0. On the Way: 158-171
11. "The Most Religious City in the World": 172-187
12. "The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King": 188-211
13. The "Mistress and Mother" of Palaces: 212-229
14. Manly Amusement: 230-243

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE

PART THE FIRST

CHAPTER I: "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"

[3] As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered
latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism--the
religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church;
so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that
the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest.
While, in Rome, new religions had arisen with bewildering complexity
around the dying old one, the earlier and simpler patriarchal religion,
"the religion of Numa," as people loved to fancy, lingered on with
little change amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and sentiment
of which so much of it had grown. Glimpses of such a survival we may
catch below the merely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry;
in Tibullus especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details of
old Roman religious usage.

At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates,
Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:

[4] --he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical,
with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of
his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth,
from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the child
Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar; and the
worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of the
young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of the
hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment
rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things
and places--the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned
by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex,
passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase,
Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!--it was in natural harmony with
the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like
that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly
connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old
wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little
shrines.