... and to steal in by the counterfeit of a substituted body. Nor is this fault enough. Even in mimes and buffoonish farces the persons of the most holy gods are brought in, and, that laughter and merriment may be roused in the idle spectators, the deities are smitten with jesting mockeries: the theaters shout and rise up, all the tiers resound with crashes and applause, and — a thing that can be atoned for by no satisfactions — gifts and rewards are appointed for the debauched mockers of the gods: leisure from public duties, exemption and immunity, together with crowns.
And after all this do you dare to wonder whence arise these evils by which mortal kind is, without any respite, flooded and oppressed — when you both daily rehearse and daily learn by heart all those matters in which are wrapped up the disgraces of the gods and the records of their reviling; and when, if ever you wish your idle mind to be occupied with vacant fantasies, you demand that days be granted you and that these be exhibited without any intermissions? But if any indignation on behalf of your religions possessed you, it was rather these writings, these books, that you ought long ago to have burned, these that you ought to have destroyed — rather these theaters that you ought to have pulled down, in which the infamies of the gods are daily published in disgraceful plays.
For our writings, indeed — why have they deserved to be given to the flames? why should our meeting-places be savagely torn down? — in which the supreme God is prayed to, in which peace and pardon are sought for all: for magistrates, armies, kings, for friends and enemies, for those still passing their life and for those released from the bondage of the body; in which nothing else is heard save what makes men gentle, modest, chaste, pure, sharers of their goods with kinsmen, and bound together with all whom it unites in the tie of brotherhood. But the truth of the matter is this: that, because you prevail most by the sword and by the power of the steel, you judge that you also surpass in the knowledge of truth, and that you are pious toward gods whose powers you have been the first to befoul with the obscenity of your opinions.
At this point, if your fierceness permits and your fury allows, we beg you to answer us this: whether you consider that fits of anger fall upon the nature of the gods, or that the divine blessedness is far removed and severed from such passions? For if they conceive these flames and are provoked by the stirrings of wrath — as your opinions maintain (for you often say that, on account of games too carelessly performed, on account of presiding officials not approved, on account of certain little plots of ground profaned, and on account of ceremonies not duly completed, they have made the earth roar with quakings and have corrupted the airs of the seasons with the contagion of pestilence, together with a mournful devastation of the people) — it follows that it must be understood that they harbor no small angers arising from the aforesaid causes.
But if this be granted, then this too follows of necessity: that all these miseries with which the human race has long been heaped up flow from fictions of this kind. But if the indignation of the deities proceeds from these causes, then you are the authors of miseries so great, you who cease not to offend the minds of the heavenly ones and to goad them to the frenzy of vengeance. If, on the other hand, the race of the gods is immune from furies of this kind, and they know not at all what it is to be angry, then they are said to be angry with us also without any reason — they who are ignorant of what anger is and are free from its adornment and admixture. For it cannot come to pass, through the nature of things, that what is one should become two, and that a unity, divided by its inborn simplicity, should pass off into diverse things.