ishment by some individual--the religion of Rome was
supposed to have been founded by her second king Numa, and it was the
custom to refer to all that was most antique in the cult as forming a
part of the venerable "religion of Numa." For us this can be merely a
name, and even as a name misleading, for a part of the beliefs with
which we are dealing go back for centuries before Romulus and the
traditional B.C. 753 as the foundation of Rome. But it is a convenient
term if we mean by it merely the old kingdom before foreign influences
began to work. The Romans of a later time coined an excellent name not
so much for the period as for the kind of religion which existed then,
contrasting the original deities of Rome with the new foreign gods,
calling the former the "old indigenous gods" (_Di Indigetes_) and the
latter the "newly settled gods" (_Di Novensides_). For our knowledge of
the religion of this period we are not dependent upon a mere theory, no
matter how good it may be in itself, but we have the best sort of
contemporary evidence in addition, and it is to the discovery of this
evidence that the modern study of Roman religion virtually owes its
existence. The records of early political history were largely
destroyed in B.C. 390 when the Gauls sacked Rome, but the religious
status, with the conservativeness characteristic of religion generally,
suffered very few changes during all these years, and left a record of
itself in the annually recurring festivals of the Roman year, festivals
which grew into an instinctive function of the life of the common
people. Many centuries later when the calendar was engraved on stone,
these revered old festivals were inscribed on these stone calendars in
peculiarly large letters as distinguished from all the other items. Thus
from the fragments of these stone calendars, which have been found, and
which are themselves nineteen centuries old, we can read back another
eight or ten centuries further. By the aid of this "calendar of Numa" we
are able to assert the presence of certain deities in the Rome of this
time, and the equally important absence of others. And from the
character of the deities present and of the festivals themselves a
correct and more or less detailed picture of the religious condition of
the time may be drawn. This calendar and the list of _Indigetes_
extracted from it form the foundation for all our study of the history
of Roman religion.

The religious forms of a