this lore to the Etruscans, and then straightway died. His disciples
and successors taught what gods were in the habit of hurling the
lightning; how the lightning of each god might be recognized by
its colour and the quarter of the heavens whence it came; whether
the lightning boded a permanent state of things or a single event;
and in the latter case whether the event was one unalterably fixed,
or whether it could be up to a certain limit artificially postponed:
how they might convey the lightning away when it struck, or compel
the threatening lightning to strike, and various marvellous arts
of the like kind, with which there was incidentally conjoined no
small desire of pocketing fees. How deeply repugnant this jugglery
was to the Roman character is shown by the fact that, even when
people came at a later period to employ the Etruscan lore in Rome,
no attempt was made to naturalize it; during our present period
the Romans were probably still content with their own, and with
the Greek oracles.

The Etruscan religion occupied a higher level than the Roman, in
so far as it developed at least the rudiments of what was wholly
wanting among the Romans--a speculation veiled under religious
forms. Over the world and its gods there ruled the veiled gods
(-Dii involuti-), consulted by the Etruscan Jupiter himself; that
world moreover was finite, and, as it had come into being, so was
it again to pass away after the expiry of a definite period of time,
whose sections were the -saecula-. Respecting the intellectual
value which may once have belonged to this Etruscan cosmogony and
philosophy, it is difficult to form a judgment; they appear however
to have been from the very first characterized by a dull fatalism
and an insipid play upon number.