large number of minutely
specialized deities of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. As
among some lower tribes already referred to, so here many common objects
and pursuits are regarded as being under the fostering care of specific
deities. In Egypt the ripe ear of the grain, the birth of a child and
its naming, and other things had their special divinities.[1123]

+667+. The Greeks had such divine patrons of the corncrib, beans,
plowshare, cattle, city walls, banquets, potters, physicians, athletic
contests, and even one hero known as the "frightener of horses" and a
deity called the "flycatcher."[1124]

+668+. The Romans carried out this specialization in even greater
detail. Almost every object and every event of the communal life had its
patron deity: the house, the hearth, the field, the boundary stone,
sowing and reaping, the wall, breath, marriage, education, death; the
Lares were the special protectors of the house or of the field, and all
patrons of the home were summed up under the general designations _dii
penates_ and _dii familiares_. Most of these beings have proper names,
but even where there are no such names, as in the case of the _dii
penates_, there can be little doubt that they were looked on as personal
individualized beings.[1125] The tendency was, as time went on, to add
to the number of these specialized patrons, as appears from the Roman
_indigitamenta_[1126] lists of such divine beings redacted by the
priests, who were disposed, naturally, to make the objects of worship as
numerous as possible; but herein they doubtless responded to a popular
impulse.

+669+. This disposition to define practical functions minutely appears
also in the cultic history of the greater gods of the old Roman
religion: the role of Jupiter as god of sky and rain was definitely
fixed, and Tellus was not the divine mother of the human race but the
beneficent bestower of crops. As the functions of such greater gods
became more numerous and more definitely fixed, epithets were employed;
Jupiter had a dozen or more of such adjectival additions, and it appears
that at a later time such epithets were personalized into deities; but
this academic or priestly procedure does not set aside the fact that the
early Roman religion recognized a vast number of divine beings as the
specific patrons of certain things and acts.

+670+. It was quite natural for the practical Roman mind to place
everything of importance under the