35. But is it only poets
whom you have thought proper
4255
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
Do
they
4257
not abuse
your gods to make to themselves
gain, and
do not the
others
4258
find
enticing pleasures in
4259
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
The
Great Mother, too, adorned with her sacred fillets, is represented by
dancing; and that Pessinuntic Dindymene
4262
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
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
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.
4255
Lit., “have willed.”
4256
Lit., “full-grown race,”
exoleti
, a word frequently
used, as here,
sensu obscæno.
4257
i.e., the actors, etc.
4258
i.e., the crowd of adulterers, as Orelli suggests.
4259
Lit., “draw enticements of pleasures from.”
4260
Or,
“Venus, the mother…and loving parent,” etc.
4261
Lit., “of meretricious vileness.”
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.
4263
ms.
Sofocles
, corrected in LB.
Sophocles
. Cf. Trach. 1022 sqq.
4264
Lit., “towards (
in
) the last
of the
wasting
consumed by the softening of his bowels flowing
apart.”