To the Nations 1.15

If we meet on equal terms in the matter of gods, it follows that there is no difference between us in sacrifice or rite either, so that the comparison may be satisfied from another angle. We, it is said, offer sacrifice or initiate by infanticide. As for you, if what you have done by the slaughter of human beings and by infanticides has slipped your memory, you will recognize it in its proper order; for now we put off most of it, lest we seem to handle the same things everywhere. Meanwhile, as I said, the match is not lacking on another side. For even if we do it one way, you too are no less infanticides, you who are indeed forbidden by the laws to kill newborn infants; yet no laws are evaded with such impunity and such security, with everyone knowing, by the connivance of a whole generation. Nor does it make a difference that you do not kill them in a sacred rite or for a god. Indeed this is the harsher, that you dispatch them by cold and hunger or to the beasts, or drown them in water, a longer death. And if in any respect it is done differently among you, add this, that you extinguish your own offspring, and whatever falls short on the other count will be made up, nay heaped up over, in you. But we are said to dine on that victim of impiety. While this too is recognized in you, where it is more fittingly placed, we are not far removed from your voracity. If yours is lewd and ours cruel, we are joined, perhaps, by nature, in which cruelty always agrees with lewdness. And yet what do you do less, nay, what do you not do more? Do you gape too little after human flesh, because you devour it living and grown? Do you lap human blood too little, because you draw out blood that was yet to be? Do you feed too little on an infant, because you drink up the whole infant before its time?