THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY FOUNDED BY JAMES LOEB, LL.D. EDITED BY G. P. GOOLD, FH.D. PREVIOUS EDITORS t T. E. PAGE, CH^ urr.D f E. CAPPS, ph.d., ix.d. t W. H. D. ROUSE, UTT.D. t L. A. POST, i-h.d. E. H. WARMINGTON, m.a., f.b.hist.soc TERTULLIAN MINUCIUS FELIX 250 TEKTULLIAN APOLOGY DE SPECTACL LIS WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY T. R. GLOVER RLLOW or ST JOHir'S COLIXQI AKD PCBUC OR&TOR IH THS UmTKBSITT OT CAMBaiOGB MINUCIUS FELIX WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY GERALD H. RENDALL, B.D., Lirr.D., LL.D. BASED ON THE UNFINISHED VERSION BY W. G A. KERR CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD MCMLXXVII American ISBN 0-674-99276-8 British ISBN 434 99250 x Pint printed 1931 1960, 1966, 1977 BT Cop ^- PritUed in Oreat Britain : CONTENTS PACK Preface ....... vii TERTULLIAN Introduction ...... ix Apology ...... S De Spectaculis ..... 230 MINUCIUS FELIX: Introduction ...... 304 OcTAVlUS ...... 314 Index 439 PREFACE When it was decided to add a translation of Tertullian's Apology to the Loeb Library, it was the obvious thing to combine with it the " Golden Book " of Minucius Felix. There has been long controversy as to the connexion between the two works, and here the reader has a chance to compare them. Between them he will gain a fair idea of what Latin Christendom felt and believed in that age, of the ethical and cultural forces to which its intellectual leaders attached most weight, and of the new spirit which was to shape the thinking and writing of the Latin world throughout the Middle Ages. For Tertullian at least was a pioneer who led the way in a great literature. His brief tract, De Spectaculis, made famous by Gibbon, has been added to the volume. EDITORIAL NOTE (1977) : For recent scholarship the reader is advised to consult Emanuele Castorina's edition of the De Spectaculis (Florence, 1961) ; Ter- tullian, A Historical and Literary Study, by Timothy David Barnes (Oxford, 1971 : BibUography, pp. ff. 292 ) ; and the editions of the Octavius by Jean Beaujeu (Paris, "Belles-Lettres," 1964) and Carl Becker (Munich : Beck, 1967). G. P. G. INTRODUCTION " Tertuluan," wrote a well-known scholax,* " may be said to have made Christian Latinity ; it came from his hands rough-hewn, needing to be shaped and polished by later workers, but destined never to lose the general character which he had impressed upon it. He did more ; he laid the foundation of Latin Christianity." The churchmen have never really liked Tertullian ; they have found in him too much of the Puritan and the Covenanter ; they read him uneasily and praise him with reservations. "A man of vehement and ill- disciplined character he was and always remained," says Hort.'' They remember how he left " the great Church " to follow the Montanist heresy, to become an adherent of a sect which fancied itself the recipient of a new activity of the Holy Spirit, and to attack the body that he left, the people whom he now described as the psychici—in other words, the " natural man " « as opposed to the spiritual. No one finds his Latin easy to translate : few read it with ease, fewer still with enjoyment. His vocabulary is not quite classical; his mind is nd generis—unexampled among Christians or pagans. No other writer approaches • H, B. Swete, Patristic Study, p. 59. * F. J. A. Hort, AnU-NiceM Fathers, p. 101. « 1 Cor. iL 14. a2 ix TERTULLIAN him in irony ; but he gets beyond irony—^it is sar- casm, savage strident sarcasm at times ; and it jars upon churchmen and scholars alike. He offers a handle to the enemy, moreover, and Gibbon lays hold of the last chapters of the De Spectaculis. Hell is an unpopular doctrine, very intelhgibly ; but, while many saintly persons have held it decorously, Tertullian in that passage lets himself go—a thing not done by churchmen and humanists ; he had provocation enough, as we may see ; but he gave Gibbon a magnificent chance, which he was not slow to take." To make things worse, the enemy Gibbon reinforces his text with one of his footnotes : "In order to ascertain the degree of authority which the zealous African had acquired, it may be sufficient to allege the testimony of Cyprian, the doctor and guide of all the Western churches. As often as he applied himself to his daily study of the writings of TertulUan, he was accustomed to say, Da miki magistrum, Give me my master." So Tertullian is available for anti- Christian controversy, and the De Spectaculis becomes, through Gibbon's use of it, one of his most famous works.