History of Rome

​Although the province of Africa had not yet been openly decreed—with the senators, I believe, concealing it so that the Carthaginians might not get prior knowledge—nevertheless the state was buoyed up by the hope that war would be waged in Africa in that year and that the end of the Punic War was at hand.

​This state of mind had filled people’s hearts with superstitions, and they were prone both to report and to believe portents.

​For that reason, more portents were reported: that two suns had been seen, and that light had shone in the night, and that a torch-like light was seen extending at Setia from the rising of the sun to the west; that a gate at Tarracina, and both a gate and the wall in many places at Anagnia, had been struck by lightning; and that a noise had been produced with a dreadful crash in the temple of Juno Sospita at Lanuvium.

​To expiate these, a single day of supplication was held; and a nine-day festival was performed because stones had fallen from the sky. To this was added a consultation about receiving the Idaean Mother, ​concerning whom, besides the fact that M. Valerius, one of the legates, had gone ahead and reported that she would be in Italy immediately, a fresh message arrived that she was already at Tarracina.

​A judgment of no small importance occupied the senate: who was the best man in the state;

​each man indeed would have preferred for himself the true victory in that matter to any commands or honors conferred by the vote of either the patricians or the plebeians.

​P. Scipio, son of that Cn. Scipio who had fallen in Spain, a young man not yet of quaestorian age, they judged to be the best of all the good men in the whole state.

​Under the influence of what virtues they judged thus, just as it has been handed down by the writers closest in memory to those times, I would gladly hand it down to posterity; yet I will not interpose my own opinions by conjecturing on a matter buried in antiquity.

​P. Cornelius was ordered to go to Ostia with all the matrons to meet the goddess; and he was to receive her from the ship and hand her over, once carried onto the land, to the matrons to be carried.

​After the ship reached the mouth of the river Tiber, just as he had been ordered, he sailed out into the open sea on a boat, received the goddess from the priests, and carried her out to the land.

​The leading matrons of the state, among whom the name of Claudia Quinta alone is outstanding, received her; her chastity, previously of doubtful reputation as is handed down, this holy service made more illustrious to posterity.

​These women, passing her from hand to hand to succeed one another, while the whole state poured out to meet them, with censers placed before the doors where she was carried past and incense burned, praying that she might enter the Roman city willingly and propitiously, carried the goddess to the temple of Victory, which is on the Palatine, on the day before ​the Nones of April, and that day was a festival. A great crowd of people brought gifts to the goddess on the Palatine, and there was a lectisternium and games, which were called the Megalensia.