this practice a germ of moral development; I am surprised that Dr.
Westermarck has not mentioned in his chapter on gratitude the
extraordinary abundance of Roman votive offerings and inscriptions.
Doubtless there lies at the root of it the idea of _Do ut des_, or
rather of _Dabo ut des_; doubtless also it could be turned to evil
purposes in the form of _devotio_, when promises were made to a deity on
condition that he killed or injured an enemy; but in the ordinary and
common example it is impossible to deny that the final act, the
performance of the vow, must have been accompanied by a feeling of
gratitude. The merest recognition of a supposed blessing is of value in
moral development.

But it is in the _vota publica_ that we undoubtedly find something in
the nature of a bargain--covenant would be a more graceful word--with a
deity in the name of the State. Even here, however, the impression is
rather produced by the use of legal terms and the formularisation of the
process, than by any assumed attitude of contempt towards, or even of
equality with, the deity concerned. There is no trace in early Roman
religious history of any tendency to abuse or degrade the divine beings
if they did not perform their part, such as is well known in China,[411]
or even, strange to say, occasionally met with in the southern Italy of
to-day; the attitude towards the deity in cult (though not invariably in
the later Graeco-Roman literature) was ever respectful, as it was
towards the magistrates of the State. The farthest the Romans ever went
in condemning their gods was when misfortune persuaded them that they
were become indifferent or useless; then they began to neglect them, and
to turn to other gods, as we shall see in subsequent lectures.

The public _vota_ were of two kinds: the ordinary, or regularly
recurring, and the extraordinary, which were occasioned by some
particular event. Of the ordinary, the most familiar is that undertaken
by the consul, and no doubt in some form by the Rex in the days of the
kingship, for the benefit of the State on the first day of the official
year. Accompanied by the Senate and a crowd of people, the consuls went
up to the Capitoline temple, and performed the sacrifice which had been
vowed by their predecessors of a year before; after which they undertook
a new _votum_, "_pro reipublicae salute_."[412] We have not the formula
of this vow, and cannot tell what resemblance it bore to a bargain; but