13.
Did not even this occur to you, being a priest so well acquainted with the
Sibylline oracles, that our ancestors derived these games from the Sibylline
books? if those books are yours, which you consult with imperious
intentions, and read with profane eyes, and handle with polluted hands.
[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?
[28]
But why do I wonder? when, having taken a bribe, you ravaged Pessinus itself, the habitation and home
of the mother of the gods, and sold to Brogitarus—a fellow half
Gaul, half Greek, a profligate
and impious man, whose agents, while you were tribune, used to pay you the
money for your share of the work in the temple of Castor—the whole
of that place and the temple; when you dragged the priest from the very
altar and cushion of the goddess; when you perverted those omens which all
antiquity, which Persians, and Syrians, and all kings who have ever reigned
in Europe and Asia have always venerated with the
greatest piety; which, last of all; our own ancestors considered so sacred,
that though we had the city and all Italy crowded with temples, still our generals in our most
important and most perilous wars used to offer their vows to this goddess,
and to pay them in Pessinus itself,
at that identical principal altar and on that spot and in that temple.
[29]
And when Deiotarus was protecting this
temple in the most holy manner with the deepest feelings of
religion—Deiotarus, of all allies the most faithful to this empire
and the most devoted to our name—you gave it to Brogitarus as I
have said before, having sold it to him for a sum of money. And yet you
order this Deiotarus who has been repeatedly declared by the senate worthy
of the name of king and adorned with the testimony of many most illustrious
generals in his favour, to be styled king together with Brogitarus. But one
of them has been called king by the decision of the senate through my
instrumentality. Brogitarus has been called king by you for money. And I
will think him a king, indeed, if he has any means of paying you what you
have trusted him with on his note of hand. For there are
many royal qualities in Deiotarus; this was the most royal of all, that he
gave you no money; that he did not repudiate that portion of your law which
agreed with the decision of the senate, namely that he was a king; that he
recovered Pessinus, which had been
impiously violated by you and stripped of its priest and its sacrifices, in
order to maintain it in its accustomed religion; that he does not suffer the
ceremonies which have been received as handed down from the most remote
antiquity, to be polluted by Brogitarus; and that he prefers to let his
son-in-law be deprived of your liberality, rather than to allow that temple
to lose the ancient reverence due to its religious character.
But to return to these answers of the soothsayers, the first of which is that
respecting these games; who is there who does not confess that the whole of
that answer and prophecy was delivered with reference to that fellow's
games?
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