fact that the same word _pietas_, which expresses the due
fulfilment of man's duty to god, is also the ideal of the relations of
the members of a household: filial piety was, in fact, but another
aspect of that rightness of relation, which reveals itself in the
worship of the gods. No doubt that, in the city-life of later periods,
this ideal broke down on both sides: household worship was neglected
and family life became less dutiful. But it was still, especially in
the country, the true backbone of Roman society, and no one can read
the opening odes of Horace's third book without feeling the strength of
Augustus' appeal to it.

And if we translate this, as we have learned to do, into terms of the
state, we can get some idea of what the Romans meant by their debt to
their religion. As the household was bound together by the tie of
common worship, as in the intermediate stage the clan, severed
politically and socially, yet felt itself reunited in the gentile
rites, so too the state was welded into a whole by the regularly
recurring annual festivals and the assurance of the divine sanction on
its undertakings. It might be that in the course of time these rites
lost their meaning and the community no longer by personal presence
expressed its service to the gods, but the cult stood there still, as
the type of Rome's union to the higher powers and a guarantee of their
assistance against all foes: the religion of Rome was, as it has been
said, the sanctification of patriotism--the Roman citizen's highest
moral ideal. It has been remarked, perhaps with partial truth, that the
religion of the _AEneid_--in many ways a summary of Roman thought and
feeling--is the belief in the _fata Romae_ and their fulfilment. The
very impersonality of this conception makes it a good picture of what
religion was in the Roman state. It was not, as with the Jews, a strong
conviction of the rightness of their own belief and a certainty that
their divine protectors must triumph over those of other nations, but a
feeling of the constant presence of some spirits, who, 'if haply they
might find them,' would, on the payment of their due, bear their part
in the great progress of right and justice and empire on which Rome
must march to her victory. It was the duty of the citizen, with this
conception of his city before his eyes, to see to it that the state's
part in the contract was fulfilled. From his ancestors had been
inherited the tradition, which to