r sold his married son; if a
child struck his father, or a daughter-in-law her father-in-law;
if a patron violated his obligation to keep faith with his guest
or dependent; if an unjust neighbour displaced a boundary-stone, or
the thief laid hands by night on the grain entrusted to the common
good faith; the burden of the curse of the gods lay thenceforth
on the head of the offender. Not that the person thus accursed
(-sacer-) was outlawed; such an outlawry, inconsistent in its
nature with all civil order, was only an exceptional occurrence--an
aggravation of the religious curse in Rome at the time of the quarrels
between the orders. It was not the province of the individual
burgess, or even of the wholly powerless priest, to carry into
effect such a divine curse. Primarily the person thus accursed
became liable to the divine penal judgment, not to human caprice;
and the pious popular faith, on which that curse was based, must
have had power even over natures frivolous and wicked. But the
banning was not confined to this; the king was in reality entitled
and bound to carry the ban into execution, and, after the fact, on
which the law set its curse, had been according to his conscientious
conviction established, to slay the person under ban, as it were,
as a victim offered up to the injured deity (-supplicium-), and thus
to purify the community from the crime of the individual. If the
crime was of a minor nature, for the slaying of the guilty there
was substituted a ransom through the presenting of a sacrificial
victim or of similar gifts. Thus the whole criminal law rested as
to its ultimate basis on the religious idea of expiation.

But religion performed no higher service in Latium than the furtherance
of civil order and morality by such means as these. In this field
Hellas had an unspeakable advantage over Latium; it owed to its
religion not merely its whole intellectual development, but also
its national union, so far as such an union was attained at all;
the oracles and festivals of the gods, Delphi and Olympia, and the
Muses, daughters of faith, were the centres round which revolved all
that was great in Hellenic life and all in it that was the common
heritage of the nation. And yet even here Latium had, as compared
with Hellas, its own advantages. The Latin religion, reduced
as it was to the level of ordinary perception, was completely
intelligible to every one and accessible in common to all; and
ther