Moreover, the sophisticated rhetoric of the philosophers—in 155 Carneades lectured in favour of natural justice one day and against it the next—was perceived by leading Romans such as Cato the Censor as subversive to good morals. At his urging the Senate quickly concluded the diplomatic business of Carneades, Critolaus, and Diogenes in 155 and hurried them out of Rome. This was part of a broader pattern of hostility to philosophy: in 181 the (spurious) Books of Numa, falsely believed to have been influenced by Pythagoras, were burned, and the following decades witnessed several expulsions of philosophers from the city. In comedies of the period, the discipline was held up for ridicule.
The hostility toward philosophy was one aspect of a wider Roman sense of unease about changing mores. Cato, a “new man” (without senatorial ancestors) elected consul (195) and censor (184), represented himself as an austere champion of the old ways and exemplifies the hardening Roman reaction against change under foreign influence. Although Cato knew Greek and could deploy allusions to Greek literature, he advised his son against too deep a knowledge of the literature of that “most worthless and unteachable race.” Cato despised those senatorial colleagues who ineptly imitated Greek manners. He asserted the value of Latin culture in the role of father of Latin prose literature. His treatise on estate management, the De agricultura (c. 160), has survived with its rambling discourse about how to run a 200-iugera (124-acre) farm, including advice on everything from buying and selling slaves to folk medicine. Cato’s greater, historical work, the Origines, survives only in fragments: it challenged the earlier Roman histories insofar as it was written in Latin and emphasized the achievements of the Italian peoples rather than those of the few great senatorial families of Rome (whose names were conspicuously omitted).
Elected censor in 184 to protect Roman mores, Cato vowed “to cut into pieces and burn like a hydra all luxury and voluptuousness.” He expelled seven men from the Senate on various charges of immorality and penalized through taxation the acquisition of such luxuries as expensive clothing, jewelry, carriages, and fancy slaves. The worry about luxury was widespread, as evidenced by the passage of a series of sumptuary laws supported by Cato. During the depths of the Second Punic War the Oppian law (215) was passed to meet the financial crisis by restricting the jewelry and clothing women were allowed to wear; in 195, after the crisis, the law was repealed despite Cato’s protests. Later sumptuary laws were motivated not by military crisis but by a sense of the dangers of luxury: the Orchian law (182) limited the lavishness of banquets; the Fannian law (161) strengthened the Orchian provisions, and the Didian law (143) extended the limits to all Italy. A similar sense of the dangers of wealth may also have prompted the lex Voconia (169), which prohibited Romans of the wealthiest class from naming women as heirs in their wills.
The laws and censorial actions ultimately could not restrain changes in Roman mores. Economic conditions had been irreversibly altered by conquest; the magnitude of conspicuous consumption is suggested by a senatorial decree of 161 that restricted the weight of silver tableware in a banquet to 100 pounds—10 times the weight for which Publius Cornelius Rufinus was punished in 275. Moreover, the very competitiveness that had traditionally marked the senatorial aristocracy ensured the spread of cultural innovations and new forms of conspicuous consumption among the elite. In contrast to the austere Cato, other senators laid claim to prestige by collecting Greek art and books brought back by conquering armies, by staging plays modeled on Greek drama, and by commissioning literary works, public buildings, and private sculptural monuments in a Greek style.
Whereas the influence of Greek high culture was felt principally in a small circle of elite Romans who had the wealth to acquire Greek art and slaves and the leisure and education to read Greek authors, the influence of religions from the eastern Mediterranean was perceived as potentially subversive to a far wider audience. Polybius praised the Romans for their conscientious behaviour toward the gods. Romans were famous for their extreme precision in recitation of vows and performance of sacrifices to the gods, meticulously repeating archaic words and actions centuries after their original meanings had been forgotten. Guiding these state cults were priestly colleges; and priestly offices such as of pontifex and augur were filled by senators, whose dominance in politics was thus replicated in civic religion.
In earlier centuries Rome’s innate religious conservatism was, however, counterbalanced by an openness to foreign gods and cults. As Rome incorporated new peoples of Italy into its citizen body, it accepted their gods and religious practices. Indeed, among the most authoritative religious texts, consulted in times of crisis or doubt, were the prophetic Sibylline Books, written in Greek and imported from Cumae. The receptivity appears most pronounced in the 3rd century: during its final decades temples were built in the city for Venus Erycina from Sicily and for the Magna Mater, or Great Mother, from Pessinus in Anatolia; games were instituted in honour of the Greek god Apollo (212) and the Magna Mater after the war. The new cults were integrated into the traditional structure of the state religion, and the “foreignness” was controlled (i.e., limits were placed on the orgiastic elements in the cult of the Great Mother performed by her eunuch priests).
The openness, never complete or a matter of principle, tilted toward resistance in the early 2nd century. In 186 Roman magistrates, on orders from the Senate, brutally suppressed Bacchic worship in Italy. Associations of worshipers of the Greek god Bacchus (Dionysus) had spread across Italy to Rome. Their members, numbering in the thousands, were initiated into secret mysteries, knowledge of which promised life after death; they also engaged in orgiastic worship. The secrecy soon gave rise to reports of the basest activities, such as uncontrolled drinking, sexual promiscuity, forgery of wills, and poisoning of kin. According to Livy, more than 7,000 were implicated in the wrongdoing; many of them were tried and executed, and the consuls destroyed the places of Bacchic worship throughout Italy. For the future, the (extant) senatorial decree prohibited men from acting as priests in the cult, banned secret meetings, and required the praetor’s and Senate’s authorization of ceremonies to be performed by gatherings of more than five people. The terms of the decree provide a sense of what provoked the harsh senatorial reaction. It was not that the Bacchic cult spread heretical beliefs about the gods—Roman civic religion was never based on theological doctrine with pretensions to exclusive truth; rather, the growing secret cult led by male priests threatened the traditionally dominant position of senators in state religion. The decree did not aim to eliminate Bacchic worship but to bring it under the supervision of senatorial authorities. The following centuries witnessed sporadic official actions against foreign cults; it happens to be recorded that a praetor of 139 removed private altars built in public areas and expelled astrologers and Jews from the city. Thus the reaction to eastern religions paralleled that to Greek philosophy; both were perceived as new ways of thinking that threatened to undermine traditional mores and the relations of authority implicit in them. Demographic and economic developments