The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Religious Experience of the Roman People, by
W. Warde Fowler

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Title: The Religious Experience of the Roman People
From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus

Author: W. Warde Fowler

Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23349]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
OF THE
ROMAN PEOPLE

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE
AGE OF AUGUSTUS

THE GIFFORD LECTURES FOR 1909-10
DELIVERED IN EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY

BY

W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A.

FELLOW AND LATE SUB-RECTOR OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD
HON. D.LITT. UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AUTHOR OF 'THE ROMAN FESTIVALS OF THE PERIOD OF THE REPUBLIC,' ETC.

"Sanctos ausus recludere fontes"

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1911

TO
PROFESSOR W.R. HARDIE
AND
MY MANY OTHER KIND FRIENDS AND FRIENDLY HEARERS
IN EDINBURGH

PREFACE

Lord Gifford in founding his lectureship directed that the lectures
should be public and popular, _i.e._ not restricted to members of a
University. Accordingly in lecturing I endeavoured to make myself
intelligible to a general audience by avoiding much technical discussion
and controversial matter, and by keeping to the plan of describing in
outline the development and decay of the religion of the Roman
City-state. And on the whole I have thought it better to keep to this
principle in publishing the lectures; they are printed for the most part
much as they were delivered, and without footnotes, but at the end of
each lecture students of the subject will find the notes referred to by
the numbers in the text, containing such further information or
discussion as has seemed desirable. My model in this method has been the
admirable lectures of Prof. Cumont on "les Religions Orientales dans le
Paganisme Romain."

I wish to make two remarks about the subject-matter of the lectures.
First, the idea running through them is that the primitive religious (or
magico-rel