Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/202

182 ments; and as the number of the gods was as great as the number of the contingencies in earthly life, and the neglect or wrongous performance of the worship of each god revenged itself in the corresponding occurrence, it was a laborious and difficult task to gain even a knowledge of one's religious obligations, and the priests who were skilled in the law of divine things and pointed out its requirements—the pontifices—could not fail to attain an extraordinary influence. The upright man fulfilled the requirements of sacred ritual with the same mercantile punctuality with which he met his earthly obligations, and, it might be, did more than was due, if the god had done so on his part. Man even dealt in speculation with his god; a vow was in reality as in name a formal contract between the god and the man, by which the latter promised to the former for a certain service to be rendered a certain equivalent return; and the Roman legal principle that no contract could be concluded by deputy was not the least important of the reasons on account of which all priestly mediation was excluded from the religious concerns of man in Latium. Indeed, as the Roman merchant was entitled, without injury to his conventional reputation for integrity, to fulfil his contract merely in the letter, so in dealing with the gods, according to the teaching of Roman theology, the copy of an object was given and received instead of the object itself. They presented to the lord of the sky heads of onions and poppies, that he might launch his lightnings at these rather than at the heads of men. In payment of the offering annually demanded by father Tiber, thirty puppets plaited of rushes were annually thrown into the stream. The ideas of divine mercy and placability were in these instances inseparably mixed up with a pious fraudulence, which tried to delude and to pacify so formidable a master by means of a sham satisfaction. The Roman fear of the gods accordingly exercised powerful influence over the minds of the multitude; but it was by no means that sense of awe in the presence of an all-controlling nature or of an almighty God, that lies at the foundation of the views of pantheism and monotheism respectively; on the contrary, it was of a very earthly character, and scarcely different in any material respect from the trembling with which the Roman debtor approached his just, but very strict and very power-