Apology 1–8

Rulers of the Roman Empire, seated as you are for judgment in an open and lofty place, at almost the very summit of the state: if you are not permitted to examine openly and to inquire face to face what is clearly the truth in the case of the Christians; if in this kind of case alone your authority is afraid or ashamed to inquire in public with the care that justice requires; if, finally, as happened recently, hostility to this school, kept too busy in domestic tribunals, blocks the way to its defense, then let the truth be allowed to reach your ears at least by the hidden path of silent writing. It makes no entreaty for its cause, because it is not surprised at its condition either. It knows that it lives as a stranger on earth, that among foreigners it easily finds enemies, but that its race, its home, its hope, its favor, and its rank are in heaven. One thing only it sometimes longs for: not to be condemned unknown. What do the laws, ruling in their own realm, lose here if it is heard? Will their power boast the more because they condemn the truth even after hearing it? But if they condemn it unheard, besides the odium of injustice they will also earn the suspicion of some guilty knowledge, since they refuse to hear what, once heard, they could not condemn. This, then, is the first ground we lay before you: the injustice of the hatred of the name of Christians. And this injustice is both aggravated and refuted by the very plea that seems to excuse it, namely ignorance. For what is more unjust than for people to hate what they do not know, even if the thing deserves hatred? For it deserves it only when it is known whether it deserves it. But when knowledge of its desert is lacking, how is the justice of the hatred defended? That justice must be proved not from the outcome but from knowledge. Since, then, people hate because they do not know what kind of thing it is they hate, why may it not be the kind of thing they ought not to hate? So we refute them on both counts, each from the other: that they are ignorant while they hate, and that they hate unjustly while they are ignorant. It is a proof of an ignorance which condemns the injustice even while it excuses it, that all who formerly hated because they did not know what they hated cease to hate as soon as they cease to be ignorant. From these Christians are made, plainly on the basis of what they have found out; and they begin to hate what they had been and to profess what they had hated; and they are as many as we are said to be. People cry out that the city is besieged; that there are Christians in the fields, in the forts, in the islands; they mourn, as if it were a loss, that every sex, age, condition, and even rank is going over to this name; and yet not even so do they rouse their minds to consider whether some hidden good is there. They will not allow themselves to suspect more rightly; they do not care to examine more closely. Here alone human curiosity grows sluggish. They love to be ignorant, while others rejoice to have learned. How much more would Anacharsis have censured these, the unwise judging the wise, than the unmusical judging musicians! They prefer not to know, because they already hate. So they prejudge that what they do not know is the very thing which, if they knew it, they could not hate; whereas, if no ground for hatred is found, it would surely be best to stop hating unjustly, and if the desert is established, not only would nothing be taken from the hatred, but more would be gained for persevering in it, with the authority of justice itself. “But,” someone says, “a thing is not good just because it converts many; for how many are trained for evil! how many desert to what is perverse!” Who denies it? Yet what is truly evil not even those whom it carries away dare to defend as good. Nature has steeped every evil in fear or in shame. Evildoers, in short, long to hide; they avoid appearing; they tremble when caught; they deny when accused; not even under torture do they confess easily or always; certainly when condemned they grieve. They reckon up against themselves the impulses of a bad mind, or they blame them on fate or the stars; for they do not want it to be their own, because they recognize it as evil. But what is there like this in a Christian? None of them is ashamed, none of them repents, except of not having been one earlier. If he is pointed out, he glories in it; if he is accused, he does not defend himself; when questioned he confesses, even of his own accord; when condemned he gives thanks. What sort of evil is this, which has none of the natural marks of evil, fear, shame, evasion, regret, lament? What! is this an evil, whose defendant rejoices? whose accusation is his prayer, and whose punishment his happiness? You cannot call it madness, you who stand convicted of not knowing it.

