Christian innocence of infant blood and pagan blood-rites
Octavius is answering Caecilius's charge that Christians are initiated by killing an infant and drinking its blood, and he turns the charge back onto pagan practices.
Now I would like to meet the man who says or believes that we are initiated with the slaughter of an infant and with its blood. Do you think it possible that so soft, so tiny a body could receive the blows of wounds? That anyone could kill, pour out, and drain the fresh blood of a new and scarcely yet human being? No one can believe this except one who could dare to do it.
For I see that you expose your own children to wild beasts and birds, or strangle them and crush them out with a wretched kind of death. There are women who, by drinking drugs, extinguish the origin of a future human being in their very womb, and commit parricide before they give birth.
And these practices certainly descend from the teaching of your gods: for Saturn did not expose his sons, but devoured them. Rightly were infants sacrificed to him by parents in some parts of Africa, with caresses and a kiss suppressing their crying, so that a weeping victim might not be sacrificed.
The Taurians of Pontus and the Egyptian king Busiris had the rite of sacrificing guests; the Gauls slaughtered human or inhuman victims to Mercury; the Romans crushed alive a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman, in place of sacrifice; and to this day Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with homicide, and, what is worthy of Saturn's son, he is fed with the blood of a wicked and criminal man.
I believe this same superstition taught Catiline the practice of conspiring under a covenant of blood, and taught Bellona to steep her sacred rite in a draught of human gore, and how to cure epilepsy with human blood, that is, with a heavier disease.
Not unlike them are those who devour wild beasts from the arena, smeared and stained with blood or with the limbs and entrails of a human being. For us it is not lawful even to see or hear of homicide, and so far do we keep away from human blood that we do not even know the blood of animals among our food.
Latin
Illum iam uelim conuenire, qui initiari nos dicit aut credit de caede infantis et sanguine. putas posse fieri, ut tam molle, tam paruulum corpus fata uulnerum capiat? ut quisquam illum rudem sanguinem nouelli et uixdum hominis caedat, fundat, exhauriat? nemo hoc potest credere nisi qui possit audere.
uos enim uideo procreatos filios nunc feris et auibus exponere, nunc adstrangulatos misero mortis genere elidere: sunt quae in ipsis uisceribus medicaminibus epotis originem futuri hominis extinguant et parricidium faciant, antequam pariant.
et haec utique de deorum uestrorum disciplina descendunt: nam Saturnus filios suos non exposuit, sed uorauit. merito ei in nonnullis Africae partibus a parentibus infantes immolabantur, blanditiis et osculo comprimente uagitum, ne flebilis hostia Îmmolaretur.
Tauris etiam Ponticis et Aegyptio Busiridi ritus fuit hospites immolare, et Mercurio Gallis humanas uel inhumanas uictimas caedere, Romanis Graecum et Graecam, Gallum et Gallam sacrificii loco uiuentes obruere, hodieque ab ipsis Latiaris Iuppiter homicidio colitur, et quod Saturni filio dignum est, mali et noxii hominis sanguine saginatur.
ipsam credo docnisse sanguinis foedere coniurare Catilinam, et Bellonam sacrum suum haustu humani cruoris imbuere, et comitialem morbum hominis sanguine, id est morbo graviore sanare.
non dissimiles et qui de harena feras deuorant inlitas et infectas cruore uel membris hominis et uiscere saginatas. nobis homicidium nec uidere fas nec audire, tantumque ab humano sanguine canemus, ut nec edulium pecorum in cibis sanguinem nouerimus.