I will finish this lecture by illustrating briefly this renewed and extended activity of the pontifices, so far as we can dimly trace it in this third century B.C. Most of it is connected more or less directly with the State religion, yet with a tendency to become more and more secular and perfunctory; the word _cura_ would express it better than _caerimonia_, and _caerimonia_ better than _religio_. The care of the calendar, for example (a technical matter which lies outside my province in these lectures), was originally of religious importance, because the oldest religious festivals marked operations of husbandry, and these, when fixed in the calendar, must occur at the right seasons.[578] It was the duty of the pontifices so to adjust the necessary intercalations as to effect this object--a duty to which they were, as it turned out, quite unequal. But continued city life broke the connection between the festivals and the agricultural work to which they originally corresponded, and what was once a _cura_ of religious import became a secular matter of which the value was not appreciated. So too with another duty, for which both the Romans and ourselves have more reason to be grateful to them--the recording of the leading events of national history. It is uncertain what prompted the college, or rather its head, to begin making these records, though there is no doubt about the fact. But it would be natural enough that those who had charge of the calendar, which would necessitate some record of years for purposes of intercalation, should go on to mark the names of the consuls and such striking events as would make a year memorable. In any case this was what actually happened. The pontifex maximus, we are told with precision, kept a _tabula_, or whited board, on which these events were noted down, with the consuls' names attached to them, or possibly a kind of almanac, made out for the whole year, on which they could append their notes to particular days.[579] This yearly _tabula_ was no doubt at first kept secret, like all the pontifical documents, but sooner or later, perhaps at the same time as the publication of the _fasti_ and _legis actiones_, it was exposed to public view in or at the Regia.[580] This went on for at least two centuries, and the records, which in the nature of things must have grown in length and detail as events became more startling and numerous, were edited in eighty books by the pontifex maximus P. Mucius Scaevola in 123 B.C.--the year of the first tribunate of C. Gracchus. The large number of these books has long been a stumbling-block to the learned, for we are expressly told that the _annales maximi_, as the records were called, were (in spite of their name) of a very meagre character; and many conjectures have quite recently been made to explain it.[581] But guessing is almost useless, seeing that there are no data for it. The editor may have added matter of his own, amplifying and