Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] "But to us they are gods," you say. And yet how are you caught, on the contrary, acting impiously, sacrilegiously, and irreligiously toward your own gods — you who neglect the very ones you claim to believe exist, destroy the very ones you fear, and mock the very ones you even go to the trouble of avenging? [2] Check me, if I am lying. First, since you each worship different gods, you inevitably insult whichever ones you do not worship. Preferring one god over another cannot happen without insulting the other, since choosing one thing necessarily means rejecting another. [3] So then you already hold in contempt the gods you reject, and you are not afraid to offend them by rejecting them. For as we noted above, the status of each god used to hang on a vote of the senate. A god simply did not exist if some human committee, when consulted, refused him — and by refusing, condemned him.
[4] Your household gods, the ones you call the Lares, you handle with full domestic authority — pawning them, selling them, melting them down, turning a Saturn into a little cooking pot one day and a Minerva into a ladle the next, depending on how battered and worn each one gets from long years of worship, or on how urgently some owner's domestic need trumps his piety. [5] Your public gods you likewise defile by public right, holding them up for auction on the sale-spear. That is how the Capitoline gods, how the market gods, are sold off — under the very same auctioneer's cry, the very same spear, the very same entry in the quaestor's ledger, divinity itself is knocked down and carried off to the highest bidder. [6] Land burdened with tribute is worth less; men's heads assessed for the poll-tax are counted less noble — these, after all, are the marks of captivity — yet the more heavily taxed a god is, the holier he is judged; or rather, the holier he is judged, the more heavily he is taxed. Majesty is turned into a cash crop: religion goes begging door to door among the wine-shops; you charge admission for the mere ground of the temple, for the very privilege of approaching the shrine. It is not permitted to know the gods for free — they are for sale.
[7] What exactly do you do to honor them that you do not equally bestow on your own dead? The same temples, accordingly, the same altars. The same dress and the same insignia on their statues; whatever the dead man's age, his craft, his profession happened to be, that is exactly what the god now looks like. How does Jupiter's banquet differ from a funeral feast, a libation-cup from a funeral urn, a soothsayer from an undertaker? For the soothsayer, too, only ever shows up around the dead. [8] But of course you rightly grant the honor of divinity to your dead emperors — you who confer it on them while they are still alive besides! Your gods will accept the arrangement gladly; indeed they will congratulate themselves that their own masters are now their equals. [9] Yet when you worship Larentina, a common prostitute (I would even prefer a Lais or a Phryne for the honor), right alongside your Junos and your Ceres and your Dianas; when you induct Simon Magus with a statue and an inscription reading 'To the Holy God'; when out of your palace pages you manufacture some god or other by council vote — even though your older gods are no more distinguished, they will still count it an insult that others were allowed the privilege that antiquity granted only to themselves.