Roman religious response to disaster ran in a distinctive direction: rather than treating a military defeat or a plague as evidence the gods had simply abandoned Rome, the state apparatus, chiefly the pontiffs and the Senate acting on the advice of priestly colleges, treated it as a diagnostic clue that some specific ritual obligation had been performed incorrectly, and set about identifying which one.
The historian Livy records numerous episodes in which a defeat, an unusual birth, an animal behaving strangely, or other prodigies were formally reported, investigated by priests and answered with prescribed expiatory rites, precisely the pattern the namburbi rituals of Mesopotamia addressed independently in a wholly different religious system, both traditions sharing the underlying premise that misfortune signals a correctable religious fault rather than an arbitrary divine mood. This diagnostic orientation gave Roman state religion an almost administrative character: correct performance of established rites, not personal devotion or emotional sincerity, was what maintained the pax deorum, and a ritual carried out with a technical error, a wrong word, an interrupted gesture, had to be repeated from the beginning regardless of how sincerely it had been intended.