Again, if it is certain that we are the most guilty of people, why do you yourselves treat us differently from our peers, that is, from the other guilty, when the same guilt ought to meet the same treatment? Whatever we are charged with, when others are charged with it they use both their own mouths and hired advocates to commend their innocence. They are free to answer and to dispute, since it is not lawful for anyone to be condemned wholly undefended and unheard. But Christians alone are permitted to say nothing that clears their cause, that defends the truth, that keeps the judge from being unjust; all that is waited for is what public hatred needs: confession of the name, not investigation of the crime. Yet if you are trying any other guilty person, you are not at once satisfied to pronounce sentence when he confesses to the name of murderer, or temple-robber, or incestuous person, or public enemy (to speak of the charges laid against us), unless you also demand the particulars: the nature of the deed, how often, where, how, when, the accomplices, the partners. Nothing of the kind with us, though whatever is falsely spread abroad ought equally to be wrung out of us: how many murdered infants each had already tasted, how many acts of incest he had committed under cover of darkness, what cooks, what dogs were present. Oh, what glory for that governor, if he had unearthed someone who had already eaten a hundred infants! And yet we find that even inquiry into us has been forbidden. For Pliny the Younger, when he governed a province, having condemned some Christians and dislodged others from their stand, was nevertheless disturbed by their sheer number and consulted the emperor Trajan, then reigning, about what he should do for the future. He reported that, apart from their obstinate refusal to sacrifice, he had found out nothing else about their rites than meetings before dawn to sing to Christ and God and to bind themselves together in a discipline that forbids murder, adultery, fraud, treachery, and the other crimes. Trajan then wrote back that people of this kind were not to be sought out, but that if they were brought in they ought to be punished. O sentence confounded by necessity! He says they must not be sought out, as innocent, and orders them punished, as guilty. He spares and rages; he overlooks and punishes. Why do you entangle yourself, judgment? If you condemn, why not also inquire? If you do not inquire, why not also acquit? A military post is assigned by lot throughout all the provinces to track down bandits. Against those guilty of treason and public enemies every man is a soldier; the inquiry is extended even to partners and accomplices. The Christian alone may not be sought out, but he may be brought in, as though an inquiry would aim at anything else than bringing him in. So you condemn a man brought in whom no one wished to have sought; he has deserved punishment, I suppose, not because he is guilty, but because, though not to be sought, he was found. In this too you do not deal with us according to the procedure for judging criminals: to others who deny you apply torture to make them confess, to Christians alone to make them deny; whereas, if it were an evil, we would deny it and you would compel us by torture to confess. For you would not think that the crimes need not be investigated by examination just because you were sure from the confession of the name that they were committed, you who today, with a confessed murderer, though you know what murder is, nevertheless extract the details of the deed. All the more perverse, then, that when you presume our crimes from the confession of the name, you force us by torture to withdraw the confession, so that by denying the name we may at the same time deny the crimes too, which you had presumed from the confession of the name. But, I suppose, you do not want us to perish, whom you believe the worst of men. For this is how you usually say to a murderer, “Deny it!” and order a temple-robber to be torn if he persists in confessing! If you do not deal with us like this as guilty, then you judge us most innocent, since, as with the most innocent, you do not want us to persist in a confession which you know you must condemn from necessity, not from justice. A man cries out, “I am a Christian.” He says what he is; you want to hear what he is not. Governors appointed to extort the truth, from us alone you labor to hear a lie. “I am,” he says, “what you ask whether I am. Why do you torture me to say the opposite? I confess, and you torture: what would you do if I denied?” Plainly, when others deny you do not readily believe them; us, if we deny, you believe at once. Let this perversity be suspect to you, lest some hidden power be at work in secret which employs you against the form, against the nature of judging, and even against the laws themselves. For, unless I am mistaken, the laws order the wicked to be brought to light, not hidden; they prescribe that those who confess be condemned, not acquitted. This the decrees of the senate, this the mandates of the emperors define. This empire, whose ministers you are, is a civil, not a tyrannical, rule. For under tyrants torture was applied even as punishment; with you it is limited to examination. Keep your law for it up to the point where confession is necessary; and if it is anticipated by confession, torture will have nothing to do: sentence is what is needed; the guilty man must be discharged by paying the penalty he owes, not exempted from it. In short, no one is eager to acquit him; it is not lawful to wish it, and so no one is forced to deny. A Christian you think guilty of every crime, an enemy of the gods, the emperors, the laws, morals, and all nature, and yet you force him to deny, so that you may acquit one whom you could not acquit unless he denied. You betray the laws. You want him, then, to deny that he is guilty, so that you may make him innocent, and that against his will, and no longer guilty of the past. Where does this perversity come from, that you do not even consider that one who confesses freely should be believed rather than one who denies under force? Or that one compelled to deny may not have denied in good faith, and, once acquitted, may at once, just behind the tribunal, laugh at your rivalry, a Christian again? Since, then, you deal with us differently from other guilty persons in everything, striving for one thing only, that we be excluded from that name (for we are excluded if we do what non-Christians do), you can understand that what is at issue is not any crime but the name, which a certain rival power at work pursues, aiming first of all at this: that people should not wish to know for certain what they know for certain they do not know. So they both believe things about us that are not proved and refuse to have them investigated, lest what they prefer to have believed be proved untrue, so that the name hostile to that rival power may be condemned, with crimes presumed, not proved, on its own confession alone. That is why we are tortured when we confess, punished when we persevere, and acquitted when we deny: because the battle is over the name. Finally, why do you read out from your tablet that so-and-so is a Christian? Why not also a murderer? If a Christian is a murderer, why not also incestuous, or whatever else you believe us to be? With us alone are you ashamed or loath to pronounce the very names of crimes? If “Christian” is the name of no crime, it is a foul thing indeed if the only crime is the name.

