Faunus and Picus, Bona Dea and Marica, were Etruscan or Latian divinities of the Saturnian family. Italy was also filled with many local deities, in consequence of those wonderful natural phænomena which it so abundantly exhibited, and which its early inhabitants ascribed to invisible powers. A sulphuric lake was the residence of the Nymph Albunea, and the medicinal founts of Abano were the acknowledged abodes of a beneficent genius.—“Nullus lucus sine fonte, nullus fons non sacer, propter attributos illis deos, qui fontibus præesse dicuntur(44).” All nature was thus linked by a continued chain of consecrated existence, from the God of Thunder to the simple Faun. The Vacunia and Feronia of the Sabines were naturalized by Numa, and the Vejove of Etruria presided in Rome at the general council of the twelve greater gods, long before a knowledge of the Grecian Mars or Jupiter. In all their mythology we may remark the grave and austere character of the ancient Italians(45). Their deities resembled not the obscene and vicious gods of Greece. They presided over agriculture, the rights of property, conjugal fidelity, truth and justice; and in like manner in early Rome, “Cana Fides et Vesta; Remo cum fratre Quirinus Jura dabant.” —— Dionysius of Halicarnassus particularly points out the difference between the religion of the Greeks and the Romans. The latter, he informs us, “did not admit into their creed those impious stories told by the Greeks of the castration of their gods, or of destroying their own children, of their wars, wounds, bonds, and slavery, and such like things as are not only altogether unworthy of the divine nature, but disgrace even the human. They had no wailing and lamentations for the sufferings of their gods, nor like the Greeks, any Bacchic orgies, or vigils of men and women together in the temples. And if at any time they admitted such foreign pollutions, as they did with regard to the rites of Cybele and the Idæan goddess, the ceremonies were performed under the grave inspection of Roman magistrates; nor even now does any Roman disguise himself to act the mummeries performed by the priests of Cybele(46)”. Dionysius, who refers every thing to Greece, thinks that the early Roman was just the Greek religion purified by Romulus, to whom, in fact, his country was more indebted than to Numa for its sacred institutions. In reality, however, this superior purity of rites and worship was not occasioned by any such lustration of the Greek fables, but from their being founded on Italian, and not on Grecian superstitions.