The personality of the Greek gods was not so sharply individualized as the myths we happen to know would indicate, but the gods were persons. That is, during the act of prayer and sacrifice there was conjured up in the mind of the worshiper a definite anthropomorphic figure, who dealt with him somewhat as a flesh and blood man would do. But what was present in a Roman’s mind in very early times—those of the kingdom and the early republic—was probably not at all like this. The name of his deity was often an abstraction, and even when this was not verbally the case, the idea was an abstract one. And this abstraction had so little plastic form that he was scarcely certain of the being’s sex to which he addressed words of very real supplication, and wholly uncertain what, if any, concrete manifestation the god might make of his presence.[37] But it will be well to understand that this abstraction, which the Roman knew as Salus, or Fortuna, or Victoria, was not a philosophic achievement. It was not a Platonic “idea.” No one could doubt the fact that in times of danger safety was often attained. The means of attainment seemed frequently due to chance; that is, to the working of unintelligible forces. It was to evoke these forces and set them in operation that the Roman ritual was addressed, and whether these forces acted of their own mere motion, or whether the formularies contained potent spells, which compelled their activity, was not really of moment. That was the nature of the “abstraction” which such words as Fides, Concordia, and the rest signified to Roman minds. In the early days a great deal of the religious practice was borrowed from the Etruscan neighbors, conquerors and subjects of Rome. The Etruscans, as far as anything can be said definitely about them, were especial adepts in all the arts by which the aid of deities, however conceived, could be secured. How much of actual religious teaching they gave the Romans, that is, how far they actually influenced and trained the emotions which the sense of being surrounded by powerful and unaccountable forces must excite, is not yet determinable. But they gave the Romans, or increased among them, the belief in the efficacy of formulas, whether of the spoken word or of action.