or by sacrifices and offerings of propitiation, or by promises.  A superhuman power might be placed under a spell, or placated with food and drink, or persuaded by a vow.  Such “powers” were exceedingly numerous.  Greatest of all, and recognised equally by all, was the power working in the sky with the thunder and the rain.  Its presence was everywhere alike, and its operations most palpable at every season.  Countless others were concerned with particular localities or with particular functions.  Every wood, if not every tree, and also every fountain, was controlled by some such higher “power”; every manifestation or operation of nature came from such an “influence.”  There was no kind of action or undertaking, no new stage of life or change of condition, which did not depend for help or hindrance upon a similar power.  At first the “powers” bore no distinctive names, and were conceived in no definite shapes.  They were not yet gods.  The human being who sought to work upon them to favour him could only do, say, and offer such things as he thought likely to move them.  But in process of time it became inevitable that these superhuman agencies should be referred to under some sort of title, and the title literally expressed the conception.  Hence a multitude of names.  Not only was there the ever-prominent Jupiter or “sky-father”; there a veritable multitude of powers with provinces great and small.  Among the larger conceptions the power concerned with the sowing of seed was Saturn that with the growth of crops was Ceres, that with the blazing of fire was Vesta.  Among the smaller the power which taught a babe to eat was Edulia that which attended the bringing home of a bride was Domiduca.  The ability to speak or to walk was supposed to be imparted by separate agencies named accordingly.  Flowers depended on Flora and fruits on Pomona.

[Illustration:  FIG. 109.—­JUPITER.]

But to assign a name is a great step towards creating a “power” into a “god,” and such agencies began to take shape in the mind of those who named them.  This was the second stage.  Jupiter, Ceres, Saturn, and almost all the rest became “gods.”  The powers in the woodlands—­a Silvanus or Faunus—­became embodied, like the more modern gnomes and kobbolds.  Once imagine a shape, and the tendency is to give it visible form in an image “like unto man,” and to honour it with an abode—­a temple or shrine.  The earliest Romans known to us erected no images or temples, but they were not long in creating them.  Particularly rapid was the reducing of a god to human form when they came into close contact with the Etruscans and the Greeks.  For all the important deities poetry and art combined to evolve an appropriate bodily form, which gradually became conventional, so that the ordinary notion of a Jupiter, a Juno, a Mercury, or a Ceres was approximately that which had been gathered from the statue thus developed.  This trouble was not taken with all the most ancient divinities.