In transmarine commerce the relations we have previously described(29)

between Sicily and Latium, Etruria and Attica, the Adriatic and

Tarentum, continued to subsist during the epoch before us or rather,

strictly speaking, belonged to it; for although facts of this class,

which as a rule are mentioned without a date, have been placed

together for the purpose of presenting a general view under the first

period, the statements made apply equally to the present. The clearest

evidence in this respect is, of course, that of the coins. As the

striking of Etruscan silver money after an Attic standard(30) and the

penetrating of Italian and especially of Latin copper into Sicily(31)

testify to the two former routes of traffic, so the equivalence, which

we have just mentioned, between the silver money of Magna Graecia and

the copper coinage of Picenum and Apulia, forms, with numerous other

indications, an evidence of the active traffic which the Greeks of

Lower Italy, the Tarentines in particular, held with the east Italian

seaboard. The commerce again, which was at an earlier period perhaps

still more active, between the Latins and the Campanian Greeks seems

to have been disturbed by the Sabellian immigration, and to have been

of no great moment during the first hundred and fifty years of the

republic. The refusal of the Samnites in Capua and Cumae to supply

the Romans with grain in the famine of 343 may be regarded as an

indication of the altered relations which subsisted between Latium and

Campania, till at the commencement of the fifth century the Roman arms

restored and gave increased impetus to the old intercourse.

Touching on details, we may be allowed to mention, as one of the few

dated facts in the history of Roman commerce, the notice drawn from

the annals of Ardea, that in 454 the first barber came from Sicily to

Ardea; and to dwell for a moment on the painted pottery which was sent

chiefly from Attica, but also from Corcyra and Sicily, to Lucania,

Campania, and Etruria, to serve there for the decoration of tombs--a

traffic, as to the circumstances of which we are accidentally better

informed than as to any other article of transmarine commerce. The

commencement of this import trade probably falls about the period of

the expulsion of the Tarquins; for the vases of the oldest style,

which are of very rare occurrence in Italy, were probably painted in

the second half of the third century of the city, while those of the

chaste style, occurring in greater numbers, belong to the first half,

those of the most finished beauty to the second half, of the fourth

century; and the immense quantities of the other vases, often marked

by showiness and size but seldom by excellence in workmanship, must be

assigned as a whole to the following century. It was from the Hellenes

undoubtedly that the Italians derived this custom of embellishing

tombs; but while the moderate means and fine discernment of the Greeks

confined the practice in their case within narrow limits, it was

stretched in Italy by barbaric opulence and barbaric extravagance

far beyond its original and proper bounds. It is a significant

circumstance, however, that in Italy this extravagance meets us only

in the lands that had a Hellenic semi-culture. Any one who can read

such records will perceive in the cemeteries of Etruria and Campania

--the mines whence our museums have been replenished--a significant

commentary on the accounts of the ancients as to the Etruscan and

Campanian semi-culture choked amidst wealth and arrogance.(32)

The homely Samnite character on the other hand remained at all times

a stranger to this foolish luxury; the absence of Greek pottery from

the tombs exhibits, quite as palpably as the absence of a Samnite

coinage, the slight development of commercial intercourse and of urban

life in this region. It is still more worthy of remark that Latium

also, although not less near to the Greeks than Etruria and Campania,

and in closest intercourse with them, almost wholly refrained from

such sepulchral decorations. It is more than probable--especially on

account of the altogether different character of the tombs in the

unique Praeneste--that in this result we have to recognize the

influence of the stern Roman morality or--if the expression be

preferred--of the rigid Roman police. Closely connected with this

subject are the already-mentioned interdicts, which the law of the

Twelve Tables fulminated against purple bier-cloths and gold ornaments

placed beside the dead; and the banishment of all silver plate,

excepting the salt-cellar and sacrificial ladle, from the Roman

household, so far at least as sumptuary laws and the terror of

censorial censure could banish it: even in architecture we shall again

encounter the same spirit of hostility to luxury whether noble or

ignoble. Although, however, in consequence of these influences Rome

probably preserved a certain outward simplicity longer than Capua and

Volsinii, her commerce and trade--on which, in fact, along with

agriculture her prosperity from the beginning rested--must not be

regarded as having been inconsiderable, or as having less sensibly

experienced the influence of her new commanding position.

Capital in Rome

No urban middle class in the proper sense of that term, no body of

independent tradesmen and merchants, was ever developed in Rome. The

cause of this was--in addition to the disproportionate centralization

of capital which occurred at an early period--mainly the employment of

slave labour. It was usual in antiquity, and was in fact a necessary

consequence of slavery, that the minor trades in towns were very

frequently carried on by slaves, whom their master established as

artisans or merchants; or by freedmen, in whose case the master not

only frequently furnished the capital, but also regularly stipulated

for a share, often the half, of the profits. Retail trading and

dealing in Rome were undoubtedly constantly on the increase; and

there are proofs that the trades which minister to the luxury of

great cities began to be concentrated in Rome--the Ficoroni casket

for instance was designed in the fifth century of the city by a

Praenestine artist and was sold to Praeneste, but was nevertheless

manufactured in Rome.(33) But as the net proceeds even of retail

business flowed for the most part into the coffers of the great

houses, no industrial and commercial middle-class arose to an extent

corresponding to that increase. As little were the great merchants and

great manufacturers marked off as a distinct class from the great

landlords. On the one hand, the latter were from ancient times(34)

simultaneously traders and capitalists, and combined in their hands

lending on security, trafficking on a great scale, the undertaking

of contracts, and the executing of works for the state. On the other

hand, from the emphatic moral importance which in the Roman

commonwealth attached to the possession of land, and from its

constituting the sole basis of political privileges--a basis which was

infringed for the first time only towards the close of this epoch

(35)--it was undoubtedly at this period already usual for the

fortunate speculator to invest part of his capital in land. It is

clear enough also from the political privileges given to freedmen

possessing freeholds,(36) that the Roman statesmen sought in this way

to diminish the dangerous class of the rich who had no land.

Development of Rome as A Great City

But while neither an opulent urban middle class nor a strictly close

body of capitalists grew up in Rome, it was constantly acquiring more

and more the character of a great city. This is plainly indicated by

the increasing number of slaves crowded together in the capital (as

attested by the very serious slave conspiracy of 335), and still more

by the increasing multitude of freedmen, which was gradually becoming

inconvenient and dangerous, as we may safely infer from the

considerable tax imposed on manumissions in 397(37) and from the

limitation of the political rights of freedmen in 450.(38) For not

only was it implied in the circumstances that the great majority of

the persons manumitted had to devote themselves to trade or commerce,

but manumission itself among the Romans was, as we have already said,

less an act of liberality than an industrial speculation, the master

often finding it more for his interest to share the profits of the

trade or commerce of the freedman than to assert his title to

the whole proceeds of the labour of his slave. The increase of

manumissions must therefore have necessarily kept pace with the

increase of the commercial and industrial activity of the Romans.

Urban Police

A similar indication of the rising importance of urban life in Rome is

presented by the great development of the urban police. To this period

probably belong in great measure the enactments under which the

four aediles divided the city into four police districts, and made

provision for the discharge of their equally important and difficult

functions--for the efficient repair of the network of drains small and

large by which Rome was pervaded, as well as of the public buildings

and places; for the proper cleansing and paving of the streets; for

obviating the nuisances of ruinous buildings, dangerous animals, or

foul smells; for the removing of waggons from the highway except

during the hours of evening and night, and generally for the keeping

open of the communication; for the uninterrupted supply of the market

of the capital with good and cheap grain; for the destruction of

unwholesome articles, and the suppression of false weights and

measures; and for the special oversight of baths, taverns, and

houses of bad fame.

Building--

Impulse Given to It

In respect to buildings the regal period, particularly the epoch of

the great conquests, probably accomplished more than the first two

centuries of the republic. Structures like the temples on the Capitol

and on the Aventine and the great Circus were probably as obnoxious to

the frugal fathers of the city as to the burgesses who gave their

task-work; and it is remarkable that perhaps the most considerable

building of the republican period before the Samnite wars, the temple

of Ceres in the Circus, was a work of Spurius Cassius (261) who in

more than one respect, sought to lead the commonwealth back to the

traditions of the kings. The governing aristocracy moreover repressed

private luxury with a rigour such as the rule of the kings, if

prolonged, would certainly not have displayed. But at length even

the senate was no longer able to resist the superior force of

circumstances. It was Appius Claudius who in his epoch-making

censorship (442) threw aside the antiquated rustic system of

parsimonious hoarding, and taught his fellow-citizens to make a worthy

use of the public resources. He began that noble system of public

works of general utility, which justifies, if anything can justify,

the military successes of Rome even from the point of view of the

welfare of the nations, and which even now in its ruins furnishes some

idea of the greatness of Rome to thousands on thousands who have never

read a page of her history. To him the Roman state was indebted for

its great military road, and the city of Rome for its first aqueduct.

Following in the steps of Claudius, the Roman senate wove around Italy

that network of roads and fortresses, the formation of which has

already been described,(39) and without which, as the history of all

military states from the Achaemenidae down to the creator of the road

over the Simplon shows, no military hegemony can subsist. Following in

the steps of Claudius, Manius Curius built from the proceeds of the

Pyrrhic spoil a second aqueduct for the capital (482); and some years

previously (464) with the gains of the Sabine war he opened up for the

Velino, at the point above Terni where it falls into the Nera, that

broader channel in which the stream still flows, with a view to drain

the beautiful valley of Rieti and thereby to gain space for a large

burgess settlement along with a modest farm for himself. Such works,

in the eyes of persons of intelligence, threw into the shade the

aimless magnificence of the Hellenic temples.

