Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/27

I admiring curiosity with which Hellenes of a later age — a Polybius or a Posidonius — could study the manners and institutions of the Romans.

In their religious ideas, too, or at least in the religious practices on which our knowledge of those ideas is chiefly based, there is a close resemblance between the two races. It was easy to identify Greek and Italian deities, when anything was to be gained by doing so; it was by an easy though a gradual process that Roman ritual was so far superseded by Greek, that it is now a hard task to excavate the genuine Italian practice by removing the foreign strata beneath which it lies buried. It is indeed true enough that most races have been much readier than we should at first suppose to adopt the religious customs of their neighbours, or even of peoples far removed from them in kinship or geographical position. But there is hardly a case to be found in which this adoption is so complete as it was at Rome. The Romans believed the Greek forms to have superior efficacy, and they took them over, except on rare occasions, without misgiving. They found nothing in them essentially antagonistic to their own notions of their relations to the gods. In spite of much diversity there was a basis both of conception and practice which was common to both peoples. There were at least two special points of agreement: each believed in certain great deities whom they associated with their history and their fortunes; and each looked on these deities as localised in their cities, as belonging to none but