with the perils he encountered in his daily toil; here, in the
City-state, it must from the beginning have had a tendency to become an
unreality, and it ended by becoming one entirely. Some of the old rites
may have attached new meanings to themselves; it is possible, for
example, that beneath the military rites of March there was an original
agricultural significance; the Saturnalia became a merry mid-winter
festival for a town population. But a great number wholly lost meaning,
and were so forgotten or neglected in course of time that even learned
men like Varro do not seem to have been able to explain them. The only
practical question about them for the later Romans was whether their
days were _dies fasti_ or _nefasti_ or _comitiales_,--what work might or
might not be done on them.

Another point, closely connected with the last, and tending in the same
direction, is that such a calendar as this implies rigidity and routine
in religious duties. A well-ordered city life under a strong government
must, of course, be subject to routine; law, religious or civil, written
or unwritten, forces the individual into certain stereotyped ways of
life, subjects him to a certain amount of wholesome discipline. The
value of such routine to an undisciplined people has been well pointed
out by Bishop Stubbs, in writing of the effect of the rule of the Norman
and Angevin kings on the English people,[205] where it was also a
religious as well as a legal discipline that was at work. In neither
case was it the ignorant and superstitious routine of savage life, which
of late years we have had to substitute for old fancies about the
freedom of the savage; it is the willing obedience of civilised man for
his own benefit. But if it means a routine of religious rites which are
beginning to lose their meaning; if the relation between them and man's
life and work is lost; and lastly, if, as was probably the case, the
Fasti were not published, but remained in the hands of a priesthood or
an aristocracy,[206]--then there is serious loss as well as gain. You
begin sooner or later to cease to feel your dependence on the divine
beings around you for your daily bread, to get out of right relation
with the Power manifesting itself in the universe.

But, in the third place, we must believe that at first, and indeed
perhaps for ages, this very routine had an important psychological
result in producing increased comfort, convenience, and confidence in