universal. To everything existing, to the man and to the tree, to
the state and to the store-room, was assigned a spirit which came
into being with it and perished along with it, the counterpart of
the natural phenomenon in the spiritual domain; to the man the male
Genius, to the woman the female Juno, to the boundary Terminus,
to the forest Silvanus, to the circling year Vertumnus, and so on
to every object after its kind. In occupations the very steps of
the process were spiritualized: thus, for example, in the prayer
for the husbandman there was invoked the spirit of fallowing, of
ploughing, of furrowing, sowing, covering-in, harrowing, and so
forth down to that of the in-bringing, up-storing, and opening of
the granaries. In like manner marriage, birth, and every other
natural event were endowed with a sacred life. The larger the
sphere embraced in the abstraction, the higher rose the god and the
reverence paid by man. Thus Jupiter and Juno are the abstractions
of manhood and womanhood; Dea Dia or Ceres, the creative power;
Minerva, the power of memory; Dea Bona, or among the Samnites
Dea Cupra, the good deity. While to the Greek everything assumed
a concrete and corporeal shape, the Roman could only make use of
abstract, completely transparent formulae; and while the Greek for
the most part threw aside the old legendary treasures of primitive
times, because they embodied the idea in too transparent a form, the
Roman could still less retain them, because the sacred conceptions
seemed to him dimmed even by the lightest veil of allegory. Not
a trace has been preserved among the Romans even of the oldest and
most generally diffused myths, such as that current among the Indians,
the Greeks, and even the Semites, regarding a great flood and its
survivor, the common ancestor of the present human race. Their
gods could not marry and beget children, like those of the Hellenes;
they did not walk about unseen among mortals; and they needed no