Chapter 5.—Of the Obscenities
Practiced in Honor of the Mother of the Gods.
In this matter I would prefer to
have as my assessors in judgment, not those men who rather take
pleasure in these infamous customs than take pains to put an end to
them, but that same Scipio Nasica who was chosen by the senate as
the citizen most worthy to receive in his hands the image of that
demon Cybele, and convey it into the city. He would tell us
whether he would be proud to see his own mother so highly esteemed
by the state as to have divine honors adjudged to her; as the
Greeks and Romans and other nations have decreed divine honors to
men who had been of material service to them, and have believed
that their mortal benefactors were thus made immortal, and enrolled
among the gods. Surely he
would desire that his mother should enjoy such felicity were it
possible. But if we proceeded to ask him whether, among the
honors paid to her, he would wish such shameful rites as these to
be celebrated, would he not at once exclaim that he would rather
his mother lay stone-dead, than survive as a goddess to lend her
ear to these obscenities? Is it possible that he who was of so
severe a morality, that he used his influence as a Roman senator to
prevent the building of a theatre in that city dedicated to the
manly virtues, would wish his mother to be propitiated as a goddess
with words which would have brought the blush to her cheek when a
Roman matron? Could he possibly believe that the modesty of an
estimable woman would be so transformed by her promotion to
divinity, that she would suffer herself to be invoked and
celebrated in terms so gross and immodest, that if she had heard
the like while alive upon earth, and had listened without stopping
her ears and hurrying from the spot, her relatives, her husband, and her children would have blushed for her? Therefore, the mother of the gods being such a character as the most profligate man would be ashamed to have for his mother, and meaning to enthral the minds of the Romans, demanded for her service their best citizen, not to ripen him still more in virtue by her helpful counsel, but to entangle him by her deceit, like her of whom it is written, “The adulteress will hunt for the precious soul.” Her intent was to puff up this high-
souled man by an apparently divine testimony to his
excellence, in order that he might rely upon his own eminence in
virtue, and make no further efforts after true piety and religion, without which natural genius, however brilliant, vapors into pride and comes to nothing. For what but a guileful purpose could that goddess demand the best man seeing that in her own sacred festivals she requires such obscenities as the best men would be covered with shame to hear at their own tables?