have understood it: namely, that in almost all their other
identifications of Roman and Greek deities, they were really doing
violence to their own native gods by superimposing upon them the
attributes of a deity with whom they had really nothing in common,
whereas, in identifying the new Herakles with their old Hercules, they
were doing a perfectly legitimate thing. For one who knows the true
state of affairs there is something pathetically amusing in the fact
that they really showed more delicacy in making their old (really
originally Greek) Hercules into the new Greek Herakles-Hercules, than
they did in throwing together Neptune and Poseidon, Mars and Ares, Diana
and Artemis. As a matter of fact they always reverenced the old cult of
the great altar, and never allowed the more sensational phases of Greek
worship to be practised there, and put off into another quarter the
temples which were built to Hercules under the various new attributes
which the new Greek cult brought with it. These temples were placed, as
was proper, outside the _pomerium_, in the southern part of the Campus
Martius.

But to return to the simple Hercules and the Servian regime, the Roman
state had now obtained a deity, of which, by the contagion of commerce,
they already felt a need, a god of great power from whom came success in
the practical undertakings of life. Hence he had a strong hold on the
Romans whose practical side was undergoing a rapid development. The idea
of trade was now represented in the religious world, it had received its
divine sanction.

The other god, who came up from Magna Graecia and whose formal
acceptance into the state-cult formed one of the earliest incidents in
the breakdown of the old agricultural religion, was Castor, with his
twin-brother Pollux, although brother Pollux was always an insignificant