Book 2

pr. Simon, whom they call Peter, the foremost disciple of God, about the close of day, as it chanced, when the saffron evening reddens, had plucked up the curved anchor, catching the breezes in his sails and wishing to swim across the strait, when night stirs up a contrary wind to churn the sea from its depths and shake the storm-tossed boat. The sailors' cry strikes the heavens, beating and wailing, with the screeching of the cordage, nor was there any hope at hand for the shipwrecked, near to drowning, when the throng, pale with the perils, sees Christ afar treading the sea with his feet, as if he walked the dry shore along a solid road. At these marvels the other passengers, fearful, are amazed, but Peter alone, not trembling, recognizes the Lord of heaven and of earth and of the trackless sea, to whose omnipotence it belongs to lay the waters beneath his soles. He stretches out his hands in supplication, he asks the help he knows. But that one, gently assenting, bids him leap down from the boat. Peter obeys the command, but his footsteps had begun to dip into the topmost waves, and, his step slipping, his feet to sink down, slithering. God rebukes the mortal, because his faith is not steadfast, and he can neither tread the flowing waters nor follow Christ. Then his right hand lifts the servant and steadies him, and teaches him to walk across the swollen back of the strait. So me, having come forth from the safe silences, a talkative tongue carries into uncertain perils — not, like the disciple Peter, trusting in both desert and faith, but one whom frequent fault, light, rolls through the straits, a castaway. I am plainly rash, who, conscious of the night in which I pass my life in darkness, do not fear to trust my boat to the waves of so great a man; than whom now no one more eloquent exults, roars, thunders, and swells with the winds of speech — for whom it is most easy to sink one untaught to handle a ship, unless you, mighty Christ, stretch out your hand with favouring power, that the onrush of his eloquent mouth may not overwhelm me in the waves, but, stepping gradually, I may stand firm in the shifting shallows.

1. So far I have told of the first cradles of the old gods and the causes by which a dull error was kindled in the world, and that Rome now believes in our Christ; now I will read the objections, now refute words with words. Whence, then, do they say it began, or from what it took its start, that he might the more bend the holy hearts of the leaders by an alluring art? The lords of arms, in the springtime flower of youth, born in the midst of their father's camp, reared under the ancestral image, glowing with the examples heaped up at home, the cunning orator goads, as though he were sounding the trumpet-calls of war, and he sharpens their spirits and throws out words like these: 'If, men, victory already won is dear to your hearts, or to be won hereafter, let the virgin goddess hold a hallowed temple under your reign; what friend to your enemies says, in your holy empire, that she is not to be worshipped — she who is always present to it, who fills it with praises?' When the envoy had said this, the brother leaders' most peaceful faces reply: 'We know how sweet victory is to the brave, O most eloquent man of the Ausonian tongue, but by what means, by what method she is to be summoned, we know; with this art the father first imbued his sons, this the boy himself learned with his own father for master. Not by altars, not by the meal of the cake does happy victory come, won by prayer: tireless toil, rough valour, surpassing force of mind, ardour, vehemence, care bestow her, and hard strength in handling arms; which, if they are lacking to the fighters, although a golden Victory should spread her gleaming wings in a marble temple and rise up fashioned of many talents, she will not be present, but, offended, will seem to turn away her spears. Why, soldier, distrusting your own strength, do you fit out for yourself the idle comforts of a womanly form? Never did an iron legion behold a wingèd girl governing the weapons of panting men. Do you seek a mistress of conquering? Each man has his own right hand, and God almighty — not a virago with combed hair, nor poised on a bare foot and girt again with a band, nor clothing her swelling breasts with a floating fold. Either the hand of painters has taught you, after the manner of poets, to compose a divinity out of feigned monsters, or the pleasant picture took from your shrine what, imitating with various marks and with liquid wax, it might draw into a face, and, increased by the art of the kindred poem, dared to play with coloured tints. So they follow one path, so empty dreams of things both Homer and keen Apelles conceive, and Numa; and the pigments wish the Camenae their kin, the idols; the threefold power of deceiving has grown strong. If these things are not so, let it be declared why a poetic fable from your panels and wax provides you with sacred things. Why does the Berecyntian priest lose, mutilated, his cut-off loins, since poetry has gelded the beautiful Attis? Why also are horn-footed horses barred from the temple of Trivia and the hallowed groves, since the Muse has carried off the chaste youth in a swift chariot along the shores, and a many-coloured wall sketches this for you too? Cease at last, if there is any shame, gentile folly, to fashion incorporeal things with feigned limbs, cease to cover a man's back with feathers: in vain a woman is called a bird, and the same a great goddess a vulture. Do you wish to adorn your senate, most wealthy Rome? Hang up the spoils captured by arms and blood, heap up, a victress, the diadems of slaughtered kings, break the foul ornaments of the repulsed gods: then a victory won not on earth alone but above the stars also shall be kept for you in the midst of the shrine.' While he interrupts the princes with such words, he goes on and fills the trumpet with great harmonies; he pleads the old custom, affirms that nothing is sweeter than the accustomed, and that peoples and men are held by their own law. 'Just as, to those being born,' he says, 'various souls fall to boys, so to cities there is brought, when first the walls rise, their own hour and day, either a fate or a genius, by whose guidance they reign.' He adds too that the secret of things and the hiding-places of truth can be discerned by some prosperity of a favouring good through the proofs of fortune, if those things be happy which any man, by experience, may prove: that every idol always yielded to the forefathers happily and with a right foot; he reckons up the force of long time, he rouses up Rome herself, white with snowy hair and withered in face, demanding back with a querulous mouth her own divinities. 'I am free; let me be allowed to live by my own custom. Will there be anyone to reproach my thousand years? We are all set beneath one sun, quickened by the same air; the breeze is common to all the living. But who or what kind of God there may be, following different ways we ask, and by far-distant roads we go, one to the hidden; each nation has its own custom, by which road, hastening, it may go to so vast a deep.' To these things, so magnificent and flowing with so great an art, even Faith alone, most learned, first replied, to open the porch to the inner shrines of the true sect; for when we deal with divine matters, and him who either lacked a beginning or will lack an end, and who was before chaos and created the world, we strive to conceive in our mind, the force of understanding is slight, of human wit, and too narrow for so great a task; for indeed, if a lesser nature should try to strain its gaze more keenly and to penetrate the secrets of the supreme God, who would doubt that it grows feeble, frail, its sight overcome, and that the power of the wearied mind, within its small breast, is confounded and, dulled, succumbs to feeble cares? But the easy way of faith summons us to believe the omnipotent one, who grants not only present goods, but also things to come, and promises them, unbounded through long ages, lest I go wholly dissolved into the void, into nothingness, and perish after a brief enjoyment of the light. Weigh the author of the gift from the gift itself: the eternal one bestows eternal things, the mortal confers mortal, God divine things, the perishable what is to perish. All things that time accomplishes and that the end carries off are worthless by their brevity, and not worthy of an everlasting giver, whose own wealth it is never to cease, and to give to man that which never ceases. For if God offers anything corrupt or to be corrupted, and has nothing more precious than these, he is poor and weak and unworthy of the highest honour, and not omnipotent, but the empty shadow of a divinity. By this reasoning Faith wisely concludes — nay, does not doubt — that he is the true God, who bids us hope that what we are and that we live shall be unharmed for ever, if we deserve it. 