but—­a much more significant fact—­their Greek names were dropped, and they were given Roman names instead, to make them seem less out of place.  Then too these Roman names were not new names, translations of their Greek titles, but were the names of already existing Roman deities with whom they were easily identified, so that we see at once that their coming was no real enrichment of the Roman Olympus; what they stood for was already represented there, and their coming was simply a reduplication, with the consequent result that as these parvenus increased in prominence and influence, they robbed of all their vitality the sober old Roman deities to whom they had attached themselves.  What were these original deities who were thus doomed to death in B.C. 496?  Demeter took the name of the old Roman goddess Ceres, a goddess of fertility, about whom we know just enough to assert that she belonged to the old religion of Numa and that she was at heart quite a different person from Demeter.  All the rest is lost, submerged under the new Demeter-Ceres with her temple built by Greek architects and her April games.  It is this new Ceres who soon develops an extraordinary political importance because her temple is to the Plebeians as a class what the temple of Minerva is to the unions of organised labour.  It is there that they have their meeting-place, and the temple itself is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn temple, the treasury of the state as a whole.  The very officers of the Plebeians, the famous Plebeian aediles, get their name from association with this temple (aedes).  This political side of her activity is the only real advantage, except the grain itself, connected with her importation; the two form at best a poor economic compensation for the ever increasing immoral effects of the public games of Ceres.

But though Ceres is the most important of the three deities economically and politically, we must not forget the other two, both of whom are interesting, though one of them more for what she is not than for what she is.  Along with Demeter came Dionysos and Demeter’s daughter Kore:  the three were associated in the solemn mysteries of Eleusis, but none of the beauty of these ideas went over into the Roman cult.  Demeter was merely the deified grain-traffic, and Dionysos was little else than the god of wine, while poor Kore fell out without any particular content for a curious reason that we shall see in a moment.  The only old Roman deity with whom Dionysos could be identified was the god Liber, who had had a rather interesting history, and who had done enough along the line of self-development to deserve a better fate than to be crushed to insignificance under the prominence of his new namesake.  Liber was at this time a flourishing god of fertility and, since the introduction of the grape into Italy, especially the patron of the fruit of the vine, but he had made his own career, and there was a time when he had no