Italy then was something like Turkey is now.  Dear knows whom you might chance on, if you watched with anointed eyes . . . in St. Sophia . . . or among the Sabine hills.  Somewhere or other, as I said just now, reminiscences of the Mysteries would have survived.  I picture an old wise man, one of the guardians of those traditions, coming down from the mountains, somewhere between 1500 and 1000 B. C., to the little city on the Tiber; touching something in the hearts of the people there, and becoming,—­why not?—­their king.  For I guess that this one was not so different from a hundred little cities you should have found strewn over Italy not so long ago.  The ground they covered,—­and this is still true,—­would not be much larger than the Academy Garden; their streets but six or seven feet across.  Their people were a tough, stern, robberish set; but with a side, too, to which saintliness (in a high sense) could make quick appeal.  Intellectual culture they had none; the brain-mind was the last thing you should look for (in ancient Rome at least);—­and just because it was dormant, one who knew how to go about it could take hold upon the Buddhic side.  That was perhaps what this Numa Pompilius achieved doing.  There would be nothing extraordinary in it.  The same thing may be going on in lots of little cities today, in pralayic regions:  news of the kind does not emerge.  We have a way of dividing time into ancient and modern; and think the one forever past, the other forever to endure.  It is quite silly.  There are plenty of places now where it is 753 B.C.; and no doubt there were plenty then where it was pompous 1919.—­Can anyone tell me, by the bye, what year it happens to be in Europe now?

How much Numa may have given his Romans, who can say?  Most of it may have worn away, before historic times, under the stress of centuries of summer campaigns.  But something he did ingrain into their being; and it lasted, because not incompatible with the life they knew.  It was the element that kept that life from complete vulgarity and decay.

You have to strip away all Greekism from your conceptions, before you can tell what it was.  The Greek conquest was the one Rome did not survive.  Conquered Greece overflowed her, and washed her out; changed her traditions, her religion, the whole color of her life.  If Greece had not stepped in, myth-making and euhemerizing, who would have saved the day at Lake Regillus? Not the Great Twin Brothers from lordly Lace-daemon, be sure.  Who then?  Some queer uncouth Italian nature-spirit gods?  One shakes one’s head in doubt:  the Romans did not personalize their deities like the Greeks.  Cato gives the ritual to be used at cutting down a grove; says he—­“This is the proper Roman way to cut down a grove.  Sacrifice with a pig for a peace-offering.  This is the verbal formula:  ’Whether thou art a god or a goddess to whom that grove is sacred,’ “—­and so on.  Their gods were mostly like that:  potentialities in the unseen, with whom good relations must be kept by strict observance of an elaborate ritual.  There were no stories about them; they did not marry and have families like the good folk at Olympus.