[M. Boissier (_La religion romaine_, i, 2) decided that the Romans were religiously ruled more by fear than hope, and that their worship consisted chiefly of "timid supplications and rigorous expiations." Mommsen, on the other hand (ch. xii, p. 191), pronounces that "the Latin religion was grounded mainly on man's enjoyment of earthly pleasures." Both statements would be equally true of all ancient religions. Compare M. Boissier's later remarks, pp. 21-25, 26, 28, wherein he contradicts himself as does Mommsen.] As regards, again, the failure of the early Latin pantheon to stimulate sculpture and poetry, it has to be noticed that sculpture and poetry tended to make as well as to be made by mythology in Greece. The argument against the Latin pantheon is in fact an argument in a circle. If the Latin Gods were not "associated with any definite bodily shapes" (parentage, marriage, and offspring they certainly _had_), it could only be when and _because_ they were not yet sculptured. Greek Gods before they were sculptured would be conceived just as variably. Were _they_ then thought of as formless? The proposition is strictly inconceivable. Latin Gods must have been imagined very much as were and are those of other barbarous races, who are notoriously thought of as having sex, form, and passions. Greek mythology simply reached the art stage sooner. The cults of Hellas did not start with a mythology full-blown, thereby creating the arts; the mythology grew step by step with and in the arts, in a continuous mutual reaction; many Greek myths being really tales framed to explain the art-figures of other mythologies, Egyptian and Asiatic. Thus the primitive bareness of the Latin mythology signifies not a natural saplessness which could give no increase to art, but (1) loss of lore and (2) a lack of the artistic and literary factors which record and stimulate higher mythologic growth.