Arnobius — Against the Nations 2.36
“But the gods are held to be immortal.” Not, then, by nature, but by the will and gift of God the Father. By what pact, then, did he bestow the gift of immortality on gods brought forth under a fixed arrangement, and will he by this pact deign to gift souls with immortality, though savage death seem able to extinguish them and, reduced to nothing, to delete them in irreversible abolition? That divine Plato, sensing many things about God worthy and not common to the crowd, in the discourse and book named Timaeus says gods and the world are of a corruptible nature and not altogether free of dissolution, but by the will of God the king and prince are held in perpetual binding. For what is rightly bound and tied with most perfect knots is kept by God’s goodness; nor can it be loosed by any other than by him who bound it, if the case requires, and gifted by a saving command.
Therefore if the matter is so and it is fitting to judge or believe nothing else, why do you marvel that souls are called by us of mid quality, when Plato says the divinities themselves have mid natures, but continuous and unsetting life is supplied by principal benevolence?
For if perhaps you do not know and it was unknown to you before because of the novelty of the thing, take it late and learn from him who knows and has brought it into the open — Christ: that souls are not daughters of the greatest king nor began to know themselves as generated by him, as is said, and to be proclaimed in the essence of his name, but that they have some other begetter, separated from the emperor by quite many grades of dignity and power, yet noble from his court and by the loftiness of eminent births.
Latin
36.1. ''Sed immortales perhibentur dii esse''. - Non ergo natura, sed voluntate dei patris ac munere. Quo igitur pacto immortalitatis largitus est donum dis <die> certa prolatis, et animas hoc pacto dignabitur immortalitate donare, quamvis eas mors saeva posse videatur extinguere et ad nihilum redactas inremeabili abolitione delere. 2. Plato ille divinus multa de deo digna nec communia sentiens multitudini in eo sermone ac libro cui nomen Timaeus scribitur [ Timaeus 41] deos dicit et mundum corruptibilis esse natura neque esse omnino dissolutionis expertes, sed voluntate dei regis ac principis vinctione in perpetua contineri. Quod enim recte sit vinctum et nodis perfectissimis conligatum, dei bonitate servari: neque ullo ab alio nisi ab eo qui vinxit et dissolvi, si res poscat, et salutari iussione donari.
3. Ergo si res est ita nec aliud convenit vel existimare vel credere, quid animas admiramini mediae dici qualitatis a nobis, cum numinibus ipsis dicat Plato medias esse naturas, sed continuam et inocciduam vitam principali benivolentia subrogari?
4. Si enim forte nescitis et antea vobis incognitum propter rei novitatem fuit, accipite sero ac discite ab eo qui novit et protulit in medium Christo, non esse animas regis maximi filias nec ab eo quemadmodum dicitur generatas coepisse se nosse atque in sui nominis essentia praedicari, sed alterum quempiam genitorem his esse, dignitatis et potentiae gradibus satis plurimis ab imperatore diiunctum, eius tamen ex aula et eminentium nobilem sublimitate natalium.