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Cicero, a weighty man, and a philosopher in his way, when about to
be made edile, wished the citizens to understand that, among the other
duties of his magistracy, he must propitiate Flora by the celebration
of games. And these games are reckoned devout in proportion to their
lewdness. In another place, and when he was now consul, and the
state in great peril, he says that games had been celebrated for ten
days together, and that nothing had been omitted which could pacify the
gods: as if it had not been more satisfactory to irritate the gods by
temperance, than to pacify them by debauchery; and to provoke their
hate by honest living, than soothe it by such unseemly grossness. For
no matter how cruel was the ferocity of those men who were threatening
the state, and on whose account the gods were being propitiated, it
could not have been more hurtful than the alliance of gods who were won
with the foulest vices. To avert the danger which threatened men's
bodies, the gods were conciliated in a fashion that drove virtue from
their spirits; and the gods did not enrol themselves as defenders of
the battlements against the besiegers, until they had first stormed and
sacked the morality of the citizens. This propitiation of such
divinities, a propitiation so wanton, so impure, so immodest, so
wicked, so filthy, whose actors the innate and praiseworthy virtue of
the Romans disabled from civic honors, erased from their tribe,
recognized as polluted and made infamous;, this propitiation, I
say, so foul, so detestable, and alien from every religious feeling,
these fabulous and ensnaring accounts of the criminal actions of the
gods, these scandalous actions which they either shamefully and
wickedly committed, or more shamefully and wickedly reigned, all this
the whole city learned in public both by the words and gestures of the
actors. They saw that the gods delighted in the commission of these
things, and therefore believed that they wished them not only to be
exhibited to them, but to be imitated by themselves. But as for that
good and honest instruction which they speak of, it was given in such
secrecy, and to so few (if indeed given at all), that they seemed
rather to fear it might be divulged, than that it might not be
practised.
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