Book VI.
————————————
1. Having shown briefly how impious and infamous are the opinions which you have formed about your gods, we have now to4559 speak of their temples, their images also, and sacrifices, and of the other things which are4560 united and closely related to them. For you are here in the habit of fastening upon us a very serious charge of impiety because we do not rear temples for the ceremonies of worship, do not set up statues and images4561 of any god, do not build altars,4562 do not offer the blood of creatures slain in sacrifices, incense,4563 nor sacrificial meal, and finally, do not bring wine flowing in libations from sacred bowls; which, indeed, we neglect to build and do, not as though we cherish impious and wicked dispositions, or have conceived any madly desperate feeling of contempt for the gods, but because we think and believe that they4564—if only they are true gods, and are called by this exalted name4565—either scorn such honours, if they give way to scorn, or endure them with anger, if they are roused by feelings of rage.
Footnotes
- 4559
Lit., “it remains that we.”
- 4560
Lit., “series which is,” etc.
- 4561
Singular. [But costly churches were built about this time.]
- 4562
Non altaria, non aras, i.e., neither to the superior nor inferior deities. Cf. Virgil, Ecl., v. 66.
- 4563
[It is not with any aversion to incense that I note its absence, so frequently attested, from primitive rites of the Church.]
- 4564
The earlier edd. prefix d to the ms. eos—“that the gods,” etc.
- 4565
Lit., “endowed with the eminence of this name.”