system is no longer
equal to the work demanded of it, and pitiably mistaking their true
course in seeking a remedy. Their knowledge of the Divine, always narrow
and limited, becomes by degrees blurred and obscured, and their sight
begins to fail them. I hope in due course to explain this, and to give
you some idea of the sadness of their religious experience before the
advent of an age of philosophy, of theological syncretism, and of the
worship of the rulers of the state.

Let us now turn for a few minutes to the special difficulties of our
subject. These are serious enough; but they have been wonderfully and
happily reduced since I began to be interested in the Roman religion
some twenty-five years ago. There were then only two really valuable
books which dealt with the whole subject. Though I could avail myself of
many treatises, good and bad, on particular aspects of it, some few of
which still survive, the only two comprehensive and illuminating books
were Preller's _Roemische Mythologie_, and Marquardt's volume on the cult
in his _Staatsverwaltung_. Both of these were then already many years
old, but they had just been re-edited by two eminent scholars
thoroughly well equipped for the task--Preller's work by H. Jordan, and
Marquardt's by Georg Wissowa. They were written from different points of
view; Preller dealt with the deities and the ideas about them rather
than with the cults and the priests concerned with them; while Marquardt
treated the subject as a part of the administration of government,
dealing with the worship and the _ius divinum_, and claiming that this
was the only safe and true way of arriving at the ideas underlying that
law and worship.[10] Both books are still indispensable for the student;
but Marquardt's is the safer guide, as dealing with facts to the
exclusion of fancies. The two taken together had collected and sifted
the evidence so far as it was then available.

The _Corpus Inscriptionum_ had not at that time got very far, but its
first volume, edited by Mommsen, contained the ancient Fasti, which
supply us with the religious calendar of early Rome, and with other
matter throwing light upon it. This first volume was an invaluable help,
and formed the basis (in a second edition) of the book I was eventually
able to write on the _Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic_. At
that time, too, in the 'eighties, Roscher's _Lexicon of Greek and Roman
Mythology_ began to appear, which ai