CHAPTER IX.

You yourselves are guilty of sacrificing children and adults in your worship of various deities, and of eating blood in several loathsome rites and horrible repasts. Your knowledge of our horror of eating blood is evidenced by the tests which you apply to us. Incest, too, is one of your commonest crimes.

FOR a more thorough refutation of these charges I will shew what deeds are performed by you partly in public, partly in secret, whence perhaps you have been led to credit them also about us.

In Africa infants were openly sacrificed to Saturn down to the proconsulate of Tiberius ²², who exposed the priests themselves on the very trees that overshadowed their own temple of crimes, as on votive crosses; as the soldiery of our own country²³ who did that work for the proconsul can testify. And even now this accursed crime is secretly continued. It is not the Christians alone who defy you; no crime is permanently eradicated, nor does any god change his character. Since Saturn did not spare his own sons, he naturally persisted in not sparing the children of others; whom indeed the parents themselves used to offer to him and present as [30] willing victims, the infants being caressed lest they should be sacrificed weeping. And yet this parental child-murder is much more heinous than manslaughter.

Adults were sacrificed to Mercury amongst the Gauls. I dismiss the Tauric fables to the theatres where they belong. Lo, in that most religious city of the pious descendants of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter ²⁴ whom in his own games they deluge with human blood. 'But,' you say, 'only the blood of a criminal condemned to the beasts.' And therefore, I suppose, of less moment than the blood of a man! Is it not rather worse, because that of a bad man? At all events the blood is shed in manslaughter. Jupiter must be Christian, as your view of Christian goes; and the only son of his father for cruelty!

But since in the case of infanticide it matters nothing whether it be committed under religious sanctions or out of mere caprice (although it does matter whether it is parental child-murder or manslaughter), I will appeal to the people. How many of those who stand around panting for the blood of the Christians,—how many, think you, of yourselves even, magistrates most just and severe against us, shall I prick in their consciences, who are in the habit of strangling the children born to them? Since there is a difference, too, in the kind of death, surely that is the more cruel method by which you squeeze out their breath under water, or expose [31] them to cold and hunger and the dogs; for an adult, too, would choose death by the knife in preference. But to us, to whom murder has once for all been forbidden, it is unlawful even to destroy the fetus in the womb whilst the blood is still forming into a human being. Prevention of birth is premature murder; nor does it alter the question whether one takes away a life already born, or destroys one which is in process of formation. That also is a human being, which is about to become one, just as every fruit exists already in the seed.

As for feeding upon blood and tragic dishes of that kind, read whether it is not somewhere related (it is in Herodotus ²⁵, I think) that certain nations have appointed the tasting of blood, drawn from the arms of both parties, for the ratification of a treaty. Some such tasting there was, too, under Catiline. They say also that among certain Scythian tribes a dead person is eaten by his own relatives. I am going far afield. To-day, at home, blood from an incised thigh, caught in a shield and given to her own worshippers, seals those dedicated to Bellona. What about those, too, who for the cure of epilepsy at the gladiatorial show in the arena drink with greedy thirst the fresh blood flowing from the throats of the criminals?

What about those, likewise, who sup off the flesh of wild beasts from the arena, and eat a meal off boar or stag? That boar in the struggle wiped the blood off the victim whom he first made [32] bloody; that stag wallowed in the blood of a gladiator. The paunches of the very bears are eagerly desired, loaded with as yet undigested human entrails. Flesh which has fed on man is immediately rejected by man's stomach. You that eat these things, how far are you removed in your repasts from the feasts of the Christians? But do they do less who with beastly lust open their mouths to human bodies, because they devour what is alive? Are they the less consecrated to filth by human blood because they lick up only what is about to become blood? They eat not infants indeed, but rather adults. Your crime may well blush in the presence of Christians, who do not reckon the blood even of animals amongst articles of food, and who accordingly abstain also from things strangled²⁶, and those that have died of themselves ²⁷, lest we should be defiled by any blood secreted in the entrails.

Lastly, among the tests applied to the Christians you present to them sausage-skins filled with blood, simply because you are quite certain that it is unlawful for them, and you wish through it to inveigle them into error. Moreover, what folly it is for you to credit with a thirst for human blood the very people on whom you confidently rely to shrink with horror from the blood of cattle,—unless perchance you have found the former more palateable. And [33] indeed this also ought to be applied as a test to the Christians in the same manner as the brazier and the incense-box. For they would be tested just as much by their desire for human blood as by their refusal to sacrifice; and in other respects they would have to be put to death if they tasted, just as if they had refused to sacrifice. And, at all events, you would never be in want of human blood at your trials and condemnations of prisoners.

Similarly again, who are more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself has taught? Ctesias relates that the Persians cohabit with their own mothers. The Macedonians, too, are suspected of the same, because, when they first heard the tragedy of Oedipus, they laughed at the incestuous king's grief, and exclaimed, h1laune th_n mhte/ra. Just consider now what opportunities there are for the contraction of incestuous unions, the promiscuousness of your profligacy supplying the occasions. In the first place, you expose your children to be taken up by any passing stranger who may be moved to pity them, or you surrender them to be adopted by better parents. All memory of a progeny thus cast off must some time or other be lost; and should a mistake once occur, thence the propagation of the incest will still go on, progeny and crime creeping on together. Secondly, wherever you are, at home, abroad, or over the sea, lust is your companion; and your promiscuous embraces may easily anywhere beget children to you unawares, even from however small a portion of the seed; so that the progeny thus scattered may through [34] human intercourse meet with members of its own kin and not recognize them as unions of incestuous blood. We, on the contrary, are protected from such a consequence by a most persevering and most constant chastity; and in proportion as we are safe from carnal defilements and all post-nuptial infidelity, so are we also from the possibility of incest. Some, far less troubled, completely withstand the attack of this sin by a virgin continence,—old men in years, children in innocence.

If you would only observe how that these sins are to be found amongst yourselves, you would at the same time perceive that they do not exist amongst Christians. The same eyes would have informed you on both points. But two kinds of blindness readily go together; so that those who see not what is, seem to see what is not. I shall shew this to be the case throughout.

Now I come to our more open crimes.