24. These are your ideas, these are your sentiments, impiously conceived, and more impiously believed. Nay, rather, to speak out more truly, the augurs, the dream interpreters, the soothsayers, the prophets, and the priestlings, ever vain, have devised these fables; for they, fearing that their own arts be brought to nought, and that they may extort but scanty contributions from the devotees, now few and infrequent, whenever they have found you to be willing38    So the ms., which is corrected in the first ed. “us to be willing”—nos velle: Stewechius reads, “us to be making good progress, are envious, enraged, and cry aloud,” etc.—nos belle provenire compererunt, invident, indignantur, declamitantque, etc.; to both of which it is sufficient objection that they do not improve the passage by their departure from the ms.that their craft should come into disrepute, cry aloud, The gods are neglected, and in the temples there is now a very thin attendance. Former ceremonies are exposed to derision, and the time-honoured rites of institutions once sacred have sunk before the superstitions of new religions. Justly is the human race afflicted by so many pressing calamities, justly is it racked by the hardships of so many toils. And men—a senseless race—being unable, from their inborn blindness, to see even that which is placed in open light, dare to assert in their frenzy what you in your sane mind do not blush to believe.

XXIV. Vestra sunt haec, vestra sunt irreligiose opinata, et irreligiosius credita. Quinimmo, ut verius proloquar, haruspices has fabulas, conjectores, arioli, vates, et numquam non vani concinnavere fanatici: qui, ne suae artes intereant, ac ne stipes exiguas consultoribus 0744B excutiant jam raris, si quando vos velle 0745A rem venire in invidiam compererunt, negliguntur dii, clamitant, atque in templis jam raritas summa est: jacent antiquae derisui ceremoniae, et sacrorum quondam veterrimi ritus religionum novarum superstitionibus occiderunt: merito humanum genus tot miseriarum angustiis premitur, tot laborum excruciatur aerumnis. Et homines brutum genus, et quod situm sub lumine est, caecitate ingenita nequeuntes videre, audent asseverare furiosi, quod vos credere non erubescitis sani.