by ridiculing the
gods--nothing could be easier than to take advantage of what looked like
married life to invent comic passages to please a Roman audience, now
consisting largely of semi-educated men who had lost faith in their own
religion, and of a crowd of smaller people of mixed descent and
nationality. Such passages, in fact, cannot safely be used as evidence
of religious ideas, apart from the tendencies of the age in which they
were written. Had there really been religious beliefs, rooted in the old
Roman mind, about the wedded life of gods and goddesses, it would even
then have been dangerous to use them mockingly in comedy. And once more,
had there been such genuinely Roman ideas, why, in an age that made for
anthropomorphism, did they not find their way into the Roman
Pantheon,--why did they survive only in literary allusions, to the
bewilderment of scholars like Aulus Gellius?

The real explanation of these curious conjunctions of masculine and
feminine names is, I think, not very hard to come by. Let us remember,
in the first place, that they were found in the books of the priests,
and that they belonged to forms of prayer--_comprecationes deorum
immortalium_; in other words, they do not represent popular ideas of the
deities, but ritualistic forms of invocation. As such they may indeed no
doubt be regarded as expressing, or as growing out of, a popular way of
thinking of the Power manifesting itself in the universe; but they are
themselves none the less, like those strange lists of divine names
called _Indigitamenta_, with which I shall deal directly, the creations
of an active professional priesthood, working upon the principle that
every deity must be addressed in precisely the correct way and no other,
and accounting the name of the deity, as indicating his or her exact
function, the most vitally important thing in the whole invocation. I
have already pointed out how difficult the early Latin must have found
it to discover how to address the _numina_ at work around him, and I
shall return to the subject in another lecture; at present all I want to
insist upon is that the priests of the City-state relieved him of this
anxiety, and indeed must have carried the work so far as to develop a
kind of science of divine nomenclature. Every one who has studied the
history of religions knows well how strong the tendency is, when once
invocation has become ritualised, for the names and titles of the
objects of worsh