But if by that most severe Servilian law, the chief men of the city, men of the greatest dignity, citizens of the most profound wisdom, allowed this road to the freedom of the city to be opened, in accordance with the resolution of the people, to the Latins, that is to say to the federate states, and if this was found no fault with by the Licinian and Mucian law, especially when the very nature and name of a prosecution, and the reward which no one could obtain except through the misfortune of some senator,1 could not be over pleasant either to a senator or to any virtuous man; was it possible to doubt that the decisions of our generals were to be of force with respect to that kind of reward in which the decisions of the judges had already been ratified? Do we suppose, then, that the sanction of the Latin tribes was given to the Servilian law, or to the other laws in which the reward of the freedom of the city was held out to men of the Latin towns, as an encouragement to such and such conduct? [55]
Listen now to the decision of the senate, which has at all times been approved of by the decision of the people. Our ancestors, O judges, ordained that the sacred rites of Ceres should be performed with the very strictest religious reverence and the greatest solemnity; which, as they had been originally derived from the Greeks, had always been conducted by Greek priestesses, and were called Greek rites. But when they were selecting a priestess from Greece to teach us that Greek sacred ceremony, and to perform it, still they thought it right that it should be a citizen who was sacrificing for citizens, in order that she might pray to the immortal gods with knowledge, indeed, derived from a distant and foreign source but with feelings belonging to one of our own people and citizens. I see that these priestesses were for the most part Neapolitans or Velians, and those are notoriously federate cities. I am not speaking of any ancient cases, I am only mentioning things that have happened lately, as, for instance, that before the freedom of the city was conferred on the Velians, Caius Valerius Flaccus being the city praetor, did, in accordance with a resolution passed by the senate, submit a motion to the people concerning a woman of Velia, called Calliphana, mentioning her expressly by name, for the purpose of making her a Roman citizen. Are we then to suppose that the Velians ratified the law which was then passed about her; or that that priestess was not made a Roman citizen; or that the treaty was violated by the senate and people of Rome?
