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   CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 12:57:49 JST CJ Bellwether

   Speech in the Roman Senate 56 B.C.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero calls Publius Clodius Pulcher a blue-haired trans communist SJW

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 13:01:02 JST CJ Bellwether

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     "What games, then, are these which the soothsayers assert to have been performed with laxity and to have been desecrated? They are the games of which the immortal gods themselves and the great Idaean Mother (Cybele) willed that you, you, Gnaeus Lentulus, whose grandsire's grandsire with his own hands welcomed her, should be a spectator. For had you not on that day chosen to view the games of the Great Mother (Cybele), it is my belief that we should not have been permitted to survive and raise our present protest.

     For innumerable bands of slaves that had been mustered by this scrupulous aedile (Clodius) from every quarter of the city, and had been incited for the occasion, were suddenly let loose upon us from every archway and entry, and at a given signal burst on to the stage. Then it was that you, yes, you, Lentulus, showed the same courage as your great-grandfather showed of old in a private capacity ; it was you, your name, your authority, your utterance, your majestic presence, and your resolute vigour, in support of which the senate and the knights of Rome and all true patriots rose to their feet, when Clodius exposed that senate and that Roman people to the mercies of a mob of jeering slaves, imprisoned and rendered powerless as they were in the tightly packed seats of the auditorium, and hampered by the confusion of the narrow exits."

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 13:06:32 JST CJ Bellwether

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     "So these games, the sanctity whereof is so deep that it has been summoned from distant lands and planted in this city, the only games which are not even called by a Latin name, that. their very title might indicate the domestication of a foreign cult, adopted in honour of the Great Mother, these games, I say, were performed by slaves, viewed by slaves, and were indeed converted under Clodius' aedileship into a Megalesia of slaves.

     O immortal gods! how could ye speak with us more clearly, if ye were with us and moving in our midst? Ye have signified and ye openly declare that the games have been desecrated. What greater example of pollution, dishonour, distortion, and confusion can be quoted, than that the whole of our slave population, liberated by permission of a magistrate, should have been let loose upon one stage and given control of another, with the result that the audience of one was exposed to the mercy of slaves, while that of the other was composed of slaves alone?"

     "Did not even this ever occur to you, priest of the Sibyl that you are, that it was from your books that our ancestors derived this rite ? - if, indeed, those books can be called yours, which you search with impious purpose, peruse with jaundiced vision, and handle with contaminated fingers.

     And it was upon the representations of this prophetess that once, when Italy was worn out by the Carthaginian war and harassed by Hannibal, our ancestors appropriated these rites from Phrygia and established them at Rome. They were welcomed by the man who was judged to be the most exemplary among the Roman people, Scipio, and by the woman who was held to be the chastest of the matrons, Claudia, whose antique severity your sister is considered to have reproduced to admiration. Did not the association of your ancestors with these rites, or the priesthood from which this cult receives its exclusive authority, or the curule aedileship which has ever been its chief protection, prevail upon you to forbear from desecrating by every enormity, staining by every indignity, and stigmatising by every crime, games of the most hallowed sanctity?"

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 13:11:20 JST CJ Bellwether

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     Cicero, not a fan of the trans.

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     CJ Bellwether (siege@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 13:29:16 JST CJ Bellwether

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     "The courses which all these adopted were determined by reasons, not indeed such as to justify those courses - for no reason can ever justify disservice to the state, - but at all events cogent reasons, combined with sentiments of high-spirited resentment; but Publius Clodius suddenly emerged from his saffron robe, his frontlet, his womanish slippers and purple hose, his breast-band, his psaltery, and his monstrous debaucheries - a fully-fledged demagogue. Had it been others than women who had caught him in this finery, had not the good offices of maid-servants permitted him to depart from a place which it was impious for him to have approached, the Roman people would now be without their demagogue, and the state without such a model of civic virtue"

     ...

     "A torch foul and fraught with sorrow was hurled at the state; it was aimed at your authority, at the dignity of the highest orders, the union of all patriots, in a word, at the whole fabric of our society. These at all events were the ultimate aim, when the incendiarism of the times vented their fury upon me, who was the detecter of all these. I met the flame; I blazed alone for my country ; but nevertheless those flames hedged you about on all sides, and I was but the first victim whom you saw smitten and smoking to save you."

     O'er the land
     of the freeeeeeee
     and the home
     of the
     Braaaaaaave

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     Sleepy time tea bear (sleepytimeteabear@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 22:56:58 JST Sleepy time tea bear

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     @siege idk but calling out the breast band specifically is cracking me up- ‘and he was wearing A BRA!!!!!!!’ Ohh nooo, should we call the army??

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     Sleepy time tea bear (sleepytimeteabear@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 29-Feb-2024 23:16:05 JST Sleepy time tea bear

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     @siege truly we are indeed the inheritors of Rome