nity into the old
homely national faith, and thereby expelling the true spirit of that
faith. The catalogue of the duties and privileges of the priest of
Jupiter, for instance, might well have a place in the Talmud. They
pushed the natural rule--that no religious service can be acceptable
to the gods unless it is free from flaw--to such an extent in
practice, that a single sacrifice had to be repeated thirty times in
succession on account of mistakes again and again committed, and that
the games, which also formed a part of divine service, were regarded
as undone if the presiding magistrate had committed any slip in word
or deed or if the music even had paused at a wrong time, and so had to
be begun afresh, frequently for several, even as many as seven, times
in succession.

Irreligious Spirit

This exaggeration of conscientiousness was already a symptom of its
incipient torpor; and the reaction against it--indifference and
unbelief--failed not soon to appear. Even in the first Punic war
(505) an instance occurred in which the consul himself made an open
jest of consulting the auspices before battle--a consul, it is true,
belonging to the peculiar clan of the Claudii, which alike in good and
evil was ahead of its age. Towards the end of this epoch complaints
were loudly made that the lore of the augurs was neglected, and that,
to use the language of Cato, a number of ancient auguries and auspices
were falling into oblivion through the indolence of the college. An
augur like Lucius Paullus, who saw in the priesthood a science and not
a mere title, was already a rare exception, and could not but be so,
when the government more and more openly and unhesitatingly employed
the auspices for the accomplishment of its political designs, or, in
other words, treated the national religion in accordance with the view
of Polybius as a superstition useful for imposing on the public at
large. Where the way was thus paved, the Hellenistic irreligious
spirit found free course. In connection with the incipient taste for
art the sacred images of the gods began as early as the time of Cato
to be employed, like other furniture, in adorning the chambers of the
rich. More dangerous wounds were inflicted on religion by the rising
literature. It could not indeed venture on open attacks, and such
direct additions as were made by its means to religious conceptions
--e.g. the Pater Caelus formed by Ennius from the Roman Saturnus in
imi