other · 176 · Athens
The Embassy is addressed jointly to Marcus Aurelius and to Commodus, saluted as conquerors of Armenia and Sarmatia and, more than all, philosophers — and the joint address is what dates it, since Commodus was raised to Augustus in 177 and the two ruled together only briefly. Athenagoras takes the three standing charges in order. To atheism he answers with an argument from the unity of God that never leaves philosophical ground: if there were two uncreated beings there would be no place for the second. To the Thyestean feasts he answers that people who will not watch a man die in the arena, and who hold that exposing an infant is murder, are unlikely to be eating anyone. To the Oedipal unions he answers with the Christian rule that a second marriage after a spouse's death is a decorous adultery, which is a stricter standard than his accusers kept. What is most striking about him is the silence afterwards. Eusebius, who lists everyone, never names him once; a note in the very translation this project ships observes that none of the Fathers except Methodius and Philip of Side seem to have had any knowledge of him. The one relation on his page — that he taught Clement of Alexandria — rests on Philip of Side, whose account the same note calls full of inconsistencies and contradictions and deserving no credence.
To get the charges stated so they could be answered: that Christians were atheists, that they ate their children, and that they slept with their mothers.
The most purely philosophical of the second-century apologies, and one that seems to have been read by almost nobody.