[398] See E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 703; cp. A. Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 274-79, as to the survivals. The reversion of the remaining Etruscan aristocracy in Rome to the language of the common people, under stress of strife with Etruria, is a phenomenon on all fours with the abandonment of French by the upper-class English in the fourteenth century, as a result of hostility with France.
[399] Even Eduard Meyer decides in this fashion (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 530) that to Italy "was denied the capacity to shape a culture for itself, to energise independently and creatively in the sphere of art, poetry, religion, and science"—this after expressly noting (ii, 155) how Greece itself developed only under the stimulus of alien culture. Compare §§ 339, 340 (ii, 533-36).
[400] Mommsen, History of Rome, Eng. tr. 1894, i, 285-300 (bk. i, ch. xv).
[401] "No people has ever possessed a vaster pantheon," observes M. Boissier, while noting the slightness of the characterisation (La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, 4e édition, i, 8). The lack of characterisation would seem to have encouraged multiplication.
[402] The fact that the Etruscans, like the other Italian peoples, remained at the stage of unintellectual formalism (Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 528-29; Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 273), suffices to show that not in race genius but in stage and conditions of culture lies the explanation. All early religion in official hands is formalist—witness the Pentateuch. The preoccupied Italians left their cults, as did the Phœnicians, to archæological officials, while the leisured Greeks carried them into poetry and art under conditions which fostered these activities.
[403] The point is discussed in the author's Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 74-90; Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 45-46.
[404] Whether or not we accept Mommsen's view (bk. i, c. xiv) that the use of the alphabet in Italy dates from about 1000 B.C. On this cp. Schwegler, i, 36.
[405] Mommsen, History of Rome, bk. i, ch. xii, Eng. tr. ed. 1868, i. 189. Cp. Boissier, as cited, i, 354, as to the respective functions of priests and pontiffs.
[406] It is only through fragmentary vestiges (Servius on Virgil, Georg. i, 21; cp. Varro in Augustine, De civitate Dei, vi, 7-10) that we know the contents of the book of Indigitamenta kept by the pontifices. It seems to have been a list, not of the Dii Indigetes commonly so-called, but of all the multitudinous powers presiding over the various operations of life. See Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 32; Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Lit. ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. 1900, i, 104; Boissier, La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins, i, 4, and note. "I have no doubt," writes Mr. Ward Fowler (The Religious Experience of the Roman People, 1911, p. 168), "that Wissowa is right in explaining Indigitamenta as Gebetsformeln, formulæ of invocation; in which the most important matter, we may add, would be the name of the deity. See his Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 177 foll." Corssen put this view before Wissowa.
[407] According to Varro (cited by Augustine, De civ. Dei, iv, 31), the early Romans for 170 years worshipped the Gods without images.