deities of Rome with the new foreign gods, calling the former the “old indigenous gods” (Di Indigetes) and the latter the “newly settled gods” (Di Novensides).  For our knowledge of the religion of this period we are not dependent upon a mere theory, no matter how good it may be in itself, but we have the best sort of contemporary evidence in addition, and it is to the discovery of this evidence that the modern study of Roman religion virtually owes its existence.  The records of early political history were largely destroyed in B.C. 390 when the Gauls sacked Rome, but the religious status, with the conservativeness characteristic of religion generally, suffered very few changes during all these years, and left a record of itself in the annually recurring festivals of the Roman year, festivals which grew into an instinctive function of the life of the common people.  Many centuries later when the calendar was engraved on stone, these revered old festivals were inscribed on these stone calendars in peculiarly large letters as distinguished from all the other items.  Thus from the fragments of these stone calendars, which have been found, and which are themselves nineteen centuries old, we can read back another eight or ten centuries further.  By the aid of this “calendar of Numa” we are able to assert the presence of certain deities in the Rome of this time, and the equally important absence of others.  And from the character of the deities present and of the festivals themselves a correct and more or less detailed picture of the religious condition of the time may be drawn.  This calendar and the list of Indigetes extracted from it form the foundation for all our study of the history of Roman religion.

The religious forms of a community are always so bound up with its social organisation that a satisfactory knowledge of the one is practically impossible without some knowledge of the other.  Unfortunately there is no field in Roman history where theories are so abundant and facts so rare as in regard to the question of the early social organisation.  But without coming into conflict with any of the rival theories we may make at least the following statements.  In the main the community was fairly uniform and homogeneous, there were no great social extremes and no conspicuous foreign element, so that each individual, had he stopped to analyse his social position, would have found himself in four distinct relationships:  a relationship to himself as an individual; to his family; to the group of families which formed his clan (gens); and finally to the state.  We may go a step further on safe ground and assert that the least important of these relations was that to himself, and the most important that to his family.  The unit of early Roman social life was not the individual but the family, and in the most primitive ideas of life after death it is the family which has immortality, not the individual.  The state is not a union of individuals but of families.