[109] There were three tribes in old Rome, the Ramnes on the Palatine, the Tities or Sabines on the Capitoline, and the Luceres; but whether the last were Etruscans or Ramnians or neither is uncertain.—ED.
CHAPTER XVIII[ToC]
ROMAN RELIGION
The Roman Gods.—The Romans, like the Greeks, believed that everything that occurs in the world was the work of a deity. But in place of a God who directs the whole universe, they had a deity for every phenomenon which they saw. There was a divinity to make the seed sprout, another to protect the bounds of the fields, another to guard the fruits. Each had its name, its sex, and its functions.
The principal gods were Jupiter, god of the heaven; Janus, the two-faced god (the deity who opens); Mars, god of war; Mercury, god of trade; Vulcan, god of fire; Neptune, god of the sea; Ceres, goddess of grains, the Earth, the Moon, Juno, and Minerva.
Below these were secondary deities. Some personified a quality—for example, Youth, Concord, Health, Peace. Others presided over a certain act in life: when the infant came into the world there were a god to teach him to speak, a goddess to teach him to drink, another charged with knitting his bones, two to accompany him to school, two to take him home again. In short, there was a veritable legion of minor special deities.
Other gods protected a city, a certain section of a mountain, a forest; every river, every fountain, every tree had its little local divinity. It is this that makes an old woman in a Latin romance exclaim, "Our country is so full of gods that it is much easier to find a god than a man."