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Why, then, need our argument take note of the many nations who have
waged wars with one another, and have nowhere spared the conquered in
the temples of their gods? Let us look at the practice of the Romans
themselves let us, I say, recall and review the Romans, whose chief
praise it has been "to spare the vanquished and subdue the proud,"
and that they preferred "rather to forgive than to revenge an
injury;" and among so many and I great cities which they have
stormed, taken, and overthrown for the extension of their dominion,
let us be told what temples they were accustomed to exempt, so that
whoever took refuge in them was free. Or have they really done this,
and has the fact been suppressed by the historians of these events? Is
it to be believed, that men who sought out with the greatest eagerness
points they could praise, would omit those which, in their own
estimation, are the most signal proofs of piety? Marcus Marcellus,
a distinguished Roman, who took Syracuse, a most splendidly adorned
city, is reported to have bewailed its coming ruin, and to have shed
his own tears over it before he spill its blood. He took steps also to
preserve the chastity even of his enemy. For before he gave orders for
the storming of the city, he issued an edict forbidding the violation
of any free person. Yet the city was sacked according to the custom of
war; nor do we anywhere read, that even by so chaste and gentle a
commander orders were given that no one should be injured who had fled
to this or that temple. And this certainly would by no means have been
omitted, when neither his weeping nor his edict preservative of
chastity could be passed in silence. Fabius, the conqueror of the
city of Tarentum, is praised for abstaining from making booty of the
images. For when his secretary proposed the question to him, what he
wished done with the statues of the gods, which had been taken in large
numbers, he veiled his moderation under a joke. For he asked of what
sort they were; and when they reported to him that there were not only
many large images, but some of them armed, "Oh," says he, "let
us leave with the Tarentines their angry gods."
Seeing, then, that the writers of Roman history could not pass in
silence, neither the weeping of the one general nor the laughing of the
other, neither the chaste pity of the one nor the facetious moderation
of the other, on what occasion would it be omitted, if, for the honor
of any of their enemy's gods, they had shown this particular form of
leniency, that in any temple slaughter or captivity was prohibited?
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