'If it please you to climb to heavenly things,' she says, 'drive earthly cares from your mind, for as far as the earth lies low, set beneath in its place, and the royal palace of the vaulted heaven is divided from the ground, so far do your worldly things stand apart from my things to come — dire from good, wicked from holy, dark from serene. Whatever can perish, I counsel you to flee, whatever by the reasoning of nature takes on flaw and grows old, count it as nothing, since they will return to nothing. All things indeed that the earth begets, that it holds, I myself established in the beginning, and to the gleaming world I gave notable ornaments, and fashioned beautiful seeds. Yet I willed there to be a measure, and granted them to be enjoyed with sparing habits, as much as the dying and sick use of the body and of fleeting life might ask for itself; not that man, captivated by his desires and vainly burning, should reckon every good to lie in the sweetness of things and in the thin show of those which I bade run with time; and I appointed a span of life, under which I might test noble breasts, lest virtue, sluggish and unexercised, should bear an enervated strength, without the praise of the wrestling-ground. For the savour of these is seductive and pestilent, which, while they pass away, with a wondrous charm hold the minds entangled and bound; pleasure must be conquered, the soul's steadfastness must be unsnared, lest, bound by soft and clinging fetters, it be pressed down, captive. We must struggle with our utmost efforts; amid bitter things the path of virtue must be pursued, lest it love the sweets of a fleeting condition, lest it heap up too much gold, lest, ambitious, it wish to gaze greedily on the varied colours of gems, lest it display itself to the popular breezes and, puffed up, swell with fair honour, lest it stretch after its native soil, the acres of its father's land, and pour out its mind upon foreign fields, and lest it surrender to the bodily senses all that it wills or that it does, lest it prefer the useful to the just, and may set all its hope in me, never to perish — the things I shall have given — and my gifts to be drawn out through a long day.' With God, then, promising these things, what brave and keen man, capable of virtue, would prefer any brief thing to eternal things within him? Or what wise man would think the joys of the limbs better than the rewards of a living mind? Does not one difference set man apart from the beast — that the goods of the four-footed lie before their eyes, while I, on the contrary, hope for what is kept beyond sight, long, into eternity? For if my whole life will perish with my body, nor will anything of mine be able to survive after the grave, what ruler of heaven is there for me, what founder of the world, what God, or what power now to be rightly feared? I will go through impure debaucheries with seething lust, I will defile beds, I will trample on holy modesty, I will deny, while keeping it, some deposit of a kinsman left without a witness; greedy, I will despoil my poor clients, I will kill my aged mother with a magic spell (the old woman delays the second master by her postponed death), nor do I fear the evil; the public laws are deceived; the law sits armed, but knows not the hidden crime; or, if the matter lie open, the judge is corrupted with gold. Rarely does the just axe strike the guilty with its penalty. But why do I muse on these things? Lo, God recalls me, threatening with stern majesty; he denies that the monuments of my works shall perish through death. 'He shall not die,' he says, 'the inner man who breathes; he shall pay eternal punishment because he has ill ruled his subject limbs, nor is it hard for me to surround the liquid nature with flames; though it be borne, blowable, in the manner of the south wind, yet I will seize it and apply torments, I myself, incorporeal, and the one begetter of spirits. Nay, I will decree like fellowships of punishment for bodies too, since I can renew the ashes into their ancient form, nor is the power to be despaired of: I who could fashion the new, will repair the destroyed. There are no lacking examples of my power in the very seeds: nature teaches that all things grow green again after death; for they are dried up when the vigour perishes by which they lived before; then, dry and dead, consigned to the furrows or the pits, they lie hidden, and, after the manner of a tomb buried, they rise from the mounds with a reborn shoot. Can you know, or even guess, what so skilful a craftsman builds that, or what force works within? Let nothing, O wretches, deceive you of the doctrines of the natural philosophers. Lo, I, the Lord of begetting and of restoring what has perished, the mighty Increaser, bring back all withered things into their old forms, whether by flower or by leaf; and this same thing I shall one day do for man, that he may rise from the empty ash and stand in his former structure, which may repay me, according to its deserts, either by torments its crimes, or may shine on the height of supreme virtue, no longer to perish thereafter, in whatever lot it shall remain. Meanwhile, while the mingled substance flourishes in one, let it be mindful of its own author, let it venerate and, humbled, pray to its maker. One did not found the figment of the breathing soul, and another the body, nor do numerous divinities govern the goods of the present life; not one god supplies the crops and the spelt of the ears, while another gives must to the clusters and pours the purple juice from the heavy vine-shoot. I myself am he who makes the green olives swell with berries — which you feign sprung from Grecian Pallas — and I who grant the hours of Lucina to those being born; by my law the twofold sex, through mutual bonds, loves to beget offspring and rejoices in the propagation of its kind; which fire you defile with wanton loves and screen your debaucheries under the shadow of the goddess Venus. I alone rule the elements, nor by the mass of labour, like some wretched or weak or frail being, am I wearied. Boundless is the light that is mine, and an age that cannot be dissolved and an antiquity not understood by your senses. Hence for so many governances of the world I have no need of ministries, nor do I seek sharers or partners; moreover, the angelic legions, which my right hand made, it is mine to know, and what nature subsists in created things, and of what kind they are kept for my uses. You, passing me over, devise a thousand divinities, which you pretend obey my powers, that you may diminish me into various parts — me, of whom no part or form can be cut away, since I am a simple substance, nor can I be a part. Division is subject only to things composed and made; me no one created, that I might be cut up, the one founder of all things. Believe: what I shaped out of nothing is no part of me. Come, then, mortal, build a temple to me alone, and venerate me, the one God. I send back the building-stones, both those that Paros cuts and the Punic crag, those that green Lacedaemon holds and spotted Synnas; let no one dedicate to me the native purple of a rock. I love the temple of the mind, not of marble: in that the golden foundations of faith abide; the structure rises in snowy whiteness, gleaming with piety; justice covers the lofty roof; within, kindly modesty scatters the floor painted with the red flower of chastity, and keeps the halls. This is the house fit for me, this most beautiful seat receives me, worthy of an eternal and heavenly guest. Nor is this place new; my glory has flowed into the flesh, and the true light of God. God made illustrious the nursling matter, and made the body habitable, a parent to himself, that he might be able to rest in a temple of his pleasing. I had founded man perfect; I had bidden him gaze on heavenly things, turned with all his senses toward me, in upright posture and lofty bearing, looking on high; but he despised the ground and bent himself down toward the riches of the world, and drove my divinity from his breast. He was to be restored for me; sent down into him, my own Spirit descended, and the flesh brought forth from clay it informed with divine powers, and now the supreme God transferred the assumed man into godhead and taught it to grow warm again with our worship.' I would wish to know with what ears you receive these precepts of the Father, most learned censor of the Italian race. Or do you choose only the old custom, with reason abandoned, and does the keenness of the wise man and the genius of the man allow it to be said? 