Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Yet its own power stands there in plain view. Those from the beginning could not [...] deity, by asserting that these men became gods after death — Varro says so, and those who have dreamed the same dream along with him. [2] Here, then, is where I take my stand: if your gods have been admitted into this rank and this divine standing the way men are enrolled into the senatorial order, [...] you must then grant that there exists some supreme ruler who holds the power of admission, a kind of Caesar of the gods; for no one can confer a rank on others in which he does not himself hold sovereign authority. [3] (But if they were able to make themselves gods after death, why then did they choose to be of an inferior condition from the beginning?) [4] Or if there is no one who makes gods, by what right are they called "made," seeing that they could only have come into being through another's hand? So you are left no room to deny that there is some contractor of divinity.
[5] Let us then examine closely the grounds on which mortality gets promoted into heaven. Of these, I believe, you will offer a twofold account. [6] Either the one responsible does it so as to have auxiliaries, or defenses, or even ornaments for his own high estate; or he confers it out of the necessity of rewarding merit wherever it is found. [7] No other explanation is available to imagine: no one bestows a gift on someone except for his own advantage or for the recipient's sake. [8] But it cannot suit a divine power to have such power that he actually makes gods out of dead men — and if such generosity is granted because he is in need of the service or even the protection of certain persons, and dead ones at that — how strange, when he could have made others immortal from the start! [9] No need to spend more time on [...] who compared human things to divine ones. Indeed this later opinion ought to be examined, whether a god, out of remembrance of merits, [...] bestowed it, [10] whether heaven lay open to men of old for their merits — one must then reconsider the fact that since then no one has been worthy of that honor. Unless the place can no longer hold any more: apparently antiquity earned [...] so much. [11] Well then, let us reconsider whether it was earned. Let the one who says it was earned set out the merits themselves. [12] If any [...] of that sort count toward a vote for divinity, then you have admitted into heaven Ops and Saturn, brother and sister stained by incest. [13] Your Jupiter was a stolen infant, unworthy of both roof and human breast — deservedly, since so wretched a nurse awaited him in Crete. [14] Grown up, he finally drives out his father, whoever he was — that most fortunate king of the golden age, as they say, under whom the peace of freedom from toil and want rested undisturbed, under whom
"no farmers subdued the fields; the earth itself, unasked, brought forth all things."
[15] "But he hated his incestuous father, [...] his castrator." And yet look — he himself mates with his own sister, so that I think that saying was first made about him: "the child of his own father." What a dutiful father, what a dutiful son! [16] But if the laws had already been in force then, Jupiter deserved to be sewn into two sacks! After this, why would he hesitate, his lust already hardened by incest, to spill over into lesser things — that is, adulteries and seductions? [17] The poets have amused themselves over this in such a way that, as when in a little book about a runaway slave his exploits are made public, we are accustomed to hawk the account of his services for the use and abuse of others — [18] sometimes portraying him as the price of luxury, since he actually paid the price of an ox, or the value of an ox, and rained a shower of gold onto rooftops — that is, bought his way in with money; sometimes in likenesses of the deeds themselves, as the eagle who carried off the boy, the swan who sang.
[19] So far are these from being mere fables about fa[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]sit, whether it is or is not wanton[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]na of men whom[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] long since let loose from the faith through[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ], that we need not pursue the matter at greater length. [20] For if indeed[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] and on behalf of their own sowers the same populace lingered[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] by nature, elsewhere authority demanded a likeness of character. How much the worse is he who is not the better? For by a private title you call him Jupiter the Best, and it is Vergil's phrase, "a just Jupiter." [21] So then, all of them are incestuous with their own kin, shameless with strangers, impious, unjust: the one whom no fable has left without some conspicuous disgrace — he was not fit to be made a god!
14.