The Roman Questions (106-109)

Why do the Romans reverence Fortuna Primigenia,[*] or First-born, as one might translate it?

Is it because by Fortune, as they say, it befell Servius, born of a maidservant, to become a famous king of Rome? This is the assumption which the majority of Romans make.

Or is it rather because Fortune supplied the origin and birth of Rome?[*]

Or does the matter have an explanation more natural and philosophic, which assumes that Fortune is the origin of everything, and Nature acquires its solid frame by the operation of Fortune, whenever order is created in any store of matter gathered together at haphazard.

Why do the Romans call the Dionysiac artists[*] histriones [*]?

Is it for the reason that Cluvius Rufus[*] has recorded? For he states that in very ancient times, in the consulship of Gaius Sulpicius and Licinius Stolo,[*] 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.

Why do they not marry women who are closely akin to them?

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?

Or do they fear the disagreements which arise in marriages of near kin, on the ground that these tend to destroy natural rights?

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?

Why was it not permitted for the priest of Jupiter, whom they call the Flamen Dialis, to touch either flour or yeast?[*]

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,[*] if it were being killed or destroyed in the grinding.

Yeast is itself also the product of corruption, and produces corruption in the dough with which it is mixed: for the dough becomes flabby and inert, and altogether the process of leavening seems to be one of putrefaction[*]; at any rate if it goes too far, it completely sours and spoils the flour.