CHAPTER VI.

Your ancient decrees are perpetually being ignored by yourselves, both as regards personal and social questions, as well as religious restrictions.

Now I wish these most religious guardians and devotees of laws and ancestral institutions to answer [20] for their own loyalty and respect and devotion to the decrees of their forefathers, and to say if they have not broken away or deviated from any of them, or if they have not annulled some which were necessary and excellently adapted to secure propriety generally. What, pray, has become of those laws which checked extravagance and ostentation ¹⁷? which decreed that not more than one hundred pence should be allowed for a supper, nor more than one fowl, and that not specially fattened, served up; which banished from the senate on a grave charge of ostentation a patrician who possessed ten pounds weight of plate; which immediately suppressed the theatres as they sprang up to the deterioration of morals; which allowed the distinctions belonging to rank and honourable birth to be assumed neither rashly nor with impunity? For I see suppers now which can only be called 'centenarian' from the 'hundreds' of pounds spent upon them ¹⁸; and silver mines wrought into dishes,—it were of little moment if it were only for senators, and not for freedmen, or those still in slavery. I see also theatres, for one is no longer sufficient, nor may they be uncovered. It was of course lest immodest pleasure should be chilled, particularly in winter, that the Spartans first invented the disgrace of a cloak at the games! I see, too, no distinction left in dress between matrons and prostitutes. With regard to women, indeed, even those regulations of our ancestors which [21] protected modesty and sobriety have fallen into disuse; when no woman knew aught of gold, save on the one especial finger which her spouse had pledged to himself with the wedding-ring; when women abstained from wine so rigorously that her own relatives starved to death a matron for breaking open the bins of a wine-cellar. In the time of Romulus a woman who had touched wine was put to death with impunity by her husband Mecenius. Hence arose the necessity of their offering kisses to near relatives, that they might be judged by their breath. Where is that conjugal happiness, so successful in the point of morals at all events, by reason of which not one family for nearly six hundred years from the foundation of the city took action for a divorce? But now in the case of women every limb is heavy with gold, no kiss is free on account of wine; moreover a divorce is now the subject of prayer, as though it were the natural fruit of marriage.

Even as regards your gods themselves, what your ancestors wisely decreed, you, their most obsequious sons, have rescinded. Father Bacchus with his mysteries, the consuls by the authority of the senate banished, not only from the city but from the whole of Italy. Serapis and Isis and Harpocrates with his dog-headed Anubis, Piso and Gabinius the consuls, who at any rate were not Christians, forbade the Capitol, that is, expelled from the assembly of the gods, and rejected, having overthrown their altars; thus restraining the vices of shameful and idle superstitions. Upon these gods, whom you restored, you [22] have conferred the highest majesty. Where is your religious awe? where the veneration due from you to your ancestors? In dress, in food, in style of living, in sentiment, nay in language itself, you have renounced your progenitors. You are ever praising the past, yet you live day by day in a round of novelty. From which it is clear that, in departing from the virtuous regulations of your ancestors, you retain and preserve customs which you ought not, whilst you fail to preserve those which you ought. Besides, that very tradition of your forefathers which now for the first time you seem to most faithfully guard, in respect of which you pronounce the Christians principally guilty of transgression, I mean zeal in the worship of the gods,—a matter on which antiquity especially erred,—although you may have rebuilt the altars of the now Roman Serapis, although you may have offered your phrenzied orgies to the now Italian Bacchus,—that very tradition I will in its proper place ¹⁹ shew that you have equally despised and neglected and destroyed in the face of their authority. At present I shall reply to that disgraceful report of our secret atrocities, and so clear the way to deal with our more open crimes. [23]