parallel with those of other primitive religions, but more especially
we must try to note what is characteristically Roman alike in custom
and ritual and in the motives and spirit which prompted them.




CHAPTER II

THE 'ANTECEDENTS' OF ROMAN RELIGION


In every early religion there will of course be found, apart from
external influence, traces of its own internal development, of stages
by which it must have advanced from a mass of vague and primitive
belief and custom to the organised worship of a civilised community.
The religion of Rome is no exception to this rule; we can detect in its
later practice evidences of primitive notions and habits which it had
in common with other semi-barbarous peoples, and we shall see that the
leading idea in its theology is but a characteristically Roman
development of a marked feature in most early religions.

=1. Magic.=--Anthropology has taught us that in many primitive
societies religion--a sense of man's dependence on a power higher than
himself--is preceded by a stage of magic--a belief in man's own power
to influence by occult means the action of the world around him. That
the ancestors of the Roman community passed through this stage seems
clear, and in surviving religious practice we may discover evidence of
such magic in various forms. There is, for instance, what anthropology
describes as 'sympathetic magic'--the attempt to influence the powers