Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But since they want some others admitted separately into divinity from among men, and distinguished between those born divine and those made divine, following Dionysius the Stoic, I shall add something on this category too. [2] As for Hercules himself, the sum of the answer is this: was he worthy of heaven and of divinity? For it is on the strength of such merits that they grant divinity. [3] If it is for his courage, because he steadily dispatched wild beasts, what is so remarkable in that? Do not condemned men in the arena, or even the cheapest sand-pit fighters, dispatch a great many beasts together — and more zealously at that? [4] If it is for having traveled the whole world, how many wealthy men has the sweet love of travel granted the same thing, or philosophers their beggarly servitude? Do they not remember that Asclepiades the Cynic, on a single little cow — on whose back he rode, and whose udder, whenever he needed, fed him — surveyed the entire world with his own eyes? [5] If Hercules also went down to the underworld, who does not know that the road to the underworld lies open to everyone? [6] [...] very many [...] that Pompey [...] who did not even save Ostia [...] into one corner of Carthage's Byrsa [...]. All the more is Scipio credited with divinity for so many slaughters, more than Hercules. [7] Add rather to Hercules' titles the rapes of virgins, of married women, the bands of Omphale, and, for the loss of a pretty boy, the shamefully abandoned campaign of the Argonauts. [8] Add to his glory, after that disgrace, his fits of madness too; go worship the arrows that killed his sons and his wife! [9] The man who then, in his grief over that slaughter of kin, more rightly should have thrown himself onto the pyre — the man who, ensnared by poisons through his wife's wanton jealousy, deserved that fate more than an honorable death — him you have lifted from the pyre up into heaven, with the same easy generosity by which you also promoted another man, consumed by fire — but a divine fire — who was said to have invented a few clever tricks of experience and to have brought the dead back to life. [10] That one, though son of Apollo, as much a man as grandson of Jupiter, great-grandson of Saturn — (unless he must be counted a bastard of uncertain father, as Argive Socrates reported) — whom, once exposed and found again, more shamefully reared than Jove himself, on a dog's udder no less, no one can deny was a man — was struck down by a thunderbolt. [11] Jupiter the Best turns out bad again here, impious toward his own grandson, jealous of a mere craftsman! [12] And indeed Pindar did not conceal his true merit: he sings of the man's greed and love of gain being condemned in him, by which, in fact, through the corrupt sale of his medicine, he drove the living to death rather than bringing the dead back to life. [13] They say his mother too perished in the same fashion — deservedly [...] had brought forth a beast [...] burst up to heaven by the same sort of ladder, so to speak. [14] "And yet the Athenians, everyone knows, sacrifice to gods of that sort; for they hold funeral rites among the dead for Asclepius and his mother." As if they themselves did not also worship their own Theseus, a god by merit no less. And why not, if he abandoned his savior on a foreign shore, through that same forgetfulness — or rather madness — that had caused his own father's death?
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