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It is a commonplace of writers on comparative religion that primitive prayers contain no ethical element.' It is said that in the early days of religion men importuned their gods for increase of blessings or decrease of sufferings. They prayed for victory over their enemies, for the rich booty of successful warfare, for fruitfulness in their flocks, herds, and fields, and, at a later stage of their development, for success in ventures of trade. They prayed also for relief in time of pestilence, famine, or other calamity. Furthermore, far from confining their petitions to their own prosperity, they frankly and openly prayed that disaster and death might be the portion of their enemies. But they did not pray to the gods to make them better men, to give them clean hearts, to guide them in the straight and narrow way of purity and rectitude, to strengthen them so that they could resist temptation. In a word, for many primitive cultures a complete divorce of religion and morality is assumed. Morality of a kind these cultures had, but it was independent of their religion. With them religion was the means of getting in touch with the powers of the unseen world, whose assistanice could be secured by due forms of ritual; while the morality they knew was founded on social conditions. Offense against the moral code made one liable to punishment by such forms of reprisal as the community recognized but did not necessarily imply any offense against a god. The union of morality and religion came comparatively late. Such is the description frequently given of the relation of religion and morality among primitive peoples, and the lack of the ethical element in their prayers is continually emphasized. In this paper it is my purpose to examine Roman prayers with a view to determining to what extent they conform to or diverge from the type described above; and where they diverge, to ascertain the sources of the new elements contained in them. I will begin with some of the prayers given by Appel in his Romanarum precationum

In a recent number of the American Journal of Archaeology' Miss Margaret Waites revives she controversy in regard to the origin of the cult of the Lares. Adopting in substance the view held by Samter, De-Marchi, Rohde, von Domaszewski and others, she traces it to the worship of the Lar familiaris, in whom she recognizes "a good spirit, closely attached in each case to a 'p'articular family, to its dwelling and to the territory immediately suIrrounding the house." The worship of this spirit, she argues, "contains many features which seem to point to a chthonic cult and which imply that the Lar was originally worshiped as the spirit of the ancestor who had founded the family and still watched with devotion over the fortunes of his descendants. " One's immediate reaction on reading this article is that among all the theories of cult origins that die hard, this ancestor theory of the worship of the Lares has one of the first places. It is probably as old as Plautus, certainly goes as far back as Varro, and has the support of other Roman writers; it has established itself in the commentaries on many Latin authors, is found in more than one dictionary of antiquities, and is defended even by those specialists in Roman religion and folklore whom I have mentioned above. Within recent years, to be sure, its prestige has suffered in no inconsiderable degree through the opposition of Wissowa in his article in Roscher's Lexicon, in his volume Religion und Kultus der Romer, his discussion in the Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft,2 and in other places. Moreover, Warde Fowler, after a grudging admission of its possibility in his Roman Festivals,3 has definitely rejected it in his Religious Experience of the Roman People (pp. 77-79). It is disregarded by Clifford Moore in his incidental reference to the cult in his book on