense of humanity and of shame?

ARTICLE II.

How preposterously the heathen vaunted that their gods had been made gods after this mortal life by another, higher dispenser of divinity; that there is but one God, Who had created the world before all the gods of the gentiles, and the crops, even before Ceres, Bacchus and Minerva; and that the discoverers of those crops can no more be called gods than Lucullus, who first brought cherries into Italy, and Cato, who first brought the green fig.

The heathen did indeed admit, what they could never deny, that Saturn and the others whom they had dreamed to be gods were in fact men; but with Varro they maintained that divinity had been given them after they had duly discharged the office of this mortal life (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 11, p. 335). But they tried in vain to defend their absurd opinion with another, more absurd invention. For men could not become gods after their death except either by their own doing or by some other god more powerful than they. Yet both are false. For they themselves did not have the power to confer divinity on themselves when dead. For if they had ever been able to do that, they would never have been men, subject to the infirmities and vices of mortals. Our Author gives this reason for it: They would never have been men, possessing, that is, the power of a better condition than the frail human one (ibid.). For only the Son of God, God from eternity, having indeed assumed the nature of man, but in a wholly wonderful manner and without any stain of vice or sin, lived a mortal life.

Nor again could the feigned gods of the gentiles receive divinity from any other unless he were greater and more powerful than they; or, to use Tertullian's words to the heathen: You must grant that there is some more exalted God, and a kind of dispenser of divinity (ibid.). Now the noun manceps is taken by writers of more polished Latin for one who contracts for, sells and buys something publicly. But here it seems rather to be taken by our Author for a guardian, overseer and superintendent of divinity (the same, On Idolatry, ch. 1, and On Modesty, ch. 14); in which sense the contractors of baths and other things are called mancipes in the Theodosian Code (Theodosian Code, the single law On Contractors, vol. V, p. 183). But whoever said that Saturn and other dead men received their divinity from another, its dispenser, by that very fact openly confess that they are not gods. For it is altogether necessary that the true God be from Himself alone and eternal.

Moreover, no one, unless he is plainly out of his mind, would ever say that anything was done by the almighty and most wise God inconsiderately, rashly and without cause. Yet no cause at all can be assigned why He should share His divinity with dead men (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 11, p. 333). For a twofold

cause only could exist, or rather be devised: first, that God had need of their services and help; second, that they merited divinity by their outstanding deeds and virtues. But both are proved to be falser than falsehood itself.

For of what help of men, either dead or even living, did almighty God ever have need? For founding the world? But whatever gentiles assert that will have Pythagoras against them (ibid., p. 13), who, as we saw above (Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 21, art. 2), proclaimed the world uncreated. And although the world was in fact created, as Plato and other philosophers rightly taught, as has also been noted, nevertheless the true God, Whose power is infinite, needed no one's aid at all to fashion it.

And what of the fact that it is established that before Saturn and any other gods of the gentiles, the rains, as Tertullian says, poured down from heaven, and the stars (Tertullian, place cited), that is, the sun and moon, shone, and the lights, namely of the stars, blossomed? For in another book he wrote: The heaven had blossomed with lights, the sun had all the more exulted in its rays (Against Marcion IV, ch. 42). What help, then, could Saturn or anyone else bring to God for creating the world, who arose a long time after the sun, moon and stars? Tertullian adds that before all the gods of the gentiles the thunders roared, and that Jupiter himself feared the lightnings which you place in his hand (or, as in the older printed and unprinted codices, "place upon") (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 11, p. 334). And indeed, since it is certain that the thunders roared before Jupiter came into being, no one should doubt that, with the fear implanted in all men, he at least at first feared thunderbolts he had never heard. Therefore Tertullian rightly and deservedly laughs at the heathen, who babbled that the lightnings and thunderbolts were in his hand and were hurled by him, though not made by him.

But he presses more sharply still that nothing imperfect is made by the Almighty, and that for that reason the world, complete in all its parts, was founded by Him. All things, then, that are necessary to sustain the life of man He had created before any gods of the gentiles and before all men. So, says Tertullian himself, nothing provided for maintaining man, that is, for preserving him and keeping him from dying, and for upholding him, that is, sustaining, nourishing, refreshing him, and given, could be brought in after man was created (ibid.). But these words of his are not to be pared so close as to make him believed to have said that nothing could be created by God after man was made by which the life of man might be maintained and upheld. For he meant nothing other than that all the things without which human life cannot be preserved were created by God before any men were made, and much more before Saturn and Jupiter and all the other gods of the heathen. As surely, then, as clearly, he concludes from this that the true God needed no one's help to make the world. Therefore no gods were made for this reason.

He presses further that every crop had sprung abundantly from the earth before

Liber, and Ceres, and Minerva, indeed before that first man of theirs (ibid.), that is, Saturn, whom the heathen babbled was the most eminent and first of all the gods, as we were saying a little earlier. And there he rebukes the heathen who thought that Liber was enrolled among the number of the gods for the discovery of wine, Ceres of grain, Minerva of the olive. For these crops had to be created before they could be discovered. And He alone is God by Whom they were created and established. Nor should you press that Lucretius, speaking of these things, used the verb instituisse ("established"), where he sang:

For Ceres is said to have established crops for mortals, and Liber the liquid / draught born of the vine, / though life could go on without these things, / as report has it that some nations live even now. (Lucretius V, line 14 and following.)

For the poet is speaking there of things that had been found out by the skill and wit of certain people. So he took the verb instituisse in no other sense than "discovered". And if anyone maintains that he said instituisse because Bacchus and Ceres were said to have taught the way of making bread from grain and wine from grapes, we shall not resist much. But he will gain not a whit by it. For it is quite enough for us that it is more certain than certain that no crops were created by Bacchus, Ceres and Minerva. For no one can either become or be a god because he pointed them out or discovered them.

Nor, next, is anyone else to be heard who dares to object that the discovery of crops is of such use to men that for this benefit alone Ceres, Bacchus and Minerva deserved to be counted in the flock of the gods. For this reasoning has already been sufficiently refuted. Then again, if it were of any weight, Lucullus too ought to have become a god, who first, as Tertullian says, made cherries (the manuscripts have cerasia) known to Italy from Pontus (Tertullian, ibid.). And we learn from Pliny that in the year 680 from the founding of the city, after the victory over Mithridates, cherries were brought by this Lucullus into Italy from Pontus (Pliny, Natural History XV, ch. 25, p. 207), or, as Jerome says, from Cerasus (Jerome, Letter 23 to Eustochium, p. 60), from which they took their name. By the authority of these eminent men, therefore, another passage of Tertullian in the second book To the Nations must be corrected, where we read it written: "Gnaeus Pompey from Pontus..... made known to Italy" (Tertullian, To the Nations II, ch. 16).

He presses that the green fig was not known at Rome before Cato brought it into the senate (ibid.). This whole story is described by Pliny, already cited (Pliny, Natural History XV, ch. 18, p. 198), and from it, as from the former, Tertullian concludes that the gentiles are unjust, who placed Ceres, Bacchus and Minerva among the number of their gods for discovering crops, and left among the dead Lucullus and Cato, who had brought into Italy and Rome other crops hitherto unknown. But we have pursued this more fully in other dissertations of ours (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 14, art. 2; on Arnobius, ch. 9, art. 2; and dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 30, art. 5), where we refute those same gentiles, who babbled that men, for benefits conferred on other men,

had become gods after their death.

ARTICLE III.

With what witlessness the gentiles vaunted that Saturn, Jupiter and others had been made gods for their merits and splendid deeds, while others more excellent than they were left among the dead, namely Socrates, Aristides, Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Pompey, Polycrates, Sulla, Croesus, Crassus, Demosthenes, Cicero; and it is shown that by the same reasoning as for their own gods the gentiles would have to grant divinity to Lais, Phryne, Larentia, and to the Caesars themselves, whether dead or living.

The second reason for granting divinity to dead men was taken by the heathen from their merits and outstanding deeds, by which they boldly vaunted that they had attained it. But whoever seriously asserted this were compelled, as Tertullian rightly observes, to confess that there is some deifying God (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 11, p. 333), that is, one who makes others gods for certain splendid deeds. That supreme God, then, had to weigh the merits of others in the most equitable scale of justice, and by His omnipotence reward them with the due prize. But to Him alone, most equitable and almighty, belongs divinity, which He cannot give to any other distinct from Himself, whether by nature or by any merits. For the supreme divinity cannot be divided, and, as we have often said, God is either one or none.

But come, tell us, I beg you, what were the virtues and outstanding merits of Saturn, Jupiter, Juno and the others by which they could have earned divinity? Did not the gentiles openly proclaim, and insolently boast, that they lived a life infamous and polluted with debaucheries, adulteries and, as we have shown elsewhere (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. 12, art. 1 and following), every kind of the greatest crimes and outrages? Yet suppose they were laden with as many and as great virtues as the vices with which they were defiled; why then, says Tertullian, when these were raised to heaven and endowed with divinity, were others equal in virtue, and even more excellent, left among the dead (Tertullian, ibid.)? For no gentile, however reckless in daring, could deny this, which is most clearly proved by the examples of illustrious men whose outstanding and singular virtues the heathen themselves extolled with the highest praise.

For, to run through the examples put forward by Tertullian (ibid.), what god of the gentiles was wiser than Socrates, who by the oracle of Apollo, cited by us elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 3, art. 2), was declared the wisest of all mortals? Yet so far was he from being called a god that he was condemned by the judgement of the Athenians, he over whose death, said Cicero, I am wont to weep when I read Plato (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods III, p. 252, line 29). We have discussed this death of Socrates in our earlier dissertations (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. 3, art. 2, and on Lactantius, ch. 14, art. 1), and something more is to be said a little later (below, ch. XXVI, art. 4).

What god of the gentiles was more just than Aristides (Tertullian,

Apology, ch. 11, p. 336), by whom, as Valerius Maximus says, the justice of all Greece is measured (Valerius Maximus V, ch. 3, § 3, foreign examples)? For this reason he is surnamed by antonomasia "Aristides the Just" by Cicero (Cicero, On Duties III, p. 339, line 7), and in Greek by Plutarch Ἀριστείδης ὁ δίκαιος (Plutarch, vol. I, p. 318, and vol. II, p. 186). Yet the heathen not only denied him the divinity given to others most unjust, but by a faction of wicked men, as the same Valerius Maximus testifies, he was ordered to leave his country. And he added at once: Happy Athens, which after his exile could find any man either good or loving of her, when sanctity itself then departed with him (Valerius Maximus, place cited).

Which of the warlike gods was more renowned for military glory than Themistocles (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 11, p. 336)? Yet he, after the many exploits splendidly achieved in war which Thucydides (Thucydides, History I, p. 62 and following) and Plutarch (Plutarch, Life of Themistocles, p. 113 and following) have handed down to memory, when he had made his country famous, safe, as Valerius Maximus again says, wealthy, the first of Greece (Valerius Maximus V, ch. 3, foreign examples, § 3), found it plainly ungrateful. For, falsely accused of treason, he fled first to Argos, then to Corcyra, afterwards to Admetus, king of the Molossians, and then to Artaxerxes, son of Xerxes; at last, an exile, having drunk bull's blood, as some think, or, as many others relate, poison, he flew out of the bonds of the body as out of a kind of prison.

What god of the gentiles, our Author continues, was more exalted than Alexander and Pompey? For to both their deeds in arms and war won the surname "the Great". But by how unhappy an end they both departed from this life no one can be ignorant who has even lightly touched the books written by Quintus Curtius and Plutarch about their lives. Yet no less than Mars, Romulus and the others had they earned the reward of divinity by their outstanding deeds.

What god of the gentiles, moreover, was more fortunate than the Greek Polycrates and the Roman Sulla (Tertullian, place cited)? For many, as Sallust says, doubted whether Sulla was braver or more fortunate (Sallust, The Jugurthine War, ch. 17). Plutarch further attests that after his triumph, when he had recounted before the assembly the deeds done by him as bravely as fortunately, he ordered himself to be surnamed "the Fortunate" (Plutarch, Life of Sulla, vol. I, p. 453 and following). But these things did not bring him to divinity. For, corrupted by luxuries, he ended his life by the lousy disease. The good fortune of Polycrates is described in these words of Valerius Maximus: All his undertakings were received on a smooth course; his hopes grasped the sure fruit of the thing desired; vows were uttered and at the same time fulfilled; to will and to be able stood on equal footing (Valerius Maximus VI, ch. 8, § 5, foreign examples). And indeed he enjoyed such prosperity that a ring of the greatest value, when he had thrown it into the sea to test his good fortune, was afterwards found in a fish that was caught. You have as witness of this and of his other successes Strabo (Strabo, Geography XIV, p. 657), Herodotus (Herodotus III,

§ 39 and following), and very many others. But he ended the course of so many and such great prosperities not with the title of divinity received, but, as Valerius Maximus further records, with the punishment of the cross.

What more? No god of the gentiles was richer than Croesus and Crassus (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XI, p. 337). For of the first Ovid sang:

To whom has the opulence of rich Croesus not been heard of? (Ovid, Ex Ponto, book IV)

Of Crassus, moreover, Tullius says: He used to deny, he says, that any sum of money was great enough for a man who wished to be first in the commonwealth, if he could not maintain an army from his own revenues (Cicero, On Duties, book I, p. 354, line 3). And from this arose that proverb, Richer than Croesus and Crassus, about which you will be able to read more in Erasmus (Erasmus, Adages, Chiliad I, Century VI, adage 74). Yet Croesus, conquered and taken captive by Cyrus, was compelled to serve him in slavery, which, says Cicero, is the last of all evils (Cicero, Philippic II, p. 606, line 12). See Herodotus (Herodotus, book I, § 86 and following), Thucydides, Justin the historian, and others. Who, moreover, does not know of the unhappy slaughter of Crassus, who, after he had been routed and overthrown by the Parthians together with the greater part of the Roman army, was mocked when his head had been cut off? Plutarch has much about him in his life (Plutarch, Life of Crassus, vol. I, p. 564 and following), whom, like Florus, Velleius Paterculus, Justin the historian and the other writers of Roman history, you will be able to consult.

Which god of the gentiles, moreover, says Tertullian, ever surpassed the Greek Demosthenes or the Latin Cicero in eloquence? But what was the reward of so great a Greek and Latin eloquence, unknown to absolutely no one? Not divinity, surely, but a most unhappy end by a cruel death? But since these things are well enough known to all, let it now suffice to have proved them by these five verses of Juvenal, after he has sung of Crassus and Pompey:

The eloquence and fame of Demosthenes or of Cicero / he begins to wish for, and wishes for through the whole Quinquatria, / whoever still worships Minerva, bought with a single as, / . . . / by eloquence; but each orator perished; each / the copious and overflowing fountain of his genius gave to death. (Juvenal, Satire X, line 115 and following)

Who then, argues Tertullian, would not be angry with the heathen, who, while they left so many men so excellent in virtue and merits in the underworld, babbled that so many others, wicked and most depraved, had after their death been proclaimed gods on account of certain notable deeds (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XI, p. 337)?

He presses further (ibid., ch. XIII, p. 347), and says: What were the virtues and merits of the goddess Larentina? Was she not a public harlot? We have certainly proved that sufficiently elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. XVIII, art. 1, and on Lactantius, ch. XXXII, art. 1). But would you call the Junos, Cereses and Dianas more chaste? Did not the gentiles themselves, as we have shown in the preceding dissertations, publish their unbridled lust and unchastity? Wherefore our Author mocks thus the mad impiety of the gentiles who worshipped these goddesses: I would that you would at least worship Lais and Phryne among the Junos and the Cereses and the Dianas (Tertullian,

Apology, ch. XIII, p. 347). Lais, indeed, practised the harlot's trade publicly, of whom Propertius says:

Not so thronged was the house of Ephyrean Lais, / at whose doors all Greece lay. (Propertius, book II, Elegy VI, lines 1 and 2)

She admitted no one, however, unless she had received the sum of money which she demanded. And because she lived at Corinth, from this arose that proverb, expressed in a verse of Horace:

It does not befall every man to go to Corinth. (Horace, book I, Epistle XVII, line 36)

Sotion, moreover, cited by A. Gellius (Gellius, Attic Nights, book I, ch. VIII, p. 37), relates that Demosthenes answered that he did not buy repentance at so high a price. We have noted something about her elsewhere (vol. I of the Apparatus, p. 1241), and if you wish more, go to Pausanias (Pausanias, book II, p. 42), Athenaeus (Athenaeus, book XIII, ch. VI, p. 587), Ovid (Ovid, Amores, book I, Elegy V, line 12) and others. Callistratus, too, cited with approval by the same Athenaeus, has informed us that Phryne, also mentioned by Tertullian, was so rich that she promised she would build the walls of Thebes, if there were inscribed: Alexander razed it, but Phryne the courtesan raised it up again. Alexander indeed made [the ruin], but Phryne the harlot remade it (Athenaeus). But we have observed more about her elsewhere (vol. I of the Apparatus, pp. 550 and 744, and Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. XXII, art. 3).