What of this, that most people run blindly into hatred of the name in such a way that, even while giving someone a good testimony, they mix in a reproach for the name? “Gaius Seius is a good man, only he is a Christian.” Likewise another: “I am amazed that Lucius Titius, a wise man, has suddenly become a Christian.” No one stops to consider whether Gaius is good and Lucius prudent because he is a Christian, or a Christian because he is prudent and good. They praise what they know, they blame what they do not know, and they spoil what they know with what they do not know, when it would be more just to judge the hidden beforehand from the evident than to condemn the evident beforehand from the hidden. Others brand people whom they had known, before they took this name, as vagrant, worthless, and wicked, with the very thing they praise. In the blindness of hatred they stumble into commendation: “What a woman! how wanton, how gay! What a young man! how wanton, what a lover! They have become Christians!” So the name is blamed for the reform. Some even bargain with this hatred at the cost of their own interests, content to suffer loss so long as they do not have at home what they hate. A husband, no longer jealous, has cast out a wife now chaste; a father, once so patient, has disowned a son now obedient; a master, once mild, has banished from his sight a slave now faithful. As soon as anyone is reformed by this name, he gives offense. Good is not worth as much as hatred of Christians. Now, then, if the hatred is of a name, what guilt can there be in names? What charge can be brought against words, unless some sound of the name is barbarous, or ill-omened, or abusive, or indecent? But “Christian,” so far as its meaning goes, is derived from anointing. And even when it is wrongly pronounced by you “Chrestian” (for you do not have certain knowledge even of the name), it is formed from sweetness or kindness. So in harmless people even a harmless name is hated. “But the school is hated in the name, of course, of its founder.” What is new if a discipline gives its followers a surname from its teacher? Are not philosophers called after their founders Platonists, Epicureans, Pythagoreans? and from the places of their gatherings and stations Stoics and Academics? Likewise physicians from Erasistratus, grammarians from Aristarchus, even cooks from Apicius? Yet no one is offended by the profession of a name handed down with the teaching from its teacher. Certainly, if anyone has proved a school bad, and so its founder bad, he will prove the name too bad and worthy of hatred because of the guilt of the school and its founder; and so before hating the name it was proper first to examine the school from its founder, or the founder from the school. But as it is, both inquiry and knowledge of either are neglected; the name is seized, the name is attacked; and the mere word condemns beforehand an unknown school and an unknown founder, because they are named, not because they are convicted.

