I THALES TO LUCRETIUS 27 



And what a motley crowd of gods they were on 

 whose caprice or indifference he pours his vials of 

 anger and contempt ! The tolerant pantheon of 

 Rome gave welcome to any foreign deity with 

 respectable credentials ; to Cybele, the Great Mother, 

 imported in the shape of a rough-hewn stone with 

 pomp and rejoicings from Phrygia 204 B.C. ; to Isis, 

 welcomed from Egypt ; to Herakles, Demeter, As- 

 klepios, and many another god from Greece. But 

 these were dismissed from a man's thought when the 

 prayer or sacrifice to them had been offered at the 

 due season. They had less influence on the Roman's 

 life than the crowd of native godlings who were 

 thinly-disguised fetishes, and who controlled every 

 action of the day. - For the minor gods survive the 

 changes in the pantheon of every race. Of the Greek 

 peasant of to-day Sir Rennell Rodd testifies, in his 

 Custom and Lore of Modern Greece, that much as he 

 would shudder at the accusation of any taint of pagan- 

 ism, the ruling of the Fates is more immediately real 

 to him than divine omnipotence. Mr. Tozer confirms 

 this in his Highlands of Turkey. He says : c It is 

 rather the minor deities and those associated with 

 man's ordinary life that have escaped the brunt of 

 the storm, and returned to live in a dim twilight of 

 popular belief.' In India, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us 

 that, 'even the supreme triad of Hindu allegory, which 

 represent the almighty powers of creation, preserva- 

 tion, and destruction, have long ceased to preside 

 actively over any such corresponding distribution of 

 functions.' Like limited monarchs, they reign, but 

 do not govern. They are superseded by the ever- 

 increasing crowd of godlings whose influence is per- 



