🔺 AFTER CANNAE
“How much more religious toward the gods did our senate show themselves! After the fatal defeat at Cannae (216 BC), they decreed that no women should mourn longer than thirty days, to the end that the rites of Ceres might be by them performed. For now, the greatest part of the men lying slain upon the bloody accursed earth, there was no family in the city that did not partake of the general calamity. And therefore the mothers and daughters, wives and sisters of the slain were compelled to put off their mourning-clothes, and put on their white garments, and to perform the office of priests. Through which constancy of observing religion, they forced the deities themselves to blush, and be ashamed of raging any more against such a nation, that could not be drawn from adoring them that had with so much cruelty destroyed them.”
Valerius Maximus
