ate and magistrates so far as it concerned human beings only; but so
far as it affected the relations of the divine inhabitants of the
various communities it must have been the work of the pontifices. That
work is indeed almost entirely hidden from us, for Livy's books of this
period are lost, and Livy is the only historian who has preserved for us
in any substance the religious side of Rome's public life. But what we
have learnt in the course of these lectures will have made it plain that
no political changes could take place without involving religious
adaptation, and also that the only body qualified to undertake such
adaptation was the pontifical college.

We may thus be quite certain, that though they had lost their old
monopoly of religious knowledge, the pontifices found plenty of fresh
work to do in this period. It is my belief that they now became more
active than they ever had been. From this time, for example, we may
almost certainly date their literary or quasi-literary activity; I mean
the practice of recording the leading events of each year, which may
have had its origin a century earlier, with the eclipse of the sun in or
about 404 B.C.[573] I should guess that after the admission of the
plebeians to the college in 300 B.C., the new members put fresh life and
vigour into the old work, and developed it in various directions. It is
in this period that I am inclined to attribute to the college that zeal
for compiling and perhaps inventing religious formulae of all kinds,
which took shape in the _libri_ or _commentarii pontificum_, and
embodied that strange manual of the methods of addressing deities, which
we know as _Indigitamenta_. And again, in the skilled work of the
admission of new deities and the dedication of their temples, occasioned
by the new organisation and condition of Italy, and lastly, in the
supervision of the proper methods of expiating _prodigia_, which (though
the habit is doubtless an old one) began henceforward to be reported to
the Senate from all parts of the ager Romanus and even beyond, their
meetings in the Regia must have been fully occupied. Our loss is great
indeed in the total want of detail about the life and character of the
great plebeian pontifex maximus of the first half of the third century
B.C., that Titus Coruncanius whom I have already mentioned as being a
Latin by birth; for Cicero declares that the _commentarii_ of the
college showed him as a man of the greatest abil