from the fragments of these stone calendars, which have been found, and
which are themselves nineteen centuries old, we can read back another
eight or ten centuries further. By the aid of this "calendar of Numa" we
are able to assert the presence of certain deities in the Rome of this
time, and the equally important absence of others. And from the
character of the deities present and of the festivals themselves a
correct and more or less detailed picture of the religious condition of
the time may be drawn. This calendar and the list of _Indigetes_
extracted from it form the foundation for all our study of the history
of Roman religion.

The religious forms of a community are always so bound up with its
social organisation that a satisfactory knowledge of the one is
practically impossible without some knowledge of the other.
Unfortunately there is no field in Roman history where theories are so
abundant and facts so rare as in regard to the question of the early
social organisation. But without coming into conflict with any of the
rival theories we may make at least the following statements. In the
main the community was fairly uniform and homogeneous, there were no
great social extremes and no conspicuous foreign element, so that each
individual, had he stopped to analyse his social position, would have
found himself in four distinct relationships: a relationship to himself
as an individual; to his family; to the group of families which formed
his clan (_gens_); and finally to the state. We may go a step further on
safe ground and assert that the least important of these relations was
that to himself, and the most important that to his family. The unit of
early Roman social life was not the individual but the family, and in
the most primitive ideas of life after death it is the family which has
immortality, not the individual. The state is not a union of individuals
but of families. The very psychological idea of the individual seems to