Finally our Author, to pierce the heathen with a sharper goad, asks them why they made gods of the worst of men, far worse than the other illustrious men whom we have listed. Was heaven, he says, ever shut, so that the best men could not afterwards enter it? Why then did they afterwards open it to their Caesars, not only dead but even living, ruined and dissolute with every kind of crime? Will your gods, he continues, O heathen, credit it to you, nay, will they rejoice, that their lords are made equal to them (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XIII, p. 347)? You surely perceive that he is jesting, and that the emperors are called by him lords of the gods, because, as we have already said, it was in their power either to make new gods or to remove from the midst those already made. Nor is it less evident with what strong reasons he demonstrates that nothing more senseless could have been invented by the heathen than that men had been made gods for certain merits or some outstanding deeds,

ARTICLE IV.

The threefold kind of gods invented by Varro is refuted: the physical, or natural; the mythical, or fabulous; and the gentile, or civil and popular.

To tear up by the roots the errors of the gentiles about their gods, Tertullian in his second book To the Nations (Tertullian, To the Nations, book II, ch. I and following, p. 64 and following) refutes all that had been handed down about them by Varro in the sixteen books on divine matters cited by Augustine (Augustine, City of God, book IV, ch. II, p. 147). He judged that Varro ought to be refuted by name because, as we have shown in its place (Dissertation on Lactantius, last chapter, art. 3), he was reckoned the most acute and most learned of all writers.

Now he had distinguished a threefold kind of gentile theology,

or kind of gods; and the first indeed the physical, or natural, which the gentile philosophers vainly tried to maintain in their schools and in almost innumerable treatises. For these are the words of this Varro cited by Augustine: The philosophers have left many books, in which there is: who the gods are, where they are, of what kind, of what quality, from what time, or whether they have been from eternity; whether they are of fire, as Heraclitus believes; or of numbers, as Pythagoras; or of atoms, as Epicurus; and other such things, which ears can bear more easily within walls in a school than outside in the forum (Augustine, City of God, book VI, ch. V, p. 150). But these dissensions and controversies of the philosophers about the gods show most plainly that their opinions about their gods were utterly false and absurd.

The second kind of gods Varro called the mythical, or fabulous: For it is called mythicon, says Augustine, from fables, since a fable is called μῦθος in Greek (ibid.). And this had been invented by the poets, who sang of the generations of the gods, their debaucheries, adulteries and any other unspeakable deeds whatever. Yet Varro himself, again on Augustine's testimony (the same, book IV, ch. XXXII, p. 112), openly confessed that the forefathers, or ancient Romans, had given credit to them when they peddled those horrible crimes and marriages of the gods; because the multitude of the unlearned common people inclined more to these poets than to the natural philosophers. Who indeed would not detest both impieties as the very greatest? For the peoples worshipped in earnest these gods, however infamous and ridiculous. Others, wiser than they, stirred on by the wicked wiles and frauds of demons, deceived the unwary minds of the common people in their very religion, which is the highest of things, or allowed them to be deceived.

The third kind of theology, or of gods, moreover, is called civil, that is, of citizens and peoples, that is, of those gods whom the peoples had adopted for themselves at their own will and pleasure. But besides the fact that this kind of gods plainly goes back to the second and fabulous one, as Augustine, already cited by us, teaches (the same, book VI, ch. VII, p. 153), what is more absurd than to believe those to be gods whom the blind and mad common people had imagined to be enrolled in the number of the gods after the time of this mortal life had been run through, as we have often said, in every kind of crime?

This threefold kind of gods, then, our Tertullian, with various weighty arguments, and afterwards Augustine, overturn from the foundations (the same, book VI, ch. V and following, p. 150 and following). It is not necessary, therefore, that the things which have been examined and explained by so great a doctor (the same, book IV, ch. XXXI and following, and book VIII, ch. I and following, p. 162 and following) should now be set out one by one by us. And then, if any difficulty arises in them, it has been smoothed out to the best of our ability in this and our other dissertations.

CHAPTER XXVI.

How clearly Tertullian shows from the literature and writings of the heathen that all their gods are false.

ARTICLE I.

How Tertullian demonstrates that the gods of the gentiles are false

from the literature by which they were formed in prudence and the liberal duties, and were taught the various battles of the gods among themselves: Venus wounded, Mars long bound in chains, Jupiter freed by a monster, or weeping the fall of Sarpedon, or in heat with love for his sister; likewise the servitude of Apollo and Neptune, Aesculapius judged by the thunderbolt; and from the tragedies of the poets, and by name those of Lentulus and Hostilius, and from others who ridicule a male moon.

Such is the nature of error that it is not long consistent with itself, and destroys itself precisely when it lifts its head most boldly. It is no wonder, then, if the heathen overturned the divinity given to dead men in the very place where they ought to have established it most firmly. For nowhere was it to be set out more clearly and plainly than in that literature by which young men were formed, as Tertullian says, in prudence (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XIV, p. 351), which, on Cicero's testimony, consists in the knowledge of things good and evil and of things neither good nor evil; and in the liberal duties (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book III, p. 245, line 15), which, as Terence says, it is altogether right that a free and freeborn man should know (Terence, The Eunuch, act III, scene II, line 24). But in this literature, as our Author puts it, how many mockeries do I find, by which they defamed the divinity of their deities?

If anyone asks what that literature and those writings are, we shall answer that the poems of Homer are designated by that name. For what our Author relates in the same place he took from that same poet. And if anyone wishes this confirmed for him by someone's authority, here is Minucius Felix ready to hand, who, after reviewing those various mockeries of the gods from the poems of Homer, whom he names, continues thus: By these and suchlike fictions and sweeter lies the minds of boys are corrupted, and with these same fables clinging to them they grow up to the full strength of mature age, and in these same opinions the wretches grow old. But we have tried to explain these things more fully in the earlier dissertation on this book of Minucius (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. XVII, art. 4).

Let us now consider, if you please, how these things are proved by Tertullian: From that very, he says, I will begin... your, of him whence oma, and every sea, to whom as much honour as you add, so much you have taken from your gods, by magnifying the one who made sport of them (Tertullian, To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 575). And these words are indeed so copied in the codex of Agobard and in the edition of Gothofredus, who thinks that the words lost there should be supplied thus: I will begin from your very study, whence all matter and every sea. Rigaltius, however, giving no reason, and as though sure of the true reading of Tertullian, would have it written in his text: I will begin from your very Homer, whose is the wave and every sea.

But this conjecture ought to have been propped up by at least some reason. To us, however, it seems probable enough that Tertullian, who is speaking of the literature of the gentiles, is citing some most celebrated writer of theirs, to whom the heathen, in praising him, took away from their gods as much honour as they gave him. And that, beyond doubt, is Homer, both because, as we have seen elsewhere, he is the oldest

writer of all, and because they valued his writings so highly that young men were trained by them in prudence, as we were saying just now, and in the liberal duties. If, however, anyone more sagacious shows that another is indicated by Tertullian, we shall gladly hear him. But notice, I pray, that Homer himself is named in these following words of our Author: We still remember Homer; he it is, I think, who treated the divine majesty with the human condition, imbuing the gods with human misfortunes and passions (ibid.), that is, corrupted by all, even the foulest, human affections and vices.

And certainly that chief of the Greek poets befouled his books everywhere with these infamies of the gods. Our Author, however, lest he be too long, chose a few examples; and first that in which he sings that the gods, for the sake of the Trojans and the Achaeans, met and fought it out among themselves like pairs of gladiators (the same, Apology, ch. XIV, p. 351); or, as in the book To the Nations: Who matched them in pairs, as it were of gladiators, with their favour divided (and To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 575). But who does not know how very often he sang in the Iliad these battles of the gods, and Venus, as Tertullian continues (ibid.), wounded by a human arrow, Mars almost wasted away in chains, Jupiter now freed by the work of a certain monster, now weeping the fall of Sarpedon, now, in the most obscene manner of swine, in heat and itching with lust for his sister and wife Juno, while he was recounting to her his shameful love for his mistresses. But here it should be observed in passing that in Rigaltius's edition there is written simply: Venus wounded by a human arrow. In our manuscripts, however, and in the older printed copies, one reads: Venus wounded, because she wanted to snatch away her son Aeneas when he had been almost killed by the same Diomede. Mars, etc. Rigaltius is silent, indeed, as to why he removed these words, but he no doubt judged that they had been added by some copyist by way of explanation and afterwards thrust into the text. For they do not occur in the book To the Nations, where the same things are repeated. Nor is it easy to say why those words, by the same Diomede, should have been added there, when no mention of him had been made before. But because these words are found in very many of the most ancient manuscript copies, they ought not to have been cut out without a previous notice, as we said above (Dissertation on the Octavius of Minucius, ch. XVII, art. 4). For the rest, we have pointed out and explained elsewhere (and Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. XII, arts. 1 and 3) the passages of Homer which Tertullian seems, not without reason, to have cited about that Venus, about Jupiter and Mars.

In the same way, too, we have shown in the same dissertations with how many reproaches and insults other poets also assailed their gods. For not without great dishonour to them had they feigned, as Tertullian further notes (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XIV, p. 352), Apollo pasturing the flocks of King Admetus, Neptune hiring out his builder's labour to Laomedon, and Aesculapius struck by Jupiter's thunderbolt, as Pindar also sang.

With still greater mockery and disgrace, as Tertullian continues (and To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576, and book

II, ch. XIV), and as we have also noted elsewhere (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. XIV, art. 1), the gods are put on show in the scenes, tragedies and games of the heathen. For with what insults and abuse, I beseech you, were they not harassed by the actors of comedies and tragedies? Their titles alone, and their plots alone, made this plain enough to all. Of these Tertullian lists a few (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XV, p. 358), namely the adulterer Anubis, Diana flogged, the will of the dead Jupiter, three starving Herculeses mocked, and the masculine Moon. What then, you will say? Was the Moon of the masculine gender among the titles of comedies? Yes indeed. For very many of the heathen had foolishly persuaded themselves that at least some of their gods were male and female at once (Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. XXVII, arts. 3 and 4, and the others cited there). Servius, indeed, on this verse of Virgil, in which he brings in Aeneas speaking thus while Ilium burns:

I descend, and, with the god leading, between flame and foes / I make my way. . . . (Virgil, Aeneid, book II, line 632)

makes this remark: According to those (Virgil, Aeneid, book II, 632) who say that the deities have a share in both sexes. For Calvus says:

And Venus, the mighty God.

Likewise Virgil:

Nor was the God absent from the straying right hand,

though it was either Juno or Allecto. There is also in Cyprus a statue of a bearded Venus (Servius, p. 252). If you want other witnesses, Macrobius will give you several, who observes that in the cited verse of Virgil one should read deo [the god] and not dea [the goddess] (Macrobius, Saturnalia, book III, ch. VIII, p. 329). This he proves not only by the words of Calvus already cited by Servius and by the statue of the bearded Venus, but also by the testimony of Aristophanes, who calls her Aphroditos [masculine], and of Laevinus, who worshipped her whether she be male or female. He adds, moreover, that Philochorus asserted that she is the same as the Moon, to whom men sacrifice in women's dress, and women in men's. And what comes still closer to Tertullian's purpose, Spartianus relates that the emperor Caracalla came to Carrhae for the sake of the god Lunus (Spartianus, Life of Caracalla). And there he informs us that this was recorded by all the most learned, as something chiefly observed by the people of Carrhae: that he who thought the moon female was always subject to women; but he who believed it a male god ruled his wife and suffered no womanly snares.

What wonder, then, if the poets composed tragedies in mockery of the gods, inscribed with ridiculous titles of gods? Two of these poets our Author names, Lentulus and Hostilius (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XV, p. 358, and To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576); but mention of them occurs rarely in others. In another book, however, he said of the same Lentulus: The boxer Cleomachus... now to be crowned among the Novian fullers, and deservedly recorded by the mime-writer Lentulus in his Catinenses (the same, On the Pallium, ch. IV). There he expressly calls Lentulus, whom Jerome too mentions (Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, book II), a mime-writer, that is, an author of a play,

to which he had prefixed the title Catinenses. A little later, however, our Author cites the decisions of Lentulus the augur (Tertullian, On the Pallium, ch. IV). But this man was different from the mime-writer. There is therefore more reason to doubt whether he is the mime-writing poet who is sharply rebuked by Juvenal in these two verses:

Nimble Lentulus too acted the Laureolus well, / worthy, in my judgement, of a real cross. (Juvenal, Satire VIII, line 184)

For although no one denies that the Laureolus was a play, some nevertheless suspect that the word egit [acted] signifies that it was acted by Lentulus as an actor rather than set down in writing by a poet of that name. But what if he, being both actor and poet, both wrote and acted it? And then, that play was not acted by one actor only. Why then is Lentulus alone named, unless he had also handed it down in writing?

For the rest, mention of Hostilius the mime-writer in the books of others is still less frequent. Yet if you believe Priscian, Hostilius, following the example of Ennius, had published annals of the Roman people in compressed language. He could, therefore, also write comedies. If anyone, moreover, suggests something better about him and Lentulus, he will do us a great kindness.

ARTICLE II.

How clearly Tertullian demonstrates that the gods of the gentiles are false from the literature of the actors, by whom were represented, with voice, gesture, movement and song, the Sun mourning his son, Cybele sighing for a shepherd, the eulogies of Jupiter, the judgement of Juno, Venus and Minerva, and the ignominious image of Minerva and Hercules.

Tertullian passes on to the actors, and makes it plain that their gods were held in no less mockery by them than by the poets. For the literature of the actors, he says, marks out all their foulness (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XV, p. 359), and they express it with voice, face, movements of the body, costume and insignia. For who indeed does not know that the actors, about whom Valerius Maximus has related much (Valerius Maximus, book II, ch. IV, § 4), were the performers of tragedies and comedies, who represented the persons of gods and others? But why, someone will say, did Tertullian, not only in this book but also in another, say not the actors but the literature of the actors (Tertullian, To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576)? What is this literature of the actors? Some indeed have thought that latera [flanks] should be read there; but it is a mere suspicion, propped by the authority of no codex. But what if by the name of literature he meant those things which were displayed by the voice and bodily movements of the actors, but had first been handed down by the poets in writing and letters? For, as Augustine says: What, compared with this evil, are the thefts of Mercury, the wantonness of Venus, the debaucheries and turpitudes of the others, which we would bring forward from books, if they were not daily sung and danced in the theatres (Augustine, City of God, book VII, ch. XXVI, p. 182). And by whom were they sung and danced, if not by the actors, after they had been committed to writing by the poets?

Tertullian, then, brings forward these examples of the things which were performed by those actors to the insult and the utmost disgrace of their gods: The Sun mourns his son cast down from heaven (Tertullian, Apology, ch.

XV, p. 359). In our parchments, and in the editions older than Rigaltius, it is hurled from heaven: Phaethon, beyond doubt, whose story is well known. In the first book To the Nations, nevertheless, we read: The Sun mourns his son destroyed by the thunderbolt (the same, To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576). This indeed fits Aesculapius, as we noted in the preceding article. But since we saw in the same place that mention of him is made in the Apology, it may be gathered from this that Phaethon is meant there, and Aesculapius in the book To the Nations.

