Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/208

188 genius of the farm-yard, Herculus or Hercules (from hercere to enclose, P. 174), was identified with the totally different Hellenic Herakles. In like manner it may be rather the result of ancient borrowing than of an original community of religious ideas, that the Roman as well as the Greek called the God of wine by the name of the care-dispelling "deliverer" (Lyæos, Liber Pater), and the divinity of the bosom of the earth the "dispenser of riches" (Pluto—Dis Pater), and that the spouse of the latter, Persephone, became converted at once by change of the initial sound and by transference of the idea into the Roman Proserpina, that is, "germinatrix." Even the goddess of the Romano-Latin league, Diana of the Aventine, seems to have been copied from the federal goddess of the Ionians of Asia Minor, the Ephesian Artemis; at least her carved image in the Roman temple was formed after the Ephesian type (P. 119). It was in this way alone, through the myths of Apollo, Dionysus, Pluto, Herakles, and Artemis, which were early pervaded by Oriental ideas, that the Aramaic religion exercised, at this period a remote and indirect influence on Italy.

These individual cases however of derivation from abroad were of little moment, and equally unimportant and verging on extinction were the remains of the natural symbolism of primeval times, of which the legend of the oxen of Caeus may perhaps be a specimen (P. 19). In all its leading features the Roman religion was an organic creation of the people among whom we find it.

The Sabellian and Umbrian worship, judging from the little we know of it, rested upon quite the same fundamental views as the Latin with local variations of colour and form. That it was different from the Latin is very distinctly apparent from the establishment of a special college at Rome for the preservation of the Sabine rites (P. 46); but that very fact affords an instructive illustration of the nature of the difference. Observation of the flight of birds was with both stocks the regular mode of consulting the gods; but the Titles observed different birds from the Ramnian augurs. Similar relations present themselves, wherever we have opportunity of comparing them. Both stocks in common regarded the gods as abstractions of the earthly and as of an impersonal nature; they differed in expression and ritual. It was natural that these diversities should appear of importance to the worshippers of those days; we are no longer able