Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I think I have proved the case adequately about false divinity versus true, having shown how the proof stands — not merely by disputations, not by argument-chains, but by the very testimony of the ones you believe to be gods — so that nothing further remains to be argued in this case. But since the name of Rome specifically comes to mind, I will not pass over the encounter that the presumption of certain people provokes, who say that the Romans, as a reward for the most scrupulous religious devotion, have been raised to such heights that they came to possess the whole world — and indeed that the gods themselves are the reason, since above all others those flourish who above all others do the gods service. So this, apparently, is the wage the Roman gods paid the Roman name for its gratitude: Sterculus and Mutunus and Larentina built the empire! For I can hardly believe that foreign gods would have wished to grant more to an alien nation than to their own — handing over to men across the sea the native soil in which they were born, grew up, were ennobled, and buried.
Let Cybele see to it herself, if she took a fancy to the city of Rome as a memorial of her own Trojan stock — her own homegrown people, after all, once shielded against Achaean arms — if she foresaw passing over to their avengers, knowing that they would subdue Greece, the conqueror of Phrygia. And so, as a grand proof of the majesty she has bestowed on the city, she put on display even in our own age: when Marcus Aurelius was carried off from the republic at Sirmium on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of April, that most holy chief priest of hers, on the ninth day before the same Kalends — the very day he offers his unclean blood by mutilating even his own arms — issued, for the safety of the emperor Marcus, the usual routine orders, though Marcus had already been taken from us! Oh, what sluggish messengers, what drowsy dispatches — through whose fault Cybele did not learn of the emperor's death in time, lest Christians laugh at a goddess like that!
But neither would Jupiter have let his own Crete be shaken by Roman fasces so readily, if he had not forgotten that Idaean cave, the Corybantic bronze clashing, and the delightful smell of his nurse there. Would he not have set that little grave-mound of his above the whole Capitol, so that the land that covers the ashes of Jupiter might rather be preeminent over the whole world? And would Juno really want the Punic city she loved 'above Samos even' to be destroyed — a city loved, at any rate, by the race of Aeneas's descendants? As far as I know:
here were her arms,
here was her chariot; that this should be the seat of empire for the nations,
if the fates should ever allow it, even then she was striving and cherishing it.
That poor 'wife and sister of Jupiter' had no power against the fates! Clearly, 'Jupiter himself stands subject to fate.' And yet the fates did not dedicate so much honor to the Roman name, when it surrendered Carthage to them against Juno's set purpose and vow, as they gave to that thoroughly prostituted whore Larentina!
It is certain that many of your gods have reigned as kings. So then, if they hold the power to bestow empire — when they themselves were reigning, from whom had they received that favor? Whom did Saturn and Jupiter worship? Some Sterculus, I suppose. But the Romans came later, with their own catalogue of little gods. Even those who did not reign were themselves ruled by others who were not yet worshippers of them — since they were not yet even considered gods. So it belongs to others to grant kingship, because kingship was being exercised long before these gods were even carved into shape.
But how empty it is to credit the pinnacle of the Roman name to merits of religious devotion, when religion only advanced after empire — or rather, kingship — had already advanced! Well then, let religion have advanced with events. For even though a superstitious curiosity was conceived under Numa, still no cult of the gods yet consisted, among the Romans, of either statues or temples. It was a frugal religion, poor in ritual, with no Capitols vying to reach the sky, but haphazard altars of turf, vessels still of Samian pottery, a thin wisp of sacrificial smoke, and the god himself nowhere to be found. For not yet at that time had the ingenuity of the Greeks and the Etruscans flooded the city with the fashioning of images. So the Romans were not religious before they were great, and therefore they were not great because they were religious.
But then how were they great through religion, when their greatness sprang from irreligion? For unless I am mistaken, every kingdom or empire is sought through wars and extended through victories. And wars and victories consist chiefly in the capture and destruction of cities. That business cannot happen without injury to gods — the same devastation levels city walls and temples alike, the same slaughter kills citizens and priests without distinction, and the plundering of sacred wealth is no different from the plundering of profane wealth. So the sacrilege of the Romans is as numerous as their trophies, their triumphs over gods as many as their triumphs over nations, their plunder as extensive as the images of captive gods still standing to this day! And so they let themselves be worshipped even by their own enemies, and decree to those enemies 'empire without end' — enemies whose injuries they ought rather to have repaid than their flatteries. But those who feel nothing are harmed with as much impunity as they are worshipped in vain. Certainly it cannot square with belief that men should seem to have grown great by the merits of religion, when, as we have shown, they either grew by injuring religion or injured religion by growing. Even those kingdoms that were melted down into the sum total of the Roman empire were not without their own religions when they lost it.