Punished for a Name

I have said all this by way of preface, to show the public hatred of us in its true colors. Now I take my stand on our innocence. I will not only refute the charges brought against us; I will turn them back on the men who bring them, so that everyone may see that Christians are free of the very crimes those men know perfectly well are common among themselves — and so that they may blush for their accusations. I will not say these are the worst of men accusing the best; they are, as they would have it, men accusing their partners in the same sin. We will answer for every crime we are said to commit in secret, the very crimes we catch them committing in broad daylight, the crimes for which we are held to be wicked, senseless, deserving of punishment, deserving of ridicule. [a]

But whenever our truth meets you successfully at every point, the authority of the laws is brought up as a last resort: either their rulings are said to settle the matter absolutely, or else obedience, however unwilling, is put ahead of the truth. So I will deal with you first on the laws, since you have set yourselves up as their chosen protectors.

Now, when you lay it down sternly in your sentences, “It is not lawful for you to exist,” and order it carried out without a moment’s hesitation, you are showing the violence and the unjust mastery of plain tyranny — if you deny that the thing is lawful simply because you want it to be unlawful, and not because it ought to be. But if you would have it unlawful because it ought not to be lawful, then surely whatever does harm should have no permission in law; and on that very ground it is already settled that whatever is beneficial is legitimate. Well then: if I have found what your law forbids to be good, then, having reached that conclusion, has the law not lost its power to keep me from it? Though of course, if the thing were evil, the law would rightly forbid it to me.

If your law has gone wrong, it is of human making, I think; it did not fall out of heaven. Is it any wonder that a man should make a mistake in framing a law, or come to his senses and throw it out? Did the Spartans not amend the laws of Lycurgus himself, and so wound their author that he shut himself away and starved himself to death? Are you not yourselves, every day, hacking away with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts at that whole ancient and tangled forest of your laws, trying to let some light into the darkness of the past? Has Severus, the most resolute of rulers, not just yesterday thrown out the absurd Papian laws — which compel people to have children before the Julian laws allow a marriage to be contracted — old and venerable though they were? There were laws too, in the old days, that a man against whom judgment had gone could be cut into pieces by his creditors; but by common consent that cruelty was later erased from the statutes, and the death penalty was turned into a mark of shame. By adopting the plan of confiscating a debtor’s goods, they chose to bring the blood into his face in blushes rather than let it out of his body.

How many laws lie out of sight that still need reforming! It is not the number of their years, nor the standing of the man who made them, that recommends laws, but simply that they are just; and so, when a law’s injustice is recognized, it is rightly condemned, even though it condemns. But why do we call these laws merely unjust? If they punish bare names, we may as well call them irrational. And if they punish acts, why in our case do they punish an act on the strength of a name alone, while in other cases they require the act to be proved — not from the name, but from the wrong that was done?

I practice incest, they say. Why do they not investigate it? I kill infants. Why do they not put me to the torture to get the truth out of me? I commit crimes against the gods, against the Caesars. Why, when I am able to clear myself, am I not allowed to speak on my own behalf? No law forbids the sifting of the crimes it prohibits, because a judge never punishes justly unless he is sure a crime has been committed, and a citizen does not truly obey the law if he does not know what the punishment is for. It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge is convinced of its justice; the people from whom obedience is expected must be convinced as well. A law that does not care to be tested and approved lies under grave suspicion; and if it tyrannizes over men untested, it is a positively wicked law.

A word now about where laws of this kind came from. There was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by the emperor unless the senate had approved him first. Marcus Aemilius learned this in the case of his god Alburnus. And this too makes our case: among you, divinity is handed out at the judgment of human beings. Unless the gods give satisfaction to men, they will not be made gods at all — the god will have to win over the man. [e]

Tiberius, then — in whose day the Christian name made its entry into the world — had received a report out of Palestine of events that had plainly shown the truth of Christ’s divinity, and he brought the matter before the senate with his own vote in Christ’s favor. The senate rejected the proposal, because it had not given the approval itself. Caesar held to his own opinion and threatened punishment against anyone who accused the Christians.

