Page:Roman Constitutional History, 753-44 B.C..djvu/165

Rh districts beyond recovery, and their farms were incorporated with the large estates. The governing class saw that the state, of which agriculture was altogether the mainstay, was being ruined, but they sacrificed the welfare of the nation for the sake of the rabble in the capital and of their own political and pecuniary interests. After 180-177 nothing was done to stay the downward progress of Italian agriculture, except the founding of one Roman colony in 157. Nobody was responsible in this government by a senatorial corporation, and the catastrophe was fast approaching.

II. The Decline of Religion and Morals; the Growth of the Equestrian Class.

Decline of the National Religion. — The Roman national religion had never contained any very prominent moral elements; still, it had imparted a belief in a just government of the world and, above all, in a divine establishment of the Roman state and in a divine sanction of the public acts. Now it was losing its substance of simple faith, the public worship became a matter of minute and tedious forms, involving ever greater expense, and the moral elements, with the restraints which they imposed, were disappearing. Unbelief spread fast among the highest classes, who saw in religion more and more only a means of imposing on the multitude. Among the lower classes the old national faith was giving way to all kinds of superstition. The Oriental worship of Cybele had been introduced in 204. Later the secret worship of Bacchus was favorably received, spread all over Italy, and led to the vilest crimes and practices. Just as the government had shown criminal negligence in allowing the orgies to spread unhindered, so it displayed reckless severity and incompetence in the hasty prosecutions, which resulted in the summary condemnation of thousands of persons and the execution of most of them.