There was further represented by the actor Cybele sighing for a disdainful shepherd, namely Atys. We have seen this story described by Minucius Felix (Dissertation on the Octavius of Minucius, ch. XX, art. 2, and Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. XXVI, art. 1), and by Arnobius, who on that account harries the heathen thus: Is the Great Mother made calmer and gentler if she sees the old story of Atys rubbed up again by the actors (Arnobius, Against the Nations, book VII)? And earlier: The Great Mother loved him: if as a grandmother loves a grandson, the matter is innocent; but if as the theatres loudly proclaim, the love is infamous and pernicious (the same, book V).

Tertullian continues, and rebukes the heathen in these words: You endure the eulogies of Jupiter to be sung (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XV, p. 359), and in the book To the Nations, to be set to music (To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576); that is, you endure the reproaches and disgraces of Jupiter to be expressed by the voices and gestures of actors, and to be chanted to the music of pipes in comedies, such as the Amphitryon and certainly very many others like it. You endure also Juno, Venus and Minerva to be judged by a shepherd (the same, Apology, ibid.), namely by Paris, brought up among the shepherds on Mount Ida and called a shepherd, whose judgement on these goddesses is unknown to no one. We shall therefore add nothing, except what Augustine said cleverly and entirely to our point: Although they be false, the quarrels or judgements about several gods, and about those three goddesses who are said to have contended for excellence in beauty before Paris as judge, to win the golden apple, are nevertheless sung and danced amid the applause of the theatre, even to appease by games the gods who delight in these crimes, whether true or false (Augustine, City of God, book XVIII, ch. X, p. 495). And thus, says our Author, the majesty of the gods was violated and defiled, the heathen not only not blushing (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XV, p. 359), but even, as is read in Rigaltius's edition, applauding, or, in our parchments and the old editions, and in the book To the Nations, rejoicing (To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576).

Tertullian presses on (ibid.): What of the fact that (our manuscript codices and the old editions have ipsum [itself]) the image of your god clothes a most ignominious (the same other codices have ignominious) and infamous head? And in the book To the Nations: The image of any god you please clothes an infamous and degraded head; that is, an ignominious actor, notorious for his crimes, represents the image of any god whatever. He adds further: An impure body, trained for that art by effeminacy, that is, a shameless mime-actress [presents] some Minerva, or a more wanton mime a Hercules (ibid.); that is, he displays on the stage the shameful deeds of each. Who

man of sound mind does not see that the divinity of these deities, boasted of by the heathen, is plainly and utterly overthrown by these performances of the actors, by that applause and delight of the spectators, and by all those tragedies and comedies about which we have argued at greater length in the preceding dissertation and in the other places cited there (Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. XXVII, art. 3)?

ARTICLE III.

How greatly the gentiles, putting on the character of the gods in the arena, ruined their divinity, representing the castrated Atys, or Hercules burning alive, or Mercury testing the dead with a branding iron, or the brother of Jupiter dragging off the corpses of gladiators with a mallet; and how others arranged adulteries and pandering in the temples, by which they defile the majesty of the gods.

From the actors' theatre Tertullian goes down into the cavea, as he himself puts it, and does not find the heathen more religious there (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XV, p. 361, and To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576). They distinguish, indeed, a threefold cavea, or rather three parts of it, as we learn from Cicero (Cicero, On Old Age, p. 412, line 37, and On Friendship, p. 422, line 13), Suetonius (Suetonius, book II, § 44), Servius (Servius on Aeneid, book V, line 340, and book VIII, line 635) and others. The highest was where the women sat, the middle where the people, the third where the nobler men sat and watched the public games. Tertullian, however, like Ammianus Marcellinus (Marcellinus, book XIX, p. 550), designates by the name of cavea the arena of the amphitheatre, in which the gladiators fought. For in his book To the Nations he wrote: You are more religious in the gladiators' cavea, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance just the same, furnishing plots and stories for the guilty who are to be dispatched, or else the guilty are punished in the very persons of the gods (Tertullian, To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576). And in the Apology in like manner: In the cavea, he says, where over human blood, over the filth of punishments, your gods dance just the same, supplying plots and stories to the criminals, except that the criminals often put on your gods themselves (the same, Apology, ch. XV, p. 361, and To the Nations, book I, at the place cited). By these words he signifies that after the gladiators' combat a pantomime, having put on the mask and character of some god, went down into the arena and danced over the bodies of the criminals who had been killed or were breathing their last, that is, of those who, condemned for their crimes, were forced to fight with beasts. Say, then, how fine and pious it was for a masked god to perform the office of an executioner, or to make sport of the corpses of the accused killed by the beasts.

Let no one think, however, that this was invented or exaggerated by our Author, for he testifies that he saw it often with his own eyes: We have seen, he says, at one time (Tertullian, ibid.); and in the book To the Nations: We have often seen Atys castrated, that god from Pessinus, a city, namely, situated on the border of Greater Phrygia below Mount Agdestis, in which Atys, on the testimony of Pausanias, was said to be buried. Moreover: He who was burning alive, he says, had put on Hercules (Pausanias, book I, p. 4). And what did he mean by these words, unless that in those cruel spectacles guilty and wicked men, having put on the character either of Atys

or of Hercules, represented the castrated Atys and Hercules burnt alive? We have treated of both in our dissertation on the books of Arnobius (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. XIV, art. 2, and ch. XVIII, art. 1).

What more? We have laughed, Tertullian says further, also amid the sportive cruelties of the noonday men (Tertullian, at the place cited), that is, of the gladiators of whom we have treated above, at Mercury, that is, at a man bearing before him the mask of Mercury, testing the dead, or the slain gladiators, with a cautery, or red-hot iron, to see whether some fraud lay hidden and whether they were really dead.

We have seen, he continues (ibid.), also the brother of Jupiter, namely Pluto, dragging off the corpses of the gladiators with a mallet, or, as is read in the book To the Nations, the funeral train with a mallet, namely into the spoliarium, where the gladiators who had been beaten and had received a mortal wound were finished off, if any breath remained. For which reason Seneca wrote: Do you think anyone is so greedy of life that he would rather have his throat cut in the spoliarium than in the arena (Seneca, Epistle XCIV, near the end, p. 384)? He says more elsewhere (Epistle VII, p. 172) about the noonday gladiators, and so does Suetonius (Suetonius, Life of Claudius, § 34, and Life of Caligula, § 26 and following), whom you should see, as also Lampridius (Lampridius, Life of the Emperor Commodus), about the spoliarium, into which the gladiators were dragged with a hook.

Moreover, one cannot help wondering at some who would have it written in this text of Tertullian: We have seen also to the brother of Jupiter (Johannes Argolus, Notes on Onuphrius Panvinius, On the Circus Games, ch. II), as if he had said: We have seen the same Mercury who not only tested the corpses of the gladiators with a cautery, but also led them off with a mallet to Pluto, the brother of Jupiter, that is, to the underworld. For they seem not to have paid enough attention to these words of the same Tertullian in the book To the Nations: Dis Pater, the brother of Jupiter, leads off the funeral train of the gladiators with a mallet, while Mercury, little-winged on his bald head, little-fiery in his caduceus, tests with a cautery the bodies already lifeless or feigning death (Tertullian, To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576). He therefore distinguishes the office of each: that of Mercury, who examined whether the gladiators were dead; and that of Pluto, who led the dead, or their funeral train, into the spoliarium. For he is speaking of those things which were customarily done at the gladiatorial games. At other times, indeed, Mercury was said to lead down to Tartarus with his caduceus, or wand, as Virgil sings of him:

Then he took his wand: with this he calls forth pale souls / from Orcus, sends others down beneath gloomy Tartarus, / gives sleep and takes it away, and unseals eyes in death. (Virgil, Aeneid, book IV, line 242 and following)

Moreover, the heathen mocked their gods not only in the public spectacles and the arena but even in their temples, where surely, if anywhere, divine honours were to be paid them. For in them, says Tertullian, one could see adulteries arranged, pandering transacted between the altars, and, for the most part in the very lodgings of the temple-keepers and priests, no differently than in brothels, lust gratified under their very fillets and caps and purple robes, while the incense was burning (Tertullian, Apology,

ch. 15), or expressed and fulfilled. And do not, I beg you, hold his good faith suspect. For Juvenal, though a heathen, since he could not bear such great outrages, assails them with the utmost indignation in these verses:

For lately, as I recall, the shrine of Isis, and Ganymede of Peace, and the secret palace of the imported Mother, and Ceres; for in what temple does a woman not offer herself for sale? / (Juvenal, Satire IX, lines 22 ff.)

And indeed he had said earlier, and truly:

Or rather she arranges her hair at the shrine of the Isiac bawd. / (Satire VI, lines 4, 5.)

But we have already said more on these things in our other dissertations (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. XIII, art. 1, and on Lactantius, p. 27, arts. 1 and 34). Who, then, being of sound mind, will not willingly subscribe to Tertullian, who from all these things that have been set out in this and the preceding articles rightly concludes that by the heathens themselves the whole divinity of their gods, whom they wished to be acknowledged and worshipped by Christians and others, is utterly ruined and overturned from its foundations?

For so many and such great insults, disgraces and mockeries of the gods "disquiet", he says, "the honour of the divinity", that is, they disturb it and do not allow it to be quiet and secure. Nay more, "they make obsolete the summits of majesty" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XV, and To the Nations, book I, ch. X). And so indeed it stands in our manuscripts and in all the editions before Rigault. But he judged the sense of the word obsoletant most inept, and wished it corrected to adsolant, by which, following Gothofredus, he thinks is meant "they press down to the ground and the earth". He readily grants that in our Author's first book To the Nations is written: "They bring the summit of majesty to the ground" (Tertullian, loc. cit.); but what prevents him from having used this word in one book and the other in another? And whoever objects that the sense of the word obsoletant is most inept certainly does not sufficiently attend to the fact that the same Tertullian said elsewhere: "That many would perish again after salvation, who had made the wedding garment obsolete" (the same, Scorpiace, ch. VI). Is not the sense of this word in that book the same as in the Apology? If then it seems most inept, why, I ask you, did Rigault keep in the one book what he changed in this one? It ought not, then, to have been altered on the testimony of a single manuscript, the Fulda codex, if it is found in it, to which so many other copies of older and better note most plainly stand opposed. For it is enough if obsoletant is Tertullian's genuine word, which Fortunatus too used in exactly the same sense (Fortunatus, Life of St Albinus, § 1), namely "they abrogate, antiquate, make obsolete". The sense of our Author here, therefore, is this: the heathens, when they harass their gods with such great insults, reproaches and injuries in every place, both sacred and profane, and nevertheless wish them to be worshipped and adored, with one hand annul and destroy their divinity, which with the other they were vainly striving to establish.

ARTICLE IV.

By what arguments Tertullian made plain that the gods of the heathens were mocked and hissed off by the philosophers, and by name by Socrates, Diogenes and Varro.

No one indeed, whoever he may be, can object to us

that the religion of the gentile philosophers towards their gods was greater than that of the rest of the common people (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XIV, p. 353). For nearly all of them were so estranged from the knowledge of the true God, or from preaching Him once known, that Tertullian thought it superfluous here to call them by their names. And he seems to have let them go here because elsewhere, as we have shown (above, ch. V, art. 4), he had demonstrated plainly enough their vain and most absurd opinions about God.

Socrates, nevertheless, he names expressly in this very place, and not undeservedly. For of all mortals, as we noted before (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. III, art. 2), he was declared the wisest by the oracle of Apollo. But he, however wise he was held, "to the insult of the gods", says Tertullian, "swore by the oak, and the he-goat, and the dog" (Tertullian, loc. cit.). Rigault, indeed, wished us to be advised there that in the Fulda codex the words "and the dog" are missing: but it is surely enough that they are found in all the others. In the book To the Nations, however, the copyist erred by writing heram for hircum (the same, To the Nations, ch. X, p. 576). We have related more elsewhere about that oath of Socrates, and have made it plain that it is reported by various writers in various ways indeed, but never without contempt and injury to the gods (Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. XXX, art. 1).

Tertullian adds besides that Socrates was condemned to death by the Athenians for this reason, that he was destroying the gods; but that they were at length so driven by remorse for the unjust condemnation that "they afterwards", he says, "punished the accusers of Socrates" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XIV, p. 354), namely Meletus with death and Anytus with exile, "and set up a golden image" of Socrates "in a temple" (Plato, Apology of Socrates, vol. III, p. 390). But we read it handed down in writing by Laertius: Χαλκῆς εἰκόνος ἐτιμήσαντο, "they honoured him with a bronze", not a golden, "image" (Laertius, book II, Life of Socrates, § 43). For this reason Casaubon and Ménage wish aeream to be restored in Tertullian's text, and the latter wonders at Rigault here for having informed no one of this emendation. But Rigault is certainly less to be wondered at there, where he follows the common reading of all the manuscripts, than in very many other places, where against their manifest witness he altered and corrupted the genuine text of Tertullian.

Since, then, Socrates by denying the gods of the gentiles had stirred up the hatred of the Athenians against himself, Tertullian thereupon added at once: "Plainly of old, that is, always, truth is hated." But someone will, not altogether without reason, call into doubt whether these words, "that is, always", were inserted into this text afterwards. For to what end, he will say, would Tertullian have explained the adverb olim with these words? Could he not more simply have said: "Truth is always hated"? What of the fact that the adverb olim is taken by Virgil to signify any time whatever, where he sings: "Already for you, at times, very strong" (Virgil, Georgics, book II, line 100, and Aeneid, book VIII, line 391); that is, says Servius, "at every time". And after this the same poet: "Not otherwise than at times with thunder", that is, as Servius further observes: "Mostly, as is usual. For it is not an adverb of time" (Servius,

p. 511). But could not Tertullian have said that truth was hated by men olim, namely in the time of Socrates, of whom he was speaking, and in his own as well, and so always? Whatever you decide, he concludes from it that the hatred of truth is so great that the Athenians held it in hatred in Socrates as he overturned the fictitious gods. Of his condemnation and death we have argued above, in the earlier dissertations cited there (above, ch. XXV, art. 3).

To Socrates Tertullian joins two other philosophers (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XIV, p. 355), one a Greek, Diogenes, the other a Roman, Varro. But it will perhaps seem strange to many why, with the former testimony, he argues against the heathens thus in this book and in the first To the Nations: "Diogenes", he says, "makes some jest or other at Hercules"; in the other book, "made a jest" (To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576). For, they will argue, is this argument of so much weight that it deserved to be repeated? For if Tertullian did not know what jest Diogenes made at Hercules, what could he conclude from it against the false gods of the gentiles? And who is this Diogenes? Since that is hard to say, some suspect that Diagoras should be read, who, it is said, because he lacked fire for cooking his dinner, sought it from a statue of Hercules, so that it might cook the meal as its thirteenth labour. But absolutely all the manuscripts are against this emendation. We, therefore, yielding to their authority, shall readily be persuaded that he calls Diogenes the Cynic, just as in the same place he calls Varro a cynic. For who does not know how much Hercules is mocked by this very Diogenes the Cynic in Lucian's Dialogues (Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, 56, p. 137, and ancient authors, p. 190)? There is besides that epigram of Ausonius in which Diogenes is said, not without a jest, to have made Hercules the founder of his sect:

"I am the first founder of the Cynic way." "What reasoning is this? Alcides is said to be far earlier." "With Alcides as teacher I was once second: now I am first of the Cynics, and he a god." / (Ausonius, Epigram 26.)

But is not that the "something or other" by which Tertullian bears witness that the divinity of Hercules was mocked by this Diogenes? If, however, you show that he had in view some other mockery recorded by Lucian or another, we shall not resist you. Further, although he called it "something or other", yet because it was not unknown to the heathens, he therefore argues rightly from it against their gods (Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. XXIV, art. 4).

