Who Spread Your Books Abroad?

The dilemma I am placed in is of your making. It is drawn not from the resources of logic, of which you know nothing, but from the murderer’s tool kit, and with a murderer’s intent. If I keep silent, I am held guilty; if I speak, I become a slanderer. You forbid me to answer and force me to answer at the same time. Very well, then; I must avoid going too far either way. I will say nothing that does harm, but I must scatter the charges made against me, for it is impossible not to be afraid of a man who is ready to kill you. And I will do it in the order of what you have now set before me, leaving the rest as it stands in those most learned books of yours, which I refuted before I had read them. [a]

You say that “you sent your accusation against me not to the many, but only to those who had been offended by what I had said; for one ought to speak to Christians not for show but to build them up.” Then I ask you to consider: how did the report that you had written these books reach me? Who scattered them broadcast through Rome and Italy and the islands off the coast of Dalmatia? How did these charges against me ever come to my ears, if they were only lurking in your desk and in your friends’ desks? How can you dare to say that you are speaking as a Christian, not for show but to build up, when at your mature age you set yourself to say things against your equal that a murderer would hardly say of a thief, or a prostitute against another of her trade, or a clown against a mime actor? For ages now you have been laboring to bring forth these mountains of accusation against me, and sharpening these swords to pierce my throat. Your cries have been as loud as the laments of Ceres, or a driver’s shouts to his horses. Was this so that all the provinces where they echoed might read the praise you wrote of me, and recite your speeches in my honor in every street and every corner, even in the women’s weaving rooms? This is the religious restraint and Christian building up you speak of! Your reserve and your discretion are such that men come to me from the West, crowd after crowd, and tell me of your abuse of me. And though they speak only from memory, they agree so exactly that I was obliged to make my answer, not to your writings, which I had not yet read, but to what was said to be in them, and to catch on the shield of truth the darts of falsehood that were flying all over the world.