The awful experience of that war had done much to discredit the old Roman religious system, which had been found insufficient of itself to preserve the State.

The people, excited and despairing, had been quieted by what may be called new religious prescriptions, innumerable examples of which are to be found in Livy's books.
The Sibylline books were constantly consulted, and _lectisternia, supplicationes, ludi_, in which Greek deities were prominent, were ordered and carried out.

Finally, in 204 B.C., there was brought to Rome the sacred stone of the Magna Mater Idaea, the great deity of Pessinus in Phrygia, and a festival was established in her honour, called by the Greek name Megalesia.

All this means, as can be seen clearly from Livy's language,[549] that the governing classes were trying to quiet the minds of the people by convincing them that no effort was being spared to set right their relations with the unseen powers; they had invoked in vain their own local and native deities, and had been compelled to seek help elsewhere; they had found their own narrow system of religion quite inadequate to express their religious experience of the last twenty years.

And indeed that old system of religion never really recovered from the discredit thus cast on it.