Too Many Gods to Name. Early Christian writers, such as St. Augustine and Tertullian, mocked the traditional Roman religion, in which there was a separate deity for every single, minuscule aspect of human life and experience. In agriculture, for instance, there was a god to watch over seeds, one to keep mice from eating them, one concerned with the plowing of furrows, another with the sowing of seed, yet another with irrigation, or mildew, or drought, or the harvest, and so on, almost without end. While this polytheism certainly offended monotheistic Christians, it still tells us much about the Romans and their gods. The Roman pantheon was a celestial bureaucracy, with major and minor divinities overseeing human life in fine detail. The Roman belief was that every human action was guided by an expert divinity. Even the most mundane aspects...