Gratitude was not a prominent characteristic of the Roman, but I have already remarked on the presence of it in the practice of the _votum_, and there is at least some evidence that it was recognised as due to benignant deities as well as human beings.[525] In public life, throughout Roman history, the forms of religious rites were maintained on all important occasions. When Varro wrote a little manual of Senatorial procedure for the benefit of the inexperienced Pompeius when consul in 70 B.C., he was careful to mention the preliminary sacrifice and _auspicatio_, performed by the presiding magistrate, who also had to see that the business _de rebus divinis_ came first on the paper of agenda.[526] At one time every speaker invoked the gods at the beginning of his oration, as well indeed he might in a situation so unusual and trying for a Roman before the days of Greek education; and the earliest speeches preserved in the literary age, _e.g._ those of Cato and the Gracchi, retained the religious exordium.[527] We have a trace of the Gracchan practice in a famous passage at the end of the work called _Rhetorica ad Herennium_ of _circ._ 82 B.C., where the death of Ti. Gracchus is graphically described.[528] But there is no need to multiply examples of public religious formalism on occasions of all kinds, on entering on an office, founding a colony, leaving Rome for a provincia, and so on; some of them I have already mentioned, others are familiar to all classical students. So let us not hesitate for a moment to give this people credit for their religiousness. True, their neighbours, Greeks like Polybius, approved of it only with an ironical smile on their lips, as we may smile at the devoted formalism of extreme Catholic or Protestant, while we secretly--if we have some sympathy with strangely varying human nature--admire the confidence and regularity that we cannot ourselves claim. At the moment where I have thus paused before beginning my second story, at the end, that is, of the regal period, I believe that this religious system, though perhaps beginning to harden, still meant a profound belief in the Power thus manifested in many forms, and an ardent and effective desire to be in right relation to it. I believe that it contained the germ of a living and fruitful growth; but that growth was at this very moment arrested by the beginning of a process of which I shall have much to say in the next two or three lectures.