must picture to himself a totally different orientation of the whole:the upper layer of remains, which he sees before him, is for hispurpose in most cases not merely useless, but positively misleading.In the same way, if we wish to form a picture of the genuine Romanreligion, we cannot find it immediately in classical literature; wemust banish from our minds all that is due to the contact with theEast and Egypt, and even with the other races of Italy, and we mustimagine, so to speak, a totally different mental orientation beforethe great influx of Greek literature and Greek thought, which gavean entirely new turn to Roman ideas in general, and in particularrevolutionised religion by the introduction of anthropomorphic notionsand sensuous representations. But in this difficult search we are notleft without indications to guide us. In the writings of the savants ofthe late Republic and of the Empire, and in the Augustan poets, biassedthough they are in their interpretations by Greek tendencies, there isembodied a great wealth of ancient custom and ritual, which becomessignificant when we have once got the clue to its meaning. More directevidence is afforded by a large body of inscriptions and monuments, andabove all by the surviving Calendars of the Roman festival year, whichgive us the true outline of the ceremonial observances of the earlyreligion.It is not within the scope of this sketch to enter, except by way ofoccasional illustration, into the process of interpretation by whichthe patient work of scholars has disentangled the form and spirit ofthe native religion from the mass of foreign accretions. I intendrather to assume the process, and deal, as far as it is possible in socontroversial a subject, with results upon which authorities aregenerally agreed. Neither will any attempt be made to follow thedevelopment which the early religion underwent in later periods, whenforeign elements were added and foreign ideas altered and remoulded theold tradition. We must confine ourselves to a single epoch, in whichthe native Roman spirit worked out unaided the ideas inherited fromhalf-civilised ancestors, and formed that body of belief and ritual,which was always, at least officially, the kernel of Roman religion,and constituted what the Romans themselves--staunch believers in theirown traditional history--loved to describe as the 'Religion of Numa.'We must discover, as far as we can, how far its inherited notions ranparallel with those of other primitive religions, but more especiallywe must try to note what is characteristically Roman alike in customand ritual and in the motives and spirit which prompted them.CHAPTER IITHE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGIONIn every early religion there will of course be found, apart fromexternal influence, traces of its own internal development, of stagesby which it must have advanced from a mass of vague and primitivebelief and custom to the organised worship of a civilised community.The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule; we can detect in itslater practice evidences of primitive notions and habits which it hadin common with other semi-barbarous peoples, and we shall see that theleading idea in its theology is but a characteristically Roman
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