And what a motley crowd of gods they were on whose caprice or indifference he pours his vials of anger and contempt! The tolerant pantheon of Rome gave welcome to any foreign deity with respectable credentials; to Cybele, the Great Mother, imported in the shape of a rough-hewn stone with pomp and rejoicings from Phrygia 204 B. C.; to Isis, welcomed from Egypt; to Herakles, Demeter, Asklepios, and many another god from Greece. But these were dismissed from a man's thought when the prayer or sacrifice to them had been offered at the due season. They had less influence on the Roman's life than the crowd of native godlings who were thinly disguised fetiches, and who controlled every action of the day. For the minor gods survive the changes in the pantheon of every race. Of the Greek peasant of to-day Mr. Rennel Rodd testifies, in his Custom and Lore of Modern Greece, that much as he would shudder at the accusation of any taint of paganism, the ruling of the Fates is more immediately real to him than divine omnipotence. Mr. Tozer confirms this in his Highlands of Turkey. He says: "It is rather the minor deities and those associated with man's ordinary life that have escaped the brunt of the storm, and returned to live in a dim twilight of popular belief." In India, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us that, "even the supreme triad of Hindu allegory, which represents the almighty powers of creation, preservation, and destruction, have long ceased to preside actively over any such corresponding distribution of functions." Like limited monarchs, they reign, but do not govern. They are superseded by the ever-increasing crowd of godlings whose influence is personal and special, as shown by Mr. Crooke in his instructive Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India. The old Roman catalogue of spiritual beings, abstractions as they were, who guarded life in minute detail, is a long one. From the _indigitamenta_, as such lists are called, we learn that no less than forty-three were concerned with the actions of a child. When the farmer asked Mother Earth for a good harvest, the prayer would not avail unless he also invoked "the spirit of breaking up the land and the spirit of ploughing it crosswise; the spirit of furrowing and the spirit of ploughing in the seed; and the spirit of harrowing; the spirit of weeding and the spirit of reaping; the spirit of carrying corn to the barn; and the spirit of bringing it out again." The country, moreover, swarmed with Chaldæan astrologers and casters of nativities; with Etruscan haruspices full of "childish lightning-lore," who foretold events from the entrails of sacrificed animals; while in competition with these there was the State-supported college of augurs to divine the will of the gods by the cries and direction of the flight of birds. Well might the satirist of such a time say that the "place was so densely populated with gods as to leave hardly room for the men."