constitutes no coincidence, as it sought an ecumenical solution in contrast to J. A.
Hartung’s Die Religion der Römer(1836), but to no avail. German scholarship pro-
ceeded, from what it appropriated as Müller’s axiomatic demonstration, to enshrine
the view that either the Romans had no mythology, or had totally lost a very early
mythology; these scholars did not consider that perhaps the Romans had no mytho-
logy of the Greek variety (Phillips 1991a). In this the specialists in Roman religion
unwittingly supported the more general “common knowledge” view of classical studies
that “real” classical civilization was Hellenic (supraC1).
Classicists agreed on the value of the Sanskrit evidence but soon they began to
disagree on the use of other comparative evidence, a disagreement centered on Britain
and Germany. The former, with an enormous colonial empire, possessed a huge and
rapidly increasing stock of comparative ethnography, the immediate basis, along with
Darwin’s theories, on which apparently to explain notorious conundrums ancient and
modern of human societies and their institutions. It cannot be overemphasized that
academics in mid-nineteenth-century Britain conceived anthropology and religious
studies and classical studies as but parts of one overarching discipline. The organ-
izational change did not begin until 1883 – 4, with Tylor’s appointment as reader
in anthropology. Nevertheless, despite the place of anthropology as a sub-faculty
of natural sciences, Tylor regularly lectured on topics such as “Anthropological
Elucidations of Greek and Latin Authors” (1888); his “Anthropology in Ancient
History” (1904) was cross-listed (often the case with his lectures) with the ancient
history sub-faculty of litterae humaniores, and note that the very next year (1905)
Cyril Bailey offered his lecture series on Roman religion. Such juxtapositions, and
there were countless others of this ilk, speak volumes. As for publications, Tylor cited
classical sources aptly and promiscuously; the classicists Farnell and Fowler quoted
Tylor; and R. R. Marrett imbibed R. H. Codrington’s The Melanesians(1891), anth-
ologized the observations about manain his notebooks, and prefixed a stage of
pre-animism to Tylor’s theory of animism, as he strove in The Threshold of Religion
(1909) to provide a comparative-ethnographic solution to the vexed issue of numen
in early Roman religion. Whatever the value of the comparative material (it is still
disputed), the work on numenhad little Nachleben; Weinstock’s empirico-positivist
position still remains one with which, unfortunately, most today would agree
(Weinstock 1949). There was a conceptual gap which would not be bridged; the
author of the book Weinstock was reviewing, H. J. Rose, had just earlier written
that Tylor’s animism was “still popular today because it contains a large measure of
truth” (Rose 1943: 362, Rose 1935).
Germany’s relatively tiny colonial empire provided scant ethnographic data in com-
parison to Britain’s. While nationalistic and evolutionary issues blocked attention
to the British material, German Romanticism’s idealization of the people, especially
evident in Des Knaben Wunderhornof Arnim and Brentano (1806), led scholars
to utilize German folklore in many areas of classical studies, including Roman reli-
gion. The British had a long tradition of folklore studies, often tinged with nation-
alism, but their folklorists largely remained antiquarians with scant influence on
the Oxonians’ work on Roman religion. Wilhelm Mannhardt’s Antike Wald- und
Feldkulte(1875–7) remains famous (Kippenberg 2002: 81–7); Ernst Samter utilized
20 C. Robert Phillips, III