[25]
O ye immortal gods! How could you speak more plainly to
us if you were living among and associating with us? You show
us and plainly tell us that those games were profaned. What can be mentioned
more deformed, polluted, altered and perverted, than for the whole body of
slaves, as if they had been liberated by the permission of the magistrates,
to be turned loose into one theatre, and set as guards over another, so that
one body of spectators might be exposed to the power of slaves, and that the
other might consist entirely of slaves? If during the games a swarm of bees
had come on the stage, we should think it necessary to send for the
soothsayers out of Etruria; and shall we all see on a sudden such vast
swarms of slaves let loose upon the Roman people, blocked up and shut in,
and not be moved by that? And perhaps, in the case of a swarm of bees, the
soothsayers would warn us from the written books of the Etruscans to guard
against the slaves.
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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.
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