Produced by Turgut Dincer, Ted Garvin and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE OF THE ROMAN PEOPLE FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE AGE OF AUGUSTUS THE GIFFORD LECTURES FOR 1909-10 DELIVERED IN EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY BY W. WARDE FOWLER, M.A. FELLOW AND LATE SUB-RECTOR OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD HON. D.LITT. UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER AUTHOR OF 'THE ROMAN FESTIVALS OF THE PERIOD OF THE REPUBLIC,' ETC. "Sanctos ausus recludere fontes" MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1911 TO PROFESSOR W.R. HARDIE AND MY MANY OTHER KIND FRIENDS AND FRIENDLY HEARERS IN EDINBURGH PREFACE Lord Gifford in founding his lectureship directed that the lectures should be public and popular, _i.e._ not restricted to members of a University. Accordingly in lecturing I endeavoured to make myself intelligible to a general audience by avoiding much technical discussion and controversial matter, and by keeping to the plan of describing in outline the development and decay of the religion of the Roman City-state. And on the whole I have thought it better to keep to this principle in publishing the lectures; they are printed for the most part much as they were delivered, and without footnotes, but at the end of each lecture students of the subject will find the notes referred to by the numbers in the text, containing such further information or discussion as has seemed desirable. My model in this method has been the admirable lectures of Prof. Cumont on "les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain." I wish to make two remarks about the subject-matter of the lectures. First, the idea running through them is that the primitive religious (or magico-religious) instinct, which was the germ of the religion of the historical Romans, was gradually atrophied by over-elaboration of ritual, but showed itself again in strange forms from the period of the Punic wars onwards. For this religious instinct I have used the Latin word _religio_, as I have explained in the _Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions_, vol. ii. p. 169 foll. I am, however, well aware that some scholars take a different view of the original meaning of this famous word, which has been much discussed since I formed my plan of lecturing. But I do not think that those who differ from me on this point will find that my general argument is seriously affected one way or another by my use of the word.