Someone will perhaps doubt whether the other philosopher, whom he calls Varro the cynic, is the one whose learning, as we have seen, the heathens heap with such praises, and who had composed so many books on religions. For did he too dare to jest about the gods? Why not? Do we not read in our Author's books To the Nations: "Varro, the Diogenes of the Roman pen, brings in three hundred Joves, or Jupiteres" (our manuscripts, Jupiteros) "as one should say, without heads" (Tertullian, To the Nations, book I, ch. X, p. 576)? But how could he bring in so many Joves without mockery? Did not Minucius Felix, beyond doubt following our Tertullian, say that there are "so many monsters of Jove",

"as many as there are names". See what we have remarked on these words elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. XV, art. 2). Some, however, think these things were said by Varro in the Menippean satires; why not in his other books on the religion of the heathens, of which there was so great a number? But wherever they were said by him, the false divinity both of Jove and of the others is shown from them most plainly. And this was so firmly held by those in whom some spark of honesty and fairness still remained, that they utterly rejected Father Liber, as we saw above (above, ch. XVIII, art. 9), and Serapis and Harpocrates with his Cynocephalus. But surely, with all the other false deities removed, they ought to have worshipped the one almighty God.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Other arguments of Tertullian are weighed, by which he shows that the gods of the gentiles are false and nothing.

ARTICLE I.

How wicked was the licence of provinces, cities, and especially of the Egyptians, to adopt peculiar gods for themselves: how little likely are the things Tertullian has handed down about Joseph the patriarch, and whether the Egyptians called him a god and worshipped him under the name of Serapis: by what right he says that Astartes is the god of Syria, Disares of Arabia, Belenus of the Norici, Caelestis of Africa, and their own petty kings the gods of Mauretania.

Another most evident proof of false religion is certainly the licence given to cities and peoples to adopt and worship for themselves any god they pleased, often unknown to the rest. And many provinces and cities of the gentiles worshipped gods "taken up at whim", says our Tertullian, "not from knowledge of the truth", either rejected by others or unknown to them (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 417, and To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII). There he refutes above all the Egyptians, who, as we have shown in our other dissertations (Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. XXXIV, art. 2, and the places cited there), with a superstition as impious as it was absurd not only consecrated sheep and other beasts, but also condemned to death those who had killed any god of this kind. Having received this liberty of adopting, the Egyptians, says Tertullian, so abused it that they made Joseph the Patriarch a god under the name of Serapis (Tertullian, loc. cit.). But he confuses many things there, and so much indeed that it seems strange how a man thoroughly versed in the sacred Scriptures should offer us many things plainly opposed to them.

For first Joseph, he says (Tertullian, To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII), "younger than the other brothers" (he ought to have excepted Benjamin), "sold in Egypt, served in the household of Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians". But in the book of Genesis (Gen. 37:18 and 36, and 39:1 ff.) we read that he was sold to the Midianites, and by them to Potiphar, Pharaoh's eunuch and master of the soldiers, whom he in fact served until he was sent to prison. Unless, then, this Potiphar, who is called πετεφρῆς by Josephus (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, book II, ch. III,

p. 39 ff.), you prove to have been enrolled in the royal household of Pharaoh, this opinion of Tertullian appears false. Nor is it truer, what he added, that he was "desired by the less than chaste queen", and for that reason thrust into prison by the king's command. For it was not by the queen but by Potiphar's wife, as is related in the same sacred book, that he was solicited to defilement, and he was cast into chains by the deceived Potiphar. Tertullian asserts besides that Joseph received in marriage the daughter of King Pharaoh, whose dreams he had explained. But sacred Scripture (Gen. 41:50) and Josephus the historian (Josephus, loc. cit.) inform us that that Joseph the patriarch married Aseneth, the daughter of Potiphar, priest of Heliopolis.

Finally, some judge that what our Author added is contrary to the truth handed down in the same books of Genesis and of Josephus: "Joseph from the prison taught the solutions, he opens the dream to the King" (Tertullian, To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII). For he had been released from the prison when he interpreted the king's dreams. Yet could he not by these words have pointed to the dreams of Pharaoh's two eunuchs, which he did in fact explain in prison, and which afterwards gave occasion for the explaining of the same Pharaoh's dreams? Further, the things contrary to sacred Scripture that Tertullian reports he wrote in the book To the Nations alone, and omitted entirely in the Apology. What the cause of this omission was, whether because he noticed that they were not wholly true, who would dare to decide? For the rest, he had perhaps drawn them from corrupt sources, unless you show that the copyists erred over the proper names, as they often did over other things, in copying this book.

That, therefore, seems more likely to Vossius (Vossius, On the Origin and Progress of Idolatry, book I, ch. XXIX) which he further relates, that the Egyptians, after grain had been supplied to them by Joseph in the time of famine, ordered in memory and as a symbol of so great a benefit that a bull be kept by the priests, which they honoured first with civil, and then with divine worship. And it is certainly established that the bull was made a god by the same Egyptians, Apis, and thence Serapis, of whom Rufinus writes (Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History, book II, ch. XXIII), and we elsewhere (vol. I of the Apparatus, p. 1090). A most celebrated statue of this Serapis was also made at Alexandria, of which the same Rufinus says: "On whose head a corn-measure was set; and indeed they say it was formed in honour of our Joseph, on account of the measuring out of the grain with which he relieved the Egyptians in the time of famine." Suidas supports Rufinus (Suidas, under the word Σαράπις), yet neither could deny that others held other opinions.

From the Egyptians our Author passes to other peoples, who with no less licence had taken to themselves peculiar gods, unknown to others and especially to the Romans: "How many indeed are there", he says, "who know by sight or hearing which is the god proper to each province and city, as Astartes of Syria" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 418) (our manuscripts, Adstartes); in the book To the Nations, "Atagartis of the Syrians" (To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII)? This reading can be confirmed by these words of Pliny: "But to the Syrians, Magog. There the prodigious Atagartis is worshipped, called Derceto by the Greeks" (Pliny, Natural History, book V, ch. XXIII,

p. 577). And Strabo says of Hierapolis, ἐν ᾗ τιμῶσι τὴν Συρίαν θεὸν τὴν Ἀταργάτιν, "in which they worship the Syrian goddess Atargatis" (Strabo, Geography, book XVI, p. 748). But afterwards he wrote: Ἀταργάτην δὲ τὴν Ἀθάραν, Δερκετὼ δ' αὐτὴν Κτησίας καλεῖ; "Atargatis they called Athara, whom Ctesias called Derceto" (ibid., p. 785). By others, however, she was called Astartes, as by Minucius Felix, who had read this name, as also many others, in the Apology of our Tertullian. See Vossius (Vossius, On the Origin and Progress of Idolatry, book I, ch. XXVIII), and, if you please, what we have noted on that passage of Minucius (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. XIV, art. 1).

And as she was the goddess of Syria, so of Arabia, says Tertullian, Disares (Tertullian, loc. cit.), but otherwise in the second book To the Nations, Obodanedussiren. They think this name was corrupted by an unskilled copyist, who made one out of these two, Obodas and Dusares. They try to confirm their opinion by the authority of Eusebius, by whom they say indeed that these gods of the Arabs were mentioned, but they indicate neither his words nor the book. On both these gods there is more in Vossius, whom anyone may readily consult (Vossius, On the Origin and Progress of Idolatry, book II, ch. VIII, p. 178). "The ancestral god of the Norici too was Belenus", says our Author (the same, ibid., ch. XXIV, p. 419); but these names too were corrupted in our manuscripts, Nori Cibelenus, and in some editions Tibelenus, whom Vossius suspects to be the one whom the ancient Saxons called Tybelinus or Tebilenus, and the Slavs Zeerneboch. But is it not far more probable that he speaks of the god Belenus whom the people of Aquileia, as Julius Capitolinus (Capitolinus, Life of Maximinus, p. 361, col. 2) and Herodian (Herodian, History, book II, p. 612) have recorded, held in the highest honour and believed to be the sun? Gruter, moreover, presents various inscriptions To the God Belenus, set up by Augustus Caesar (Gruter, Inscriptions, vol. I, pp. 26 and 27). Indeed he is proclaimed by Ausonius as the god of the people of Bordeaux in more than one poem (Ausonius, On the Professors of Bordeaux, Poem 4, § 145, and Poem 10, § 154). Belenus, therefore, was worshipped not only by the Norici, a people of Germany, but by others too. But Tertullian perhaps named these expressly for the reason that he knew this god was honoured by them above the rest (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 420). If, nevertheless, you show that some more obscure god of the Norici or of another nation is denoted by him, we shall assent to you without reluctance.

Nor did he omit his own homeland, and "Caelestis of Africa", and in the book To the Nations, "Caelestis of the Africans" (To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII), of whom we have argued above (above, ch. XVIII, art. 6). Mauretania, further, was a region of the same Africa, about which he at once appends this: "the petty kings of Mauretania, its own". But Minucius Felix and Lactantius name Juba, whom the inhabitants of this province honoured with divine honour in particular. Consult, if you like, what has been argued in our dissertations on the books of both (Dissertation

on Minucius' Octavius, ch. XVI, art. 2; Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. XXX, art. 2).

ARTICLE II.

On other gods, unknown to the Romans, who were worshipped in the provinces and cities of Italy, such as Delventinus of the people of Casinum or of Crustumerium, Visidianus of the people of Narnia, Ancaria or Ancharia of the people of Asculum, Nursia or Nortia of the people of Volsinii, Valentia of the people of Ocriculum, and of the Falisci, in honour of the father Curris, and Juno received the name.

Tertullian pursues his argument, and from the provinces farther removed from Rome he comes to Italy, and "throughout it", he says, "gods too are registered by municipal consecration" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 420), whom the Romans did not worship. For so great was the blindness and licence of the inhabitants of every city that they had not only gods unknown to others, but gods "whose very names", as he says, "in their dignity do not differ from human surnames" (the same, To the Nations, book II, ch. II). But as they bore the name of a man, so it is plain that they lived a human life, and therefore are not gods. He lists a good many of them (ibid.), and so that there might be no room for anyone to detract from his credibility, he cites Varro as witness, beyond doubt in those books which, on Augustine's testimony (Augustine, City of God, book VI, ch. III, p. 148), he had published on divine things.

At the head of the column of these obscure gods is placed "Delventinus of the people of Casinum" (Tertullian, loc. cit.), or, as our older handwritten manuscripts and others have it, Casianensium; the older printed editions, Crustuminiensium; and afterwards, in some editions, Belventinus. Casinum, a town of Campania, says Varro (Varro, On the Latin Language, book VI, p. 77), was held first by the Samnites, sprung from the Sabines, and then by the Romans. Pliny made mention of that town (Pliny, Natural History, book III, ch. IV, p. 229), and Silius (Silius Italicus, book XII, line 525), and the name occurs in various inscriptions published by Gruter (Gruter, pp. 136 and 151). If, however, anyone prefers to read there Crustuminensium, he will be able to support his opinion with these verses of Virgil:

. . . . . Nor is the same scion for Crustumian and Syrian pears. / (Virgil, Georgics, book II, line 88.)

For Servius observes this in the same place: "Crustumian pears are partly reddish, from the town of Crustumium." And Pliny describes the territory of Crustumerium and its situation in these words: "On this side of thirteen miles from the City, dividing the territory of Veii from that of Crustumerium, then that of Fidenae, and the Latin from the Vatican" (Pliny, Natural History, book III, ch. V, p. 323). But a little before he had mentioned another Crustuminum (ibid., p. 322), where it was situated is now unknown. Further, if we must yield to the authority of the better and older manuscripts, Tertullian designated the town of the Casinians (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 420, and To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII), which they now think to be Monte Cassino.

Next he says: "Visidianus of the people of Narnia". And Pliny, where he enumerates the towns and peoples of Umbria: "the Narnienses", he says, "whose town was formerly called Nequinum

" (Pliny, Natural History, book III, ch. XIV, p. 365). And certainly we read it written by Livy: "The other consul, Apuleius, besieged the town of Nequinum in Umbria. The place was steep, and on one side sheer, where Narnia now stands" (Livy, book X, § 9). It took that name from the river Nar, by which it is washed, as you will understand from these words of Strabo: Νάρνα δι' ἧς ῥεῖ ὁ Νὰρ ποταμός, "Narnia, through which the river Nar flows" (Strabo, Geography, book V, p. 227). The Narnienses are also celebrated in various inscriptions in Gruter (Gruter, p. 174, inscr. 4; p. 388, inscr. 2; p. 460, inscr. 4).

Further, "Ancharia of the people of Asculum", in the book To the Nations and in our manuscript copies: Ancharia (Tertullian, loc. cit.). By Pliny it is called "the colony of Asculum, the most renowned of Picenum" (Pliny, Natural History, book III, ch. XIII, p. 362), under whose name many inscriptions are extant in Gruter (Gruter, p. 465, inscr. 1 and 10; p. 371, inscr. 1; and p. 427, inscr. 1). And Strabo calls it Ἄσκλον τὸ Πικηνόν, "Asculum of Picenum". But there is another Asculum, a town of Apulia, most famous for the defeat of Pyrrhus. Our Author is beyond doubt speaking of one or the other, unless you prove that the same goddess was worshipped in both. That he speaks of the former, however, someone will perhaps think can be inferred from these verses of Lucan on Lentulus:

. . . . . Lentulus is driven from the citadel of Asculum. / (Lucan, Pharsalia, book II, line 150.)

For some observe that Esculea and Asculea are said without distinction; why not Aesculea too, whence the Aesculani with whom we are now dealing?

For the rest, Turnèbe (Turnèbe, Adversaria, book XVII, ch. XXIV) suspects that Ancharia is the goddess by whose frenzy men seized were called ancarii, and he tries to establish this by these two verses of Lucilius cited by Nonius (Nonius, under the word Quiritare):

These same things she will bray from our people, and will wail, running about like an ancarius and loudly crying out.

In our edition of these verses, indeed, we read: "Here, I say ... like an arenarius". But that is corrupt beyond doubt, and against the laws of the metre. Nevertheless this is a mere conjecture of Turnèbe, which still needs further proof. In the book To the Nations, moreover, the name Anchariam is found, and quampraeverint, which, judging it corrupt, they wished to be replaced by et quampraeverim: but without giving any reason for the emendation, which does not seem better than the corrupted text. We therefore prefer to wait for the help of another manuscript rather than indulge in various conjectures.

More easily, then, will that be proved which Tertullian added: "Nursia of the people of Volsinii" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 421); in the book To the Nations (To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII, p. 71) and in our unpublished books, Norcia and Nortia, or, as Lipsius notes on Tacitus, to be cited shortly, Neurscia. And Livy mentions the Volsinenses once and again (Livy, V, § 31, and book IX, § 21), who are so called also in a certain inscription published by Gruter (Gruter, inscr. 1, p. 385). But Tertullian himself elsewhere, as

we have observed (above, ch. XXIII, art. 3), calls them Volsinii, as do Propertius (Propertius, book IV, elegy 2, line 2) and Pliny (Pliny, Natural History, book II, ch. LII, p. 287, and book III, ch. IV, p. 322), who testify that this city, which is now under the dominion of the supreme pontiffs, was the wealthiest of the Etruscans.

That Norcia was their goddess we learn from these words of Livy, already cited: "Cincius, a careful authority on monuments of this kind, affirms that at Volsinii nails, markers of the number of the years, are to be seen fixed in the temple of Nortia, the Etruscan goddess" (Livy, book VII, § 3). Juvenal too sang this of her:

. . . The same people, if Norcia had favoured the Tuscan, if the unwary old age of the Prince had been crushed, would in this very hour be calling Sejanus Augustus. / (Juvenal, Satire X, line 70, etc.)

Further, "Valentia of the people of Ocriculum", says Tertullian (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 421). Ocriculum, or Ocriculi, in Strabo †Ὀκρίκλον (Strabo, Geography, book V, p. 227), is a city within the borders of Umbria, not far distant from Rome, and is now called Otricoli. Pliny makes mention of it (Pliny, Natural History, book III, ch. IV, p. 323, and ch. XIV, p. 365), Livy (Livy, book IX, § 41), and others, above all the geographers. That Valentia was indeed the goddess of the people of Ocriculum you will recognize from this ancient inscription in Gruter (Gruter, p. 2, inscr. 12): FOR THE SAFETY OF THE GOING AND RETURN OF OUR LORD THE MOST HOLY .... TI. AUG., A SHRINE OF THE COUNCIL OF THE GODS AND GODDESSES OF OUR AUG., AT THE BIDDING OF A VISION OF THE GODDESS VALENTIA, S. P. E. C.