Consult your own histories. You will find there that Nero was the first to fall on the Christian sect with the imperial sword, at a time when it was making headway at Rome in particular. But we count it our glory that our condemnation was hallowed by the hatred of such a man. Anyone who knows Nero can understand that nothing brought his condemnation down on it unless it was of singular excellence. Domitian too, a man of Nero’s stamp in cruelty, tried his hand at persecution; but he had something human in him, and soon put a stop to what he had started, even bringing back the people he had banished. These are the sort of men who have always persecuted us — unjust, godless, contemptible men, of whom even you yourselves have nothing good to say, and whose sentences you have made a habit of reversing for those who suffered under them.

Out of all the rulers from that day to this, with anything of divine or human wisdom in them, point out a single persecutor of the Christian name. Far from it — we can bring you one who was their protector, as you will see if you examine the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most serious of emperors. In them he bears witness that the drought in Germany was broken by rain obtained through the prayers of the Christians who happened to be serving under him. And though he did not lift the Christians’ legal disabilities by public law, he set them aside just as openly in another way, adding a sentence of condemnation against their accusers — and a heavier one at that.

What sort of laws are these, which none but the godless carry out against us — the unjust, the vile, the bloody, the senseless, the insane? Laws which Trajan partly cancelled by forbidding Christians to be hunted out; which no Hadrian ever enforced, for all his appetite for everything strange and new, nor Vespasian, though he subdued the Jews, nor a Pius, nor a Verus. Surely it would be judged more natural for bad men to be rooted out by good rulers, as their natural enemies, than by rulers of their own kind.

Now I would like these most religious defenders and champions of their fathers’ laws and institutions to tell me something about their own loyalty, and about the honor and obedience they themselves show to those ancestral institutions. Have they abandoned nothing? Have they strayed from none of the old paths? Have they not thrown out the most useful and necessary rules for living a decent life? [i]

What has become of the laws that held down expensive and showy living? The laws that forbade more than a hundred asses to be spent on a dinner, and more than one bird to be set on the table at a time — and that not a fattened one; that expelled a patrician from the senate on what was then counted the serious charge of aiming to be too great, because he had acquired about seven pounds of silver; that pulled the theatres down as fast as they went up, since they went up to corrupt the people’s manners; that did not allow the badges of public office or of noble birth to be usurped lightly or without penalty?

For I see that Hundred-Suppers must now take their name not from a hundred asses but from the hundred sestertia laid out on them; and that whole mines of silver are turned into serving dishes — and it would be a small thing if this were true only of senators, and not of freedmen, or even of men whose backs still show the whip. I see, too, that a single theatre is not enough, and that theatres are no longer left open to the sky: no doubt so that an indecent pleasure should not go numb in the wintertime, the Spartans invented their thick cloaks for the shows. And I see no difference now between the dress of a respectable married woman and that of a prostitute.

As for women, those laws of your fathers that used to be such an encouragement to modesty and sobriety have fallen out of use as well. In those days a woman knew no gold on her except on the one finger her husband had solemnly sealed to himself with the betrothal ring; and women’s abstinence from wine went so far that a married woman was starved to death by her own relatives for opening the compartments of a wine cellar, while back in the days of Romulus, Mecenius killed his wife for merely tasting wine, and suffered nothing for it. This is also why it was the custom for women to kiss their relatives — so that they might be caught by their breath. Where is that happiness of married life, so much to be desired, which marked our earlier manners, and by which for about six hundred years there was not a single divorce among us? Now women have every limb of the body weighed down with gold; wine-drinking is so common with them that the kiss is never offered willingly; and as for divorce, they long for it as though it were what marriage naturally comes to.

The laws your fathers in their wisdom passed about the gods themselves, you, their most loyal children, have repealed. The consuls, on the authority of the senate, banished Father Bacchus and his mysteries not merely from the city but from the whole of Italy. The consuls Piso and Gabinius — no Christians, surely — barred Serapis, Isis, and Harpocrates, with their dog-headed friend, from the Capitol. In doing it they cast them out of the assembly of the gods, overturned their altars, and drove them out of the country, anxious to keep the vices of that degraded and lewd religion from spreading. These are the gods you have restored, and on whom you have conferred the highest honors.

