[706] Polybius vi. 56.
[707] Livy xxxi. 4 ad fin., cp. xxv. 2, xxvii. 36, etc. For the Iovis epulum see R.F. 216 foll. and the references there given. Wissowa, R.K. foll. 111. 385 foll. I am not sure that I am right in limiting the human partakers of the epulum of Nov. 13 to the plebeian magistrates.
[708] Livy xxxi. 5. The importance of the words "prolationem finium" does not seem to have been noticed by historians. If they are genuine they indicate an undoubtedly aggressive attitude.
[709] Livy xxxi. 7 and 8.
[710] Livy xxxvi. 1.
[711] Augustine, Civ. Dei, iv. 27: "Relatum est in litteras doctissimum pontificem Scaevolam disputasse tria genera tradita deorum: unum a poetis, alterum a philosophis, tertium a principibus civitatis. Primum genus nugatorium dicit esse, quod multa de diis fingantur indigna, etc. Expedire igitur falli in religione civitates."
[712] Livy xxxii. 9, cp. 28. In connection with these prodigia it may be worth noting that in xxxii. 30 we are told that a consul vowed a temple to Juno Sospita, who had in her famous seat at Lanuvium been a constant centre of marvel-mongering. Livy xxxiv. 53 places the building of this temple in foro olitorio three years later, if we may read there Sospitae instead of the Matutae of the MSS. with Sigonius: (cp. Aust, de Aedibus, p. 21, and Wissowa, R.K. 117). This interesting deity had been taken into the Roman worship in 338 B.C., but not moved from Lanuvium, which had peculiar religious relations with Rome. See Myth. Lex. vol. ii. p. 608, where the attributes of this Juno in art are described by Vogel. The date of the temple at Rome was 194. Whether the object of it was to diminish the portents at Lanuvium it is impossible to say, but judging from the records of prodigia in Julius Obsequens it had that effect. I find only four prodigia reported from Lanuvium after this date.
[713] See the passage in Frontinus, de Aqueductibus, i. 7 (C. Herschel's edition gives the reading of the best MS.), and the mutilated passage in the new epitomes of Livy found by Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt (Oxyrrhyncus Papyri, vol. iv. pp. 101 and 113). The general bearing of the two passages taken together seems to me to be that given in the text.
[714] Cic. ad Fam. i. 1 and 2. A somewhat similar case in 190 B.C. will be found in Livy xxxviii. 45, where the oracle forbade a Roman army to cross the Taurus range.
[715] Livy xxxiv. 55.
[716] Livy xxxviii. 56, mentions statues which were believed to be those of Scipio the elder, his brother Lucius, and Ennius, "in Scipionum monumento" outside the Porta Capena, and another of Scipio at Liternum, where he had a villa; this one Livy says that he saw himself blown down by a storm. On statues and busts at Rome, see Pliny xxxiv. 28 foll.; Mrs. Strong, Roman Sculpture, p. 28 foll.; Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies, p. 550 foll.; and for coins, p. 456.
[717] See above, p. 240, for the remarkable exception in the case of the elder Scipio, whose practice when in Rome was to go up to the Capitoline temple before daybreak and contemplate the statue of Jupiter; the dogs never barked at him, and the aedituus opened the cella Iovis at his summons. I see no good ground for rejecting this story, which is not likely to have been invented. It can be traced back to two writers, Oppius, the friend of Caesar, and Julius Hyginus, the librarian of Augustus (Gell. vi. 1. 1), and was probably based on tradition. Livy mentions it in xxvi. 19, and suggests that this and other ways of Scipio were assumed to impress the multitude. The Roman mind was naturally averse from such individualism in religion; but Scipio was beyond doubt more familiar than his contemporaries with Greek ideas. In a chapter on Idealism in his little book on Religion and Art in Ancient Greece, Professor Ernest Gardner writes: "The statue (of Athene) by Phidias within the Parthenon offered not merely that form in which she would choose to appear if she showed herself to mortal eyes, but actually showed her form as if she had revealed it to the sculptor. To look upon such an image helped the worshipper as much as--perhaps more than--any service or ritual, to bring himself into communion with the goddess, and to fit himself, as a citizen of her chosen city, to carry out her will in contributing his best efforts to its supremacy in politics, in literature, and in art." That Scipio had some feeling of this kind need not be doubted, though the statue was not a great work of art like that of Phidias. Cp. Lucretius, vi. 75 foll.
