consecrated in order to propitiate their gods, contributed
largely to the overthrow of public order._
Cicero, a weighty man, and a philosopher in his way, when about to
be made edile, wished the citizens to understand[111] that, among
the other duties of his magistracy, he must propitiate Flora by
the celebration of games. And these games are reckoned devout in
proportion to their lewdness. In another place,[112] and when he was
now consul, and the state in great peril, he says that games had been
celebrated for ten days together, and that nothing had been omitted
which could pacify the gods: as if it had not been more satisfactory
to irritate the gods by temperance, than to pacify them by debauchery;
and to provoke their hate by honest living, than soothe it by such
unseemly grossness. For no matter how cruel was the ferocity of those
men who were threatening the state, and on whose account the gods
were being propitiated: it could not have been more hurtful than
the alliance of gods who were won with the foulest vices. To avert
the danger which threatened men's bodies, the gods were conciliated
in a fashion that drove virtue from their spirits; and the gods did
not enrol themselves as defenders of the battlements against the
besiegers, until they had first stormed and sacked the morality of
the citizens. This propitiation of such divinities,--a propitiation
so wanton, so impure, so immodest, so wicked, so filthy, whose actors
the innate and praiseworthy virtue of the Romans disabled from civic
honours, erased from their tribe, recognised as polluted and made
infamous;--this propitiation, I say, so foul, so detestable, and alien
from every religious feeling, these fabulous and ensnaring accounts
of the criminal actions of the gods, these scandalous actions which
they either shamefully and wickedly committed, or more shamefully and
wickedly feigned, all this the whole city learned in public both by
the words and gestures of the actors. They saw that the gods delighted
in the commission of these things, and therefore believed that they
wished them not only to be exhibited to them, but to be imitated by
themselves. But as for that good and honest instruction which they
speak of, it was given in such secrecy, and to so few (if indeed given
at all), that they seemed rather to fear it might be divulged, than
that it might not be practised.