Having made these remarks by way of preface, as it were, to expose the injustice of the public hatred against us, I will now take my stand on the case for our innocence; and I will not only refute what is charged against us but turn it back on those who charge it, so that people may learn even from this that there is not in Christians what they do not know is in themselves, and at the same time may blush to accuse, I do not say the worst the best, but now, as they would have it, their own equals. We will answer each of the things we are said to commit in secret, which we find them committing openly, things for which we are reckoned criminal, or vain, or worthy of condemnation, or laughable. But since, when our truth meets every point, the authority of the laws is at last set against it, so that either it is said that nothing may be reconsidered after the laws have spoken, or the necessity of obedience is, against one's will, preferred to the truth, I will first contend with you about the laws, as with their guardians. First, then, when you harshly lay down, “You are not permitted to exist!” and prescribe this without any more humane reconsideration, you avow violence and an unjust domination from the citadel, if you deny that it is lawful because you so wish, not because it ought not to be lawful. But if you do not wish it to be lawful because it ought not to be, then without doubt what is done wrongly ought not to be lawful, and by this very fact it is decided beforehand that what is done rightly is lawful. If I find that what your law has forbidden is good, does it not follow from that prior judgment that it cannot forbid me something it would rightly forbid only if it were evil? If your law has erred, it was conceived, I suppose, by a man; for it did not fall from heaven. Are you surprised that a man could err in framing a law, or come to his senses in rejecting it? Did not the amendment by the Spartans of the laws of Lycurgus himself cause their author such grief that he condemned himself to starve to death in seclusion? Do not you yourselves every day, as experience lights up the darkness of antiquity, lop and fell that whole old and rough forest of laws with the new axes of imperial rescripts and edicts? Did not Severus, most steadfast of emperors, only yesterday abolish the most futile Papian laws, which compel people to have children before the Julian laws allow a marriage to be contracted, despite the authority of their great age? There were also laws that debtors who had been condemned might be cut into pieces by their creditors; but by public consent that cruelty was later erased, and the capital penalty was changed into a mark of disgrace: the confiscation of goods, once adopted, preferred to bring the blood into a man's face rather than to shed it. How many laws still lie hidden that you need to clean up, laws commended neither by the number of their years nor by the rank of their makers, but by equity alone! And so, when they are recognized as unjust, they are rightly condemned, even though they condemn. How do we call them unjust? Indeed, if they punish a name, even foolish; but if deeds, why do they punish deeds on the name alone in our case, when in others they establish them as proved from the act, not from the name? I am incestuous: why do they not investigate? A killer of infants: why do they not extract it? I commit some offense against the gods, against the Caesars: why am I not heard, who have the means to clear myself? No law forbids the examination of what it forbids to be committed, because neither does a judge punish justly unless he knows that what is unlawful has been committed, nor does a citizen obey the law faithfully if he does not know what kind of thing it is that the law punishes. No law owes the consciousness of its justice to itself alone, but to those from whom it expects obedience. Besides, a law that does not wish to be examined is suspect, and wicked if it rules unexamined.

To go back a little to the origin of laws of this kind: there was an old decree that no god should be consecrated by a general unless approved by the senate. Marcus Aemilius knows this, from his god Alburnus. This too tells in favor of our cause, that with you divinity is weighed by human judgment. Unless a god has pleased man, he will not be a god; man will now have to be gracious to god! Tiberius, then, in whose time the Christian name came into the world, when news was brought to him from Syria Palestine of events that had revealed there the truth of His divinity, referred the matter to the senate with his own vote in favor. The senate, because it had not itself approved it, rejected it; Caesar held to his opinion and threatened danger to the accusers of the Christians. Consult your records: there you will find that Nero was the first to rage with the imperial sword against this school, just then rising especially at Rome. But we even glory in such a dedicator of our condemnation. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing but some great good was condemned by Nero. Domitian too, a portion of Nero in cruelty, had tried it; but, being also something of a man, he soon checked what he had begun, even restoring those he had banished. Such have always been our persecutors: unjust, impious, base men, whom you yourselves are accustomed to condemn, and whose victims you have been accustomed to restore. But of all the emperors since then down to the present, men wise in things divine and human, show us one destroyer of Christians! We, on the contrary, show a protector, if the letters of Marcus Aurelius, that most serious emperor, are looked up, in which he testifies that the great drought in Germany was dispelled by rain obtained, as it happened, through the prayers of Christian soldiers. As he did not openly remove the penalty from such men, so in another way he openly set it aside, even adding a condemnation, and a harsher one, for their accusers. What kind of laws, then, are these, which only the impious, unjust, base, savage, vain, and insane enforce against us? which Trajan partly frustrated by forbidding Christians to be sought out; which no Hadrian, though an explorer of all curiosities, no Vespasian, though the conqueror of the Jews, no Pius, no Verus enforced? Surely the worst would more readily be judged fit to be rooted out by all the best, as by their opponents, than by their own allies.

