kalends of April next;
and that no one should sacrifice in public with any strange or foreign
rite. I do not know that the wonderful good sense of this decree has
ever been commented on. To take violent or cruel measures would have
been dangerous in the extreme at such a psychological moment. Livy tells
this story at the very end of the year 213, and the kalends of April
referred to must be those of the next year; there was, therefore, plenty
of time to obey the order, and in the meantime the excitement might
subside of itself. The mischief was not absolutely and suddenly
stopped; in private houses the new rites were allowed to go on,--a
policy adhered to in time to come,--but the _ius divinum_ of the Roman
State, the public worship of the Roman deities, must not be tampered
with. This wise policy seems to have succeeded for the time; for even
after the capture of Tarentum by Hannibal, and the prospect of an attack
in that direction from Macedonia, we do not hear of any renewed
outbreak. _Prodigia_ are reported as usual, but the remedy thought
sufficient is only a single day's _supplicatio_ and a _sacrum
novendiale_. The consuls, however, in the true Roman spirit, devoted
themselves for several days to religious duties before leaving Rome for
their commands.

This was at the beginning of the year 212. But after the Latin festival
at the end of April we hear of a new _religio_, and a very curious
one.[694] It looks as though certain Latin oracles, written in Saturnian
verse, and attributed to an apocryphal _vates_ of the suspicious name of
Marcius, had got abroad in the panic of the previous year, and had been
confiscated by the praetor urbanus charged, as we saw, with the
suppression of religious mischief. He had handed them on to the new
praetor urbanus of 212. One of them prophesied the disaster of Cannae
which had already happened; the other gave directions for instituting
games in honour of Apollo, including one which placed the religious part
of these _ludi_ in the hands of the decemviri. I strongly suspect that
the whole transaction was a plan on the part of the Senate and the
religious colleges, in order to quiet the minds of the people by a new
religious festival in honour of a great deity of whose prestige every
one had heard, for he had been long established in Rome; he is now to
take a more worthy place there, to be incorporated in the _ius divinum_
in a new sense, in gratitude perhaps for his recent advice g