The "fashions and customes of Rome," which prompted Plutarch's questions, are directly or indirectly associated with the worship of the gods, while the solutions which he suggests contain occasionally myths. It is not, however, all Roman gods, cults, and myths that are discussed by Plutarch: he limits himself, on the whole, to those which are purely Roman, or rather purely Italian. This limitation is not accidental, and it is significant. It does not indeed appear that Plutarch designed to confine himself thus: the fact seems rather to be that, long before his time, the Romans had borrowed the myths, the ritual, and the gods of Greece, and that Plutarch, as a Greek, found nothing strange or unintelligible in the resemblances which the Roman ritual of his day bore to the religion of his native land. It was the points of difference which caught his attention. And here we must note a further limitation of the subject of the _Romane Questions_ and of this Introduction. Surprise and inquiry are excited not by the familiar, but by the unusual; so Plutarch's attention was arrested not by customs which, though purely Italian, were universal in Italy, _e.g._, the practice of covering the head during worship, but by fashions for which he could find no analogy or parallel in the stage of religion with which alone he was acquainted. In such isolated customs, out of harmony with their surroundings, modern science sees "survivals" from an earlier stage of culture; and it is as survivals that they will be treated in this Introduction. Now, the stage of religion with which Plutarch was familiar, and in which he could find no analogies for those "fashions and customes," was polytheism; and if those practices are survivals, they must be survivals from a stage of religion earlier than polytheism.