A determined effort was made from time to time by the patriotic Romans to destroy Hellenic influence and to preserve in their original purity early Roman forms of worship. But all attempts were futile. The average Roman citizen, though practical and unimaginative, was still enamored of the beautiful myths and exquisite statues of the Greek gods. And it was only by Hellenizing their own deities that they could bring themselves into touch and communion with the Hellenic spirit. The æsthetical and fascinating influence of the Greek language, literature and sculpture, was overwhelming. "At bottom, the Roman religion was based only on two ideas--the might of the gods who were friendly to Rome, and the power of the ceremonies over the gods. How could a religion, so poverty-stricken of thought, with its troops of phantom gods, beingless shadows and deified abstractions, remain unscathed and unaltered when it came in contact with the profusion of the Greek religion, with its circle of gods, so full of life, so thoroughly anthropomorphised, so deeply interwoven into everything human?"[135] Not only from Greece but from every conquered country, strange gods were brought into Italy and placed in the Roman pantheon. When a foreign city was besieged and captured, the Romans, after a preliminary ceremony, invited the native gods to leave their temples and go to Rome where, they were assured, they would have much grander altars and would receive a more enthusiastic worship. It was a religious belief of the ancient masters of the world that gods could be enticed from their allegiance and induced to emigrate. In their foreign wars, the Romans frequently kept the names of their own gods secret to prevent the enemy from bribing them. The gods at Rome increased in number just in proportion that the empire expanded. The admission of foreign territory brought with it the introduction of strange gods into the Roman worship. When the Romans needed a new god and could not find a foreign one that pleased them, they deliberately manufactured a special deity for the occasion. In the breaking up and multiplication of the god-idea, they excelled all the nations of antiquity. It was the duty of the pontiffs to manufacture a divinity whenever an emergency arose and one was needed. The god-casting business was a regular employment of the Decemviri and the Quindecemviri; and a perusal of the pages of Roman history reveals these god-makers actively engaged in their workshops making some new deity to meet some new development in Roman life.