dventurers[109] on Mount Coelius; perhaps there
were still other peoples. All these small settlements ended with
uniting with Rome on the Palatine. A new wall was built to include the
seven hills. The Capitol was then for Rome what the Acropolis was for
Athens: here rose the temples of the three protecting deities of the
city--Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and the citadel that contained the
treasure and the archives of the people. In laying the foundations, it
was said there was found a human head recently cleft from the body;
this head was a presage that Rome should become the head of the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[108] Rather 753 B.C.--ED.

[109] There were three tribes in old Rome, the Ramnes on the Palatine,
the Tities or Sabines on the Capitoline, and the Luceres; but whether
the last were Etruscans or Ramnians or neither is uncertain.--ED.

CHAPTER XVIII

ROMAN RELIGION

=The Roman Gods.=--The Romans, like the Greeks, believed that
everything that occurs in the world was the work of a deity. But in
place of a God who directs the whole universe, they had a deity for
every phenomenon which they saw. There was a divinity to make the seed
sprout, another to protect the bounds of the fields, another to guard
the fruits. Each had its name, its sex, and its functions.

The principal gods were Jupiter, god of the heaven; Janus, the
two-faced god (the deity who opens); Mars, god of war; Mercury, god of
trade; Vulcan, god of fire; Neptune, god of the sea; Ceres, goddess of
grains, the Earth, the Moon, Juno, and Minerva.

Below these were secondary deities. Some personified a quality--for
example, Youth, Concord, Health, Peace. Others presided over a certain
act in life: when the infant came into the world there were a god to
teach him to speak, a goddess to teach him to drink, another charged
with knitting his bones, two to accompany him to school, two to take
him home again. In short, there was a veritable legion of minor
special deities.

Other gods protected a city, a certain section of a mountain, a
forest; every river, every fountain, every tree had its little local
divinity. It is this that makes an old woman in a Latin romance
exclaim, "Our country is so full of gods that it is much easier to
find a god than a man."

=Form of the Gods.=--The Romans, unlike the Greeks, did not give their
gods a precise form. For a long time there was no idol in Rome; they
worshipped Jupiter under the form of a rock, Mar