mes beside the usual yearly _ludi
Romani_, at a cost of 333,333 and one-third asses, three being the
sacred number. Then a _supplicatio_ was decreed, which was attended not
only by the urban population, but by crowds from the country, and for
three days the decemviri superintended a _lectisternium_ on a grand
scale, such as had never been seen in Rome before, in which twelve
deities in pairs, Roman and Greek indistinguishable from each other,
were seen reclining on cushions. If Wissowa interprets this
rightly,[678] as I think he does, it marks a turning-point in the
religious history of Rome. The old distinction between _di indigetes_
and _di novensiles_ now vanishes for good; the showy Greek ritual is
applied alike to Roman and to Greek deities; the Sibylline books have
conquered the _ius divinum_, and the decemviri in religious matters are
more trusted physicians than the pontifices. The old Roman State
religion, which we have been so long examining, may be said henceforward
to exist only in the form of dead bones, which even Augustus will hardly
be able to make live.

So far, however, all had been orderly and dignified. But after Cannae we
begin to divine that the stress of disaster is telling more severely on
the nervous fibre of the people. Two Vestals were found guilty of
adultery always a suspicious event; in such times a wicked rumour once
spread would have its own way. One killed herself; the other was buried
alive at the Colline gate. A _scriba pontificis_, who had seduced one of
them, was beaten to death by the pontifex maximus. Such a violation of
the _pax deorum_ was itself a prodigium, and again the books were
consulted, and an embassy was sent to Delphi with Fabius Pictor as
leader.[679] Greece is looming ever larger in the eyes of the frightened
Roman.

Under such circumstances it is hardly astonishing to read of a new (or
almost new) and horrible rite, in which a Greek man and woman and a
Gallic man and woman (slaves, no doubt) were buried alive in the _forum
boarium_ in a hole closed by a big stone, which had already, says Livy,
been used for human victims--"minime Romano sacro." As in the case of
the Vestals, blood-shedding is avoided, but the death is all the more
horrible. What are we to make of such barbarism? Technically, it must
have been a sacrifice to Tellus and the Manes, like the _devotio_ of
Decius, and like that also, it probably had in it a substratum of
magic.[680] As regards the choice