'The old custom is dearer to me than the way of justice, than the piety brought forth from heaven, than the faith of truth, than the rule of the right sect.' If whatever custom held in the rude years of the nascent world must be holily worshipped and preserved, let us roll back every age through its own footprints right up to the beginning, and let us be pleased to condemn, step by step, whatever a later successor's usage discovered. When the world was new, no farmers were subduing the fields: what mean the ploughs to themselves? What the superfluous care of the harrow? The belly is better filled with the acorns of the oak. The first men split the cleavable wood with wedges: let the glowing iron-mass melt down the axes into a lump again, and let the vein trickle back into its own metal. Slain cattle gave coverings, and a cold cave gave small dwellings: let us return to the caverns, let us take rough garments of sewn-on hides. Once savage peoples, their ferocity subdued and tamed, let them now growl grimly and again return to bestial ways and run back to their old condition. Let the young man, with Scythian piety, hurl from the votive bridge his father, withered with age (such was the custom of old), let the rites of Saturn smoke with the slaughter of infants and the savage altars resound with mournful wailings. Let the race of Romulus itself weave huts of frail thatch: so they say Remus dwelt; let them spread royal couches with hay, or wear a cloak of Libyan she-bear's hide, arranged on a shaggy body. Such things had the Trinacrian leader, or the Tuscan. Ancient Rome is not consistent with herself, changed through time and altered in rites, in dress, in laws, in arms. She worships much that she did not worship under King Quirinus; some things she established better, some she shunned, and she has not ceased to vary her custom, and the laws she had founded long ago she turned to the contrary. Why do you cast in my teeth the accustomed rites, Roman senator, when the decrees of the fathers and the people's resolve, the bond of an unstable judgment, has often made things new? Now too, as often as it is profitable to depart from the accustomed and to condemn past fashions with a fresh observance, we rejoice that something is found out and at last laid bare which lay hidden; ever increased by slow advances the life of man grows and profits by long use. So stands the changing order of mortal age, so nature varies its turns: infancy crawls, the step and the spirit of the feeble boy totter, sinewy youth seethes with over-hot blood, soon comes the steadied age of ripe strength; the last, better in counsels but weak in strength, fails in body, old age purged of mind. Through these discordant times the mutable age has led the human race in its courses; so, dull, amid its first beginnings and sunk to the ground, it acted like a four-footed beast; soon, tender, of teachable genius and now fit for arts to be learned, it was polished by the various novelty of things; thence, swelling with vices, it grew up into hot-blooded years, until it solidified its strength with seasoned vigour. The time is come that it should now be wise in divine things, more keenly, by the counsel of a serene mind, skilfully to seek out hidden things and at last to keep watch over eternal salvation, though, if so great is the love and care of the old custom, and it pleases not to depart from the ancient rite, there stands in the old books a noble example: already then, in the time of the flood or before, a nation served the one God — the nation which first inhabited the new-made lands and dwelt in an empty world; whence the extended shoot of our stock draws its origin and reforms the laws of native piety. But since we speak of Roman cults, I admit that the very people of Hector's blood for a long time worthily worshipped not many gods, and, content with rare shrines, set up few altars on the hills. Innumerable gods thereafter Rome bore for herself, when cities were subdued by valour and famous triumphs; amid the smoking ruins of temples the victor's armed right hand seized the enemy's images and, venerating them captive, carried them home like divinities. This image she snatched from the ruin of two-sea'd Corinth, that she took as plunder from burnt Athens; some images conquered Cleopatra gave, of a dog's head, some, when the sands of Hammon were subdued, the Syrtic trophies held — horned faces. As often as renowned Rome received with applause the chariot of a triumphing leader, so often she added altars to the gods and made herself new divinities from the spoils — divinities which, torn up with their native walls, could bring no aid to their own shrines! Do you see how the footprints of the old custom always are proved to have tottered variously with uncertain steps, in taking on gods unknown to the forefathers, and dedicating itself under a foreign religion, and not keeping its own rites? Whatever there is of holy things is in exile, and the foreign came into the hostile city. In vain, then, perverse observance, you cling to the accustomed: it is not the ancestral custom that you love, shameless one, it is not. But the cunning orator says that the city, by fate, was allotted by what genius it should pass its own age. 'For to all peoples, or to their walls, there is given,' he says, 'either a fate or a genius, after the manner of our souls, which under an unequal lot enter new bodies.' First of all, what a genius may be, or what state befits it, I do not know — what it can do and whence it arises, a formless spirit without body or form or any appearance, and what it knows, what offices it cares for. On the other hand, the souls of men, infused within the vital veins, I understand thus: that the blood from these takes its motion, light and tender warmth, whence, ranging through the limbs, it quickens the breast, kindles the cold, stiffens the dry, relaxes the hard. So the living mind tempers and governs the life of man for itself — which you try to compare with a feigned genius of the walls, who is nowhere and never was. Nay, the living mind in ruling bodies also turns over the highest counsel, that it may prepare faithful safeguards for the naked and weak, that it may shun perils to be feared, foresee the useful, be set to various arts, take counsel to what master it should submit itself, and whom it should think the maker of the world, whom the sum of things should follow. But this genius of your city — I would have you say — when did it first begin to pour itself into the as-yet-small Rome? Did it flow from the wolf's teats in the wooded valley and feed the twin infants, while it itself is being born? Or, flying with the vultures through the unknown breezes, did the shadow draw a sudden shape from a cloud? Does it sit on the highest roofs, or guard the inner shrines? Does it establish customs and found forensic laws, or does it intervene even in the ditches of the camps, drive the keen men to arms, rouse them with trumpets, urge them against the foe? What of these things would not a wise man see worthy of his laughter? Yet let us feign that there is some power that cares