a new physician, may gain in authority. The next
year again, 213, brought another crop of _prodigia_, but Livy dismisses
them with the simple words, "His procuratis ex decreto pontificum."[692]
It is reasonable to suppose that a reaction was taking place in the
minds of the senators and pontifices, and that they were determined to
take as little notice as possible of disturbing symptoms, relying on the
prestige of the Delphic oracle, and acting on its advice to suppress
_lascivia_.

But in this same year the _lascivia_ broke out again with unprecedented
force. The cause was not only, as Livy explains it, the dreary
continuance of the war with varying success; if we read between the
lines we may guess that the break-up of family life occasioned by the
deaths of so many heads of houses and their sons, had opened the way for
_feminine_ excitement and for the introduction of external rites such as
an old Roman _paterfamilias_ would no more have tolerated than the
pontifices themselves. "Tanta religio," says Livy,[693] "et ea magna ex
parte externa, civitatem incessit, _ut aut homines, aut dii repente alii
viderentur facti_"; it seemed as if the old religious system, in spite
of all its highly formalised apparatus of expiation, was being
deliberately set aside. "Nec iam in secreto modo atque intra parietes
abolebantur Romani ritus: sed in publico etiam ac foro Capitolioque
(this is the hardest cut of all) _mulierum_ turba erat, nec
sacrificantium nec precantium deos patrio more." To understand such an
amazing religious rebellion against the _ius divinum_ we must remember
that 80,000 men had fallen at Cannae, besides great numbers in the two
previous years, and that therefore the real effective human support of
that _ius_ had in great part given way. Private priests and prophets,
vermin to be found all over the Graeco-Roman world, had captured for
gain the minds of helpless women, and of the ruined and despairing
population of the country now flocking into Rome. The aediles and
triumviri capitales, responsible for the order of the city, could do
nothing; the Senate had to commission the praetor urbanus to rid the
people of these _religiones_. When in those days the Senate and
magistrates took such a matter in hand, further rebellion was
impossible. All we are told is that the praetor issued an edict ordering
that all who possessed private forms of prophecy or prayer, or rules of
sacrifice, should bring them to him before the