were in origin--as some of them still continued to be--the independent
acts of worship of groups of agricultural households. Gradually, as the
community grew on the lines we have just seen, there grew with it a
sense of an organised state, as something more than the casual
aggregation of households or clans (_gentes_). As the feeling of union
became stronger, so did the necessity for common worship of the gods,
and the state-cult came into being primarily as the repetition on
behalf of the community as a whole of the worship which its members
performed separately in their households or as joint-worshippers in the
fields. But the conception of a state must carry with it at least two
ideas over and beyond the common needs of its members: there must be
internal organisation to secure domestic tranquillity, and--since there
will be collision with other states--external organisation for purposes
of offence and defence. Religion follows the new ideas, and in two of
the older deities of the fields develops the notions of justice and
war. Organisation ensues, and the general conceptions of state-deities
and state-ritual are made more definite and precise.

It will be at once natural and convenient that we should consider these
three departments of religion in the order that has just been
suggested--the worship of the household, the worship of the fields, the
worship of the state. But it must not be forgotten that both the
departments themselves and the evidence for them frequently overlap.
The domestic worship is not wholly distinguishable from that of the
fields, the state-cult is, as we have seen, very largely a replica of
the other two. The evidence for the domestic and agricultural cults is
in itself very scanty, and we shall frequently have to draw inferences
from their counterparts in the state. Above all, it is not to be
supposed that any hard and fast line between the three existed in the
Roman's mind; but for the purposes of analysis the distinction is