f all sorts were demanded from the people. Hercules, especially,
as is more than once intimated in the plays of Plautus, became very rich
by his tithes.[294] Religion became more and more a charm, on the exact
performance of which the favor of the gods depended; so that ceremonies
were sometimes performed thirty times before the essential accuracy was
attained.

The gods were now changed, in the hands of Greek statuaries, into
ornaments for a rich man's home. Greek myths were imported and connected
with the story of Roman deities, as Ennius made Saturn the son of Coelus,
in imitation of the genealogy of Kronos. That form of rationalism called
Euhemerism, which explains every god into a mythical king or hero, became
popular. So, too, was the doctrine of Epicharmos, who considered the
divinities as powers of nature symbolized. According to the usual course
of events, superstition and unbelief went hand in hand. As the old faith
died out, new forms of worship, like those of Cybele and Bacchus, came in.
Stern conservatives like Cato opposed all these innovations and
scepticisms, but ineffectually.

Gibbon says that "the admirable work of Cicero,'De Natura Deorum,' is the
best clew we have to guide us through this dark abyss" (the moral and
religious teachings of the philosophers).[295] After, in the first two
books, the arguments for the existence and providence of the gods have
been set forth and denied, by Velleius the Epicurean, Cotta the
academician, and Balbus the Stoic; in the third book, Cotta, the head of
the priesthood, the Pontifex Maximus, proceeds to refute the stoical
opinion that there are gods who govern the universe and provide for the
welfare of mankind. To be sure, he says, as Pontifex, he of course
believes in the gods, but he feels free as a philosopher to deny their
existence. "I believe in the gods," says he, "on the authority and
tradition of our ancestors; but if we reason, I shall reason against their
existence." "Of course," he says, "I believe in divination, as I have
always been taught to do. But who knows whence it comes? As to the voice
of the Fauns, I never heard it; and I do not know what a Faun is. You say
that the regular course of nature proves the existence of some ordering
power. But what more regular than a tertian or quartan fever? The world
subsists by the power of nature." Cotta goes on to criticise the Roman
pantheon, ridiculing the idea of such gods as "Love, Deceit, Fear, Labor,