Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/191



Roman world of gods, as we hare already indicated (P. 28), was a higher counterpart, an ideal reflection, of the earthly Rome, in which the little and the great were alike reproduced with painstaking exactness. The state and the clan, the individual phenomena of nature as well as the individual operations of mind, every man, every place and object, every act even falling within the sphere of Roman law, reappeared in the Roman world of gods; and, as earthly things come and go in perpetual flux, the circle of the gods underwent a corresponding fluctuation. The tutelary spirit, which presided over the individual act, lasted no longer than that act itself: the tutelary spirit of the individual man lived and died with the man; and eternal duration belonged to divinities of this sort only in so far as similar acts and similarly constituted men and therefore spirits of a similar kind ever coming into existence afresh. As the Roman gods ruled over the Roman community, so every foreign community was presided over by its own gods; but strict as was the distinction between the burgess and non-burgess, between the Roman and the foreign god, both foreign men and foreign divinities might be admitted by resolution of the community to the freedom of Rome, and when the citizens of a conquered city were transported to Rome, the gods of that were also invited to take up their new abode there.

It is no part of our present task to consider the Roman deities in detail; but it is important, even in an historical point of view, to call attention to the peculiar narrowness of conception and at the same time the deeply rooted earnestness that marked the Roman faith. Abstraction and per-