What more? "Nortia of the people of Sutrium", says our Author (Tertullian, loc. cit.). But Sutrium, says Livy, "a city allied to the Romans, was as it were the barrier of Etruria" (Livy, book IX, § 32, and book VI, § 3). He had already made mention of it before, and it occurs also in various inscriptions presented by Gruter (Gruter, pp. 254, 302, 365 and 481). It is twenty-four miles distant from the city of Rome, as Marsus noted on these words of Silius Italicus: "the roofs of Sutrium" (Silius Italicus, book VIII, line 408). See Erasmus on the proverb "As if they were going to Sutrium" (Erasmus, Adages, chiliad 4, century 4, adage 52, p. 841). The goddess of the inhabitants of this city, then, as Tertullian says, was Norcia. But before, as we have seen, he had said "Norcia of the people of Volsinii". Was she, then, the same goddess of both? Does he not there list the peculiar and proper gods of each city? And it is beyond doubt for this reason that they wished the name in the former place to be written somewhat differently, as we have noted. Yet not only all our manuscripts oppose this emendation, but also Livy, whom we have cited. But since Volsinii and Sutrium were cities of Etruria, and this goddess is called by Livy the goddess of Etruria, she could have been the goddess of both cities. If anyone, however, shows that there were two, called by different names, we shall readily subscribe to his opinion.

The column of these municipal and local gods

Tertullian closes with these words: "Of the Falisci, in honour of the father Curris; and Juno received the surname" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. XXIV, p. 421, and To the Nations, book II, ch. VIII). Falisca is a city of Etruria situated between Mount Ciminus and the Tiber. Mention of the colony of the Falisci is made in the books of Pliny (Pliny, Natural History, book III, ch. IV, p. 320) and in Gruter's inscriptions (Gruter, p. 288, inscr. 1), and more often in the histories of Titus Livius (Livy, book V, §§ 17, 18, 26, and book VII, § 17, etc.), and in these verses of Virgil:

These hold the Fescennine ranks and the just Falisci, these the heights of Soracte and the Flavinian fields, and the lake with the mount of Ciminus, and the groves of Capena. / (Virgil, Aeneid, book VII, lines 695 ff.)

You will find similar things sung by Silius Italicus (Silius Italicus, book VIII, lines 406 ff.). For the rest, Juno, as no one is unaware, had many surnames, of which one, on the testimony of Festus, was Curris. If anyone asks why she was so called, let him hear Servius: "Juno has many names: she is Curetis, because she uses a chariot and a spear" (Servius, on Aeneid book I, line 6). Another, if he wishes, let him hear Festus Pompeius: "Curis is the Sabine for spear .... They called Juno Curitis, because they thought she bore a spear" (Festus, under the word Curis). But just as these writers support our Tertullian when he asserts that Juno was surnamed Curris or Curetis, so they oppose him, saying openly that this surname was given her not in honour of the father Curis, but from the spear, which was called curis by the Sabines, or from the chariot, as Servius hints; who, however, is rebuked by some, who judge the former etymology of this name the truer.

What then? Can it be answered that Juno drew this surname from the spear, which the Falisci afterwards gave her in honour of the father Curis? But who, you will ask, is that father Curis? Ovid indeed teaches us that Romulus was so called, where he sings:

The next day is free, but the third is named for Quirinus, who holds this name, and was Romulus before: whether because the spear was called curis by the ancient Sabines, the warlike god came to the stars from his weapon; or the Quirites gave the name to their King; or because he had joined Cures to the Romans. / (Ovid, Fasti, book II, § 13.)

But that name had been given not only to Romulus but before him to Janus, as Macrobius has attested in these words: "In the rites we invoke Janus Junonius, Janus Quirinus ... father as being of the gods, Junonius as holding the entrances not only of the month of January but of all the months. For all the calends are under the dominion of Juno .... Quirinus as being the parent of wars, from the spear which the Sabines call curis" (Macrobius, Saturnalia, book I, ch. IX). Janus, therefore, had various names, of which three bear on our purpose. The first is Pater, the second is Quirinus, derived from curis or spear, and the third Junonius, as being the beginning and entrance both of January and of all the months. Can it not be confirmed from this, as Tertullian wrote, that Juno received from the father Curis, who was also called Junonius, her Curis or Curitis,

surname? On this conjecture, however, let others be the judges.

For the rest, the sense of Tertullian's words can be twofold, according to the differing reading of our codices. For if you read there, as in our handwritten copies and in Rigault's edition, "of the Falisci, in honour (MSS. honore) of father Curis, and Juno received the name", the sense will be: Juno is the goddess of the Falisci, who received her appellation of Curitis in honour of father Curis. But if we read with the other editions, "among the Falisci father Curis is in honour, whence Juno received her surname", these words will signify that divine honours were paid by the Falisci to father Curis, from whom Juno was surnamed. But if he is speaking of the honour of father Curis, why, I ask, is mention inserted there of Juno, who has plainly nothing to do with the matter? Will not those come nearer to Tertullian's mind who have shown that he is to be understood of Juno Curitis, whom the Falisci worshipped as the particular goddess of their city? But do you weigh and pronounce which is the truer reading and interpretation.

But someone will perhaps come to meet us and object that Tertullian suffered something human there, since he so expressly affirms that to these gods of the provinces and cities, named by him so far, no divine honour was rendered by the Romans (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 24). For had not the Capitol earlier been called by him the senate-house of demons? Are these not, moreover, his words in another book: "The amphitheatre is consecrated with more and harsher names than (in the older printed editions "than" is lacking) the Capitol, the senate-house of all the gods" (the same, book On the Spectacles, ch. 12)? Did not Rome, as Leo the First says, serve the errors of all nations, and take up their gods (Leo, sermon on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul)? The Romans therefore worshipped the gods of any nations whatever. But although the matter is so, they nevertheless venerated them all only in general, and not by name. For they could not even count them, how much less honour and invoke them! Tertullian, however, is disputing about the local and particular gods, whom the inhabitants of cities and provinces were accustomed to worship as their own fellow townsmen, and to invoke by their own names.

What wonder, then, if most of them are now unknown to all, such as Delventinus and Visidianus, named in the Apology, and in the book To the Nations, the Numentinus or Numertinus of the Athenians, or rather of the Athernienses (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 24, and To the Nations, book II, ch. 8)? For the knowledge of these and of other local gods, whose number was infinite, has long since been snatched from us. Yet our Author's argument is not on that account of less strength, by which, from what has been said so far, he concludes with the fullest right that the gentiles were most unjust, who, while they had the power to worship at pleasure and caprice any false god whatever, even one unknown to other nations, would not allow the true God to be adored by the Christians.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

With what great absurdity the Romans boasted that by their piety towards the gods they had earned the empire of the whole world.

ARTICLE I.

How false it is that the Romans earned the lordship of the whole world by their piety towards the gods Sterculus, Mutinus, Larentia, Cybele, Jupiter, Juno and the others, who were bound to protect their own fatherland rather than the Romans, and who were all subject to fate.

We have seen the false religion of the gentiles, who worshipped gods plainly invented, so overthrown by Tertullian with so many and such weighty reasons that no man, if he be of sound mind, would seem able to resist them. But since such is the obstinacy of most men who err that they will never confess themselves beaten, the heathen still rose up against us and, as Tertullian says, objected to us that the Romans, in reward for their most diligent religiousness, had been raised so high that they took possession of the world (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 422, and To the Nations, book II, ch. 17); that is, that by great piety and religion towards their gods they had earned and obtained the empire of the whole world. "These gods therefore exist," they said, "and ought to be honoured by all men." But this whole argument, which we have set out more fully elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 16, arts. 2 and 3), our Tertullian not undeservedly judges to be plainly frivolous and of no weight. Yet, so as not to give the heathen even the least room for muttering, he refutes and demolishes this argument, such as it is, with various answers.

For the gods of the Romans, he says, were either native and their very own, or foreign and adopted. But can it be said that the bounds of the Roman empire were extended by the first? "Of course that wage," these are the words of Tertullian mocking this opinion, "was paid out to the Romans by the gods in return for favour. Sterculus and Mutinus and Larentina advanced the empire" (Tertullian, place cited). In the older printed books "si" is read for "scilicet", but with plainly the same sense, though in a less elegant expression. He names there the basest and plainly infamous gods of the Romans in order to sting with the sharper goads of irony the heathen who most absurdly boasted of the power of their gods. For Sterculus, as he teaches elsewhere, was diligent in helping the fields with dung (the same, To the Nations, book II, ch. 9). But of him, as also of the most foul Mutinus, and of Larentina, who is called by the same author a public harlot, we have argued before and in earlier dissertations (above, ch. 25, art. 3; and Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 17, art. 2, and Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 52, arts. 1 and 2). And no one in his right mind will ever dare to affirm seriously that the bounds of the Roman empire were stretched out by native gods of this infamous kind. Nor indeed by their other domestic and particular gods. For the power, might and holiness of the true God cannot be divided among many, just as neither can His nature. Yet no one ever said that in the aforesaid infamous gods, or in the other domestic gods of the Romans, there was the same as in

almighty God: the nature and almightiness, the might and the holiness. They are therefore not gods, nor could they bring any increase whatever to the Roman empire.

It remains, then, that the greatness of the Roman empire grew by the help and power of foreign gods. Yet that opinion lacks all likelihood whatever no less than the former. For besides the reason just brought forward, "I should not think," as Tertullian rightly says, "that foreign gods wished to favour an alien nation more, and gave over to people from across the sea the native soil in which they were born, grew up, were ennobled and were buried" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25); that is, that they favoured their fatherland and the land that nursed them less than the Romans, who were from overseas and strangers. For by what vice of an ungrateful mind could they hand over their native soil to the Romans to be laid waste and made subject to their rule?

But to make this plainer by some examples: "Let Cybele see to it," he says, the daughter of Heaven and Earth, the wife of Saturn and the great mother, "whether she loved the city of Rome as the memorial of the Trojan race, her own native stock, that is, protected against the arms of the Achaeans; whether she foresaw that she would pass over to her avengers, who she knew would subdue Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 424). That the force of this argument may be seen, it must be recalled that Cybele seems to some to have been named from Cybelus, a mountain of Phrygia. And no one doubts that her most celebrated image was set up at Pessinus, which was a city of Phrygia, and that it was afterwards installed at Rome with the greatest pomp, as we have said elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. 19, art. 1, and on Arnobius, ch. 20, art. 2, and on Lactantius, ch. 31, art. 3). Tertullian argues from this as follows: did Cybele love the Romans on account of Aeneas, who sprang from Troy, a city of Lesser Phrygia, and was therefore her native son, because they drew their origin from him after he had been snatched from the Trojan fire and the arms of the Achaeans? Or did she scorn her own fatherland and prefer the Romans to it, because she foresaw that her image would be carried to Rome, and that Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia her fatherland, would be subdued by the Romans? Why then did she allow this city, where she was worshipped with the highest honour, to be stormed by the Greeks? Be it so, however: suppose, if you will, that she permitted that too. But how could she know beforehand that one day she herself, or what is the same thing, her image, would be carried from Pessinus to Rome? For she no more foresaw this than the day on which the emperor Marcus Aurelius died at Sirmium. That day, says Tertullian, she plainly either did not know, or she sent the news too late to her chief priest, the archigallus, who on the sixth day after this emperor's death was offering for his welfare the impure blood drawn from his arms. And so the Christians with full right laughed at such a goddess, either ignorant of the future or cruel, who allowed not only the blood of her archigallus to be shed to no purpose, but also her own fatherland to be utterly destroyed. She could therefore bring the Romans no help for widening the bounds of their empire without an unjust and ungrateful mind.

Nor again was Jupiter bound to embrace them with greater zeal and favour (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25). For could he forget that cave of Ida in the island of Crete, where the gentiles proclaimed that he had been born and buried? Did he, his love of his fatherland turned to hatred, allow "his own Crete", as Tertullian puts it (ibid.), "to be shaken by the Roman fasces" and arms? Had the Corybantian bronzes too fallen from his memory, by whose clang and din the most inhuman savagery of his father Saturn, who wished to devour him, was eluded? Had he, finally, buried in wilful forgetfulness "the most pleasant odour of his nurse there" (ibid.)? But many are in doubt who that nurse was, and what her most pleasant odour. Some suspect that by these words Tertullian alludes to the horn of Amalthea, from which nectar and ambrosia flowed. But this suspicion is beyond doubt empty. For the question is of Jupiter's nurse, whom some supposed to be the goat Amalthea, others the Nymphs, that is, the daughters of Melissus, king of Crete. If, then, our Author followed this latter opinion, the odour of the Nymphs, who were said to have fed Jupiter with honey and milk, could rightly be called most pleasant. But if he had the former in view, as is more likely, he is not without irony harassing the absurd divinity of Jupiter, who had sucked the milk of an ill-smelling goat and could not forget that most foul odour. Yet if he always remembered that, and his fatherland Crete, he ought to have set Crete before the Capitol, and to have given the empire of the whole world to the Cretans rather than to the Romans. Of his birth, moreover, his nurses, his upbringing and his tomb we have treated elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 15, art. 2).

And what of Juno, the sister and wife of this Jupiter? "Would she wish," says Tertullian, "the Punic city" of Carthage to be destroyed "by the race of Aeneas's sons, of all people" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 427, and To the Nations, book II, ch. 17), that is, by the Romans? Did she not prefer that city, dear to her, to Samos, where she had been brought up, or married to Jupiter, as is clear from these verses of Virgil, cited by our Author only in part and with the poet's name left unsaid:

Which Juno is said to have cherished alone above all lands, / Samos set second. Here were her arms, / here was her chariot: that this should be the kingdom of the nations, / if the fates should anywhere allow, the goddess even then strives and fosters.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book I, line 19 and following.)

But "that wretched one", Tertullian says further, "the wife and sister of Jupiter", however much she loved Carthage, could nevertheless not prevent its overthrow by the Romans. For she availed nothing "against the fates" of this city, deadly as they were. Nor indeed is that to be wondered at, since "plainly Jupiter himself", our Author continues, "stands by fate" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 428). And is not that saying confirmed openly enough by the reply of the Delphic Apollo to the messengers of Croesus, which Herodotus related in these very words, "the fated lot it is impossible even for a god to escape", that is, "To flee a lot destined by fate is impossible even for a god" (Herodotus, book I, §91)? And of Jupiter himself Cicero (Cicero, On Divination, book II, p. 281, line 44) and Homer

(Homer, Iliad 16, line 434, and Odyssey 3, line 137 and following), cited by him, pronounce as follows: "Nothing happens outside fate ..... Homer means this when he brings in Jupiter complaining that he could not snatch his son Sarpedon from death. That Greek verse to this effect signifies the very same:

What is prepared to be, that overpowers even highest Jove."

In like manner Seneca too: "Whatever it is that has bidden us live thus and die thus binds the gods also by the same necessity. An irrevocable course carries human and divine things alike. That very founder and ruler of all things wrote the fates indeed, but he follows them; he always obeys, he commanded once" (Seneca, On Providence, ch. 5, p. 501). Hence that Greek proverb, "Not even the gods fight against necessity": "Not even the gods resist necessity." See, please, the observations of Erasmus on this proverb, and of Lipsius on the cited words of Seneca. See also Vossius (Vossius, On the Origin and Progress of Idolatry, book II, ch. 44, p. 276 and following), and, if you will, what we have remarked in our Dissertation on Minucius Felix about fate, and in the following one about Jupiter and Juno (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 6, art. 3; and Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 31, art. 4).

If, then, Juno and Jupiter himself and all the gods are subject to fate, as the heathen confess, they beyond doubt could never give any increase to the Roman empire. For if fate is more powerful than Jupiter and all the gods, the heathen ought surely to have paid greater honours, says Tertullian (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 428), "to the fates, which surrendered Carthage to them", than to Juno and to the most prostituted she-wolf Larentina, of whom we treated a little before. It is false, therefore, that the Romans earned the lordship of the whole earth by great piety towards Juno, Jupiter and their other gods, whether native or brought in.

ARTICLE II.

