Although we cannot accept as actual history the particulars given by Dionysius Halicarnassensis respecting the manner in which Romulus established the principles of Roman religious and political administration, considerable value may be conceded to such an account, because it is calculated to explain, from the writer’s point of view, the existence of certain actual characteristics of Roman civic and sacred polity.[34] Romulus is recorded as subjecting Religion to the selective power of reason and good taste. Reason decides what it is becoming for the Divine Nature to be, and everything inconsistent with this salutary notion is rigidly excluded from the State Religion. Romulus teaches the Romans that the gods are good, and that their goodness is the cause of man’s happiness and progress; he instructs them in Temperance and Justice, as the bases of civic concord, and of the advantages resulting therefrom; he inculcates military Fortitude as the best means of securing the undisturbed practice of the other virtues, and the social blessings springing from such practice; and he concludes that Virtue is not a matter of chance, or the result of supernatural inspirations, but the product of reasonable laws when zealously and faithfully carried into practice by the citizens. Reason is here clearly represented as the lawgiver of Religion, and the cause and origin of the practical virtues. Dionysius may, as we have suggested, be endeavouring to explain, by an _ex post facto_ piece of history, the existence of certain characteristics of the Roman constitution as exhibited in its later developments, but these features are not the less evident and essential parts of the system because we cannot accept any particular account of the time and manner in which they were incorporated with it. Further, the Roman administrative authority deliberately repressed the exhibition of religious enthusiasm as dangerous to the stability of the Republic; the State could brook no rival in her affections: the devotion of Regulus[35] and the suppression of the Bacchanalia bear equal witness to a firm insistence on the control of personal emotion as a cardinal principle of Roman administration.[36] The apparently paradoxical and casuistical position assigned in the “De Natura Deorum” to Cotta, who believes in the national religion as a Roman while denying it as a philosopher, is sufficiently lucid and rational when regarded in the light of the religious administration of Rome, which had never claimed to enslave the intelligences of men, so long as that elaborate ritual, with which the safety of the State was involved, received due and reverential attention.[37]