[166] The Arabs of the Ulád Bu ʿAzîz in Southern Morocco maintain that there are three classes of persons who are infallibly doomed to hell, namely, those who have been cursed by their parents, those who have been guilty of unlawful homicide, and those who have burned corn. They say that every grain curses him who burns it.
[167] Cf. Westcott, op. cit. p. 104.
[168] Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, 391.
[169] Idem, Bellerophon, 17 (Fragmenta, 300).
[170] Plato, Respublica, ii. 379 sq.
[171] Idem, Phædrus, p. 247. Idem, Timæus, p. 29.
[172] Idem, Respublica, ii. 364 sqq. Idem, Leges, x. 905 sqq.; xii. 948.
[173] Idem, Respublica, ii. 379 sq. Cf. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 176 sqq.
[174] Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum, See also Idem, De adulatore et amico, 22.
The gods of the Romans were on the whole unsympathetic and lifeless beings, some of them even actually pernicious, as the god of Fever, who had a temple on the Palatine hill, and the god of Ill-Fortune, who had an altar on the Esquiline hill.[175] The relations between the gods and their worshippers were cold, ceremonial, legal. The chief thing was not to break “the peace of the gods,” or, when it was broken, to restore it.[176] They were rendered propitious by “sanctity” and “piety.”[177] But sanctity was defined as “the knowledge of how we ought to worship them,” and piety was only “justice towards the gods,” the return for benefits received; Cicero asks, “What piety is due to a being from whom you receive nothing?”[178] The divine law, fas, was distinguished from the human law, jus. To the former belonged not only the religious rites but the duties to the dead, as also the duties to certain living individuals.[179] Offences against parents were avenged by the divi parentum;[180] the duty of hospitality was enforced by the dii hospitales and Jupiter;[181] boundaries were protected by Jupiter Terminalis and Terminus;[182] and Jupiter, Dius Fidius, and Fides, were the guardians of sworn faith.[183]