for such things, a shadow or a soul, through which the commonwealth has drawn its fate and is wholly quickened with warm marrow. Why does not this same power take counsel about the religion to be worshipped? Why does it not, free, look up to heaven? Why does it think the fate prescribed for it unchangeable, as if it were captive? Why does it feign the chains of birth-fate? He who may now refuse what then he was allowed to will, and abolish his errors and bend his senses. Thus for about seven hundred years it wandered, slippery and ever doubting what form of empire might please, what equitable power of ruling there should be. Even then the kingly state had the city in its rising, not without the aged set in their share of cares. Soon we see the nobles of the stock of old men handle the helm of counsel; then the plebeian throngs, joined to the fathers, in a mixed authority on equal terms, long ruled in matters of war and peace to be governed. Under the consul the nobility flourished, the plebs trusted in the tribune. This state suddenly displeases, and twice five are created, the heights of the highest nobles, whom twelve fasces surround at once, and each his own axe. Again the whole commonwealth gives itself back to twin leaders and grants the consuls to set up the annals. A blood-stained triumvir troubled the last ages. On these waves once the fate or genius or public spirit wandered; at length, taught to find the right path, the august head girt itself with a diadem, calling him father of the fatherland, ruler of the people and the senate, who should be the leader of the soldiery and the same a good dictator and censor and master of morals, guardian of wealth, avenger of crimes, bestower of honours. But if, with so many grades of things, with counsels so often varied, it scarcely at last came to that which it approves and which public reverence guards by a holy covenant, why does it doubt to acknowledge the divine laws, unknown to it before and at last restored? Let us give thanks: now it doubts no longer; for, made subject to Christ, Rome serves God, hating its former cults. By Rome I mean the men, whom we believe the mind of the city, not the genius, whose image is feigned in vain; though why do you feign for me one genius of Rome, when you are wont to assign to gates, houses, baths, stables their own geniuses, and through all the members of the city, and through its places, to feign many thousands of geniuses, that no corner may be empty of its own shadow? It remains that a like madness should impose a fate too on all buildings, that each wall, founded and built under a star of its own, should at its first hours have received by what lot it should remain, and when it should fall; they ascribe to the stones the feebly strong threads of Lachesis, and believe the beams of the roofs hang from spun spindles, and assign decrees to the very rafters, as if it mattered at the rising of what star the ash-tree was torn up that, lofty, should climb to the topmost roof. In short, there is no human affair, no action in the world, to which they do not declare a fatal lot to be attached. Since they lay this down, let them say why a law was founded in twice six tables, or why the red rubric threatens, which forbids the guilty to sin, whom the iron fates compel to crime and plunge into the inevitable. Nay, they even drive them to will, insinuating a depraved desire, that it may not be allowed the wretched to refuse the forbidden. Yield, if there is any shame, and blunt your sword, you harsh laws that punish with penalties those who deserved nothing; dissolve the prison-cave, under which you hold the bodies of an innocent throng by a sinning fate. No one is guilty, if the fates rule what is lived and done: nay, he is guilty, whoever, willing, dares what is not allowed, since to will the one or the other is his own, and the fates do not impose the charge on man, but he himself becomes guilty by his own choice, and repays the chosen wickedness, his deeds impious, with deserved punishments, slain not by his lot. Whoever thinks there is room for fate, let him know that the all-parent God knows that he is forbidden by none of the fatal stars, nor that pious prayers are repelled by any decree of astrology. For the soul breathes greater things and bears itself higher than the stars, and passes the ways and clouds of fate, and treads underfoot the moments, whatever are thought to fix the appointed lot at the time of birth. Hither come, all the race of men, hither run together, and cities: the boundless light calls; know your Maker! The free sect lies open: the fatal things are nothing; or if there are any, they vanish, void, when Christ is set against them. But many gods, they say, led Rome through prosperity, gods whom she worships for their desert, given to her in great triumphs. Come then, warrioress, declare what force made subject to you Europe and Libya; tell the names of the gods. That you, Jupiter, should rule over Crete, Pallas over Argos, the Cynthian over Delphi, they granted, with a favouring omen. Isis left the dwellers by the Nile, the Cytherean the Rhodians, the huntress virgin Ephesus, Mars surrendered the Hebrus, Bromius forsook Thebes, and Juno herself yielded that her own Africans should serve the Phrygian grandsons, and her whom the goddess wished to be mistress over subject nations, if any fates allow — even then she both strives and cherishes — she bade to live, made over, to the bridle of Romulus. By the treachery of native gods did so many cities fall, and lie their altars destroyed, by the very ones who betrayed them? O piety, O holy faith! A faithless majesty led its nurslings to other places, and faith is given to those divinities which by desertion earned to be hallowed! Or did it wish to save its own, and did religion, struggling much, try to drive off the hostile squadrons, straining against the Roman bands, but a stronger valour broke it in the death-bearing dust of the fields? Nay, it is so: poor in truth, in arms and in strength, superstition was conquered, and the glory fled, empty. But it was not hard, or hard enough, for a nation born to the battle-line to break sluggish victories and to bow the soft necks of every kind of god. Was it with stout sweat that the rough Samnite and Marsian waged war against the Dictaean Corybantes? Did the Etruscan soldier fight with whip-bearers, and with boxers anointed with oil and the art of the wrestling-school? Nor could Mercury, distinguished by his hat, when Lacedaemon was taken, save his own wrestling-schools from the disaster. The Cybelian foe, meeting the Apennine-dwelling footman in combat, how could he defend Asia and Ida, with the Gaul driving the lines into battle? Unless perhaps Idalian roses, the laurel of the lyre-playing bard, the reeds and bow of the forest-dwelling girl gave themselves into servitude, and to subdue trampled rites was a work of difficulty and of boundless labour. On the waves of Actium the symphony had given the war's signal to Egypt; the trumpet blared against it. Slender skiffs and frail boats had pressed close, the Memphian beaks among the turreted Liburnians: nothing could Serapis the god avail, or the barker Anubis. The burning army, under the leader of the Julian stock, prevailed — the leader whom Algidus had sent from his cold height. Not armed Venus, not then shielded Minerva came to aid, not the degenerate order of gods, exiled from their fatherland, stood by the Roman arms; and the conquered one himself before did not aid the hostile lines, if indeed he knew how to keep his ancient grief. But you say the gods chose where a holier usage of temples should remain with frequent worship without end, and that the conquering standards of the men of Aeneas of their own accord followed the love of King Numa, with none compelling. Did Pallas likewise willingly choose the tents of Diomedes and the camp of keen Ulysses, the guards of the citadel slain, where she sweated, sorrowful, in a dripping image? Or as often as the bravest leader of the Macedonians heaped up the lofty ashes of temples upon conquered Amyclae, did the divinities, made captive as plunder, wish themselves to be mingled with the booty and borne to the citadel of Assyrian Babylon? I cannot bear that the Roman name and the wars sweated over and the titles sought with so much blood should be carped at; he detracts from the unconquered legions and diminishes Rome's own rewards, who, whatever was bravely done, ascribes to Venus and snatches the palm from the victors. In vain, then, do we marvel at the four-horse chariots on the topmost arch and the leaders standing in the lofty chariots, the Fabricii, the Curii, here the Drusi, there the Camilli, and beneath the leaders' feet the captives with bent knee pressed down to the yoke, their hands twisted behind their backs, and the fragments of weapons hung on a heavy trunk, if Flora, Matuta, Ceres, and Larentina subdued Brennus, Antiochus, Perses, Pyrrhus, Mithridates. 