differently according to their starting point.

One of the earliest philosophical influences which reached Rome was
however that of a pre-Socratic school, the school of Pythagoras. This
was natural enough in itself, as the headquarters of the school was in
Southern Italy, but it is curious and significant that the first
pronounced instance of its influence occurred shortly after the Second
Punic War, and in connexion with a clever fraud which was perpetrated
with a view to influencing religion. In the year B.C. 181 a certain man
reported that when he was ploughing his field, which lay on the other
side of the Tiber, at the foot of the Janiculum, the plough had laid
bare two stone sarcophagi, stoutly sealed with lead, and bearing
inscriptions in Greek and Latin according to which they purported to
contain, one of them the body of King Numa, the other, his writings.
When they were opened the one which ought to have contained the body was
empty, in the other lay two rolls, each roll consisting of seven books;
the one set of seven was written in Latin and treated of pontifical law,
the other consisted of philosophical writings. They were examined, found
to be heretical and subversive to true religion, and were accordingly
burned in the Comitium. The connexion of Numa and Pythagoras,
historically impossible but believed in at this time, makes it
practically certain that this was a clever attempt to introduce the
philosophy of Pythagoras into Rome under the holy sanction of the name
of Numa. Fortunately the zeal of the city praetor frustrated the scheme.
But the doctrines of philosophy, which thus failed to enter by the door
of religion, found the door of literature wide open for them. As the
irony of fate would have it, Cato, the stalwart enemy of Greek
influence, had brought back from Sardinia with him the poet Ennius, and
at about the time when the false books of Numa were burning in the
Comitium Ennius was giving to the world a Latin translation of the
_Sacred History_ of the Greek Euhemerus. This Euhemerus, a Sicilian who
had lived about a century before this time, earned his title to fame by
writing a novel of adventure and travel, in which he described a trip
which he had taken in the Red Sea along the coast of Arabia to the
wonderful island of Panchaia, where he found a column with an
inscription on it telling the life history of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus,
who were thus shown to have been historical characters afterwar