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Even Caesar himself gives us positive testimony regarding this
custom; for, in his deliverance in the senate about the conspirators,
he says (as Sallust, a historian of distinguished veracity, writes)
"that virgins and boys are violated, children torn from the embrace of
their parents, matrons subjected to whatever should be the pleasure of
the conquerors, temples and houses plundered, slaughter and burning
rife; in fine, all things filled with arms, corpses, blood, and
wailing." If he had not mentioned temples here, we might suppose
that enemies were in the habit of sparing the dwellings of the gods.
And the Roman temples were in danger of these disasters, not from
foreign foes, but from Catiline and his associates, the most noble
senators and citizens of Rome. But these, it may be said, were
abandoned men, and the parricides of their fatherland.
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