Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/211

The Etruscan religion occupied a higher level than the Roman, in so far as it developed at least the rudiments of that of which the Romans were wholly destitute—speculation veiled under the forms of religion. Over the world and its gods there ruled the veiled gods (Dii involuti), consulted by Etruscan Jupiter himself; that world moreover was finite, and, as it had come into being, so would it again pass away after the expiry of a definite period of time, whose sections were the sæcula. Respecting the intellectual value which may once have belonged to this Etruscan cosmogony and philosophy, it is difficult to form a judgment; they appear however to have been from the very first characterized by a dull fatalism and an insipid play upon numbers.