Thus limited in their native culture, the Roman upper class were inevitably much affected by higher foreign cultures when they met these under conditions of wealth and leisure. Long before that stage, indeed, they consulted Greek oracles and collected responses; and they had informally assimilated before the conquest a whole series of Greek Gods without giving them public worship.[410] The very Goddess of the early Latin League, the Aventine Diana, was imaged by a copy of Artemis of Ephesus, the Goddess of the Ionian League.[411] As time went on the more psychologically developed cults of the East were bound to attract the Romans of all classes. What of religious emotion there was in the early days must have played in large part around the worship which the State left free to the citizens as individuals--the worship of the _Lares_ and _Penates_, the cults of the hearth and the family; and in this connection the primitive mythopoeic instinct must have evolved a great deal of private mythology which never found its way into literature. But as the very possession of _Lares_ and _Penates_, ancestral and domestic spirits, was originally a class privilege, not shared by the landless and the homeless, these had step by step to be made free of public institutions of a similar species--the _Lares Praestites_ of the whole city, festally worshipped on the first day of May, and other _Lares Publici_, _Rurales_, _Compitales_, _Viales_, and so on--just as they were helped to bread. Even these concessions, however, failed to make the old system suffice for the transforming State; and individual foreign worships with a specific attraction were one by one inevitably introduced--that of Æsculapius in the year 291 B.C., in a panic about pestilence; that of Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, in 205: both by formal decision of the Senate. The manner of the latter importation is instructive. Beginning the Hannibalic war in a spirit of religious patriotism, the Senate decreed the destruction of the temples of the alien Isis and Serapis.[412] But as the war went on, and the devotion shown to the native Gods was seen to be unrewarded, the Senate themselves, yielding to the general perturbation which showed itself in constant resort to foreign rites by the women,[413] prescribed resort to the Greek sacrificial rites of Apollo.[414] Later they called in the cult of Cybele from Phrygia;[415] and other cults informally, but none the less irresistibly, followed.