even some revolt of [43] feeling, at that contact with coarser
natures to which his religious conclusions exposed him. At the
beginning of the year one hundred and seventy-three public anxiety
was as great as ever; and as before it brought people's superstition
into unreserved play. For seven days the images of the old gods, and
some of the graver new ones, lay solemnly exposed in the open air,
arrayed in all their ornaments, each in his separate resting-place,
amid lights and burning incense, while the crowd, following the
imperial example, daily visited them, with offerings of flowers to
this or that particular divinity, according to the devotion of each.

But supplementing these older official observances, the very wildest
gods had their share of worship,--strange creatures with strange
secrets startled abroad into open daylight. The delirious sort of
religion of which Marius was a spectator in the streets of Rome,
during the seven days of the Lectisternium, reminded him now and
again of an observation of Apuleius: it was "as if the presence of
the gods did not do men good, but disordered or weakened them." Some
jaded women of fashion, especially, found in certain oriental
devotions, at once relief for their religiously tearful souls and an
opportunity for personal display; preferring this or that "mystery,"
chiefly because the attire required in it was suitable to their
peculiar manner of beauty. And one morning Marius [44] encountered
an extraordinary crimson object, borne in a litter through an excited
crowd--the famous courtesan Benedicta, still fresh from the bath of
blood, to which she had submitted herself, sitting below the scaffold
where the victims provided for that purpose were slaughtered by the
priests. Even on the last day of the solemnity, when the emperor
himself performed one of the oldest ceremonies of the Roman religion,
this fantastic piety had asserted itself. There were victims enough