 Cotta has put his finger on something important about the role of authority in religion. If one calls the authority of tradition into question, then one risks having no religion left. And if one of the purposes of religion is, from a practical point of view – both in the Roman context and surely more widely – the promotion of a sense of social cohesion and communal identity, then to challenge tradition is to threaten those objectives. So Cotta’s remarks on authority are not an evasion of Balbus’ closing challenge, but an acknowledgement of what it means to have a religious commitment in the first place. Cotta’s position here has plausibly been seen (Wynne 2019, 167) as an inspiration for fideism, the view that faith or tradition is a justificatory source of religious belief independent of reason.