35. But is it only poets
whom you have thought proper4255
| 4255
Lit., “have willed.” |
to allow to
invent unseemly tales about
the gods, and to turn them shamefully into sport? What do your
pantomimists, the actors, that
crowd of mimics and
adulterers?
4256
| 4256
Lit., “full-grown race,” exoleti, a word frequently
used, as here, sensu obscæno. |
Do
they
4257
| 4257
i.e., the actors, etc. |
not
abuse
your gods to make to themselves
gain, and
do not the
others4258
find
enticing pleasures in
4259
| 4259
Lit., “draw enticements of pleasures from.” |
the wrongs and insults offered to the
gods? At the
public games, too, the colleges of all the
priests
and
magistrates take their places, the
chief Pontiffs, and the
chief
priests of the curiæ; the Quindecemviri take their places,
crowned with wreaths of laurel, and the flamines diales with
their mitres; the augurs take their places, who disclose the
divine
mind and will; and the
chaste maidens also, who cherish and
guard the
ever-burning
fire; the whole people and the
senate take their places;
the fathers who have done service as consuls,
princes next to the gods,
and most worthy of
reverence; and, shameful to say, Venus, the mother
of the race of Mars, and
parent of the imperial people, is represented
by gestures as in
love,
4260
and is delineated with shameless mimicry
as raving like a Bacchanal, with all the passions of a
vile
harlot.
4261
| 4261
Lit., “of meretricious vileness.” |
The
Great Mother, too,
adorned with her
sacred fillets, is represented by
dancing; and that Pessinuntic Dindymene
4262
| 4262
i.e., Cybele, to whom Mount Dindymus in Mysia was sacred, whose rites,
however, were celebrated at Pessinus also, a very ancient city of
Galatia. |
is, to the dishonour of her age,
represented as with shameful desire using passionate gestures in the
embrace of a herdsman; and also in the Trachiniæ of
Sophocles,
4263
| 4263
ms. Sofocles, corrected in LB.
Sophocles. Cf. Trach. 1022 sqq. |
that son of
Jupiter, Hercules,
entangled in the toils of a
death-fraught
garment,
is exhibited uttering piteous
cries, overcome by his violent suffering,
and at last wasting away and being consumed, as his intestines soften
and are dissolved.
4264
| 4264
Lit., “towards (in) the last of the wasting
consumed by the softening of his bowels flowing
apart.” |
But in
these tales even
the
Supreme Ruler of the heavens Himself is brought forward, without
any
reverence for His name and
majesty, as acting the part of an
adulterer, and changing His
countenance for purposes of seduction, in
order that He might by
guile rob of their chastity matrons, who were
the wives of others, and putting on the appearance of their husbands,
by assuming the form of another.
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