Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 9 35
blush before us Christians, who do not reckon the blood even of
animals among articles of food, who abstain even from things
strangled and from such as die of themselves, lest we should in
any way be polluted even by blood which is buried -within the
body. Again, among the trials of the Christians you offer them
sausages actually filled with blood, being of course perfectly
aware that the means you wish to employ to get them
to abandon their principles is in their eyes impermissible.
Further, how absurd it is for you to beheve that they, who
you are assured, abhor the blood of beasts, are panting for the
blood of man, imless perchance you have found the former more
palatable! Indeed this thirst for blood, like the httle altar
and the incense-box, should have been itself apphed as a means
of testing the Christians. For they would then be distinguished
by their desire for human blood, in the same way as by their
refusal to sacrifice; being other-wise deserving of rejec-tion, if
they had refused to taste, just as if they had sacrificed. And
you would at any rate have had no lack of human blood at
the hearing and condemnation of prisoners. Again, who are
more incestuous than those whom Jupiter himself has taught?
Ctesias records that the Persians have sexual intercourse with
their own mothers. The Macedonians, too, are suspect, because
on first hearing the tragedy of Oedipus, they ridiculed his grief
at the incest of which he had been guilty, saying: II montaitsa
mere. And now reflect what an opening is left to mistakes
to bring about incestuous unions, for which the -wide range of
profligacy supplies opportunity. In the first place there is
your exposure of your children, to be brought up by some
passing stranger out of pity, and your surrender of them to be
adopted by parents better than yourselves. The memory of
a progeny thus cast off must some time or other be lost, and
when once the error has rooted itself, the transmission of the
incest -will proceed farther and farther, as the family grows
gradually with the crime. In the second place, everywhere, at
home, abroad, across the seas, lust is in attendance, whose
promiscuous impulses can easily beget children to you unawares
in some place or other, even from however small a portion of
the seed, so that a family, which has thus become scattered,
may through the varied intercourse of men meet its own past,
and may yet fail to recognise in it the mixtures of incestuous
blood. We on the contrary are guarded from this result by
a scrupulously faithful chastity, and we are as safe from the
chance of incest as we are from debauchery and every excess
in wedded hfe. Some are even much safer, as they -withstand
all possibility of this mistake by virgin continence, old men in
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