Rome, Italy, and Greece

In religion we recognize the same features as in the whole of early Roman civilization. Its foundation appears extremely primitive. The very conception of divinity and the organiza-tion of worship round the hearth and fields of the family seem to be earlier than the foundation of cities, and, without any doubt, come from the herdsmen and ploughmen who were descended from the old prehistoric tribes. Of these primor-dial elements, some seem to have belonged rather to the Indo-European invaders of the Italic peninsula, and the others, such as Saturn and Mother Earth, for example, to the Mediterranean autochthons, Siculians or others. ¹ But this primitive substratum was covered by the sediment brought by all the successive vicissitudes of the earliest history of Rome. As in the section of a piece of ground, we see, in the solidified mass of Roman religion, a thick stratum of Etruscan influences, hardly distinct from the primitive strata, and, immediately over it, increasingly numerous traces of the relations of Rome with the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily. The Hellenic tinge becomes more pronounced as the power of Rome advances towards the Hellenized regions of Italy; the Greek gods and representations of them grow more numerous, Etruscan and Greek legends are mingled with those of Latium, and Graeco-Etruscan rites, dances, perhaps some rudiments of poetry, and games, assume a larger and larger place in worship. Roman religion is not only Roman; it is Italian, and for that reason, from a very early period, it is permeated with Mediterranean, and especi-ally Greek, influences.