What has come of your religion — of the reverence you owe your ancestors? In your dress, in your food, in your way of life, in your opinions, and last of all in your very speech, you have disowned your forefathers. You are always praising antiquity, and every day you have some new fashion of living. By failing to keep what you should have kept, you make it clear that while you throw away the good ways of your fathers, you hold on to and guard the things you ought not. And even that tradition of your fathers which you still seem to defend so faithfully, and in which you find your chief charge against the Christians — I mean zeal in the worship of the gods, the one point on which antiquity chiefly went wrong — I shall show in its proper place that you despise it, neglect it, and overturn it, throwing away the authority of the men of old altogether, although you have rebuilt the altars of Serapis, now a Roman deity, and hold your wild rites for Bacchus, now made a god of Italy. Meanwhile I go on to answer that infamous charge of secret crimes, clearing my way toward things done in open day.

Monsters of wickedness, they call us. We are accused of keeping a holy rite in which we kill a little child and then eat it; and, after the feast, of practicing incest, with the dogs — our pimps, if you please — knocking over the lamps and getting us the shamelessness of darkness for our unspeakable lusts. This is what is constantly laid to our charge, and yet you take no trouble to drag out the truth of what we have been accused of for so long. Either bring the thing into the light of day, if you believe it, or give it no credit, since you have never inquired into it. On the strength of your own double dealing we are entitled to lay it down to you that there is nothing in a thing you do not dare to fish out. In the case of Christians you lay on the executioner a duty that is the exact opposite of fishing out the truth: he is not to make them confess what they do, but to make them deny what they are. [p]

We date the beginning of our religion, as I said before, from the reign of Tiberius. Truth and the hatred of truth come into our world together. As soon as truth appears, it is treated as an enemy. It has as many enemies as it has strangers: the Jews, as you would expect, out of rivalry; the soldiers, out of a wish to extort money; our own household slaves, by their very nature. We are hunted every day and betrayed every day; we are often caught in the middle of our meetings and gatherings.

Who ever came upon an infant wailing, as the story goes? Who ever kept for the judge the bloody mouths of Cyclopes and Sirens, just as he found them? Who ever found a trace of filth on our wives? Where is the man who discovered such horrors and hid them, or who was bribed into silence while he was hauling the guilty before the judge? If we always keep our secrets, when were our doings ever made known to the world? And by whom could they be made known? Not by the guilty parties themselves, surely: from the very idea of the thing, the loyalty of silence is always owed to mysteries. The rites of Samothrace and Eleusis make no disclosures — how much more will silence be kept about rites which, once uncovered, would call down punishment from men on the spot, while the anger of God is stored up for later? If, then, Christians are not the ones publishing their own crime, it follows that it must be outsiders. And where did they get their knowledge, when it is also a universal custom at religious initiations to keep the uninitiated away and to guard against witnesses — unless it is that men so wicked have less fear than their neighbors?

Everyone knows what sort of thing rumor is. It is one of your own sayings that “of all evils, none travels faster than rumor.” Why is rumor such an evil thing? Is it because it is swift? Is it because it carries information? Or is it because it is a liar in the highest degree — a thing that never brings us any truth without a taint of falsehood, always taking away, or adding, or twisting the plain fact? More than that: it is the very law of its being to last only as long as it lies, and to live only as long as there is no proof. When the proof is given, rumor stops existing; its work of merely spreading a report being done, it hands over a fact, and from then on the thing is held to be a fact and called a fact. Then nobody says “they say it happened at Rome,” or “there is a rumor that he has been given a province,” but “he has been given a province,” and “it happened at Rome.” Rumor, whose very name means uncertainty, has no place where a thing is certain. Does anyone but a fool put his trust in it? A wise man never believes what is doubtful.

Everybody knows, however eagerly a rumor is spread abroad and on however strong assertions it rests, that at some time or other it started from one single source. From there it has to creep into the tongues and ears that pass it on, and one small flaw in the seed so darkens all the rest of the story that no one can tell whether the lips it first came from planted the seed of falsehood out of a spirit of contradiction, as often happens, or out of a suspicious judgment, or out of a settled — in some men an inborn — delight in lying. It is well that time brings everything to light, as your own proverbs and sayings testify, by a provision of Nature, which has so arranged things that nothing stays hidden long, even when rumor has not spread it. It is only right, then, that report should for so long have been the sole possessor of the Christians’ crimes. This is the witness you bring against us: one that has never been able to prove the accusation it sent abroad at some time or other, and that at last, by mere persistence, hardened into a settled opinion in the world. And so I confidently appeal, against those who groundlessly hold that such things are to be believed, to Nature herself, who is always true.