And among the higher strata of society, outside of these _sacra privata_, carelessness and negligence of the old State cults were steadily on the increase.
Neither Cicero nor any of his contemporaries but Varro has anything to tell us of their details, and the decay had gone so far that Varro himself knew little or nothing about many of the deities of the old religious calendar,[532] or of the ways in which they had at one time been worshipped.

Vesta, with her simple cult and her virgin priestesses, was almost the only deity who was not either forgotten or metamorphosed in one way or another under the influence of Greek literature and mythology; Vesta was too well recognised as a symbol of the State's vitality to be subject to neglect like other and less significant cults.

The old sacrificing priesthoods, such as the Fratres Arvales and the lesser Flamines, seem not to have been filled up by the pontifices whose duty it was to do so: and the Flamen Dialis, the priest of Jupiter himself, is not heard of from 89 to 11 B.C., when he appears again as a part of the Augustan religious restoration.

The explanation is probably that these offices could not be held together with any secular one which might take the holder away from Rome; and as every man of good family had business in the provinces, no qualified person could be found willing to put himself under the restriction.

The temples too seem to have been sadly neglected; Augustus tells us himself[533] that he had to restore no less than eighty-two; and from Cicero we actually hear of thefts of statues and other temple property[534]--sacrileges which may be attributed to the general demoralisation caused by the Social and Civil Wars.