Sacrifices and Festivals

For even the public festivals, which might otherwise have drawn many to the city, were not conducted with extravagance or ostentation, but with sane moderation, since our people then measured their well-being, not by their processions or by their efforts to outdo each other in fitting out the choruses, or by any such empty shows, but by the sobriety of their government, by the manner of their dail …

neither did they observe on a grand scale the festivals imported from abroad, whenever these were attended by a feast, while contracting with the lowest bidder for the sacrifices demanded by the holiest rites of their religion.

appearing in the public choruses in garments spangled with gold, yet living through the winter in clothing which I refuse to describe and showing other contradictions of the same kind in their conduct of affairs, which bring great shame upon the city?

for it is as though one of us should see the sun or moon being born and all of us looking on, and should utter no word through some impotence of speech, and should not also at the same time be zealous, so far as in him lay, when they lacked their share of honor, to bring them in all evidence to an honored place, and cause festivals and sacrifices to be offered to them, and apportion to each a rese …

Nor indeed will he put a stop to sacrifices on which the ancestral custom has pronounced, when he knows nothing at all of the matter, just as it is not possible for mortal nature to know about such things.