Now, this love of show and novelty, of which we have abundant evidence later on as a Roman characteristic, taken together with the anxiety and alarm--the new _religio_--arising from the pestilence, will sufficiently explain the _lectisternia_, as these shows were called. We have here in fact the first appearance, constantly recurring in later Roman history, of a tendency to seek not only for novelty, but for a more emotional expression of religious feeling than was afforded by the old forms of sacrifice and prayer, conducted as they were by the priest on behalf of the community without its active participation. Those old forms might do for the old patrician community of farmers and warriors, but not so well for the new and ever-increasing population of artisans and other workmen, whether of Roman or foreign descent. It would seem, indeed, as if the sensitiveness of the human fibre of a primitive community increases with its increasing complexity, and with the greater variety of experience to which it is exposed; and in the case of Rome, as if the simple ancient methods of dealing with the divine inhabitants of the city were no longer adequate to the needs of a State which was steering its way to empire among so many difficulties and perils. It is not indeed certain that the new rites, or some points in them, may not have had their prototypes in old Italian usage, though the _lectisternia_, the actual display of gods in human form and in need of food like human beings, are almost certainly Greek in origin.[549] But so far as we can guess, the emotional element was wholly new. True, Livy tells us in two passages of his third book of occasions when men, women, and children flocked to all the shrines (_omnia delubra_) seeking for the _pax deorum_ at the invitation of the senate; but the early date, the great improbability of the senate taking any such step, and the absence of any mention of the priesthoods, makes it difficult to believe that these assertions are based on any genuine record. We must be content to mark the first _lectisternia_ in 399 as the earliest authentic example of the emotional tendency of the Roman plebs.[550]