move them. But in process of time it became inevitable that these
superhuman agencies should be referred to under some sort of title,
and the title literally expressed the conception. Hence a multitude of
names. Not only was there the ever-prominent Jupiter or "sky-father";
there a veritable multitude of powers with provinces great and small.
Among the larger conceptions the power concerned with the sowing of
seed was Saturn that with the growth of crops was Ceres, that with the
blazing of fire was Vesta. Among the smaller the power which taught a
babe to eat was Edulia that which attended the bringing home of a
bride was Domiduca. The ability to speak or to walk was supposed to be
imparted by separate agencies named accordingly. Flowers depended on
Flora and fruits on Pomona.

[Illustration: FIG. 109.--JUPITER.]

But to assign a name is a great step towards creating a "power" into a
"god," and such agencies began to take shape in the mind of those who
named them. This was the second stage. Jupiter, Ceres, Saturn, and
almost all the rest became "gods." The powers in the woodlands--a
Silvanus or Faunus--became embodied, like the more modern gnomes and
kobbolds. Once imagine a shape, and the tendency is to give it visible
form in an image "like unto man," and to honour it with an abode--a
temple or shrine. The earliest Romans known to us erected no images or
temples, but they were not long in creating them. Particularly rapid
was the reducing of a god to human form when they came into close
contact with the Etruscans and the Greeks. For all the important
deities poetry and art combined to evolve an appropriate bodily form,
which gradually became conventional, so that the ordinary notion of a
Jupiter, a Juno, a Mercury, or a Ceres was approximately that which
had been gathered from the statue thus developed. This trouble was not
taken with all the most ancient divinities. Many of the old rural and
local deities, and many of those with quite minor provinces, were left
vague and unrealised. They were represented in no temples and by no
statues. Naturally as the Roman state grew from a set of neighbouring
farms into a great city, and from a small settlement into a vast
empire, the little local gods fell into the background. The deities
which concerned the state, and to which it erected temples, were those
with the more far-reaching operations--such as the gods identified
with the sky and its thunders, with war, with fertili