That empire was not given to the Romans for their piety towards the gods, since it had been founded before Numa instituted the various rites of worshipping those same gods, which are explained here, or images of the gods had been made, or there was any god at Rome.

By still other weighty reasons Tertullian shows (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 429) that the Romans could not have received their empire, or any extension of its bounds, from any god of theirs whatever, nor from all the others. For it is certain that several of the Romans' gods, Saturn, Jupiter and others, attained the highest royal power. Tell me, then, if you please, from what other gods whom they worshipped did they receive it? Was it given to Saturn by a certain most base Sterculus, of whom we were speaking a little before? But he lived after Saturn. And no gentile could ever say what other god gave him the kingdom. Nor is there any better reason why it should be said to have been granted to the Romans by some god.

And then their empire had been founded before the worship of the gods was instituted at Rome. For "by Numa", says Tertullian (ibid.), "was conceived the curiosity

superstitious", that is, religion and superstition, which is a depraved and perverse care spent on false gods. But for what reason, do you think, was it established by him? Consult Livy (Livy, book I, §19 and following), Eutropius (Eutropius, Breviary, book I, p. 64) and the other writers of Roman history, and they will answer you: that he might restrain and refine the savage and soldierly minds of the Romans by the fear of religion and of the gods. But what, pray, were those first rites of the Roman religion? "Not yet," says our Author, "did divine worship among the Romans consist in images or in temples", as we have explained elsewhere, where we investigated the origin of temples and images (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 430, p. 27 and following, and To the Nations, book I, ch. 17, p. 583; Apparatus, vol. I, book III, dissertation 1, chs. 7 and 8, p. 717 and following).

Then too there were "no Capitols vying with heaven", as he continues (ibid., p. 28); that is, the Capitoline temple had not yet been built, so proud that it seemed to raise its summit right up to the heavens. And do not think that this is the exaggeration of a mind too hostile to the heathen. For Martial, himself a heathen, sang the same in these verses:

Nor the topmost shrine of the Capitoline Thunderer, / and the temples that gleam next to their own heaven.

(Martial, book II, epigram 51.)

Silius Italicus too:

He too, where the ancient faith stands as our royal seat, / will set a golden Capitol on the Tarpeian rock, / and will touch the summits of the temples to our heaven.

(Silius, book III, line 620.)

More, if you wish, you will easily find handed down in the books of Alessandro Donati and others on the city of Rome (Donati, On the City of Rome, book II, ch. 4 and following).

Where then, someone will ask, was divine worship carried on at that time? "Makeshift altars of turf," says Tertullian (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 420, and To the Nations, book II, ch. 17); that is, altars built up suddenly, on the spur of the moment and by chance, as may be learned from Cicero (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book II, p. 228, line 12) and Apuleius (Apuleius, On the God of Socrates, at the beginning). And the vessels with which the service was performed "were mean", says our Author, "and still of Samian ware", that is, then made of mud and soft clay, of which we have spoken elsewhere (Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 30, art. 2).

Tertullian added (Tertullian, place cited): "and the savour of sacrifice from them", as we read in both his works, the Apology as well as the second book To the Nations. But in our manuscript codices one word has been made of these two, as has often happened, and "exillis" written. And perhaps from this Rigault wished it corrected to "exilis" ["meagre"], a conjecture not altogether unhappy, though he ought to have given at least some reason for it. It can, however, be confirmed from the fact that in the same place Tertullian asserts that the rites of the Roman religion were then poor. But these two words "ex illis" can also be referred to the "Samian vessels" to which they are attached. We therefore dare to settle nothing about this variant reading.

For the rest, because in Numa's time there were no images of the gods among the Romans; nay rather, because he

had forbidden them to be made, as we have shown elsewhere (Apparatus, vol. I, p. 733 and 1227 and following), Tertullian thence inferred: "And God Himself nowhere." For he seems to have been altogether persuaded, as we shall see in the following chapter, that the opinion had spread through the minds of the gentiles that there were no other gods than their images, or that their divinity resided in them.

You see, then, how rightly he concludes from what has been said: "Therefore the Romans were not religious before they were great, and so they were not great because they were religious" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 430). For their empire was founded and established before they either had gods or at least worshipped and adored them with so many superstitious rites and with the empty pomp of so many ceremonies. Yet surely they needed the help and aid of the gods in equal measure both for spreading that empire and for laying its foundations; and it is manifest that they never had it. But this is shown by him most evidently by still other reasons, which we must examine.

ARTICLE III.

That the empire of the Romans was no more given or extended by any gods of the gentiles than that of the Babylonians, Medes, Egyptians, Assyrians, Amazons and Jews, who reigned before these same Romans; that the bounds of their empire were extended by their impiety and sacrileges; and that by no miracles at all, no divinations, no oracles can it be proved that any gods of these or of the other gentiles exist.

It is certain indeed, as the Romans themselves openly confessed, that earthly kingdoms are instituted, given and dispensed by someone. But that power can rest with Him alone Who created all things. None of the Romans' gods, therefore, ever gave any kingdom to their worshippers or to others. And certainly before their pontiffs, the Fifteen Men, the Salii, the Luperci and the Vestals, of whom we have spoken elsewhere, and before all the ministers of the Roman gods, nay, before any gods were worshipped at Rome, the kingdoms of the Babylonians, Medes, Egyptians, Assyrians and Amazons had been instituted, and, as no one is unaware, flourished with great power and glory (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 26, p. 432; and To the Nations, book II, ch. 27, p. 583). It is evident, then, that these nations received the power of reigning neither from the gods of the Romans nor from those whom they themselves worshipped: not from their own, who could not defend those by whom they were held in the highest honour; nor from the gods of the Romans, who had not yet been invented, and by whom the Romans supposed their empire to have been overthrown. We have already seen (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. 18, arts. 4 and 5) how Minucius Felix fought against the heathen with this argument.

But to make this plainer by some examples, Tertullian presses: "Why did Minerva not defend Athens from Xerxes, or why did Apollo not rescue Delphi from the hand of Pyrrhus?" (Tertullian, To the Nations, book II, place cited). For plainly no god of the heathen, neither at Rome nor anywhere else, was adorned with so great divine honour as Minerva

at Athens, where her famous image stood, known to all. Nor was any god honoured with greater worship than Apollo at Delphi, where he was believed to pour forth oracles celebrated throughout the whole world. Yet neither did he make Delphi, nor she Athens, safe from the arms of their enemies. How then were gods, whether foreign or native, able to widen the bounds of the Roman empire? Were they more powerful than the other gods? But the true God must be almighty, and therefore there can be only one Who grants and dispenses kingdoms.

Come now, let us follow Tertullian as he presses on (the same, Apology, ch. 26, p. 432). The Jews, he says, had their own kings, whom they would have even now had they not bloodied their hands with the horrible parricide of Christ. Yet these very men utterly despised the gods of the Romans. They did not, then, earn their kingdom by piety towards these gods. The Romans, moreover, having struck a treaty with these enemies of their gods, honoured their God with slain victims, and His temple with gifts and offerings. But with what eyes, I ask you, could those gods look upon these treaties, sacrifices and gifts made by the Romans to the true God, their adversary? Ought these not rather to have kindled their anger than a mind inclined to enlarge the bounds of the Roman empire?

Moreover, it is more certain than certain that kingdoms are seized by men, and invaded with arms and victories (ibid., ch. 25, p. 431). Yet these things cannot happen without cities being mostly overthrown, and therefore without a like destruction of temples and walls, the same slaughter of priests and citizens, and a common seizure and plunder of things sacred and profane. "So many, then," says Tertullian (ibid.), "are the sacrileges of the Romans as their trophies", carried off to Rome from the sacred and profane spoils of captured cities; "so many" triumphs "over gods", who could not protect their fatherland and the cities in which they were worshipped, "as over nations. So many are the spoils of war as the images of captive gods that still remain" at Rome. And the word "manubiae", of which we have spoken elsewhere (Dissertation on Minucius, ch. 16, art. 2; and on Lactantius, ch. 31, art. 4), seems to be taken there by Tertullian for the spoils which the Romans carried back with them to Rome from captured cities. And chief among them were the images of the gods, which used to be set up in the temples and thereafter adored. The empire of the Romans therefore grew, not indeed by any piety and religion of theirs towards the gods, but by impiety, crimes and sacrileges.

By what reasoning, then, our Author continues, do those gods "endure to be adored" by their enemies the Romans, "and have given empire without end to those whose injuries rather than their adorations they ought to have requited"? In our manuscript codices and in various editions, especially the older ones, "adolationes" is found, or "adulationes" ["flatteries"], as it occurs written differently by others. Some, however, have preferred "adorationes", so that this noun may answer to the earlier verb "to be adored". But what if Tertullian meant that the gods could not patiently bear the flatteries, that is, the empty blandishments of the worship of those who flattered them at the very time when they were laying everything waste with impiety and sacrileges? But in whatever way

you decide it is to be read, it must be confessed that nothing more absurd can be imagined than that the Romans enlarged the bounds of their empire by their piety towards the gods, when they had extended them by wars and victories, and therefore not without injury and insult to those same gods.

Moreover, with most of the same arguments of Tertullian against the gods of the Romans which we have set out thus far, Minucius Felix, as we showed in our first dissertation (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 16, arts. 2 and 3), utterly overthrew the feigned divinity of those same deities.

Yet the Romans and all the other heathen insisted that their gods were true gods, since they had again and again proved their divinity and almightiness by astounding signs, miracles, predictions, oracles, divinations and certain deeds which seemed to surpass all the powers of creatures. And certainly these things, which they supposed to have been done outside the accustomed order of nature, had so bewitched their eyes and mind that they were wholly persuaded that they must be ascribed to the power of the gods alone. But Tertullian shows that this argument is put forward and pressed only by those who did not know the true cause of those effects. For had they set aside empty prejudices, they could have recognized that all these things were done by the very great agility of the demons, by evil arts, tricks, frauds and illusions, with which these lying and impure spirits plainly mocked unwary men. To this is added the fact that the heathen could not deny that many things like the extraordinary deeds of their gods, as they thought them, had been produced by men given to magic, through the tricks and frauds of those same demons. Who then, unless he is mad, would say that these are true gods for that reason? Moreover, what these arguments are, and of what weight, by which Tertullian proved this (above, ch. 8, art. 3 and following), we have striven above to unfold and lay open. In the earlier dissertations too we have explained these and many other things besides (Dissertation on Minucius' Octavius, ch. 16, art. 1 and following; and Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. 18, art. 1 and following; and Dissertation on Lactantius, ch. 32, art. 4), by which other champions and defenders of our religion uprooted that opinion and argument of the gentiles.

CHAPTER XXIX.

On the likenesses, statues and images of the gods.

ARTICLE I.

By what arguments Tertullian shows that the images of the gods are not to be worshipped: there were none at Rome before Numa Pompilius, nor for a long time afterwards; they were made of the same material as cheap little vessels; by a ridiculous consecration they had changed their lot; made by craftsmen, they were subjected to various insults by beasts and men; and how absurdly beasts were joined to Liber, Cybele and Caelestis.

Since it has been shown more than enough that the gods of the gentiles are false and nothing, it necessarily follows that their images, statues and likenesses are empty and worthy of no honour whatever. For what of a false god,

can there be but a false likeness? It is therefore never worshipped and adored without great impiety. Tertullian, however, hoots off and overthrows this error of the heathen with certain particular reasons, which we must now explain.

We have already heard him say that no images or likenesses of the gods had been made at Rome in the reign of Numa Pompilius and before his time (chapter above, art. 1). For "not yet then," he says, "had the talents of the Greeks and Tuscans flooded the City with the fashioning of images" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 430). There he seems to allude, as we have remarked elsewhere (Apparatus, vol. I, p. 543), to the opinion of Tatian and of others who thought that the Tuscans were the inventors of the potter's art and of fashioning images out of clay and potter's earth. Yet these images of the gods were not carried to Rome as soon as Numa Pompilius died. For the Romans, as Varro, cited by Augustine, and Clement of Alexandria testify, worshipped their gods without images for a hundred and seventy years and more. But of these things we have argued in the volume of our Apparatus already cited (ibid.), and there we showed besides that Numa forbade any image or any likeness to be made.

Through the whole of that time, then, in which the Romans lacked them, "God Himself", says Tertullian, was "nowhere" (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 25, p. 430). Why so, unless because the heathen had taken it into their heads that the images of the gods were in reality their gods? And indeed Clement of Alexandria, cited by us elsewhere too (Apparatus, vol. I, p. 734), asserts without hesitation that it was in those later times that the gods whom the heathen adored were fashioned by them. For this reason Tertullian had said elsewhere that the gods were reckoned by these same heathen from the temples where their images had been placed (Tertullian, Apology, ch. 10, p. 330, and ch. 25, p. 427). Elsewhere, again, he calls these same images of the gods, which the Romans, as we were saying before, carried to Rome in the procession of a triumph, captive gods. But it is superfluous to prove at length what he everywhere takes for certain, and what will appear more plainly from what is soon to be said.

And with how great blindness! "The true God," he says, is spurned by the heathen, while by these same people, to be sure, "the statues" of the gods "are adored" (the same, Apology, ch. 41, p. 488). For what was there to discover in them but "that their materials are sisters of common vessels and implements, or come from those very vessels and implements, changing their lot, as it were, by consecration, while the licence of art transfigures them" (ibid., ch. 12, p. 339)? He therefore openly declares that the materials of the images, that is, the woods and metals of which they had been made, were the same as those of the vessels and implements that were destined for the common and sometimes the basest use of men. They had therefore changed their lot and fortune, first by the will and whim of the craftsmen by whom they had been fashioned, and then by a ridiculous consecration, once they had received which they were worshipped by the gentiles as true gods. But these things we have pursued more fully elsewhere (Dissertation on Arnobius, ch. 19, art. 4),

and we have made plain how insane and absurd this opinion of the heathen is.

For what greater disgrace can there be than to attend with divine honour gods who, says Tertullian, "are reckoned by their metals" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XII, page 339): understand, no doubt, "sprung from and made of" them? For Juvenal used this verb censeri in the same sense, where he sang:

What do pedigrees achieve? What does it profit, Ponticus, to be reckoned by a long blood-line? . . . . . .

(Juvenal, Satires VIII, line 1.)

Moreover, that these images of the gods should be made from metals depended on the decision of the emperor, who was the owner of the metals (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XXIX, page 439). By his nod and will, therefore, those gods were made or rejected. Besides, with how many insults are they shaped and fashioned by the craftsmen? First, says Tertullian (ibid., chapter XII, page 339), they are built up upon a cross and a stake; then they are hewn with adzes, and cut with runcinae, that is, larger saws, and polished with scabinae, that is, files. And what of the fact, he adds, that before the lead, the glue and the gomphi, in Greek γόμφους, that is, the nails by which they are fastened together, the gods are without a head? (Varro, De lingua latina, book VI, page 54.) Does he not mean by these words that the head of the image was made separately, and afterwards set upon its body and fixed to it with nails?

But these indignities, as he says (Tertullian, place cited, page 339), these excellent gods, or images, animated by no breath of life, do not feel. For statues and cold images, most like dead men, as they are not touched by the disgrace of their making, so neither are they touched by the worship and homage of those who adore them. Add to this that the stupidity of these images, he says, "kites, mice and spiders understand" (ibid.), since they nest in these statues with impunity and befoul them with their droppings. More readily still did thieves and other impious men understand it, from whose robberies and insults these images could never be safe without the watches of imperial soldiers. But we have explained these things in our earlier dissertations (Dissertation on Minucius, chapter XXI, article 1; on Arnobius, chapter XXII, article 3; and on Lactantius, chapter XXXIII, article 5).

The heathen, on the other hand, kept crying out that these were impious words and sacrilegious insults. "But gnash your teeth," our author tells them, "and foam as much as you like": these clamours will certainly profit you nothing. "For you have at some time heard a Seneca, whom you cannot gainsay, holding forth in more and bitterer words about your superstition" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XII, page 339). What these words of Seneca are we have shown in another dissertation of ours, where we also cited this passage of Tertullian (Dissertation on Lactantius, chapter XXXIII, article 3). But even had Seneca kept silent, our author's argument is no less strong; against it the gentiles could indeed foam in rage, but they could not break its force.

