rovinces of nature, the Latins, whose mind was
organising rather than productive, made this advance more slowly, and
instead of making it organised the spiritual world of animism with a
thoroughness nowhere else equalled.[1] They had, therefore, no gods
properly so called, but only a host of spirits. Even the beings they
possessed, who afterwards became great gods, were at first no more
than functional spirits. Janus, afterwards one of the chief deities
of Rome, is originally the "spirit of opening"; an abstraction
capable of great multiplication; a Janus could be invoked for each
act of that kind. Vesta is the spirit of the hearth; each household
had its Vesta, both in early and in later times. Juno is not one but
many: as each man had his genius, a spiritual self accompanying or
guarding him, so each woman had--not her genius, but her Juno. There
were many Vestas, many Junos; and it is only later that the great
goddess arises, who may be looked to from every quarter. Others of
the great gods of later Rome have a similar early history. Mars was
at first the spirit which made the corn grow; Diana was a
tree-spirit, Jovis or Diovis himself, though his name connects him
with the Greek Zeus and the Sanscrit Dyaus, and though he is
afterwards, like these, the god of the sky, was originally in Latin a
spirit of wine, and was worshipped, the Jovis of each village or each
farm, at the wine-feast in April when the first cask was broached.
Thus the gods of the Latins are not beings who have an independent
existence and features of their own; they are limited each to the
particular object or process from which he derives his character, and
have no realm beyond it. And the same is true of the family and
house-gods, whose worship formed perhaps the principal part of the
working religion of the Roman. The Lares represent the departed
ancestors of the family; they dwell near the spot in the house where
they were buried, and still preside over the household as they did in
life. They are worshipped daily with prayers and offerings of food
and drink; the family adore in them not so much the dead individuals,
though their masks hang on the wall, as the abstraction of its own
family continuity. The Penates or spirits of the store-chamber are
worshipped along with the Lares, they represent the continuity of the
family fortune. A more general name for the departed is the Manes,
the kind ones; they are thought of as living below the earth; it