The Roman father is the Capitoline Jupiter. I am not a king; the only king of the Romans is Jupiter, said the most royal of the race, and the founder of her empire, when, seeing all prostrate at his feet, he put away reluctantly the diadem offered by his creature. Thus even he who had seized the reality of power, who would have omens when he pleased, and whose will was his law, left the crown on the head of Jupiter. In Rome, all through her history “piety and patriotism were the same feeling.”(40) When her empire became world-wide, this sort of devotion did not cease. Rome had long been deified; and the double import of her name(41) expressed strength against the foe without, and nourishment to the child within. She was at once a warrior-goddess clothed in mail to meet the enemy, and a mother offering her bosom to her citizens clustered around her. And so in her new constitution, adapted for the world, her emperor too was deified, as the first of her children, her living representative, the embodiment of her force and love, the visible wielder of her unseen power. All that is sacred in home and country to us the Roman signified when he swore by the genius of the emperor. Nothing could be more tolerant than this polytheism, if the innovation extended only to the borrowing or creating a new divinity, to reforming a rite or a ceremony,(42) or to suchlike modifications of worship which admitted that on which it rested; but nothing more intolerant than the same polytheism when the worship itself was attacked. A movement against the Capitoline Jupiter would be not only sacrilege but high treason, and the refusal to call to witness the emperor’s genius was in fact to deny his imperial authority. The worship of the gods was as much identified with the empire of Rome in the West as with the civilisation of Greece throughout the East.