How were the old gods faring in this age of reckless change? Apparently a rivulet of unbelief had trickled down from the aristocracy to the crowd; it is hard to understand how a people still faithful to the ancient pantheon could have accepted with such boisterous approval those comedies in which Plautus—with whatever excuse of following Greek models—made fun of Jupiter’s labors with Alcmena, and turned Mercury into a buffoon. Even Cato, so anxious to preserve old forms, marveled at the ability of two augurs to keep from laughing when they met face to face.21 Too long these takers of auspices had been suborned to political trickery; prodigies and portents had been concocted to mold public opinion, the vote of the people had been annulled by pious humbuggery, and religion had consented to turn exploitation into a sacrament. It was a bad omen that Polybius, after living seventeen years among the highest circles in Rome, could write, about 150 B.C.., as if the Roman religion were merely a tool of government:
The quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is, in my judgment, the nature of its religion. The very thing that among other nations is an object of reproach—i.e., superstition—is that which maintains the cohesion of the Roman state. These matters are clothed in such pomp, and introduced to such an extent into public and private life, as no other religion can parallel. … I believe that the government has adopted this course for the sake of the common people. This might not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men; but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, it must be held in by invisible terrors and religious pageantry.22
Polybius could have justified himself, perhaps, by recent incidents tending to show that, despite Plautus and philosophy, superstition still was king. When the disaster of Cannae seemed to leave Rome defenseless against Hannibal, the excitable populace fell into a panic, and cried, “To what god must we pray to save Rome?” The Senate sought to still the commotion by human sacrifice; then by prayers to Greek gods; then by applying the Greek ritual to all the gods, Roman and Greek alike. Finally the Senate decided that if it could not prevent superstition it would organize and control it. In 205 it announced that the Sibylline Books foretold that Hannibal would leave Italy if the Magna Mater—a form of the goddess Cybele—should be brought from Phrygian Pessinus to Rome. Attalus, King of Pergamum, consented; the black stone which was believed to be the incarnation of the Great Mother was shipped to Ostia, where it was received with impressive ceremony by Scipio Africanus and a band of virtuous matrons. When the vessel that bore it was grounded in the Tiber’s mud, the Vestal Virgin Claudia freed it, and drew it upstream to Rome, by the magic power of her chastity. Then the matrons, each holding the stone tenderly in her turn, carried it in solemn procession to the Temple of Victory, and the pious people burned incense at their doors as the Great Mother passed. The Senate was shocked to find that the new divinity had to be served by self-emasculated priests; such men were found, but no Roman was allowed to be among them. From that time onward Rome celebrated, every April, the Megalesia, or Feast of the Great Goddess, first with wild sorrow and then with wild rejoicing. For Cybele was a vegetation deity, and legend told how her son Attis, symbol of autumn and spring, had died and gone to Hades, and then had risen from the dead.
In that same year (205) Hannibal left Italy, and the Senate complimented itself on its handling of the religious crisis. But the wars with Macedon opened the gates to Greece and the East; in the wake of soldiers returning with Eastern spoils, ideas, and myths came a flood of Greek and Asiatic captives, slaves, refugees, traders, travelers, athletes, artists, actors, musicians, teachers, and lecturers; and men in their migrations carry along their gods. The lower classes of Rome were pleased to learn of Dionysus-Bacchus, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of mystic rites that gave a divine inspiration and intoxication, of initiations that revealed the resurrected deity and promised the worshiper eternal life. In 186 the Senate was disturbed to learn that a considerable minority of the people had adopted the Dionysian cult, and that the new god was being celebrated by nocturnal bacchanalia whose secrecy lent color to rumors of unrestrained drinking and sexual revelry. “More uncleanliness was wrought with men than with women,” says Livy; and he adds, probably turning gossip into history, that “whoever would not submit to defilement . . . was sacrificed as a victim.”23 The Senate suppressed the cult, arrested 7000 of the devotees, and sentenced hundreds to death. It was a temporary victory in the long war that Rome was to wage against Oriental faiths.