In the second and third of the strata which the Calendar offers to the
excavator, representing the ordered life of the household and afterwards
of the city, we still find much of the same indistinctness. Vesta
indeed, the spirit of the hearth-fire, becomes clearly though not
personally delineated; so too, but in a less degree, does Janus the
spirit of the doorway. Two other groups of spirits also occupy the
house; the Lares, who may have been the spirits of dead ancestors duly
buried, and the Penates or spirits of the store-chamber; both of them
becoming sufficiently clear in the popular conception to be represented
by images at a very early period. But in the round of ancient festivals,
some at least of the so-called gods, so far as we can guess at their
original nature, hardly deserve that name. Liber and Ceres seem to have
been originally general names for an ill-defined class of spirits;
Robigus is the spirit of the mildew; Consus and Ops are not
personalities, but _numina_ protecting the gathered harvest, as Saturnus
probably protected the sown seed. The Compitalia was concerned only with
the Lares Compitales, spirits of the crossways; in the Paganalia we have
but very indistinct information as to the object of worship. The
Vinalia, marking a later and more skilled agricultural process, seems on
the other hand always to have been clearly connected with Jupiter
himself.
Thus in the so-called period of Numa, the period of the earlier monarchy
and the first organization of the city-state, the religious life of the
community had become highly systematized in respect of the cult, of the
priest in charge of it, and the _ius_ which governed all the citizens in
their relation to the world of divinities. Of any real change however in
the character of these divinities, of any approach to polytheism in the
way of an increased individuality of conception, of iconic
representation, or definite temple-worship, the Calendar then drawn up
supplies no certain evidence. There may indeed have been a tendency
towards a clearer definition of _numina_, arising from the very fact of
the definite organization of prayer and sacrifice, and of the allotment
of cults to particular priesthoods or families. There may, even at that
early stage in Roman history, have been an influence at work on the
Roman mind, coming from Etruria and Greece, where polytheism found its
nourishment in works of art and mythological fancy. These are
possibilities of which we must take account, but the Calendar has
nothing positive to tell us of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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