Embellishment of the City

The style of living also among the citizens now was altered. About

the time of Pyrrhus silver plate began to make its appearance on Roman

tables, and the chroniclers date the disappearance of shingle roofs in

Rome from 470.(40) The new capital of Italy gradually laid aside its

village-like aspect, and now began to embellish itself. It was not yet

indeed customary to strip the temples in conquered towns of their

ornaments for the decoration of Rome; but the beaks of the galleys of

Antium were displayed at the orator's platform in the Forum(41) and

on public festival days the gold-mounted shields brought home from

the battle-fields of Samnium were exhibited along the stalls of the

market.(42) The proceeds of fines were specially applied to the paving

of the highways in and near the city, or to the erection and

embellishment of public buildings. The wooden booths of the butchers,

which stretched along the Forum on both sides, gave way, first on the

Palatine side, then on that also which faced the Carinae, to the stone

stalls of the money-changers; so that this place became the Exchange

of Rome. Statues of the famous men of the past, of the kings, priests,

and heroes of the legendary period, and of the Grecian -hospes- who

was said to have interpreted to the decemvirs the laws of Solon;

honorary columns and monuments dedicated to the great burgomasters who

had conquered the Veientes, the Latins, the Samnites, to state envoys

who had perished while executing their instructions, to rich women

who had bequeathed their property to public objects, nay even to

celebrated Greek philosophers and heroes such as Pythagoras and

Alcibiades, were erected on the Capitol or in the Forum. Thus, now

that the Roman community had become a great power, Rome itself

became a great city.

Silver Standard of Value

Lastly Rome, as head of the Romano-Italian confederacy, not only

entered into the Hellenistic state-system, but also conformed to the

Hellenic system of moneys and coins. Up to this time the different

communities of northern and central Italy, with few exceptions, had

struck only a copper currency; the south Italian towns again

universally had a currency of silver; and there were as many legal

standards and systems of coinage as there were sovereign communities

in Italy. In 485 all these local mints were restricted to the issuing

of small coin; a general standard of currency applicable to all Italy

was introduced, and the coining of the currency was centralized in

Rome; Capua alone continued to retain its own silver coinage struck in

the name of Rome, but after a different standard. The new monetary

system was based on the legal ratio subsisting between the two metals,

as it had long been fixed.(43) The common monetary unit was the piece

of ten -asses- (which were no longer of a pound, but reduced to the

third of a pound), the -denarius-, which weighed in copper 3 1/3 and

in silver 1/72, of a Roman pound, a trifle more than the Attic

--drachma--. At first copper money still predominated in the coinage;

and it is probable that the earliest silver -denarius- was coined

chiefly for Lower Italy and for intercourse with other lands. As the

victory of the Romans over Pyrrhus and Tarentum and the Roman embassy

to Alexandria could not but engage the thoughts of the contemporary

Greek statesman, so the sagacious Greek merchant might well ponder as

he looked on these new Roman drachmae. Their flat, unartistic, and

monotonous stamping appeared poor and insignificant by the side of

the marvellously beautiful contemporary coins of Pyrrhus and the

Siceliots; nevertheless they were by no means, like the barbarian

coins of antiquity, slavishly imitated and unequal in weight and

alloy, but, on the contrary, worthy from the first by their

independent and conscientious execution to be placed on a level

with any Greek coin.

Extension of the Latin Nationality

Thus, when the eye turns from the development of constitutions and

from the national struggles for dominion and for freedom which

agitated Italy, and Rome in particular, from the banishment of the

Tarquinian house to the subjugation of the Samnites and the Italian

Greeks, and rests on those calmer spheres of human existence which

history nevertheless rules and pervades, it everywhere encounters the

reflex influence of the great events, by which the Roman burgesses

burst the bonds of patrician sway, and the rich variety of the

national cultures of Italy gradually perished to enrich a single

people. While the historian may not attempt to follow out the great

course of events into the infinite multiplicity of individual detail,

he does not overstep his province when, laying hold of detached

fragments of scattered tradition, he indicates the most important

changes which during this epoch took place in the national life of

Italy. That in such an inquiry the life of Rome becomes still more

prominent than in the earlier epoch, is not merely the result of the

accidental blanks of our tradition; it was an essential consequence

of the change in the political position of Rome, that the Latin

nationality should more and more cast the other nationalities of Italy

into the shade. We have already pointed to the fact, that at this

epoch the neighbouring lands--southern Etruria, Sabina, the land of

the Volscians, --began to become Romanized, as is attested by the

almost total absence of monuments of the old native dialects, and by

the occurrence of very ancient Roman inscriptions in those regions;

the admission of the Sabines to full burgess-rights at the end of this

period(44) betokens that the Latinizing of Central Italy was already

at that time the conscious aim of Roman policy. The numerous

individual assignations and colonial establishments scattered

throughout Italy were, not only in a military but also in a linguistic

and national point of view, the advanced posts of the Latin stock. The

Latinizing of the Italians was scarcely at this time generally aimed

at; on the contrary, the Roman senate seems to have intentionally

upheld the distinction between the Latin and the other nationalities,

and they did not yet, for example, allow the introduction of Latin

into official use among the half-burgess communities of Campania. The

force of circumstances, however, is stronger than even the strongest

government: the language and customs of the Latin people immediately

shared its predominance in Italy, and already began to undermine

the other Italian nationalities.

Progress of Hellenism in Italy--

Adoption of Greek Habits at the Table

These nationalities were at the same time assailed from another

quarter and by an ascendency resting on another basis--by Hellenism.

This was the period when Hellenism began to become conscious of its

intellectual superiority to the other nations, and to diffuse itself

on every side. Italy did not remain unaffected by it. The most

remarkable phenomenon of this sort is presented by Apulia, which after

the fifth century of Rome gradually laid aside its barbarian dialect

and silently became Hellenized. This change was brought about, as in

Macedonia and Epirus, not by colonization, but by civilization, which

seems to have gone hand in hand with the land commerce of Tarentum; at

least that hypothesis is favoured by the facts, that the districts

of the Poediculi and Daunii who were on friendly terms with the

Tarentines carried out their Hellenization more completely than the

Sallentines who lived nearer to Tarentum but were constantly at feud

with it, and that the towns that were soonest Graecized, such as Arpi,

were not situated on the coast. The stronger influence exerted by

Hellenism over Apulia than over any other Italian region is explained

partly by its position, partly by the slight development of any

national culture of its own, and partly also perhaps by its

nationality presenting a character less alien to the Greek stock than

that of the rest of Italy.(45) We have already called attention(46) to

the fact that the southern Sabellian stocks, although at the outset in

concert with the tyrants of Syracuse they crushed and destroyed the

Hellenism of Magna Graecia, were at the same time affected by contact

and mingling with the Greeks, so that some of them, such as the

Bruttians and Nolans, adopted the Greek language by the side of their

native tongue, and others, such as the Lucanians and a part of the

Campanians, adopted at least Greek writing and Greek manners. Etruria

likewise showed tendencies towards a kindred development in the

remarkable vases which have been discovered(47) belonging to this

period, rivalling those of Campania and Lucania; and though Latium and

Samnium remained more strangers to Hellenism, there were not wanting

there also traces of an incipient and ever-growing influence of Greek

culture. In all branches of the development of Rome during this epoch,

in legislation and coinage, in religion, in the formation of national

legend, we encounter traces of the Greeks; and from the commencement

of the fifth century in particular, in other words, after the conquest

of Campania, the Greek influence on Roman life appears rapidly and

constantly on the increase. In the fourth century occurred the

erection of the "-Graecostasis-"--remarkable in the very form of the

word--a platform in the Roman Forum for eminent Greek strangers and

primarily for the Massiliots.(48) In the following century the annals

began to exhibit Romans of quality with Greek surnames, such as

Philipus or in Roman form Pilipus, Philo, Sophus, Hypsaeus. Greek

customs gained ground: such as the non-Italian practice of placing

inscriptions in honour of the dead on the tomb--of which the epitaph

of Lucius Scipio (consul in 456) is the oldest example known to us;

the fashion, also foreign to the Italians, of erecting without any

decree of the state honorary monuments to ancestors in public places

--a system begun by the great innovator Appius Claudius, when he

caused bronze shields with images and eulogies of his ancestors to be

suspended in the new temple of Bellona (442); the distribution of

branches of palms to the competitors, introduced at the Roman national

festival in 461; above all, the Greek manners and habits at table.

The custom not of sitting as formerly on benches, but of reclining

on sofas, at table; the postponement of the chief meal from noon to

between two and three o'clock in the afternoon according to our mode

of reckoning; the institution of masters of the revels at banquets,

who were appointed from among the guests present, generally by

throwing the dice, and who then prescribed to the company what, how,

and when they should drink; the table-chants sung in succession by the

guests, which, however, in Rome were not -scolia-, but lays in praise

of ancestors--all these were not primitive customs in Rome, but were

borrowed from the Greeks at a very early period, for in Cato's time

these usages were already common and had in fact partly fallen into

disuse again. We must therefore place their introduction in this

period at the latest. A characteristic feature also was the erection

of statues to "the wisest and the bravest Greek" in the Roman Forum,

which took place by command of the Pythian Apollo during the Samnite

wars. The selection fell--evidently under Sicilian or Campanian

influence--on Pythagoras and Alcibiades, the saviour and the Hannibal

of the western Hellenes. The extent to which an acquaintance with

Greek was already diffused in the fifth century among Romans of

quality is shown by the embassies of the Romans to Tarentum--when

their mouthpiece spoke, if not in the purest Greek, at any rate

without an interpreter--and of Cineas to Rome. It scarcely admits

of a doubt that from the fifth century the young Romans who devoted

themselves to state affairs universally acquired a knowledge of what

was then the general language of the world and of diplomacy.

