rliest efforts at
speech. Neither of them had anything else to do.

Pavor had. At thunder, at lightning, at a meteor, at moisture on a
wall, at no matter what, at silence even, the descendants of a
she-wolf's nursling quailed. They lived in a panic. In panic the gods
were born. It is but natural, perhaps, that Fright should have been
held supreme. The other gods, mainly divinities of prey and of havoc,
were lustreless as the imaginations that conceived them. Prosaic,
unimaged, without poetry or myth, they dully persisted until pedlars
appeared with Hellenic legends and wares. To their tales Rome
listened. Then eidolons of the Olympians became naturalized there.
Zeus was transformed into Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, Pallas into
Minerva, Demeter into Ceres, and all of them--and with them all the
others--into an irritable police. The Greek gods enchanted, those of
Rome alarmed. Plutarch said that they were indignant if one presumed
to so much as sneeze.

Worship, consequently, was a necessary precaution, an insurance
against divine risks, a matter of business in which the devout
bargained with the divine. Ovid represented Numa trying to elude the
exigencies of Jove. The latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head.
"You shall have a cabbage," said the king. "I mean something human."
"Some hairs then." "No, I want something alive." "We will give you a
pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later,
after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion
to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck
terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a god more
serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the
conquest Fright became Might and the latter an effulgence of Jove's.

Jove was magnificent. In the Capitol he throned so augustly that we
swear by him still. Like Rome he is immortal. But Pavor, that had
faded into him, was never invoked. The reason was not sacerdotal, it
was political. Rome never imposed her gods on the quelled. With
superior tact she lured their gods from them. At any siege, that was
her first device. To it she believed her victories were due. It was to
avoid possible reprisals and to remain invincible, that her own
national divinity she so carefully concealed that the name still is a
secret. With the gods, Rome gathered the creeds of the world, set them
like fountains among her hills, and drank of their sacred wat