remained at home, attending to his sole business, which was to make Rome the mistress of the world.  The gods of Rome, says Hegel, are not human beings, like those of Greece, but soulless machines, gods made by the understanding, even when borrowed from Greek story.  They were worshipped also in the interest of the practical understanding, as givers of earthly fortune.  The Romans had no real reverence for their gods; they worshipped them in no spirit of adoring love, but always for some useful object.  It was a utilitarian worship.  Accordingly the practical faculties, engaged in useful arts, were deified.  There was a Jupiter Pistor, presiding over bakers.  There was a goddess of ovens; and a Juno Moneta, who took care of the coin.  There was a goddess who presided over doing nothing, Tranquillitas Vacuna; and even the plague had an altar erected to it.  But, after all, no deities were so great, in the opinion of the Romans, as Rome itself.  The chief distinction of these deities was that they belonged to the Roman state[269].

Cicero considers the Romans to be the most religious of all nations, because they carried their religion into all the details of life.  This is true; but one might as well consider himself a devout worshipper of iron or of wood, because he is always using these materials, in doors and out, in his parlor, kitchen, and stable.

As the religion of Rome had no doctrinal system, its truths were communicated mostly by spectacles and ceremonies, which chiefly consisted in the wholesale slaughter of men and animals.  There was something frightful in the extent to which this was carried; for when cruelty proceeds from a principle and purpose, it is far worse than when arising from brutal passion.  An angry man may beat his wife; but the deliberate, repeated, and ingenious torments of the Inquisition, the massacre of thousands of gladiators in a Roman amphitheatre, or the torture of prisoners by the North American Indians, are all parts of a system, and reinforced by considerations of propriety, duty, and religious reverence.

Mommsen remarks[270], that the Roman religion in all its details was a reflection of the Roman state.  When the constitution and institutions of Rome changed, their religion changed with them.  One illustration of this correspondence he finds in the fact that when the Romans admitted the people of a conquered state to become citizens of Rome, their gods were admitted with them; but in both cases the new citizens (novensides) occupied a subordinate position to the old settlers (indigites[271]).

That the races of Italy, among whom the Latin language originated, were of the same great Asiatic stock as the Greeks, Germans, Kelts, and Slavic tribes, is sufficiently proved by the unimpeachable evidence of language.  The old Latin roots and grammatic forms all retain the analogies of the Aryan families.  Their gods and their religion bear marks of the same origin, yet with a special and marked development.