* Gibbon is an English Classic, and so is Matthew Arnold ; the two are in general the English- man's only sources for his impressions of TertulUan. " The stern Tertullian," " the zealous African," with » Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xv. (vol. 11. p. 27 in Bury's edition). * I do not myself rank De Spectaculis among the best works of Tertullian, and I would not Initially have chosen it for this volume ; still it illustrates the life of the period, and, with all its rhetoric and some anger, it is written from a moral standpoint, it brings out the character of pagan pleasures, and it shows a passion for Christ which is illumin- ating. X INTRODUCTION his " long variety of affected and unfeeling witti- cisms," writes Gibbon ; and Arnold follows suit in his sonnet with " the fierce Tertullian " and " the unpitying Phrygian sect." Before we leave these famous English critics, it may suffice to say that Gibbon translated with a judicious laxity and drew his " veil over the rest of this infernal description " for " the humanity of the reader," when there was nothing left for it to con- ceal ; and that the historian (for the moment) and the critic aUke forgot the use of the historical imagina- tion and the duty laid upon us of understanding the man we criticize, his outlook, and the situation in which he spoke. What did he say ? we ask. But Tertullian said a great deal more than Gibbon and Arnold quote in these two passages. What did he mean ? and what was the experience that led him to speak as he did ? are further questions, which they do not raise. They were, of course, busy with other issues ; but this abrupt treatment of a master mind is not historical criticism. I have tried elsewhere" to draw the portrait of Tertulhan—to see him " steadily and whole," as Matthew Arnold teaches us. Here my task is to translate him, and the reader has only to turn a few pages to see whether I have succeeded or failed. But before Tertullian speaks for himself, one or two things are to be said. Tertullian is a Latin of Africa—one of a great series. Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aureb'us, and Apuleius, the cleverest of Latin himaourists, Aristophanic in genius, in freedom of speech and ingenuity of speech, • T/u Conflict of Beligiont in th« Early Roman Empire, Methuen & Co. xi — TERTULLIAN are his contemporaries. Cyprian, another African, as we have seen, studied his books intently a genera- tion later ; Arnobius, Lactantius, perhaps Minucius Felix, follow, all significant figures. In the fourth century comes Augustine, the greatest of them all the one supreme figure in Church History, from what- ever aspect it is studied, between St. Paul and Martin Luther. Nor is it only in prose that Africa shines ; amid the general decline of poetry the graceful Dracontius has a charm of his own, as Gaston Boissier has made clear." It was a Roman Africa that pro- duced these men ; they were not Moors nor negroes, as an innocent African of America has supposed. Their Carthage owed more to Julius Caesar than to Dido. Roman Africa is a long way from the Eastern M'orld, separated by sea and desert ; but it is not far from Italy, and the genius of the people is Latin, but with a difference. The colonist acquires sometimes a new accent by crossing the sea, or retains an old one, which later on may seem old-fashioned. The new environment induces a new mind, which is very often really the old mind of the race, fertilized and quick- ened by new experience and new problems. There may have been Moorish or Punic blood, unrecorded, in the veins of some of these great men ; but it is not necessary to postulate it on the ground of racial characteristics, for when we dogmatize upon race and its types we stray into an area ill-explored and very treacherous for those who guess. Nutricula causidicorum is Juvenal's epithet for "* Roman Africa about a.d. 100 ; and among the ' See Gaston Boissier's very charming book Roman Africa, in a readable translation. Putnam, 1898. * Juvenal, vii. 148. xii INTRODUCTION " pleaders "she nurtured few will giveTertullian a low place. He has moved too much in legal circles, and (like Cyprian after him) is only too lawyer-like in handling Christian problems. He grew up a pagan, as he tells us. Dates, names, episodes are all lacking in the story of the planting of the Christian religion in Africa, but that is not exceptional in the expansion of Christianity through the ancient world. The men and women who spread the faith were lowly enough —the fuller and the baker, sneered Celsus, and the foreign slave on the verandah, when the master of the house was out of hearing, illiterates one and all. Not all quite illiterate, however ; for Clement of Alexandria and TertuUian were contemporaries of Celsus, and not noticeably less educated.