tings were read by many people, and eventually by a praetor, who at
once pronounced them to be subversive of religion. That anything
supposed to emanate from Numa should have this character was of course
impossible; and it is plain that the writings were believed even at the
time to be absurd forgeries, drawn up with the idea of investing strange
doctrines with the authority of Numa's name; for the legend of a
religious connection between Numa and Pythagoras must have been known at
the time. The discoverer appealed to the tribunes, who referred the
matter to the senate; and the senate authorised the praetor to burn the
books in the Comitium, which was done in the presence of a large
assembly.

In a later lecture I shall have something to say of the revival of
Pythagoreanism in the time of Cicero, and I need not now attempt to
explain what such a revival might mean. All we need to note is that
something subversive of the Roman religion was believed to be
circulating in 181 in Roman society under the assumed authority of
Numa's name, and that the senate, warned by recent experience,
determined to stamp it out at once. They seem to have suddenly become
alive to the fact that Greece, and in this instance mainly Magna
Graecia, was sending clever agents to Rome for the propagation of ideas
which might make the people less tractable to authority. In the stress
of the great war, indeed for years afterwards, they had probably never
had leisure to reflect on the inevitable result of the writings of a man
like Ennius, who was not improbably responsible for the propagation of
these very Pythagorean notions.[746] Now a reaction seems to set in
against the flowing tide of admiration for everything Greek;[747] but it
was too late to arrest the flood. All that could be hoped for was that
in the lives and minds of the wiser Romans the new Greek civilisation
might so leaven the old Roman ignorance that no permanent harm should be
done to the instincts of _virtus_ and _pietas_: and to some extent this
hope was realised. But for the masses there was no such hope. What Greek
teaching reached their minds was almost wholly that of the _ludi
scenici_; and I must now say a word in conclusion about this unwholesome
influence--unwholesome, that is, so far as it affected the old religious
ideas.

I had occasion, when dealing with Dr. Frazer's notion that the Roman
religion admitted such ideas as the marriage of the gods with all its
natural cons