the books is concerned, and it is not until B.C. 293 that
the narrative of new gods begins again. But in other ways the oracles
were not idle during these two hundred years. We must rid ourselves of
the idea that it was necessary that their consultation should always
result in the importation of some new Greek deity. The oracles might
order the carrying out of some new religious rite regarding the deities
already present, and these religious rites, especially the public
processions so frequently performed, feed the ever-growing superstition
of the populace. It is essential to a charm or incantation that it
should contain something strange or foreign, it is above all things help
from without; and when the gods send prodigies and portents, when their
statues weep and sweat blood, when cattle speak, and meteors fall from
the sky, something strange and unusual must be done to counteract these
things. Among the foreign acts thus ordered the sacred procession occurs
frequently. It started from the temple of Apollo in the Campus Martius
and passed into the city through the Porta Carmentalis, went across the
Forum and then outside the _pomerium_ again to the temple of Ceres, and
then to the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine. It was therefore a
power from without which came into their city to purify them and to
carry away out of the city again the impurities of which it had rid the
community.

It is also characteristic of such semi-magical things that they lose
their effects after a few applications, and other things must be sought
always more complicated and more strange. Thus from the beginning of the
republic down through the Second Punic War we have a series of
extraordinary measures, growing more and more complicated until in the
religious frenzy of the years after Cannae even human sacrifices are
performed at the command of the books. In this the third century before
Christ deities begin again to be introduced, and it is to this century
that we now turn.

It is probable that the Romans had always worshipped certain powers of
healing, but what their names were under the old regime we do not know,
except that possibly they were connected with the gods of water. At the
close of the kingdom they received, as we have seen, Apollo the divine
healer, Apollo Medicus, and this was originally the only side of his
activity which he exercised at Rome. At various seasons of plague during
the early centuries of the republic they c