[22]
What games, then, are they which the soothsayers say have not been performed
with due diligence, and have been polluted? Those of which the immortal gods
themselves and the blessed mother Cybele chose you—you, O Cnaeus
Lentulus, by the hands of whose ancestor she was originally
received—to be a spectator. And unless you had chosen to be a
spectator of the Megalesia on that day, I do not know whether we should have
been allowed to be give and to complain of these things. For an enormous
multitude of slaves in a state of great excitement, collected out of all the
streets by this religious aedile, burst in on a sudden upon the stage from
all the arch-ways and doors at a given signal. Your virtue,—yours,
I say, O Cnaeus Lentulus,—was at that crisis shown to be equal to
that formerly displayed by your ancestor as a private individual. The senate
standing up, and the Roman knights and all virtuous men, followed you, and
your name and your command, and your voice, aspect, and authority, when he
had handed over the senate and people of Rome, hampered by the dense body in which they were
sitting, chained as it were to the spectacle, and hindered by the crowd and
narrow space, to a multitude of slaves and buffoons.
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