Chapter XVIII.

18. The greatness of the subject, and our duty to those on their defence also,⁴³⁸¹ demand that we should in like manner hunt up the other forms of baseness, whether those which the histories of antiquity record, or those contained in the sacred mysteries named initia,⁴³⁸² and not divulged⁴³⁸³ openly to all, but to the silence of a few; but your innumerable sacred rites, and the loathsomeness of them all,⁴³⁸⁴ will not allow us to go through them all bodily: nay, more, to tell the truth, we turn aside ourselves from some purposely and intentionally, lest, in striving to unfold all things, we should be defiled by contamination in the very exposition. Let us pass by Fauna⁴³⁸⁵ Fatua, therefore, who is called Bona Dea, whom Sextus Clodius, in his sixth book in Greek on the gods, declares to have been scourged to death with rods of myrtle, because she drank a whole jar of wine without her husband’s knowledge; and this is a proof, that when women show her divine honour a jar of wine is placed there, but covered from sight, and that it is not lawful to bring in twigs of myrtle, as Butas⁴³⁸⁶ mentions in his Causalia. But let us pass by with similar neglect⁴³⁸⁷ the dii conserentes, whom Flaccus and others relate to have buried themselves, changed in humani penis similitudinem in the cinders under a pot of exta.⁴³⁸⁸ And when Tanaquil, skilled in the arts of Etruria,⁴³⁸⁹ disturbed these, the gods erected themselves, and became rigid. She then commanded a captive woman from Corniculum to learn and understand what was the meaning of this: Ocrisia, a woman of the greatest wisdom divos inseruisse genitali, explicuisse motus certos. Then the holy and burning deities poured forth the power of Lucilius,⁴³⁹⁰ and thus Servius king of Rome was born.