o bring into subjection to himself all other gods who dared to
challenge his supremacy, just as the city which paid him honour was to
overcome all other cities which refused to acknowledge her. From
henceforth Juppiter Optimus Maximus represents all that is most truly
Roman in Rome. It was under his banner that her battles were fought, it
was to him in all time to come that returning generals gave thanks.
Tradition sets the completion of the Capitoline temple in the first year
of the republic, but the idea and the actual beginning of the work
belong to the later kingdom and hence to our present period, and the
contemplation of it forms a fitting close to the development which we
have tried to sketch. And now that this part of our work is over it may
be well to ask ourselves what we have seen, for there have been so many
bypaths which we have of necessity explored, that the main road we have
travelled may not be entirely distinct in our mind. In the period which
corresponds to the later kingdom, and roughly to the sixth century
before Christ, and which we have called "Servian" for convenience, we
have watched a primitive pastoral community, isolated from the world's
life, turning into a small city-state with political interests, the
beginnings of trade and handicraft, and various rival social classes;
and we have seen how along with the coming of these outside interests
there came various new cults connected with them, most of them implying
entirely new deities, and only one or two of them new sides of old
deities. The body of old Roman religion had received its first blows;
what Tacitus (_Hist._ i. 4) says of the downfall of the empire--"Then
was that secret of the empire disclosed, that it was possible for a
ruler to be appointed elsewhere than at Rome"--is true of Roman religion
in this period when it was discovered that the state might take into
itself deities from outside Rome. And yet while the principle itself was
fatal, the practice of it, so far, had been without much harm. Rome's
growth was inevitable, it was quite as inevitable that these new
interests should be represented in the world of the gods; her old gods
did not suffice, hence new ones were introduced. But the actual gods
brought in thus far were harmless; Hercules, Castor, Minerva, Diana
never did Rome any injury in themselves, never injured her national
_morale_, never lowered the tone of earnest sobriety which had been
characteristic of the old regi
|