rse (_mundus_).[244] Ovid amused himself
with this uncertainty of the philosophers, and in the first book of his
_Fasti_ "interviewed" the god, whose answers are unluckily of little
value for us.[245] At various times and in different hands Janus has
been pronounced a sun-god, a heaven-god, a year-god, a wind-god; and now
a Cambridge school of speculators, to whose learning I am in many ways
indebted, has claimed him as an oak-god, the mate of Diana, the Jupiter
of aboriginal Latium, and so on.[246] We have fortunately long left
behind us the age when it was thought necessary to resolve the Greek and
Roman gods into personifications of natural phenomena, and to try to
explain all their attributes on one principle; but my learned friends at
Cambridge have of late been showing a tendency to return to methods not
less dangerous; they hanker, for example, after etymological evidence,
which in the case of deities is almost sure to be misleading unless it
is absolutely certain, and supported by the history of the name. This is
unluckily not the case with Janus; his etymology is matter of
dispute,[247] and he is therefore open, and always will be so, to the
inquirer who is hunting a scent, and more concerned to prove a point
than to discover what the early Romans really thought about a god. In
this lecture I am but humbly trying to do this last, and I may therefore
leave etymology, with the mythology and philosophy of a later age, and
confine myself to such facts of the cult of Janus as are quite
undisputed. They will admit of being put together very shortly.

The first and leading fact is that Janus was the first deity to be
addressed in all prayers and invocations; of this we have abundant
evidence, as also of the corresponding fact that Vesta came last.[248]
Secondly, we know that he was the object of worship on the Kalends of
January, and probably of every month, and that the sacrificing priest
was in this case the _rex sacrorum_. Thirdly, we know that he had no
temple until the year 260 B.C., but that he was associated with the
famous gateway at the north-east end of the Forum--not a gate in the
wall, but a symbolic entrance to the heart of the city, as the round
temple of Vesta at the opposite end, with its eternal fire, was symbolic
of the common life of the community. Fourthly, we know a few cult-titles
of Janus, among them Clusius (or Clusivius), and Patulcius, in which the
connection with gates is obvious; Junonius, w