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| Chapter IX.
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Chapter IX.
That I may refute more thoroughly these charges, I will
show that in part openly, in part secretly, practices prevail among
you which have led you perhaps to credit similar things about us.
Children were openly sacrificed in Africa to Saturn as lately as the
proconsulship of Tiberius, who exposed to public gaze the priests
suspended on the sacred trees overshadowing their temple—so many
crosses on which the punishment which justice craved overtook their
crimes, as the soldiers of our country still can testify who did that
very work for that proconsul. And even now that sacred crime still
continues to be done in secret. It is not only Christians, you see, who
despise you; for all that you do there is neither any crime thoroughly
and abidingly eradicated, nor does any of your gods reform his ways.
When Saturn did not spare his own children, he was not likely to spare
the children of others; whom indeed the very parents themselves were in
the habit of offering, gladly responding to the call which was made on
them, and keeping the little ones pleased on the occasion, that they
might not die in tears. At the same time, there is a vast difference
between homicide and parricide. A more advanced age was sacrificed to
Mercury in Gaul. I hand over the Tauric fables to their own theatres.
Why, even in that most religious city of the pious descendants of
Æneas, there is a certain Jupiter whom in their games they lave
with human blood. It is the blood of a beast-fighter, you say. Is it
less, because of that, the blood of a man?87
| 87 [Another example of
what Christianity was doing for man as man.] | Or is it
viler blood because it is from the veins of a wicked man? At any rate
it is shed in murder. O Jove, thyself a Christian, and in truth only
son of thy father in his cruelty! But in regard to child murder, as it
does not matter whether it is committed for a sacred object, or merely
at one’s own self-impulse—although there is a great
difference, as we have said, between parricide and homicide—I
shall turn to the people generally. How many, think you, of those
crowding around and gaping for Christian blood,—how many even of
your rulers, notable for their justice to you and for their severe
measures against us, may I charge in their own consciences with the sin
of putting their offspring to death? As to any difference in the kind
of murder, it is certainly the more cruel way to kill by drowning, or
by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs. A maturer age has always
preferred death by the sword. In our case, murder being once for all
forbidden, we may not destroy even the fœtus in the womb, while as
yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its
sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor
does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy
one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be
one; you have the fruit already in its seed. As to meals of blood and
such tragic dishes, read—I am not sure where it is told (it is in
Herodotus, I think)—how blood taken from the arms, and tasted by
both parties, has been the treaty bond among some nations. I am not
sure what it was that was tasted in the time of Catiline. They say,
too, that among some Scythian tribes the dead are eaten by their
friends. But I am going far from home. At this day, among ourselves,
blood consecrated to Bellona, blood drawn from a punctured thigh and
then partaken of, seals initiation into the rites of that goddess.
Those, too, who at the gladiator shows, for the cure of epilepsy, quaff
with greedy thirst the blood of criminals slain in the arena, as it
flows fresh from the wound, and then rush off—to whom do they
belong? those, also, who make meals on the flesh of wild beasts at the
place of combat—who have keen appetites for bear and stag? That
bear in the struggle was bedewed with the blood of the man whom it
lacerated: that stag rolled itself in the gladiator’s gore.
The entrails of the very bears, loaded with as yet undigested human
viscera, are in great request. And you have men rifting up man-fed
flesh? If you partake of food like this, how do your repasts differ
from those you accuse us Christians of? And do those, who, with savage
lust, seize on human bodies, do less because they devour the living?
Have they less the pollution of human blood on them because they only
lick up what is to turn into blood? They make meals, it is plain, not
so much of infants, as of grown-up men. Blush for your vile ways before
the Christians, who have not even the blood of animals at their meals
of simple and natural food; who abstain from things strangled and that
die a natural death, for no other reason than that they may not
contract pollution, so much as from blood secreted in the viscera. To
clench the matter with a single example, you tempt Christians with
sausages of blood, just because you are perfectly aware that the thing
by which you thus try to get them to transgress they hold
unlawful.88
| 88 [See Elucidation
VII., p. 58, infra in connection with usages in cap.
xxxix.] | And how unreasonable it is to believe that
those, of whom you are convinced that they regard with horror the idea
of tasting the blood of oxen, are eager after blood of men; unless,
mayhap, you have tried it,
and found it sweeter to the taste! Nay, in fact, there is here a test
you should apply to discover Christians, as well as the fire-pan and
the censer. They should be proved by their appetite for human blood, as
well as by their refusal to offer sacrifice; just as otherwise they
should be affirmed to be free of Christianity by their refusal to taste
of blood, as by their sacrificing; and there would be no want of blood
of men, amply supplied as that would be in the trial and condemnation
of prisoners. Then who are more given to the crime of incest than those
who have enjoyed the instruction of Jupiter himself? Ctesias tells us
that the Persians have illicit intercourse with their mothers.
The Macedonians, too, are suspected on this point; for on first hearing
the tragedy of Œdipus they made mirth of the incest-doer’s
grief, exclaiming, ῾ἥλαυνε εἰς
τὴν μητέρα. Even
now reflect what opportunity there is for mistakes leading to
incestuous comminglings—your promiscuous looseness supplying the
materials. You first of all expose your children, that they may be
taken up by any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite
unknown; or you give them away, to be adopted by those who will do
better to them the part of parents. Well, some time or other, all
memory of the alienated progeny must be lost; and when once a mistake
has been made, the transmission of incest thence will still go
on—the race and the crime creeping on together. Then, further,
wherever you are—at home, abroad, over the seas—your lust
is an attendant, whose general indulgence, or even its indulgence in
the most limited scale, may easily and unwittingly anywhere beget
children, so that in this way a progeny scattered about in the commerce
of life may have intercourse with those who are their own kin, and have
no notion that there is any incest in the case. A persevering and
stedfast chastity has protected us from anything like this:
keeping as we do from adulteries and all post-matrimonial
unfaithfulness, we are not exposed to incestuous mishaps. Some of us,
making matters still more secure, beat away from them entirely the
power of sensual sin, by a virgin continence, still boys in this
respect when they are old. If you would but take notice that such
sins as I have mentioned prevail among you, that would lead you to see
that they have no existence among Christians. The same eyes would tell
you of both facts. But the two blindnesses are apt to go together; so
that those who do not see what is, think they see what is not. I shall
show it to be so in everything. But now let me speak of matters which
are more clear.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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