ble political necessity. Even the Sibylline
books came to be used for personal and political purposes. In the year
144 the praetor Marcius Rex was commissioned to repair the Appian and
Aniensian aqueducts and to construct a new one. The _decemviri sacris
faciundis_, consulting the books, as it was said, for other reasons,
found an oracle forbidding the water to be conveyed to the Capitoline
hill, and seem on this absurd ground to have been able to delay the
necessary work. Our information is much mutilated, but the real
explanation seems to be that there was some personal spite against
Marcius, who, however, eventually completed the work.[713] Nearly a
century later a Sibylline oracle, beyond doubt invented for the purpose,
was used to prevent Pompeius from taking an army to Egypt to restore
Ptolemy Auletes to his throne. But all students of Roman history in the
last two centuries B.C. are familiar with such cases of the prostitution
of religion or religious processes, and I have already said enough about
it in the lecture on divination.[714]

I do not, of course, mean to assert that personal and political motives
account for all or the greater number of _prodigia_ reported. There is
plenty of evidence that the genuine old _religio_ could be stirred up by
real marvels, which the government were bound to expiate in order to
satisfy public feeling. Thus in 193 B.C. earthquakes were so frequent
that the Senate could not meet, nor could any public business be done,
so busy were the consuls with the work of expiation. At last the
Sibylline books were consulted and the usual religious remedies applied;
but the spirit of the age is apparent in the edict of the consuls,
prompted by the Senate, that if _feriae_ had been decreed to take place
on a certain day for the expiation of an earthquake, no fresh earthquake
was to be reported on that same day.[715] This delicious edict,
unparalleled in Roman history, caused the grave Livy to declare that the
people must have grown tired, not only of the earthquakes, but of the
_feriae_ appointed to expiate them.

Let us turn to another and more interesting feature of this age, which
is plainly visible in the sphere of religion, as in other aspects both
of private and public life: I mean the growth of _individualism_. Men,
and indeed women also, as we shall see, are beginning to feel and to
assert their individual importance, as against the strict rules and
traditions, civil or religious,