tem to turn a
Roman numen into a full-fledged personal deity: the pontifices might
carry the process some way, but they never could have completed it
themselves without the help of the Greeks.

One deity seems to stand alone in the list--Tellus or Terra Mater,
Mother Earth.[228] We are coming directly to the great deity of the
heaven, and we might naturally expect that an agricultural folk would be
much concerned with her who is his counterpart among so many peoples.
She does not give her name to any of the festivals of the calendar; but
at one of them, the Fordicidia in April, at a time when the earth is
teeming with mysterious power, and when the festivals are of a
peculiarly agricultural character, she has her own special sacrifice--a
pregnant cow, whose young are torn from her womb, burnt by the _Virgo
vestalis maxima_, and their ashes used in certain mystic rites, _e.g._
at the Parilia which followed on the 21st.[229] She seems to have had
her function in human life as well; but about this we are much in the
dark in spite of Dieterich's attempts to elucidate it in his _Mutter
Erde_.[230] Whether she played a part at the birth of a child we cannot
be sure; but at marriage there is little doubt that she was originally
an object of worship, though in later days she gave way before Ceres and
Juno.[231] And as at death the body was laid in her embrace, we are not
surprised to find her prominent here also: she was the home of the dead
whether buried or burnt, and of the whole mass of the Manes. We shall
presently see how a Roman commander might devote himself and the whole
army of the enemy to Tellus and the Manes; and it is interesting to find
that a similar formula of _devotio_, of later date, combines Tellus with
Jupiter, the speaker touching the ground when he mentions her name, and
holding his hands upwards to heaven when he names the god.[232] Very
curious, too, is the rite of the _porca praecidanea_, which in
historical times was offered to Ceres as well as Tellus immediately
before harvest; in case a man had wittingly or unwittingly omitted to
pay the proper rites (_iusta facere_) to his own dead, it was his duty
to make this offering, lest as a result of the neglect the earth-power
should not yield him a good harvest.[233] Originally, we need hardly
doubt, Tellus was alone concerned in this; but Ceres, who at all times
represented rather the ripening and ripened corn than the seed in the
bosom of the earth, grad