J. P. F. Wynne’s 2019 monograph Cicero on the Philosophy of Religion: On the Nature of the Gods and On Divination opens its introduction with a with a pointed and cutting sentence: “The Romans did not understand their own religion.” I was browsing through the book, to see if it would be of some indeterminable use in the future for my personal reading and polytheistic musings, and this sentence stopped me in my tracks for a moment. Derived from the situation presented by Marcus Tullius Cicero in Academica 1.9, the sentence is certainly direct and eye catching, befitting an introductory hook. And, yet, instead of simply rolling my eyes and breezing past it, I sat with the thought a moment. The Romans did not…