The Romans, ever anxious about the will of the gods, naturalized among themselves the Etruscan institution of the Haruspices.  The prodigies observed were in the entrails of animals and the phenomena of nature.  The parts of the entrails observed were the tongue, lungs, heart, liver, gall bladder, spleen, kidneys, and caul.  If the head of the right lobe of the liver was absent, it was considered a very bad omen.  If certain fissures existed, or were absent, it was a portent of the first importance.  But the Romans were a very practical people, and not easily deterred from their purpose.  So if one sacrifice failed they would try another and another, until the portents were favorable.  But sceptical persons were naturally led to ask some puzzling questions, such as these, which Cicero puts in his work on Divination:[293] How can a cleft in a liver be connected, by any natural law, with my acquisition of a property?  If it is so connected, what would be the result, if some one else, who was about to lose his property, had examined the same victim?  If you answer that the divine energy, which extends through the universe, directs each man in the choice of a victim, then how happens it that a man having first had an unfavorable omen, by trying again should get a good one?  How happens it that a sacrifice to one deity gives a favorable sign, and that to another the opposite?  But these criticisms only arrived after the old Roman faith had begun to decline.

Funeral solemnities were held with great care and pomp, and festivals for the dead were regularly celebrated.  The dead father or mother was accounted a god, and yet a certain terror of ancestral spectres was shown by a practice of driving them out of the house by lustrations.  For it was uncertain whether the paternal Manes were good spirits, Lares, or evil spirits, and Lemures.  Consequently in May there was the Lemuria, or feast for exorcising the evil spirits from houses and homes, conducted with great solemnity.

Sec. 4.  The Decay of the Roman Religion.

“The more distinguished a Roman became,” says Mommsen, “the less was he a free man.  The omnipotence of law, the despotism of the rule, drove him into a narrow circle of thought and action, and his credit and influence depended on the sad austerity of his life.  The whole duty of man, with the humblest and greatest of the Romans, was to keep his house in order, and be the obedient servant of the state.”  While each individual could be nothing more than a member of the community, a single link in the iron chain of Roman power; he, on the other hand, shared the glory and might of all-conquering Rome.  Never was such esprit de corps developed, never such intense patriotism, never such absolute subservience and sacrifice of the individual to the community.  But as man is manifold and cannot be forever confined to a single form of life, a reaction against this narrow patriotism was to be expected