Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Now I hurry on to filthier matters. Your own authors were not ashamed to make Larentina public knowledge. This woman was a hired harlot — whether while she was Romulus's nurse (and so called "the she-wolf," because she was a harlot), or while she was Hercules's mistress, and by then Hercules already dead, that is, already a god. [2] For they say that his temple-keeper, playing dice alone by chance in the shrine, to conjure up for himself a partner he did not have, played with one hand in Hercules's name and the other in his own: [3] if he himself won, he would take a little dinner and a little harlot out of Hercules's collection box; but if Hercules won — that is, the other hand — he would offer the same to Hercules. [4] Hercules's hand won: that too could be added as a thirteenth labor to his list of twelve. [5] The temple-keeper paid out the dinner to Hercules, and hired Larentina the harlot; the fire dined — the very fire that dissolves even Hercules's own... the whole altar consumed everything. [6] Larentina slept alone in the shrine; and the woman, straight out of the brothel trade, boasts that she was serviced by Hercules in a dream — and no doubt she could suffer that much in a dream, given what she was dwelling on in her mind. [7] As she came out of the shrine early the next morning, a certain lad — a kind of second-hand "Hercules," one might say — fell for her, [8] ...that this had been told to him by Hercules himself, that indeed... a centaur — for it was not permitted to go unpunished... he even writes her down as his heir. [9] Soon she... having pursued through Hercules... a field... divinity, and to her own daughters as well, whom she also made heirs... [10] the divine Larentina, worthy of the Romans' own divine powers... alone dear to Hercules out of all his wives, for she alone was rich... like Ceres, who found favor once dead!
[11] With so many precedents and... who could not be affirmed a god? Who, in the end, ever raised a controversy over Antinous's divinity, on the grounds that Ganymede was handsomer, or dearer to his lover? [12] Among you heaven lies open to the dead; you drive a highway from the underworld clear up to the stars; harlots climb up there right and left — lest you think you are granting your kings any great favor!
XI.