Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/131

 ■CriAP. IX. MORALS OF THE ANCIENT FAMILY. 125 shoukl have their commencement and progress, and the god of th'i primitive generations in this race was very small ; by degrees men made hira larger ; so morals, very narrow and incomplete at first, became insensibly enlarged, nntil, from stage to stage, they reached the point of proclaiming the duty of love to- wards all mankind. The point of departure was the family, and it was under the influence of the domestic religion that duties first appeared to the eyes of man. Let us picture to ourselves this religion of the fire and of the tomb in its flourishing period. Man sees a divinity near him. It is present, like conscience it- self, to his minutest actions. This fragile being finds himself under the eye of a witness who never leaves him. He never feels himself alone. At his side in the house, in the field, he has protectors to sustain him in the toils of life, and judges to punish his guilty ac- tions. " The Lares," said the Romans, " are formida- ble divinities, whose duty it is to punish mankind, and to watch over all that passes in the interior of the house." The Penates they also describe as " gods who enable us to live ; they nourish our bodies and regulate our minds." ' Men loved to apply to the holy fire the epithet of chaste, and they believed that it enjoined chastity upon mortals. No act materially or morally impure could bo committed in its presence. The fiist ideas of wrong, of chastisement, of expia- tion, seem to have come fiom this. The man who fielt guilty no longer dared to approach liis own hearth ; his god repelled him. He who had shed blood was xo longer allowed to sacrifice, or to oflfer libations, or • Plutarch, Bom. Quest., 61. Macrobius, Sat., III. 4.