Closely connected with the _lectisternia_, and following close upon them in chronological order, were the processional ceremonies called _supplicationes_. The historical relation between the two is by no means clear; but if we conclude, as I am fairly sure we may, that the _lectisternia_ were shows of a joyful character, accompanied, as Livy describes the first one, with private entertainments, and meant to keep up the spirits of the plebeian population, and if we then turn to the early _supplicationes_, in which men, women, and children, _coronati_, and carrying laurel branches, went in procession to the temples, and there prostrated themselves after the Greek fashion, the women "crinibus passis aras verrentes," we shall be disposed to look on them as, in origin at least, distinct from each other.[551] We may conjecture that the appearance of the gods in human form at the doors of their temples suggested to the plebeian women a kind of emotional worship which was alien to the old Roman feeling, but familiar enough to those (and they must have been many) who knew the life of the Greek cities of Italy. It may be that they had tried it even in earlier times; but anyhow, in the fourth and third centuries B.C. advantage was taken of the _pulvinaria_ to use them as stopping-places in the procession of a _supplicatio_, and the phrase becomes a common one in the annals, "supplicatio ad omnia pulvinaria indicta." The _lectisternia_ were ordered five times in the fourth century;[552] by that time, it would seem likely, the _supplicationes_ had become an authorised institution, and had perhaps embodied the practice of _lectisternia_ in the way suggested above. We shall meet with them again when we come to the religious history of the war with Hannibal.