Dio's Rome, Volume 3: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During The Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English Form — John Shaqi
Dio's Rome, Volume 3: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During The Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English FormCassius Dio Cocceianus
History
Dio's Rome, Volume 3: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During The Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English Form
Cassius Dio Cocceianus
Rome -- History
[-5-] "Now being of such an origin yourself, and after growing up naked
among your naked companions, picking up pig manure and sheep dung and
human excrement, have you dared, O most accursed wretch, first to slander
the youth of Antony who had the advantage of pedagogues and teachers as
his rank demanded, and next to impugn him because in celebrating the
Lupercalia, an ancestral festival, he came naked into the Forum? But I
ask you, you that always used all the clothes of others on account
of your father's business and were stripped by whoever met you and
recognized them, what ought a man who was not only priest but also leader
of his fellow priests to have done? Not to conduct the procession, not to
celebrate the festival, not to sacrifice according to ancestral custom,
not to appear naked, not to anoint himself? 'But it is not for that that
I censure him,' he answers, 'but because he delivered a speech and
that kind of speech naked in the Forum.' Of course this man has become
acquainted in the fuller's shop with all minute matters of etiquette,
that he should detect a real mistake and be able to rebuke it properly.
[-6-] "In regard to this matter I will say later all that needs to be
said, but just now I want to ask the speaker a question or two. Is it
not true that you for your part were nourished by the ills of others and
educated in the misfortunes of your neighbors and for this reason are
acquainted with no liberal branch of knowledge, that you have established
a kind of association here and are always waiting, like the harlots, for
a man who will give something, and that having many men in your pay to
attract profit to you you pry into people's affairs to find out who has
wronged (or seems to have wronged) whom, who hates whom, and who is
plotting against whom? With these men you make common cause, and through
these men you are supported, selling them the hopes that chance bestows,
trading in the decisions of the jurors, deeming him alone a friend who
gives more and more, and all those enemies who furnish you no business or
employ some other advocate, while you pretend not even to know those who
are already in your clutch and affect to be bored by them, but fawn upon
and giggle at those just approaching, like the mistresses of inns?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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