tific interest in their own religious
antiquities; and to Varro, by far the most learned of these, and to
Verrius Flaccus, who succeeded him in the Augustan age, we owe directly
or indirectly almost all the solid facts on which our knowledge of the
Roman worship rests. But their works have come down to us in a most
imperfect and fragmentary state, and what we have of them we owe mainly
to the erudition of later grammarians and commentators, and the learning
of the early Christian fathers, who drew upon them freely for
illustrations of the absurdities of paganism. And it must be added that
when Varro himself deals with the Roman gods and the old ideas about
them, he is by no means free from the inevitable influence of Greek
thought.

Apart from the literary material and the few surviving fragments of
religious law and ritual, there are two other sources of light of which
we can now avail ourselves, archaeology and anthropology; but it must be
confessed that as yet their illuminating power is somewhat uncertain. It
reminds the scrupulous investigator of those early days of the electric
light, when its flickering tremulousness made it often painful to read
by, and when, too, it might suddenly go out and leave the reader in
darkness. It is well to remember that both sciences are young, and have
much of the self-confidence of youth; and that Italian archaeology, now
fast becoming well organised within Italy, has also to be co-ordinated
with the archaeology of the whole Mediterranean basin, before we can
expect from it clear and unmistakable answers to hard questions about
race and religion. This work, which cannot possibly be done by an
individual without _co-operation_--the secret of sound work which the
Germans have long ago discovered--is in course of being carried out, so
far as is at present possible, by a syndicate of competent
investigators.[14]

In order to indicate the uncertain nature of the light which for a long
time to come is all we can expect from Italian archaeology, I have only
to remind you that one of the chief questions we have to ask of it is
the relation of the mysterious Etruscan people to the other Italian
stocks, in respect of language, religion, and art. Whether the Etruscans
were the same people whom the Greeks called Pelasgians, as many
investigators now hold: whether the earliest Roman city was in any true
sense an Etruscan one: these are questions on the answers to which it is
not as yet safe