Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/171

 CBAP. II. NEW KELIGIOUS BELIEFS. iCv to the prosperity of this fiimily, that a wliole city wished to adopt hitn, and offer him public worship, to obtain his favors. This was the case with the Demeter of the Eumolpidae, the Athene of the Butadje, and the Hercu- les of the Poti/ii. But when a family consented thus to share its god, it retained at least the priesthood. We may remark that the dignity of priest, for each god, was during a long time hereditary, and could not go out of a certain family.' Tiiis is a vestige of a time when the god himself was the property of this family; when he protected it alone, and would be served only by it. We are correct, therefore, in saying that this second religion was at first in unison with the social condition of men. It was cradled in each fiimily, and remained long bounded by this narrow hori;5on. But it lent it- self more easily than the worship of the dead to the future progress of human association. Indeed, the an- cestors, heroes, and manes were gods, who by their very nature could be adored only by a very small num- ber of men, and who thus established a perpetual and impassable line of demarcation between families. The religion of the gods of nature was more comprehensive. No rigorous laws opposed the propagation of the wor- ship of any of these gods. There was nothing in their nature that required them to be adored by one family only, and to repel the stranger. Finally, men must have come insensibly to perceive that the Jupiter of one > Herodotus, V. G4, Co; IX. 27. Pindar, Isthm.,Yll. 18. Xenophon, Hell., VI. 8. Plato, Laws, p. 7o9 ; Banquet, p. 40. Cicero, De Divin., I. 41. Tacitus, Ann. II. 54. Plutarch, The- seus, 23. Strabo, IX. 421 ; XIV. Col. Callimaclius, Ilijmn to Apollo, 8i. Pausanias, 1.37; VI. 17; X. 1. Apollodorus, 11/ ?. Harpocration, v. EvuS'ai. Boeckli, Corp, Inscript., 134^.