Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Now I should like the most religious guardians and avengers of the laws and of ancestral institutions to answer for their own good faith, honor, and obedience toward the decrees of their forefathers — whether they have deserted none of them, strayed from none of them, let slip none of the necessary and most fitting points of that discipline. What became of those laws that once curbed extravagance and ostentation — the ones that allowed no more than a hundred coppers to be spent on a dinner, and no more than a single chicken to be served, and that not even fattened; the ones that struck a patrician from the senate roll, as guilty of gross extravagance, for owning ten pounds of silver; the ones that tore down theaters the moment they arose to corrupt public morals; the ones that did not allow the badges of rank and honorable birth to be usurped carelessly or with impunity? For I see dinners now costing hundreds — hundreds of sesterces, that is — and I see silver mined and poured out onto serving dishes, and it's no small matter if these belong not to senators but to freedmen, or even to men whose backs have not yet worn out the whip. I see theaters, too, that are not content to be single, nor bare. For fear that shameless pleasure might grow cold even in winter, the Spartans were the first to invent the cloak for the games. And I see that between respectable matrons and streetwalkers no difference of dress has been left at all.
Where women are concerned, even those institutions of the forefathers that once championed modesty and sobriety have fallen away — the days when no woman knew gold except on a single finger, the one her betrothed had pledged with the ring of engagement; when women abstained from wine so absolutely that a matron was starved to death by her own kin for having broken open the seals on the wine-cellar, and under Romulus a woman who had so much as touched wine was killed with impunity by her husband Metennius. For that reason even kissing one's relatives was a kind of necessity, so that they could be judged by the smell of one's breath. Where now is that happiness of marriages, prospering as it did precisely from good morals, thanks to which, for almost six hundred years from the founding of the city, no household filed for divorce? But now among women there is no limb too light to bear gold, no kiss too free of wine, and divorce is now actually a thing to be wished for, as if it were the very fruit of marriage.
Even where your own gods are concerned, the very things your fathers had prudently decreed, you yourselves, so very obedient, have overturned. Father Liber, with his mysteries, the consuls and the senate's authority drove out — not just from the city, but across the entirety of the Italian peninsula. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates with their dog-headed Anubis were forbidden entry to the Capitol — that is, driven out of the very senate-house of the gods — by the consuls Piso and Gabinius, men who were certainly no Christians, who even tore down their altars, curbing the vices of shameful, idle superstitions. And you, by restoring these gods, have conferred on them the highest majesty.
Where now is the religion, where the reverence you owe to your ancestors? In dress, in diet, in furnishing, in feeling, even in the way you talk, you have cast off your forefathers. You are forever praising antiquity, while living day to day on novelty. And this shows that, in departing from the good institutions of your ancestors, you are keeping and guarding exactly what you should not, while failing to keep what you should. And as for the one thing you still seem most faithfully to guard as handed down from your fathers, the one point on which you have chiefly branded Christians as guilty of transgression — I mean the cult of the gods — that is precisely where antiquity went most badly astray, even though you have rebuilt altars to Serapis as if he were Roman now, even though you now offer your Bacchic frenzies to an Italian Bacchus; I will show in its proper place that this cult is in fact despised, neglected, and destroyed by you yourselves, against the very authority of your ancestors. For now, though, I will answer that charge of infamous secret crimes, so as to clear my path toward the more open charges.