Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/48

28 or not understood at all. It could not be otherwise; for, as in the character of the two nations the great contrasts, which during the Græco-Italian period had lain side by side undeveloped, were after their division distinctly evolved, so also in their religion a separation took place between the idea and the image, which had hitherto been one whole in the soul. Those old tillers of the ground, when the clouds were driving along the sky, probably expressed to themselves the phenomenon by saying that the hound of the gods was driving together the startled cows of the herd. The Greek forgot that the cows were really the clouds, and converted the son of the hound of. the gods—a form devised merely for the particular purposes of that conception—into the adroit messenger of the gods, ready for every service. When the thunder rolled among the mountains, he saw Zeus brandishing his bolts on Olympus; when the blue sky again smiled upon him, he gazed into the bright eye of Athenæa, the daughter of Zeus; but so powerful over him was the influence of the forms which he had thus created, that he soon saw nothing in them but human beings invested and illumined with the splendour of nature's power, and freely formed and transformed them according to the laws of beauty. It was in another fashion, but not less strongly, that the deeply implanted religious feeling of the Italian race manifested itself; it held firmly by the idea, and did not suffer the form to obscure it. As the Greek, when he sacrificed, raised his eyes to heaven, so the Roman veiled his head; for the prayer of the former was vision, that of the latter reflection. Throughout the whole of nature he adored the spiritual and the universal. To everything existing, to man and to the tree, to the state and to the storeroom, a spirit was assigned, which came into being with it, and perished along with it, the counterpart in the spiritual domain of the physical phenomenon; to the man the male Genius, to the woman the female Juno, to the boundary Terminus, to the forest Silvanus, to the circling year Vertumnus, and so on to every object after its kind. In occupations even the steps of the process were spiritualized: thus, for example, in the prayers for the husbandman there was invoked the spirit of fallowing, of ploughing, of furrowing, sowing, covering-in, harrowing, and so on to those of in-bringing, up-storing, and opening of the granaries. In like manner, marriage, birth, and every other physical event,