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Plutarch
With dissertations on Italian cults, myths, taboos, man-worship, aryan marriage, sympathetic magic and the eating of beans
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I will conclude this section with quotations from two distinguished authorities on Mythology, who would both dissent from the views which have been advanced above, but whose words seem to me to bear unintentional testimony in favour of those views. E. H. Meyer, in his Indogermanische Mythen (ii. 612), says, "Roman religion seldom displays more than the elementary rudiments, or rather let us say the last remnants of mythology," and "whereas the cult of the greater gods is known to us in a form greatly affected by Hellenism, … the local gods usually scarcely rise above the rank of spirits (sich meistens kaum über daemonischen Rang erheben)." Preller, in his Römische Mythologie (i. 48), says, "The Romans' belief in gods would be termed more rightly pandæmonism than polytheism. … One is involuntarily reminded of those Pelasgians of Dodona who, according to Herodotus, assigned neither names nor epithets to their gods. … Indeed, most of the names of the oldest Roman gods have such a shifting, indefinite meaning, that they can scarcely be regarded as proper names, as the names of persons."
III. Italian Cults.
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