66 QUEEN'S QUARTERLY. 



yan stock? These questions are not easy to answer. Our chief dif- 

 ficulty is that we cannot to-day get with any precision at this religion 

 at any given period ; what I have loosely called early Roman religion 

 represents the general stage of Animism held in common with the 

 rest of the Aryan stock with traces of all the minor stages of de- 

 velopment and spread over a long period. It is clear that the Romans 

 must have passed through the pastoral stage and therefore at one 

 time given great prominence to the spirits connected with hunting 

 and herding, and of these divinities we find some traces existing at 

 the period I am attempting to discuss. But at the time at which we 

 can first catch a glimpse of the Roman, and for centuries afterwards,, 

 he is essentially an agriculturalist, worshipping especially those 

 spirits connected with the soil and therefore tending to neglect those 

 that he used to worship in his pastoral state. 



On the whole, then, this early religion, as far as we find clear 

 traces of it, is that of the latest form of Animism, that belonging to 

 an agricultural state of society, and I am therefore tempted, par- 

 ticularly on historical grounds, to regard this latter stage as the time 

 when Roman religion develops along its own lines. 



But we do find traces of early forms of worship, to be assigned 

 to the time when Greek and Roman were one. We find survivals 

 of magic, as when we find puppets of straw thrown into the Tiber 

 as a rain charm. So we find sacred trees — the fig tree in the Campus 

 Martius and the " ficus Ruminalis " ; and, in the case of animals, the 

 wolf and woodpecker sacred to Mars, probably remnants of Totem- 

 ism, though in all these cases the later Roman invented' aetjological 

 legends, representing, for instance, " ficus Ruminalis," as the tree 

 under which Romulus and Remus were suckled by the wolf. 



There is a further most interesting question. Given this general 

 stage of animism through which all religions have passed, what are 

 the peculiarities of development due to the Romans themselves ? To 

 what extent did the character of the nation have a modifying inflence 

 on their view of their divinities? The question is easier when we 

 apply it to the relation between men and their gods and still easier 

 when asked of the Roman ritual and ceremonial, but I think that 

 one may venture to assert that the peculiar development by the Ro- 

 mans themselves in their conception of the spirits shows itself in 

 three ways, which I shall do no more than hint at. 



(1) The vast emphasis placed on those spirits who are con- 

 nected with agriculture in its every form, from the clearing of the 

 primaeval forest to the gathering in of the harvest and its safe stor- 



