neid_ ("quo numine laeso")
and in innumerable other passages. Thus von Domaszewski in his collected
papers (p. 157) is undoubtedly right in defining a _numen_ as a being
with a will--"ein wollendes Wesen"; though his account of its evolution,
and of the way in which in its turn it may produce a _deus_, may be open
to criticism.

The word thus suggests that the Roman divine beings were functional
spirits with will-power, their functions being indicated by their
adjectival names. Proper names they had not as a rule, but they are
getting cult-titles under the influence of a priesthood, which titles
may in time perhaps attain to something of the definiteness of
substantival names. This indeed could hardly have been so in the mind of
the ordinary Roman even at a later age; and it is quite possible that if
an intelligent Greek traveller of the sixth century B.C. had given an
account of the gods of Rome,[225] he would have said, as Strabo said of
an Iberian people in the time of Augustus, that they were without gods,
or worshipped gods without names. But the name, even as a cult-title, is
of immense importance in the development of a spirit into a deity, and
in most cases, at any rate at Rome, it was the work of officials, of a
state priesthood, not of the people. To address a deity rightly was
matter of no small difficulty: how were you to know how he would wish
to be addressed? Servius tells us that the pontifices addressed even
Jupiter himself thus: "Iupiter optime maxime, _sive quo alio nomine te
appellari volueris_." On the other hand, in the same comment he tells us
that "iure pontificio cautum est, ne suis nominibus di Romani
appellarentur, ne exaugurari possent," _i.e._ lest they should be
enticed away from the city by enemies. This last statement seems indeed
to me to be a doubtful one,[226] but it will serve to illustrate the
nervousness about divine names, of which there is no doubt whatever. We
know for certain that those religious lawyers the pontifices were
greatly occupied with the task of drawing up lists of names by which
_numina_ should be invoked,--formularising the ritual of prayer, as we
shall see in another lecture; and this must have become at one time
almost a craze with them, to judge by the lists of Indigitamenta
preserved in their books, to which Varro had access, and which were
copied from him by St. Augustine.[227] But after all it needed the
stimulus given by actual contact with a polytheistic sys