If it is not permitted to you, O rulers of the Roman Empire, presiding for judgement in the open and elevated place, at almost the very summit of the city, to examine openly and to inquire in public what may be the plain truth in the cause of the Christians; if in this one matter alone your authority either fears or is ashamed to make inquiry with the diligence of justice in public; if, in short, as has lately happened, a persecution of this sect, over-busy in domestic tribunals, blocks the way to its defence—let the truth at least be permitted to reach your ears by the hidden path of silent letters. It begs nothing on behalf of its own cause, since it does not marvel at its own condition.
It knows that it lives as a stranger upon the earth, that among aliens it readily finds enemies, but that it has its race, its home, its hope, its favour, and its dignity in the heavens. One thing it earnestly desires meanwhile: not to be condemned unknown. What does it here lose for the laws that hold sway in their own realm, if it be heard? Or will their power the rather glory in this, that even when they have heard the truth they will condemn it? But if they condemn it unheard, besides the odium of injustice they will also deserve the suspicion of some guilty conscience, in being unwilling to hear what, once heard, they could not condemn. This, then, we set before you as the first cause of the injustice of hatred against the name of the Christians. That injustice the very title both weighs down and refutes which seems to excuse it—namely, ignorance.
For what is more unjust than that men should hate what they do not know, even if the thing deserves hatred? For then it deserves it, when it is known whether it deserves it. But when the knowledge of its desert is lacking, whence is the justice of the hatred defended, which must be proved not by the outcome but by conscience? When, therefore, men hate for this very reason, because they are ignorant of what sort of thing it is that they hate, why may it not be of such a sort that they ought not to hate it? Thus from either alternative we convict them of both: both that they are ignorant while they hate, and that they hate unjustly while they are ignorant. It is a testimony of ignorance which, while it excuses injustice, condemns it; since all who formerly hated, because they were ignorant of what sort of thing it was they hated, at the same time cease to be ignorant and cease also to hate.
From these there come to be Christians, assuredly upon full knowledge, and they begin to hate what they had been and to profess what they had hated; and they are as many as we are branded to be. They cry out that the city is besieged; that in the fields, in the fortresses, on the islands there are Christians; they mourn, as though at a loss, that every sex, age, condition, and even rank is going over to this name. And yet not even by this very thing are their minds moved to the estimation of some latent good. It is not allowed to suspect more rightly; it does not please to make trial more closely. Here alone does human curiosity grow torpid. They love to be ignorant, while others rejoice to have come to knowledge. How much more would Anacharsis have branded these—the imprudent judging of the prudent—than the unmusical of the musical! They prefer not to know, because they already hate.
So far do they prejudge that what they do not know is that which, if they knew it, they could not hate—since, if no debt of hatred be discovered, it were surely best to cease hating unjustly; but if it be established on the score of desert, then not only is nothing of the hatred to be withdrawn, but more is to be acquired towards perseverance, by the very authority of justice itself. 'But not therefore is it good,' says one, 'because it converts many; for how many are formed for evil! How many deserters into perversity!' Who denies it? Yet what is truly evil, not even those whom it seizes dare to defend as good. Every evil nature has steeped in either fear or shame. In short, evildoers are eager to lie hidden, they shun to appear;
when caught they tremble, when accused they deny, not even under torture do they easily or always confess, and certainly when condemned they mourn. They count up within themselves the impulses of an evil mind, they impute their cowardice either to fate or to the stars; for they are unwilling that what they acknowledge to be evil should be their own. But the Christian—what like to this? No one is ashamed, no one repents, save only of not having been such before; if he is branded, he glories; if he is accused, he does not defend himself; when questioned, he even confesses of his own accord; when condemned, he gives thanks. What kind of evil is this, which has none of the natural marks of evil—fear, shame, evasion, repentance, lamentation? What kind of evil is this, of which the accused rejoices, of which the accusation is a thing desired and the penalty a felicity? You cannot call it madness, you who are convicted of ignorance.
