Many of the old rural and local deities, and many of those with quite minor provinces, were left vague and unrealised.  They were represented in no temples and by no statues.  Naturally as the Roman state grew from a set of neighbouring farms into a great city, and from a small settlement into a vast empire, the little local gods fell into the background.  The deities which concerned the state, and to which it erected temples, were those with the more far-reaching operations—­such as the gods identified with the sky and its thunders, with war, with fertility, with the sea, with the hearth-fire of all Rome.  The rest might well be left to localities or to domestic worship.

From the early days of Rome there existed a calendar for festivals to certain divinities important to the little growing town, and a code of ceremonies to be performed in their honour, and of formulae of prayer to be offered to them.  The later Romans, in their characteristic conservatism, adhered to those festivals, to that ritual, and to those formulae, even when some of the deities had ceased to be of appreciable account, and when neither the meaning of the ritual nor the sense of the old words was any longer understood by the very priests who used them.

Reflect a moment on this situation.  First, we have a number of deities of the first rank, housed in temples, embodied in statues, and recognised in all the Roman world; next a number of minor divinities whose operations and worship may be remotely rural or otherwise local, and whose functions are by no means always distinguishable from those of the greater gods; then a series of more or less unintelligible ceremonials carried out by ancient rule in honour of divinities often practically forgotten; outside these a number of vague powers presiding over small domestic and other actions; finally, a peculiar Roman tendency—­in keeping with the last—­to erect into divinities, and to symbolise in statue housed in temples, all manner of abstract qualities and states, such as Hope, Harmony, Peace, Wealth, Health, Fame, and Youth.

[Illustration:  FIG. 110.—­A SACRIFICE.]

Reflect again that, when the Romans, as they spread, came into contact with Greeks, Egyptians, or other foreigners, they met with deities whose provinces were necessarily often identical with or closely akin to their own.  Then remember that there is no church and no official document to define the complete list of Roman gods.  Does it not follow, as a matter of course, on the one hand, that the importation of new gods was an easy matter, and on the other, that no individual Roman could draw the line as to the number of even the old-established deities in whom he should or should not believe?

The guardians of the public religion were satisfied if the due rites were paid by the state to those deities, on those dates, and precisely in that manner, which happened to be prescribed in the official religious books.  For the rest they left matters to the individual.