ROMAN RELIGION. From the time that the Roman religion appears within the pale of traditional and recorded history it seems to have been constantly and progressively sub jected to varying influences, both internal and external, and to have passed through many changes. For this reason different writers have had very different views as to what it really was, according as each took his vantage position at this or that point of its evolution. The religious system of the Roman Empire was distinctly different from that of the Romans when they first appeared in Italy. The long and eventful intervening period of time had as effectively changed the composition of the Roman religion as it had that of the Roman people and Roman society. Therefore, any ac count of the religious life of Rome should ex plain these constant changes, reveal their causes and show the effects they had upon Roman society and upon that of all the peoples who came closely and intimately into contact with the Imperial City. Fundamentally the primitive religious ideas of all the Indo-European peoples were quite similar. Even the Roman religion, in the days when Rome was governed by kings and had already begun to evolve complicated rituals and complex myths, still retained a suggestive similarity to that of India. Yet striking though this similarity is the difference between the two religions isjust as striking. This is due to the fact that, though the religious beliefs of the two peoples had the same origin, they bad continued for centuries to develop independent of one another, after the separation in pre historical times of the two great branches of the family. In the days of her struggles and later, of her achieved greatness, Rome strongly influenced the people with whom she came in contact, and was, in her turn, influenced by them. These influences extended from the Roman colonies in Spain and Gaul in the West to the Far East. Of these influences the strongest were those of Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor. Out of this constantly acting and re acting religious thought grew an all-pervading mysticism and love of philosophical speculation.
Early Period.— Originally the Roman reli gion was almost altogether nature worship vivi fied by a primitive belief in an all-pervading and prevailing animism. Survivals of this faith
in the religion of Rome at a later period in her history point indisputably to the fact that the Romans were at one time nomadic and given largely, if not altogether, to hunting and fish ing, and that their deities and familiar spirits partook of the nature of these occupations. In their nomadic and hunting days the Roman people built no temples and apparently erected no religious monuments. They worshipped the gods of the chase and other beneficent or feared spirits in the haunts of nature, the sacred groves in the forest, by the sides of flow ing streams and on the tops of'hills and moun tains. The early Roman gods were the per sonification of the elements of nature. The old Roman deities and supernatural beings of their nomadic life, the patrons of the chase and the guardian spirits of the mountains, the rivers, the earth, the sky and the upper heavens = ally assumed more definite attributes and became, at the same time, confined to a more restricted atmosphere as the Romans settled down to a sedentary life and became agricul tural and later on commercial. But being the first on the scene these earlier gods, for the most part, continued to develop and to assume these new attributes in conformity with the natural growth of the city and the civic progress of its people, developing finally into the chief deities of a highly organized community. This evolution was in the full process of accomplish ment when Rome became subject to strong and steadily increasing influences. This develop ment of the primitive Roman deities and the influence of outside religious forces were recog nized by the Romans at a later period, when they classified their deities as di indigentes and di novensides or novensiles, that is, the native gods and the foreign or new gods, the latter of whom were introduced from the other tribes of Italy, and at a later period from Greece and other countries with whom Rome had come into intimate political contact. Each of these gods, old and new, had his distinct ritual, place and relationship in national life.