chapter xvi

.; they take their name from the act or province over which they preside. Saturnus means one who has to do with sowing; Terminus is a boundary pure and simple. The god then, in these examples, is not a great being who has come to have these functions placed under him as well as others. He and the particular function belong together; he owes all his deity to it. Now these are only examples; the same is found to be the case with all or nearly all the distinctively Roman gods; they are, broadly speaking, all functional beings. Each bears the name of an object or a process; and on the other hand there is no object and no act which has not its god. It is astounding to observe how far the principle of the division of labour is carried among these beings. Silvanus is the god of the wood, Lympha of the stream, each wood and each stream having its own Silvanus or Lympha. Seia has to do with the corn before it sprouts, Segetia with corn when shot up, Tutilina with corn stored in the granary, Nodotus has for his care the knots in the straw. There is a god Door, a goddess Hinge, a god Threshold. Each act in opening infancy has its god or goddess. The child has Cunina when lying in the cradle, Statina when he stands, Edula when he eats, Locutius when he begins to speak, Adeona when he makes for his mother, Abeona when he leaves her; forty-three such gods of childhood have been counted. Pilumnus, god of the pestle, and Diverra, goddess of the broom, may close our small sample of the limitless crowd.

It is usually said about these multitudinous petty deities that the Roman was very religious, and saw in every act and everything for which he had a name, something mysterious and supernatural. The Greek, it is said, sees things on his own level, and adds to them a god who is human; it is by the human spirit that he interprets them. The Roman, on the contrary, sees things as mysteries and fills them with gods who are not human. That is true; but the question to be asked about these Roman gods is, to what stage of religious development do they belong: do they prove a primitive or an advanced stage of religious thought? It has been observed that these names of gods are all epithets, or adjectives; and it has been supposed that there was originally a noun belonging to them, that they were all epithets of one great deity, or, as some are masculine and some feminine, of a great male and a great female deity. The noun fell out of use, it is supposed, but was still present to the mind of the Roman, and thus his regiments of divine names are not really designations of different persons, but titles of the same person, supposed to be present alike in all these numberless manifestations. But it is not easy to conceive how, if primitive Italy had reached the conception of the unity of deity, that deity became so remarkably subdivided, nor how his own proper name and character were lost. It is much more natural to suppose that the petty gods of Rome were all the deities the early Latins had, and were worshipped for their own sake. They represent the stage of thought called Animism (see