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And it is still this weakness of the gods which is confessed in the
story of the Cuman Apollo, who is said to have wept for four days
during the war with the Achaeans and King Aristonicus. And when the
augurs were alarmed at the portent, and had determined to cast the
statue into the sea, the old men of Cumae interposed, and related
that a similar prodigy had occurred to the same image during the wars
against Antiochus and against Perseus, and that by a decree of the
senate, gifts had been presented to Apollo, because the event had
proved favorable to the Romans. Then soothsayers were summoned who
were supposed to have greater professional skill, and they pronounced
that the weeping of Apollo's image was propitious to the Romans,
because Cumae was a Greek colony, and that Apollo was bewailing
(and thereby presaging) the grief and calamity that was about to light
upon his own land of Greece, from which he had been brought. Shortly
afterwards it was reported that King Aristonicus was defeated and made
prisoner, a defeat certainly opposed to the will of Apollo; and this
he indicated by even shedding tears from his marble image. And this
shows us that, though the verses of the poets are mythical, they are
not altogether devoid of truth, but describe the manners of the demons
in a sufficiently fit style. For in Virgil, Diana mourned for
Camilla, and Hercules wept for Pallas doomed to die. This is
perhaps the reason why Numa Pompilius, too, when, enjoying
prolonged peace, but without knowing or inquiring from whom he received
it, he began in his leisure to consider to what gods he should entrust
the safe keeping and conduct of Rome, and not dreaming that the true,
almighty, and most high God cares for earthly affairs, but
recollecting only that the Trojan gods which Æneas had brought to
Italy had been able to preserve neither the Trojan nor Lavinian
kingdom rounded by Æneas himself, concluded that he must provide other
gods as guardians of fugitives and helpers of the weak, and add them to
those earlier divinities who had either come over to Rome with
Romulus, or when Alba was destroyed.
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