MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITEDST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON1911TOPROFESSOR W.R. HARDIEANDMY MANY OTHER KIND FRIENDS AND FRIENDLY HEARERSIN EDINBURGHPREFACELord Gifford in founding his lectureship directed that the lecturesshould be public and popular, _i.e._ not restricted to members of aUniversity. Accordingly in lecturing I endeavoured to make myselfintelligible to a general audience by avoiding much technical discussionand controversial matter, and by keeping to the plan of describing inoutline the development and decay of the religion of the RomanCity-state. And on the whole I have thought it better to keep to thisprinciple in publishing the lectures; they are printed for the most partmuch as they were delivered, and without footnotes, but at the end ofeach lecture students of the subject will find the notes referred to bythe numbers in the text, containing such further information ordiscussion as has seemed desirable. My model in this method has been theadmirable lectures of Prof. Cumont on "les Religions Orientales dans lePaganisme Romain."I wish to make two remarks about the subject-matter of the lectures.First, the idea running through them is that the primitive religious (ormagico-religious) instinct, which was the germ of the religion of thehistorical Romans, was gradually atrophied by over-elaboration ofritual, but showed itself again in strange forms from the period of thePunic wars onwards. For this religious instinct I have used the Latinword _religio_, as I have explained in the _Transactions of the ThirdInternational Congress for the History of Religions_, vol. ii. p. 169foll. I am, however, well aware that some scholars take a different viewof the original meaning of this famous word, which has been muchdiscussed since I formed my plan of lecturing. But I do not think thatthose who differ from me on this point will find that my generalargument is seriously affected one way or another by my use of the word.Secondly, while I have been at work on the lectures, the idea seems tohave been slowly gaining ground that the patrician religion of the earlyCity-state, which became so highly formalised, so clean and austere, andeventually so political, was really the religion of an invading race,like that of the Achaeans in Greece, engrafted on the religion of aprimitive and less civilised population. I have not definitely adoptedthis idea; but I am inclined to think that a good deal of what I havesaid in the earlier lectures may be found to support it. Once only, inLecture XVII., I have used it myself to support a hypothesis thereadvanced.
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