[718] See below, p. 386.
[719] Marquardt, 332, and Mommsen, Staatsrecht, i. ed. 2, p. 463 foll.
[720] Livy, Epit. xix.
[721] Livy xxxvii. 51: "Religio ad postremum vicit, ut dicto audiens esset flamen pontifici." Here religio is used in the sense of obligation to the ius divinum.
[722] Livy xxvii. 6; cp. 36.
[723] This story is told in Livy xl. 42.
[724] Livy xxvii. 8. For the compelling power (capere) of the Pont. Max., see Marq. 314. The story may have come from the annals of the Valerii Flacci, and also from those of the pontifices; it was apparently well known, as Valerius Maximus knew it (vi. 9. 2).
[725] Velleius ii. 43.
[726] Livy xxxi. 50.
[727] For the oath see "Lex incerta reperta Bantiae," lines 16 and 17, in Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani. The oath taboo is mentioned by Gellius 10. 15. 3.; Festus 104, and Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 113.
[728] Livy xxxii. 7; xxxix. 39.
[729] Tac. Ann. iv. 16.
[730] See above, p. 255.
[731] Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. v. p. 85 foll. Very interesting is the modern survival of Dionysiac rites recently discovered in Thrace by Mr. Dawkins (Hellenic Journal, 1906, p. 191).
[732] Farnell, op. cit. vol. v. p. 150.
[733] Quoted by Farnell, p. 151, from Rohde's Psyche.
[734] It is possible that superstitio may originally have had some such meaning; see W. Otto in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1909, p. 548 foll.; Mayor's edition of Cic. de Nat. Deorum, note on ii. 72 foll.
[735] Ovid, Fasti, iii. 523 foll. See also Roman Society in the Age of Cicero, p. 289.
[736] See Mr. Heitland's History of the Roman Republic, vol. ii. p. 229 note, and cp. Wissowa in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. s.v. "Bacchanalia."
[737] Livy xxxix. 8 foll.
[738] Plato, de Rep. 364 B; cp. Laws, 933 D.
[739] "Quaestio de clandestinis coniurationibus decreta est," Livy xxxix. 8; so also in chs. 14 and 17. Cp. Sctm. de Bacchanalibus, line 13, "conioura (se)." This document is, strictly speaking, a letter to the magistrates "in agro Teurano" in Bruttium embodying the orders of the Senatus consultum. It will be found in Bruns, Fontes Iuris Romani, or in Wordsworth, Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin.
[740] Livy xxxix. 16: "Omnia, dis propitiis volentibusque, faciemus, qui quia suum numen sceleribus libidinibusque contaminari indigne ferebant," etc.
[741] Mommsen, Strafrecht, p. 567 foll.
[742] Livy xxxix. 18 ad fin. Sctm. de Bacch. lines 3 foll.
[743] Religion der Römer, p. 78.
[744] Livy xl. 29 seems to have put his account together from Cassius Hemina and other annalists, so far as we can judge from the reference to them in Pliny, N.H. xiii. 84; Valerius Antias, who simply stated that the writings were Pythagorean as well as Numan, Livy rejects as ignorant of the chronological impossibility of making the king contemporary with the philosopher. The fragment of Cassius Hemina is quoted in Pliny, sec. 86; Val. Max. i. 1, and Plutarch, Numa 22, add nothing to our knowledge of the incident.
[745] See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, i. 268; Pliny, loc. cit., calls him "vetustissimus auctor annalium," but his work was later than the Annals or Origines of Cato.
[746] Ennius came from South Italy (Rudiae in Messapia), the home of Pythagoreanism. For traces of it in his works, see Reid on Cicero, Academica priora, ii. 51.
[747] This is the view taken by Colin, Rome et la Grèce, 200-146 B.C., p. 269 foll. This reaction was probably only a part of the general reversion to conservatism which we have been noticing in the action of the government in religious matters.
[748] See above, p. 149 foll.
[749] Quoted by Aust, Religion der Römer, p. 64. The passage is in Zeller's Religion und Philosophie bei den Römern, a short treatise reprinted in his Vorträge und Abhandlungen, ii. 93 foll.
[750] Ribbeck, Fragmenta Tragicorum Latinorum, p. 54.
[751] Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 334.
[752] Cistellaria, ii. 1. 45 foll.
[753] Aust, op. cit. p. 66.
[754] See Schanz, Gesch. der röm. Literatur, vol. i. p. 75.