There is, however, obvious reason to believe that among the Italian peoples there was at one time a great deal more of myth than has survived.[403] What is preserved is mainly fragments of the mythology of one set of tribes, and that in only a slightly developed form. All the other Italic peoples had been subdued by the Romans before any of them had come into the general use of letters;[404] and instead of being put in a position to develop their own myths and cults, or to co-ordinate the former in the Greek fashion, they were absorbed in the Roman system, which took their Gods to its pantheon, and at the same time imposed on them those of Rome. Much of their mythic lore would thus perish, for the literate Romans had not been concerned to cultivate even their own. Early Roman life being divided between war and agriculture, and there being no free literary class to concern itself with the embellishment of the myths, there subsisted only the simple myths and rituals of agriculture and folklore, the numerous list of personified functions connected with all the phases of life, and the customary ceremonial of augury and invocation in war. The augurs and pontifices were the public men and statesmen, and they made religion a State function. What occult lore there was they made a class monopoly--an effectual preventive in itself of a Hellenic development of myth. Apart from the special sets or colleges of priests there were specially appointed colleges of religio-archæological specialists--first, the six augurs and the five _pontifices_, then the _duoviri sacris faciundis_, afterwards increased to ten and to fifteen, who collected Greek oracles and saw to the Sibylline books; later the twenty _fetiales_ or heralds, and so on. "These colleges have been often, but erroneously, confounded with the priesthoods. The priesthoods were charged with the worship of a specific divinity; the skilled colleges, on the other hand, were charged with the preservation of traditional rules regarding the more general religious observances.... These close corporations supplying their own vacancies, of course from the ranks of the burgesses, became in this way the depositaries of skilled arts and sciences."[405]