the Roman's relations with the divine inhabitants of his city. A certain
number of deities have taken up their abode within the walls of the
city, and are as much its inhabitants, its citizens, as the human beings
who live there; and all the relations between the divine and human
citizens are regulated now by law, by a _ius divinum_, of which the
calendar is a very important part. _Religio_, the old feeling of doubt
and scruple, arising from want of knowledge in the individual, is still
there; it is, in fact, the feeling which has given rise to all this
organisation and routine, the _cura_ and _caerimonia_, as Cicero phrases
it. But it must be already losing its strength, its life; it was, so to
speak, a constitutional weakness, and the _ius divinum_ is already
beginning to act on it as a tonic. Doubt has passed into fixed usage,
tradition has given place to organisation. Time, place, procedure in all
religious matters, are guaranteed by those skilled in the _ius divinum_;
they know what to do as the festival of each deity comes round, and at
the right time and place they do it with scrupulous attention to every
detail. Thus the organisation of which the calendar is our best example
would have as its first result the destruction of fear and doubt in the
mind of the ordinary Roman; it would tend to kill, or at least to put to
sleep, the _religio_ which was the original motive cause of this very
organisation. As the State in our own day has a tendency to relieve
families of such duties as the care and education of children, so the
State at Rome relieved the family of constant anxiety about matters in
which they were ever in danger from the spirit-world. The State and its
authorities have taken the whole responsibility of adjusting the
relations of the human and divine citizens.[207]

Entirely in keeping with this psychological result of the calendar is
the fact, to which I have already alluded, that it supplies us with
hardly any evidence of the existence of magic, or of those "beastly
devices of the heathen" which may roughly be included under that word;
to use the language of Mr. Lang, we find none of those "distressing
vestiges of savagery and barbarism which meet us in the society of
ancient Greece." It is true enough that we do not know much about what
was done at the various festivals of the calendar, but what we do know,
with one or two exceptions, suggests an idea of worship as clean and
rational as that of the Hom