Roman gods do not live in the world of men, but they occasionally make themselves visible to them in two different ways: first, through apparitions, in periods of wakefulness or sleep – which is not often found in the texts; there, the gods advise men, warn or help them; secondly, in figurative representations, that are easily perceptible. It is then necessary to define the relationship the Romans established between those two ways of seeing the gods and the gods themselves. Authors only very cautiously mention apparitions. The god’s statue is referred to – with an apparent contradiction – either by the mere name of the god, or by the words signum or simulacrum indicating that it is a double followed by the god’s name in the genitive. Both apparitions and statues suggest a definite form of the gods’ praesentia, showing that the Romans conceived them simultaneously as present and absent in their visible manifestations.