cloister-adventures in the world of the Decamerone.  The scandalous affair of 640 seq. is well known, in which three Vestals, daughters of the noblest families, and their paramours, young men likewise of the best houses, were brought to trial for unchastity first before the pontifical college, and then, when it sought to hush up the matter, before an extraordinary court instituted by special decree of the people, and were all condemned to death.  Such scandals, it is true, sedate people could not approve; but there was no objection to men finding positive religion to be a folly in their familiar circle; the augurs might, when one saw another performing his functions, smile in each other’s face without detriment to their religious duties.  We learn to look favourably on the modest hypocrisy of kindred tendencies, when we compare with it the coarse shamelessness of the Roman priests and Levites.  The official religion was quite candidly treated as a hollow framework, now serviceable only for political machinists; in this respect with its numerous recesses and trapdoors it might and did serve either party, as it happened.  Most of all certainly the oligarchy recognized its palladium in the state-religion, and particularly in the augural discipline; but the opposite party also made no resistance in point of principle to an institute, which had now merely a semblance of life; they rather regarded it, on the whole, as a bulwark which might pass from the possession of the enemy into their own.

Oriental Religions in Italy

In sharp contrast to this ghost of religion which we have just described stand the different foreign worships, which this epoch cherished and fostered, and which were at least undeniably possessed of a very decided vitality.  They meet us everywhere, among genteel ladies and lords as well as among the circles of the slaves, in the general as in the trooper, in Italy as in the provinces.  It is incredible to what a height this superstition already reached.  When in the Cimbrian war a Syrian prophetess, Martha, offered to furnish the senate with ways and means for the vanquishing of the Germans, the senate dismissed her with contempt; nevertheless the Roman matrons and Marius’ own wife in particular despatched her to his head-quarters, where the general readily received her and carried her about with him till the Teutones were defeated.  The leaders of very different parties in the civil war, Marius, Octavius, Sulla, coincided in believing omens and oracles.  During its course even the senate was under the necessity, in the troubles of 667, of consenting to issue directions in accordance with the fancies of a crazy prophetess.  It is significant of the ossification of the Romano-Hellenic religion as well as of the increased craving of the multitude after stronger religious stimulants, that superstition no longer, as in the Bacchic mysteries, associates itself with the national religion; even the Etruscan mysticism is already left behind; the worships matured in the sultry regions of the east appear throughout in the foremost rank.  The copious introduction of elements from Asia Minor and Syria into the population, partly by the import of slaves, partly by the augmented traffic of Italy with the east, contributed very greatly to this result.