Thus in the intellectual sphere Hellenism made advances quite as

incessant as the efforts of the Romans to subject the earth to their

sway; and the secondary nationalities, such as the Samnite, Celt, and

Etruscan, hard pressed on both sides, were ever losing their inward

vigour as well as narrowing their outward bounds.

Rome and the Romans of This Epoch

When the two great nations, both arrived at the height of their

development, began to mingle in hostile or in friendly contact, their

antagonism of character was at the same time prominently and fully

brought out--the total want of individuality in the Italian and

especially in the Roman character, as contrasted with the boundless

variety, lineal, local, and personal, of Hellenism. There was no epoch

of mightier vigour in the history of Rome than the epoch from the

institution of the republic to the subjugation of Italy. That epoch

laid the foundations of the commonwealth both within and without; it

created a united Italy; it gave birth to the traditional groundwork of

the national law and of the national history; it originated the

-pilum- and the maniple, the construction of roads and of aqueducts,

the farming of estates and the monetary system; it moulded the

she-wolf of the Capitol and designed the Ficoroni casket. But the

individuals, who contributed the several stones to this gigantic

structure and cemented them together, have disappeared without leaving

a trace, and the nations of Italy did not merge into that of Rome more

completely than the single Roman burgess merged in the Roman

community. As the grave closes alike over all whether important or

insignificant, so in the roll of the Roman burgomasters the empty

scion of nobility stands undistinguishable by the side of the great

statesman. Of the few records that have reached us from this period

none is more venerable, and none at the same time more characteristic,

than the epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio, who was consul in 456,

and three years afterwards took part in the decisive battle of

Sentinum.(49) On the beautiful sarcophagus, in noble Doric style,

which eighty years ago still enclosed the dust of the conqueror of the

Samnites, the following sentence is inscribed:--

-Cornelius Lucius--Scipio Barbatus,

Gnaivod patre prognatus, --fortis vir sapiensque,

Quoius forma virtu--tei parisuma fuit,

Consol censor aidilis--quei fuit apud vos,

Taurasia Cisauna--Samnio cepit,

Subigit omne Loucanum--opsidesque abdoucit.-

_-'_-'_-'_||-'_-'_-'_

Innumerable others who had been at the head of the Roman commonwealth,

as well as this Roman statesman and warrior, might be commemorated as

having been of noble birth and of manly beauty, valiant and wise; but

there was no more to record regarding them. It is doubtless not the

mere fault of tradition that no one of these Cornelii, Fabii, Papirii,

or whatever they were called, confronts us in a distinct individual

figure. The senator was supposed to be no worse and no better than

other senators, nor at all to differ from them. It was not necessary

and not desirable that any burgess should surpass the rest, whether by

showy silver plate and Hellenic culture, or by uncommon wisdom and

excellence. Excesses of the former kind were punished by the censor,

and for the latter the constitution gave no scope. The Rome of this

period belonged to no individual; it was necessary for all the

burgesses to be alike, that each of them might be like a king.

Appius Claudius

No doubt, even now Hellenic individual development asserted its claims

by the side of that levelling system; and the genius and force which

it exhibited bear, no less than the tendency to which it opposed

itself, the full stamp of that great age. We can name but a single man

in connection with it; but he was, as it were, the incarnation of the

idea of progress. Appius Claudius (censor 442; consul 447, 458), the

great-great-grandson of the decemvir, was a man of the old nobility

and proud of the long line of his ancestors; but yet it was he who

set aside the restriction which confined the full franchise of the

state to the freeholders,(50) and who broke up the old system of

finance.(51) From Appius Claudius date not only the Roman aqueducts

and highways, but also Roman jurisprudence, eloquence, poetry, and

grammar. The publication of a table of the -legis actiones-, speeches

committed to writing and Pythagorean sentences, and even innovations

in orthography, are attributed to him. We may not on this account call

him absolutely a democrat or include him in that opposition party

which found its champion in Manius Curius;(52) in him on the contrary

the spirit of the ancient and modern patrician kings predominated

--the spirit of the Tarquins and the Caesars, between whom he forms

a connecting link in that five hundred years' interregnum of

extraordinary deeds and ordinary men. So long as Appius Claudius took

an active part in public life, in his official conduct as well as his

general carriage he disregarded laws and customs on all hands with the

hardihood and sauciness of an Athenian; till, after having long

retired from the political stage, the blind old man, returning as it

were from the tomb at the decisive Moment, overcame king Pyrrhus in

the senate, and first formally and solemnly proclaimed the complete

sovereignty of Rome over Italy.(53) But the gifted man came too early

or too late; the gods made him blind on account of his untimely

wisdom. It was not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through

Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy--propagated

from generation to generation in the senate--with the leading maxims

of which the sons of the senators became already imbued, when in the

company of their fathers they went to the council and there at the

door of the hall listened to the wisdom of the men whose seats they

were destined at some future time to fill. Immense successes were

thus obtained at an immense price; for Nike too is followed by her

Nemesis. In the Roman commonwealth there was no special dependence

on any one man, either on soldier or on general, and under the

rigid discipline of its moral police all the idiosyncrasies of human

character were extinguished. Rome reached a greatness such as no other

state of antiquity attained; but she dearly purchased her greatness at

the sacrifice of the graceful variety, of the easy abandon and of

the inward freedom of Hellenic life.

Notes for Book II Chapter VIII

1. I. XI. Punishment of Offenses against Order

2. II. I. Right of Appeal

3. II. III. The Senate, Its Composition

4. II. I. Law and Edict

5. II. III. Censorship, the Magistrates, Partition and Weakening of

the Consular Powers

6. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes

7. I. VI. Class of --Metoeci-- Subsisting by the Side of the Community

8. I. V. The Housefather and His Household, note

9. II. III. Praetorship

10. II. III. Praetorship, II. V. Revision of the Municipal

Constitutions, Police Judges

11. The view formerly adopted, that these -tres viri- belonged to the

earliest period, is erroneous, for colleges of magistrates with odd

numbers are foreign to the oldest state-arrangements (Chronol. p. 15,

note 12). Probably the well-accredited account, that they were first

nominated in 465 (Liv. Ep. 11), should simply be retained, and the

otherwise suspicious inference of the falsifier Licinius Macer (in

Liv. vii. 46), which makes mention of them before 450, should be

simply rejected. At first undoubtedly the -tres viri- were nominated

by the superior magistrates, as was the case with most of the later

-magistratus minores-; the Papirian -plebiscitum-, which transferred

the nomination of them to the community (Festus, -v. sacramentum-,

p. 344, Niall.), was at any rate not issued till after the institution

of the office of -praetor peregrinus-, or at the earliest towards the

middle of the sixth century, for it names the praetor -qui inter jus

cives ius dicit-.

12. II. VII. Subject Communities

13. This inference is suggested by what Livy says (ix. 20) as to the

reorganization of the colony of Antium twenty years after it was

founded; and it is self-evident that, while the Romans might very

well impose on the inhabitant of Ostia the duty of settling all his

lawsuits in Rome, the same course could not be followed with townships

like Antium and Sena.

14. II. I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers

15. People are in the habit of praising the Romans as a nation

specially privileged in respect to jurisprudence, and of gazing with

wonder on their admirable law as a mystical gift of heaven; presumably

by way of specially excusing themselves for the worthlessness of

their own legal system. A glance at the singularly fluctuating and

undeveloped criminal law of the Romans might show the untenableness

of ideas so confused even to those who may think the proposition too

simple, that a sound people has a sound law, and a morbid people an

unsound. Apart from the more general political conditions on which

jurisprudence also, and indeed jurisprudence especially, depends, the

causes of the excellence of the Roman civil law lie mainly in two

features: first, that the plaintiff and defendant were specially

obliged to explain and embody in due and binding form the grounds of

the demand and of the objection to comply with it; and secondly, that

the Romans appointed a permanent machinery for the edictal development

of their law, and associated it immediately with practice. By the

former the Romans precluded the pettifogging practices of advocates,

by the latter they obviated incapable law-making, so far as such

things can be prevented at all; and by means of both in conjunction

they satisfied, as far as is possible, the two conflicting

requirements, that law shall constantly be fixed, and that it

shall constantly be in accordance with the spirit of the age.

16. II. II. Relation of the Tribune to the Consul

17. V. V. The Hegemony of Rome over Latium Shaken and Re-established

18. Venus probably first appears in the later sense as Aphrodite on

occasion of the dedication of the temple consecrated in this year

(Liv. x. 31; Becker, Topographie, p. 472).

19. II. III. Intrigues of the Nobility

20. I. VI. Organization of the Army

21. II. III. Increasing Powers of the Burgesses

22. I. VI. the Five Classes

23. According to Roman tradition the Romans originally carried

quadrangular shields, after which they borrowed from the Etruscans the

round hoplite shield (-clupeus-, --aspis--), and from the Samnites the

later square shield (-scutum-, --thureos--), and the javelin (-veru-)

(Diodor. Vat. Fr. p. 54; Sallust, Cat. 51, 38; Virgil, Aen. vii. 665;

Festus, Ep. v. Samnites, p. 327, Mull.; and the authorities cited in

Marquardt, Handb. iii. 2, 241). But it may be regarded as certain that

the hoplite shield or, in other words, the tactics of the Doric

phalanx were imitated not from the Etruscans, but directly from the

Hellenes, As to the -scutum-, that large, cylindrical, convex leather

shield must certainly have taken the place of the flat copper

-clupeus-, when the phalanx was broken up into maniples; but the

undoubted derivation of the word from the Greek casts suspicion on the

derivation of the thing itself from the Samnites. From the Greeks the

Romans derived also the sling (-funda- from --sphendone--). (like

-fides- from --sphion--),(I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences).

