Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Plainly, we are called the "third race." Are some people Dog-headed Feather-folk, or Shade-footed men, or some subterranean Antipodeans? If there is any logic at all to this on your side, I would like you to produce for me the first and second races, so that the third may then make sense. Psammetichus, in fact, thought he had discovered by clever experiment the earliest proof of which race came first. The story goes that he had newborn infants handed over to be raised apart from all human contact by a nurse whom, for that very purpose, he had had struck dumb, so that, wholly cut off from the sound of human speech, the children would form their own language not by hearing it but by bringing it forth from themselves — and so mark out the first nation, whose speech nature herself had dictated. The first sound reported was "beccos"; its meaning, in the Phrygian tongue, is the word for bread. The Phrygians, accordingly, have ever since been reckoned the first race.
But this is just one instance of your fables' vanities that deserves our attention, not idly, since we are eager to show that your credulity is given over to fictions rather than to truths. Is it in the least credible that, with such an organ cut away — the very instrument of the soul laid waste, torn out by the root — with the throat mutilated (an area dangerous enough to wound even from outside), and the resulting discharge flowing back into the chest, and finally food withheld for some time besides, that nurse should nevertheless have gone on living? Come now — suppose she survived by some remedy, as they say Philomela did, whom the more sensible interpreters explain was struck dumb not by the cutting of her tongue but by the blush of her outraged modesty. Well then, if the nurse lived, she could still have babbled something: a dull, disjointed sound, a mere buzzing without any shaping by the lips, could certainly still be forced from an open mouth and a numbed tongue out of the throat alone. Perhaps, then, it was this that the infants — since it was the only sound they had — more readily picked up in a somewhat more articulate form, and, being little chatterers, stumbled upon what someone then interpreted as a discovery.
Well then, let the Phrygians be first — Christians are still not third. For how many other lines of nations came after the Phrygians? But consider this: those you call the third race may in fact hold first place, since there is no nation that is not Christian. So whichever nation was first, it is nonetheless Christian: it is ridiculous madness to call us the last and yet name us third.
But it is with regard to superstition that we are reckoned the third race, not with regard to nationality — as though there were Romans, Jews, and then Christians. Yet where do the Greeks fit into this scheme? Or granting that they are folded into Roman superstition, since Rome did indeed also import the gods of Greece, then where at the very least do the Egyptians stand, who, as far as I know, have their own peculiar and curious religion? Furthermore, if those who hold third place are so monstrous, what must be thought of those who come before them in first and second place?
IX.