parricide to the spirits of
his dead ancestors, the husband who sells his wife to the gods of the
underworld, the man who removes his neighbour's landmark to Terminus,
the stealer of corn to Ceres. All these persons shall be _sacri_: they
have offended against the gods and the gods will see to their
punishment. But these are old-world notions which soon passed into the
background and the state took over the punishment of such offenders in
the ordinary course of law. Nor again in the prayers of men to gods is
there a trace of a petition for moral blessings: the magistrate prays
for the success and prosperity of the state, the farmer for the
fertility of his crops and herds, even the private individual, who
suspends his votive-tablet in the temple, pays his due for health or
commercial success vouchsafed to himself or his relations. 'Men call
Iuppiter greatest and best,' says Cicero, 'because he makes us not just
or temperate or wise, but sound and healthy and rich and wealthy.'
Still less, until we come to the moralists of the Empire, is there any
sense of that immediate and personal relation of the individual to a
higher being, which is really in religion, far more than commandments
and ordinances, the mainspring and safeguard of morality: even the
conception of the Genius, the 'nearest' perhaps of all unseen powers,
had nothing of this feeling in it, and it may be significant that, just
because of his nearness to man, the Genius never quite attained to
god-head. As far as direct relation is concerned, religion and morality
were to the Roman two independent spheres with a very small point of
contact.

Nor even in its indirect influence does the formal observance of the
Roman worship seem likely at first sight to have done much for personal
or national morality. Based upon fear, stereotyped in the form of a
legal relationship, _religio_--'the bounden obligation'--made, no
doubt, for a kind of conscientiousness in its adherents, but a cold
conscientiousness, devoid of emotion and incapable of expanding itself
to include other spheres or prompt to a similar scrupulousness in other
relations. The rigid and constant distinction of sacred and profane
would incline the Roman to fulfil the routine of his religious duty
and then turn, almost with a sigh of relief, to the occupations of
normal life, carrying with him nothing more than the sense of a burden
laid aside and a pledge of external prosperity. Even the religious act
it