Egypt were blended with the long renown of the Nile-land, with every Egyptian custom, with the beginning and the end of life. Not less had the gods of Syria and Western Asia occupied their respective lands. These deities struck their root into the home of man, into the union of the sexes, into the loves of parent and child, of brother and sister. They had their mementos in every street of busy traffic; they watched over the Acropolis; not a fountain but laid claim to their patronage, nor a field which was fruitful but by their supposed influence. These countries had lost their political independence, but the material ease of life under the majesty of the Roman name they retained. There was a passionate love for this world’s goods, comforts, and enjoyments in the Greek, Syrian, Asiatic, Egyptian, and Libyan races, all of them more or less worn, and effete, and deeply sensualised; but their glory was this great Hellenic civilisation, with which polytheism might be termed one and the same thing. 2. When we turn to the West, the seat of the sovereign city and of the empire itself, we find that from the very beginning and through many centuries the political constitution of the city had been indissolubly blended with the worship of the Roman gods. The religion of Rome was much more than national; her polity seemed only another name for her worship. Her temples were as much a part of her political life as her forum. So far at least she had embodied in her whole structure the legend of her Etruscan teacher, wherein the dwarf Tages sprung from the soil to communicate the worship claimed by the gods.(39) Her soil and her worship were indivisible. And even after seven centuries, when the city was embracing the world in its arms, this union practically existed. Rome indeed admitted, as we have said, the gods of the conquered nations into her pantheon, but it was on the same tenure as the nations themselves shared her civic rights. Jupiter Capitolinus was a sort of suzerain not only to the gods of the Grecian Olympus, but to the dark forms of the Nile deities, to the Syrian, the Libyan, the Gallic, the Germanic, the Sarmatian Valhalla. When the greatest of her poets would express unending duration, he joins together the race of Æneas enthroned on the Capitol with the god who dwelt there: “Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet ævo, Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet, imperiumque Pater Romanus habebit.”