In 615 the Roman -praetor peregrinus- directed all the Chaldeans to evacuate Rome and Italy within ten days.

The same fate at the same time befel the Jews, who had admitted Italian proselytes to their sabbath.
In like manner Scipio had to clear the camp before Numantia from soothsayers and pious impostors of every sort.

Some forty years afterwards (657) it was even found necessary to prohibit human sacrifices.

The wild worship of the Cappadocian Ma, or, as the Romans called her, Bellona, to whom the priests in their festal processions shed their own blood as a sacrifice, and the gloomy Egyptian worships began to make their appearance; the former Cappadocian goddess appeared in a dream to Sulla, and of the later Roman communities of Isis and Osiris the oldest traced their origin to the Sullan period.

Men had become perplexed not merely as to the old faith, but as to their very selves; the fearful crises of a fifty years' revolution, the instinctive feeling that the civil war was still far from being at an end, increased the anxious suspense, the gloomy perplexity of the multitude.