If, in short, it is certain that we are the most guilty of all, why are we treated by you yourselves otherwise than our peers, that is, the rest of the guilty, when for the same offence the same treatment ought to intervene? Whatever we are called, when others are so called, they use both their own mouth and the pleading of a hired advocate to commend their innocence; the faculty of answering and of pleading lies open, since it is not even lawful for men to be condemned wholly undefended and unheard. But to Christians alone nothing is permitted to be said that might clear the cause, that might defend the truth, that might keep the judge from being unjust; but this alone is looked for which is necessary to the public hatred: the confession of the name, not the examination of a crime—
whereas, if you take cognizance of any guilty man, you are not content, the moment he has confessed the name of murderer or sacrilegious person or incestuous person or public enemy—to speak of the charges laid against us—to pronounce sentence, unless you also exact the attendant circumstances: the quality of the deed, the number, the place, the time, the accomplices, the associates. But concerning us there is nothing of the kind, though it ought equally to be wrung out—since it is falsely bruited about—how many infanticides each one had already tasted, how many acts of incest he had covered in darkness, what cooks, what dogs had been present. Oh, how great the glory of that governor, if he had dug out someone who had already devoured a hundred infants! But we find that even inquiry into us is forbidden.
For Pliny the Younger, when he was governing a province, having condemned certain Christians and driven others from their rank, being nevertheless disturbed by their very multitude as to what he should do for the rest, consulted the emperor Trajan, alleging that, apart from their obstinacy in not sacrificing, he had discovered nothing else concerning their rites than meetings before dawn to sing to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves together by a discipline forbidding murder, adultery, fraud, treachery, and the other crimes. Then Trajan wrote back that men of this kind were indeed not to be sought out, but that when brought forward they ought to be punished. O sentence confounded by its own necessity! He denies that they are to be sought out, as though innocent, and commands them to be punished, as though guilty. He spares and he rages, he winks and he takes notice.
Why, O censorship, do you thus entangle yourself? If you condemn, why do you not also inquire? If you do not inquire, why do you not also absolve? For the tracking down of robbers a military post is allotted throughout all the provinces; against those guilty of treason and against public enemies every man is a soldier: inquiry is extended even to the associates, even to the accomplices. The Christian alone it is not lawful to inquire into, but it is lawful to bring him forward—as though inquiry were to accomplish anything other than the bringing forward. You condemn, therefore, one brought forward whom no one wished to be sought out; who, I suppose, has now deserved punishment not because he is guilty, but because, though not to be sought out, he was found.
And so, not even in this do you act towards us according to the form of judging evildoers: that, whereas to the rest who deny you apply torments to make them confess, to Christians alone you apply them to make them deny; whereas, if it were an evil, we indeed should deny it, while you would compel us by torments to confess. For you would not on that account think that crimes need not be sought out by examinations, because you were sure they were committed on the confession of the name—you who today, concerning a confessed murderer, knowing what murder is, nonetheless wring out the order of the deed committed. How much more perversely do you, when you presume our crimes from the confession of the name, compel us by torments to fall away from that confession, so that by denying the name we may equally deny the crimes too which, from the confession of the name, you had presumed.
