the ideas which they involve: in the second, and particularly in
connection with some of the field-deities, it evolves new and very
frequently abstract notions, foreign to the life of the independent
country households, but necessary and vital to the life of an organised
community. Let us look first at the fate of the household deities.

=Ianus.=--We left Ianus as the _numen_ of the house-door: he passes
into the state exactly in the same capacity: the state too has its
'door,' the gate at the north-east corner of the Forum, and this
becomes the seat of his state-cult--the door which, according to
Augustan legend, is opened in the time of war and only shut when Rome
is at peace with all the world. But reflection soon gets to work on
Ianus: a door has two sides, it can both open and shut; therefore, as
early as the song of the Salii, he has developed the cult-epithets
'Opener,' 'Shutter' (_Patulci_, _Cloesi_), and as soon as he is thought
of as anything approaching a personality he is 'two-headed'
(_bifrons_), as he appears in later representations. The door again is
the first thing you come to in entering a house: the 'door-spirit'
then, with that tendency to abstraction which we shall see shortly in
other cases, becomes the god of beginnings. He watches over the very
first beginning of human life in his character of _Consevius_; to him
is sacred the first hour of the day (_pater matutinus_), the Calends of
every month, and the first month of the year (_Ianuarius_); to him too
is offered by the _rex sacrorum_ the first sacrifice of the year, the
Agonium on the 9th of January. In this capacity, moreover, his name
comes first in all the formulae of prayer, and he is looked upon--not
indeed as the father of the gods--for that is a much too
anthropomorphic notion--but as what we might now term their 'logical
antecedent': _divum deus_, as the song of the Salii quaintly puts it,
_principium deorum_, as later interpretation explained it. Yet through
all he remains the most typical Roman deity: he does not acquire a
temple till 217 B.C., nor a bust until quite late, nor is he ever
identified with a Greek counterpart. In his capacity as _pater
matutinus_ he has a native female counterpart in Matuta, a dawn-deity,
who becomes a protectress in childbirth, and as such is the centre of
the matrons' festival, the Matralia of June 11.

=Vesta.=--The history of Vesta is perhaps less romantic, but it affords
a more exact parallel betw