Tertullian, Apology 13

You claim you have gods too. Fine — then explain how you get caught being impious, sacrilegious, and irreligious toward your own deities. You presume they exist, yet you neglect them. You fear them, yet you destroy them. You claim to avenge them, yet you mock them. Check the record if you think I'm lying.

Start with the obvious: when you worship some gods and ignore others, you inevitably offend the ones you snub. You can't elevate one without contempt for the other, because there is no election without rejection. So you despise the gods you reject, and you don't even fear offending them by that rejection.

As we noted earlier, every god's standing hung on the senate's vote. A deity wasn't a god unless a consulted senator wanted him; by refusing to want him, the senate condemned him. You treat your household gods — your Lares — like household property: you pawn them, sell them, melt them down into a chamber pot for Saturn or a ladle for Minerva, whichever one's worn out and battered after years of worship, whichever one's master has felt the pinch of domestic necessity.

You defile the public gods just as badly under public law. You put them up for auction as taxable assets. The Capitolium, the vegetable market — it's all the same: same auctioneer's voice, same spear, same quaestor's notation. Divinity is sold and leased like any other lot. Fields burdened with tribute go cheaper; human heads counted for the poll tax are more ignoble — those are the marks of captivity. But the gods? The more tribute they owe, the holier they are; or rather, the holier they are, the more tribute they owe. Majesty has become a revenue stream. Religion goes begging through the taverns. You charge admission to the temple floor, a fee for the sacred entrance; you can't know the gods for free — they're for sale.

What exactly do you do to honor them that you don't also do for your dead? Buildings, altars — same thing. The statues wear the same attire and insignia. Whatever the dead man's age, art, or trade was, that's what the god becomes. How does Jupiter's silicernium differ from a funeral feast, the obba from the simpulum, the pollinctor from the haruspex? Even the haruspex shows up for the dead.

So by all means, vote divine honors to dead emperors — you already attributed divinity to them while they were alive. Your gods will accept it; better yet, they'll congratulate themselves, since their masters have just been made their equals.

But when you worship Larentina, a public prostitute — or at least Lais or Phryne — among the Junos, Cereses, and Dianas; when you consecrate Simon Magus with a statue and an inscription as a holy god; when you promote some unknown palace tutor to a synod deity — the older gods may not be more noble, but they'll count it an insult from you that this privilege, which only antiquity conferred on them, has now been allowed to others.