Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/169

 CHAP. II NEW RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. 163 there Avas but one god. They counted thousands of different Jupiters ; they had a multitude of Minervas, Dianas, and Junos, who resembled each other very lit- tle. Each of these conceptions was formed by the free operation of earh mind, and being in some sort its property, it happened that these gods were for a long time independent of each other, and that each one of them had his particular legend and his worship.' As the first ai)pearanco of these beliefs was at a time when men still lived under family government, these new gods had at first, like the demons, the heroes, and the Lares, the character of domestic divinities. Each family made gods for itself, and each kept them for itself, as protectors, Avhose good offices it did not wish to share with strangers. This thought appears fre- quently in the hymns of the Vedas ; and there is no doubt that it was the same in the minds of the Aryas of the West; for there are visible traces of it in their religion. As soon as a family, by personifying a phys- ical agent, had created a god, it associated him with its sacred fire, counted him among its Penates, and added a few words for him in its formula of prayer. This ex- plains why we often meet among the ancients with expressions like this : The gods who sit near my hearth ; the Jupiter of my hearth ; the Apollo of my fathers.' "I conjure you," said Tecraessa to Ajax, "in the name seidon Hippius, Poseidon Phytalmius, the Ereclithean Poseidon, the ^gean Poseidon, the Heliconian Poseidon, were different gods, who had neither the same attributes nor the same worship- pers. ba, 345; JUedea, 395. Sophocles, Ajax, 492. Virgil, VIII. 543. Herodotus, I. 44.
 * The same name often conceals very different divinities. Po-
 * 'Eanovjroi, hpioTiot, naxQwoi. 'O ifi'og Zevg, Eurip., Hecu-