The best documented lectisternium comes from one of Rome's darkest military moments. After Hannibal destroyed a Roman army at Lake Trasimene in 217 BCE during the Second Punic War, Livy records that the Senate, confronting a crisis of both morale and religious confidence, ordered a lectisternium for an expanded set of twelve gods, paired into six couples: Jupiter and Juno, Neptune and Minerva, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Diana, Vulcan and Vesta, Mercury and Ceres, effectively presenting a formal roster of Rome's principal state gods together at one collective banquet rather than honouring only a select few as in 399 BCE. The ceremony lasted several days and was paired with other emergency religious measures, including vows and additional sacrifices, as Rome worked through the aftermath of the defeat and prepared, ultimately unsuccessfully in the short term, for the even greater disaster at Cannae the following year.
This episode shows the lectisternium functioning as part of a broader Roman religious toolkit for managing collective anxiety during genuine state emergencies, distinct from routine annual festivals, deployed specifically when ordinary sacrifice was judged insufficient to the scale of the crisis. Its recurrence across the Republic's history at moments of plague, famine and military catastrophe indicates that Romans understood the rite as a recognised, if exceptional, category of religious response rather than a one-time invention, closely tied to consultation of the Sibylline Books that authorised each occurrence.