In your Empire, your most Excellent Majesties, different peoples observe different laws and customs; and no-one is hindered by law, or fear of punishment from devotion to his ancestral ways, even if they are ridiculous.
Athenagoras is at once both respectful and conciliatory, yet challenging and argumentative. He is opening his writing by pointing out to the Romans that they do not police their own citizens' beliefs in any way whatsoever, and that people are free to worship and god or goddess they choose. Each ethnic group gives different names to each god and goddess, and all believe in different myths surrounding them; for example, the Athenians believe in Pandrosus' impropriety based solely on the evidence of an opened box. People have rituals, perform sacrifices and worship in any way that they please, yet they are not persecuted, or maligned, by the Romans.
At once, he is positioning the Romans as unreasonable judges and as hypocrites who are singling out Christians for punishment. Christians are being vilified for their religious beliefs, which is not only unjust but also makes no logical sense at all.
If, indeed, anyone can convict us of wrongdoing, be it trifling, or more serious, we do not beg off punishment, but are prepared to pay the penalty, however cruel and unpitying. But if the accusation goes no farther than a name - and it is clear that up to today the tales about us rest only on popular and uncritical rumor, and not a single Christian has been convicted of wrongdoing - it is your duty, illustrious, kind and most learned Emperors, to relieve us of these calumnies by law.
Athenagoras is a skilled orator and translates this skill well into text as well. He makes each point logically but also plays to the Romans' sense of their own intelligence by letting them know that anyone who had any intellectual idea about justice would surely agree with the points he is making.
Here, he makes the point that Christians are being accused of wrongdoing merely because they are Christians; they are assumed to have committed acts of wrongdoing because of their religious affiliation or belief. He asks that rather than considering them guilty of something because they are Christians that instead they are held to the same standards of ethics as non-Christians, and as such are only punished from crimes they have actually committed. Since, to his knowledge, no Christian has actually yet committed a crime, there should be no such assumptions made about their criminality. They should be judged like everyone else, on their deeds, rather than on the name of their religion.
This is what Plato says, "To discover the creator, and father of the universe, is difficult, and when you have discovered Him it is impossible to tell everybody about Him." In speaking thus, Plato views God as uncreated, and eternal. And if he recognizes other gods, such as the sun, the moon, and the stars, he recognizes them as eternal.
Athenagoras, known to have been a Plato scholar, is using the philosopher's argument to point out to the Romans that if their gods and goddesses exist, and he is of course prepared to believe that they do, then they were created by God the almighty, and so rather than maligning Christians, the Romans should accept them and respect them for worshipping the one and only creator of the universe. In short, if their gods exist, they were created by the Christians' God, and therefore only exist because the Christian's God created them.
