Greek polytheistic period is the
broadest and finest that the ancient polytheism produced. It recognized
a divine element in all sides of human life, from the lowest to the
highest; it marked out the various directions of human feeling and
effort, and in its final outcome it reached the conception of a unity in
the divine government of the world, and gave expression to man's best
aspirations for the present and for the future. True, it gave way at
last to philosophy; but it had recognized those elements of thought on
which philosophy was based. The Persian and Hebrew systems expressed
more definitely the idea of a divine monocracy, and lent themselves
easily to the formation of a religious society, a church, but they did
not escape the limitations of mere national feeling. The Greeks founded
no church--they formulated universal ethical and religious conceptions,
and left the development to the individual. All the great ancient
religions reached a high ethical plane and a practical monotheism, but
the Greek was the richest of all in the recognition of the needs of
humanity.

+796+. _Rome._ The Roman pantheon (if the Italian divine community can
properly be called a pantheon) had not the fullness and fineness of the
Greek--in accordance with the Roman genius it included only deities
having special relations with the family and its work and with the
state.[1370] The rich Roman development of specific gods of the home is
referred to above.[1371] The old nature gods long retained their place,
doubtless, in popular worship, but were gradually subordinated to and
absorbed in the larger divine figures. And the great gods themselves
began at an early time to be assimilated to Greek deities and to assume
their functions and even their names.[1372]

+797+. The most important of the nature gods are Sol, Luna, and Tellus
(primitive figures that soon gave way to deities divorced from the
physical sun, moon, and earth), and the patrons of agricultural work,
Consus and Ops, Liber and Libera, Silvanus and Faunus. The natural
features represented by these deities did not disappear entirely from
the greater deities, but were purified and elevated. Anna Perenna, for
example, as representative of the round of years, remained by the side
of Janus, but he embodied this conception in a larger civic way.

+798+. The greatest of the Roman gods, Juppiter[1373] or Jupiter, is
identical in name with Zeus, but differs from him in mythological
dev