But, I suppose, you do not wish us to perish, whom you believe to be the worst of men. For thus you are wont to say to a murderer, 'Deny,' and to order the sacrilegious man to be torn if he persists in confessing. If you do not so act towards us as guilty, then you judge us to be the most innocent, since, as though most innocent, you do not wish us to persevere in that confession which you know must be condemned by you of necessity, not of justice. A man cries out, 'I am a Christian.' He says what he is; you wish to hear what he is not. Presidents for the wringing out of truth, concerning us alone you labour to hear a lie. 'I am this,' he says, 'which you ask whether I be. Why do you torture me perversely? I confess, and you torture; what would you do if I denied?' Plainly, when others deny, you do not readily grant them credence:
but us, if we deny, you at once believe. Let this perversity be suspect to you, lest some force lie hidden in secret which supplies you against the form, against the nature of judging, and against the very laws themselves. For, unless I am mistaken, the laws bid evildoers to be dug out, not to be hidden; they prescribe that the confessed be condemned, not absolved. This the decrees of the senate, this the mandates of the emperors define. This empire, whose ministers you are, is a civil, not a tyrannical dominion. For among tyrants torments were applied even as a penalty; among you they are moderated to inquiry alone. Keep for them your own law, which requires them only up to confession; and now, if they are anticipated by confession, they will be idle—there is need of sentence;
the guilty man must be cancelled by paying the debt of his penalty, not exempted from it. In short, no one is eager to absolve him. It is not lawful to wish this; therefore no one is compelled to deny. You reckon the Christian a man guilty of all crimes, an enemy of the gods, of the emperors, of the laws, of morals, of all nature; and you compel him to deny, that you may absolve one whom you could not absolve unless he denied. You prevaricate against the laws: you wish him, then, to deny that he is guilty, that you may make him innocent, and that indeed against his will, and no longer guilty even as to the past. Whence this perversity, that you do not even reflect upon this too, that one who confesses of his own accord is rather to be believed than one who denies under compulsion? Or lest, having been forced to deny, he should not have denied in good faith, and, once absolved on the spot, should there behind the tribunal laugh at your rivalry, a Christian again?
Since, therefore, in all things you dispose of us otherwise than the rest of the guilty, straining after this one end, that we may be excluded from that name—for we are excluded if we do what non-Christians do—you can understand that it is not any crime that is in the cause, but the name, which a certain rationale of a rival working pursues, doing this first of all: that men should be unwilling to know for certain what they know for certain that they do not know. Therefore they both believe about us things that are not proved, and are unwilling that inquiry be made, lest it be proved that those things are not which they had preferred to have believed, so that the name of that rival rationale, hostile through crimes presumed, not proved, may be condemned on its own confession alone.
Therefore we are tortured when we confess, and punished when we persevere, and absolved when we deny, because it is the battle of a name. In short, why do you recite from the tablet that man as 'a Christian'? Why not also 'a murderer,' if the Christian is a murderer? Why not also 'incestuous,' or whatever else you believe us to be? In our case alone are you ashamed or grieved to pronounce the very names of the crimes? If 'Christian' is the name of no crime, it is very foolish that the crime should be of the name alone. Why is it that most men so, with closed eyes, dash into hatred of it, that while bearing good testimony to someone they mingle in the reproach of the name? 'Gaius Seius is a good man, only that he is a Christian.' Likewise another:
'I marvel that Lucius Titius, a wise man, has suddenly become a Christian.' No one reflects whether Gaius is good and Lucius prudent for the reason that he is a Christian, or a Christian for the reason that he is prudent and good. They praise what they know, they blame what they do not know, and that which they know they invade by that which they do not know—though it were juster to prejudge the hidden by the manifest than to precondemn the manifest by the hidden. Others, whom before this name they had known as vagrant, base, wicked, brand from that very thing which they praise: in the blindness of hatred they dash into a testimony in his favour: 'What a woman! how wanton, how gay! What a youth! how much a rake, how much a lover! They have become Christians.' Thus the name is imputed to their reformation.
Some even strike bargains with this hatred at the cost of their own advantages, content with the injury, so long as they may not have at home what they hate. A husband, no longer jealous, has cast out a wife now chaste; a father, formerly forbearing, has disowned a son now submissive; a master, once mild, has banished from his sight a slave now faithful: as each one is reformed by this name, he gives offence. The good is not worth so much as the hatred of Christians. Now therefore, if it is a hatred of the name, what guilt is there in names, what accusation of mere words, unless perchance some sound of a name rings barbarous, or ill-omened, or abusive, or unchaste? But 'Christian,' so far as the interpretation goes, is derived from 'anointing.' And even when it is wrongly pronounced by you 'Chrestian'—
for the exact knowledge of the name is not even in your possession—it is compounded of sweetness or kindliness. Thus in harmless men there is hated even a harmless name. But, it is objected, the sect is hated in the name of its very founder. What is new, if some school induces upon its followers a surname derived from its master? Are not the philosophers named after their authors—Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? And also, from the places of their gatherings and stations, Stoics and Academics? Likewise physicians after Erasistratus, and grammarians after Aristarchus, and even cooks after Apicius? And yet the profession of a name transmitted, together with its institution, from the institutor offends no one.
