Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/193

Rh persons and things which also formed the basis of private law), that it might thus be able in due fashion to invoke the gods individually or by classes, and to point out (indigitare) to the multitude the modes of appropriate invocation. Of such notions, the products of outward abstraction, of the homeliest simplicity sometimes venerable sometimes ridiculous, Roman theology was in substance made up. Conceptions such as Sowing (Sæturnus) and Field-labour (Ops), Blossom (Flora), War (Bellona), Boundary (Terminus), Youth (Juventus), Health (Salus), Faithfulness (Fides), Harmony (Concordia), were among the oldest and most sacred of Roman divinities. Perhaps the most peculiar of all the forms of deity in Rome, and probably the only one for whose worship there was devised an effigy peculiarly Italian, was the double-headed Ianus; and yet it was simply suggestive of the idea so characteristic of the scrupulousness of the religious sentiment in Rome, that at the commencement of every act the "spirit of opening" should first be invoked, while it especially betokened the deep conviction that it was as indispensable to combine the Roman gods in sets as it was necessary that the more personal gods of the Hellenes should stand singly and apart. Of all the worships of Rome that which perhaps had the deepest hold was the worship of the tutelary spirits that presided in and over the household and the store-chamber: these were in public worship Vesta and the Penates, and in family worship the gods of forest and field the Silvani, and above all the gods of the household in its strict sense, the Lases or Lares, to whom their share of the family meal was regularly assigned, and before whom it was, even in the time of Cato the elder, the first duty of the father of the household on returning home to perform his devotions. In the ranking of the gods, however,