History of Rome

​While these things were being done in Africa and Spain, Hannibal spent the summer in the Sallentine territory in the hope of gaining possession of the city of Tarentum through treachery. Meanwhile, some insignificant cities of the Sallentines themselves defected to him.

​At the same time, among the twelve peoples in the territory of the Bruttii who had defected to the Carthaginians in the previous year, the Consentini and the Tauriani returned to the allegiance of the Roman people;

​and more would have returned, had not Titus Pomponius Veientanus, a prefect of the allies, who had acquired the reputation of a regular general through several successful raids in the Bruttian territory, clashed with Hanno after collecting a makeshift army.

​A great multitude of men, but an undisciplined crowd of peasants and slaves, was slain or captured there. The least of the losses was that the prefect was captured among the rest, a man who was then the promoter of a rash battle, and previously, as a tax-farmer, unfaithful and damaging both to the state and to the tax-farming companies by all kinds of evil arts.

​The consul Sempronius fought many small battles in Lucania, but none worthy of mention, and stormed several insignificant towns of the Lucanians. As the war was drawn out longer, ​and as prosperity and adversity altered not so much fortune as the minds of men, so great a superstition, and that for the most part foreign, invaded the state, that either the men or the gods suddenly seemed to have become different.

​And no longer were Roman rites being neglected only in secret and within walls, but even in public, in the Forum and on the Capitol, there was a crowd of women neither sacrificing nor praying to the gods in the ancestral manner.

​Sacrificers and prophets had seized the minds of men; whose number was increased by the rustic common people, driven into the city by poverty and fear from lands uncultivated and infested due to the long war, and by the easy profit from the error of others, which they practiced as if by the exercise of a permitted art.

​At first, the secret indignation of the good citizens was heard; then the matter reached even the senators and became a public complaint.

​The aediles and the capital triumvirs were severely blamed by the senate because they did not prevent it; but when they attempted to remove that multitude from the Forum and to scatter the apparatus of the sacred rites, they were not far from being violently assaulted.

​When it became apparent that this evil was now too powerful to be quieted by the lesser magistrates, the business was given by the senate to Marcus Aemilius, the urban praetor, that he should free the people from those superstitions.

​He both read the decree of the senate in an assembly and ordered that whoever had books of prophecy or prayers, or a written art of sacrificing, should bring all those books and writings to him before the Kalends of April, and that no one should sacrifice in a public or sacred place with a new or foreign rite.