Scipio, Laelius, Furius, and the Ancestral Religion

Abstract

Abstract In the anxieties of the Second Punic War the Romans sought divine aid alike from new Greek and even oriental cults and from ancient Italian rites. But in the subsequent decades a deeper-and to some extent a disenchanted-knowledge of Greece and things Greek combined with the nationalistic pride of a conquering people (and one already committed to reverence of its ancestors) to create a new consciousness of the Roman religious tradition, and of the need to keep it free from the contamination of foreign cults-or foreign scepticism. In 186 BC the Bacchanals were suppressed, and in 181 the books of Numa; in 161 philosophers and rhetors were expelled; either in 173 or 154 two Epicureans were thrown out of Rome by a consul, L. Postumius; in I 5 5 the embassy of the Athenian philosophers caused some concern; and in 139 Chaldaeans (astrologers) and possibly Jews were banned by the praetor and Xvir, Cn. Cornelius Scipio Hispanus. The new Latin-writing historians of the period, Cato and after him the so-called early annalists, Cassius Hemina and Pisa, recorded and explained ancient rites in a doubtless unsystematic fashion, but probably more fully than their predecessors who used the Greek language. And it appears that some time around the middle of the century a Lex Plaetoria may have set up IIviri to restore the decrepit altars of traditional cults.