himself that these were not real beings, but only his own
conceptions, thrown heavenward.

The third class of deities were those adopted from Greece. New deities,
like Apollo, were imported, and the old ones Hellenized. The Romans had no
statues of their gods in early times; this custom they learned from
Greece. "A full river of influence," says Cicero, "and not a little brook,
has flowed into Rome out of Greece[282]." They sent to Delphi to inquire
of the Greek oracle. In a few decades, says Hartung, the Roman religion
was wholly transformed by this Greek influence; and that happened while
the senate and priests were taking the utmost care that not an iota of the
old ceremonies should be altered. Meantime the object was to identify the
objects of worship in other countries with those worshipped at home. This
was done in an arbitrary and superficial way, and caused great confusion
in the mythologies[283]. Accidental resemblances, slight coincidences of
names, were sufficient for the identification of two gods. As long as the
service of the temple was unaltered, the priests troubled themselves very
little about such changes. In this way, the twelve gods of Olympus--Zeus,
Poseidon, Apollo, Ares, Hephaestos, Hermes, Here, Athene, Artemis,
Aphrodite, Hestia, and Demeter--were naturalized or identified as Jupiter,
Neptune, Apollo, Mars, Vulcan, Mercury, Juno, Minerva, Diana, Venus,
Vesta, and Ceres, Dionysos became Liber or Bacchus; Persephone,
Proserpina; and the Muses were accepted as the Greeks had imagined them.

To find the true Roman worship, therefore, we must divest their deities of
these Greek habiliments, and go back to their original Etruscan or Latin
characters.

Among the Etruscans we find one doctrine unknown to the Greeks and not
adopted by the Romans; that, namely, of the higher "veiled deities,"[284]
superior to Jupiter. They also had a dodecad of six male and six female
deities, the Consentes and Complices, making a council of gods, whom
Jupiter consulted in important cases. Vertumnus was an Etruscan; so,
according to Ottfried Mueller, was the Genius. So are the Lares, or
household protectors, and Charun, or Charon, a power of the under-world.
The minute system of worship was derived by Rome from Etruria. The whole
system of omens, especially by lightning, came from the same source.

After Janus, and three Capitoline gods (Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva), above
mentioned, the Romans worshipped a series of dei