preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman religious usage.

At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates,
Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:

[4] --he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical,
with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one
of his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The
hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the
child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar;
and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity
of the young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that
religion of the hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages
and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very
definite things and places--the oak of immemorial age, the rock on
the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the
shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed
involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen
Inest!--it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people
amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man
and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with
an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed
for room in their homely little shrines.

And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his golden
image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (now
about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the
world would at last find itself [5] happy, could it detach some
reluctant philosophic student from the more desirable life of
celestial contemplation, and compel him to rule it), there was a boy