Plainly, if anyone shall prove the sect to be evil, and so its author too to be evil, he will prove the name also to be evil, deserving of hatred on account of the guilt of the sect and its author; and therefore, before the hatred of the name, it was fitting first to recognize the sect from its author, or the author from the sect. But now, the inquiry into and acknowledgement of both being neglected, the name is fastened upon, the name is assailed; and mere sound precondemns a sect unknown and an author unknown, because they are named, not because they are refuted.
And so, having as it were prefaced these things to expose the injustice of the public hatred against us, I will now take my stand upon the cause of our innocence; nor shall I merely refute the charges brought against us, but I shall hurl them back upon the very men who bring them, so that from this too people may know that there is not in Christians what they do not know to be in themselves, and at the same time that the accusers may blush -- I will not say the worst men accusing the best, but, as they would have it, accusing their own equals. We shall reply to each of the charges: to the things we are said to commit in secret -- the very things which we find them committing openly -- the charges on account of which we are reckoned criminal, or foolish, or worthy of condemnation, or fit for mockery.
But since, when our truth meets every charge, the authority of the laws is finally set up as a barrier against it -- so that either it is said that nothing may be reconsidered after laws have been passed, or that necessity of obedience is preferred to truth against our will -- I shall first join issue with you concerning the laws, as with the guardians of the laws. Now first of all, when you harshly lay it down by saying, 'You are not permitted to exist!' and prescribe this without any more humane reconsideration, you profess violence and an unjust tyranny from your citadel of power, if you deny that a thing is permitted merely because you will it so, and not because it ought not to have been permitted. But if you refuse to permit it because it ought not to be permitted, then without doubt that ought not to be permitted which is done wrongly.
If I discover that to be good which your law has forbidden, can it not, on that very presumption, fail to forbid me -- since, if it were evil, it would rightly forbid it? If your law has erred, it was, I think, conceived by a human being; for it did not fall down from heaven. Do you wonder that a man could either err in framing a law, or come to his senses in repealing one? Did not even the laws of Lycurgus himself, when amended by the Lacedaemonians, inflict such grief upon their author that he passed judgment on himself by starvation in solitude? And do you not yourselves daily, as your experience sheds light upon the darkness of antiquity, hew down and cut away that whole old and squalid forest of laws with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts?
Did not Severus, most steadfast of princes, only yesterday abolish, after their old age of so great authority, those utterly worthless Papian laws, which compel men to beget children before the Julian law allows a marriage to be contracted? Moreover, there were laws by which men condemned in debt were cut to pieces by their creditors; yet afterward, by public consent, that cruelty was struck out, and the capital penalty was turned into a mark of disgrace. The introduced proscription of goods chose rather to make a man's blood mantle with shame than to shed it. How many laws still lie hidden that need cleansing away by you! Laws which neither the number of their years nor the dignity of their founders commends, but equity alone; and therefore, when they are recognized as unjust, they are deservedly condemned, though they themselves condemn. In what way do we call them unjust? Nay rather, if they punish a mere name, we call them even foolish;
but if it is deeds they punish, why do they punish on the strength of a name alone deeds which in the case of others they defend as proved from the act committed, not from a name? I am incestuous: why do they not investigate? An infanticide: why do they not extort a confession? I commit some offense against the gods, against the Caesars: why am I not given a hearing, I who have wherewith to clear myself? No law forbids the examination of what it forbids to be committed, since neither does a judge justly avenge unless he learns that what is not permitted has been committed, nor does a citizen faithfully obey the law while ignorant of the nature of that which the law avenges. No law owes the assurance of its own justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Otherwise a law is suspect that does not wish to prove itself, and it is wicked if, unproved, it lords it over men.