The pilum was considered by the ancients as quite a Roman invention.

24. I. XIII. Landed Proprietors

25. II. III. Combination of the Plebian Aristocracy and the Farmers

against the Nobility

26. Varro (De R. R. i. 2, 9) evidently conceives the author of the

Licinian agrarian law as fanning in person his extensive lands;

although, we may add, the story may easily have been invented to

explain the cognomen (-Stolo-).

27. I. XIII. System of Joint Cultivation

28. I. XIII. Inland Commerce of the Italians

29. I. XIII. Commerce in Latium Passive, in Etruria Active

30. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce

31. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce

32. II. IV. Etruria at Peace and on the Decline, II. V. Campanian

Hellenism

33. The conjecture that Novius Flautius, the artist who worked at

this casket for Dindia Macolnia, in Rome, may have been a Campanian,

is refuted by the old Praenestine tomb-stones recently discovered,

on which, among other Macolnii and Plautii, there occurs also a Lucius

Magulnius, son of Haulms (L. Magolnio Pla. f.).

34. I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce, II. II.

Rising Power of the Capitalists

35. II. III. The Burgess Body

36. II. III. The Burgess Body

37. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes

38. II. III. The Burgess Body

39. II. VII. Construction of New Fortresses and Roads

40. We have already mentioned the censorial stigma attached to Publius

Cornelius Rufinus (consul 464, 477) for his silver plate.(II. VIII.

Police) The strange statement of Fabius (in Strabo, v. p. 228) that

the Romans first became given to luxury (--aisthesthae tou plouton--)

after the conquest of the Sabines, is evidently only a historical

version of the same matter; for the conquest of the Sabines falls in

the first consulate of Rufinus.

41. II. V. Colonizations in the Land of the Volsci

42. II. VI. Last Campaigns in Samnium

43. II. VIII. Inland Intercourse in Italy

44. I. III. Localities of the Oldest Cantons

45. I. II. Iapygians

46. II. V. Campanian Hellenism

47. II. VIII. Transmarine Commerce

48. II. VII. The Full Roman Franchise

49. II. VI. Battle of Sentinum

50. II. III. The Burgess-Body

51. II. VIII. Impulse Given to It

52. II. III. New Opposition

53. II. VII. Attempts at Peace

CHAPTER IX

Art and Science

The Roman National Festival--

The Roman Stage

The growth of art, and of poetic art especially, in antiquity was

intimately associated with the development of national festivals.

The thanksgiving-festival of the Roman community, which had been

already organized in the previous period essentially under Greek

influence and in the first instance as an extraordinary festival,

--the -ludi maximi- or -Romani-,(1) --acquired during the present

epoch a longer duration and greater variety in the amusements.

Originally limited to one day, the festival was prolonged by an

additional day after the happy termination of each of the three

great revolutions of 245, 260, and 387, and thus at the close of

this period it had already a duration of four days.(2)

A still more important circumstance was, that, probably on the

institution of the curule aedileship (387) which was from the first

entrusted with the preparation and oversight of the festival,(3) it

lost its extraordinary character and its reference to a special vow

made by the general, and took its place in the series of the ordinary

annually recurring festivals as the first of all. Nevertheless the

government adhered to the practice of allowing the spectacle proper

--namely the chariot-race, which was the principal performance--to

take place not more than once at the close of the festival. On the

other days the multitude were probably left mainly to furnish

amusement for themselves, although musicians, dancers, rope-walkers,

jugglers, jesters and such like would not fail to make their

appearance on the occasion, whether hired or not But about the year

390 an important change occurred, which must have stood in connection

with the fixing and prolongation of the festival, that took place

perhaps about the same time. A scaffolding of boards was erected at

the expense of the state in the Circus for the first three days, and

suitable representations were provided on it for the entertainment of

the multitude. That matters might not be carried too far however in

this way, a fixed sum of 200,000 -asses- (2055 pounds) once for all

appropriated from the exchequer for the expenses of the festival; and

the sum was not increased up to the period of the Punic wars. The

aediles, who had to expend this sum, were obliged to defray any

additional amount out of their own pockets; and it is not probable

that they at this time contributed often or considerably from their

own resources. That the new stage was generally under Greek influence,

is proved by its very name (-scaena-, --skene--). It was no doubt at

first designed merely for musicians and buffoons of all sorts, amongst

whom the dancers to the flute, particularly those then so celebrated

from Etruria, were probably the most distinguished; but a public stage

had at any rate now arisen in Rome and it soon became open also to

the Roman poets.

Ballad Singers, -Satura- --

Censure of Art

There was no want of such poets in Latium. Latin "strolling minstrels"

or "ballad-singers" (-grassatores-, -spatiatores-) went from town to

town and from house to house, and recited their chants (-saturae-(4)),

gesticulating and dancing to the accompaniment of the flute.

The measure was of course the only one that then existed, the

so-called Saturnian.(5) No distinct plot lay at the basis of the

chants, and as little do they appear to have been in the form of

dialogue. We must conceive of them as resembling those monotonous

--sometimes improvised, sometimes recited--ballads and -tarantelle-,

such as one may still hear in the Roman hostelries. Songs of this sort

accordingly early came upon the public stage, and certainly formed the

first nucleus of the Roman theatre. But not only were these beginnings

of the drama in Rome, as everywhere, modest and humble; they were, in

a remarkable manner, accounted from the very outset disreputable.

The Twelve Tables denounced evil and worthless song-singing, imposing

severe penalties not only upon incantations but even on lampoons

composed against a fellow-citizen or recited before his door, and

forbidding the employment of wailing-women at funerals. But far more

severely, than by such legal restrictions, the incipient exercise of

art was affected by the moral anathema, which was denounced against

these frivolous and paid trades by the narrowminded earnestness of

the Roman character. "The trade of a poet," says Cato, "in former

times was not respected; if any one occupied himself with it or was a

hanger-on at banquets, he was called an idler." But now any one who

practised dancing, music, or ballad-singing for money was visited

with a double stigma, in consequence of the more and more confirmed

disapproval of gaining a livelihood by services rendered for

remuneration. While accordingly the taking part in the masked

farces with stereotyped characters, that formed the usual native

amusement,(6) was looked upon as an innocent youthful frolic, the

appearing on a public stage for money and without a mask was

considered as directly infamous, and the singer and poet were in

this respect placed quite on a level with the rope-dancer and the

harlequin. Persons of this stamp were regularly pronounced by the

censors(7) incapable of serving in the burgess-army and of voting

in the burgess-assembly. Moreover, not only was the direction of the

stage regarded as pertaining to the province of the city police--a

fact significant enough even in itself--but the police was probably,

even at this period, invested with arbitrary powers of an

extraordinary character against professional stage-artists. Not only

did the police magistrates sit in judgment on the performance after

its conclusion--on which occasion wine flowed as copiously for those

who had acquitted themselves well, as stripes fell to the lot of the

bungler--but all the urban magistrates were legally entitled to

inflict bodily chastisement and imprisonment on any actor at any

time and at any place. The necessary effect of this was that dancing,

music, and poetry, at least so far as they appeared on the public

stage, fell into the hands of the lowest classes of the Roman

burgesses, and especially into those of foreigners; and while at

this period poetry still played altogether too insignificant a part

to engage the attention of foreign artists, the statement on the other

hand, that in Rome all the music, sacred and profane, was essentially

Etruscan, and consequently the ancient Latin art of the flute,

which was evidently at one time held in high esteem,(8) had been

supplanted by foreign music, may be regarded as already applicable

to this period.

There is no mention of any poetical literature. Neither the masked

plays nor the recitations of the stage can have had in the proper

sense fixed texts; on the contrary, they were ordinarily improvised

by the performers themselves as circumstances required. Of works

composed at this period posterity could point to nothing but a sort

of Roman "Works and Days"--counsels of a farmer to his son,(9) and

the already-mentioned Pythagorean poems of Appius Claudius(10) the

first commencement of Roman poetry after the Hellenic type. Nothing

of the poems of this epoch has survived but one or two epitaphs

in Saturnian measure.(11)

Roman Historical Composition

Along with the rudiments of the Roman drama, the rudiments of Roman

historical composition belong to this period; both as regards the

contemporary recording of remarkable events, and as regards the

conventional settlement of the early history of the Roman community.

