ul character, accompanied, as Livy
describes the first one, with private entertainments, and meant to keep
up the spirits of the plebeian population, and if we then turn to the
early _supplicationes_, in which men, women, and children, _coronati_,
and carrying laurel branches, went in procession to the temples, and
there prostrated themselves after the Greek fashion, the women "crinibus
passis aras verrentes," we shall be disposed to look on them as, in
origin at least, distinct from each other.[551] We may conjecture that
the appearance of the gods in human form at the doors of their temples
suggested to the plebeian women a kind of emotional worship which was
alien to the old Roman feeling, but familiar enough to those (and they
must have been many) who knew the life of the Greek cities of Italy. It
may be that they had tried it even in earlier times; but anyhow, in the
fourth and third centuries B.C. advantage was taken of the _pulvinaria_
to use them as stopping-places in the procession of a _supplicatio_, and
the phrase becomes a common one in the annals, "supplicatio ad omnia
pulvinaria indicta." The _lectisternia_ were ordered five times in the
fourth century;[552] by that time, it would seem likely, the
_supplicationes_ had become an authorised institution, and had perhaps
embodied the practice of _lectisternia_ in the way suggested above. We
shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the
war with Hannibal.

One word more before I leave this subject for the present. In all this
innovation we must not forget to note the growth of individual feeling
as distinguished from the old worship of civic grouping, in which the
individual, as such, was of little or no account. I pointed out the
first signs of this individualism when speaking of the temple of the
Capitoline Jupiter, and we shall have reason to mark its rapid growth
further. We are now, in fact, and must realise that we are, in a period
in which, throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the need was beginning to
be felt of some new rule of individualistic morality. The Roman
population, now recruited from many sources, was but reflecting this
need unconsciously when it insisted on new emotional rites and
expiations. The Roman authorities were forced to satisfy the demand; but
in doing so they made no real contribution to the history of Roman
religious experience. It was impossible that they should do so; they
represented the old civic form