bylon, Egypt, the Hindus, and the Jewish people. We know in fact as
little about the religion of the old Italian populations as we do about
that of our own Teutonic ancestors, less perhaps than we do about that
of the Celtic peoples. The Romans were a rude and warlike folk, and
meddled neither with literature nor philosophy until they came into
immediate contact with the Greeks; thus it was that, unfortunately for
our purposes, the literary spirit, when at last it was born in Italy,
was rather Greek than Roman. When that birth took place Rome had spread
her influence over Italy,--perhaps the greatest work she ever
accomplished; and thus the latest historian of Latin literature can
venture to write that "the greatest time in Roman history was already
past when real historical evidence becomes available."[12]

We have thus to face two formidable facts: (1) that the period covered
by my earlier lectures must in honesty be called prehistoric; and (2)
that when the Romans themselves began to write about it they did so
under the overwhelming influence of Greek culture. With few exceptions,
all that we can learn of the early Roman religion from Roman or Greek
writers comes to us, not in a pure Roman form, clearly conceived as all
things truly Roman were, but seen dimly through the mist of the
Hellenistic age. The Roman gods, for example, are made the sport of
fancy and the subject of Hellenistic love-stories, by Greek poets and
their Roman imitators,[13] or are more seriously treated by Graeco-Roman
philosophy after a fashion which would have been absolutely
incomprehensible to the primitive men in whose minds they first had
their being. The process of disentangling the Roman element from the
Greek in the literary evidence is one which can never be satisfactorily
accomplished; and on the whole it is better, with Wissowa and Marquardt,
to hold fast by the facts of the cult, where the distinction between the
two is usually obvious, than to flounder about in a slough of what I can
only call pseudo-evidence. If all that English people knew about their
Anglo-Saxon forefathers were derived from Norman-French chroniclers, how
much should we really know about government or religion in the centuries
before the Conquest! And yet this comparison gives but a faint idea of
the treacherous nature of the literary evidence I am speaking of. It is
true indeed that in the last age of the Republic a few Romans began to
take something like a scien