med at summing up all that was then
known about the deities of both peoples; this is not even yet completed,
and many of the earlier articles seem now almost antiquated, as
propounding theories which have not met with general acceptance. All
these earlier articles are now being superseded by those in the new
edition of Pauly's _Real-Encyclopaedie_, edited by Wissowa. Lastly,
Wissowa himself in 1902 published a large volume entitled _Die Religion
und Kultus der Roemer_, which will probably be for many years the best
and safest guide for all students of our subject. Thoroughly trained in
the methods of dealing with evidence both literary and archaeological,
Wissowa produced a work which, though it has certain limitations, has
the great merit of not being likely to lead anyone astray. More
skilfully and successfully than any of his predecessors, he avoided the
chief danger and difficulty that beset all who meddle with Roman
religious antiquities, and invariably lead the unwary to their
destruction; he declined to accept as evidence what in nine cases out of
ten is no true evidence at all--the statements of ancient authors
influenced by Greek ideas and Greek fancy. He holds in the main to the
principle laid down by Marquardt, that we may use, as evidence for their
religious ideas, what we are told that the Romans _did_ in practising
their worship, but must regard with suspicion, and subject to severe
criticism, what either they themselves or the Greeks wrote about those
religious ideas--that is, about divine beings and their doings.

It is indeed true that the one great difficulty of our subject lies in
the nature of the evidence; and it is one which we can never hope
entirely to overcome. We have always to bear in mind that the Romans
produced no literature till the third century B.C.; and the documentary
evidence that survives from an earlier age in the form of inscriptions,
or fragments of hymns or of ancient law (such as the calendar of which I
spoke just now), is of the most meagre character, and usually most
difficult to interpret. Thus the Roman religion stands alone among the
religions of ancient civilisations in that we are almost entirely
without surviving texts of its forms of prayer, of its hymns or its
legends;[11] even in Greece the Homeric poems, with all the earliest
Greek literature and art, make up to some extent for the want of that
documentary evidence which throws a flood of light on the religions of
Ba