it was almost
impossible to connect Juppiter with a specific form of government other
than the republic, much less with a particular royal family like the
Julian house. Juppiter had come to mean republicanism. The Capitoline
temple had ushered in the republic in B.C. 509 and there was a halo of
republicanism about it which was too genuine to be used as a mask for
concealing imperial features. With the four other deities matters stood
very differently. The god Julius, Apollo, Vesta, and Mars the Avenger
were either already identical with the imperial family or could easily
be connected with it.

The central feature of the religion of the empire was a thing altogether
unique and unknown in the republic: the worship of the emperors as gods.
From Augustus on this was the chief characteristic of the state
religion; its beginnings must be sought therefore under his reign and he
is largely accountable for it. According to our modern ideas it seems a
very strange thing to worship a living man as a god; it seems also
strange to worship a dead man as a god, but there we have at least the
analogy of the worship of the saints, and the inherent instinct of the
race toward ancestor-worship which unexpectedly crops out in all of us
at intervals. But we must rid ourselves of modern ideas and try to
appreciate the historical evolution of emperor-worship. This evolution
is perfectly clear and we can trace every step of it, though in doing so
we must remember that the various processes which we are compelled to
take up one after another in our explanation went on in nature side by
side, and exercised a sympathetic influence one upon the other, which we
have to eliminate from our explanation but make allowance for in our
finished concept.

We have seen that from the very beginning of religious life in Rome the
idea was present that everything, each individual and each family, had
its divine double, the individual in the shape of his Genius, the family
in the shape of protecting spirits, Vesta, the Penates, and later the
Lar. In addition to this, under the influence of the Greek myths which
various families adopted, certain gods originally independent became
especially associated with these families. Each family was naturally
interested in the worship of its own gods, but this particular worship
was quite as naturally confined to the particular family or its
dependents. Now the first preliminary step toward emperor-worship was
taken when