Registers of Magistrates

The writing of contemporary history was associated with the register

of the magistrates. The register reaching farthest back, which was

accessible to the later Roman inquirers and is still indirectly

accessible to us, seems to have been derived from the archives of the

temple of the Capitoline Jupiter; for it records the names of the

annual presidents of the community onward from the consul Marcus

Horatius, who consecrated that temple on the 13th Sept. in his year of

office, and it also notices the vow which was made on occasion of a

severe pestilence under the consuls Publius Servilius and Lucius

Aebutius (according to the reckoning now current, 291), that

thenceforward a nail should be driven every hundredth year into the

wall of the Capitoline temple. Subsequently it was the state officials

who were learned in measuring and in writing, or in other words, the

pontifices, that kept an official record of the names of the annual

chief magistrates, and thus combined an annual, with the earlier

monthly, calendar. Both these calendars were afterwards comprehended

under the name of Fasti--which strictly belonged only to the list of

court-days. This arrangement was probably adopted not long after the

abolition of the monarchy; for in fact an official record of the

annual magistrates was of urgent practical necessity for the purpose

of authenticating the order of succession of official documents. But,

if there was an official register of the consuls so old, it probably

perished in the Gallic conflagration (364); and the list of the

pontifical college was subsequently completed from the Capitoline

register which was not affected by that catastrophe, so far as this

latter reached back. That the list of presidents which we now have

--although in collateral matters, and especially in genealogical

statements, it has been supplemented at pleasure from the family

pedigrees of the nobility--is in substance based from the beginning

on contemporary and credible records, admits of no doubt. But it

reproduces the calendar years only imperfectly and approximately: for

the consuls did not enter on office with the new year, or even on a

definite day fixed once for all; on the contrary from various causes

the day of entering on office was fluctuating, and the -interregna-

that frequently occurred between two consulates were entirely omitted

in the reckoning by official years. Accordingly, if the calendar years

were to be reckoned by this list of consuls, it was necessary to note

the days of entering on and of demitting office in the case of each

pair, along with such -interregna- as occurred; and this too may have

been early done. But besides this, the list of the annual magistrates

was adjusted to the list of calendar years in such a way that a pair

of magistrates were by accommodation assigned to each calendar year,

and, where the list did not suffice, intercalary years were inserted,

which are denoted in the later (Varronian) table by the figures 379,

383, 421, 430, 445, 453. From 291 u. c. (463 B. C.) the Roman list

demonstrably coincides, not indeed in detail but yet on the whole,

with the Roman calendar, and is thus chronologically certain, so far

as the defectiveness of the calendar itself allows. The 47 years

preceding that date cannot be checked, but must likewise be at least

in the main correct.(12) Whatever lies beyond 245 remains,

chronologically, in oblivion.

Capitoline Era

No era was formed for ordinary use; but in ritual matters they

reckoned from the year of the consecration of the temple of the

Capitoline Jupiter, from which the list of magistrates also started.

Annals

The idea naturally suggested itself that, along with the names of

the magistrates, the most important events occurring under their

magistracy might be noted; and from such notices appended to the

catalogue of magistrates the Roman annals arose, just as the

chronicles of the middle ages arose out of the memoranda marginally

appended to the table of Easter. But it was not until a late period

that the pontifices formed the scheme of a formal chronicle (-liber

annalis-), which should steadily year by year record the names of all

the magistrates and the remarkable events. Before the eclipse of the

sun noticed under the 5th of June 351, by which is probably meant that

of the 20th June 354, no solar eclipse was found recorded from

observation in the later chronicle of the city: its statements as to

the numbers of the census only begin to sound credible after the

beginning of the fifth century,(13) the cases of fines brought before

the people, and the prodigies expiated on behalf of the community,

appear to have been regularly introduced into the annals only after

the second half of the fifth century began. To all appearance the

institution of an organized book of annals, and--what was certainly

associated with it--the revision (which we have just explained) of the

earlier list of magistrates so as to make it a year-calendar by the

insertion, where chronologically necessary, of intercalary years, took

place in the first half of the fifth century. But even after it became

a practically recognized duty of the -pontifex maximus- to record year

after year campaigns and colonizations, pestilences and famines,

eclipses and portents, the deaths of priests and other men of note,

the new decrees of the people, and the results of the census, and

to deposit these records in his official residence for permanent

preservation and for any one's inspection, these records were still

far removed from the character of real historical writings. How scanty

the contemporary record still was at the close of this period and how

ample room is left for the caprice of subsequent annalists, is shown

with incisive clearness by a comparison of the accounts as to the

campaign of 456 in the annals and in the epitaph of the consul

Scipio.(14) The later historians were evidently unable to construct a

readable and in some measure connected narrative out of these notices

from the book of annals; and we should have difficulty, even if the

book of annals still lay before us with its original contents, in

writing from it in duly connected sequence the history of the times.

Such chronicles, however, did not exist merely in Rome; every Latin

city possessed its annals as well as its pontifices, as is clear from

isolated notices relative to Ardea for instance, Ameria, and Interamna

on the Nar; and from the collective mass of these city-chronicles

some result might perhaps have been attained similar to what has

been accomplished for the earlier middle ages by the comparison of

different monastic chronicles. Unfortunately the Romans in later times

preferred to supply the defect by Hellenic or Hellenizing falsehoods.

Family Pedigrees

Besides these official arrangements, meagrely planned and uncertainly

handled, for commemorating past times and past events, there can

scarcely have existed at this epoch any other records immediately

serviceable for Roman history. Of private chronicles we find no trace.

The leading houses, however, were careful to draw up genealogical

tables, so important in a legal point of view, and to have the family

pedigree painted for a perpetual memorial on the walls of the

entrance-hall. These lists, which at least named the magistracies held

by the family, not only furnished a basis for family tradition, but

doubtless at an early period had biographical notices attached to

them. The memorial orations, which in Rome could not be omitted at the

funeral of any person of quality, and were ordinarily pronounced by

the nearest relative of the deceased, consisted essentially not merely

in an enumeration of the virtues and excellencies of the dead, but

also in a recital of the deeds and virtues of his ancestors; and so

they were doubtless, even in the earliest times, transmitted

traditionally from one generation to another. Many a valuable

notice may by this means have been preserved; but many a daring

perversion and falsification also may have been in this way

introduced into tradition.

Roman Early History of Rome

But as the first steps towards writing real history belonged to

this period, to it belonged also the first attempts to record, and

conventionally distort, the primitive history of Rome. The sources

whence it was formed were of course the same as they are everywhere.

Isolated names like those of the kings Numa, Ancus, Tullus, to whom

the clan-names were probably only assigned subsequently, and isolated

facts, such as the conquest of the Latins by king Tarquinius and the

expulsion of the Tarquinian royal house, may have continued to live in

true general tradition orally transmitted. Further materials were

furnished by the traditions of the patrician clans, such as the

various tales that relate to the Fabii. Other tales gave a symbolic

and historic shape to primitive national institutions, especially

setting forth with great vividness the origin of rules of law. The

sacredness of the walls was thus illustrated in the tale of the death

of Remus, the abolition of blood-revenge in the tale of the end of

king Tatius(15), the necessity of the arrangement as to the -pons

sublicius- in the legend of Horatius Cocles,(15) the origin of the

-provocatio- in the beautiful tale of the Horatii and Curiatii, the

origin of manumission and of the burgess-rights of freedmen in the

tale of the Tarquinian conspiracy and the slave Vindicius. To the same

class belongs the history of the foundation of the city itself, which

was designed to connect the origin of Rome with Latium and with Alba,

the general metropolis of the Latins. Historical glosses were annexed

to the surnames of distinguished Romans; that of Publius Valerius the

"servant of the people" (-Poplicola-), for instance, gathered around

it a whole group of such anecdotes. Above all, the sacred fig-tree and

other spots and notable objects in the city were associated with a

great multitude of sextons' tales of the same nature as those out of

which, upwards of a thousand years afterwards, there grew up on the

same ground the Mirabilia Urbis. Some attempts to link together these

different tales--the adjustment of the series of the seven kings, the

setting down of the duration of the monarchy at 240 years in all,

which was undoubtedly based on a calculation of the length of

generations,(16) and even the commencement of an official record of

these assumed facts--probably took place already in this epoch. The

outlines of the narrative, and in particular its quasi-chronology,

make their appearance in the later tradition so unalterably fixed,

that for that very reason the fixing of them must be placed not in,

but previous to, the literary epoch of Rome. If a bronze casting of

the twins Romulus and Remus sucking the teats of the she-wolf was

already placed beside the sacred fig-tree in 458, the Romans who

subdued Latium and Samnium must have heard the history of the origin

of their ancestral city in a form not greatly differing from what

we read in Livy. Even the Aborigines--i. e. "those from the very

beginning"--that simple rudimental form of historical speculation as

to the Latin race--are met with about 465 in the Sicilian author

Callias. It is of the very nature of a chronicle that it should attach

prehistoric speculation to history and endeavour to go back, if not

to the origin of heaven and earth, at least to the origin of the

community; and there is express testimony that the table of the

pontifices specified the year of the foundation of Rome. Accordingly

it may be assumed that, when the pontifical college in the first half

of the fifth century proceeded to substitute for the former scanty

records--ordinarily, doubtless, confined to the names of the

magistrates--the scheme of a formal yearly chronicle, it also added

what was wanting at the beginning, the history of the kings of Rome

and of their fall, and, by placing the institution of the republic on

the day of the consecration of the Capitoline temple, the 13th of

Sept. 245, furnished a semblance of connection between the dateless

and the annalistic narrative. That in this earliest record of the

origin of Rome the hand of Hellenism was at work, can scarcely

be doubted. The speculations as to the primitive and subsequent

population, as to the priority of pastoral life over agriculture, and

the transformation of the man Romulus into the god Quirinus,(17) have

quite a Greek aspect, and even the obscuring of the genuinely national

forms of the pious Numa and the wise Egeria by the admixture of alien

elements of Pythagorean primitive wisdom appears by no means to be

one of the most recent ingredients in the Roman prehistoric annals.

