Dying in Order to Live

As for your charges of stubbornness and presumption — whatever it is you bring against us on those counts — there is no shortage of places where you will stand comparison with us. Our first act of defiance concerns the thing you rank second only to the worship owed to God: the worship owed to the majesty of the Caesars. On that score we are charged with irreverence toward them, since we neither appease their images nor swear by their guardian spirit. We are called public enemies. [a]

Very well, let it stand. But the emperors find enemies among you as well, and they keep collecting surnames to mark their victories over them: one becomes Parthicus, another Medicus and Germanicus. On this point the Roman people can look and see for themselves which of us it is that still has unsubdued nations in its midst, nations outside their rule.

“But you belong to us, and yet you conspire against us.”

The plain fact is that we acknowledge the loyalty Romans owe their emperors. No conspiracy has ever broken out from our body. No Caesar’s blood has ever left a stain on us, in the senate or even in the palace. No seizure of the purple has ever been carried through by us in any province. Syria still gives off the smell of its corpses; the Gauls still cannot wash the blood out of their Rhone.

Your charges that we are out of our minds I pass over, since they do not touch the Roman name. But I will take up the charge of irreverent contempt, and remind you of the irreverence of your own lower classes: the witty placards that the statues know so well, the jeers that go up at the public assembly, the curses that make the circus ring. If you are not rebels in arms, you are rebels in tongue, always.

But refusing to swear by Caesar’s guardian spirit — that, I suppose, is a different matter altogether. And yet it is quite an open question who the perjurers are on this point, seeing that you do not swear in good faith even by your own gods. It is true that we do not call the emperor a god; on that, as the saying goes, we pull a face. But you who call Caesar a god both mock him, by calling him what he is not, and curse him, since he has no wish to be what you call him. He would rather go on living than be made a god.

The rest of your charge of stubbornness you sum up in this indictment: that we boldly refuse none of it — not your swords, not your crosses, not your wild beasts, not fire, not tortures — such is our hardness and our contempt of death. But among your own ancestors, in earlier days, courage taught men not merely to despise all these terrors but to earn great praise by them. [h]

How many swords there were, and what brave men were willing to die on them, is tiresome to list. Take the cross, that refinement of cruelty, of which there have been so many instances: your own Regulus was glad to be the first to suffer it, and so gave the world a thing it had not seen before. A queen of Egypt used wild beasts of her own to die by. The Carthaginian woman who in her country’s last hour was braver than her husband Hasdrubal was only following the example Dido had set long before, of going into the fire to die. And a woman of Athens defied the tyrant, wore out his tortures, and at the end — for fear that her body and her sex might give way under the strain — bit off her tongue and spat it out of her mouth: the one instrument that could have made a confession was gone, and confession was now out of her power.

In your own case you count such deeds glorious; in ours, stubborn. Then wipe out the glory of your ancestors, and you will wipe out us along with it. Be content from now on to repeal your forefathers’ praises, so that you will not have to hand us any credit for the same sufferings.

Perhaps you will say that a rougher age made the spirits of the old days tougher, and that now we have the blessing of quiet and peace, so that men’s minds and tempers ought to be easier even toward strangers. Very well, you answer: “Compare yourselves with the ancients if you like. We are bound to hate everything we find in you that offends us, because it is not current among us.”

Then answer me case by case. I am not asking for examples pitched at exactly the same level. Since it was contempt of death under the sword that made the heroic stories of your ancestors, it is surely not love of life that takes you to the trainers to hire yourselves out, sword in hand, as gladiators; nor is it fear of death that puts your names on the army’s rolls. Since some woman or other made her death famous by wild beasts, it can only be of your own free choice that you go out to meet wild beasts day after day, in the middle of peacetime. And though no Regulus among you now sets up a cross to be crucified on, contempt of fire has shown itself even in our own day: one of your own men lately hired himself out, for a wager, to walk to any place you cared to name wearing the burning shirt. If a woman once danced in defiance under the whip, one of your own beast-fighters has done the very same thing quite recently, running the course laid out for him — to say nothing of the famous endurance of the Spartans.

