ss from these ancient ideas
will be found in the thirty-ninth chapter of his _Origin and Development
of Moral Ideas_.

Coming next to the act of sacrifice itself, it is needless to say that
the victim must be as exactly fitted to please the deity--if that be the
right way to express the obligation--as the priest who sacrificed it. It
must be of the right kind, sex, age, colour; it must go willingly to the
slaughter, adorned with fillets and ribbons (_infulae_, _vittae_), in
order to mark it off from other animals as holy; in the case of oxen, we
hear also of the gilding of the horns, but this must have been costly
and unusual.[371] All these details were doubtless laid down in the _ius
divinum_, and in later times, when the deities dwelt in roofed temples,
they were embodied in the _lex_ or charter of each temple.[372] I do not
need to go into them here minutely; for my present purpose, the
elucidation of the meaning which the Romans attached to sacrificial
worship, it will be sufficient to point out that all victims, so far as
we know, were domestic animals, and in almost all cases they were
valuable property (_pecunia_), such as belonged to the stock of the
Latin farmer, ox, sheep, pig, varying according to age and sex. Goats
were used at the Lupercalia, and a horse was sacrificed to Mars, as we
have seen, on October 15, and at the Robigalia in April a red dog was
offered to the spirit of the mildew. But though time forbids me to
explain all these rules, a careful study of the evidence for them is
most useful for any one who wishes to understand the influence of the
_ius divinum_ on the mind of the early Roman. In the family what rules
were needed were matter of tradition; deities were few, and offerings
limited. But in the city-state it was very different; here even the _di
indigetes_ were many, with diverse wishes and likings as well as
functions: how were these to be ascertained and remembered at the right
moment? Here, as in all methods of securing the _pax deorum_, a central
supervising authority was needed, in whose knowledge and wisdom the
whole community had confidence; and he was found in the rex, as is
clearly shown in the whole traditional account of the priest-king Numa.
Very naturally tradition also ascribed to Numa the institution of the
pontifices, whom the historical Romans knew as succeeding the rex in the
supervision of religious law.[373]

If all went well, the victim going willingly and no ill ome