popular expression for a godsend. The other fact of interest in this
connection is that, inasmuch as ancestors were worshipped only _en
masse_ and not as individuals, that process could not take place in
Roman religion which is so familiar in many other religions, namely that
the great gods of the state should some of them have been originally
ancestors whose greatness during life had produced a corresponding
emphasis in their worship after death, so that ultimately they were
promoted from the ranks of the deified dead into the select Olympus of
individual gods. This has been a favourite theory of the making of a god
from the time of Euhemerus down to Herbert Spencer. There are religions
in which it is true for certain of the major gods, but there are no
traces of the process in Roman religion, and the reason is obvious in
view of the peculiar character of ancestor worship in Rome.

We have now seen the principal elements which went to make up the family
religion and that part of the state religion which was an enlargement
and an imitation of the family religion. But even in the most primitive
times a Roman's life was not bounded by his own hut and the phenomenon
of death. There was work to be done in life, a living to be gained, and
here, as everywhere, there were hosts of unseen powers who must be
propitiated. His religion was not only coincident with every phase of
private life, it was also closely related to the specific occupations
and interests of the people, and just as the interests of the community,
its means of livelihood, were agriculture and stock-raising, so the gods
were those of the crops and the herds. Some years ago the late Professor
Mommsen succeeded in extracting from the existing stone calendars a list
of the religious festivals of the old Roman year, and also in proving
that this list of festivals was complete in its present condition at a
time before the city of Rome was surrounded by the wall which Servius
Tullius built, and that it therefore goes back to the old kingdom, the