RED UTENSILS 489

INDEX 491

LECTURE I

INTRODUCTORY

I was invited to prepare these lectures, on Lord Gifford's foundation,
as one who has made a special study of the religious ideas and practice
of the Roman people. So far as I know, the subject has not been touched
upon as yet by any Gifford lecturer. We are in these days interested in
every form of religion, from the most rudimentary to the most highly
developed; from the ideas of the aborigines of Australia, which have now
become the common property of anthropologists, to the ethical and
spiritual religions of civilised man. Yet it is remarkable how few
students of the history of religion, apart from one or two specialists,
have been able to find anything instructive in the religion of the
Romans--of the Romans, I mean, as distinguished from that vast
collection of races and nationalities which eventually came to be called
by the name of Rome. At the Congress for the History of Religions held
at Oxford in 1908, out of scores of papers read and offered, not more
than one or two even touched on the early religious ideas of the most
practical and powerful people that the world has ever known.

This is due, in part at least, to the fact that just when Roman history
begins to be of absorbing interest, and fairly well substantiated by
evidence, the Roman religion, as religion, has already begun to lose its
vitality, its purity, its efficacy. It has become overlaid with foreign
rites and ideas, and it has also become a religious monopoly of the
State; of which the essential characteristic, as Mommsen has well put
it, and as we shall see later on, was "the conscious retention of the
principles of the popular belief, which were recognised as irrational,
for reasons of outward convenience."[1] It was not unlike the religion
of the Jews in the period immediately before the Captivity, and it was
never to profit by the refining and chastening influence of such lengthy
suffering. In this later condition it has not been attractive to
students of religious history; and to penetrate farther back into the
real religious ideas of the genuine Roman people is a task very far from
easy, of which indeed the difficulties only seem to increase as we
become more familiar with it.

It must be remarked, too, that as a consequence of this
unattractiveness, the accounts given in standard