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In the Punic wars, again, when victory hung so long in the balance
between the two kingdoms, when two powerful nations were straining
every nerve and using all their resources against one another, how many
smaller kingdoms were crushed, how many large and flourishing cities
were demolished, how many states were overwhelmed and ruined, how many
districts and lands far and near were desolated! How often were the
victors on either side vanquished! What multitudes of men, both of
those actually in arms and of others, were destroyed! What huge
navies, too, were crippled in engagements, or were sunk by every kind
of marine disaster! Were we to attempt to recount or mention these
calamities, we should become writers of history. At that period Rome
was mightily perturbed, and resorted to vain and ludicrous expedients.
On the authority of the Sibylline books, the secular games were
re-appointed, which had been inaugurated a century before, but had
faded into oblivion in happier times. The games consecrated to the
infernal gods were also renewed by the pontiffs; for they, too, had
sunk into disuse in the better times. And no wonder; for when they
were renewed, the great abundance of dying men made all hell rejoice at
its riches, and give itself up to sport: for certainly the ferocious
wars, and disastrous quarrels, and bloody victories, now on one
side, and now on the other, though most calamitous to men, afforded
great sport and a rich banquet to the devils. But in the first Punic
war there was no more disastrous event than the Roman defeat in which
Regulus was taken. We made mention of him in the two former books as
an incontestably great man, who had before conquered and subdued the
Carthaginians, and who would have put an end to the first Punic war,
had not an inordinate appetite for praise and glory prompted him to
impose on the worn-out Carthagians harder conditions than they could
bear. If the unlooked-for captivity and unseemly bondage of this
man, his fidelity to his oath, and his surpassingly cruel death, do
not bring a blush to the face of the gods, it is true that they are
brazen and bloodless.
Nor were there wanting at that time very heavy disasters within the
city itself. For the Tiber was extraordinarily flooded, and
destroyed almost all the lower parts of the city; some buildings being
carried away by the violence of the torrent, while others were soaked
to rottenness by the water that stood round them even after the flood
was gone. This visitation was followed by a fire which was still more
destructive, for it consumed some of the loftier buildings round the
Forum, and spared not even its own proper temple, that of Vesta, in
which virgins chosen for this honor, or rather for this punishment,
had been employed in conferring, as it were, everlasting life on
fire, by ceaselessly feeding it with fresh fuel. But at the time we
speak of, the fire in the temple was not content with being kept
alive: it raged. And when the virgins, scared by its vehemence,
were unable to save those fatal images which had already brought
destruction on three cities in which they had been received, Metellus
the priest, forgetful of his own safety, rushed in and rescued the
sacred things, though he was half roasted in doing so. For either the
fire did not recognize even him, or else the goddess of fire was
there, a goddess who would not have fled from the fire supposing she
had been there. But here you see how a man could be of greater service
to Vesta than she could be to him. Now if these gods could not avert
the fire from themselves, what help against flames or flood could they
bring to the state of which they were the reputed guardians? Facts
have shown that they were useless. These objections of ours would be
idle if our adversaries maintained that their idols are consecrated
rather as symbols of things eternal, than to secure the blessings of
time; and that thus, though the symbols, like all material and
visible things, might perish, no damage thereby resulted to the things
for the sake of which they had been consecrated, while, as for the
images themselves, they could be renewed again for the same purposes
they had formerly served. But with lamentable blindness, they suppose
that, through the intervention of perishable gods, the earthly
well-being and temporal prosperity of the state can be preserved from
perishing. And so, when they are reminded that even when the gods
remained among them this well-being and prosperity were blighted, they
blush to change the opinion they are unable to defend.
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