In one sense, Rome has diffused religion through the world, as she has diffused civilization, as she has founded the idea of a central government, extending itself over a considerable part of the world. But even as the civilization which Rome has diffused has not been the small, narrow, austere culture of ancient Latium, but in fact the grand and large civilization which Greece created, so the religion to which she definitely lent her support was not the niggardly superstition which was sufficient to the rude and primitive inhabitants of the Palatine: it was Judaism, that is to say, in fact, the religion which Rome scorned and hated most, that which two or three times she believed herself to have finally vanquished to the profit of her own national worship. This ancient religion of Latium, which contented a race endowed with narrow intellectual wants and morals, among which customs and social rank almost held the place of a religion during some centuries, was a sufficiently despicable thing. As M. Boissier has perfectly proved, a more false conception of the divinity was never seen. In the Roman worship, as in most of the ancient Italiote worships, prayer was a magic formula, acting by its own virtue, independent of the moral dispositions of him who prayed. People prayed only for a selfish end. There exist some registers called _indigitamenta_, containing lists of the gods who supply all the wants of men; thus there was no need of being deceived. If the god was not addressed by his true name, by that under which it pleased him to be invoked, he was capable of misapprehension, or of interpreting capriciously. Now these gods, who are in some degree the forces of the world, are innumerable. There was a little god who made the infant utter his first cry (_Vaticanus_); there was another who presided over his first word (_Fabulinus_); another who taught the baby to eat (_Educa_); another who taught him to drink (_Potina_); another who made him keep quiet in his cradle (_Cuba_). In truth, the good wife of Petronius was right, when, in speaking of the Campagna, she said, "This country is so peopled with divinities, that it is easier to find a god than a man." Besides these, there were unending series of allegories, or deified abstractions, Fear, the Cough, Fever, Manly Fortune, Patrician Chastity, Plebeian Chastity, the Security of the Age, the Genius of the Customs (or of the _octroi_), and above all (listen, that one who, to say the truth, was the great god of Rome), the Safety of the Roman People. It was a civil religion in the full force of the term. It was essentially the religion of the State. There was no priesthood distinct from the functions of the State: the State was the veritable god of Rome. The father had there the right of life and death over his son; but if this son had the least function, and the father met him in his path, he descended from his horse, and bent himself before him.