40 
part of the Homan religion, it was tolerated. But it enacts 
that if any persons deemed it essential to celebrate such a rite, 
they must apply to the Prsetor Urbanus, who must consult the 
Senate, not fewer than 100 Senators being present. Further 
it decrees, that they should have no priest or priestess, or 
common fund, and take no joint oath, vow, or promise; that 
unless by special permission of the praetor no more than five 
persons, three women and two men, should come together. 
Capital punishment is denounced against those who violate the 
decree, and it is ordered that it should be engraved on a tablet 
of brass, to be set up where it could be easily read, and its 
enactments carried into effect within ten days from the 
exhibition of the tablet. Henceforth only the secret worship 
of the matronly divinities, Ceres and Bona Dea, was allowed 
at Home; and the introduction of foreign rites vigilantly 
opposed, till towards the end of the Hepublic, and under the 
Empire, a flood of superstitions came in from Egypt and the 
East. 
The male and female informers were rewarded by a donation 
to each of 200,000 asses ; the male by an exemption from 
further military service, and from the obligation to maintain 
a cavalry horse; to the female, who was the daughter 
of a freedman, is granted, besides the liberty of disposing of 
her own property, and choosing herself a guardian, that of 
marrying a Homan citizen. The value of this privilege may he 
estimated from the circumstance, that till the time of Augustus 
it was not lawful for one of free birth to marry the daughter of 
a freedman, and even he did not extend this license to the 
senators. The previous discreditable life of the informer seems 
to have been considered as no obstacle to her entering into a 
reputable family. The copy of the decree, which has happily 
escaped destruction, was addressed to the authorities of the 
Ager Teuranus by the Homan Consuls, and bears marks of the 
nails by which they affixed it to a wall. This place is 
represented by a village in the Peninsula between the gulf of 
Tarentum and the Adriatic. The tablet was found in digging 
in 1640, was given to the Emperor of Germany, and was con¬ 
signed by him to the Imperial Library at Vienna, where it 
remains. 
