Roman law in the same manner was a rule of expediency, rightly or
wrongly conceived, with comparatively little tincture of religion. In
this again we probably see the effect of a fusion of tribes upon the
tribal superstitions. "Rome," it has been said, "had no mythology." This
is scarcely an overstatement; and we do not account for the fact by
saying that the Romans were unimaginative, because it is not the
creative imagination that produces a mythology, but the impression made
by the objects and forces of nature on the minds of the forefathers of
the tribe.

A more tenable explanation, at all events, is that just suggested, the
disintegration of mythologies by the mixture of tribes. A part of the
Roman religion--the worship of such abstractions as Fides, Fortuna,
Salus, Concordia, Bellona, Terminus--even looks like a product of the
intellect posterior to the decay of the mythologies, which we may be
pretty sure were physical. It is no doubt true that the formalities
which were left--hollow ceremonial, auguries, and priesthoods which were
given without scruple, like secular offices, to the most profligate men
of the world--were worse than worthless in a religious point of view.
But historians who dwell on this fail to see that the real essence of
religion, a belief in the power of duty and of righteousness, that
belief which afterwards took the more definite form of Roman Stoicism,
had been detached by the dissolution of the mythologies, and exerted its
force, such as that force was, independently of the ceremonial, the
sacred chickens, and the dissipated high priests. In this sense the
tribute paid by Polybius to the religious character of the Romans is
deserved; they had a higher sense of religious obligation than the
Greeks; they were more likely than the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or any
of their other rivals, to swear and disappoint not, though it were to
their own hindrance; and this they owed, as we conceive, not to an