re entirely unknown at
Rome for three centuries after the foundation of the temple. That
ritual, as it existed in Greece from the earliest times, retaining the
essential features which it bore in its original Thracian home,[731] has
lately been thoroughly examined and clearly expounded by Dr. Farnell in
the fifth volume of his _Cults of the Greek States_, and the student of
the Roman religious history of this period would do well to study
carefully his fifth chapter. In most Greek states, as at Athens, in
spite of occasional outbreaks, the wilder aspects of the cult had not
been encouraged, but at Delphi and at Thebes, _i.e._ on Parnassus and
Cithaeron, the more striking phenomena of the genuine ritual are found
down to a late period. Dr. Farnell has summed these up under three heads
at the beginning of his account: "The wild and ecstatic enthusiasm that
it inspired, the self-abandonment and communion with the deity achieved
through orgiastic rites and a savage sacramental act, and the prominence
of women in the ritual, which in accordance with a certain psychic law
made a special appeal to their temperament."[732] It meant in fact
exactly that form of religious ecstasy which was peculiarly abhorrent to
the minds of the old Romans, who had built up the _ius divinum_ with its
sober ritual and its practical ideas of the supernatural powers around
them. We found nothing in our studies of this religion to lead us to
suppose for an instant that it had any mental effect such as "the
transcending of the limits of the ordinary consciousness and the feeling
of communion with the divine nature."[733] The Latin language indeed had
no native words for the expression of such emotions.[734]

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that there was no soil in
Italy, or even at Rome, where such emotional rites might take root. We
may believe that the dignity and sobriety of the Roman character was in
part at least the result of the discipline of ordered religion in family
and state; but this is not to say that the Romans were never capable of
religious indiscipline,--far from it. The Italian rural festival, then
as now, was lively and indecorous, so far as we can guess from the few
glimpses we get of it; and at Rome the ancient festival of Anna Perenna,
in which women took part, was a scene of revelry as Ovid describes
it,[735]--of dancing, singing, and intoxication, and we need not wonder
that it found no place in the ancient calendar