Who, then, will not lament the blind impiety of those who, so that greater veneration might be paid to their gods, or images, "yoked beasts", says Tertullian, "to Liber, and Cybele, and Caelestis" (Tertullian, Apology,

chapter XII, page 339), that is, to the chariot in which they were feigned to ride? For the chariot of Liber was drawn by tigers, as one may learn from Ovid (Ovid, Metamorphoses, last fable, and the book On the Art of Love, line 560) and from many others. Wherefore it will be enough to have cited these lines of Virgil:

Nor Liber, who, victorious, turns his yoked team with vine-leaf reins, driving his tigers from the lofty peak of Nysa.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book VI, line 779.)

The chariot of Cybele, on the other hand, was drawn by lions, as Lucretius sings:

Her the learned old poets of the Greeks have sung as driving, from her seat in a chariot, a pair of yoked lions, teaching that the great earth hangs in the space of the air and that earth cannot rest upon earth.

(Lucretius, book II, line 600 and following.)

Diodorus Siculus, however, writes that lions and leopards were set beside the image of this goddess because she was said to have been nursed by them (Diodorus, Bibliotheca, book III, page 135).

The third goddess, moreover, to whose chariot beasts were yoked, is called by Tertullian Caelestis, as it is written in our manuscripts, though in certain others "to Ceres" is read. And she indeed was called Caelestis, and her chariot was drawn by serpents, as Ovid confirms in these verses:

. . . The fruitful goddess yoked twin serpents to her car, and curbed their mouths with bridles, and was borne through the air midway between heaven and earth.

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, book V, last fable.)

Yet not Ceres alone, but Venus also was surnamed Caelestis, and they prattled that her chariot was drawn by swans and doves. If you ask for a witness, Ovid is at hand again:

Borne in her light chariot through the midst of the breezes, the Cytherean had not yet reached Cyprus on swans' wings.

(Ibid., book X, last section.)

And afterwards:

And carried through the light breezes by her yoked doves.

Lastly, the chariot of Juno, who was also called Caelestis, was drawn by horses, as Homer and Virgil attest, and by peacocks, as others do. For Ovid sang again:

. . . . . In her nimble chariot the Saturnian goddess enters the clear upper air with her painted peacocks.

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, book II, a little before the end.)

It is therefore as hard to say what Tertullian means by the name Caelestis as it is easy to prove that beasts were yoked by the gentiles, as Tertullian says, to their gods, or to their images. But no man of sound mind will ever deny that nothing is more absurd than seriously to venerate and adore images of this kind as true gods, or as endowed with divine power.

ARTICLE II.

How absurdly the heathen said that images were their gods, although very many worshipped certain gods unknown to others and adopted by themselves, or pawned their household gods, sold them and changed them into the vilest vessels, or kept the public gods for sale at the auction, and thought those the holier which paid more tribute and were sold more dearly.

Tertullian could not patiently bear the heathen,

who, wilfully closing their eyes to the light of right reason, shining brighter than the midday sun, contended with wondrous obstinacy that the images, statues and likenesses of false gods were to be kept and worshipped. For in place of reason, he says, there was only that senseless outcry: "These are gods to us" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XIII, page 344). But they were mere words, by which they were plainly condemned by their own judgement. For they could not deny that no god, as we saw above (chapter XVIII, article 9), could be named and honoured without the approval of the senate. Yet it lay in the power of any heathen whatever to choose or reject whatever god he wished, or whatever image of a god pleased him. And so a god taken up by one man another spurned at his pleasure. But that could not be done without wrong to the one rejected, or, as Tertullian himself speaks in addressing them: "When you worship some gods and others others, you certainly offend those whom you do not worship. The preference of one cannot go forward without insult to another" (Tertullian, place cited).

Some, however, think that Augustine had these words in view where he rejects that whole line of argument and refutes it thus: "I do not say what Tertullian says, more wittily perhaps than truly: 'If gods are selected like onions, the rest are surely judged rejects.' I do not say this. For I see that even from among the selected some are selected for something greater and more excellent, as in soldiering, when recruits have been chosen, from these too some are chosen for some greater work of arms..... There is no need to run through many things, since the matter is in the open. Therefore it is not because certain gods were selected out of many that either he who wrote it, or their worshippers, or the gods themselves are to be blamed; rather, one must take note who these are and for what purpose they appear to have been selected" (Augustine, City of God, book VII, chapter I, page 162). But it may perhaps be answered that Augustine there is disputing about the selected gods of the heathen, while Tertullian, in the place cited, is disputing about the images of any gods whatever. Others, however, will object that the heathen, as we have said, believed these very images to be their gods. To this, although they did not always speak in the same way of both, Augustine's argument against Tertullian seems none the less strong. Yet it cannot be denied that its weight is far greater if Augustine had in view what our author argued at greater length in the books To the Nations against Varro's opinion on these very selected gods (Tertullian, To the Nations, book II, chapter IX), and above all these words of his: "If the heathen had definite gods, they ought to have been content, and not to desire chosen ones. In this too they are caught out as irreligious. For if gods are selected, as you will, those that are not selected are pronounced rejects" (ibid.). Some, moreover, were so persuaded that this passage was the one marked by Augustine that, following him, they boldly put back the noun bulbi, "onions", in place of the word vultis, "you will", in this text.

Yet someone will press against this that Tertullian, although in the Apology he discourses about the images of the gods, nevertheless drew from those things which the heathen supposed to be gods this same conclusion as in the book To the Nations about the selected gods themselves: "The standing of each god depended on the senate's estimation. He was not a god whom man,

consulted, did not wish to be one" (the same, Apology, chapter XIII, page 344). But he ought to notice that these words denote not selected gods but the images of any gods whatever, which the heathen, as he adds in the same place, could at their pleasure pawn, sell, change or break. Yet that could not be done without shame and disgrace to them, and above all when, one being rejected, another was chosen. May it not also be said that the force of the argument drawn from this by Tertullian lies in this: that whatever gods are feigned must either be almighty or be no gods at all? But among several almighty ones one cannot be selected as stronger rather than another, as one well can among recruits and soldiers.

But if this whole argument seems to you plainly weak, take another from him, which you will confess beyond doubt to be of greater weight. It is agreed, he says, that all the images of the gentiles, or, what is the same, all their gods, were either domestic and private, or common and public (the same, Apology, chapter XIII, page 344, and To the Nations, book I, chapter X). The first were called lares and penates, which each man kept at home and was wont to worship with a rite of his own. Of the penates there are these lines of Tibullus:

But may it be my lot to honour my fathers' penates, and to render the monthly incense to the ancient lar.

(Tibullus, book I, elegy 3, line 33.)

Let us add, if you please, these lines too, put forth by Virgil:

Within are fifty maidservants, whose charge it is to lay out the store in long order and to honour the penates with fire.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book I, line 707.)

Of the lares, Juvenal sang:

O little lares, my own, whom I am wont to adorn with a pinch of incense, or with meal, or with a slender garland.

(Juvenal, Satires IX, near the end.)

There is no need to heap up here more of what the heathen often chanted about both in verse and prose. But such was the inconstancy of mind of these same gentiles, and such their impious contempt for their gods, that over those whom they had long worshipped they exercised, says Tertullian, "a domestic power, by pawning, selling, changing them, sometimes into a little cooking-pot out of Saturn, into a ladle out of Minerva" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter 344). As, then, the gentiles made images, or gods, out of vessels destined for the vilest use, as we saw before, so also out of these they afterwards fashioned other vessels, or pawned them, or put them up for sale. For out of Saturn, that is, out of Saturn's image, they sometimes formed a cacabulum, that is, a smaller cacabus, which, on Varro's testimony, was a vessel "in which they cooked food; from this they called it cacabus" (Varro, De lingua latina, book IV, §27). The trulla, on the other hand, was a drinking-vessel, as is plain from these verses of Horace:

He who was wont on feast days to drink Veientan wine from a Campanian ladle.

(Horace, Satires, book II, satire 3, line 143.)

This indeed is confirmed by Juvenal (Juvenal, Satires III, line 112). Sometimes, however, it seems to be taken by others for the vessel by which the belly's, as we showed in another dissertation (Dissertation on Arnobius, last chapter, last article),

load was laid down. But that it was taken by Tertullian in the former sense will the more easily be proved to us because he spoke in the same place of a vessel for preparing food. Of the trulla and the cacabulum we said something in the dissertation cited.

There were, moreover, two causes for which these gods, or images, were changed, pawned and sold by the heathen. The first, says Tertullian, was "as each god is worn down and battered while he is long worshipped" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter 344). So they cast out that god when eaten away by age or disfigured, or changed it into something else. The other cause was: "As each has found domestic necessity holier than the god." So indeed Rigault; but in the Froben edition: "And each [has found] the master." Better in other editions and in all our unpublished copies: "As each master," that is, of that god and image, "has found domestic necessity holier" (345). But what, someone will ask, does the word "holier" mean there? Some answer that Tertullian meant nothing else than that this god was sold by his poor master, to whom his own need and want seemed holier than his god. For they think that necessity called "holier" is the extreme and most pressing one, as Livy calls the "holier treasury" that which, he says, was kept for the last emergencies (Livy, book XXVII, §10). Cicero too might be cited, who wrote to Atticus that it had been decreed "that they should take the money from the holier treasury" (Cicero, To Atticus, book VIII, letter 29, page 284, line 6). Yet will he wholly miss the mark who says that the adjective "holier" refers not to the noun "necessity" but to "god"? For the holier the heathen thought a god to be, at the dearer price they sold him. And certainly Tertullian himself, in the same place and in the book To the Nations, says: "The gods who are more holy are more tributary" (Tertullian, To the Nations, book I, chapter X). Further, whether it is the god or rather the necessity of the heathen that is designated by this word "holier", Tertullian rightly rebukes them with these words: "Private gods, whom you call lares and penates by a domestic consecration, you trample on, or tread underfoot, with domestic licence, selling and pawning them according to your need and your will" (ibid., page 55).

Nor did they value their public gods more, whom, as he continues, "they defiled equally by public right" (the same, Apology, chapter XIII, page 345, and To the Nations, book I, place cited); indeed they treated them more shamefully and insultingly. For each man sold his private gods at his own discretion indeed, but privately; the public ones, however, publicly, inasmuch as they held them "as tributaries in the auction-register" (ibid.). The hastarium, if you believe Turnèbe (Turnèbe, Adversaria, book XXVIII, chapter V), was the place where the goods of the proscribed were sold. Rigault, however, thinks that by that name is meant the auction-book, that is, the register and record of the revenues, which used to be knocked down to the contractors every fifth year under the spear and the crier's voice. And certainly our author says: "Those whom you have entered in the auction-register, under ... to the tax-farmers, every fifth year you knock down, proscribed, among your revenues" (Tertullian,

To the Nations, book I, chapter X). But Tertullian seems beyond doubt to mean both of these. For he says that the public gods are transferred to that place where, like the other goods of the proscribed, first entered in the public record-office, they were kept for five years until they were sold publicly, and so "under the same spear", as he says, "under the same entry of the quaestor, their divinity is knocked down". And could not the hastarium be named both from that spear and from the entry, or register, of the quaestor?

Be that as it may, these gods, says Tertullian, were held not only saleable but tributary too, because for the five-year stay in the auction-register some revenue and tribute was paid (the same, Apology, chapter XIII, page 344). With what disgrace and reproach, pray, were those wretched gods visited! For if you ask in what manner people went there to sell and buy them, Tertullian will answer: "So the Capitol is resorted to, so the vegetable market" (the same, ibid.). Less well in some printed editions: "If.... if", for "so.... so". For in the book To the Nations we read: "So the Serapeum, so the Capitol is resorted to" (and To the Nations, book I, chapter X, page 55); that is, the auction-register for the storing and selling of gods is let in the same way and for a like tribute as the Capitol, the Serapeum and the vegetable market. And no one was allowed to enter these temples, any more than to sell anything in the vegetable market, without paying a tribute. "Therefore those that are more tributary", he concludes, "are more holy; nay, those that are more holy are more tributary" (ibid.); that is, the holier a god was reckoned by the false opinion of the heathen, the greater the price and tribute they exacted for his stay in the auction-register and for his sale.

If anyone should perhaps ask us further who those public gods were, we shall answer that they were chiefly of three kinds. Some were set up in temples; others were either made, or bought and brought in; others, lastly, were carried about openly through the streets and squares, as we noted above (above, chapter XXIV, article 4). The first were wont to pay tribute and be sold for their age alone; the second and third at the heathen's pleasure. Did not those, then, who branded their gods with such infamy openly confess, even against their will, that neither they nor their images were gods or worthy of any divine honour?

ARTICLE III.

How perversely the gentiles inaugurated Simon Magus, like their other gods, with the statue of a holy god, and represented them all in the same dress and with the same insignia that their age, craft and business had had before death, and set up like statues to their emperors, whether dead or living; and that nothing can be concluded from this against the holy images of the Christians.

Tertullian's last argument against the mad worshippers of images is not wholly free from difficulty. Let us therefore hear him a little longer, rebuking the heathen in these words: "With what face," he says, "[do you] Junos, Cereses, Dianas," that is, the images of these and of your other goddesses and gods,

"do you adore, when you inaugurate Simon Magus with the statue and inscription of a holy god?" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XIII, page 347). We have observed, moreover, that it was handed down by Justin Martyr that in the reign of Claudius a statue was set up to this Simon Magus on the island in the Tiber between the two bridges with this inscription: "To Simon the holy god" (Apparatus, volume I, page 6). The most holy martyr is supported by Cyril of Jerusalem (Cyril, Catechesis VI, page 157), who states that it was set up by the same emperor Claudius, and by Eusebius (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, book II, page 52), who affirms without hesitation that it was set up by the Romans. It would be as easy as it is superfluous to cite other witnesses here. For all grant that this was the common opinion of the ancient writers.

But more recent critics boldly assert that it rests on a gross error which, starting from the same Justin, who was wholly ignorant of the Latin tongue, then pervaded the minds of the rest. For when he had got it into his head, they say, that the statue of Semo Sancus Dius Fidius was the same as that of Simon Magus, the others all incautiously subscribed to him, deceived as he was by the false likeness of the name.

What then? [Were] all, who knew not only Greek but Latin, and even those who had come to Rome after Justin Martyr, [deceived]? Did none of them detect this error, or give even a single warning of it once he had recognized it? Because in a later age a statue of Semo Sancus was found, does it follow of necessity that there was none of Simon Magus in Justin's time? And what of the fact that Augustine plainly testifies that images both of himself and of the harlot Helen were fashioned by this same Simon Magus, which, he says, "he offered to his disciples to be adored, and had set up at Rome by public authority as images of gods" (Augustine, On Heresies, chapter I, page 6)? But if he set up these images at Rome, could not some one of them still have been extant in Justin's time? What, then, prevents that holy martyr and others after him from either having seen one of them or having been informed by others that it had been seen?

But suppose, if it please God, that Justin, Augustine and very many others erred; Tertullian's argument against the statues of the gods is no less strong. For all at least admit that an image of Semo Sancus was set up at Rome. And it was no less impious to adore the image of this false god than that of Simon Magus. Moreover, says Tertullian, in the statues of the gods "the dress was the same, the insignia the same, and as the dead man's age, his craft, his business was, so is the god" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter 347). And what is more absurd than when, as he wrote in another book, "an old man is figured from Saturn, a beardless youth from Apollo, a virgin from Diana, and a soldier is consecrated in Mars and a smith in Vulcan" (the same, To the Nations, book I, chapter X)? For who, looking at these things, did not see at once that they had been men, once busied even with base crafts, who for that very reason could never be gods? Not without the utmost impiety, therefore, were their images and likenesses adored as those of gods.