The pedigrees of the noble clans were completed in a manner analogous

to these -origines- of the community, and were, in the favourite style

of heraldry, universally traced back to illustrious ancestors. The

Aemilii, for instance, Calpurnii, Pinarii, and Pomponii professed to

be descended from the four sons of Numa, Mamercus, Calpus, Pinus, and

Pompo; and the Aemilii, yet further, from Mamercus, the son of

Pythagoras, who was named the "winning speaker" (--aimulos--)

But, notwithstanding the Hellenic reminiscences that are everywhere

apparent, these prehistoric annals of the community and of the leading

houses may be designated at least relatively as national, partly

because they originated in Rome, partly because they tended primarily

to form links of connection not between Rome and Greece, but between

Rome and Latium.

Hellenic Early History of Rome

It was Hellenic story and fiction that undertook the task of

connecting Rome and Greece. Hellenic legend exhibits throughout an

endeavour to keep pace with the gradual extension of geographical

knowledge, and to form a dramatized geography by the aid of its

numerous stories of voyagers and emigrants. In this, however, it

seldom follows a simple course. An account like that of the earliest

Greek historical work which mentions Rome, the "Sicilian History" of

Antiochus of Syracuse (which ended in 330)--that a man named Sikelos

had migrated from Rome to Italia, that is, to the Bruttian peninsula

--such an account, simply giving a historical form to the family

affinity between the Romans, Siculi, and Bruttians, and free from all

Hellenizing colouring, is a rare phenomenon. Greek legend as a whole

is pervaded--and the more so, the later its rise--by a tendency to

represent the whole barbarian world as having either issued from the

Greeks or having been subdued by them; and it early in this sense spun

its threads also around the west. For Italy the legends of Herakles

and of the Argonauts were of less importance--although Hecataeus

(after 257) is already acquainted with the Pillars of Herakles, and

carries the Argo from the Black Sea into the Atlantic Ocean, from the

latter into the Nile, and thus back to the Mediterranean--than were

the homeward voyages connected with the fall of Ilion. With the first

dawn of information as to Italy Diomedes begins to wander in the

Adriatic, and Odysseus in the Tyrrhene Sea;(18) as indeed the

latter localization at least was naturally suggested by the Homeric

conception of the legend. Down to the times of Alexander the countries

on the Tyrrhene Sea belonged in Hellenic fable to the domain of the

legend of Odysseus; Ephorus, who ended his history with the year 414,

and the so-called Scylax (about 418) still substantially follow it.

Of Trojan voyages the whole earlier poetry has no knowledge;

in Homer Aeneas after the fall of Ilion rules over the Trojans

that remained at home.

Stesichorus

It was the great remodeller of myths, Stesichorus (122-201) who first

in his "Destruction of Ilion" brought Aeneas to the land of the west,

that he might poetically enrich the world of fable in the country of

his birth and of his adoption, Sicily and Lower Italy, by the contrast

of the Trojan heroes with the Hellenic. With him originated the

poetical outlines of this fable as thenceforward fixed, especially the

group of the hero and his wife, his little son and his aged father

bearing the household gods, departing from burning Troy, and the

important identification of the Trojans with the Sicilian and Italian

autochthones, which is especially apparent in the case of the Trojan

trumpeter Misenus who gave his name to the promontory of Misenum.(19)

The old poet was guided in this view by the feeling that the

barbarians of Italy were less widely removed from the Hellenes than

other barbarians were, and that the relation between the Hellenes and

Italians might, when measured poetically, be conceived as similar to

that between the Homeric Achaeans and the Trojans. This new Trojan

fable soon came to be mixed up with the earlier legend of Odysseus,

while it spread at the same time more widely over Italy. According to

Hellanicus (who wrote about 350) Odysseus and Aeneas came through the

country of the Thracians and Molottians (Epirus) to Italy, where the

Trojan women whom they had brought with them burnt the ships, and

Aeneas founded the city of Rome and named it after one of these Trojan

women. To a similar effect, only with less absurdity, Aristotle

(370-432) related that an Achaean squadron cast upon the Latin coast

had been set on fire by Trojan female slaves, and that the Latins

had originated from the descendants of the Achaeans who were thus

compelled to remain there and of their Trojan wives. With these tales

were next mingled elements from the indigenous legend, the knowledge

of which had been diffused as far as Sicily by the active intercourse

between Sicily and Italy, at least towards the end of this epoch.

In the version of the origin of Rome, which the Sicilian Callias

put on record about 465, the fables of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Romulus

were intermingled.(20)

Timaeus

But the person who really completed the conception subsequently

current of this Trojan migration was Timaeus of Tauromenium in Sicily,

who concluded his historical work with 492. It is he who represents

Aeneas as first founding Lavinium with its shrine of the Trojan

Penates, and as thereafter founding Rome; he must also have interwoven

the Tyrian princess Elisa or Dido with the legend of Aeneas, for with

him Dido is the foundress of Carthage, and Rome and Carthage are said

by him to have been built in the same year. These alterations were

manifestly suggested by certain accounts that had reached Sicily

respecting Latin manners and customs, in conjunction with the critical

struggle which at the very time and place where Timaeus wrote was

preparing between the Romans and the Carthaginians. In the main,

however, the story cannot have been derived from Latium, but can only

have been the good-for-nothing invention of the old "gossip-monger"

himself. Timaeus had heard of the primitive temple of the household

gods in Lavinium; but the statement, that these were regarded by the

Lavinates as the Penates brought by the followers of Aeneas from

Ilion, is as certainly an addition of his own, as the ingenious

parallel between the Roman October horse and the Trojan horse, and the

exact inventory taken of the sacred objects of Lavinium--there were,

our worthy author affirms, heralds' staves of iron and copper, and an

earthen vase of Trojan manufacture! It is true that these same Penates

might not at all be seen by any one for centuries afterwards; but

Timaeus was one of the historians who upon no matter are so fully

informed as upon things unknowable. It is not without reason that

Polybius, who knew the man, advises that he should in no case be

trusted, and least of all where, as in this instance, he appeals to

documentary proofs. In fact the Sicilian rhetorician, who professed to

point out the grave of Thucydides in Italy, and who found no higher

praise for Alexander than that he had finished the conquest of Asia

sooner than Isocrates finished his "Panegyric," was exactly the man to

knead the naive fictions of the earlier time into that confused medley

on which the play of accident has conferred so singular a celebrity.

How far the Hellenic play of fable regarding Italian matters, as it

in the first instance arose in Sicily, gained admission during this

period even in Italy itself, cannot be ascertained with precision.

Those links of connection with the Odyssean cycle, which we

subsequently meet with in the legends of the foundation of Tusculum,

Praeneste, Antium, Ardea, and Cortona, must probably have been already

concocted at this period; and even the belief in the descent of the

Romans from Trojan men or Trojan women must have been established at

the close of this epoch in Rome, for the first demonstrable contact

between Rome and the Greek east is the intercession of the senate on

behalf of the "kindre" Ilians in 472. That the fable of Aeneas was

nevertheless of comparatively recent origin in Italy, is shown by

the extremely scanty measure of its localization as compared with

the legend of Odysseus; and at any rate the final redaction of these

tales, as well as their reconciliation with the legend of the origin

of Rome, belongs only to the following age.

While in this way historical composition, or what was so called among

the Hellenes, busied itself in its own fashion with the prehistoric

times of Italy, it left the contemporary history of Italy almost

untouched--a circumstance as significant of the sunken condition of

Hellenic history, as it is to be for our sakes regretted. Theopompus

of Chios (who ended his work with 418) barely noticed in passing the

capture of Rome by the Celts; and Aristotle,(21) Clitarchus,(22)

Theophrastus,(23) Heraclides of Pontus (about 450), incidentally

mention particular events relating to Rome. It is only with Hieronymus

of Cardia, who as the historian of Pyrrhus narrated also his Italian

wars, that Greek historiography becomes at the same time an authority

for the history of Rome.

Jurisprudence

Among the sciences, that of jurisprudence acquired an invaluable basis

through the committing to writing of the laws of the city in the years

303, 304. This code, known under the name of the Twelve Tables, is

perhaps the oldest Roman document that deserves the name of a book.

The nucleus of the so-called -leges regiae- was probably not much more

recent. These were certain precepts chiefly of a ritual nature, which

rested upon traditional usage, and were probably promulgated to the

general public under the form of royal enactments by the college of

pontifices, which was entitled not to legislate but to point out the

law. Moreover it may be presumed that from the commencement of this

period the more important decrees of the senate at any rate--if not

those of the people--were regularly recorded in writing; for already

in the earliest conflicts between the orders disputes took place as

to their preservation.(24)

Opinions--

Table of Formulae for Actions

While the mass of written legal documents thus increased, the

foundations of jurisprudence in the proper sense were also firmly

laid. It was necessary that both the magistrates who were annually

changed and the jurymen taken from the people should be enabled to

resort to men of skill, who were acquainted with the course of law and

knew how to suggest a decision accordant with precedents or, in the

absence of these, resting on reasonable grounds. The pontifices who

were wont to be consulted by the people regarding court-days and on

all questions of difficulty and of legal observance relating to the

worship of the gods, delivered also, when asked, counsels and opinions

on other points of law, and thus developed in the bosom of their

college that tradition which formed the basis of Roman private law,

more especially the formulae of action proper for each particular

case. A table of formulae which embraced all these actions, along with

a calendar which specified the court-days, was published to the people

about 450 by Appius Claudius or by his clerk, Gnaeus Flavius. This

attempt, however, to give formal shape to a science, that as yet

hardly recognized itself, stood for a long time completely isolated.

That the knowledge of law and the setting it forth were even now a

means of recommendation to the people and of attaining offices of

state, may be readily conceived, although the story, that the first

plebeian pontifex Publius Sempronius Sophus (consul 450), and the

first plebeian pontifex maximus Tiberius Coruncanius (consul 474),

were indebted for these priestly honours to their knowledge of law,

is probably rather a conjecture of posterity than a statement

of tradition.

