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ble political necessity. Even the Sibylline books came to be used for personal and political purposes. In the year 144 the praetor Marcius Rex was commissioned to repair the Appian and Aniensian aqueducts and to construct a new one. The _decemviri sacris faciundis_, consulting the books, as it was said, for other reasons, found an oracle forbidding the water to be conveyed to the Capitoline hill, and seem on this absurd ground to have been able to delay the necessary work. Our information is much mutilated, but the real explanation seems to be that there was some personal spite against Marcius, who, however, eventually completed the work.[713] Nearly a century later a Sibylline oracle, beyond doubt invented for the purpose, was used to prevent Pompeius from taking an army to Egypt to restore Ptolemy Auletes to his throne. But all students of Roman history in the last two centuries B.C. are familiar with such cases of the prostitution of religion or religious processes, and I have already said enough about it in the lecture on divination.[714] I do not, of course, mean to assert that personal and political motives account for all or the greater number of _prodigia_ reported. There is plenty of evidence that the genuine old _religio_ could be stirred up by real marvels, which the government were bound to expiate in order to satisfy public feeling. Thus in 193 B.C. earthquakes were so frequent that the Senate could not meet, nor could any public business be done, so busy were the consuls with the work of expiation. At last the Sibylline books were consulted and the usual religious remedies applied; but the spirit of the age is apparent in the edict of the consuls, prompted by the Senate, that if _feriae_ had been decreed to take place on a certain day for the expiation of an earthquake, no fresh earthquake was to be reported on that same day.[715] This delicious edict, unparalleled in Roman history, caused the grave Livy to declare that the people must have grown tired, not only of the earthquakes, but of the _feriae_ appointed to expiate them. Let us turn to another and more interesting feature of this age, which is plainly visible in the sphere of religion, as in other aspects both of private and public life: I mean the growth of _individualism_. Men, and indeed women also, as we shall see, are beginning to feel and to assert their individual importance, as against the strict rules and traditions, civil or religious,
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