The general notion of the exactness of ritual will perhaps become clearer when we come to examine some of the festivals in detail, but it is of extreme importance for the understanding of the Roman religious attitude, to think of it from the first as an essential part in the expression of the relation of man to god. =4. Directness of Relation--Functions of Priests.=--In contrast to all this precision of ritual, which tends almost to alienate humanity from deity, we may turn to another hardly less prominent feature of the Roman religion--the immediateness of relation between the god and his worshippers. Not only may the individual at any time approach the altar of the god with his prayer or thank-offering, but in every community of persons its religious representative is its natural head. In the family the head of the household (_pater familias_) is also the priest and he is responsible for conducting the religious worship of the whole house, free and slave alike: to his wife and daughters he leaves the ceremonial connected with the hearth (_Vesta_) and the deities of the store-cupboard (_Penates_), and to his bailiff the sacrifice to the powers who protect his fields (_Lares_), but the other acts of worship at home and in the fields he conducts himself, and his sons act as his acolytes. Once a year he meets with his neighbours at the boundaries of their properties and celebrates the common worship over the boundary-stones. So in[4] the larger outgrowth of the family, the _gens_, which consisted of all persons with the same surname (_nomen_, not _cognomen_), the gentile _sacra_ are in the hands of the more wealthy members who are regarded as its heads; we have the curious instance of Clodius even after his adoption into another family, providing for the worship of the _gens Clodia_ in his own house, and we may remember Virgil's picture of the founders of the _gentes_ of the Potitii and the Pinarii performing the sacrifice to Hercules at the _ara maxima_, which was the traditional privilege of their houses. When societies (_sodalitates_) are formed for religious purposes they elect their own _magistri_ to be their religious representatives, as we see in the case of the Salii and the Luperci. Finally, in the great community of the state the king is priest, and with that exactness of parallelism of which the Roman was so fond, he--like the _pater familias_--leaves the worship of Vesta in the hands of his 'daughters,' the Vestal virgins. And so, when the Republic is instituted, a special official, the _rex sacrorum_, inherits the king's ritual duties, while the superintendence of the Vestals passes to his representative in the matter of religious law, the _pontifex maximus_, whose official residence is always the _regia_, Numa's palace. The state is but the enlarged household and the head of the state is its religious representative.