Human Sacrifice

But some have by now been led to such a pitch of impiety and folly that they slaughter and offer in sacrifice to their false gods even actual men, whose figures and forms the gods are. Nor do they see, wretched men, that the victims they are slaughtering are the models of the gods they make and worship, and to whom they are offering the men. For they are offering, one might say, equals to equals, or rather, the higher to the lower; for they are offering living creatures to dead things, and rational beings to things without motion. [a]

For the Scythians who are called Taurians offer in sacrifice to their Virgin, as they call her, the survivors of shipwrecks and any Greeks they catch. In this they go so far in impiety against their own kind, and so lay bare the savagery of their gods. For those whom Providence has rescued from danger and from the sea, they slaughter, almost fighting against Providence, since by their own brutal character they undo its kindness. Others, when they return victorious from war, at once divide their prisoners into hundreds, take one man from each, and sacrifice to Ares the man they have picked out of each hundred. Nor is it only the Scythians who commit these abominations, because of the fierceness natural to them as barbarians. On the contrary, this deed is a particular result of the wickedness that goes with idols and false gods. For the Egyptians used formerly to offer victims of this kind to Hera, and the Phoenicians and Cretans used to appease Cronos with sacrifices of children. Even the ancient Romans used to worship Jupiter Latiarius, as he was called, with human sacrifices. Some in one way and some in another, but all without exception, committed this pollution and incurred it: they incurred it simply by carrying out the murders, and they polluted their own temples by filling them with the smoke of such sacrifices.

This, then, was the ready source of many evils for humankind. Seeing that their false gods were pleased with these things, people at once imitated their gods with similar wrongdoing, thinking that to imitate beings they considered superior did them credit. So humankind was thinned out by the murder of grown men and of children, and by every kind of license. For nearly every city is full of every kind of debauchery, the result of the savage character of its gods. And in the temples of the idols no one lives soberly except the one whose debauchery they all bear witness to.