Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
We have arrived at the hour of the lamps, at the service of the dog, and the inventions of darkness. Here I am afraid I may fall short: for what comparable thing can I hold against you? Well then, go ahead and praise the scheme of our modest incest — how we contrived a treacherous, adulterous night, so as not to defile either daylight or a genuine night; how we thought it right to spare even earthly lamps their part in it; how we even trick our own conscience, since whatever we do, we suspect it too, if we choose. But your incestuous acts, by your own freedom, enjoy full daylight and full night and the whole conscious witness of heaven — and, more fortunate still, while you mingle your incest openly with the whole sky looking on, only you yourselves remain in the dark about it; whereas we can recognize our own crimes even in the dark.
Clearly the Persians, as Ctesias records, freely have relations with their mothers, both knowingly and without any horror of it. And the Macedonians too plainly make a public practice of what they approve — for when the drama of Oedipus first came onstage, his eyes gouged out, they greeted it with laughter and mockery. The startled tragic actor, pulling off his mask, said, 'What, my lords, have I displeased you?' The Macedonians answered, 'No, indeed, you did splendidly — but the playwright was an utter fool if he made this up, or Oedipus was out of his mind if he really did it' — and then one turned to another and said, 'Drive him — into his mother.' But what is one nation, or two, against the whole world's stain? For we have polluted every land, we have fouled every ocean. Show me, then, some nation free of the vices that drag the whole human race into incest — if any nation, by the very necessity of intercourse, of age and sex, not to mention lust and excess, is free of it, that will be the one that lacks incest; if any is set apart from the human condition by some special nature, so that it is exposed neither to ignorance, error, nor accident, that alone will be able to stand more firmly in answer to Christians.
Consider, then, how lust drifts among your errors and your winds, if you lack peoples whom the broad shoals and rough seas of error might drive into this crime. To begin with, when you expose your own infants to a stranger's pity, or hand them over in adoption to better-off parents, do you forget how much material for incest you are furnishing, how much opportunity you are opening up for accidents? Surely, by some rule of stricter discipline, or at least out of regard for such outcomes, you restrain your lust wherever you are, at home or abroad, so that the scattering of your seed and lust's leaping about does not, in ignorance, produce children whom either the parents themselves afterward, or other children, might encounter — since even the ordinary restraint of age has been shut out by lust? However many adulteries, however many seductions, however many acts of public lust under a settled or a roving label, so many minglings of blood, so many entanglements of kin, so many pathways from there into incest. This is exactly the source from which the mimes and comic playwrights draw their endless supply of plots; from this source, too, that very tragedy — no mere fiction — broke out, the one judged by Fuscianus, prefect of the city.
A boy, honorably born, through his companions' chance carelessness, wandered past the doorway; a passerby, in transit, drew him along the road, and he was lost from home. A little Greek who had raised him, or perhaps had caught him at the threshold in the usual Greek fashion as he wandered in, took him in. From there, his age disguised, he was carried off to Rome and put up in a slave market. An unsuspecting father bought him and made use of the Greek; then, as is customary, once he was grown, the master assigned the young man to the fields and to chains. There, meanwhile, his old tutor and nurse were themselves paying a penalty of servitude. The whole affair is laid out before them; they compare, in turn, how each had come to this end — the one, that his foster son had perished in boyhood; the other, that he too had been lost since boyhood, though by the same turn of events: born at Rome, in an honorable house — and perhaps he recognized certain marks as well. And so, by God's will, it came about that so great a stain was exposed to the world; the spirit is shaken by daylight, the dates line up with the ages; the eyes, too, recall something of the features, certain distinguishing marks are noted on the body. The masters — or rather, by now, the parents — are driven on only by the diligence of an inquiry carried further; the slave-dealer is tracked down, and found, to their misfortune. Once the crime was uncovered, the parents took their own lives by the noose; the estate the prefect assigned to the son, wretchedly surviving — not as an inheritance, but as wages for his violation and incest. One example alone should be enough of this public eruption of the sort of crimes that lie hidden among you. Nothing in human affairs happens only once; only a single instance can, plainly, be dug up and exposed. As for the sacraments of our religion, which you level accusations at, I think, you have your own equivalents even among what are not sacraments at all!
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