showing that even the stories with which (alone or chiefly) the common people were acquainted bore unsuspected witness to the truth of the religion he taught. But to return to our interpretation of the "fashions and customes" of Rome as survivals of a stage of religion earlier than polytheism. A second difficulty remains. Distinguished writers on the philosophy of religion hold that polytheism is not developed out of fetichism or animism, but is primitive and underived from any earlier stage. The survivals, then, which Plutarch records, could not point to the existence of an earlier stage. Here, again, it is not for me to handle such high themes as the philosophy of religion. I am bound down to the humbler task of noting the simple fact that, until borrowed from Hellas, polytheism was unknown in Italy. This is a very bare statement—so naked as almost to amount to a literary impropriety. I must, therefore, take three sections to clothe it. II. ITALIAN GODS. That some of the great gods of Rome were but Greek gods borrowed is universally admitted (see _e.g._ Mommsen's _History of Rome_, i. 186 _ff._, or Ihne, i. 119). Even so strong a supporter of the theory of a Græco-Italian period as Roscher admits unreservedly that the mythology, worship, and the very name of Apollo were borrowed in early but still historic times (_Lexikon_, i. 446). When, then, we find Plutarch putting the question why the temples of Æsculapius and Vulcan were built outside Rome (_Romane Questions_, 94 and 47), we at once surmise that these were imported gods, whose worship was indeed sanctioned and ordained by the Roman State but was not admitted within the sacred circle of the _pomœrium_, reserved for the temples of indigenous Roman gods. In the case of Æsculapius we have historical proof that his was an imported worship; in consequence of a pestilence in Rome in B.C. 293 the god was fetched from Epidaurus, and the temple in question was erected two years afterwards.[1] We do not happen to have any similar historical record of the introduction of Vulcan's worship, but the name of the god, be it Cretan or Etruscan, is foreign.[2]