Finally, these same gentiles, not only to these and other ancient

gods of theirs, but also to their emperors when dead, and sometimes while still living, as we shall say a little later, had built temples in which their images were placed, and they worshipped them with the same honour as their other gods. And what greater impiety is there than to adore and venerate as that of a true god the image of a living man, or of a dead one who, while he lived, was often defiled with every kind of crime? Yet certainly this detestable superstition belonged not only to the mad and ignorant crowd but also to others who were of the greatest power in talent and authority. For Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan in these words about himself and certain people who denied that they were Christians: "When, at my dictation, they called upon the gods, and made supplication with incense and wine to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for this purpose together with the images of the deities, and moreover cursed Christ, none of which things, it is said, can be forced upon those who are truly Christians" (Pliny, To Trajan, book X, letter 101). And no wonder indeed if true Christians refused wholly and utterly what could not be done without the gravest crime of idolatry.

The gentiles, then, are no longer to be heeded who objected to us that help was brought them from statues and images of gods of this kind, especially ancient ones, that oracles were poured forth, or that I know not what miracles were done. For do not the things we have said about these gods, or images, show more plainly than the midday sun that nothing, much less miracles, could have been done by them? Then too Tertullian, as we saw above, plainly shows that if anything seems to have been done by them outside the accustomed order of nature, it is to be ascribed to the evil arts, illusions and frauds of demons, who, lurking, as he puts it, "under the prostitution of images and the consecration of human names" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XXVII), deceived the unwary minds of the gentiles. But we have argued enough about these things before (above, chapter X, article 3 and following).

Nor is there any reason for some heretic to mutter in our ear, or to cry out openly, that from what has so far been explained following Tertullian it can be concluded that all the sacred images of the Christians without exception are condemned by him. For he disputed of no others than those of false gods, which, as has been sufficiently proved, cannot be adored without the guilt of sacrilegious impiety (Tertullian, On Idolatry, chapter V). Nor with better right will another press that he affirmed emphatically elsewhere that any statues and images whatever are forbidden by the divine law of Moses. For in the same place he asserts no less clearly that images, or statues, of the bronze serpent, of the Cherubim and others were made at God's command by that same Moses, which therefore brought with them nothing of perverse worship and idolatry. He thought, then, that those images are not to be condemned which have nothing akin to the impious worship of idols. But these things are explained at greater length in the first volume of our Apparatus and in our other earlier dissertations (Apparatus, volume I, page 748; Dissertation on Minucius Octavius, chapter XXIX, article I and following; Dissertation on Arnobius, chapter XXII, article 1 and following; and Dissertation on Lactantius, chapter XXXIV, article 1 and following). But if those things, together with what we have related,

are put side by side, they will bring each other and receive from each other a new and mutual light.

CHAPTER XXX.

On the temples and sacrifices of the gentiles

ARTICLE I.

With what impiety the heathen built temples and altars to their gods and to their emperors dead and living, and exacted a fee for the ground of the temples, for entry, for the doors and doorposts; and with what unspeakable crimes they defiled those same temples, which the Christians did not know even by day.

By the arguments with which Tertullian shows that the images and likenesses of false gods are contrary to true religion, by the very same he shows that their temples are so too and are not to be built. For it was never lawful to build temples to any false god, much less to a dead or living man, as to a true god. Who, then, will be able to bear with patience the heathen, who set up temples, or, as Tertullian puts it, shrines and altars, not only to their old feigned gods but also to their dead and living emperors? Wherefore he addresses and mocks them in these words: "Fittingly do you dedicate the honour of divinity to dead emperors, to whom you assign it even while they live"; or, as he added in another book, you build "priesthoods, sacred equipages, thensae, chariots, solisternia", that is, seats and thrones, "and lectisternia too" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XIII; To the Nations, book I, chapter 314). And lest anyone should doubt that those temples were consecrated to these new gods, the gentiles themselves had conspicuous titles of the gods to whom they were dedicated inscribed on their thresholds and altars. And if anyone wishes examples brought forward of temples dedicated to emperors, here are Suetonius's words about Julius Caesar: "He allowed honours greater even than human eminence to be decreed to him: temples, altars, images, a couch beside the gods, flamens, Luperci" (Suetonius, book I, §76). Nay, this mad impiety of the heathen went so far that Valerius Maximus dared to pray to this same Julius Caesar in these words: "Revering your altars and your most holy temples, divine Julius, I pray that with propitious and favouring power you suffer the misfortunes of such great men to lie hid under the protection and guardianship of your example" (Valerius Maximus, book I, chapter VI, §13).

The emperor Augustus was indeed more modest, who, again on Suetonius's testimony, "though he knew that temples were customarily decreed even to proconsuls, yet in no province accepted one except in his own name and Rome's jointly" (Suetonius, book II, §52). Yet he did accept these temples, which could not be accepted without wrong to the true and supreme God. Others, therefore, are much more to be condemned, who founded these and other temples in the name of the emperor or even of the commonwealth. What, then, is to be said of Domitian and other most wicked emperors who, as the writers of Roman history relate, ordered themselves to be called gods and temples to be built to them? No man of sound mind will deny that this is the supreme crime of impiety.

But notice, I pray, how blind and untamed was

the obstinacy, impiety and avarice of the gentiles. Surely the temple and sacred house of any god is built for no other reason than that it may be frequented by all, and therefore access to it ought to be easy, voluntary and free for everyone. Yet the heathen, just as with the utmost iniquity they strove by every kind of punishment to force the Christians to go to them, so by the gravest vice of avarice they kept their own gentiles out of them unless a price was paid. For through them it was not lawful for anyone at all to enter any temple free; but from everyone who went in they exacted, says Tertullian, "a fee for the ground of the temple, for access to the sacred place" (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XIII), that is, for entrance to the sacred house. By the word "ground" is meant there the place on which this sacred house had been built. Cicero indeed explains this clearly in these words: "They turn the ground, that is, they change their seat and place" (Cicero, Oration 12, For Caecina, page 241). And elsewhere: "They could not have changed this citizenship," he says, "before they had turned their ground by a change of this citizenship" (Oration 36, For Cornelius Balbus, page 519, line 38). Somewhat more obscurely, then, Tertullian said in the first book To the Nations that a fee was extorted by the heathen "for the posts, for the doors" of the temples to be opened to anyone (Tertullian, To the Nations, book I, chapter X). Godefroy, however, thinks that this word stipitibus, "posts", is corrupt and that stipibus, "coins", should be read, because Tertullian himself wrote in the Apology: "How few now throw in coins?" (the same, Apology, chapter XLII). But his former words concern those entering the temple, the latter those already inside. Rigault, then, did not do ill to keep the word stipitibus, but he ought to have given some reason for his opinion. We, for our part, shall easily be persuaded that by this word stipitibus Tertullian meant either stones, or perhaps the Terminal gods, set before the door of the temples, which were indeed called stipites, as we showed from the verses of the ancient poets in other dissertations of ours already cited (Dissertation on Minucius, chapter XIX, articles 2 and 17; and Dissertation on Lactantius, page 32, article 2). For there he seems to distinguish the post, the door and the entrance of the temple, so that by these distinctions he might pursue the avarice and impiety of the heathen more sharply. Yet what could you dare to settle for certain, if the word is corrupt and you cannot find a better manuscript?

Besides this sordidness of intolerable avarice, the heathen polluted these same temples of their gods with pandering and adulteries, as shamelessly as with impunity, as was observed above (chapter XXVI, article 4) with our Tertullian (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XV). By what reasoning, then, could they believe that their gods dwelt in these temples, which they so very often disgraced with such great outrages and crimes?

No wonder, then, if Christians, says Tertullian, "do not know these temples even by day" (Tertullian, place cited), that is, did not go to them by day, and much less by night, the night privy to such great crimes. Yet if ever they did enter, "they too would perhaps strip them", as he says, "if they adored them"; that is, if Christians had ever been able to go into these temples as the gentiles did, they would beyond doubt, like Dionysius,

the tyrant, and others whom we have mentioned elsewhere, despoiled them outright, not indeed, as those men did, for avarice's sake, but on account of the crimes and sacrileges that were committed in them. But we have discussed more concerning the temples of the heathen and also of the Christians in our dissertations already cited (Dissertation on Minucius, chapter 12, article 2; on Arnobius, chapter 21, article 1; and on Lactantius, chapter 33, article 1).

ARTICLE II.

With what a guilty conscience and how great avarice the heathen sacrificed to their gods, and offered grains of incense worth one as, two drops of neat wine, the blood of a worthless ox longing to die, and things killed off, putrid, hooves, little heads, the plucked-out leavings of feathers and bristles, and defrauded Hercules of the tithe owed to him.

Truly the piety and religion of the gentiles was no greater in their sacrifices than in their temples, nor was their avarice and greed for gain any less. For in sacrificing to their gods they offered, after all, says Tertullian, besides their defilements also a filthy conscience (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XXX), that is, one polluted with all those crimes which have been noted a little before and throughout this dissertation. But if you are eager to know what kind and how much incense they burned, our Author will answer you: grains of incense worth one as, and the tears of an Arabian tree (ibid.), that is, grains of incense, not indeed Sabaean, which sold at a higher price, but Arabian, which was bought at the cheapest price. Nay more, avaricious men offered not more grains of this incense, however common, but only those taken up, as we observed before (above, chapter 24, article 3, and Dissertation on Lactantius, chapter 35, article 2), with three fingers, by which very few indeed could be grasped.

But what, someone will object, did not very many burn with a full hand whole heaps of incense, even costly incense, as Tibullus sang in these verses:

Juno of birthdays, receive the holy heaps of incense,

which the learned girl gives you with her tender hand.

(Tibullus, book IV, elegy 6.)

Did not Martial also sing:

I have used up both salted meal-cakes and heaps of incense;

the flocks have dwindled, while the ewe-lamb falls again and again?

(Martial, book VII, epigram 53.)

But these are without doubt poetic exaggerations; and Martial is there speaking about the interpretation of dreams. And who does not know that those who wish to know the future, and to obtain what they most desire, spare no expense? Nor is it less certain that only the rich, and very few of them, burned to their gods either very much or more costly incense, and then indeed only when they were pressed by some necessity, or so as to court the little rumours of empty glory. But almost all the rest gave three or four grains of incense, and, as Tertullian adds, two drops of neat wine (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XXX), that is, the least of incense and wine they could. But with what feeling of mind, you will learn from these verses of Ovid about an old woman sacrificing:

She drips in wine too, whatever of the wine is left over;

either she herself or her companions, yet she herself drinks more.

"Hostile tongues and unfriendly mouths we have bound,"

said the old woman as she left, and out she went drunk.

(Ovid, Fasti, book III, § 15.)

It was plainly by the same vice of avarice that the heathen sacrificed victims, not fat ones, certainly, or chosen, or unblemished, but, as Tertullian goes on to say, the blood of a worthless ox longing to die (Tertullian, place cited). But certain more fastidious critics would have it written there not "of an ox" but "of a man", who alone can long for death. This, however, is mere quibbling against the common agreement of all the manuscripts. For who does not see that this was said metaphorically by our Tertullian of an ox so worn out by age, leanness and wasting that it would prefer death to life, if that could be? Therefore Tertullian himself had earlier addressed the heathen in these words: Whatever is killed off and putrid and scabby you sacrifice......, which at home too you would have set aside for the boys, that is the slaves, or for the dogs (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XIV, and To the Nations, book I, chapter X). Yet they were bound to sacrifice unblemished, excellent and comely victims to their gods by this law, which Cicero reported in just these words: Let them provide whatever victims are becoming and pleasing to each god (Cicero, On the Laws, book II, page 334, line 46). And these, as Vitruvius, cited by Macrobius, teaches, were called eximiae, either because they are taken out (eximuntur) from the flock, or because they are chosen for their outstanding (eximia) appearance as fit to be offered to the deities (Macrobius, Saturnalia, book III, chapter V). And hence, on Pliny's testimony, there was a custom of testing and selecting victims. And Virgil mentions this custom in that verse:

. . . They sacrifice chosen two-year-old sheep according to custom.

(Virgil, Aeneid, book IV, verse 57.)

For as Servius aptly notes there: it was the custom that sheep were chosen for sacrifices which lacked nothing, as in the sixth book, that is, of the same Poet, where he sang again:

Now from the untouched herd to sacrifice seven bullocks

were better, and as many chosen two-year-old sheep according to custom.

(The same, book VI, verse 38 and following.)

And just as Virgil repeats the same, so Servius on these verses again observes this: According to ancient custom, which he passed over as known to all, that is, that they should have neither a pointed tail, nor a split tongue, nor a black ear: by which he teaches that "untouched" is one thing, "chosen" another.

So the heathen, against the law given and the received custom, offered all the worst things, and, as has been said, the blood of a worthless (reprobi) ox, that is, of one disallowed (reprobati) and rejected by their ancient law and custom. And if some at times did in fact select excellent victims, as was commanded, they certainly did not present them whole and untouched, but only some, and the worse, of their parts, such as little heads (capitula), says Tertullian, that is, heads. For he himself in another book speaks of the chameleon's little head (capitulum) straight from the back, for the neck is lacking (Tertullian, On the Pallium, chapter III), which is the hinder part of the neck. So there capitulum is taken by him for the whole head of the chameleon. Keeping back, then, the better parts of the victims, they sacrificed the head, and the hooves, and, as he says elsewhere, of feathers (the same, Apology, chapter XIV),

the plucked-out leavings (To the Nations, book I, chapter X), and other things too which masters and fathers of households would have set aside for their slaves, nay, for their dogs. But if anyone should plainly prove that something there is said hyperbolically by Tertullian, we shall not resist him much. Yet no one can deny that he rightly imputed it as a fault to the heathen that worse victims were sacrificed to the gods, and that from the fat and unblemished ones whatever was better was taken away and kept back for their own uses.

Nor did the avaricious impiety of the heathen stop here. For they did not fear to defraud Hercules of the tenth part of their goods owed to him. Wherefore Tertullian, addressing them, rebukes them in these words: Of Hercules' tithe you do not lay even a third part upon his altar (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XIV). Yet Cicero openly testifies that this whole tithe ought to have been paid in full by them (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book III, page 253, line 22). And it is surely for this reason that Plautus brings in a certain Gelusinus speaking thus:

It is needful to have come here, as fast as may be,

that I may offer the tenth part to Hercules.

(Plautus, Truculentus, act II, scene II.)

Nor, I pray, should you doubt that the whole tithe of goods is meant by this poet. For elsewhere he said that from this it could easily be known from a slave how much gold his master had. Here are his very lines:

But I should like to know how much gold my master has kept back for himself, and what he has given back to his father.

If he is an honest fellow, he has treated him as Hercules in part; the tenth part to him

he gave, nine he took for himself.

(The same, Bacchides, act IV, scene 4.)

Plutarch gave various reasons for this custom and institution, which anyone can easily read in his books (Plutarch, Roman Questions, question 13, page 267, volume II). But the gentiles, little concerned about this duty of their religion, withdrawing from this tithe whatever they could with impunity, did not pay even a third part of it. And how true this is you will learn from these further verses of the same Plautus:

From this marketing now, from one mina, I have just taken off

five coins, and taken them for myself, Hercules' share.

(Plautus, Truculentus, act II, scene 7.)

As wittily, then, as deservedly Tertullian mocks the heathen thus: I rather praise your wisdom, in that you snatch back something from what is lost (Tertullian, Apology, chapter XIV). And he rightly called lost what was given to false gods and deities.

By what reason, then, with what effrontery did the heathen strive to drive the Christians to the worship of their gods and to sacrificing to them, with a cruelty surely greater than a wild beast's? For even though they had believed those to be true gods, even though they had honoured them with a worship as sincere as it was false, even though they had sacrificed to them victims unblemished, chosen and the best of all; yet nothing was more unjust and perverse, nothing more contrary to the laws human, divine and of nature itself, than to condemn the Christians neither defended nor heard, but only for their name, and with the most exquisite [torments] which man's

or rather the devil's ingenuity could devise, to put them to death by tortures. But these most cruel and most unjust men feared that the Christians, if heard, would demonstrate so evidently the truth of their own religion and the falsity of the others that no one could ever oppose them. For how easy and ready this was for all of them has been most clearly proved in the whole of this dissertation.

Moreover, in it we have tried to explain, each in its own place, whatever difficult, obsolete and barbarous words occur in these books of Tertullian which we have striven to elucidate and illustrate. So we have not thought it necessary to weave a new index of them here.