art naturally
formed his place of abode (-templum-) and his image; walls and
effigies made by the hands of men seemed only to obscure and to
embarrass the spiritual conception. Accordingly the original Roman
worship had no images of the gods or houses set apart for them;
and although the god was at an early period worshipped in Latium,
probably in imitation of the Greeks, by means of an image, and
had a little chapel (-aedicula-) built for him, such a figurative
representation was reckoned contrary to the laws of Numa and was
generally regarded as an impure and foreign innovation. The Roman
religion could exhibit no image of a god peculiar to it, with the
exception, perhaps, of the double-headed Ianus; and Varro even
in his time derided the desire of the multitude for puppets and
effigies. The utter want of productive power in the Roman religion
was likewise the ultimate cause of the thorough poverty which always
marked Roman poetry and still more Roman speculation.

The same distinctive character was manifest, moreover, in the domain
of its practical use. The practical gain which accrued to the Roman
community from their religion was a code of moral law gradually
developed by the priests, and the -Pontifices- in particular,
which on the one hand supplied the place of police regulations
at a time when the state was still far from providing any direct
police-guardianship for its citizens, and on the other hand brought
to the bar of the gods and visited with divine penalties the breach
of moral obligations. To the regulations of the former class
belonged the religious inculcation of a due observance of holidays
and of a cultivation of the fields and vineyards according to the
rules of good husbandry--which we shall have occasion to notice
more fully in the sequel--as well as the worship of the heath or
of the Lares which was connected with considerations of sanitary
police,(13) and above all the practice of burning the bodies of
the dead, adopted among the Romans at a singularly early period,
far earlier than among the Greeks--a practice implying a rational
conception of life and of death, which was foreign to primitive
times and is even foreign to ourselves at the present day. It must
be reckoned no small achievement that the national religion of the
Latins was able to carry out these and similar improvements. But
the civilizing effect of this law was still more important. If
a husband sold his wife, or a fathe