To reconsider something concerning the origin of laws of this kind: there was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by an emperor unless approved by the senate. Marcus Aemilius knew this in the case of his god Alburnus. This too tells in favor of our cause, that among you divinity is weighed by human judgment. Unless a god pleases a man, he shall not be a god; a man will now have to be propitious to a god. Tiberius, therefore, in whose time the Christian name entered the world, when it had been reported to him from Syria Palaestina that the truth of that very divinity had there been revealed, laid the matter before the senate, with the prerogative of his own vote. The senate, because it had not itself approved it, rejected it; Caesar held to his opinion, threatening danger to the accusers of the Christians.
Consult your own records; there you will find that Nero was the first to rage with the Caesarian sword against this sect, especially when it was arising at Rome. But in such a dedicator of our condemnation we even glory. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing but some great good could have been condemned by Nero. Domitian too had attempted it, a portion of Nero in cruelty; but, inasmuch as he was also a man, he easily checked what he had begun, even restoring those whom he had banished. Such have our persecutors ever been -- unjust, impious, base -- men whom you yourselves have been accustomed to condemn, and whose condemned victims you have been wont to restore. But out of so many princes since then, down to the present day, men wise in things divine and human, bring forward a single vanquisher of the Christians!
But we, on the contrary, bring forward a protector, if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most grave of emperors, be sought out, in which he attests that the well-known Germanic drought was dispelled by a rain obtained, as it chanced, through the prayers of Christian soldiers. Just as he did not openly remove the penalty from men of this kind, so in another way he openly scattered it abroad, adding indeed a still more hideous condemnation upon the accusers. What sort of laws, then, are these which impious and unjust men alone enforce against us -- base, savage, vain, senseless men -- laws which Trajan in part frustrated by forbidding that Christians be sought out; laws which no Hadrian, though an investigator of all curiosities, no Vespasian, though a subduer of the Jews, no Pius, no Verus, ever imposed?
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Surely the worst men would more readily be adjudged fit for uprooting by the best of men, as by their rivals, than by their own comrades. Now let those most religious protectors and avengers of the laws and of ancestral institutions answer, if you please, concerning their own fidelity and honor and obedience toward the ordinances of their forefathers -- whether they have fallen away from none, whether they have strayed from any, whether they have not blotted out those very things that were most necessary and most fitting to discipline.
For those laws have passed away which curbed extravagance and ambition -- laws which ordered that not more than a hundred asses be entered in the reckoning for a dinner, and that not more than one hen be served, and that not fattened; laws which removed from the senate a patrician who had possessed ten pounds of silver, as one guilty of a great display of ambition; which straightway demolished theaters that were rising for the corruption of morals; which did not allow the insignia of high rank and honorable birth to be usurped rashly or with impunity. For I see dinners now to be called 'hundred-thousand-sesterce' feasts, reckoned at a hundred thousand sesterces apiece; and I see the silver mines drained to make platters -- it is a small thing if they belong to senators and not to freedmen, or even to men whose backs are still torn by the whip. I see theaters too, and neither single ones enough, nor uncovered ones.
For lest even in winter unchaste pleasure should grow cold, the Lacedaemonians were the first to devise the cloak for the games. I see too that among matrons and prostitutes no distinction of dress is left. As regards women, indeed, those ancestral institutions have also fallen which used to safeguard modesty and sobriety, when no woman knew gold except upon a single finger, which her betrothed had pledged with the nuptial ring; when women were kept so far from wine that a matron starved herself to death because she had unsealed the compartments of the wine-cellar; and, indeed, under Romulus, when a woman who had touched wine was slain with impunity by her husband Metennius. For this reason there was even a necessity of offering kisses to kinsmen, that they might be judged by the breath.