Now I should like those most scrupulous protectors and avengers of the laws and of ancestral institutions to answer concerning their own faithfulness, honor, and obedience toward the decrees of their ancestors: whether they have departed from none, whether they have strayed in nothing, whether they have not erased things necessary and most fitting for discipline. Where have those laws gone that restrained expense and display? which ordered that no more than a hundred asses be spent on a dinner and no more than one hen be served, and that not fattened; which removed from the senate, as a great mark of ambition, a patrician who had owned ten pounds of silver; which pulled down theaters at once as they rose to corrupt morals; which did not allow the insignia of offices and of honorable birth to be usurped lightly or with impunity? For I see dinners that must be called “hundreds” now from a hundred thousand sesterces, and silver from the mines worked into platters (it would be little if for senators, and not for freedmen or for men still breaking whips with their backs). I see too that theaters are not enough when single, nor when uncovered; for it was the Spartans who first devised the cloak for the games, lest shameless pleasure should be cold even in winter. I see also that between matrons and prostitutes no distinction of dress is left. With regard to women, indeed, even those institutions of the ancestors have fallen which protected modesty and sobriety, when no woman knew gold except on the one finger which her betrothed had pledged with the betrothal ring; when women were kept from wine to such a degree that her family starved a matron to death for unsealing the compartments of the wine cellar, while under Romulus a woman who had touched wine was killed with impunity by her husband Metennius. For that reason they were even required to offer kisses to their relatives, so that they might be judged by their breath. Where is that happiness of marriages, prospered of course by good morals, through which for nearly six hundred years from the founding of the city no household wrote a bill of divorce? But now in women no limb is light for the gold on it, no kiss is free for the wine; and divorce is now even prayed for, as though it were the fruit of marriage. Even concerning your gods themselves, you, most obedient people, have rescinded what your fathers had wisely decreed. Father Liber with his mysteries the consuls, by authority of the senate, banished not only from the city but from all Italy. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates with his dog-headed companion were forbidden to be brought into the Capitol, that is, were expelled from the senate-house of the gods: the consuls Piso and Gabinius, certainly not Christians, cast them off, even overturning their altars, to restrain the vices of base and idle superstitions. You have restored them and conferred on them the highest majesty. Where is your religion, where the veneration you owe your ancestors? In dress, food, furnishings, feelings, and even in your very speech you have renounced your great-grandfathers. You always praise antiquity, and you live in new ways from day to day. This shows that, while you depart from the good institutions of your ancestors, you retain and guard what you ought not, since what you ought you have not guarded. Even that which you seem to guard most faithfully as handed down from your fathers, the thing in which above all you have marked out Christians as guilty of transgression, I mean zeal for worshiping the gods, in which antiquity erred most: though you have now rebuilt altars to Serapis, now made Roman, though you offer up your frenzies to Bacchus, now made Italian, I will show in its place that it is likewise despised, neglected, and destroyed by you, against the authority of your ancestors. For now I will answer that infamy of secret crimes, to clear my way to things more open.

