When these various measures failed to allay the pestilence, an old custom of driving a nail into the temple of Jupiter was solemnly revived. This practice in its inception purposed to make a calendar of years. But once when a dictator had driven in the nail, forthwith a pestilence had ceased. So now it was urged that, if a dictator and no common magistrate drove in the nail, the pestilence would cease. So says Livy, but there is abundant evidence, both from ancient literature and from modern folk-lore, that he has missed the real significance of the act. We find traces of a world-wide belief in the possibility of transferring the evils of the body, as well as the evils of the soul, to some other being or animal, or thing. The scapegoat is familiar to all, and we know from Leviticus,[76] that at the cleansing of a leper the Jews let a bird fly away. Pliny[77] too tells us, that a Roman cure for epilepsy was to drive a nail into the ground, where the epileptic’s head had struck it on falling: a similar cure for toothache was practised in France and Germany, and for ague in Suffolk.[78] In each instance the idea was to nail fast the evil thing, and so hinder it from returning to trouble its former host. A story given by L. Strackerjan,[79] and quoted by Frazer, comes even more closely to the point. During the Thirty Years’ War pestilence came from Neuenkirchen, in Oldenburg, to a neighbouring farmhouse in the semblance of a blue vapour, and entering the house found its way into a hole in the door-post. The farmer seized a peg and hammered it into the hole, so that it should not come out. After a time he drew out the peg, believing the danger was past, but out came the blue vapour once more. Every member of the unhappy household fell a victim to the pestilence.
In 348 B.C. pestilence[80] was again rife, and a _lectisternium_ was observed at the instance of the Sibylline books.
In 331 B.C. Rome was again in the grip of a devastating pestilence.[81] Numbers of the Senate had already perished, when a female slave came to the aediles and declared that the victims had died of poison. She would show them matrons actually engaged in compounding poisons, and a store laid up in readiness for use. Sure enough, drugs were found in the possession of two women of patrician rank, Cornelia and Sergia, and in spite of their protest that these were harmless, they were compelled to swallow them, and fell victims to their own nefarious devices. One hundred and seventy matrons were implicated in their guilt, and paid the penalty with their lives. Rome offered a human holocaust to the spirit of panic fear.