and
piety. With the aid of the censors they imposed the practice of the
national virtues, that is to say of the qualities useful to society,
temperance, courage, chastity, obedience to parents and magistrates,
reverence for the oath and the law, in fact, the practice of every form of
patriotism. During the last century of the republic the pontiff Scaevola,
one of the foremost men of his time, rejected as futile the divinities of
fable and poetry, as superfluous or obnoxious those of the philosophers and
the exegetists, {36} and reserved all his favors for those of the
statesmen, as the only ones fit for the people.[18] These were the ones
protecting the old customs, traditions and frequently even the old
privileges. But in the perpetual flux of things conservatism ever carries
with it a germ of death. Just as the law failed to maintain the integrity
of ancient principles, like the absolute power of the father of the family,
principles that were no longer in keeping with the social realities, so
religion witnessed the foundering of a system of ethics contrary to the
moral code that had slowly been established. The idea of collective
responsibility contained in a number of beliefs is one instance. If a
vestal violated her vow of chastity the divinity sent a pest that ceased
only on the day the culprit was punished. Sometimes the angry heavens
granted victory to the army only on condition that a general or soldier
dedicate himself to the infernal gods as an expiatory victim. However,
through the influence of the philosophers and the jurists the conviction
slowly gained ground that each one was responsible for his own misdeeds,
and that it was not equitable to make a whole city suffer for the crime of
an individual. People ceased to admit that the gods crushed the good as
well as the wicked in one punishment. Often, also, the divine anger was
thought to be as ridiculous in its manifestations as in its cause. The
rural superstitions of the country districts of Latium continued to live in
the pontifical code of the Roman people. If a lamb with two heads or a colt
with five legs was born, solemn supplications were prescribed to avert the
misfortunes foreboded by those terrifying prodigies.[19]

All these puerile and monstrous beliefs that burdened {37} the religion of
the Latins had thrown it into disrepute. Its morality no longer responded
to the new conception of justice beginning to prevail. As a rule Rome
remedied the pove