Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] I want to review your rites too. I won't even mention what you're like when sacrificing — how you slaughter every diseased, wasted, mangy creature, while from the fat and sound ones you lop off the superfluous bits, little heads and hooves, the very parts you'd have marked at home for the slave-boys or the dogs; how out of Hercules' tithe you don't put even a third part on his altar. I'll praise your wisdom instead, for salvaging something from a dead loss. [2] But when I turn to your literature, on which you're schooled in prudence and the liberal arts, what mockeries I find! That the gods fought each other pitched, paired off like gladiators, over the Trojans and the Achaeans; that Venus was wounded by a mortal's arrow because she wanted to snatch her son Aeneas away from that same Diomedes, who had all but killed him; [3] that Mars was nearly used up by thirteen months in chains; that Jupiter, so as not to suffer the same violence from the rest of the heaven-dwellers, was freed by the services of some monster, and now weeps over Sarpedon's fall, now grunts filthily after his own sister, under the pretext of mistresses he'd once, long ago, not loved quite so much. [4] After that, what poet is not found, on his own leading authority, a defamer of the gods? This one hires out Apollo to King Admetus to graze his flocks; that one lets Neptune's building-labor out to Laomedon on contract. [5] There's even that lyric poet — I mean Pindar — who sings that Aesculapius, for the crime of greed, since he practiced medicine to harm, was condemned by a thunderbolt. What a wicked Jupiter, if the thunderbolt is his — cruel to his own grandson, jealous of a craftsman! [6] Among the most religious of peoples, such things ought neither to have been put about as true nor invented as false. Not even the tragedians and comedians spare the gods, presenting the misfortunes or wanderings of this or that god's household. [7] I'll say nothing of the philosophers — Socrates is enough, who, to the gods' disgrace, swore by an oak, a goat, and a dog. "But Socrates was condemned precisely because he was destroying the gods." Clearly — truth has always been hated; that is, always. [8] Yet the Athenians, repenting of their verdict, later punished Socrates' accusers and set up his golden image in a temple; the rescinding of his condemnation is itself testimony in Socrates' favor. [9] And Diogenes makes some joke or other at Hercules' expense, and the Roman Cynic Varro brings on three hundred Jupiters — or "Jupiterlets," if that's the word — without heads.