[27]
Formerly, then, by the advice of this
prophetess, when Italy was wearied
by the Punic war and harassed by Hannibal, our ancestors imported that
sacred image and those sacred rites from Phrygia, and established them at Rome, where they were received by that
man who was adjudged to be the most virtuous of all the Roman people,
Publius Scipio Nasica, and by the woman who was considered the
chastest of the matrons, Quinta Claudia; the old-fashioned strictness of
whose sacrifice on that occasion your sister is considered to have imitated
in a wonderful manner. Did, then, neither your ancestors, connected as they
were with these religious ceremonies, nor the priesthood itself, by which
all these religious observances were established, nor the curule aedileship,
which above all things is accustomed to uphold this worship, influence you
to abstain from polluting those most holy games with every sort of crime,
and polluting them with infamy, and involving them in guilt?
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. George Bell & Sons, York Street, Covent Garden. 1891.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.