The same poet also translated and made known to the Romans the Sacred History of Euhemerus. This was a romantic tale written in the third century before our era in which the author told of an imaginary voyage which he had made from Arabia to the island Panchaea in the Indian Ocean; there he found inscribed on a column the history of the supposed gods Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus, and learned that they and the other gods and heroes had been originally historical persons who were raised to their high position because of the services they had rendered mankind. This Sacred History was an interesting example of the rationalizing tendency of the age that produced it; its effect upon the Roman, whose belief in the traditional religion was already shaken, we can readily understand. Unquestionably Ennius’ work and the plays of the comedians hastened the work of unbelief, although they were only two of many factors that contributed to the ultimate result. The first half of this same second century was also a time of religious unrest. Whatever may have been the reason, whether the common longing for mystic assurance of safety and salvation had come naturally to the front in the Roman and Italian mind, or whether the large number of Greeks, slaves, traders, and other members of the lower and immigrant classes had moved the natives by mystic practices which they had brought with them, certain it is that a considerable part of the Romans found no satisfaction for their deeper longings in the traditional religion, and turned to a form of the Greek mysteries.[268] The mysteries of Bacchus which had gradually made their way up the peninsula from the Greek cities of the south led to such excesses in 186 B.C. that the Roman senate felt obliged to adopt stern measures; yet it is significant that it did not dare to forbid the celebration of these mysteries, but attempted only to control them. The Bacchic mysteries offered essentially the same religious satisfaction that the great mysteries at Eleusis did. Their influence at this time in Italy shows how conscious men had become of larger religious desires and how little the current forms of religion satisfied them. The conservatives in the state abhorred the Bacchic rites and would have no more part in them than in philosophy, towards which they showed an amusing timidity. Five years after the regulation of the mysteries an attempt was made to introduce at Rome some philosophic books which were generally regarded as subversive in their tendencies. The method of their introduction was the same one which has been used many times for similar purposes. Some farmers plowing in their fields at the foot of the Janiculum found two stone chests or coffins with inscriptions upon them in both Latin and Greek, saying that in one King Numa Pompilius had been buried, and that in the other were the books of the sacred law established by him. On opening the sarcophagi it was discovered that the body of the