other · 166 · Rome
Tatian was an Assyrian who had gone through the Greek schools and mysteries and come out contemptuous of all of them, and the Address is written in that voice — your rhetoric was invented to serve injustice, your philosophers contradict each other and take fees, and your gods are worse than the men who worship them. Its serious argument is chronological: Moses is older than Homer, and therefore the Hebrew scriptures are older than everything the Greeks call ancient, which makes the Christians the heirs of the elder wisdom and not a novelty. It is also where Eusebius goes for the claim that Crescens the Cynic plotted against Justin — though the shipped translation's own note observes that the passage proves the plot and not that it succeeded, and this dataset does not harden it either.
To tell the Greeks that everything they were proud of, they had got later and second-hand.
The only complete work of his that survives, and the earliest Christian text to argue the case on chronology rather than on prophecy.