Of Roman religion before it was influenced by the Greeks and the Etruscans we have comparatively little knowledge. Our literary sources for that period are late and fragmentary, and consist almost wholly of the speculations of the learned. But we have preserved in fragmentary form some twenty stone calendars, dating from the early empire. These calendars are not unlike that classic work known to us all, the Old Farmer’s Almanack, in that they not only enumerate the days and the months, but also note religious festivals and great historic events. In all of them two styles of letters are employed. The larger letters in part indicate one class of religious festivals; other festivals and historical notices are inscribed in letters of smaller size. Theodor Mommsen was the first to see the meaning of this difference. He showed that the religious festivals recorded in the larger letters represented the earliest stage of Roman religion known to us.[263] Some forty-five fixed public festivals in the year’s round are thus indicated. We cannot now discover the character of a number of these, and the functions of some of the gods who belonged to that earliest stage were as obscure to the scholars of the time of Cicero as they are to us today. But we can determine the approximate date at which this earliest period of Roman religion closed, so to speak, for there is no mention in these entries of the triad of the Capitol—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. As I have just said, tradition tells us that this group was introduced by the Tarquin dynasty in the first half of the sixth century before our era; so that the date that can be set for the close of this first stage of Roman religion is somewhere about 600-550 B.C. An examination of the character of the earliest festivals shows the stage of civilization which had been attained by the Romans. Some thirteen or fourteen among those whose nature can be discovered had to do with agriculture, a few perhaps with grazing, a few others with war; certain ones were connected with the household and the cult of dead ancestors, or were the occasions on which special efforts were made to avert the baneful influences of the dead. The Romans then at this stage were a simple agricultural people, busy with their efforts to get a living from the soil with the aid of their flocks and herds, and engaged in armed conflicts with the neighbors. Their religion had little in it that showed the exercise of the imagination; it was confined rather to those elements which a life rooted in the ground, possessing no broad outlook, required. The heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, and stars, and the operations of nature were not deified; and the social relations, which later furnished many abstract divinities, as yet had no place among the divine powers. Only those things which had to do with the Roman’s daily life in his own neighborhood received his devotion.