the wholly powerless priest, to carry into effect such a divine curse.  Primarily the person thus accursed became liable to the divine penal judgment, not to human caprice; and the pious popular faith, on which that curse was based, must have had power even over natures frivolous and wicked.  But the banning was not confined to this; the king was in reality entitled and bound to carry the ban into execution, and, after the fact, on which the law set its curse, had been according to his conscientious conviction established, to slay the person under ban, as it were, as a victim offered up to the injured deity (-supplicium-), and thus to purify the community from the crime of the individual.  If the crime was of a minor nature, for the slaying of the guilty there was substituted a ransom through the presenting of a sacrificial victim or of similar gifts.  Thus the whole criminal law rested as to its ultimate basis on the religious idea of expiation.

But religion performed no higher service in Latium than the furtherance of civil order and morality by such means as these.  In this field Hellas had an unspeakable advantage over Latium; it owed to its religion not merely its whole intellectual development, but also its national union, so far as such an union was attained at all; the oracles and festivals of the gods, Delphi and Olympia, and the Muses, daughters of faith, were the centres round which revolved all that was great in Hellenic life and all in it that was the common heritage of the nation.  And yet even here Latium had, as compared with Hellas, its own advantages.  The Latin religion, reduced as it was to the level of ordinary perception, was completely intelligible to every one and accessible in common to all; and therefore the Roman community preserved the equality of its citizens, while Hellas, where religion rose to the level of the highest thought, had from the earliest times to endure all the blessing and curse of an aristocracy of intellect.  The Latin religion like every other had its origin in the effort of faith to fathom the infinite; it is only to a superficial view, which is deceived as to the depth of the stream because it is clear, that its transparent spirit-world can appear to be shallow.  This fervid faith disappeared with the progress of time as necessarily as the dew of morning disappears before the rising sun, and thus the Latin religion came subsequently to wither; but the Latins preserved their simplicity of belief longer than most peoples and longer especially than the Greeks.  As colours are effects of light and at the same time dim it, so art and science are not merely the creations but also the destroyers of faith; and, much as this process at once of development and of destruction is swayed by necessity, by the same law of nature certain results have been reserved to the epoch of early simplicity—­results which subsequent epochs make vain endeavours to attain.  The mighty intellectual development of the Hellenes,