Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume IV/Commodianus/The Instructions of Commodianus/Chapter 7

VI.&#8212;Of the Same Jupiter&#8217;s Thunderbolt.

Ye say, O fools, Jupiter thunders.&#160; It is he that hurls thunderbolts; and if it was childishness that thought thus, why for two hundred years have ye been babies? &#160; And will ye still be so always?&#160; Infancy is passed into maturity, old age does not enjoy trifles, the age of boyhood has departed; let the mind of youth in like manner depart.&#160; Your thoughts ought to belong to the character of men.&#160; Thou art then a fool, to believe that it is Jupiter that thunders.&#160; He, born on the earth, is nourished with goats&#8217; milk.&#160; Therefore if Saturn had devoured him, who was it in those times that sent rain when he was dead?&#160; Especially, if a god may be thought to be born of a mortal father, Saturn grew old on the earth, and on the earth he died.&#160; There was none that predicted his previous birth.&#160; Or if he thunders, the law would have been given by him.&#160; The stories that the poets feign seduce you.&#160; He, however, reigned in Crete, and there died.&#160; He who to you is the Almighty became Alcmena&#8217;s lover; he himself would in like manner be in love with living men now if he were alive.&#160; Ye pray to unclean gods, and ye call them heavenly who are born of mortal seed from those giants.&#160; Ye hear and ye read that he was born in the earth:&#160; whence was it that that corrupter so well deserved to ascend into heaven?&#160; And the Cyclopes are said to have forged him a thunderbolt; for though he was immortal, he received arms from mortals.&#160; Ye have conveyed to heaven by your authority one guilty of so many crimes, and, moreover, a parricide of his own relations.