of the law to Jewish scribes after the captivity, or as
casuistry to the confessors of the middle ages. When the art of writing
became familiar to experts, the natural and primitive desire of the
Roman to have exactness in the spoken word affected him also in his
relations with the word as written. The scribe and the Pharisee found
their opportunity. The whole public religion of the State, and to some
extent also the private religion of the family, became a mass of forms
and formulae, and never succeeded in freeing itself from these fetters.

We can best illustrate this superfluity of priestly zeal in that strange
list of forms of invocation called _Indigitamenta_, which I have already
explained with the help of Wissowa.[592] Working upon the old Roman
animism, and the popular fondness for formulae, the pontifices drew up
those lists in the fourth and third centuries B.C., which have so
seriously misled scholars as to the genuine primitive religious ideas of
the Romans. They are in the main priestly inventions, the work of
ingenious formulators. We may even be tempted to look on them as an
attempt to rivet the yoke of priestly formalism on the life of the
individual as well as on the life of the State as a whole. But if ever
this was the intention, it was too late. A people that was beginning to
get into touch with the civilisation of Hellas could not possibly bear
such a yoke. In the last lecture we have already seen a tendency towards
emotional religion independent of the old State worship; the philosophy
of individualism was to complete the work of emancipation in the last
two centuries B.C. The old State religion remained, but in stunted form
and with paralysed vitality; Rome was the scene of an _arrested
religious development_. The feeling, the religious instinct (_religio_)
was indeed there, though latent; the Romans were human beings, like the
rest of us. But as we go on with the story we shall find that, when
trouble or disaster brought it out of its hiding-place, it was no longer
possible to soothe it on Roman principles or by Roman methods. These
methods--in other words, the _ius divinum_ as formulated by the
authorities--had been meant to soothe it, and had indeed so effectually
lulled it to sleep, that when at last it awoke again they had lost the
power of dealing with it. When the craving did come upon the Roman,
which in time of peril or doubt has come upon individuals and
communities in all ages, for suppo