To the Nations 1.16

We come to the hour of the lamps, the ministry of the dogs, and the devices of darkness. Here I fear I may have to give way. For what such thing shall I charge against you? But come, praise the plan of our bashful incest: that we have contrived an adulterous night, so as to defile neither the light nor true night; that we have thought it right to spare even earthly lights; that we play a trick even on our own conscience; for whatever we do, if we like, we can merely suspect it. But your incests enjoy, in their freedom, every light and every night and the whole witness of heaven; and, that they may turn out the more happily, while you commit incest openly with all heaven for witness, you alone do not know it; we, however, can recognize our crimes even in the dark. Plainly the Persians, as Ctesias reports, live freely with their mothers, as knowingly as they do without horror. And the Macedonians too clearly practise what they approved: for when Oedipus with his eyes torn out first came on their stage, they received him with laughter and derision. The tragic actor, dismayed, drew back his mask and said, “Gentlemen, have I displeased you?” The Macedonians answered: “No, you played it finely; but the writer is most foolish if he invented it, or Oedipus most mad if he did it.” And from then on one said to another, “He drove at his mother.” But one nation or another: how small a stain on the whole world! We, of course, have infected every sun and polluted every ocean! Name, then, some nation free of the things that drag the whole human race into incest. If any nation lacks intercourse itself and the constraints of age and sex, not to say lust and luxury, that will be the nation free of incest. If there is some nature set apart from the human condition, so as to be exposed neither to ignorance nor to error nor to chance, that alone will be able to answer the Christians more firmly. Consider, then, lust tossed among errors as among winds, and see whether peoples are lacking on whom the broad and rough shoals of error may drive them into this crime. Above all, when you expose your infants to the mercy of strangers, or give them for adoption to better parents, do you forget how much material for incest is supplied, how great an opening is made for accidents? Plainly those of you who are stricter from some discipline, or from a definite scruple, hold back your lust from such an outcome in every place, at home or abroad, lest the scattering of seed and the leaps of lust everywhere produce children unknown to you, on whom either the parents themselves or other children might later fall, since lust shuts out even the restraint of age. As many adulteries, as many acts of defilement, as many errors of public lust, whether under a fixed or a roaming signboard, so many minglings of blood, so many joinings of families, so many channels to incest. From this the veins of plots flow for the mimes and comedies; from this too came that tragedy which broke out not long ago and was judged when Fuscianus was prefect of the City. A boy of noble birth, through the chance negligence of his attendants, went out beyond the door, was carried off by passers-by, and was lost to his home. A Greek who had nursed him … Then, changed by age, he was brought back from Asia to Rome to the slave market. His father unknowingly bought him and used him in the Greek fashion; then, as was his custom, the master sent the youth to the fields and to chains. There his tutor and his nurse had long been undergoing punishment. The whole story is laid before them; they tell each other their fortunes: they, that their charge had been lost in boyhood; he, that he too had been lost from boyhood; and moreover, by the same event, that he had been born at Rome of a respectable house; perhaps he also recounted certain tokens. So, by the will of God, that so great a stain might be brought home to the world, their spirit is shaken day by day, the times correspond with his age, the eyes recall something of the features, some peculiarities of the body are recognized. The diligence of the inquiry, once pressed, drives on the masters, or rather now only the parents. The slave-dealer is traced and, unhappily, found. When the crime is revealed, the parents cure themselves with a noose; the prefect assigns the property to the son who unhappily survived, not as an inheritance but as the wages of defilement and incest. That one example of a public outbreak of such crimes lurking among you was enough. Nothing happens only once in human affairs. Only once, plainly, could it be dug out of the sacraments of our religion, I suppose! You make the charge, and the same things are found among you even without sacraments.