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Lord Gifford in founding his lectureship directed thatthe lectures should be public and popular, i.e. not restrictedto members of a University. Accordingly in lecturing Iendeavoured to make myself intelligible to a generalaudience by avoiding much technical discussion andcontroversial matter, and by keeping to the plan ofdescribing in outline the development and decay of thereligion of the Roman City-state. And on the whole Ihave thought it better to keep to this principle in publishingthe lectures; they are printed for the most part muchas they were delivered, and without footnotes, but at theend of each lecture students of the subject will find thenotes referred to by the numbers in the text, containingsuch further information or discussion as has seemeddesirable. My model in this method has been the admirablelectures of Prof. Cumont on "les ReligionsOrientales dans le Paganisme Romain."
I wish to make two remarks about the subject-matterof the lectures. First, the idea running through them isthat the primitive religious (or magico-religious) instinct,which was the germ of the religion of the historicalRomans, was gradually atrophied by over-elaboration ofritual, but showed itself again in strange forms from theperiod of the Punic wars onwards. For this religiousinstinct I have used the Latin word religio, as I haveviiiexplained in the Transactions of the Third InternationalCongress for the History of Religions, vol. ii. p. 169 foll. Iam, however, well aware that some scholars take a differentview of the original meaning of this famous word, whichhas been much discussed since I formed my plan oflecturing. But I do not think that those who differ fromme on this point will find that my general argument isseriously affected one way or another by my use of theword.
Secondly, while I have been at work on the lectures,the idea seems to have been slowly gaining ground thatthe patrician religion of the early City-state, which becameso highly formalised, so clean and austere, and eventuallyso political, was really the religion of an invadingrace, like that of the Achaeans in Greece, engrafted onthe religion of a primitive and less civilised population.I have not definitely adopted this idea; but I am inclinedto think that a good deal of what I have said in theearlier lectures may be found to support it. Once only,in Lecture XVII., I have used it myself to support ahypothesis there advanced.
I have retained the familiar English spelling of certaindivine names, e.g. Jupiter (instead of Iuppiter), as lessstartling to British readers.
I wish to express my very deep obligations to theworks of Prof. Wissowa and Dr. J. G. Frazer, and also toMr. R. R. Marett, who gave me useful personal help inmy second and third lectures. From Prof. Wissowa andDr. Frazer I have had the misfortune to differ on one ortwo points; but "difference of opinion is the salt of life,"as a great scholar said to me not long ago. In readingthe