[708] Livy xxxi. 5. The importance of the words "prolationem finium" does not seem to have been noticed by historians. If they are genuine they indicate an undoubtedly aggressive attitude.
[709] Livy xxxi. 7 and 8.
[710] Livy xxxvi. 1.
[711] Augustine, Civ. Dei, iv. 27: "Relatum est in litteras doctissimum pontificem Scaevolam disputasse tria genera tradita deorum: unum a poetis, alterum a philosophis, tertium a principibus civitatis. Primum genus nugatorium dicit esse, quod multa de diis fingantur indigna, etc. Expedire igitur falli in religione civitates."
[712] Livy xxxii. 9, cp. 28. In connection with these prodigia it may be worth noting that in xxxii. 30 we are told that a consul vowed a temple to Juno Sospita, who had in her famous seat at Lanuvium been a constant centre of marvel-mongering. Livy xxxiv. 53 places the building of this temple in foro olitorio three years later, if we may read there Sospitae instead of the Matutae of the MSS. with Sigonius: (cp. Aust, de Aedibus, p. 21, and Wissowa, R.K. 117). This interesting deity had been taken into the Roman worship in 338 B.C., but not moved from Lanuvium, which had peculiar religious relations with Rome. See Myth. Lex. vol. ii. p. 608, where the attributes of this Juno in art are described by Vogel. The date of the temple at Rome was 194. Whether the object of it was to diminish the portents at Lanuvium it is impossible to say, but judging from the records of prodigia in Julius Obsequens it had that effect. I find only four prodigia reported from Lanuvium after this date.
[713] See the passage in Frontinus, de Aqueductibus, i. 7 (C. Herschel's edition gives the reading of the best MS.), and the mutilated passage in the new epitomes of Livy found by Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt (Oxyrrhyncus Papyri, vol. iv. pp. 101 and 113). The general bearing of the two passages taken together seems to me to be that given in the text.
[714] Cic. ad Fam. i. 1 and 2. A somewhat similar case in 190 B.C. will be found in Livy xxxviii. 45, where the oracle forbade a Roman army to cross the Taurus range.
[715] Livy xxxiv. 55.
[716] Livy xxxviii. 56, mentions statues which were believed to be those of Scipio the elder, his brother Lucius, and Ennius, "in Scipionum monumento" outside the Porta Capena, and another of Scipio at Liternum, where he had a villa; this one Livy says that he saw himself blown down by a storm. On statues and busts at Rome, see Pliny xxxiv. 28 foll.; Mrs. Strong, Roman Sculpture, p. 28 foll.; Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies, p. 550 foll.; and for coins, p. 456.
[717] See above, p. 240, for the remarkable exception in the case of the elder Scipio, whose practice when in Rome was to go up to the Capitoline temple before daybreak and contemplate the statue of Jupiter; the dogs never barked at him, and the aedituus opened the cella Iovis at his summons. I see no good ground for rejecting this story, which is not likely to have been invented. It can be traced back to two writers, Oppius, the friend of Caesar, and Julius Hyginus, the librarian of Augustus (Gell. vi. 1. 1), and was probably based on tradition. Livy mentions it in xxvi. 19, and suggests that this and other ways of Scipio were assumed to impress the multitude. The Roman mind was naturally averse from such individualism in religion; but Scipio was beyond doubt more familiar than his contemporaries with Greek ideas. In a chapter on Idealism in his little book on Religion and Art in Ancient Greece, Professor Ernest Gardner writes: "The statue (of Athene) by Phidias within the Parthenon offered not merely that form in which she would choose to appear if she showed herself to mortal eyes, but actually showed her form as if she had revealed it to the sculptor. To look upon such an image helped the worshipper as much as—perhaps more than—any service or ritual, to bring himself into communion with the goddess, and to fit himself, as a citizen of her chosen city, to carry out her will in contributing his best efforts to its supremacy in politics, in literature, and in art." That Scipio had some feeling of this kind need not be doubted, though the statue was not a great work of art like that of Phidias. Cp. Lucretius, vi. 75 foll.