Chapter XXXV.

35. But is it only poets whom you have thought proper⁴²⁵⁵ to allow to invent unseemly tales about the gods, and to turn them shamefully into sport? What do your pantomimists, the actors, that crowd of mimics and adulterers?⁴²⁵⁶ Do they⁴²⁵⁷ not abuse your gods to make to themselves gain, and do not the others⁴²⁵⁸ find enticing pleasures in⁴²⁵⁹ the wrongs and insults offered to the gods? At the public games, too, the colleges of all the priests and magistrates take their places, the chief Pontiffs, and the chief priests of the curiæ; the Quindecemviri take their places, crowned with wreaths of laurel, and the flamines diales with their mitres; the augurs take their places, who disclose the divine mind and will; and the chaste maidens also, who cherish and guard the ever-burning fire; the whole people and the senate take their places; the fathers who have done service as consuls, princes next to the gods, and most worthy of reverence; and, shameful to say, Venus, the mother of the race of Mars, and parent of the imperial people, is represented by gestures as in love,⁴²⁶⁰ and is delineated with shameless mimicry as raving like a Bacchanal, with all the passions of a vile harlot.⁴²⁶¹ The Great Mother, too, adorned with her sacred fillets, is represented by dancing; and that Pessinuntic Dindymene⁴²⁶² is, to the dishonour of her age, represented as with shameful desire using passionate gestures in the embrace of a herdsman; and also in the Trachiniæ of Sophocles,⁴²⁶³ that son of Jupiter, Hercules, entangled in the toils of a death-fraught garment, is exhibited uttering piteous cries, overcome by his violent suffering, and at last wasting away and being consumed, as his intestines soften and are dissolved.⁴²⁶⁴ But in these tales even the Supreme Ruler of the heavens Himself is brought forward, without any reverence for His name and majesty, as acting the part of an adulterer, and changing His countenance for purposes of seduction, in order that He might by guile rob of their chastity matrons, who were the wives of others, and putting on the appearance of their husbands, by assuming the form of another.