22.
About the time that these reports were brought from Spain, the Taurian Games1 were performed for two days for religious reasons.2 Then for ten days, with great magnificence, Marcus Fulvius gave the games which he had vowed during the Aetolian war.3
[2]
Many actors too came from Greece to do him honour. Also a contest of athletes4 was then for the first time made a spectacle for the Romans and a hunt of lions and panthers was given, and the games, in number and variety, were celebrated in a manner almost like that of the present time.5
[3]
Then a nine-day feast took place because in Picenum through three days there had been showers of stones, and especially because flames shining in the sky in many places were said to have set fire to the garments of many when a light breeze blew upon them.
[4]
A one-day period of prayer was also added by decree of the pontiffs because the temple of Ops on the Capitoline had been struck by lightning.
[5]
The consuls atoned for this with full-grown victims and purified the City. About the same time [p. 283]it was reported too from Umbria that a hermaphrodite6 about twelve years old had been discovered. In their fear and awe of this portent they ordered the prodigy to be removed from Roman soil and killed as soon as possible.7
[6]
In the same year Transalpine Gauls, crossing into Venetia without any devastation or war, took possession of a site for founding a town not far from where Aquileia now stands.
[7]
Roman ambassadors sent across the Alps to inquire into the matter received the reply that this party had not set out with the authority of the state, nor did they know what they were doing in Italy.8
[8]
Lucius Scipio at this time celebrated for ten days the games which he said he had vowed during the war with Antiochus, with money contributed for the purpose by the kings and cities.
[9]
Valerius Antias is the authority for the statement that after his condemnation and the sale of his property he had been sent as an ambassador to Asia to resolve the disputes between the two kings, Antiochus and Eumenes:
[10]
he adds that at that time the money was contributed to him and artists collected throughout Asia, and that finally, after his embassy, action was taken in the senate about these games, of which he had made no mention after the war in which he said that they had been vowed.9
1 These games, instituted under the monarchy, were in honour of the gods of the lower world.
2 While the expression is vague, it would seem that there was some special reason for celebrating these games at this time.
3 Cf. v. 7-10 above. If the emendation here adopted is correct, Fulvius probably exceeded his appropriation of 80,000 sesterces there mentioned.
4 They were probably boxers or wrestlers.
5 The Greek features of the games were marks of the Greek culture of Fulvius.
6 B.C. 186
7 Cf. the treatment of a similar creature reported at XXXI. xii. 8.
8 This is the first invasion of Italy over the eastern passes of the Alps. Possibly these invaders were not Gauls, but came from farther east.
9 Neither the vow nor the embassy is mentioned elsewhere by Livy.
Livy. Books XXXVIII-XXXIX with an English Translation. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1936: published without copyright notice.
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