of victims it baffles us, for if we
can understand the selection of a Gallic pair at a time when the Gauls
of North Italy were taking Hannibal's side, it is not so easy to see why
the Greeks were just now the objects of public animosity. Diels has
suggested that Gelo, son of Hiero of Syracuse, deserted Rome for
Carthage after Cannae,[681] and wanting a better explanation we may
accept this, and imagine, if we can, that the cruel death of a pair of
Greek slaves need not be taken as expressing any general feeling of
antagonism or hatred for things Greek. But, after all, the most
astonishing fact in the whole story is this--that the abominable
practice lasted into the Empire; Pliny, at least, emphatically states
that his own age had seen it, and heard the solemn form of prayer which
the magister of the quindecemviri used to dictate over the victims.[682]
Pliny, we may note, also speaks of the _forum boarium_ as the scene of
the sacrifice, where also the first gladiatorial games were
exhibited.[683] Rome was already accustomed to see horrors there.

As we have now reached the climax of the religious panic of these years,
I may pause here for a moment to refer to an interesting matter which I
mentioned in my third lecture. At this very time, if we accept Wissowa's
conjecture, the twenty-seven puppets of straw known as Argei, which were
thrown over the _pons sublicius_ by the Vestals on the ides of May, were
being substituted as surrogates for the sacrifice by drowning of the
same number of Greeks (Argei); an atrocity which he fancies actually
took place somewhere in the interval between the first and second Punic
wars, under orders found in the Sibylline books.[684] All scholars know
that there were in the four regions of the old city twenty-seven (or
twenty-four) chapels, _sacella_, which were also called Argei, and have
caused great trouble to topographers and archaeologists.[685] To
complete his hypothesis, Wissowa conjectures that these too date from
this same age, and were distributed over the city in order to take away
the miasma caused by some great pestilence or other trouble, of which,
owing to the loss of Livy's second decade, we have no information. But
neither have we a scrap of information about the building of the
chapels, or the drowning of the twenty-seven Greeks, an atrocity so
abominable that the only way in which we might conceivably account for
its disappearance in the records would be the hypothesis of a