ners, too, were struck with the strange
phenomenon, in an age of philosophic doubt. Polybius in the second
century B.C. declared his opinion that what was reckoned among other
peoples as a thing to be blamed, _deisidaimonia_, both in public and
private life, was really what was holding together the Roman state.[515]
Even in the wild century that followed, Posidonius could repeat the
assertion of Polybius, and in the age of Augustus, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, then resident at Rome, looking back on the early history
of Rome, stated his conviction that one needed to know the _pietas_ of
the Romans in order to understand their wonderful career of
conquest.[516] Aulus Gellius, in a curious passage in which he notes
that the Romans had no deity to whose activity they could with
certainty ascribe earthquakes, describes them as "in constituendis
religionibus atque in dis immortalibus animadvertendis _castissimi
cautissimique_,"--a rhetorical but happy conjunction of epithets. He
means that they would order religious rites, though ignorant of the
_numen_ to whom they were due.[517]

It might be argued that these later writers knew really little or
nothing about the primitive Romans, and that these passages only prove
that this people had an extraordinary scrupulosity about forms and
ceremonies in this as in other departments of action. But the argument
will not hold; the survival of all this formalism into an age of
disintegration really proves beyond a doubt that there must have been a
time when these forms really expressed anxieties, fears, convictions,
the earliest germs of _conscience_.

May we not take the constant occurrence in literature of such phrases as
_dis faventibus_, _dis iuvantibus_ or _volentibus_, as evidence of an
idea deeply rooted at one time in the Roman mind, that nothing should be
undertaken until the will of the deities concerned had been ascertained
and that early form of conscience satisfied? Let us remember that the
whole story of the _Aeneid_ is one of the bending of the will of the
hero, as a type of the ideal Roman, to the ascertainable will of the
powers in the universe.

And we have abundant evidence that as a matter of fact the good-will of
the divine inhabitants of house and city was asked for whenever any kind
of work was undertaken,--even the ordinary routine work of the farm or
of government. In the household every morning some offering with prayer
was made to the Lar familiaris in histo