is the Stoic [Greek:  eimarmenae] applied to the idea of Rome and her Empire; that Stoic conception could not take the form of Jupiter, as in Varro’s hands, for the god had to be modelled on the Homeric pattern, not on the Stoic.  It is perhaps not going too far to say that the god, as a theological conception, never recovered from this treatment; any chance he ever had of becoming the centre of a real religious system was destroyed by the Aeneid, the pietas of whose hero is indeed nominally due to him, but in reality to the decrees of Fate.[570]

While philosophers and poets were thus performing intellectual and imaginative feats with the gods of the State, the strong tendency to superstition, untutored fear of the supernatural, which had always been characteristic of the Italian peoples, so far from losing power, was actually gaining it, and that not only among the lower classes.  As Lucretius mockingly said, even those who think and speak with contempt of the gods will in moments of trouble slay black sheep and sacrifice them to the Manes.  This feeling of fear or nervousness, which lies at the root of the meaning of the word religio,[571] had been quieted in the old days by the prescriptions of the pontifices and their jus divinum, but it was always ready to break out again; as we have seen, in the long and awful struggle of the Hannibalic war, it was necessary to go far beyond the ordinary pharmacopoeia within reach of the priesthoods in order to convince the people that all possible means were being taken for their salvation.  Again, in this last age of the Republic, there are obvious signs that both ignorant and educated were affected by the gloom and uncertainty of the times.  Increasing uncertainty in the political world, increasing doubt in the world of thought, very naturally combined to produce an emotional tendency which took different forms in men of different temperament.  We can trace this (1) in the importance attached to omens, portents, dreams; (2) in a certain vague thought of a future life, which takes a positive shape in the deification of human beings; (3) at the close of the period, in something approaching to a sense of sin, of neglected duty, bringing down upon State and individual the anger of the gods.

1.  If we glance over the latter part of the book of prodigies, compiled by the otherwise unknown writer Julius Obsequens from the records of the pontifices quoted in Livy’s history, we can get a fair idea of the kind of portent that was troubling the popular mind.  They are much the same as they always had been in Roman history,—­earthquakes, monstrous births, temples struck by lightning, statues overthrown, wolves entering the city, and so on; they are extremely abundant in the terrible years of the Social and Civil Wars, become less frequent after the death of Sulla, and break out again in full force with the murder of Caesar.  They were reported to the pontifices from the places where they were