The Religion of Ancient Rome

=1. The Deities.=--The worship of the household seems to have originated, as has been suggested, in the sense of the sacredness of certain objects closely bound up with the fami...

Since, in the matter of religion, the Roman state is in the main but the agricultural household magnified, we shall not, in considering its worship, be entering on a new stratum...

=1. Theology.=--The characteristic appellation of a divine spirit in the oldest stratum of the Roman religion is not _deus_, a god, but rather _numen_, a power: he becomes _deus...

The life of the early Roman in the fields, his activities, his hopes and fears, are reflected in the long list of agricultural festivals which constitute the greater part of the...

It might be said that a religion--the expression of man's relation to the unseen--has not necessarily any connection with morality--man's action in himself and towards his neigh...

In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages by which it must have advanced from a mas...

So far we have been considering the regular relations of man and god, seen in recurring or special offerings, in vows and in acts of purification and lustration--all based on th...

After this sketch of the main features which we must expect to find in Roman religion, we may attempt to look a little more in detail at its various departments, but before doin...

The conditions of our knowledge of the native religion of early Rome may perhaps be best illustrated by a parallel from Roman archæology. The visitor to the Roman Forum at the p...