[8] “It’s no wonder you have made an
assault upon the senate-house; nothing is closed to you. Only tell us what sort
of a god you want him to be made. He cannot be an Epicurean god, neither
having himself any care nor causing any to others. A Stoic? How can he be
‘round,’ as Varro says, ‘without head or prepuce’?
Yet there is something in him of the Stoic god, now I see. He has neither heart
nor head. By Hercules, though, if me had asked this favor
of Saturn, whose festival month the Saturnalian
prince kept going the whole year long, he wouldn’t have got it; and surely he
wouldn’t of Jove, whom so far as he possibly could he convicted of incest. For
he put to death Silanus his son-in-law, just because
the man preferred that his sister, prettiest of all the girls, so that
everybody called her Venus, should be called his Juno. ‘Why his sister?’ you say,—in
fact, I ask it. Think, you blockhead. At Athens
that sort of thing is halfway allowed; at Alexandria
altogether. ‘But since at Rome,’
you say, ‘the mice live on dainties.’ He’s going to straighten our crooked
ways! He doesn’t know what goes on in his own chamber, and now ‘he searches the
regions of heaven.’ He wants to become a god. Isn’t he satisfied that he has a
temple in Britain;
that the barbarians worship him and beseech him as a god that they may find
him a merciful madman?”
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