6 Rome was in a bad way; her crops had failed and the
importation of grain from Latium was rendered very difficult because of
the war with the Latins in which she was engaged. In her distress she
turned to the Sibylline books, and on the occasion of this their first
recorded use, the oracles ordered the introduction into Rome of the cult
of three Greek deities, Demeter, Dionysos, and Kore. It was a most
appropriate and characteristic choice. In the first place the deities in
question were worshipped at Cumae, the home of the books, whence Rome
could, and probably did, borrow the cult; and in the second place
Demeter was the goddess of grain, and it was from Cumae that Rome was
already beginning to obtain her imported grain supply. Thus the coming
of the Cumaean Demeter into the religious world of Rome is but the
sacred parallel to the coming of Cumaean grain into the material world
of Rome. The Greek goddess of grain came with the grain, just as Castor
had come with the Greek cavalry, with this essential distinction however
that Demeter came by the incantation of the books and the enactment of
the Senate, whereas Castor's coming was a slow and normal development.

It is important to notice closely exactly what happened when these
deities were introduced, partly because they form the first recorded
instance, and hence may well have acted as a model for subsequent
repetitions of the act, but also because we have a more definite
knowledge of the phenomena in this case than in many others. In the
first place it is clear that the deities were felt to be foreign: not
only was their temple built out the Aventine way, in the valley of the
Circus Maximus, outside the _pomerium_, but--a much more significant
fact--their Greek names were dropped, and they were given Roman names
instead, to make them seem less out of place. Then too these Roman names
were not new names, translations of their Greek titles, but were the
names of already existing Roman deities with whom they were easily
identified, so that we see at once that their coming was no real
enrichment of the Roman Olympus; what they stood for was already
represented there, and their coming was simply a reduplication, with the
consequent result that as these parvenus increased in prominence and
influence, they robbed of all their vitality the sober old Roman deities
to whom they had attached themselves. What were these original deities
who were thus doomed to death in B.C. 496