mself,
and perhaps these effects were all the stronger because of his valiant
struggle against it. Then too the state was already worshipping the gods
of his family, even Vesta Augusta, the goddess of his own hearth. He
had become in substance, even if not yet in name, the father of his
country. It had been an immemorial custom that the members of the
household should worship the Genius of the master of the house. In every
household in Rome that custom still existed. It was a very logical step,
and one therefore which a Roman could easily take, to carry out the
analogy of the family and to allow the whole state to worship the Genius
of the emperor, who was the head of the family of the state. The idea
therefore was not at all incongruous, nor was the way in which it was
carried out, though the latter was so ingenious as to deserve special
consideration.

In the old days when Rome was a farming community, the guardianship of
the gods over the fields was one of the most important elements in
religious life. The gods were above all the protectors of the boundary
lines, and thus it came to pass that where two roads crossed and thus
the corners of four farms came together the deities protecting these
farms were worshipped together as the Lares Compitales, the Lares of the
_compita_ or cross-roads. Curiously enough this worship was later
extended to the crossing of city streets, and as was natural it became
more highly organised in the city than it had been in the country.
Regular associations, _collegia_, were formed to look after the details
of the worship, headed by the _magistri vicorum_, who were however not
public officials but merely the elected heads of these colleges, men
mainly from the lower ranks of society. The contagion of civil and
political strife affected these colleges as well as their more
aristocratic parallels, higher up in the social scale, and turned them
into local political clubs. The part played by these clubs in the civil
struggles which occupied the last century of the republic was such that
the Senate in B.C. 64 was compelled to dissolve them, though they were
restored again six years later and existed until Caesar destroyed them
entirely. But now Augustus was creating a new organisation for the city,
dividing it into fourteen regions, each region containing a certain
number of subdivisions called _vici_. The old "colleges of the
cross-roads" afforded him just the sort of opportunity which he neve