Chapter XV.

Others of your writers, in their wantonness, even minister to your pleasures by vilifying the gods. Examine those charming farces of your Lentuli and Hostilii, whether in the jokes and tricks it is the buffoons or the deities which afford you merriment; such farces I mean as Anubis the Adulterer, and Luna of the masculine gender, and Diana under the lash, and the reading the will of Jupiter deceased, and the three famishing Herculeses held up to ridicule. Your dramatic literature, too, depicts all the vileness of your gods.  The Sun mourns his offspring14    Phaethon. cast down from heaven, and you are full of glee; Cybele sighs after the scornful swain,15    Atys or Attis. and you do not blush; you brook the stage recital of Jupiter’s misdeeds, and the shepherd16    Paris. judging Juno, Venus, and Minerva. Then, again, when the likeness of a god is put on the head of an ignominious and infamous wretch, when one impure and trained up for the art in all effeminacy, represents a Minerva or a Hercules, is not the majesty of your gods insulted, and their deity dishonored? Yet you not merely look on, but applaud. You are, I suppose, more devout in the arena, where after the same fashion your deities dance on human blood, on the pollutions caused by inflicted punishments, as they act their themes and stories, doing their turn for the wretched criminals, except that these, too, often put on divinity and actually play the very gods. We have seen in our day a representation of the mutilation of Attis, that famous god of Pessinus, and a man burnt alive as Hercules. We have made merry amid the ludicrous cruelties of the noonday exhibition, at Mercury examining the bodies of the dead with his hot iron; we have witnessed Jove’s brother,17    Pluto. mallet in hand, dragging out the corpses of the gladiators. But who can go into everything of this sort? If by such things as these the honour of deity is assailed, if they go to blot out every trace of its majesty, we must explain them by the contempt in which the gods are held, alike by those who actually do them, and by those for whose enjoyment they are done. This it will be said, however, is all in sport. But if I add—it is what all know and will admit as readily to be the fact—that in the temples adulteries are arranged, that at the altars pimping is practised, that often in the houses of the temple-keepers and priests, under the sacrificial fillets, and the sacred hats,18    [“Sacred hats and purple robes and incense fumes” have been associated with the same crimes, alas! in widely different relations.] and the purple robes, amid the fumes of incense, deeds of licentiousness are done, I am not sure but your gods have more reason to complain of you than of Christians. It is certainly among the votaries of your religion that the perpetrators of sacrilege are always found, for Christians do not enter your temples even in the day-time. Perhaps they too would be spoilers of them, if they worshipped in them. What then do they worship, since their objects of worship are different from yours? Already indeed it is implied, as the corollary from their rejection of the lie, that they render homage to the truth; nor continue longer in an error which they have given up in the very fact of recognizing it to be an error.  Take this in first of all, and when we have offered a preliminary refutation of some false opinions, go on to derive from it our entire religious system.

CAPUT XV.

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Caetera lasciviae ingenia etiam voluptatibus vestris, per deorum dedecus operantur. Dispicite Lentulorum et Hostiliorum venustates, utrum mimos an deos vestros in jocis et strophis rideatis : MOECHUM ANUBIM , et MASCULUM LUNAM , et DIANAM FLAGELLATAM , et JOVIS MORTUI TESTAMENTUM recitatum, et TRES HERCULES FAMELICOS irrisos. Sed et histrionum litterae 0359A omnem foeditatem eorum designant. Luget Sol filium jactatum de coelo, laetantibus vobis, et Cybele pastorem suspirat fastidiosum , non erubescentibus vobis. Et sustinetis Jovis elogia cantari, et Junonem , Venerem, 0360A Minervam a pastore judicari. Quid, quod imago dei vestri ignominiosum caput et famosum vestit? quod corpus impurum et ad istam artem effeminatione productum Minervam aliquam vel Herculem repraesentat? Nonne violatur majestas et divinitas 0361A constupratur plaudentibus vobis? Plane religiosiores estis in cavea, ubi super sanguinem humanum, super inquinamenta poenarum proinde saltant dii vestri, argumenta et historias noxiis ministrantes, nisi quod et ipsos deos vestros saepe noxii induunt? Vidimus aliquando castratum Atyn , illum 0362A deum ex Pessinunte; et qui vivus ardebat, Herculem induerat. Risimus et inter ludicras meridianorum crudelitates Mercurium mortuos cauterio examinantem. Vidimus et Jovis fratrem gladiatorum cadavera cum malleo deducentem . Singula ista quaeque adhuc investigare quis possit? Si honorem 0363A inquietant divinitatis, si majestatis vestigia obsoletant , de contemptu utique censentur, tam eorum qui ejusmodi factitant, quam eorum quibus factitant. Sed ludicra ista sunt. Caeterum si adjiciam, quae non minus conscientiae omnium recognoscent, in templis adulteria componi, inter aras lenocinia tractari, in ipsis plerumque aedituorum et sacerdotum tabernaculis, sub iisdem vittis et apicibus et purpuris, thure flagrante libidinem expungi : nescio, plusne de vobis dii vestri, quam de Christianis querantur. Certe sacrilegi de vestris semper apprehenduntur. Christiani enim templa nec interdiu norunt; spoliarent forsitan ea et ipsi, si et ipsi ea adorarent. Quid ergo colunt, qui talia non colunt? Jam quidem intelligi subjacet veritatis esse cultores, qui mendacii non 0363B sint: nec errare amplius in eo, in quo errasse se recognoscendo cessaverint. Hoc prius capite, et omnem hinc sacramenti nostri ordinem haurite, repercussis ante tamen opinionibus falsis.