'Yet with these for sponsors, favourable omens gave to their right hand joyful successes, and a lucky bird was present.' What does valour mean to itself, what glory, if a raven of Apollo aided Corvinus with wing or throat? But yet why was this raven absent on the deadly day, by chance, when the funerals covered ill-omened Cannae and the consul fell upon the heaped-up corpses? Why, on the fields of the Cremera, did no god warn, by crow or by the boding lapwing, that the three hundred Fabii would perish, with sinister Mars, their stock barely surviving in one? Did no Tritonian owl, flying up at grief-bringing Carrhae, betray to Crassus, a herald, that the goddess was at hand, or did snow-white doves carry the Paphian one, whose gilded fringe the Persian nation might tremble at? But I see what examples of ancient valour move you: you say the world was subdued by land and sea, you recount glad fortunes and every prosperous thing, you mention in order the pomps of a thousand triumphs and the litters of spoils led through the midst of Rome. Do you wish me to say what cause raised your toils, Roman, to such a height, by what nourishments your glory, increased, so resounds that it bridles the world with the reins laid upon it? Wishing to join peoples discordant in tongue and realms dissonant in worship under one empire, God determined that whatever was tractable in its ways should bear soft reins under a harmonious yoke, that the love of religion might hold the hearts of men joined; for no bond worthy of Christ is made unless a single mind unites the entangled nations. Concord alone knows God, alone, tranquil, rightly worships the kindly Father: that most peaceful consent of human covenant prospers the world for him, puts it to flight in sedition, exasperates it with savage arms, feeds it with the gift of peace, holds it by quiet piety. In all the lands which the western ocean contains and which Aurora lights with her rosy dawn, raging Bellona was confounding all mortal things and arming savage right hands for mutual wounds. About to bridle this madness, God taught the nations everywhere to bow their head under the same laws and all to become Romans, those whom the Rhine and the Hister, those whom golden-flowing Tagus, those whom great Hiberus floods, those between whom the horned river of the Hesperides glides, and those whom Ganges nourishes, and the warm seven mouths of the Nile wash. A common right made them equal and bound them by the same name and reduced the conquered into fraternal bonds. Men live in regions of every kind no otherwise than as if one native city should enclose fellow-citizens born together within single walls, and we were all reconciled by an ancestral hearth. Regions distant in their tract and shores divided by the sea now meet for one common forum through suretyships, now through commerce and the arts to a thronged assembly, now through the marriage-couch to the right of foreign wedlock; for, the blood being mixed, one offspring is woven from peoples in alternation. This was brought about by the great successes and triumphs of the Roman empire: for Christ, even then coming, believe it, the way was made ready, which the public friendship of our peace long since built by the governance of Rome. For what place could there be for God in a savage world and in the discordant breasts of men, guarding their own rights by a dissimilar reasoning, as was once the case? So the disordered senses in the human breast and the disjoined parts of a mind with a disturbed covenant neither clear wisdom visits nor God enters. But if the summit of the mind, having gained the right of ruling, should rein the impulses of the pugnacious stomach and the rebellious fibres and curb the whole liver by one reason, the state of life becomes stable, and a sure judgment drinks in God within the heart and is subjected to the one Lord. Lo, be present, Omnipotent, flow into the harmonious lands: now the world receives you, Christ, whom, joined in a common bond, peace and Rome hold; you bid these be the heads and summits of things, nor is Rome approved by you without peace, and the excellence of Rome makes peace please, Rome which restrains the various motions at once by its rule and presses them with terror; for it has not, despoiled of the former strength of its valour, grown old, nor felt the ages, nor with trembling arms, when the wars call, does it take up arms, nor does it supplicate with so degenerate a mouth the venerable princes, as that full-noble senator wishes, powerful in the art of pleading and learned to feign cunningly and to put on the lying weight of a grave person, as a tragic singer covers his face with hollowed wood, through whose gaping some great accusation he may pant. If it is allowed to feign a voice, surely that voice is fitter for Rome, which now under her name I shall bring forth. She, because she thinks it base to weep at the repulse of the temples, and to say that the aegis fought for her in doubtful perils, and to confess herself heavy with declining age, embracing her own leaders, thus joyfully speaks: 'O illustrious leaders, hail, noble offspring of an unconquered prince, under whom I have laid aside all my age, reborn, and have seen my white hairs grow golden again: for though old age diminishes all mortal things, for me the long day brings forth another age, I who by living long have learned to despise the end. Now, now a just reverence befits my years, now deservedly I am called venerable and the head of the world, when I shake the helmet under the olive's foliage and the reddening crests, veiling my fierce belt with a green garland, and, armed, adore God without the crime of slaughter. For a crime — alas, it grieves me — a crime had savage Jupiter persuaded me, that, dipped in the holy blood of the righteous, I should defile with death the sword accustomed to wars. At his instigation first Nero, his mother slain, drank apostolic blood and polluted me with the slaughter of the holy, and, savage, branded his own crime upon me. After him Decius too, raging with open throats, fed his insane madness; soon the thirst burned of many like men, blazing through grim wounds to draw forth illustrious souls and to sport with punishments, and to pour streaming deaths into my lap, and under the law of the forum to cut harmless necks. With this stain your times have now cleansed me, guilty. I live piously by your authorship, impiously of old by the art of Jove, I confess; for what did he hand down that was not bloody? Or what did he ask for himself that was mild or gentle? He who, while he feared beforehand that the worship of Christ should grow, raged and defiled the wretched age with blood. And there are those who do not hesitate to reproach us with sinister wars, since we have spurned the altars of the temples, and affirm that the Libyan, repelled from the hinge of the Colline gate, Hannibal, was driven back by the rule of Jove and Mars, and that the victorious Senones were put to flight from the citadel of the Capitol when the divinities fought from above on the high rock! Those who again trample into me my past disaster and old griefs, let them see that in your time I now suffer no such thing: no barbarian foe shakes my bars with his spear; no stranger, in arms, in dress and hair unknown, wanders here and there, roaming through the captured city, dragging my youth into transalpine bonds. Lately the Getic tyrant tried to destroy Italy, coming, sworn, from his native Hister, to level these citadels