Sed conversus ad litteras vestras, quibus informamini ad prudentiam et liberalia officia, quanta invenio ludibria! deos inter se propter Troianos et Achivos ut gladiatorum paria congressos depugnasse, Venerem humana sagitta sauciatam, quod filium suum Aenean paene interfectum ab eodem Diomede rapere vellet, Martem tredecim mensibus in vinculis paene consumptum, Iovem, ne eandem vim a ceteris caelitibus experiretur, opera cuiusdam monstri liberatum, et nunc flentem Sarpedonis casum, nunc foede subantem in sororem sub commemoratione non ita dilectarum iampridem amicarum.
But I turn to your literature, by which you are trained in wisdom and the liberal arts; and what absurdities I find! I read how the gods on account of Trojans and Achaeans fell to it and fought it out themselves like so many pairs of gladiators; how Venus was wounded by a mans arrow, because she wished to snatch away her son Aeneas, who was all but killed by that same Diomedes; how Mars was almost done to death by thirteen months in fetters; how Jove, to escape similar outrage from the rest of the celestials, was liberated by a certain monsters aid; how now he wept Sarpedons fall, and now he shamefully craved his sisters embraces, recounting to her all the former doxies he had never loved so much!a And thereafter which of the poets is not to be found following the pattern of his great original and dishonouring the gods?
final_alignments\Tertullian_Apology.json