which was the traditional privilege of their houses. When societies (sodalitates) are formed for religious purposes they elect their own magistri to be their religious representatives, as we see in the case of the Salii and the Luperci. Finally, in the great community of the state the king is priest, and with that exactness of parallelism of which the Roman was so fond, he—like the pater familias—leaves the worship of Vesta in the hands of his 'daughters,' the Vestal virgins. And so, when the Republic is instituted, a special official, the rex sacrorum, inherits the king's ritual duties, while the superintendence of the Vestals passes to his representative in the matter of religious law, the pontifex maximus, whose official residence is always the regia, Numa's palace. The state is but the enlarged household and the head of the state is its religious representative.

If then the approach to the gods is so direct, where, it may be asked, in the organisation of Roman religion is there room for the priest? Two points about the Roman priesthood are of paramount importance. In the first place, they are not a caste apart: though there were restrictions as to the holding of secular magistracies in combination with the priesthood—always observed strictly in the case of the rex sacrorum and with few exceptions in the case of the greater flamines—yet the pontifices might always take their part in public life, and no kind of barrier existed between them and the rest of the community: Iulius Cæsar himself was pontifex maximus. In the second place they are not regarded as representatives of the gods or as mediators between god and man, but simply as administrative officials appointed for the performance of the acts of state-worship, just as the magistrates were for its civil and military government. In origin they were chosen to assist the king in the multifarious duties of the state-cult—the flamines were to act as special priests of particular deities, the most prominent among them being the three great priests of Iuppiter (flamen Dialis), Mars, and Quirinus; the pontifices were sometimes delegates of the king on special occasions, but more particularly formed his religious consilium, a consulting body, to give him advice as to ritual and act as the repositories of tradition. In later times the flamines still retain their original character, the pontifices and especially the pontifex maximus are responsible for the whole organisation of the state-religion and are the guardians and interpreters of religious lore. In the state-cult then the priests play a very important part, but their relation to the worship of the individual was very small indeed. They had a general superintendence over private worship and their leave would be required for the introduction of any new domestic cult; in cases too where the private person was in doubt as to ritual or the legitimacy of any religious practice, he could appeal to the pontifices for decision. Otherwise the priest could never intervene in the worship of the family, except in the case of the most solemn form of marriage (confarreatio), which, as it conferred on the children the right to hold certain of the priesthoods, was regarded itself as a ceremony of the state-religion.

In his private worship then the individual had immediate access to the deity, and it was no doubt this absence of priestly mediation and the consequent sense of personal responsibility, no less than its emotional significance, which caused the greater reality and permanence of the domestic worship as compared with the organised and official cults of the state.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IVToC

EARLY HISTORY OF ROME—THE AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITY

After this sketch of the main features which we must expect to find in Roman religion, we may attempt to look a little more in detail at its various departments, but before doing so it is necessary to form some notion of the situation and character of the Roman community: religion is not a little determined by men's natural surroundings and occupations. The subject is naturally one of considerable controversy, but certain facts of great significance for our purpose may fairly be taken as established. The earliest settlement which can be called 'Rome' was the community of the Palatine hill, which rises out of the valleys more abruptly than any of the other hills and was the natural place to be selected for fortification: the outline of the walls and sacred enclosure running outside them (pomoerium) may still be traced, marking the limits of 'square Rome' (Roma quadrata), as the historians called it. The Palatine community no doubt pursued their agricultural labours over the neighbouring valleys and hills, and gradually began to extend their settlement till it included the Esquiline and Caelian and other lesser heights which made up the Septimontium—the next stage of Rome's development. Meanwhile a kindred settlement had been established on the opposite hills of the Quirinal and Viminal, and ultimately the two communities united, enclosing within their boundaries the Capitol and their meeting-place in the valley which separated them—the Forum. In this way was formed the Rome of the Four Regions, which represents the utmost extent of its development during the period which gave rise to the genuine Roman religion. All these stages have left their mark on the customs of religion. Roma quadrata comes to the fore in the Lupercalia: not merely is the site of the ceremony a grotto on the Palatine (Lupercal), but when the Luperci run their purificatory course around the boundaries, it is the circuit of the Palatine hill which marks its limits. Annually on the 11th of December the festival of the Septimontium was celebrated, not by the whole people, but by the montani, presumably the inhabitants of those parts of Rome which were included in the second settlement. Finally, the addition of the Quirinal settlement is marked by the inclusion among the great state-gods of Quirinus, who must have been previously the local deity of the Quirinal community.

But more important for us than the history of the early settlement is its character. We have spoken of early Rome as an agricultural community: it would be more exact and more helpful to describe it as a community of agricultural households. The institutions of Rome, legal as well as religious, all point to the household (familia) as the original unit of organisation: the individual, as such, counted for nothing, the community was but the aggregate of families. Domestic worship