Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 11, 12 43
a reward neither rashly nor unworthily nor wastefully. I wish
therefore to review their merits, to see whether they are of such
a kind as to warrant their elevation to heaven, and not rather
their abasement to the lowest hell, which, when you please, you
affirm to be a prison of infernal punishment. For it is there
that are wont to be thrust away all that were undutiful to
parents, guilty of incest towards sisters, adidterers of -wives,
abductors of maidens, polluters of boys, and those who rage,
kiU, steal, deceive, and whoever are like some god of your
own, not one of whom you will be able to prove free from taint of
crime or fault, unless you deny his humanity. But, to make it
impossible for you to deny that they were men, there are also
these characteristics which do not allow the belief that they
became gods afterwards either. For if you sit in judgment
for the punishment of such, if all the good among you reject
the intercourse, the conversation, the company, of the evil and
the base, and yet that great god has admitted their fellows
into a partnership in his own majesty—why then do you
condemn those whose fellows you worship? Your justice
imphes chastisement in heaven. To please your gods you
must convert your worst criminals into gods! The deification
of their equals is a comphment to them. But to omit further
consideration of this disgrace, suppose they were honest and
pure and good; yet how many better men have you left in the
lower world! a Socrates distinguished for -wisdom, an Aristides
for justice, a Themistocles for generalship, an Alexander for
glory, a Polycrates for good fortune, a Croesus for wealth, a
Demosthenes for eloquence. Which of those gods of yours is
worthier and -wiser than Cato, a juster man or a better soldier
than Scipio, who more eminent than Pompey, more fortunate
than Sulla, wealthier than Crassus, more eloquent than Cicero ?
How much more worthily would he have waited to adopt these
as gods, especially as he had foreknowledge of these better ones
to come! He was in a hurry, I suppose, and closed the doors
of heaven once for all, and is doubtless blushing now when he
hears the complaints of better men grumbhng in the lower
world.'
CHAP. XII. I say no more now about this point, knowing
that the truth itself wiU enable me to prove to you what they
are not, when I have shown you what they are. With regard
then to your gods, I see only the names of certain dead men of
old time, about whom I hear tales, and I recognise sacred rites
derived from the tales. With regard, however, to the images
themselves, I have no fault to find except that the materials