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.
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