Here, I take it, your tremendous charges of stubbornness against the Christians come to an end. Since we are open to them only in the same way you are yourselves, all that is left is to compare the grounds each side has for being laughed at. You take it as settled that all our stubbornness is built on the strength of our convictions — and so it is: we count on a resurrection of the dead. Hope in that resurrection is contempt of death. [n]

So laugh as much as you like at the towering stupidity of minds that die in order to live. But if you want to laugh more freely and mock us more boldly, you will first have to take a sponge — or your tongue, perhaps — and wipe out those writings of your own that keep cropping up, which say in much the same terms that souls will return to bodies. How much more worth accepting our version is, which holds that they will return to the very same bodies! And how much more ridiculous the notion you have inherited, that a human spirit will turn up again in a dog, or a mule, or a peacock!

Again, we say that God has appointed a judgment that weighs every man by what he deserves. You hand that work to Minos and Rhadamanthus, and pass over Aristides, who was a juster judge than either of them. By the sentence of that judgment, we say, the wicked will spend an eternity in fire that does not go out, and the devout and the innocent a place of happiness. In your view too the destinations are fixed and cannot be altered: Pyriphlegethon on the one side, Elysium on the other. And it is not only your makers of myth and poetry who sing in this strain. Your philosophers speak with complete confidence of souls coming back to what they were, and of a final judgment that hands out two destinies.

How long, then, you most unjust of nations, will you refuse to recognize us — and, what is more, refuse to curse your own people, when no distinction can be drawn between us, since we are one and the same? Since you certainly do not hate what you are yourselves, give us your right hands instead. Join your greetings to ours, mix your embraces with ours: bloodstained with bloodstained, incestuous with incestuous, conspirator with conspirator, stubborn and vain with the stubborn and vain. Together we have betrayed the majesty of the gods; together we provoke their anger. [r]

You have a third race of your own — not third in point of religion, as we are said to be, but a third race in sex: made of male and female in one, and all the better fitted, for that, to serve the lust of men and women alike.

So is it our very nearness and agreement that offends you? Being on a level tends to supply, without anyone noticing, the raw material of rivalry. As they say, potter envies potter, and smith envies smith.

But enough of this pretended confession; let it stop here. Our conscience has come back to the truth, and to the steadiness of truth. All those things you allege will be found, in truth, in us alone; and we alone — the people they are brought against — can refute them, if only you will hear the other side. That is where full knowledge comes from, the knowledge that both guides deliberation and steers a verdict. It is your own maxim that no case should be decided without hearing both sides of it, and ours is the one case in which you neglect it.

You give full rein to that fault of human nature by which men condemn in others what they allow in themselves, or loudly charge others with the very things they know, and go on knowing, that they are guilty of. The life you choose to spend yourselves on is different from ours: chaste in other people’s eyes, you are unchaste toward your own selves; vigorous against vice out of doors, you give way to it at home. This is the injustice we suffer: knowing the truth, we are condemned by people who do not know it; free of the guilt, we are judged by people who are tangled up in it.

Take the speck — or rather the plank — out of your own eye, so that you can get the speck out of other people’s. Reform your own lives first, and then you will be in a position to punish the Christians. But just so far as you reform yourselves, you will refuse to punish them; just so far, in fact, you will have become Christians yourselves, and just so far as you become Christians you will have reformed your lives.

Learn what it is you accuse in us, and you will accuse no longer. Search out what it is you fail to accuse in yourselves, and you will turn accuser against yourselves. From these few plain remarks, so far as we have been able to open the matter to you, you will at least get some sight of your own error and some discovery of our truth. Condemn that truth, if you can, but only after you have examined it; go on approving the error, if you think best, but explore it first. And if the rule you have laid down for yourselves is to love error and hate truth, why do you not press through to a full discovery of both — the thing you love and the thing you hate?