toring, and opening of
the granaries. In like manner marriage, birth, and every other
natural event were endowed with a sacred life. The larger the
sphere embraced in the abstraction, the higher rose the god and the
reverence paid by man. Thus Jupiter and Juno are the abstractions
of manhood and womanhood; Dea Dia or Ceres, the creative power;
Minerva, the power of memory; Dea Bona, or among the Samnites
Dea Cupra, the good deity. While to the Greek everything assumed
a concrete and corporeal shape, the Roman could only make use of
abstract, completely transparent formulae; and while the Greek for
the most part threw aside the old legendary treasures of primitive
times, because they embodied the idea in too transparent a form, the
Roman could still less retain them, because the sacred conceptions
seemed to him dimmed even by the lightest veil of allegory. Not
a trace has been preserved among the Romans even of the oldest and
most generally diffused myths, such as that current among the Indians,
the Greeks, and even the Semites, regarding a great flood and its
survivor, the common ancestor of the present human race. Their
gods could not marry and beget children, like those of the Hellenes;
they did not walk about unseen among mortals; and they needed no
nectar. But that they, nevertheless, in their spirituality--which
only appears tame to dull apprehension--gained a powerful hold on
men's minds, a hold more powerful perhaps than that of the gods of
Hellas created after the image of man, would be attested, even if
history were silent on the subject, by the Roman designation of faith
(the word and the idea alike foreign to the Hellenes), -Religlo-,
that is to say, "that which binds." As India and Iran developed from
one and the same inherited store, the former, the richly varied
forms of its sacred epics, the latter, the abstractions of the
Zend-Avesta; so in the Greek mythology the person is predominant,
in the Roman the idea, in the former freedom, in the latter necessity.

Art

Lastly, what holds good of real life is true also of its counterfeit
in jest and play, which everywhere, and especially in the earliest
period of full and simple existence, do not exclude the serious,
but veil it. The simplest elements of art are in Latium and Hellas
quite the same; the decorous armed dance, the "leap" (-triumpus-,
--thriambos--, --di-thyrambos--); the masquerade of the "full people"
(--satyroi--, -satura-), who, w