In contemplating the Roman foundations of this period we are struck by certain indications of the activity of the _pontifices_, as distinguished from the _duoviri sacris faciundis_; i. e. the activity of that college of priests whose special charge was the Roman religion proper, and who were only indirectly concerned with foreign introductions. For example, we may note with interest a group of four agricultural deities, to whom temples were dedicated in the eight years between 272 and 264 B.C., the years, that is, of the pacification and settlement of Italy after the invasion of Pyrrhus[1504]. These deities were Consus, Tellus, Pales, and Vortumnus. Owing to the loss of Livy’s second decade we cannot be very certain of the immediate object of these foundations; but we may guess that they had a definite meaning in connexion with the events of the time, and that they were chiefly the work of the pontifical college. Less distinct perhaps, but still worth noticing, is a group of foundations in honour of deities connected with water[1505], i.e. to Tempestates, Juturna and Fons, which seem to have had some reference to the naval operations of the First Punic War. The temple of Juturna was vowed by Lutatius Catulus in the battle at the Aegates Insulae in 241 B.C.; that to the Tempestates by Cornelius Scipio, when the fleet was almost destroyed near Corsica in 259 B.C.; and that of Fons in the Corsican war in 231 B.C. It was characteristic of the Roman mind, and of the pontifical methods, thus to connect the spirits of the springs in Rome with those of the sea and its tempests. It is at this time also that we notice the appearance of abstractions resolved into deities, such as Salus, Spes, Fides, Honos et Virtus, Concordia, and Mens. These, as I have said elsewhere[1506], are not genuine old Roman cults, but pontifical creations in the spirit of the old Roman impersonal and daemonic ideas of divine agency. In connexion with these I may mention the conviction which has grown upon me in the course of these investigations, that it was in this reactionary period, as we may call it, that the pontifices drew up that extraordinary list of deities, classified according to their functions in relation to man and his activity and suffering, which we know as the _Indigitamenta_. This seems to me characteristic of the period, inasmuch as it was probably based on the old Roman ideas of divine agency, now systematized by something like scientific terminology and ordered classification. It is the old national belief in the ubiquity of the world of spirits, now edited and organized by skilled legal theologians. But it would be beyond the province of this work to venture farther into this tangled question.