e
should be called; "quis deus incertum est"[242] can no longer be said of
him. Once provided with a flamen and an ordered cult of sacrifice and
prayer, I conceive that he had now in him the possibility of turning
into a _deus_ personally conceived, if he came by the chance.[243] A few
did get the chance; others did not; Volcanus, for example, became a god
after the model of the Greek Hephaestus, while Volturnus remained a
numen and made no further progress, though he was doubtless ready to
"take" the Graecising epidemic when it came. I do not say that he or any
other numen was the better for the change. But I must not now pursue the
story of this strange double fate of the old Roman deities; I have
perhaps said enough to show that city life, with its priesthoods and its
ordered ritual, had some appreciable effect on the deities who were
admitted to it.

Among these deities there were four of whom I have as yet said nothing
at all, though they are the most famous of all the divine inhabitants of
Rome. I have mentioned nine flamines; there were in all twelve, and
besides these there was in historical times a priest known as the _rex
sacrorum_, the republican successor to some of the religious functions
of the civil king. This rex, and the three _flamines maiores_, so called
in contra-distinction to the other nine, were specially attached to the
cults of Janus, Jupiter (_Flamen Dialis_), Mars (_Flamen Martialis_),
and Quirinus (_Flamen Quirinalis_). I have kept these deities apart from
the others already mentioned, not only because their priests stand apart
from the rest, but because they themselves seem from the first to have
been more really gods (_dei_); Quirinus is the only one who has an
adjectival name. Two of them, Jupiter and Mars, remained throughout
Roman history of real importance to the State, and in Jupiter there were
at least some germs of possible development into a deity capable of
influencing conduct and enforcing morality. Of Janus this cannot
possibly be said; and as he is historically the least important of the
four, I will begin by saying a few words about him as a puzzle and a
curiosity only.

Janus, ever since he ceased to be an intelligible deity, has been the
sport of speculators; and this happened long before the Roman religion
came to an end. In the last century B.C. philosophic writers about the
gods got hold of him, and Varro tells us that some made him out to be
the heaven, others the unive