The Religious Experience of the Roman People: From the Earliest Times to the Age of AugustusFowler, W. Warde (William Warde)
Religion
The Religious Experience of the Roman People: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus
Fowler, W. Warde (William Warde)
Cults -- Rome; Rome -- Religion
The list of foundations also points to other tendencies and experiences
of the time. We might guess that there was some attempt, with the aid of
pontifical skill, to encourage agriculture or give it a fresh start
after the invasion of Pyrrhus; for between 272 and 264, the years of the
pacification of Italy, we find temples built to four agricultural
deities, three indigenous Roman ones, Consus, Tellus, Pales, and one
Etruscan garden god, Vertumnus.[587] Then we have a group of foundations
in honour of deities connected with water--Juturna, Fons, Tempestates,
which seem to have some reference to the naval activity of the first
Punic war; they all fall between 259 and 241 B.C.[588] Lastly, we notice
a fresh accession of deified abstractions,--Salus (an old deity in a new
form), Spes, Honos et Virtus, Concordia, and Mens.[589] I am glad to
find that the latest investigator of these religious abstractions is at
one with me in believing that they simply mark a developed stage in the
religious bent of the earliest Roman. If the old Romans had the habit of
spiritualising a great variety of material objects, in other words, if
they were in an advanced animistic stage, there seems to be no reason
why they should not have begun to spiritualise mental concepts also (for
which they had words, as for the material objects), even at a very early
period. The whole psychological aspect of such abstractions is most
interesting, but I must pass it over here, merely suggesting that each
of these abstractions was doubtless deified for some particular reason,
under the direction, or with the sanction, of the pontifices.[590]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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