31. After the good king Servius Tullius had completed his census, he performed a solemn purification of the city and people. During the Republic, the same ceremony was repeated after every general registration, which took place once in five years. Sacrifices of a pig, a sheep, and an ox were offered; water was sprinkled from olive-branches, and certain substances were burned, whose smoke was supposed to have a cleansing effect. In like manner, farmers purified their fields, and shepherds their flocks. An army or a fleet always underwent lustration before setting out on any enterprise. In the case of the latter, altars were erected on the shore near which the ships were moored. The sacrifices were carried three times around the fleet, in a small boat, by the generals and priests, while prayers were offered aloud for the success of the expedition.
RECAPITULATION.
Roman religion less imaginative and more practical than the Greek. Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus its chief divinities. Yearly festivals had reference chiefly to war and husbandry. Worship of Janus. Household gods. The Romans shared their belief in oracles with the Greeks; their arts of divination, with the Etruscans. Four Sacred Colleges: Pontiffs, Augurs, Heralds, and Keepers of the Sibylline Books. Priests might hold civil offices. Ceremonial cleansing of the city after every census; of armies and fleets before every expedition.
II. The Roman Republic.
32. The 480 years’ history of the Roman Republic will be best understood if divided into four periods:
| I. | The Growth of the Constitution, | B. C. 510-343. |
| II. | Wars for the possession of Italy, | B. C. 343-264. |
| III. | Foreign Wars, by which Rome became the ruling power in the world, | B. C. 264-133. |
| IV. | Internal Commotions and Civil Wars, | B. C. 133-31. |
The leaders of the revolution which expelled the Tarquins, restored the laws of Servius and carried forward his plans, by causing the election of two chief magistrates, of whom one was probably a plebeian. The consuls, during their year of office, had all the power and dignity of kings. They were preceded in public by their guard of twelve lictors, bearing the fasces, or bundles of rods. Out of the city, when the consul was engaged in military command, an ax was bound up with the rods, in token of his absolute power over life and death.
33. For 150 years the Republic was involved in a struggle for existence, during which its power was much less than that of regal Rome. The Latins threw off their supremacy, and Lars Por´sena, the Etruscan king of Clu´sium, actually conquered the city, and received from the Senate an ivory throne, a golden crown, a scepter, and triumphal robe, in token of homage. In their further attempts upon Latium, the Etruscans were defeated, and Rome became independent, but with the loss of all her territories west of the Tiber. The Latins were defeated at the Lake Regillus, by the aid—so Roman minstrels related—of the twin deities, Castor and Pollux, who appeared at the head of the legions, in the form of two beautiful youths of more than mortal stature, mounted on white horses, and who were the first to break through into the enemy’s camp. A temple was consequently built to them in the Forum, and they were regarded as the especial patrons of the Roman knights.
34. External dangers over, the patricians again made their power felt in the oppression of the common people. The first period of the Republic was absorbed in conflicts between the two great orders in the state—less attractive, certainly, than the romantic stories of the kingly age, or the stirring incidents of the later period of conquest. But the steps by which a great people has gained and established its freedom can never be without importance, especially to the only republic which has rivaled Rome in grandeur, in variety of interests, or in the multitude of races and languages included eventually within its limits.