in the provinces, no qualified person could be found willing to put himself under the restriction.  The temples too seem to have been sadly neglected; Augustus tells us himself[533] that he had to restore no less than eighty-two; and from Cicero we actually hear of thefts of statues and other temple property[534]—­sacrileges which may be attributed to the general demoralisation caused by the Social and Civil Wars.  At the same time there seems to have been a strong tendency to go after strange gods, with whose worship Roman soldiers had made acquaintance in the course of their numerous eastern campaigns.  It is a remarkable fact that no less than four times in a single decade the worship of Isis had to be suppressed,—­in 58, 53, 50, and 48 B.C.  In the year 50 we are told that the consul Aemilius Paullus, a conservative of the old type, actually threw off his toga praetexta and took an axe to begin destroying the temple, because no workmen could be found to venture on the work.[535] These are indeed strange times; the beautiful religion of Isis, which assuredly had some power to purify a man and strengthen his conscience,[536] was to be driven out of a city where the old local religion had never had any such power, and where the masses were now left without a particle of aid or comfort from any religious source.  The story seems to ring true, and gives us a most valuable glimpse into the mental condition of the Roman workman of the time.

Of such foreign worships, and of the general neglect of the old cults, Cicero tells us nothing; we have to learn or to guess at these facts from evidence supplied by later writers.  His interest in religious practice was confined to ceremonies which had some political importance.  He was himself an augur, and was much pleased with his election to that ancient college; but, like most other augurs of the time, he knew nothing of augural “science,” and only cared to speculate philosophically on the question whether it is possible to foretell the future.  He looked upon the right of the magistrate to “observe the heaven” as a part of an excellent constitution,[537] and could not forgive Caesar for refusing in 59 B.C. to have his legislation paralysed by the fanatical declarations of his colleague that he was going to “look for lightning.”  He firmly believed in the value of the ius divinum of the State.  In his treatise on the constitution (de Legibus) he devotes a whole book to this religious side of constitutional law, and gives a sketch of it in quasi-legal language from which it appears that he entirely accepted the duty of the State to keep the citizen in right relation to the gods, on whose good-will his welfare depended.  He seems never to have noticed that the State was neglecting this duty, and that, as we saw just now, temples and cults were falling into decay, strange forms of religion pressing in.  Such things did not interest him; in public life the State religion was to him a piece of the constitution,