with the ground, to dissolve the golden roofs with flames, to clothe the gowned nobles in sheepskins; and now, rushing on, he had trampled the Venetian fields with his squadrons and laid waste the wealth of the Ligurians, and the pleasant country of the deep Po, and was pressing the Tuscan soil, the river overcome. These storm-clouds of horsemen no ever-wakeful goose drove off, the betrayer of a hidden peril in the dark of night, but the raw strength of men, and the shattered breasts of those who closed in combat, and a spirit not trembling to sink in death for the fatherland and to seek through wounds a fair praise. Did that day too, with Jove for sponsor, bring so great a reward of valour? The leader of the army and of the empire was for us a Christ-powerful youth, and his companion and parent, Stilicho, with the one God Christ for both; when his altars were adored and the cross inscribed on their brows, the trumpets sounded: the foremost spear ran before the dragons, which, loftier, lifts up the summit of Christ. There, after thrice ten years, the deadly nation of Pannonia at last paid its penalties, destroyed. The bodies, once enriched with famous plunder, lie heaped in mounds; you will marvel, late posterity, at the unburied corpses far and wide, which covered the Pollentine fields with their bones. If I could lift up my head, cut down by the hands of the Gauls, from the squalor of the ashes, with Camillus returning, if I received the standards with smoking, beaming brow, if I could wreathe with garlands my wretched ruins and gird with laurel the ill-hanging towers, in what lap shall I receive you, most valiant prince? What flowers shall I scatter? With what garlands shall I deck the halls? What hangings shall I suspend at the festal gates, free from so great a war, and, while you stand under arms, free and having experienced the Getic tumults only by hearing? Mount the triumphal chariot, and, the spoils recovered, come hither with Christ for companion. Allow me, I will take off the chains from the captive flocks; lay down the manacles worn by long servitude, you bands of mothers and youths. Let the old man, exiled from his ancestral hearth, unlearn to be a slave, let the boy too learn, with his mother restored to the ancestral threshold, to know himself freeborn. Let all fear be absent; we have conquered, it is good to exult. What such thing befell, when the Carthaginian leader of old was repulsed? He, after he had struck the trembling bars of the sought-for gate, relaxed by the Baian waters, abandoned his hardest oak-strength to luxury and broke his iron by lust. But our Stilicho, closing hand to hand from the very line of battle, compelled the iron-clad men to turn their backs. Here Christ our God was present to us, and pure valour, there your delights, fruitful Campania, conquered the wanton foe; not Jupiter protected the keen Fabius, but pleasant Tarentum aided him, which gave him the tyrant subdued to be trampled by its allurements. For these deserts what worthy rewards shall I repay? I have none: to fashion limbs in statues is a worthless thing; nothing worthless befits valour; for worthless is what time snatches away: the bronze falls, or the tawny gold flows down, or the brightness of silver perishes if use has been lacking, and the vein, darkened by rust, corrupts its colour. A living glory is owed to you, prince, a living reward of valour, an immortal honour, following your deeds. Ruler of the world, you shall be joined with Christ for ever, by whose leadership you draw my realm to heavenly things. Let nothing move you, I pray, the voice of the great rhetor, who, under the guise of an envoy, weeping for dead rites, dares, with the weapons of his genius and the strength of his speaking, alas, to attempt our faith, nor does he see you and me devoted, Augustus, to God, for whom we have closed the squalid temples and cast down the altars wet with gore. Let Christ alone rule and keep our palaces; let no demon now know the Romulean citadels, but let my hall serve the Lord of peace alone.' Thus speaking, Rome besought her pious nurslings to spurn the envoy who sought what must not be admitted, the envoy of Jove sent from the shrines by a soothsayer, but not from the fatherland; the fatherland's own glory is Christ. Yet he persists, affirming that the way of going is many-forked and various, when one God is sought; that hence some, but thence others, hasten apart, each through his own windings; but that the crossroads are constrained to the same end together and run together into one; nay, that the heaven and the soil, the winds, the sea, the clouds are given in common to all — both we who worship you, Christ, and those who offer rotting entrails on carved stones. I do not deny the common use, for all the living, of the air, the stars, the sea, the earth, and the rain. Nay, even the unjust and the just alike dwell under one sky, the impious and the pious take in the same breezes, the chaste and the unchaste, the harlot and the wife, nor does the breath of the priest pant otherwise from his mouth than that of the swordsman, the spirit that tempers life with the airy draught. The cloud of spring rains, the west wind driving it, but it makes fruitful alike the fields of the thief and of the harmless farmer. So the pure streams of a summer pool the traveller approaches, as does the robber, when weary; so the sea serves the pirates as it does the merchant, nor does the wave obey the enemy less than when it carries the benches of a lawful keel. Therefore nature, capable of either thing, offers itself to peoples to be created, nor has it to distinguish the unequal desert of the living, whom it is bidden only to feed. For the world serves, it does not judge; this the supreme Lord of nature reserves for himself unto the appointed times; now the gifts given to man by the same laws are present, those once granted: the fountain flows, the river overflows, the sail-flying sea is cleft by ships, the rain falls in, the thin breeze flits, the moving air quickens, and the thing of nature becomes public and ready for all, while the elements, in their service, keep their own course. So the upright man and the one guilty of a capital crime enjoy the same stars and the kindly bounty of the easy sky. To live is common, but not common to deserve. In short, the Roman, the Daha, Sarmatian, Vandal, Hun, Gaetulian, Garamant, Alaman, Saxon, Galaula, all walk on one earth, one heaven is for all, and one ocean too, which contains our world. I add another thing: the animals drink from our springs; of the very dew there is corn for me, of which there is grass for the wild asses, the filthy sow swims in our river, our breeze enters even the dogs themselves and quickens the wild bodies with its light breath. But Roman and barbarian differ as far as the four-footed is separated from the two-footed, or the dumb from the speaking; so much also do those who rightly follow God's precepts stand apart from the stupid cults and the errors of them. The communion of air and heaven, then, does not make men equal in the religion to be held; it only begets bodies, nourishes, repairs, and keeps the recurring seeds. Nor does it matter of what kind, of what shape, or of what desert: provided they be, as bodies, brought forth of earth from the earthly things in which is vigour from the elements; for the work of the craftsman Father flows into the midst with no distinction, nor runs with a grudging gift, the gift given before the first man Adam grew foul. Nor, restricted by the vice of those who use it, does it fail or withdraw itself from the unworthy, nor does it shun the foul and base. No otherwise the ray of the sun, when it lights all places with its diffused splendour, strikes the golden roofs, but it strikes also the gables foul with black smoke. It enters the bright Capitols with their marbles, but it enters also the cracks of the prison and the foul holes of the closed dung, and the squalid cell in a reeking arch. But the dark workhouses will not be, for that reason, what are the palace ceilings tawny with jewelled metal. Surely the more those will not be — who seek a divinity in urns and tombs and appease the phantoms with blood — what those are who venerate