Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] We have set out these things according to the threefold division of divinity as a whole, whichever facts were better known or more striking, so it may seem we have answered enough on the physical class of gods, the poetic, and the national. [2] But since all this superstition no longer belongs to the philosophers, nor the poets, nor the peoples who handed it down, but to the ruling Romans, who seized it and built their own authority on it, we must now enter another, wider tract of human error — indeed, cut down a whole forest, one that truth has been overshadowed in on every side by seeds and vices of superstition sown thick. [3] Now Varro divided the gods of the Romans three ways: into the certain, the uncertain, and the select. What vanity! For what business did they have with the uncertain, if they already had the certain? [4] Unless perhaps they wanted, with Athenian stupor, to hedge their bets — for at Athens too there is an altar inscribed "To the unknown gods." Does anyone, then, worship what he does not know? [5] Then again, if they had the certain, they ought to have been content with them and not craved the select as well — in which very fact they are caught out as irreligious: for if gods are picked out like so many onions, then those not picked are pronounced rejects.
[6] We, for our part, recognize two classes of Roman gods: the common and the proper — that is, those they share with everyone else, and those they have invented entirely for themselves. [7] And are these not called the "public" gods and the "imported" ones? Their very altars teach it: the imported ones at the shrine of Carna, the public ones on the Palatine. [8] Since the common gods are already covered, whether under the physical or the mythical heading, we have already dealt with them under those descriptions. [9] If it please us to speak of the proper gods, the Romans' own, we must marvel at that third class — the home-grown gods — since no other nation has ever invented so much superstition purely for itself. [10] We divide these into two kinds: some taken up from men, others conceived purely in the mind. [11] Since, then, the same pretext of consecrating the dead serves them here too — as though for merits of life — we must, of necessity, throw back the same answer: that not one of these was ever worth so much.
[12] They believed Aeneas, whom they call "the Needy Father," a soldier never once glorious, crippled by a stone. And as common and doglike as that weapon was, just so ignoble was the wound. But Aeneas is found out, moreover, as a traitor to his own country — Aeneas quite as much as Antenor. [13] And if they refuse to admit this, then certainly Aeneas, with his fatherland in flames, abandoned his comrades — a man to be measured against a Punic woman, who did not desert her husband Hasdrubal when, through Aeneas's cowardice, he was on his knees begging mercy of the enemy, but instead, snatching up her children, judged it wiser to keep her looks and her father to herself not by flight, but by throwing herself into the flames of burning Carthage, as into the embrace of her dying homeland. [14] Aeneas the Dutiful — for the sake of one small boy and one decrepit old man, while Priam and Astyanax were left to their fate? Yet by that very measure he ought to be more detested by Romans, who swear their oaths against their own children and wives and every pledge of their own, for the safety of their rulers and rulers' houses. [15] They consecrate the son of Venus, and Vulcan knowingly allows it, and Juno concedes it. [16] If the porters of their own parents get to sit in heaven, why are the young men of Argos not counted gods instead, seeing that, so their mother might commit no sacrilege at the sacred rites, they hauled her cart yoked to it more than humanly? [17] Why is she not rather the goddess — she who was more devoted — the daughter who nursed her own father from her own breasts as he starved in prison? [18] What else is there to Aeneas's glory, except that he was nowhere to be seen at the battle of Laurentum? Or perhaps, true to his usual habit, he simply fled the field like a deserter once again.
[19] Romulus too became a god after death. If it is because he founded a City, why are not other founders of cities made gods too, right down to women who founded them? Indeed, Romulus both killed his own brother and stole other men's virgins by trickery. Is that why he is a god, why he is Quirinus — because that is when the parents of the raped got to wail?
[20] What did Sterculus do to deserve divinity? If he was so diligent in enriching the fields with dung, Augeas supplied more manure than he ever did. [21] If Faunus's son Picus was being hauled into court, having been struck out of his mind, he deserved treatment rather than consecration. [22] If Faunus's daughter excelled in chastity, to the point that she would not even keep company among men — whether from savagery, or awareness of her own deformity, or shame at her father's madness — how much more worthy is Penelope of the title "Good Goddess," who, lodged among so many worthless suitors, kept her besieged chastity intact and defended it? [23] There is also Sanctus, who won a shrine from King Plotius for his hospitality: Ulysses too could have granted you one more god, out of the most generous Alcinous.
X.