old anxious
nervousness about the good-will of the gods. But now we mark a change
which gave the old institution new life and new work. At the end of this
fourth century (300 B.C.) it was thrown open to plebeians by the lex
Ogulnia; and, as I have already mentioned, within a few years we come
upon a plebeian pontifex maximus, who was not even a Roman by birth, yet
one of the most famous in the whole series of the holders of that great
office. Most probably, too, the numbers of the members have already been
increased from five to nine, of whom five must be plebeian. These
members begin to be found holding also civil magistracies, and the
pontifex maximus was often a consul of the year. It is quite plain then
that this priestly office is becoming more and more secularised; it
expands with the new order of things instead of shrinking into itself.
It leaves religion, in the proper sense of the word, far behind. The
sacrificing priests, the flamines, etc., who were the humbler members in
a technical sense of the same college, go on with their proper and
strictly religious work under the supervision of the pontifex
maximus,[572] but they steadily become of less importance as the greater
members become secularised in their functions and their ambitions. And
these greater members, instead of becoming stranded on a barren shore of
antique religion, boldly venture into a new sphere of human life, and
add definite secular work to their old religious functions.

The events of the latter part of the fourth century B.C., culminating in
the publication of the Fasti and the _legis actiones_, probably meant
much more for the Romans than we can divine by the uncertain light of
historical imagination. It is the age of expansion, internal and
external; the old patrician exclusive rule was gone beyond recall; the
plebeians had forced their way into every department of government,
including at last even the great religious _collegia_; the old Latin
league had been broken up, and the Latin cities organised in various new
relations to Rome, each one being connected with the suzerain city by a
separate treaty, sealed with religious sanctions. After the Samnite wars
and the struggle with Pyrrhus, further organisation was necessary, and
there arose by degrees a loose system of union which we are accustomed
to call the Italian confederation. The adaptation of all these new
conditions to the existing order of things at Rome was the work of the
sen