just as they themselves, the descendants, were sitting at the feet of
the Greeks in this life. But though the enactment of the Senate gave
these gods Roman citizenship, and the priests of the Sibylline books
were in duty bound to perform the ritual of the cult, be it said to the
credit of the Romans, the gods themselves never took a very deep hold of
the religious life of the people in general. Their names, to be sure,
crept into a few of the old formulae and stood side by side with the
older deities, and Proserpina was made much of by the Roman poets; but
the real tests of devotion, dedicatory inscriptions, are almost entirely
absent. Strangely enough the only thing which seems to have caught
their fancy was the weird ritual of the nightly sacrifice at the
Tarentum, and especially its repetition after one hundred years. This
idea of the hundred years is Roman rather than Greek, and it is at least
open to question whether it may not have been added to the instructions
in the oracle to give the whole matter an added Roman colour. Thus in
B.C. 249 were instituted the Secular Games, which were repeated with
approximate accuracy in B.C. 146, and would doubtless have been again
between B.C. 49 and 46, had not the Civil War completely filled men's
minds and made human sacrifices to the dead, in battle, an almost daily
occurrence. Meantime the Roman annalists were working backwards in their
own peculiar fashion, and building out into the past a series of
fictitious celebrations preceding B.C. 249, one hundred years apart,
back into the time of the kingdom. On the other hand we shall have
occasion later to speak of the restoration of the games and their
reorganisation by Augustus.

Under the test of adversity nations are very much like individuals, and
a national weakness, which is often entirely concealed in normal
conditions, comes prominently and disastrously to the surface in the
hour when strength is most needed. The war with Hannibal was just such a
crisis in Rome's history, and under its influence Rome's dependence upon
the Sibylline books was more pronounced than ever. The seeds of
superstition sown during the earlier centuries burst now into full
blossom, destined to produce the fruit, the gathering of which was to be
the bitter task of the closing centuries of the republic. The story of
the Second Punic War, regarded merely from the military standpoint,
reads for Rome almost like a nightmare, with its long succession o