The Religion of Numa | Page 2

of however
not as representing independent blocks, arbitrarily arranged in a certain
consecutive order, not as five successive religious consciousnesses, but
merely as marking the entrance of certain new ideas into the continuous
religious consciousness of the Roman people. The history of each of
these periods is simply the record of the change which new social
conditions produced in that great barometer of society, the religious
consciousness of the community. It is in the period of the old kingdom
that our story begins.
At first sight it may seem a foolish thing to try to draw a picture of the
religious condition of a time about the political history of which we
know so little, and it is only right therefore that we should inquire what
sources of knowledge we possess.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when under the banner of the
new-born science of "Comparative Philology" there gathered together a
group of men who thought they held the key to prehistoric history, and
that words themselves would tell the story where ancient monuments
and literature were silent. It was a great and beautiful thought, and the
science which encouraged it has taken its place as a useful and
reputable member of the community of sciences, but its pretensions to
the throne of the revealer of mysteries have been withdrawn by those

who are its most ardent followers, and the "Indo-Germanic religion"
which is brought into being is a pleasant thought for an idle hour rather
than a foundation and starting-point for the study of ancient religion in
general. Altogether aside from the fact that although primitive religion
and nationality are in the main identical, language and nationality are
by no means so--we have the great practical difficulty in the case of
Greece and Rome that in the earliest period of which we have
knowledge these two religions bear so little resemblance that we must
either assert for the time of Indo-Germanic unity a religious
development much more primitive than that which comparative
philology has sketched, or we must suppose the presence of a strong
decadent influence in Rome's case after the separation, which is equally
difficult. If we realise that in a primitive religion the name of the god is
usually the same as the name of the thing which he represents, the
existence of a Greek god and a Roman god with names which
correspond to the same Indo-Germanic word proves linguistically that
the thing existed and had a name before the separation, but not at all
that the thing was deified or that the name was the name of a god at that
time. We must therefore be content to begin our study of religion much
more humbly and at a much later period.
In fact we cannot go back appreciably before the dawn of political
history, but there are certain considerations which enable us at least to
understand the phenomena of the dawn itself, those survivals in culture
which loom up in the twilight and the understanding of which gives us
a fair start in our historical development. For this knowledge we are
indebted to the so-called "anthropological" method, which is based on
the assumption that mankind is essentially uniform, and that this
essential uniformity justifies us in drawing inferences about very
ancient thought from the very primitive thought of the barbarous and
savage peoples of our own day. At first sight the weakness of this
contention is more apparent than its strength, and it is easy to show that
the prehistoric primitive culture of a people destined to civilisation is
one thing, and the retarded primitive culture of modern tribes stunted in
their growth is quite another thing, so that, as has so often been said,
the two bear a relation to each other not unlike that of a healthy young
child to a full-grown idiot. And yet there is a decided resemblance

between the child and the idiot, and whether prehistoric or retarded,
primitive culture shows everywhere strong likeness, and the method is
productive of good if we confine our reasoning backwards to those
things in savage life which the two kinds of primitive culture, the
prehistoric and the retarded, have in common. To do this however we
must have some knowledge of the prehistoric, and our modern retarded
savage must be used merely to illumine certain things which we see
only in half-light; he must never be employed as a lay-figure in
sketching in those features of prehistoric life of which we are totally in
ignorance. It is peculiarly useful to the student of Roman religion
because he stands on the borderland and looking backwards sees just
enough dark shapes looming up behind him to crave more light. For in
many phases of early Roman religion there are present characteristics
which