the supreme Lord of heaven and offer justice and adorn the temple of the breast. But the great secret of a hidden reason cannot be sought otherwise than if the way be multiplied by scattered paths, and the track wear a hundred lanes, about to seek the hidden God by a varied hunt. Far otherwise is the truth; for the great circuit of ways has doubtful windings and wanders too perplexedly; the simple way alone lacks error, knowing not to be bent into a byway, nor doubtful at many crossroads. Yet I do not deny that a twofold journey ever meets us, that mortal things go in two directions, when ignorance doubts whither it may bear its step, the one is many-forked, but the other simple and single; the one follows God, the other worships many gods, and its diverging branches are as many as the standards of the temples, as many as the phantoms that flit among bronze monsters, or this one snatches to the Dionysia of thyrsus-bearing Bacchus, or entices others to the Saturnalian feasts, or, hidden, teaches what rites the infant Diespiter demands to be paid him amid the clashings of the bronze. And now the Lupercalian thongs and the naked runnings of the youth are sought; thence the Megalesian eunuch, inflamed with dire furies, is called to the blind oracles. There are those, ready to go by shorter crossroads, who venerate the cheap little vegetables in the Nilotic gardens, daring to set leek and onion as gods among the clouds, and to place garlic and mustard above the stars of heaven. For Isis and Serapis and the ape with the great tail and the crocodile are the same as Juno, Laverna, Priapus. These you worship, Nile, those you adore, Tiber: there is one superstition, though the error is not of one colour. Hence another path arises, hidden in dark thickets, a track which the cattle and the dumb animals take, and those that lurk in the woods: the mind of men, knowing not heaven, is covered, living captive under a savage tyrant. This one thinks there is no God, since all things are turned by chances, and the ages roll under no governor. This road in no wise differs by a great distinction from those ways which you tread, who think the divinities many and the portents of a supreme god numerous. Of the simple way, then, the leader is God; he bids the mortal race go by the one way which he himself directs, lofty, on a right-hand slope to the high summit. The first face of the way is untilled, rough, sad, difficult, but at its end most beautiful, and endowed with ample riches, and abounding in perennial light, and such as can compensate for past labours. A manifold demon is the leader who, on the left side, confounds a hundred-forked way; thence he draws bearded sophists, hence he draws those powerful in wealth or honour; he allures both with the tongues of birds and deceives by the soothsayer, he goads with the riddle of the raving aged Sibyl, he involves in astrology, drives into the magic arts, solicits by an omen, captures by the augur, terrifies by the entrails. You see how the one way is wandering by many windings, having suffered such a leader as suffers it not to go to the Lord of salvation, but shows the way of death through byways, byways painted with brief goods, but at the very end sad, and plunged headlong into a sudden Charybdis? Go far off, you nations! No fellowship of ways have you with the people of God; depart far away and penetrate your own chaos, whither that one calls you, going before, through the perplexed pathless places of infernal night! But for us, seeking the one Lord of life, the light is the way, and the clear day, and a simple grace. We follow hope and walk by faith and enjoy the things to come, to which the joys of the present life do not attain, nor do pleasure possessed and to be possessed run together. The last complaint of the envoy was bewailed with grief, that to the Palladian hearths the meal is denied, or to the very virgins and the chaste choirs the sustenance is refused, and the Vestal fires are defrauded of their accustomed expense, hence, he says, that the barren fields more rarely come to fruit, and that grim famine rages, and through the whole world that mortals grow pale, poor and in want of bread. What so great and so hateful famine has arisen in the present time, as the anger of Triptolemus and Ceres stirred up in the storehouse to avenge the virgin's wrong, I do not remember, nor does rumour whisper any such thing. I hear that the Nile runs through the Pharian fields after its custom, and that the green crops of Canopus stand in pools. Or let him come who, with a dried-up river, brings the news that hungry Memphis is squalid with thirst beneath the dust, and that the Pelusian marsh sweats no mud. Has the spring, hidden by nature's secret cover, dried up, and does the vein scarcely drip a thin liquid? Does the river, fleeing back, hate to graze our banks and bend its course toward the scorched Indians? Does the thirsty channel in mid-tract devour the wave of the river, and are the pools suddenly absorbed in a chasm, so that they cannot cover the furrows with their shallows, nor the dry glebes of Egypt be drawn over the plains, the stiff clods softened to a rich mud by the streams poured in, whence the harvest may wave wide over the long-haired fields, and the surface clothe itself more thickly with heavy ears? Look, does the ploughman of the Libyan countryside cease to load the ships with grain and to send to the mouths of the Tiber the wheaten heaps for the food of the people? Does the furrower of the Leontine plain cease to loose the fruit-bearing skiffs from the Lilybaean shore, and the Roman fleet give no sails to the straits, nor burst the granaries, carrying the stored corn-stores of the Sardinians? So does the Punic ploughman fill his tables with wild pears, and the Sicilian feeds on uprooted herbs, and now does Sardinia supply oaken acorns to the people of Remus, now is the food of Quintus the stony berry? Who comes hungering to the spectacles of the great circus? What region endures grim fasts on empty steps? Or what mill of the Janiculum rests, mute? How great fruits each province bears, and how with rich fertility the bounteous world flows abundantly, the corn-dole is the proof, which is given publicly to your commons, Rome, and feeds the long leisure of so great a populace. Suppose there may chance to be some year a little less fruitful: it is no wonder, nor new in the world; our forefathers learned, having endured famine for the most part, if the wasting air has dried up the thin clouds beneath a burning star, and the most frequent rain has not poured in its spring waters upon the new and green crop; if the ripe harvest, before it solidified the conceived marrow with tender milk, drew in its juice from the warm east wind, blown upon it, and bore hungry stalks, and the barren forest of straw mocked the vain prayers of the farmer. By these flaws, if I err not, the field was corrupted even before it lay subject to the Palladium, before Vesta should keep the household gods under the Pergamene roof with hidden fire, before the father of Priam should build the walls with hired workmen, before the virgin Pallas should found her own Athens; for in these cities, since the origin of the Vestal ash, as they relate, was taken from the first kindling, and either a Phrygian or a Greek consecrated the hearths for his nurslings. The elements waver with ancient errors, and, shaken from their lawful measure, for the most part are borne into chances other than the law has, or the journey of the year. Now the devouring mildew consumes the crop from the vice of the malignant air, now the cold ice of the chill north wind, after the west winds, in the warm spring, burns the fault into it and dyes the scorched head of the stalk with soot; or, while the swelling herb of the tender seed sprouts, it perishes, constricted by continuous and excessive frosts, nor is it able to fix a thin fibre in the earth; soon, cast out of the soil as the ice settles, it is left over, and the bare root is torn from the withdrawn field. The doubtful caltrops come up and the bristling thistle; these dry thirst bears, this the drunken moisture rears. A temperateness poured out too little or too much works these diseases of the lands