Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/194

174 these spirits of the house and of the field occupied the lowest rather than the highest place; it was (and it could not be otherwise with a religion which renounced all attempts to idealize) not in the broadest and most general, but in the simplest and most individual abstraction, that the pious heart found most nourishment.

This indifference to ideal elements in the Roman religion was accompanied by a practical and utilitarian tendency. The divinity who next to the gods of the house and the forest was held in most general reverence, not merely among the Latins, but also among the Sabellian stocks, was Herculus or Hercules, the god of the enclosed homestead (from hercere), and thence in general the god of property and of gain. Nothing was more common in Roman life than for a man to make a vow to present to this god the tenth part of his property at the "chief altar" (ara maxima) in the cattle-market for the averting of threatened losses or the securing of desired gains. At this same altar it was customary to conclude contracts and to confirm them by oath; on which account Hercules himself came early to be identified with the god of good faith (Deus Fidius). It was no mere result of accident that this tutelary god of speculation was, to employ the language of an ancient author, reverenced in every spot of Italy, and had altars erected to him everywhere in the streets of the towns as well as by the roadsides; and just as little the result of accident was the similarly early and widely diffused worship of the goddess of chance and good luck (Fors Fortuna), and of the god of traffic (Mercurius). Strict frugality and mercantile speculation were rooted in the Roman character too deeply not to find their thorough reflection in its divine counterpart.

Respecting the world of spirits little can be said. The departed souls of mortal men, the "good" (manes) continued to exist as shades haunting the spot where the body reposed, and received meat and drink from the survivors. But they dwelt in the depths beneath, and there was no bridge that led from the lower world either to men ruling on earth or upward to the gods above. The hero-worship of the Greeks was wholly foreign to the Romans, and the late origin and poor invention of the legend as to the foundation of Rome are shown by the thoroughly unRoman transformation of king Romulus into the god Quirinus. Numa, the oldest and most venerable name in Roman tradition, never