lt of the Magna Mater, received into the sacred circle
of Roman worships.[741] But there is yet another lesson to be learnt
from the conduct of the government at this crisis. Who would have
suspected, while reading the horrible story, and noting the almost
arbitrary energy with which the _coniuratio_ was stamped out, that the
Dionysiac rites would even now be tolerated under certain conditions?
That this was so is a fact attested not only by Livy, but by the
_Senatusconsultum_ itself.[742] The government was now forced to
recognise the fact that there were Romans for whom the _ius divinum_ no
longer sufficed, and who needed a more emotional form of religion. If
any one (so ran in effect the _Senatusconsultum_) felt conscientiously
that he could not wholly renounce the new religion, he might apply in
person to the praetor urbanus; and the praetor would lay the matter
before a meeting of the Senate, at which not less than a hundred must be
present. The Senate may give leave for the worship, provided that no
more than five persons be present at it; and that there be no common
fund for its support, nor any permanent priest to preside at it. These
clauses, says Aust,[743] are a concession to the strong spiritual
current of feeling which sought for something fresher and better to take
the place of the old religion of forms; and on the whole we may agree
with him. All religious revivals are liable to be accompanied by moral
evil, but they all express unmistakably a natural and honourable
yearning of the human spirit.

Not long after this, in 181, the government put its foot down firmly on
what seems to have been another attempt, though in this case a ludicrous
one, to introduce strange religious ideas at Rome. We have the story of
this on the authority not only of Livy, but of the oldest Roman
annalist, Cassius Hemina, from whose work Pliny has preserved a fragment
relating to this matter.[744] Cassius must almost certainly have been
alive in 181, and would remember the event;[745] and though his account
and Livy's differ in details, we may take the story as in the main true.
A secretary (_scriba_), who had land on the Janiculan hill, dug up there
a stone coffin with an inscription stating that the king Numa was buried
in it. No remains of a body were found, but in a square stone casket
inside the coffin were found books written on paper (_charta_) and
supposed to be writings of Numa about the Pythagorean philosophy. These
wri