This vast eclecticism, open to all novelties, did not bring about a break with the past. Theology succeeded in effecting a reconciliation with all, even the rudest and most absurd traditions of fable, by an ingenious system of moral allegories. “Divine” Homer thus became a master of piety and wisdom, and mythology a collection of edifying stories. Demonology made it possible to justify all the traditional practices of the cult, as well as magic and divination: everything which seemed incompatible with the new idea of the divinity was ascribed to lower powers. Thus the Pythagoreans could take up the position not of adversaries or reformers but of interpreters of the ancestral religion. They claimed that they remained faithful to the wisdom of the sages who, at the dawn of civilisation, had received a divine revelation, which had been transmitted first to Pythagoras and then to Plato. They felt so sure that they were expressing the thought of these masters, whose authority made law, that they did not hesitate to subscribe the venerated names, by a pious fraud, to their own writings. Nowhere did apocryphal literature have a more luxuriant efflorescence than in these circles. When the sect was introduced into Rome it sought, according to its wont, to connect itself with old local traditions, and without much difficulty it succeeded. The national pride of the conquerors of Greece could, with some complacency, regard it as Italic. Pythagoras passed for the teacher of King Numa, the religious legislator of the city. Ennius had expressed this philosopher’s doctrine in his poems, and altogether, from the time of the ancient republic onwards, the half mythical moralist of Greater Greece enjoyed singular consideration in Rome.[58] But the first to give new life to the Pythagorean school, which had died in Italy centuries before, was, according to Cicero, his friend, the senator Nigidius Figulus, a curious representative of the scientific religiosity which characterised the sect. This Roman magistrate, a man of singular erudition, was bitten with all the occult sciences. A grammarian, a naturalist and a theologian, he was also an astrologer and magician and, on occasion, a wonder-worker. He did not confine himself to theory but gathered about him a club of the initiate, of whom we cannot say whether they were most attracted by scientific curiosity, by austere morals or by mystic practices. Vatinius, the relative and friend of Caesar, and, probably, the spiritualist Appius Claudius Pulcher were the most prominent of this circle of converts.