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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?"