annibalic
war we shall have plenty of opportunity of noting this kind of
expedient. The Roman people, we must remember, were getting more and
more to be inhabitants of a large city, and, as such, to seek for
entertainment, like all citizens in all ages. The religious rites of the
old calendar were perhaps by this time getting too familiar, losing
their original meaning; whether they had ever been very entertaining to
a city population may be doubted. Something more showy was needed;
processions had always been to the taste of the Roman, and banquets,
such as the epulum Iovis, which I have already noticed, often
accompanied the processions.

Now, this love of show and novelty, of which we have abundant evidence
later on as a Roman characteristic, taken together with the anxiety and
alarm--the new _religio_--arising from the pestilence, will sufficiently
explain the _lectisternia_, as these shows were called. We have here in
fact the first appearance, constantly recurring in later Roman history,
of a tendency to seek not only for novelty, but for a more emotional
expression of religious feeling than was afforded by the old forms of
sacrifice and prayer, conducted as they were by the priest on behalf of
the community without its active participation. Those old forms might do
for the old patrician community of farmers and warriors, but not so well
for the new and ever-increasing population of artisans and other
workmen, whether of Roman or foreign descent. It would seem, indeed, as
if the sensitiveness of the human fibre of a primitive community
increases with its increasing complexity, and with the greater variety
of experience to which it is exposed; and in the case of Rome, as if the
simple ancient methods of dealing with the divine inhabitants of the
city were no longer adequate to the needs of a State which was steering
its way to empire among so many difficulties and perils. It is not
indeed certain that the new rites, or some points in them, may not have
had their prototypes in old Italian usage, though the _lectisternia_,
the actual display of gods in human form and in need of food like human
beings, are almost certainly Greek in origin.[549] But so far as we can
guess, the emotional element was wholly new. True, Livy tells us in two
passages of his third book of occasions when men, women, and children
flocked to all the shrines (_omnia delubra_) seeking for the _pax
deorum_ at the invitation of the senate; but the