Rome, founded, according to tradition, as a free community, threw her gates open to the oppressed and discontented of the surround ing country. This liberality of thought and at titude on the threshold of her career dis tinguished her ever afterward and enabled her to assimilate, first, all of Italy, and afterward vast domains outside the Italic Peninsula. The deities and religious customs and practices of all the tribes of of Indo-European origin, which were quite similar, gradually became domesticated in Rome. Naturally as the Roman Empire broadened and became more cosmo politan, its religious system also became broader and more all-embracing. Having ab sorbed the deities of the Italic Peninsula, the habit of absorption became, with Rome, all impelling, and the pantheon of the Imperial City, reaching out its octopus arms in every direction throughout the already wide confines of the rapidly extending Roman domain, and even beyond it, brought new creeds, new deities i and new religious philosophies into Rome. Under such conditions as these little or no religious dogma could exist; nor did it. On the contrary, religious Rome was like a vast, all absorbing sponge drawing into itself all that came within its sphere of action, religious creeds, ideas, customs, philosphies, elaborate theories and mystical speculations, with their corresponding practices, rituals, ceremonies and public celebrations. Thus ecclesiastical Rome became as cosmopolitan and eclectic as the Roman Empire itself. This is but another way of saying, however, that the religious life of the Roman community was constantly shifting as the process of broadening continued.
Evolution of the Gods.— In the early Ro man gods, which, as we have already seen, consisted for the most part of guardian deities of hunting, fishing, fighting and all the prac tical needs of daily life, were the seed germs from which sprang the national state religion under the early kings and the mighty gods of later imperial Rome, with their magnificent temples, shrines and extensive and highly or ganized priesthood and other ecclesiastical dig nitaries, their close connection with the state and their inseparable partnership with the im perial family. The first temples built in Greece and Rome were suggestive of their origin. They consisted of rows of pillars of wood so erected as to imitate or represent the sacred groves of the forest. Diana, the moon god dess, under one name or another and with somewhat varying attributes, the favorite deity of so many nomadic peoples given to the chase, and in all probability the chief deity of the nomadic Romans, gave place to the earth mother,. the producer, the characteristic deity of an agricultural people. The agricultural Ro mans created a new relationship between the heavens which sent the refreshing and in vigorating rains and mist upon the earth and the great earth mother who received them; and they made the sky and the great ea on account of this relationship, wife, father and mother. But the moon god dess did not thereby lose all her ancient power and glory. She still remained what she had al ways been, distinctively the patroness of the hunters and of all persons taking long journey& Connected from early times with the primitive priests she continued to be intimately connected with the diviners and soothsayers, and later on, with the alchemists and astrologers, their first cousins.
In the meantime Jupiter, the god of the sky, of the upper regions and of thunder, usurped the foremost place primitively held by Diana, the moon mother, becoming the titular deity of the Romans and the supreme god of the Latin races united under the imperial sway of Rome. Originally, as his powers, functions,
titles and attributes indicate, he was the chief active, divine spirit of the heavens, a being to be feared and propitiated by a nomadic people, but one of no other very great interest to them. But though Jupiter grew to be the greatest of the Roman gods and was affectionately desig nated the All-father, yet he preserved to the last all the primitive earmarks of his nature origin. He was generally represented with the thunderbolts in his hand (the sign of his do minion over the elements), and the eagle (the thunder bird) .by his throne. As the god of the dawn he was the white one*; and in general everything connected with his .worship was white. Even the consuls dressed in white when they sacrificed to him in their official capacity, and his priests wore white caps symbolical of the color sacred to him as representing the light of day, or more properly of the dawn or com ing day. For the same reason white animals were offered to him in sacrifice.
Jupiter not only attracted to himself the attributes and qualities of other deities with many of their functions, but he also showed a signal power of extending all these acquired functions and, in a sense, organizing them into a component part of the system of state re ligion. One of the strangest of these develop ments is that of Juno, the female counterpart of the supreme deity himself, and the definition of the supposed female qualities of the sky. In other words she is but a subdivision of Jupiter himself, whose sister and wife she is represented, in Roman mythology, to be. She bore the same relation to women that Jupiter did to men. She was the special protectress of women throughout life and she presided at birth, marriage and death, being ever the tutelar female genius, and by extension the guardian of national finances, as the Roman wife was of the household finances.
Next to Jupiter and Juno, his regal consort, the greatest of the Roman state gods was Mars, who, beginning as a deity of agriculture, as the Romans emerged from barbarism grew more and more the patron of war, as Jupiter's war like functions and attributes became obscured in his assumption of the throne of the Roman pantheon. Yet as Jupiter never altogether out grew his warlike associations so Mars never got completely away from his earlier agricul tural connection. Jupiter, with Mars and Quir inns, formed the great triad of gods of the earlier state religion of Rome. The latter, who was the Colline deity of war, became the patron of soldiers and other armed people in times of peace; while Mars, who was especially honored in March and October, was the patron of the opening and closing of the war campaigns and of the sports connected therewith. Thus, in the readjustment of religious ideas, customs and practices, after Rome had extended her sway over all of Italy, the functions and attributes of the tribal deities became more and more specialized, each god, however, in the shifting of the scenes, retaining his most characteristic part and attributes. Thus Janus, the door keeper, who is usually associated with Vesta, the keeper of the hearth, came, through a natural process of evolution, to preside over the beginnings of all undertakings. He was represented as having two faces, that he might see the more readily the beginning and the end of all things. He carried a staff (sym bolical of traveling) and a key (the sign of his functions as doorkeeper).