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| Chapter VI.
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Chapter VI.
I would now have these most religious protectors
and vindicators of the laws and institutions of their fathers, tell me,
in regard to their own fidelity and the honour, and submission they
themselves show to ancestral institutions, if they have departed from
nothing—if they have in nothing gone out of the old
paths—if they have not put aside whatsoever is most useful and
necessary as rules of a virtuous life. What has become of the laws
repressing expensive and ostentatious ways of living? which forbade
more than a hundred asses to be expended on a supper, and more
than one fowl to be set on the table at a time, and that not a fatted
one; which expelled a patrician from the senate on the serious ground,
as it was counted, of aspiring to be too great, because he had acquired
ten pounds of silver; which put down the theatres as quickly as they
arose to debauch the manners of the people; which did not permit the
insignia of official dignities or of noble birth to be rashly or with
impunity usurped? For I see the Centenarian suppers must now bear the
name, not from the hundred asses, but from the hundred
sestertia83
| 83 As = 2-1/8 farthings.
Sestertium = £7, 16s. 3d. | expended on them; and that mines of silver are
made into dishes (it were little if this applied only to senators, and
not to freedmen or even mere whip-spoilers84
). I see,
too, that neither is a single theatre enough, nor are theatres
unsheltered: no doubt it was that immodest pleasure might not be torpid
in the wintertime, the Lacedæmonians invented their woollen cloaks
for the plays. I see now no difference between the dress of matrons and
prostitutes. In regard to women, indeed, those laws of your fathers,
which used to be such an encouragement to modesty and sobriety, have
also fallen into desuetude, when a woman had yet known no gold upon her
save on the finger, which, with the bridal ring, her husband had
sacredly pledged to himself; when the abstinence of women from wine was
carried so far, that a matron, for opening the compartments of a wine
cellar, was starved to death by her friends,—while in the times
of Romulus, for merely tasting wine, Mecenius killed his wife, and
suffered nothing for the deed. With reference to this also, it was the
custom of women to kiss their relatives, that they might be detected by
their breath. Where is that happiness of married life, ever so
desirable, which distinguished our earlier manners, and as the result
of which for about 600 years there was not among us a single
divorce? Now, women
have every member of the body heavy laden with gold; wine-bibbing is so
common among them, that the kiss is never offered with their will; and
as for divorce, they long for it as though it were the natural
consequence of marriage. The laws, too, your fathers in their wisdom
had enacted concerning the very gods themselves, you their most loyal
children have rescinded. The consuls, by the authority of the
senate, banished Father Bacchus and his mysteries not merely from the
city, but from the whole of Italy. The consuls Piso and Gabinius, no
Christians surely, forbade Serapis, and Isis, and Arpocrates, with
their dogheaded friend,85
admission into the
Capitol—in the act casting them out from the assembly of the
gods—overthrow their altars, and expelled them from the country,
being anxious to prevent the vices of their base and lascivious
religion from spreading. These, you have restored, and conferred
highest honours on them. What has come to your religion—of the
veneration due by you to your ancestors? In your dress, in your food,
in your style of life, in your opinions, and last of all in your very
speech, you have renounced your progenitors. You are always praising
antiquity, and yet every day you have novelties in your way of living.
From your having failed to maintain what you should, you make it clear,
that, while you abandon the good ways of your fathers, you retain and
guard the things you ought not. Yet the very tradition of your fathers,
which you still seem so faithfully to defend, and in which you find
your principal matter of accusation against the Christians—I mean
zeal in the worship of the gods, the point in which antiquity has
mainly erred—although you have rebuilt the altars of Serapis, now
a Roman deity, and to Bacchus, now become a god of Italy, you offer up
your orgies,—I shall in its proper place show that you despise,
neglect, and overthrow, casting entirely aside the authority of the men
of old. I go on meantime to reply to that infamous charge of secret
crimes, clearing my way to things of open day.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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