107
Is it for the reason that Cluvius RufusPeter, Frag. Hist. Rom. p. 314, Cluvius, Frag. 4. has recorded? For he states that in very ancient times, in the consulship of Gaius Sulpicius and Licinius Stolo,In 361 b.c. a pestilential disease arose in Rome and destroyed to a man all persons appearing on the stage. Accordingly, at the request of the Romans, there came many excellent artists from Etruria, of whom the first in repute and the one who for the longest time enjoyed success in their theatres, was named Hister: and therefore ali actors are named histriones from him.
108
Why do they not marry women who are closely akin to them?
108
Do they wish to enlarge their relationships by marriage and to acquire many additional kinsmen by bestowing wives upon others and receiving wives from others?
108
Or do they fear the disagreements which arise in marriages of near kin, on the ground that these tend to destroy natural rights?
108
Or, since they observed that women by reason of their weakness need many protectors, were they not willing to take as partners in their household women closely akin to them, so that if their husbands wronged them, their kinsmen might bring them succour?
109
Why was it not permitted for the priest of Jupiter, whom they call the Flamen Dialis, to touch either flour or yeast? Cf. Aulus Gellius, x. 15. 19.
109
Is it because flour is an incomplete and crude food? For neither has it remained what it was, wheat, nor has it become what it must become, bread; but it has both lost the germinative power of the seed and at the same time it has not attained to the usefulness of food. Wherefore also the Poet by a metaphor applied to barley-meal the epithet mylephatosas,Homer, Od. ii. 355: mill-slaughtered. if it were being killed or destroyed in the grinding.
