worships, the multitude of their own accord would have introduced the latter, in resentment of the exclusiveness of the patricians in keeping the old domestic and national cults in their own hands. [771] As now eastern conquests multiplied the number of foreign slaves and residents in Rome, the foreign worships multiplied with them; and with the worships came such forms of freethought as then existed in Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. In resistance to these, as to the orgiastic worships, political and religious conservatism for a time combined. In 173 B.C. the Greek Epicurean philosophers Alkaios and Philiskos were banished from the city, [772] a step which was sure to increase the interest in Epicureanism. Twelve years later the Catonic party carried a curt decree in the Senate against the Greek rhetors, [773] uti Romae ne essent; and in 155 the interest aroused by Carneades and the other Athenian ambassadors led to their being suddenly sent home, on Cato's urging. [774] It seems certain that Carneades made converts to skepticism, among them being the illustrious Scipio Æmilianus. [775] In the sequel the Greeks multiplied, especially after the fall of Macedonia, [776] and in the year 92 we find the censors vetoing the practices of the Latin rhetors as an unpleasing novelty, [777] thus leaving the Greeks in possession of the field. [778] But, the general social tendency being downwards, it was only a question of time when the rationalism should be overgrown by the superstition. In 137 there had been another vain edict against the foreign soothsayers and the worshippers of Sabazius; [779] but it was such cults that were to persist, while the old Roman religion passed away, [780] save insofar as it had a non-literary survival among the peasantry. § 2