this god in early as well as later times is shown above all things by the fact that he was always worshipped outside the city, as a god who must be kept at a distance.  Naturally his cult was associated with the dominant interest of life, the crops, and he was worshipped in the beautiful ceremony of the purification of the fields, which Mr. Walter Pater has so exquisitely described at the opening of Marius the Epicurean.  But he was regarded as the protector of the fields and the warder off of evil influences rather than as a positive factor in the development of the crops.  Then too in the early days of the Roman militia, before the regular army had come into existence, the war season was only during the summer after the planting and before the harvest, so that the two festivals which marked the beginning and the end of that season were also readily associated with the state of the crops at that time.

But the most interesting and curious thing about this old religion is not so much what it does contain as what it does not.  It is not so much what we find as what we miss, for more than half the gods whom we instinctively associate with Rome were not there under this old regime.  Here is a partial list of those whose names we do not find:  Minerva, Diana, Venus, Fortuna, Hercules, Castor, Pollux, Apollo, Mercury, Dis, Proserpina, Aesculapius, the Magna Mater.  And yet their absence is not surprising when we realise that almost all of the gods in this list represent phases of life with which Rome in this early period was absolutely unacquainted.  She had no appreciable trade or commerce, no manufactures or particular handicrafts, and no political interests except the simple patriarchal government which sufficed for her present needs.  Her gods of water were the gods of rivers and springs; Neptune was there, but he was not the ocean-god like the Greek Poseidon.  Vulcan, the god of fire, who was afterwards associated with the Greek Hephaistos and became the patron of metal-working, was at this time merely the god of destructive and not of constructive fire.  Even the great god Juppiter who was destined to become almost identical with the name and fame of Rome was not yet a god of the state and politics, but merely the sky-god, especially the lightning god, Juppiter Feretrius, the “striker,” who had a little shrine on the Capitoline where later the great Capitoline temple of Juppiter Optimus Maximus was to stand.  Another curious characteristic of this early age, which, I think, has never been commented on, is the extraordinarily limited number of goddesses.  Vesta is the only one who seems to stand by herself without a male parallel.  Each of the others is merely the contrasted potentiality in a pair of which the male is much more famous, and the only ones in these pairs who ever obtained a pronounced individuality did so because their cult was afterwards reinforced by being associated with some extra-Roman cult.  The best illustration of this last is Juno.