From the Hannibalic war to the end of the Republic is the period of the decay and downfall of the old Roman religion. This period need not detain us long; it has been no part of my plan to exhibit this religion on its death-bed, for the Fasti do not admit us to that scene. They show us a living and genuine, not a spurious and enfeebled religious life. A few salient facts shall suffice as illustrations of the slow process of this dissolution. At the very outset of the period we mark the solemn introduction into Rome of Cybele, the Magna Mater Idaea, and the stone which was supposed to represent her; and we are thus warned that even the Greek cults, with all their adjuncts of art and mythology, are no longer sufficient for Roman needs. The State is once more in peril, and the far-reaching struggle with Hannibal has brought her into touch with new peoples and cults. The Greeks do indeed continue to be the chief invaders of the Roman religious territory, but the religion they bring with them is a debased one. The extraordinary rapidity with which the orgiastic rites of Dionysus spread over Italy in 186 B.C. proves at once that the Italian religious forms were wearing out, and that the Greek substitute was no longer a wholesome one[1507]. From this time forward the lower strata of population show a tendency to run after exciting Oriental forms of worship, which neither the attempted restoration of the old religion by Augustus, nor the subsequent rapid growth of Christianity, could entirely and permanently check. Among the educated classes the old beliefs were being eaten away by the acids of a second-hand philosophy. The Greeks had long begun to inquire into the nature of the gods, and they passed on their disintegrating criticism to their conquerors. Euhemerus, the arch-destroyer of ancient faiths, became known to the Romans through a translation by Ennius at the beginning of the second century B.C.; and it took only another century and a half to produce the sceptical and eclectic treatise of Cicero, _De Natura Deorum_.