Language

That the real genesis of the Latin and doubtless also of the other

Italian languages was anterior to this period, and that even at its

commencement the Latin language was substantially an accomplished

fact, is evident from the fragments of the Twelve Tables, which,

however, have been largely modernized by their semi-oral tradition.

They contain doubtless a number of antiquated words and harsh

combinations, particularly in consequence of omitting the indefinite

subject; but their meaning by no means presents, like that of the

Arval chant, any real difficulty, and they exhibit far more agreement

with the language of Cato than with that of the ancient litanies.

If the Romans at the beginning of the seventh century had difficulty

in understanding documents of the fifth, the difficulty doubtless

proceeded merely from the fact that there existed at that time in Rome

no real, least of all any documentary, research.

Technical Style

On the other hand it must have been at this period, when the

indication and redaction of law began, that the Roman technical style

first established itself--a style which at least in its developed

shape is nowise inferior to the modern legal phraseology of England in

stereotyped formulae and turns of expression, endless enumeration of

particulars, and long-winded periods; and which commends itself to the

initiated by its clearness and precision, while the layman who does

not understand it listens, according to his character and humour, with

reverence, impatience, or chagrin.

Philology

Moreover at this epoch began the treatment of the native languages

after a rational method. About its commencement the Sabellian as well

as the Latin idiom threatened, as we saw,(25) to become barbarous,

and the abrasion of endings and the corruption of the vowels and more

delicate consonants spread on all hands, just as was the case with the

Romanic languages in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian

era. But a reaction set in: the sounds which had coalesced in Oscan,

-d and -r, and the sounds which had coalesced in Latin, -g and -k,

were again separated, and each was provided with its proper sign;

-o and -u, for which from the first the Oscan alphabet had lacked

separate signs, and which had been in Latin originally separate but

threatened to coalesce, again became distinct, and in Oscan even the

-i was resolved into two signs different in sound and in writing;

lastly, the writing again came to follow more closely the

pronunciation--the -s for instance among the Romans being in many

cases replaced by -r. Chronological indications point to the fifth

century as the period of this reaction; the Latin -g for instance was

not yet in existence about 300 but was so probably about 500; the

first of the Papirian clan, who called himself Papirius instead of

Papisius, was the consul of 418; the introduction of that -r instead

of -s is attributed to Appius Claudius, censor in 442. Beyond doubt

the re-introduction of a more delicate and precise pronunciation was

connected with the increasing influence of Greek civilization, which

is observable at this very period in all departments of Italian life;

and, as the silver coins of Capua and Nola are far more perfect than

the contemporary asses of Ardea and Rome, writing and language appear

also to have been more speedily and fully reduced to rule in the

Campanian land than in Latium. How little, notwithstanding the labour

bestowed on it, the Roman language and mode of writing had become

settled at the close of this epoch, is shown by the inscriptions

preserved from the end of the fifth century, in which the greatest

arbitrariness prevails, particularly as to the insertion or omission

of -m, -d and -s in final sounds and of -n in the body of a word,

and as to the distinguishing of the vowels -o -u and -e -i.(26) It is

probable that the contemporary Sabellians were in these points further

advanced, while the Umbrians were but slightly affected by the

regenerating influence of the Hellenes.

Instruction

In consequence of this progress of jurisprudence and grammar,

elementary school-instruction also, which in itself had doubtless

already emerged earlier, must have undergone a certain improvement.

As Homer was the oldest Greek, and the Twelve Tables was the oldest

Roman, book, each became in its own land the essential basis of

instruction; and the learning by heart the juristico-political

catechism was a chief part of Roman juvenile training. Alongside of

the Latin "writing-masters" (-litteratores-) there were of course,

from the time when an acquaintance with Greek was indispensable for

every statesman and merchant, also Greek "language-masters"

(-grammatici-)(27)--partly tutor-slaves, partly private teachers,

who at their own dwelling or that of their pupil gave instructions

in the reading and speaking of Greek. As a matter of course, the rod

played its part in instruction as well as in military discipline and

in police.(28) The instruction of this epoch cannot however have

passed beyond the elementary stage: there was no material shade

of difference, in a social respect, between the educated and

the non-educated Roman.

Exact Sciences--

Regulation of the Calendar

That the Romans at no time distinguished themselves in the

mathematical and mechanical sciences is well known, and is attested,

in reference to the present epoch, by almost the only fact which can

be adduced under this head with certainty--the regulation of the

calendar attempted by the decemvirs. They wished to substitute for the

previous calendar based on the old and very imperfect -trieteris-(29)

the contemporary Attic calendar of the -octaeteris-, which retained

the lunar month of 29 1/2 days but assumed the solar year at 365 1/4

days instead of 368 3/4, and therefore, without making any alteration

in the length of the common year of 354 days, intercalated, not as

formerly 59 days every 4 years, but 90 days every 8 years. With the

same view the improvers of the Roman calendar intended--while

otherwise retaining the current calendar--in the two inter-calary

years of the four years' cycle to shorten not the intercalary months,

but the two Februaries by 7 days each, and consequently to fix that

month in the intercalary years at 22 and 21 days respectively instead

of 29 and 28. But want of mathematical precision and theological

scruples, especially in reference to the annual festival of Terminus

which fell within those very days in February, disarranged the

intended reform, so that the Februaries of the intercalary years came

to be of 24 and 23 days, and thus the new Roman solar year in reality

ran to 366 1/4 days. Some remedy for the practical evils resulting

from this was found in the practice by which, setting aside the

reckoning by the months or ten months of the calendar (30) as now no

longer applicable from the inequality in the length of the months,

wherever more accurate specifications were required, they accustomed

themselves to reckon by terms of ten months of a solar year of 365

days or by the so-called ten-month year of 304 days. Over and above

this, there came early into use in Italy, especially for agricultural

purposes, the farmers' calendar based on the Egyptian solar year of

365 1/4 days by Eudoxus (who flourished 386).

Structural and Plastic Art

A higher idea of what the Italians were able to do in these

departments is furnished by their works of structural and plastic art,

which are closely associated with the mechanical sciences. Here too we

do not find phenomena of real originality; but if the impress of

borrowing, which the plastic art of Italy bears throughout, diminishes

its artistic interest, there gathers around it a historical interest

all the more lively, because on the one hand it preserves the most

remarkable evidences of an international intercourse of which other

traces have disappeared, and on the other hand, amidst the well-nigh

total loss of the history of the non-Roman Italians, art is almost

the sole surviving index of the living activity which the different

peoples of the peninsula displayed. No novelty is to be reported in

this period; but what we have already shown(31) may be illustrated

in this period with greater precision and on a broader basis, namely,

that the stimulus derived from Greece powerfully affected the

Etruscans and Italians on different sides, and called forth among

the former a richer and more luxurious, among the latter--where it

had any influence at all--a more intelligent and more genuine, art.

Architecture--

Etruscan

We have already shown how wholly the architecture of all the Italian

lands was, even in its earliest period, pervaded by Hellenic elements.

Its city walls, its aqueducts, its tombs with pyramidal roofs, and its

Tuscanic temple, are not at all, or not materially, different from the

oldest Hellenic structures. No trace has been preserved of any advance

in architecture among the Etruscans during this period; we find among

them neither any really new reception, nor any original creation,

unless we ought to reckon as such the magnificent tombs, e. g. the

so-called tomb of Porsena at Chiusi described by Varro, which vividly

recalls the strange and meaningless grandeur of the Egyptian pyramids.

Latin--

The Arch

In Latium too, during the first century and a half of the republic,

it is probable that they moved solely in the previous track, and it

has already been stated that the exercise of art rather sank than rose

with the introduction of the republic.(32) There can scarcely be named

any Latin building of architectural importance belonging to this

period, except the temple of Ceres built in the Circus at Rome in 261,

which was regarded in the period of the empire as a model of the

Tuscanic style. But towards the close of this epoch a new spirit

appeared in Italian and particularly in Roman architecture;(33) the

building of the magnificent arches began. It is true that we are not

entitled to pronounce the arch and the vault Italian inventions.

It is well ascertained that at the epoch of the genesis of Hellenic

architecture the Hellenes were not yet acquainted with the arch, and

therefore had to content themselves with a flat ceiling and a sloping

roof for their temples; but the arch may very well have been a later

invention of the Hellenes originating in more scientific mechanics;

as indeed the Greek tradition refers it to the natural philosopher

Democritus (294-397). With this priority of Hellenic over Roman

arch-building the hypothesis, which has been often and perhaps justly

propounded, is quite compatible, that the vaulted roof of the Roman

great -cloaca-, and that which was afterwards thrown over the old

Capitoline well-house which originally had a pyramidal roof,(34) are

the oldest extant structures in which the principle of the arch is

applied; for it is more than probable that these arched buildings

belong not to the regal but to the republican period,(35) and that

in the regal period the Italians were acquainted only with flat or

overlapped roofs.(34) But whatever may be thought as to the invention

of the arch itself, the application of a principle on a great scale is

everywhere, and particularly in architecture, at least as important as

its first exposition; and this application belongs indisputably to the

Romans. With the fifth century began the building of gates, bridges,

and aqueducts based mainly on the arch, which is thenceforth

inseparably associated with the Roman name. Akin to this was the

development of the form of the round temple with the dome-shaped roof,

which was foreign to the Greeks, but was held in much favour with the

Romans and was especially applied by them in the case of the cults

peculiar to them, particularly the non-Greek worship of Vesta.(37)

Something the same may be affirmed as true of various subordinate,

but not on that account unimportant, achievements in this field.

