But now, what sort of journey do you think that woman had to Rome? which I, by means of the neighbourhood of the people of Aquinum and Venafrum, heard and ascertained from many people. What throngings of the people were there in these cities! what groanings of men and women! that a woman should go from Larinum, should go all the way from the Adriatic to Rome, with a large retinue, and great sums of money, in order to be the more easily able to convict and oppress by a capital charge, falsely trumped up, her own son!
[193] There was not one of all those people (I may almost say) who did not think that every place required purifying, by which she had passed on her journey; no one who did not think the very earth itself, the common mother of us all, polluted by the footsteps of that wicked mother. Accordingly, she could not stay long in any city; of all that number of people, who might have been her entertainers, not one was found who did not flee from the contagion of her sight. She trusted herself to night and solitude, rather than to any city or to any host. [194] But now, which of us does she think is ignorant of what she is doing, of what she is contriving, of what she is thinking? We know whom she has addressed herself to, whom she has promised money to, whose good faith she has endeavoured to undermine by means of bribes. Moreover, we are acquainted with her nocturnal sacrifices, which she thinks are secret, and her wicked prayers, and her abominable vows; in which she makes even the immortal gods to be witnesses of her wickedness, and does not perceive that the minds of the gods are propitiated by piety, by religion, and holy prayers, not by a polluted superstition, nor by victims slain to conciliate their sanction for acts of wickedness. This insanity and barbarity of hers I may well feel sure that the immortal gods have rejected with disgust from their altars and temples.
