er gained admission among the
Romans; hardly in a single instance were superstition and despair
induced, even in times of extreme distress, to seek an extraordinary
deliverance through means so revolting. Of belief in ghosts, fear
of enchantments, or dealing in mysteries, comparatively slight
traces are to be found among the Romans. Oracles and prophecy never
acquired the importance in Italy which they obtained in Greece,
and never were able to exercise a serious control over private or
public life. But on the other hand the Latin religion sank into
an incredible insipidity and dulness, and early became shrivelled
into an anxious and dreary round of ceremonies. The god of the
Italian was, as we have already said, above all things an instrument
for helping him to the attainment of very substantial earthly aims;
this turn was given to the religious views of the Italian by his
tendency towards the palpable and the real, and is no less distinctly
apparent in the saint-worship of the modern inhabitants of Italy.
The gods confronted man just as a creditor confronted his debtor;
each of them had a duly acquired right to certain performances and
payments; and as the number of the gods was as great as the number
of the incidents in earthly life, and the neglect or wrong performance
of the worship of each god revenged itself in the corresponding incident,
it was a laborious and difficult task even to gain a knowledge of
a man's religious obligations, and the priests who were skilled
in the law of divine things and pointed out its requirements--the
-Pontifices- --could not fail to attain an extraordinary influence.
The upright man fulfilled the requirements of sacred ritual with
the same mercantile punctuality with which he met his earthly
obligations, and at times did more than was due, if the god had
done so on his part. Man even dealt in speculation with his god;
a vow was in reality as in name a formal contract between the god
and the man, by which the latter promised to the former for a certain
service to be rendered a certain equivalent return; and the Roman
legal principle that no contract could be concluded by deputy was
not the least important of the reasons on account of which all
priestly mediation remained excluded from the religious concerns
of man in Latium. Nay, as the Roman merchant was entitled, without
injury to his conventional rectitude, to fulfil his contract merely
in the letter, so in dealing with the