=Oriental Superstitions.=--Already in 220 there was in Rome a temple of the Egyptian god Serapis. The Senate ordered it to be demolished. As no workman dared to touch it, the consul himself had to come and beat down the doors with blows of an axe. Some years after, in 205, during the war with Hannibal, it was the Senate itself that sent an ambassador to Asia Minor to seek the goddess Cybele. The Great Mother (as she was called) was represented by a black stone, and this the envoys of the Senate brought in great pomp and installed in Rome. Her priests followed her and paced the streets to the sound of fifes and cymbals, clad in oriental fashion, and begging from door to door. Later, Italy was filled with Chaldean sorcerers. The mass of the people were not the only ones to believe in these diviners. When the Cimbri menaced Rome (104), Martha, a prophetess of Syria, came to the Senate to offer it victory over the barbarians; the Senate drove her out, but the Roman women brought her to the camp, and Marius, the general in chief, kept her by him and consulted her to the end of the war. Sulla, likewise, had seen in vision the goddess of Cappadocia and it was on her advice that he took his way to Italy. =Sceptics.=--Not only priests and diviners came to Rome, but also philosophers who scoffed at the old religion. The best known of these, Carneades, the ambassador of the Athenians, spoke in Rome in public, and the youth of Rome came in crowds to hear him. The Senate bade him leave the city. But the philosophers continued to teach in the schools of Athens and Rhodes, and it was the fashion to send the Roman youth thither for instruction. About the third century before Christ Euhemerus, a Greek, had written a book to prove that there were no gods; the gods, he said, were only men of ancient times who had been deified; Jupiter himself had been a king of Crete. This book had a great success and was translated into Latin by the poet Ennius. The nobles of Rome were accustomed to mock at their gods, maintaining only the cult of the old religion. The higher Roman society was for a century at once superstitious and sceptical. CHANGES IN MANNERS