nterpreted as meaning a
functional or creative force. Jupiter is the sky or heaven itself, with
all its manifestations of activity; Tellus is Mother Earth, full of
active productive power. At the bottom of these cold and colourless
conceptions there is thus a real idea of power, not supernatural but
rather natural power, which may both hurt and benefit man, and which he
must attempt to enlist on his side. This enlistment was the task of the
Roman priesthood and the Roman government, and so effectually was it
carried out that the divine beings lost their vitality in the process.

We shall be better able to follow out this curious fate of the Roman
deities in later lectures; here I wish to note one other aspect of the
Roman idea of divinity, which will help to explain what I have just been
saying about the life and force inherent in these numina.

In most cursory accounts of the Roman religion it has been the practice
to lay particular stress upon an immense number of "gods," as they used
to be called, each of which is supposed to have presided over some
particular act or suffering of the Roman from the cradle to the
grave--from Cunina, the "goddess" of his cradle, to Libitina who looked
after his interment. I have as yet said nothing about all these. I will
now briefly explain why I have not done so, and why I hesitate to
include them, at any rate in the uncompromising form in which they are
usually presented, among the genuine religious conceptions of the
earliest period. Later on I shall have further opportunity of discussing
them; at the end of this lecture I can only sum up the results of recent
research into this curious cloud of so-called deities.

We know of them mainly, but not entirely, from Tertullian, and the _de
Civitate Dei_ of St. Augustine.[323] These scholarly theologians,
wishing to show up the absurdity of the heathen religions, found a mine
of material in the great work of Varro on the Roman religious
antiquities; and though they found him by no means so elegant a writer
as Cicero, they studied him with pains, and have incidentally added
immensely to our knowledge both of Varro himself and of the Roman
religion. St. Augustine tells us that it was in the last three books of
his work that Varro treated of the Roman deities, and that he divided
them under the heads of _di certi_, _di incerti_, and _di selecti_. In
the first of these he dealt chiefly with those with which we are now
concerned: they were