第54章 A.D.20-22(14)

Meantime Junius Blaesus received an extension of his government of Africa, and Servius Maluginensis, the priest of Jupiter, demanded to have Asia allotted to him."It was," he asserted, "a popular error that it was not lawful for the priests of Jupiter to leave Italy; in fact, his own legal position differed not from that of the priests of Mars and of Quirinus.If these latter had provinces allotted to them, why was it forbidden to the priests of Jupiter? There were no resolutions of the people or anything to be found in the books of ceremonies on the subject.Pontiffs had often performed the rites to Jupiter when his priest was hindered by illness or by public duty.For seventy-five years after the suicide of Cornelius Merula no successor to his office had been appointed; yet religious rites had not ceased.If during so many years it was possible for there to be no appointment without any prejudice to religion, with what comparative ease might he be absent for one year's proconsulate? That these priests in former days were prohibited by the pontiff from going into the provinces, was the result of private feuds.Now, thank heaven, the supreme pontiff was also the supreme man, and was influenced by no rivalry, hatred or personal feeling."As the augur Lentulus and others argued on various grounds against this view, the result was that they awaited the decision of the supreme pontiff.Tiberius deferred any investigation into the priest's legal position, but he modified the ceremonies which had been decreed in honour of Drusus's tribunitian power with special censure on the extravagance of the proposed inscription in gold, so contrary to national usage.Letters also from Drusus were read, which, though studiously modest in expression, were taken to be extremely supercilious."We have fallen so low," people said, "that even a mere youth who has received so high an honour does not go as a worshipper to the city's gods, does not enter the Senate, does not so much as take the auspices on his country's soil.There is a war, forsooth, or he is kept from us in some remote part of the world.Why, at this very moment, he is on a tour amid the shores and lakes of Campania.Such is the training of the future ruler of mankind; such the lesson he first learns from his father's counsels.An aged emperor may indeed shrink from the citizen's gaze, and plead the weariness of declining years and the toils of the past.But, as for Drusus, what can be his hindrance but pride?"Tiberius meantime, while securing to himself the substance of imperial power, allowed the Senate some shadow of its old constitution by referring to its investigation certain demands of the provinces.In the Greek cities license and impunity in establishing sanctuaries were on the increase.Temples were thronged with the vilest of the slaves; the same refuge screened the debtor against his creditor, as well as men suspected of capital offences.No authority was strong enough to check the turbulence of a people which protected the crimes of men as much as the worship of the gods.

It was accordingly decided that the different states were to send their charters and envoys to Rome.Some voluntarily relinquished privileges which they had groundlessly usurped; many trusted to old superstitions, or to their services to the Roman people.It was a grand spectacle on that day, when the Senate examined grants made by our ancestors, treaties with allies, even decrees of kings who had flourished before Rome's ascendancy, and the forms of worship of the very deities, with full liberty as in former days, to ratify or to alter.

First of all came the people of Ephesus.They declared that Diana and Apollo were not born at Delos, as was the vulgar belief.They had in their own country a river Cenchrius, a grove Ortygia, where Latona, as she leaned in the pangs of labour on an olive still standing, gave birth to those two deities, whereupon the grove at the divine intimation was consecrated.There Apollo himself, after the slaughter of the Cyclops, shunned the wrath of Jupiter; there too father Bacchus, when victorious in war, pardoned the suppliant Amazons who had gathered round the shrine.Subsequently by the permission of Hercules, when he was subduing Lydia, the grandeur of the temple's ceremonial was augmented, and during the Persian rule its privileges were not curtailed.They had afterwards been maintained by the Macedonians, then by ourselves.

Next the people of Magnesia relied on arrangements made by Lucius Scipio and Lucius Sulla.These generals, after respectively defeating Antiochus and Mithridates, honoured the fidelity and courage of the Magnesians by allowing the temple of Diana of the White Brow to be an inviolable sanctuary.Then the people of Aphrodisia produced a decree of the dictator Caesar for their old services to his party, and those of Stratonicea, one lately passed by the Divine Augustus, in which they were commended for having endured the Parthian invasion without wavering in their loyalty to the Roman people.Aphrodisia maintained the worship of Venus; Stratonicea, that of Jupiter and of Diana of the Cross Ways.

Hierocaesarea went back to a higher antiquity, and spoke of having a Persian Diana, whose fane was consecrated in the reign of Cyrus.

They quoted too the names of Perperna, Isauricus, and many other generals who had conceded the same sacred character not only to the temple but to its precincts for two miles.Then came the Cyprians on behalf of three shrines, the oldest of which had been set up by their founder Aerias to the Paphian Venus, the second by his son Amathus to Venus of Amathus, and the last to Jupiter of Salamis, by Teucer when he fled from the wrath of his father Telamon.