of Syria, might be capable of
invading exhausted Italy. To have an enemy once more in the peninsula
would probably be fatal to Rome and Italy, and one more effort was
necessary in order to avert such a calamity; an effort that must be made
at once, while Carthage lay prostrate.

It is necessary to grasp fully the danger of the moment if we are to
understand the part played by religion (if I may use the word) in
bringing about the desired result. It was most difficult to persuade a
people worn out by one war that it was essential for their safety that
they should at once face another. Historians naturally look on the
success of the Senate in this task as due to its own prestige, and to
the skilful oratory of the Consul in the speech to the people which Livy
has reproduced in his own admirable rhetoric. But a closer examination
of the chapters at the beginning of the historian's thirty-first book
will show that religion too was used, in accordance with the experience
of the late war, to put pressure on the voters and to inspire their
confidence. As we saw in the last lecture, they had been constantly
cheered and braced by religious expedients,--their often-recurring
_religio_ had been soothed and satisfied; now the same means were to be
used positively rather than negatively, to help in urging them to a
definite course of action. Some sixty years later Polybius, writing of
the extreme religiousness of the Romans, expressed his conviction that
religion was invented for political objects, and only serves as the
means of bridling the fickle and unreasoning Demos; for if it were
possible to have a State consisting of wise men only, no such
institution would be necessary.[706] The philosophic historian is here
thinking mainly of the way in which religion was turned to account by
the Roman authorities in his own lifetime. We cannot have a better
illustration of this than the events of the year 200 B.C.

Already, in the autumn of the previous year, the ground had been
prepared. To the plebeian games in November there had been added a feast
of Jupiter (_Iovis epulum_), as had been done more than once during the
late war.[707] Jupiter, in the form of his image in the Capitoline
temple, lay on his couch at the feast of the outgoing plebeian
magistrates, with his face reddened with minium as at a triumph, and
Juno and Minerva sat each on her _sella_ on either side of him; and to
give practical point to this show, corn from Africa