With the close of the Second Punic War there began for Rome a period of very great material prosperity.  This prosperity was, to be sure, not exactly distributed, and it is not without its resemblance to some of our modern instances of commercial prosperity, in that it was not so much a general bettering of economic conditions as the very rapid increase of the wealth of a relatively small number, an increase gained at the expense of positive detriment to a large element in the population.  Thus it was that a century of which the first seventy years provide an almost unparalleled spectacle of the increase of national territory, accompanied, according to the ancient methods of taxation, by a vast increase in national wealth, should close with the tragedies of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and the legacy of class hatred which produced the civil wars.  This growth in wealth and territory was not without its effects on the outward appearance of the state religion.  The territory was gained by a series of minor wars in the course of which many temples were vowed; and the spoils of the war provided the means for the fulfilment of the vows.  Thus to the outward observer it might well have seemed that the religion of the state was enjoying a time of great prosperity.  Between the close of the Punic War (B.C. 201) and the year of Tiberius Gracchus (B.C. 133) we have accurate knowledge of the dedication of no less than nineteen state temples, and there were undoubtedly many others of which we have no record.  Another apparently good sign is the fact that the Sibylline books are silent, so far as the introduction of new deities is concerned.  Yet these surface indications are deceptive.  As for the Sibylline books, now that the pomerium line had been broken down, and the temples of Greek gods might be placed anywhere in the city, it was a very simple matter for the state to bring in any Greek god that it pleased, and likening him to a more or less similar Roman god and calling him by the Roman name, to put up a temple to him anywhere.  It was also true that, as Roman theology was now based on the principle that every Roman god had his Greek parallel and vice versa, there were no gods left, whose names would have occurred at all in the Sibylline books, who could not be brought in now without them.  And as for the vowing of new temples, this represented at best merely the habit formed during more devout days; religion was moving by the momentum acquired during the Second Punic War, and the gods to whom these temples were erected were really Greek gods under Roman names.  In a word, not only was the state religion becoming more and more of a form day by day, but the form was that of Greece and not of Rome.  It is extremely interesting to trace this movement in detail, to look behind the outward appearance and see the remarkable changes that were really taking place.