Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
As for the obstinacies or presumptions you charge us with, none of these escape a fair comparison either. The first "obstinacy" is this: your religion ranks the majesty of Caesar second only to the gods, and we are called irreligious toward the Caesars because we neither propitiate their images nor swear by their genii. We are named enemies of the state. Yet see how it stands: from among your own nations new Caesars are made every day, Parthian, Median, German — let the Roman people look to that, seeing what untamed and foreign stock supplies them. "But you conspire with our own people against our own people!" We know well enough what Roman loyalty to the Caesars amounts to: no conspiracy has ever broken out, no blood of a Caesar has ever stained the Senate house or the very palace, no province has ever grasped at the throne — of course not! Syria still reeks with the stench of corpses, the Gauls still refuse to wash in their own Rhone! But I pass over crimes of sheer madness, since even Rome's own name will not own them; let me instead recall the sacrileges of your vanity, the irreverence of your own native people, the mocking pamphlets the statues could tell you about, and those sly digs and curses tossed about in council chambers, that echo round the circus: if not in arms, you are forever rebels at least in tongue. But I suppose there is some further point in refusing an oath sworn upon Caesar's genius: for the crime of false swearing is itself questionable at law, given that you do not even keep faith when swearing by your own gods. But we do not call the emperor a god: at such a claim we simply — as the saying goes — pull a face. No, it is you who, in calling Caesar a god, deride him as something he is not, and do him an injury, since he declines to become what you name him: for he would sooner go on living than be turned into a god!
XVIII.