6o QUEEN'S QUARTERLY. 



It is almost entirely with this first stage that this paper is con- 

 cerned—with what the Romans loved to term "the religion of 

 Numa."* This early stage— the first, we may call it, if we are 

 speaking of Roman Religion, though in historical days we find traces 

 of a still more primitive form of religion in the shape of Magic, 

 Stone and Tree Worship— has a very characteristic list of divinities 

 who claimed the worship of the primitive Roman. It may appear 

 tedious to attempt an enumeration of these gods and to mention the 

 sphere of their influence, but without this any generalisations on 

 Roman worship would lose half their meaning. 



To start with those that are less known, there was the god 

 Rubigo. One of the commonest pests that the Latin farmer had to 

 deal with was the red mildew on the corn. Obviously some evil 

 spirit produced this, who had to be propitiated. Hence in the earliest 

 calendar of festivals we find a festival of Rubigo, the spirit of the 

 mildew, celebrated on April 25th; the ritual was the sacrifice of a 

 red dog and of a sheep by the Flamen, and the exposition of their 

 entrails on the altar of the divinity, some five miles outside of Rome. 



There was many another, closely connected with Rubigo. There 

 was Semonia, who had a general charge of the seed sown ; Seja, who 

 protected the corn before it sprouted ; Segetia, who was the god of 

 the standing crop; Nodotus, who protected the growth of the corn 

 until the knots had developed. Saturn, in later times the god of agri- 

 culture and civilisation in general, and identified with Chronos of the 

 Greek mythology, was originally the god of sowing, as we see from 

 the derivation of the word : " ab satu est dictus Saturnus," says 

 Varro, with greater accuracy than was the wont of ancient philolo- 

 gists. This festival, best known of all to us as in many ways the 

 origin of our own Christmas festivities, the Saturnalia, celebrated 

 on December 17th, commemorated the sowing of next year's crop. 



Another rustic Deity is Silvanus, the spirit of the woodland, of 



those forests that the earliest Roman had to fell before he could 



commence even the rudest agriculture. The strange thing about him 



is that he never properly became domesticated; he would never be 



induced to come and live in a temple ; he loved his freedom too well, 



and kept to the woods and the thickets. Yet for all this he consented 



(on proper entreaty) to make himself useful to the settler; he was 



Tutor finium, arvorum pecorisque deus. 

 (Hon Epod. II, 22). 



* Cic. Rep. 2, 14, 26, cp. 5, 2, 3. 



