ABSTRACT
THE several elements of population and the various quasi-national units which were merged in the Roman Italy of Augustus all contributed something to the medley of cult and ritual, of religious practices and beliefs, of superstitions and half-beliefs that Italy presents in the last century of the Republic, and which educated and thoughtful men had long ceased to take seriously. From the neolithic " Mediterranean " race, faint glimpses of whose religion we may catch in the little disturbed islands of Malta and Sardinia; from the invading northerners, whose language was Indo-European and whose religious beliefs contained much that they held in common with other early Indo-European speaking tribes; from the semiOriental Etruscans; from the Greeks in whose country the amalgam of Mediterranean and northern cults had produced a very different result from what occurred in Italy, where again the speculations of Greek philosophy added still another hue to the shifting kaleidoscope, from various Eastern lands whose cultsof Cybele, Mithras, Isis, Adonis, to mention no others-thinly or not at all disguised had been imported directly or indirectly; from the Kelts of Gallia Cisalpina and of Gaul proper; from Africa, Thrace, and Germany-the heterogeneous mass that appears as "Roman religion " at the beginning of the Empire, deriving something from all these sources, no longer served any genuine religious need, and despite the Augustan revival, and despite all that syncretism could do, contained within itself all the elements of its own disruption. Many attempts have been made to determine just what traces of Italic non-Roman religion
may be identified in the early religion of Rome. Such attempts are fore-doomed to failure-the necessary evidence to sustain a convincing conclusion is lacking. We must be content to relate what little has survived of pre-Roman, or rather of non-Roman, religion in ancient Italy outside of Rome itself. Here no doubt much has been lost to us through the working of the same process that disguised Greek gods, more or less successfully, as Roman in Rome; more than one native deity and cult has been swallowed up by assimilation with some Greek or Roman worship that seemed like enough to justify identification. Something has been said of native cults among the non-Italic peoples of Italy, strictly so defined, in previous chapters; here we shall be concerned only with the Italic-speaking tribes and the more interesting and important of their remains that tell us something of their religion.
