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 sestertia6    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-spoilers7    Slaves still bearing the marks of the scourge.). 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,8    Anubis. 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.

CAPUT VI.

Nunc religiosissimi legum et paternorum institutorum protectores et cultores respondeant velim de sua fide et honore et obsequio erga majorum consulta, si a nullo desciverunt, si in nullo exorbitaverunt , si non necessaria et aptissima quaeque disciplinae oblitteraverunt. Quonam illae leges abierunt sumptum et ambitionem comprimentes, quae centum aera non amplius in coenam subscribi jubebant, nec amplius quam unam inferri 0299A gallinam, et eam non saginatam ; quae patricium , quod decem pondo argenti habuisset, pro magno titulo ambitionis senatu summovebant; quae theatra stuprandis moribus orientia statim destruebant 0300A ; quae dignitatum et honestorum natalium insignia non temere, nec impune usurpari sinebant? Video enim et centenarias coenas , a centenis jam sestertiis dicendas, et in lances 0301A (parum est [enim] si senatorum et non libertinorum vel adhuc flagra rumpentium) argentaria metalla producta. Video et theatra nec singula satis esse, nec nuda . Nam ne vel hieme voluptas impudica frigeret, primi Lacedaemonii odium penulae ludis excogitaverunt. Video et inter matronas atque prostibulas nullum de habitu 0302A discrimen relictum. Circa feminas quidem etiam illa majorum instituta ceciderunt, quae modestiae, quae sobrietati patrocinabantur, cum aurum nulla norat , praeter unico digito , quem sponsus oppignerasset pronubo annulo; cum mulieres usque adeo a vino abstinerent ut matronam ob resignatos 0303A cellae vinariae loculos sui inedia necarint. Sub Romulo vero quae vinum attigerat, impune a Mecenio marito trucidata est . Idcirco et oscula propinquis offerre necessitas erat, ut spiritu judicarentur . Ubi est illa felicitas matrimoniorum de moribus utique prosperata, qua per annos ferme sexcentos ab Urbe condita nulla repudium domus 0304A scripsit? At nunc in foeminis prae auro nullum leve est membrum; prae vino nullum liberum est osculum ; repudium vero jam et votum est, quasi matrimonii fructus . Etiam circa ipsos deos vestros quae prospecte decreverant patres vestri, iidem vos obsequentissimi rescidistis. Liberum patrem cum mysteriis suis consules senatus 0305A auctoritate non modo urbe, sed universa Italia elimiverant. Serapidem et Isidem et Harpocratem cum suo Cynocephalo , Capitolio prohibitos [inferri], id est curia deorum pulsos, Piso et Gabinius consules, non utique christiani, eversis etiam aris eorum abdicaverant, turpium et otiosarum superstitionum vitia cohibentes. His vos restitutis summam majestatem contulistis. Ubi religio, ubi veneratio majoribus debita a vobis? Habitu, victu, instructu , sensu , ipso denique sermone proavis renuntiastis. Laudatis semper antiquitatem, et nove de die vivitis. Per quod ostenditur, dum a bonis majorum institutis deceditis, ea vos retinere et custodire, quae non debuistis, cum quae debuistis non custodistis . Ipsum adhuc quod videmini fidelissime 0305B tueri a patribus traditum, in quo principaliter reos transgressionis Christianos destinatis, studium 0306A dico deorum colendorum, de quo maxime erravit antiquitas, licet Serapidi jam-Romano aras restruxeritis, licet Baccho jam-Italico furias vestras immolaritis, suo loco ostendam proinde despici et negligi et destrui a vobis adversus majorum auctoritatem. Nunc enim ad illam occultorum facinorum infamiam respondebo, ut viam mihi ad manifestiora purgem .