lt was wholly unknown at
Rome, was something entirely new and strange, a fresh and hopeful
prescription for an exhausted patient. The project was seized on with
avidity, and supported by the influence of Delphi and of that strange
soldier mystic the great Scipio.[704] The best man in the State was to
receive the goddess, and when, after many months, she came to Italy in
the form of a black stone, it was Scipio who was chosen for the duty.
For Attalus, king of Pergamus, had consented to let her go from her
Phrygian home; and when she arrived at Ostia, Scipio with all the Roman
matrons went thither by land; alone he boarded the ship, received the
goddess from her priests, and carried her to land, where the noblest
women of the State received her,--received the black stone, that
is,--and carried it in their arms in turns, while all Rome poured out to
meet her, and burned incense at their doors as she passed by. And
praying that she might enter willingly and propitiously into the city,
they carried her into the temple of Victory on the Palatine on the 4th
of April, henceforward to be a festal day, the popular Megalesia.

This Magna Mater was the first Oriental deity introduced into Rome, and
the last deity introduced by the Sibylline books. It is probable that no
Roman then knew much about the real nature of her cult and its noisy
orgiastic character and other degrading features; it was sufficient to
have found a new prescription, and once more to have given the people,
and especially the women, a happy moment of hope and confidence. But the
truth came out soon enough; and though the goddess must have her own
priests, it was ordered by a _Senatusconsultum_ that no Roman should
take part in her service.[705] Though established in the heart of the
city, and ere long to have her own temple, she was to continue a foreign
deity outside the _ius divinum_. As such she belongs to those worships
with which I am not called upon by the plan of these lectures to deal.

Hannibal withdrew at last from Italy, and in 202 the war came to an end.
Looking at the divine inhabitants of the city in that year, we may see
in them almost as much a _colluvies nationum_ as in the human population
itself. Under such circumstances neither the old City-state nor its
religion could any longer continue to exist. The decay of the one
reflects that of the other; the failure to trust the _di indigetes_, the
constant desire to try new and foreign manifestatio