Was there any transmutation of those ideas into religious beliefs which might help State or individual in the changes and chances of this mortal life? The answer to this question is a most emphatic negative. What spiritual help they needed they sought and obtained in new and foreign rites; their own solemn processions were sights to see and nothing more. Lustratio never really, in pagan Italy, developed an ethical meaning, as catharsis did to some extent in Greece.[128] And the explanation of this is a simple one; at a very early stage the State overpowered the individual, and the State religion obliterated all the germs of an individual religious conscience. Even in the cult of Jupiter, where, if anywhere, we might look for an ethical significance, this was so; ‘we do not pray to Jupiter,’ says Cicero, ‘to make us good, but to give us material benefits.’[129] But, meaningless as they were, the stately processions remained, and could be watched with pride by the patriotic Roman all through the period of the Empire. Then the Roman Church, with characteristic adroitness, adapted them to its own ritual, and gave them a new meaning; and the Catholic priest still leads his flock round the fields with the prayers of the Litania major in Rogation week, not only beating the bounds as we still do in Oxford on Ascension Day, but begging a blessing on the crops and herds, and deprecating the anger of the Almighty. OXFORD PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, M.A. PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY FOOTNOTES: [115] _Aen._ i. 607 foll. Cp. _Aen._ iii. 429-- Praestat Trinacrii metas lustrare Pachyni Cessantem, longos et circumflectere cursus: where the slow movement and circuitous course of a _lustratio_ are in the poet’s mind. [116] Marquardt, _Staatsverwaltung_, iii. p. 175. Cp. Serv. _Aen._ iii. 67, and Virg. _Aen._ vi. 229. [117] Iron was taboo in the grove of Dea Dia: but the Fratres Arvales had a system of _piacula_ enabling them to use it for pruning, &c., when necessary.--Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ 22. [118] Serv. _Aen._ i. 136, x. 32, xi. 842. [119] Cato R. R. 139, 140; Henzen, _Acta Fratr. Arv._ 136 foll.: cp. Ovid, _Fasti_ iv. 749 foll. [120] This is my own inference from the language of Cato in chapters 83 and 141. When the cattle are in the forest, there is a special formula of prayer for them: see ch. 83. The word _ager_ could hardly, I think, be taken as including the woodland in which the flocks fed in summer; and in May, when the _lustratio agri_ took place, they would be already off the winter pasture. In the formula for this _lustratio_ (141) Cato does include the _pastores_ and _pecua_; but they are not the most conspicuous objects of the prayer, and I am inclined to think that they are mentioned only as belonging to the farm, though not at the moment within its sacred boundary.