and wounds the sick world. No otherwise the corrupted use of our body for the most part falls into vice, nor in right order stands firm, and by an excess of moderation afflicts the limbs; for there is one state both of the world and of this body which we bear; the same nature sustains them both. Things brought forth from nothing grow, and, soon to be nothing, either totter with diseases or, overcome by time, grow old, nor is nature without flaw, for which an end is at hand. Always, believe me, the heaven has woven the years with various yields: some it has enriched, flowing with much fruit, some, unhappy, it has condemned with adverse stars, frustrating the farmer's care with empty and barren hope. But if this plague avenges the Vestal girls — a wicked plague, born of the faithless world — why does it not lay waste only the little fields of the Christians, through whom the appointed gifts are denied to your virgins? We use both the produce of the country and the method of tillage, nor does it irk us to exercise the hand; and there, if a stone has stood, which the ancient error was wont to gird with little fillets, or to entreat with a hen's lung, Terminus is broken and violated by no entrails, and the tree, beribboned, that kept the smoking lamps, falls, cut down by the avenging axe. Yet not for that reason is the fruit of the little field less, nor the glad mildness of serene weather, nor the rainy wind that tempers the cultivated fallows. But there is no great need for those who live frugally, and he to whom the greatest joys come from no large income is set free, and we exult into gain with greedy zeal. For those for whom hope is shaped toward eternity, every good is slight that the present age heaps up. O too happy, the wise man and the rustic in one, who, tilling the lands and the soul, spends on both a sleepless care, such as those whom the author Christ has imbued, and gave these precepts to the husbandmen he took up: 'When you commit the seeds to the furrows, beware of fields hard with the leanness of pebbles, lest there fall there what is sown, since the over-fruitful germ at first runs to riot, then, the sap soon failing under the heat of the fiery star, it thirsts, is parched, and dries; nor let the seeds run into thorny brambles, for rough chains weave about the rising crop and the bramble binds the frail stalks with sharp knots; and let not the grains, cast on the bank of the road, be scattered, for these lie bare and open to the birds and are devoured everywhere and lie foul, for the mockery of the unclean crows.' With these laws God strengthens the husbandman; he takes in the heavenly law of the Father not with the surface of his ear, but disposes at once the crop both of his heart and of his field, that his breast may shine no less with inner cultivation than when the glad acres display their harvests. For we root out the brambly thorns from the breast, lest the vicious shoots kill the vital germ, lest the thorny thicket of crimes hinder the fruit and crop of the soul with the frequent sin of wickedness, lest the thin gravel, with its barren sands, dry up the faith withering beneath the heart, lest the heat of the breast blaze and burn the gifts of grace in exhausted veins, in short, lest a worthless care leave God in the worn-away part of the liver, lest it forsake the hope by which we feed within and surrender it to the foul birds to be devoured, and the cast-out faith become a prey to the winged enemy. Such skill of ours shall render the fruits of the fields a hundredfold, the fields on which he presses more keenly, nor does he fear that the weevil should ravage the heaped-up pile or that the black ant should hoard it in its hollows. There are also most beautiful rewards for our virgins: both modesty, and a face covered with a holy veil, and a private honour, and a beauty unknown and not public, and rare and slight feasts, and a mind ever sober, and the law of chastity fulfilled to the end of life. Hence the fruits are gathered tenfold into the granaries, granaries never liable to the nocturnal thief, for no thief approaches heaven, the heavenly things are never unsealed by fraud; fraud rolls in the lowest earth. What honour there now is of Vestal virginity I will examine, by what law it governs all the glory of modesty. And first, the little ones are taken in their tender years, before their own will is a free choice, glowing with the praise of chastity and the love of the gods, that they may condemn the just bonds of the sex meant for marriage, the captive modesty is consigned to the ungrateful altars, nor does pleasure perish, despised, for the wretches, but is taken away — the pleasure of the untouched body; the mind is not held untouched, nor is any rest given to the beds for which the unwedded woman sighs over a blind wound and the torches she has lost; then, because a saved hope does not wholly slay the fire, for it will some day be allowed to kindle the resting torches and to spread the festal bridal veil over decrepit grey hairs; at the prescribed time, requiring undefiled limbs, Vesta at last loathes the virgin's old age. While the vigour fit for the marriage-chamber swelled, no idle love made fruitful the womb with a mother's offspring; the veteran old woman marries, her sacred labour fulfilled, and, the hearths deserted which her youth had served, she carries her worn-out wrinkles to the marriage-couch, and the new bride learns to grow warm in a cold bed. Meanwhile, while the twisted fillet binds her straying hair and the unwedded priestess kindles the fatal coals, she is carried, like a public procession, through the midst of the squares, sitting on a soft litter, and, with her face uncovered, imputes herself, a maiden conspicuous, to the astonished city. Thence to the seated assembly of the arena the kindly modesty and the piety free of blood goes, to behold the bloody combats and deaths and the wounds sold for food, to gaze with holy eyes; she sits, distinguished by the venerable trappings of her fillets, and takes delight in the trainers of gladiators. O tender and gentle soul! She rises at the blows and, as often as the victor thrusts the iron into the throat, she says these are her delights, and bids the breast of the fallen man, the modest maiden, with thumb turned, be broken open, lest any part of the soul lie hidden in the deepest vitals, while the pursuer throbs with the sword pressed deeper. Is this that merit, that they are said to continue the watches for the majesty of the Latian Palatine, that they redeem the life of the people and the safety of the nobles, because they bathe their necks well with their hair, or well gird their temples with little ribbons and add threads to their hair, and because beneath the earth they cut the throats of lustral beasts into the flame, with the shades for witnesses, and mingle their murmurs? Or because, sitting in the better part of the balcony, they watch the bronzed face — how with the often-thrust trident they shake the spear-shafts, and how the wounded man, when he flees, drenches with his open wounds his part of the sand, and with how much blood he marks his footprints? That golden Rome may now know no such kind of crime, I pray you, most august leader of the Ausonian realm, that you would bid this so grim rite, like the rest, be removed. Consider — is there not room left here for a father's merit, which God and the loving piety of your sire kept for you to fulfil? Lest he alone should take the rewards of so great a valour, 'I reserve a part for you, son,' he said, and left the honour whole and untouched. Seize, leader, the fame deferred unto your times, and, what is left over for the father, do you, his successor in praise, possess. He forbade the city to be steeped in the blood of bulls: do you forbid the deaths of wretched men to be offered in sacrifice. Let no one fall in the city whose punishment is a pleasure, nor let virginity delight its eyes with slaughters. Now, content with wild beasts alone, let the infamous arena play no homicides with bloodstained arms. Let Rome be devoted to God, let her be worthy of so great a prince, both mighty in valour and ignorant of crime, and whatever leader she follows in war, let her follow in piety.