+795+. The theistic scheme of the old Greek polytheistic period is the broadest and finest that the ancient polytheism produced. It recognized a divine element in all sides of human life, from the lowest to the highest; it marked out the various directions of human feeling and effort, and in its final outcome it reached the conception of a unity in the divine government of the world, and gave expression to man's best aspirations for the present and for the future. True, it gave way at last to philosophy; but it had recognized those elements of thought on which philosophy was based. The Persian and Hebrew systems expressed more definitely the idea of a divine monocracy, and lent themselves easily to the formation of a religious society, a church, but they did not escape the limitations of mere national feeling. The Greeks founded no church--they formulated universal ethical and religious conceptions, and left the development to the individual. All the great ancient religions reached a high ethical plane and a practical monotheism, but the Greek was the richest of all in the recognition of the needs of humanity. +796+. _Rome._ The Roman pantheon (if the Italian divine community can properly be called a pantheon) had not the fullness and fineness of the Greek--in accordance with the Roman genius it included only deities having special relations with the family and its work and with the state.[1370] The rich Roman development of specific gods of the home is referred to above.[1371] The old nature gods long retained their place, doubtless, in popular worship, but were gradually subordinated to and absorbed in the larger divine figures. And the great gods themselves began at an early time to be assimilated to Greek deities and to assume their functions and even their names.[1372] +797+. The most important of the nature gods are Sol, Luna, and Tellus (primitive figures that soon gave way to deities divorced from the physical sun, moon, and earth), and the patrons of agricultural work, Consus and Ops, Liber and Libera, Silvanus and Faunus. The natural features represented by these deities did not disappear entirely from the greater deities, but were purified and elevated. Anna Perenna, for example, as representative of the round of years, remained by the side of Janus, but he embodied this conception in a larger civic way.