acknowledged feature of it; divination was carried
to absurd lengths, one great branch of it consisting in the
prediction of the future from the appearance of the entrails of
slaughtered animals. Etruria had a hell with regular torments for the
departed; in Rome the belief in a future life was much less definite.
On the other hand, Etruria had deities who were something more than
abstractions; there was a circle of twelve gods, who held meetings on
high, and regulated the affairs of the world. Above them was a power,
little defined, to which the gods were subject, a kind of fate. Greek
influence, so notably apparent in Etruscan art, is present, too, we
see, in Etruscan religion; it is through this somewhat dark passage
that Greek religious ideas first came to Rome. Under this influence
various innovations took place at Rome. Before the end of the
monarchy the Romans had begun to build houses for their gods, after
being for 170 years, we are told, without any such arrangement. The
Roman "templum" was not originally a building, but a space marked
off, according to the rules of augury, for the observation of signs.
A part of the sky was also marked off for such "observation" and
"contemplation." On such a holy site, on the Capitoline hill, there
was founded by the earlier Tarquin the temple of Jupiter which always
continued to be the principal site of Roman religion. Its
architecture was Tuscan; and it contained not only a cella or holy
place for the image of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but also a cella for
Juno and one for Minerva. The latter was both an Etruscan and a Roman
deity, the goddess of memory. Art was thus enlisted in the service of
the gods; the divine figures acquired a reality and distinctness
quite wanting to the earlier divine abstractions; and a new notion of
deity was presented to the Roman mind. Other temples followed, to
Jupiter under other names than that which he had in the Capitol, and
to other deities. That of Faith was a very early one. It was a rule
in temple-building that the image in the cella faced the west, so
that the worshipper, praying towards it, faced the east. Here also
the Roman custom is a departure from the Greek; for in Greek temples
it is the rule that the image faces the east, and the worshipper the
west. The Roman orientation of sacred buildings has passed into the
practice of the Christian Church. From Etruria the Romans also
derived a great addition to the rules of divination; but