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...occupying incautious minds little by little and dragging them into the precipice, staining all honor with a foul mark. While Semiramis thought to erase by cunning what she had defiled by lust, they say she established that famous law by which it was granted to the subjects to do whatever they pleased regarding sexual matters. And fearing that she might be cheated of the embrace of her son by the women of the household (as some wish), she was the first to invent the use of breeches original: "fœmoralium", and with them, she girded all the women of the court in the private chambers; which, as it is reported, is still observed among the Egyptians and Assyrians. Others, however, write that when she had fallen into desire for her son, and had provoked him, now grown in age, into her embraces, she was killed by him after she had reigned for thirty-two years. Others disagree with these, asserting that she mingled cruelty with lust, and that she was accustomed to order those whom she had summoned to satisfy the vow of her heat to be killed immediately after intercourse, so that the crime might be hidden. But when she had become pregnant at one time, they say she revealed her adulteries by childbirth; to excuse these, they say she produced that famous law of which mention was made a little earlier. But even if it seemed that she had covered the crime a little, it could not at all take away the indignation of the son, who, whether he saw the incest he thought was his own being shared with others and could not bear it with an equal mind, or because he thought his mother's luxury was a shame, or perhaps feared for his offspring born for the succession of the empire, moved by anger, he destroyed the lustful Queen.
Ops was held to be the goddess of the crops, the wife of Saturn,
And Cybele, the mother of the gods, an image of integrity,
Was a divinity, whom the ancients worshiped with much praise.
Ops, or Rhea, who is also called Cybele (if we believe the ancients), shone with great brilliance amid many prosperous and adverse events. For she was the daughter of Uranus, a very powerful man among the still rude Greeks, and Vesta. She, sister and wife of King Saturn, would have made herself excellent by no deed that has come down to us, were it not for the fact that with feminine cunning, she freed her sons Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto from death, when she had made a pact with Saturn against his brother Titan. Because they, through the ignorance or rather the madness of the men of that age, had reached the eminence of divinity, she not only attained the honor of a queen, but through the error of mortals, she was held to be a distinguished goddess and the mother of gods, and temples, priests, and sacred rites were established for her by public institution. This monstrous evil grew so great that when the Romans were struggling in the second Punic War, it was requested by prayers from Attalus, king of Pergamum, that they send for her image as if for life-saving aid...