commerce, business,
handicraft, or politics, pursuits in which the old Roman and Latin
farmers were not directly interested; they were suffered to be in Rome
because the new population and the new interests must of necessity have
their own worships, but they were not taken into the heart and mind of
the people. So at least it seems to us, after we have been examining the
development of the native religious plant from its root upwards. But we
must remember that of that new population, its life and its needs, we
know hardly anything, and it would not be safe to assume that the
conception of Minerva had no influence on the conscience of the artisan,
or that of Hercules no power of binding the trader to honest dealing and
respect for his oath. As for Diana, though, as Dr. Carter says, she had
been introduced "as part of a diplomatic game, not because Rome felt any
religious need of her," the fact that the Latin treaty was kept in her
temple has a certain moral as well as political significance which ought
not to be overlooked. It is impossible to put ourselves mentally in the
position of the men who brought these cults to Rome, or of the Romans
who granted them admittance; but we shall be on the safe side if we
imagine the former at least to have had a conviction that their dealings
at Rome would not prosper unless they were carried out with the blessing
of their own gods.

But we now come, in the last place, to the foundation of a cult of a
very different kind from these, and of far greater import than any of
them in the history of Roman religious experience. We have seen that the
temple of Diana on the Aventine meant the transference of the headship
of the Latin league from Aricia to Rome. When Rome took over this
headship, and by removing its religious centre to Rome--or, perhaps more
accurately, by offering Diana of Aricia a new home by the Tiber--removed
also any danger of a new power growing up in Latium outside her own
influence, she seems to have taken another important step in the same
direction. Archaeological evidence confirms the tradition that at this
time the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, the real and original god of the
league, on the Alban hill, was rebuilt;[494] and as the remains of its
foundation are of Etruscan workmanship, we may believe that the work was
undertaken at that period of an Etruscan dominion in Rome which no one
now seriously doubts, and which is marked by the Etruscan name
Tarquinius, and by