Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
This, then, is why Christians are branded public enemies: because they offer the emperors no empty, lying, or reckless honors, because as men of the true religion they celebrate even the emperors' festivals with conscience rather than with license. A splendid duty, no doubt—hauling hearths and couches out into the public street, feasting block by block, defacing the city with the look of a tavern, turning wine into mud, racing about in mobs to commit assaults, indecencies, and the enticements of lust! Is public joy really expressed through public disgrace? Do such doings really suit the solemn days of princes, when they wouldn't suit any other day? Those who observe self-discipline out of respect for Caesar are the very ones who cast it off for Caesar's sake, and moral license will pass for piety, and religion will be counted an occasion for debauchery! Oh, how justly we deserve condemnation! For we, sober and chaste and upright, refuse to strike out the emperors' vows and rejoicings—why? Because on the festive day we do not shade our doorposts with laurel, nor turn day into night with lamps. It's a fine and honorable thing, on a public holiday's demand, to dress your house up like some brand-new brothel!
Still, I would like—regarding this offense too, this crime of second-degree treason for which we Christians are charged, namely not celebrating the Caesars' solemnities along with you, in the manner that neither modesty nor decency nor chastity would permit, a manner which occasion for pleasure rather than any worthy reasoning has recommended—I would like to demonstrate your own good faith and honesty in the matter, in case it turns out that even here people worse than Christians are caught out, people who don't want us reckoned Romans at all but rather enemies of the Roman princes. I appeal to the Quirites themselves, to the native-born plebs of the seven hills itself: does that Roman tongue of theirs ever spare a Caesar of its own? The Tiber is witness to that, and so are the schools that train the beast-fighters. And if only nature had spread over our breasts some transparent, glass-like covering, so that the hearts within could be seen engraved with the image of whatever new Caesar happens to be presiding over the show, distributing the largess—even at that very hour when the crowd shouts: "May Jupiter add years to your years, out of what remains of ours!" A Christian no more knows how to say such a thing than he knows how to wish for a new Caesar.
"But that's just the mob," you say. Mob though they are, still Romans—and no one clamors more loudly for Christians' blood than the mob does. Certainly the other ranks are religious out of a sense of duty, out of genuine conviction; nothing hostile breathes from the senate itself, from the equestrian order, from the camps, from the very palace! Where did the Cassiuses and the Nigers and the Albinuses come from? Where did those come from who lay siege to Caesar between two laurel groves? Where did those come from who practice their wrestling holds for the purpose of throttling him? Where did those come from who burst armed into the palace, bolder than any of the notorious Sigeriuses and Parthenii of old? From Romans, unless I'm mistaken—that is, from non-Christians. And yet all those very men, right up to the moment their treachery erupted, were offering sacrifices for the emperor's welfare and swearing by his genius, some outwardly, some in secret—and it was Christians, of all people, whom they called public enemies. And as for those who are daily now being exposed as accomplices or cheerleaders of criminal factions—the surviving gleanings left over after the vintage of parricides has been gathered in—the very men who had barricaded their doorposts with the freshest, leafiest laurels, who had wreathed their entryways in mist with the tallest, brightest lamps, who had claimed the forum for themselves with the most luxurious, most extravagant couches—they did this not to celebrate the public rejoicing, but to rehearse their own private wishes ahead of time under cover of someone else's festival, and to inaugurate, as an example and image of their own hope, a changing of the name in their hearts from one prince to another.
That same service is performed by all who go running to astrologers, fortune-tellers, augurs, and magicians to inquire about the emperor's fate—arts which Christians will not employ even for their own private concerns, knowing them to have been handed down by fallen angels and forbidden by God. But who has need to pry into the emperor's welfare, except someone plotting or wishing something against it, or hoping for and awaiting something after it? For one does not consult about loved ones with the same mindset one uses about masters. Anxious curiosity about the blood one shares is one thing; anxious curiosity about one's servitude is quite another.