Where is that happiness of marriages, prospering surely by good morals, whereby for nearly six hundred years from the founding of the city no household drew up a bill of divorce? But now among women there is no light limb for gold, no free kiss for wine, and divorce indeed has become even a thing to be wished for, as though it were the fruit of marriage. Even concerning your own gods, the provident decrees that your fathers had made, you their most obsequious sons have rescinded. Father Liber, with his mysteries, the consuls, on the authority of the senate, expelled not only from the city but from all Italy.
Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates, with their Cynocephalus, were forbidden to be brought into the Capitol -- that is, driven from the council of the gods -- by the consuls Piso and Gabinius, who were certainly not Christians; and they abolished them, even overthrowing their altars, restraining the vices of base and idle superstitions. But you, having restored these, have conferred the highest majesty upon them. Where is your religion, where the veneration owed to your ancestors? In dress, in food, in furniture, in feeling, in your very speech, in short, you have renounced your forefathers. You are ever praising antiquity, yet you live anew from day to day. By this it is shown that, while you depart from the good institutions of your ancestors, you retain and guard those things which you ought not to have, seeing that you have not guarded those which you ought.
Moreover, as to that which you seem most faithfully to guard as handed down from your fathers -- the matter in which you have chiefly marked out Christians as guilty of transgression -- I mean the zeal for worshiping the gods, concerning which antiquity most greatly erred, although you have rebuilt Roman altars for Serapis, although you now sacrifice your frenzies to Italian Bacchus -- I shall show in its proper place that this too is despised and neglected and destroyed by you, against the authority of your ancestors. For now I shall reply to that notorious charge of secret crimes, that I may clear a way for myself to more manifest matters. We are said to be most wicked, on account of the sacrament of infanticide and the eating thereof, and the incest that follows the banquet, which the dogs who overturn the lamps -- procurers, that is, of the darkness -- procure for the shameless veiling of our impious lusts.
Yet we are always so charged, and you take no pains to unearth what has for so long been charged against us. Therefore either unearth it, if you believe it, or cease to believe it, you who have not unearthed it! From your own dissimulation the presumption is laid down that there is nothing there, seeing that you yourselves do not dare to unearth it. You command the executioner to do a far different service upon the Christians: not that they should tell what they do, but that they should deny what they are. The census of this discipline, as we have already stated, dates from Tiberius. Truth began together with the hatred of itself; as soon as it appeared, it was made an enemy. It has as many foes as there are strangers, and, indeed, most properly out of rivalry the Jews, out of extortion the soldiers, and by their very nature even our own households. Daily we are besieged, daily we are betrayed, and most of all we are set upon in our very gatherings and assemblies.
Who ever came upon an infant wailing in such a manner? Who has kept for the judge the bloody mouths of Cyclopes and Sirens, just as he had found them? Who has detected upon our wives any unclean traces? Who, when he had discovered such crimes, concealed them, or sold his silence, dragging along the very men themselves? If we are always hidden, when was that betrayed which we commit? Nay, by whom could it be betrayed? Not by the guilty parties themselves, surely, since by the very form of all mysteries the pledge of silence is due. The Samothracian and Eleusinian mysteries are kept silent: how much more such things as would, if betrayed meanwhile, provoke even human chastisement, while the divine is kept in reserve! If, then, they are not their own betrayers, it follows that strangers are.
And whence do strangers get their knowledge, since even impious initiations always keep off the profane and guard against onlookers? Unless perhaps the impious are less fearful. The nature of rumor is known to all. It is your own saying: 'Rumor, an evil than which nothing else is swifter.' Why is rumor an evil? Because it is swift? Because it is an informer? Or because it is most often a liar? Rumor which, not even when it brings something true, is without the vice of falsehood, since it detracts from, adds to, and alters the truth. What of this, that its very condition is such that it endures only when it lies, and lives only so long as it does not prove itself? For, once it has proved itself, it ceases to be, and, as if having discharged its office of announcing, hands over the matter; and thenceforth the matter is held fast, the matter is named. Nor does anyone say, for example, 'They say this was done at Rome,' or,