We are called the most wicked of people on account of a sacrament of infanticide and the feeding on it, and of incest after the banquet, which the dogs who overturn the lamps, panderers, of course, of darkness, procure, to the shamelessness of impious lusts. We are always called so, yet you take no care to bring to light what we have so long been called. Either bring it to light, then, if you believe it, or stop believing it, since you have not brought it to light. Your own failure to look into it makes the plea against you that there is nothing there which you yourselves do not dare to bring to light. You give the executioner a very different task against Christians: not to make them say what they do, but to make them deny what they are. The origin of this discipline, as we have already stated, dates from Tiberius. Truth began with hatred of itself; as soon as it appeared, it is an enemy. It has as many enemies as there are outsiders: the Jews indeed specifically from rivalry, the soldiers from extortion, and by nature even our own households. Daily we are besieged, daily betrayed; very often we are surprised in our very meetings and assemblies. Who ever came upon a crying infant in such a way? Who kept for the judge the bloody mouths of Cyclopes and Sirens, just as he had found them? Who has detected any impure traces even in the wives? Who, having discovered such crimes, concealed them, or sold his silence while dragging the very people to court? If we are always hidden, when was what we commit betrayed? Indeed, by whom could it have been betrayed? Certainly not by the guilty themselves, since by the very pattern of all mysteries a pledge of silence is owed. The mysteries of Samothrace and Eleusis are kept silent; how much more such things as, once betrayed, would provoke even human punishment at once, while the divine is reserved? If, then, they are not their own betrayers, it follows that outsiders are. And where would outsiders get knowledge, since even holy initiations always shut out the profane and beware of witnesses? Unless the impious are less afraid. The nature of rumor is known to all. It is your own poet's saying: “Rumor, an evil than which no other is swifter.” Why is rumor an evil? Because it is swift? Because it informs? Or because it is mostly a liar? It is not free from the fault of lying even when it brings something true, taking away, adding, changing the truth. What of this, that its condition is such that it lasts only while it lies, and lives only as long as it does not prove? For once it has proved, it ceases to be and, as though it had fulfilled the office of reporting, hands the matter over; from then on the thing is held as fact and called fact. No one says, for example, “They say this was done at Rome,” or, “The rumor is that he has drawn a province,” but, “He has drawn a province,” and, “This was done at Rome.” Rumor, the name for what is uncertain, has no place where there is certainty. Would anyone but a thoughtless person believe rumor? For a wise man does not believe what is uncertain. Anyone can reckon that, however widely it has spread, however confidently it has been built up, it must have arisen at some time from one originator. From there it creeps along the branches of tongues and ears, and the flaw of the little seed so obscures the rest of the report that no one considers whether that first mouth sowed a lie, which often happens, from a jealous disposition, or from a whim of suspicion, or from a pleasure in lying that in some people is not new but inborn. But it is well that time reveals all things, as even your proverbs and sayings testify, by the ordering of nature, which has so arranged it that nothing lies hidden long, even what rumor has not spread. Rightly, then, has rumor alone so long been privy to the crimes of Christians. This is the informer you bring against us; and what it once threw out and over so long a time hardened into opinion it has not been able to prove even until now, so that I appeal to the testimony of nature itself against those who presume such things are to be believed.

See, we set out the reward for these crimes: they promise eternal life. Believe it for the moment. For I ask you this: whether, even if you believed it, you would think it worth reaching with such a conscience. Come, plunge the knife into an infant, enemy of no one, guilty of nothing, everyone's child; or, if that is another's duty, you need only stand by a human being dying before he has lived, wait for the new soul as it flees, catch the fresh blood, soak your bread in it, eat with pleasure. Meanwhile, as you recline, count the places, where your mother is, where your sister; note them carefully, so that when the dogs' darkness falls you make no mistake. For you will have committed a sacrilege if you have not committed incest. Initiated and sealed with such things, you live forever. I want you to answer whether eternity is worth that much. Or if not, then it is not to be believed either. Even if you believed it, I deny that you would want it; even if you wanted it, I deny that you could. Why then could others, if you cannot? Why could you not, if others can? We are of another nature, I suppose: Dog-faces or Shade-feet? We have other rows of teeth, other sinews for incestuous lust? You who believe these things of a human being can also do them. You are a human being yourself, as the Christian is too. You who cannot do them ought not to believe them. For the Christian too is a human being, and what you are. “But they are imposed on the ignorant and slipped upon them.” For, they say, they did not know that anything of the kind was asserted of Christians, which they would surely have had to watch out for and investigate with all vigilance. Yet it is the custom, I suppose, for those who wish to be initiated first to go to the father of the rites and set down what must be prepared. Then he says: “You need an infant, still tender, that does not know death, that will smile under your knife; also bread, to gather up the gush of blood; besides that, lampstands and lamps and some dogs and scraps of food to make them stretch and overturn the lights; above all, you will have to come with your mother and your sister.” What if they will not, or you have none? What, in short, of Christians who are alone in the world? There will be no lawful Christian, I suppose, unless he is a brother or a son. And what if all these things are prepared for people who do not know? Surely they learn of them afterward, and they bear them and pardon them. “They fear punishment if they cry out.” People who will deserve to be protected, who would rather die of their own accord than live with such a conscience! Suppose, then, that they fear: why do they still persevere? For it follows that you would no longer wish to be what, had you known it before, you would not have become.