But, as I have hinted in the course of this sketch more than once, the answer to this problem, as well as the key to the general understanding of the Roman religion, is to be found in the worship of the household. If we knew more of it, we should see more clearly where religion and morality joined hands, but we know enough to give us a clue. There not only are the principal events of life, birth, adolescence, marriage, attended by their religious sanction, but in the ordinary course of the daily round the divine presence and the dependence of man are continually emphasised. The gods are given their portion of the family meal, the sanctified dead are recalled to take their share of the family blessings. The result was not merely an approach--collectively, not individually--to that sense of the nearness of the unseen, which has so great an effect on the actions of the living, but a very strong bond of family union which lay at the root of the life of the state. It would be difficult to find a clearer expression of the notion than in the fact that the same word _pietas_, which expresses the due fulfilment of man's duty to god, is also the ideal of the relations of the members of a household: filial piety was, in fact, but another aspect of that rightness of relation, which reveals itself in the worship of the gods. No doubt that, in the city-life of later periods, this ideal broke down on both sides: household worship was neglected and family life became less dutiful. But it was still, especially in the country, the true backbone of Roman society, and no one can read the opening odes of Horace's third book without feeling the strength of Augustus' appeal to it.