Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Let these garland-wearers, then, meanwhile acknowledge the authority of nature under the name of a wisdom common to all men — but let them acknowledge, too, under the pledge of their own particular religion, that we worship God as nature's near neighbor — and so, as it were from this surplus, let them also examine the other arguments that forbid crownwork of any kind, without exception, to our own heads in particular. For we are pressed to move on from the ground held in common with natural discipline to the defense, now in full, of what is properly Christian, across the other varieties of crowns as well — crowns that seem designed for other uses and built of other materials, lest, because they are not made of flowers (whose use nature has marked out, as this very military laurel is not), people refuse to believe that they too fall under the sect's prohibition, on the ground that they have escaped nature's own rule. I see, then, that the matter must be handled more carefully and more fully, from its origins right down to its developments and its excesses. Secular letters are needed for this; for secular matters must be proved from their own records. The little I have touched on, I trust, will suffice. If there ever was a Pandora — whom Hesiod records as the first of women — then hers was the first head ever crowned, by the Graces, when she was endowed with gifts by them all, whence "Pandora," the all-gifted. But for us Moses, a prophetic shepherd, not a poetic one, describes Eve, the first woman, as sooner wrapping her shame in leaves than binding her brow with flowers. So there was no Pandora. But just as the crown's origin ought to blush at being traced to a fable, let it now blush at its true history as well. For it is certain that others were the inventors of the thing, or its popularizers. Pherecydes reports Saturn as crowned before all others; Diodorus reports Jupiter honored with this gift by the rest after the Titans were defeated. The same author gives Priapus his ribbons, and Ariadne her wreath of gold and Indian gems, Vulcan's handiwork, later Bacchus's gift, and afterward a constellation. Callimachus put the vine on Juno; so too the statue of her at Argos displays her, wreathed with a vine-branch, a lion's hide underfoot, trampling as stepmother on the spoils of both her stepsons. Hercules now wears the poplar on his head, now the wild olive, now parsley. You have the tragic legend of Cerberus as witness; you have Pindar, along with Callimachus, who likewise records Apollo, after killing the dragon of Delphi, putting on laurel — as a suppliant; for among the ancients suppliants wore crowns. Bacchus — identified by the Egyptians with Osiris — Harpocration contends was crowned with ivy for a particular reason: that ivy's nature is to guard the brain against drunkenness. But elsewhere the common people too recognize Bacchus as the chief patron of the crown — of the laurel, that is, in which he triumphed over the Indies — since they call his festival days the Great Crown. And if you unroll the writings of Leon the Egyptian, Isis was the first to carry ears of grain about her head — a matter, that, more of the belly. To those wanting more, the finest commentator on this very subject, Claudius Saturninus, will supply everything: for there exists a book of his on crowns, laying out their origins, their causes, their kinds, and their observances so thoroughly that you will find no grace of a flower, no gladness of a leaf, no sprig of turf or vine-branch that has not been consecrated to somebody's head. From which we may be sufficiently instructed how alien we ought to judge the institution of the crowned head to be, brought forward as it was by those very figures, and thereafter dispensed in honor of those whom the age believed to be gods. For if the devil works the lie of divinity, then in this department too — a liar from the beginning — he had without doubt already marked out those in whom that lie of divinity would be enacted. What standing, then, ought this to have among the men of the true God — something introduced by the devil's candidates as they went about their business, dedicated from the start to those same figures, by which idols even then were being initiated into their own idol-worship, from idols and among idols still living? Not that an idol is anything, but because whatever is done for idols by others belongs to demons. Further, if what others do for idols belongs to demons, how much more what the idols did for themselves, while they still lived among the living? They procured demons for themselves, that is, through the very men in whom, before this, they had gone hungry for what they were now procuring.