XII. (86) All these beings, O Gaius! were admired on account of the benefits which they had conferred on mankind, and they are admired for them even up to the present time, and they were deservedly thought worthy of veneration and of the very highest honours. But come now, and tell us yourself in what achievement of yours do you pride yourself and boast yourself as being in the least similar to their actions? (87) Have you imitated the twin sons of Jupiter in their brotherly affection, that I may begin with that point? Did you not rather, O hard-hearted and most pitiless of men! inhumanly slaughter your brother, the joint inheritor of the kingdom with you, even before he had arrived at the full vigour of manhood, when he was still in early youth. Did you not afterwards banish your sisters, lest they also should cause you any reasonable apprehension of the deprivation and loss of your imperial power? (88) Have you imitated Bacchus in any respect? Have you been an inventor of any new blessings to mankind? Have you filled the whole of the habitable world with joy as he did? Are all Asia and Europe inadequate to contain the gifts which have been showered upon mankind by you? (89) No doubt you have invented new arts and sciences, like a common pest and murderer of your kind, by which you have changed all pleasant and acceptable things into vexation and sorrow, and have made life miserable and intolerable to all men everywhere, appropriating to yourself in your intolerable and insatiable greediness all the good and beautiful things which belonged to every one else, whether from the east or from any other country of the universe, carrying off everything from the south, everything from the north, and in requital giving to and pouring down upon those whom you had plundered every sort of mischievous and injurious things from your own bitter spirit, everything which is ever engendered in cruel, and destructive, and envenomed dispositions; these are the reasons why you appeared to us as a new Bacchus. (90) But I suppose you imitated Hercules in your unwearied labours and your incessant displays of valour and virtue; you, O most wretched of men! having filled every continent and every island with good laws, and principles of justice, and wealth, and comfort, and prosperity, and abundance of other blessings, you, wretched man, full of all cowardice and iniquity, who have emptied every city of all the things which can conduce to stability and prosperity, and have made them full of everything which leads to trouble and confusion, and the most utter misery and desolation. (91) Tell me then, O Gaius! do you, after having made all these contributions to universal destruction, do you, I say, seek to acquire immortality in order to make the calamities which you have heaped upon mankind, not of brief duration and short-lived, but imperishable and everlasting? But I think, on the contrary, that even if you had previously appeared to be a god, you would beyond all question have been changed on account of your evil practices into an ordinary nature, resembling that of common perishable mortals; for if virtues can make their possessors immortal, then beyond all doubt vices can make them mortal. (92) Do not, therefore, inscribe your name by the side of that of the twin sons of Jupiter, those most affectionate of deities, you who have been the murderer and destruction of your brethren, nor claim a share in the honours of Hercules or Bacchus, who have benefited human life. You have been the undoer and destroyer of those good effects which they produced.
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