They do not lay claim to originality or artistic accomplishment;

but the firmly-jointed stone slabs of the Roman streets, their

indestructible highways, the broad hard ringing tiles, the everlasting

mortar of their buildings, proclaim the indestructible solidity and

the energetic vigour of the Roman character.

Plastic and Delineative Art

Like architectural art, and, if possible, still more completely, the

plastic and delineative arts were not so much matured by Grecian

stimulus as developed from Greek seeds on Italian soil. We have

already observed(38) that these, although only younger sisters of

architecture, began to develop themselves at least in Etruria, even

during the Roman regal period; but their principal development in

Etruria, and still more in Latium, belongs to the present epoch, as is

very evident from the fact that in those districts which the Celts

and Samnites wrested from the Etruscans in the course of the fourth

century there is scarcely a trace of the practice of Etruscan art.

The plastic art of the Tuscans applied itself first and chiefly to

works in terra-cotta, in copper, and in gold-materials which were

furnished to the artists by the rich strata of clay, the copper mines,

and the commercial intercourse of Etruria. The vigour with which

moulding in clay was prosecuted is attested by the immense number of

bas-reliefs and statuary works in terra-cotta, with which the walls,

gables, and roofs of the Etruscan temples were once decorated, as

their still extant ruins show, and by the trade which can be shown to

have existed in such articles from Etruria to Latium. Casting in

copper occupied no inferior place. Etruscan artists ventured to make

colossal statues of bronze fifty feet in height, and Volsinii, the

Etruscan Delphi, was said to have possessed about the year 489 two

thousand bronze statues. Sculpture in stone, again, began in Etruria,

as probably everywhere, at a far later date, and was prevented from

development not only by internal causes, but also by the want of

suitable material; the marble quarries of Luna (Carrara) were not yet

opened. Any one who has seen the rich and elegant gold decorations

of the south-Etruscan tombs, will have no difficulty in believing the

statement that Tyrrhene gold cups were valued even in Attica.

Gem-engraving also, although more recent, was in various forms

practised in Etruria. Equally dependent on the Greeks, but otherwise

quite on a level with the workers in the plastic arts, were the

Etruscan designers and painters, who manifested extraordinary activity

both in outline-drawing on metal and in monochromatic fresco-painting.

Campanian and Sabellian

On comparing with this the domain of the Italians proper, it appears

at first, contrasted with the Etruscan riches, almost poor in art.

But on a closer view we cannot fail to perceive that both the

Sabellian and the Latin nations must have had far more capacity

and aptitude for art than the Etruscans. It is true that in the proper

Sabellian territory, in Sabina, in the Abruzzi, in Samnium, there are

hardly found any works of art at all, and even coins are wanting.

But those Sabellian stocks, which reached the coasts of the Tyrrhene

or Ionic seas, not only appropriated Hellenic art externally, like

the Etruscans, but more or less completely acclimatized it. Even in

Velitrae, where probably alone in the former land of the Volsci their

language and peculiar character were afterwards maintained, painted

terra-cottas have been found, displaying vigorous and characteristic

treatment. In Lower Italy Lucania was to a less degree influenced

by Hellenic art; but in Campania and in the land of the Bruttii,

Sabellians and Hellenes became completely intermingled not only in

language and nationality, but also and especially in art, and the

Campanian and Bruttian coins in particular stand so entirely in point

of artistic treatment on a level with the contemporary coins of

Greece, that the inscription alone serves to distinguish the one

from the other.

Latin

It is a fact less known, but not less certain, that Latium also, while

inferior to Etruria in the copiousness and massiveness of its art,

was not inferior in artistic taste and practical skill. Evidently the

establishment of the Romans in Campania which took place about the

beginning of the fifth century, the conversion of the town of Cales

into a Latin community, and that of the Falernian territory near Capua

into a Roman tribe,(39) opened up in the first instance Campanian art

to the Romans. It is true that among these the art of gem-engraving so

diligently prosecuted in luxurious Etruria is entirely wanting, and we

find no indication that the Latin workshops were, like those of the

Etruscan goldsmiths and clay-workers, occupied in supplying a foreign

demand. It is true that the Latin temples were not like the Etruscan

overloaded with bronze and clay decorations, that the Latin tombs were

not like the Etruscan filled with gold ornaments, and their walls

shone not, like those of the Tuscan tombs, with paintings of various

colours. Nevertheless, on the whole the balance does not incline in

favour of the Etruscan nation. The device of the effigy of Janus,

which, like the deity itself, may be attributed to the Latins,(40)

is not unskilful, and is of a more original character than that of

any Etruscan work of art. The beautiful group of the she-wolf with the

twins attaches itself doubtless to similar Greek designs, but was--as

thus worked out--certainly produced, if not in Rome, at any rate by

Romans; and it deserves to be noted that it first appears on the

silver moneys coined by the Romans in and for Campania. In the

above-mentioned Cales there appears to have been devised soon after

its foundation a peculiar kind of figured earthenware, which was

marked with the name of the masters and the place of manufacture,

and was sold over a wide district as far even as Etruria. The little

altars of terra-cotta with figures that have recently been brought

to light on the Esquiline correspond in style of representation as in

that of ornament exactly to the similar votive gifts of the Campanian

temples. This however does not exclude Greek masters from having also

worked for Rome. The sculptor Damophilus, who with Gorgasus prepared

the painted terra-cotta figures for the very ancient temple of Ceres,

appears to have been no other than Demophilus of Himera, the teacher

of Zeuxis (about 300). The most instructive illustrations are

furnished by those branches of art in which we are able to form a

comparative judgment, partly from ancient testimonies, partly from

our own observation. Of Latin works in stone scarcely anything else

survives than the stone sarcophagus of the Roman consul Lucius Scipio,

wrought at the close of this period in the Doric style; but its noble

simplicity puts to shame all similar Etruscan works. Many beautiful

bronzes of an antique chaste style of art, particularly helmets,

candelabra, and the like articles, have been taken from Etruscan

tombs; but which of these works is equal to the bronze she-wolf

erected from the proceeds of fines in 458 at the Ruminal fig-tree in

the Roman Forum, and still forming the finest ornament of the Capitol?

And that the Latin metal-founders as little shrank from great

enterprises as the Etruscans, is shown by the colossal bronze figure

of Jupiter on the Capitol erected by Spurius Carvilius (consul in 461)

from the melted equipments of the Samnites, the chisellings of which

sufficed to cast the statue of the victor that stood at the feet of

the Colossus; this statue of Jupiter was visible even from the Alban

Mount. Amongst the cast copper coins by far the finest belong to

southern Latium; the Roman and Umbrian are tolerable, the Etruscan

almost destitute of any image and often really barbarous.

The fresco-paintings, which Gaius Fabius executed in the temple of

Health on the Capitol, dedicated in 452, obtained in design and

colouring the praise even of connoisseurs trained in Greek art in

the Augustan age; and the art-enthusiasts of the empire commended

the frescoes of Caere, but with still greater emphasis those of Rome,

Lanuvium, and Ardea, as masterpieces of painting. Engraving on metal,

which in Latium decorated not the hand-mirror, as in Etruria, but the

toilet-casket with its elegant outlines, was practised to a far less

extent in Latium and almost exclusively in Praeneste. There are

excellent works of art among the copper mirrors of Etruria as among

the caskets of Praeneste; but it was a work of the latter kind, and

in fact a work which most probably originated in the workshop of a

Praenestine master at this epoch,(41) regarding which it could with

truth be affirmed that scarcely another product of the graving of

antiquity bears the stamp of an art so finished in its beauty and

characteristic expression, and yet so perfectly pure and chaste,

as the Ficoroni -cista-.

Character of Etruscan Art

The general character of Etruscan works of art is, on the one hand, a

sort of barbaric extravagance in material as well as in style; on the

other hand, an utter absence of original development. Where the Greek

master lightly sketches, the Etruscan disciple lavishes a scholar's

diligence; instead of the light material and moderate proportions of

the Greek works, there appears in the Etruscan an ostentatious stress

laid upon the size and costliness, or even the mere singularity, of

the work. Etruscan art cannot imitate without exaggerating; the chaste

in its hands becomes harsh, the graceful effeminate, the terrible

hideous, and the voluptuous obscene; and these features become more

prominent, the more the original stimulus falls into the background

and Etruscan art finds itself left to its own resources. Still more

surprising is the adherence to traditional forms and a traditional

style. Whether it was that a more friendly contact with Etruria at the

outset allowed the Hellenes to scatter there the seeds of art, and

that a later epoch of hostility impeded the admission into Etruria

of the more recent developments of Greek art, or whether, as is more

probable, the intellectual torpor that rapidly came over the nation

was the main cause of the phenomenon, art in Etruria remained

substantially stationary at the primitive stage which it had occupied

on its first entrance. This, as is well known, forms the reason why

Etruscan art, the stunted daughter, was so long regarded as the

mother, of Hellenic art. Still more even than the rigid adherence to

the style traditionally transmitted in the older branches of art,

the sadly inferior handling of those branches that came into vogue

afterwards, particularly of sculpture in stone and of copper-casting

as applied to coins, shows how quickly the spirit of Etruscan art

evaporated. Equally instructive are the painted vases, which are found

in so enormous numbers in the later Etruscan tombs. Had these come

into current use among the Etruscans as early as the metal plates

decorated with contouring or the painted terra-cottas, beyond doubt

they would have learned to manufacture them at home in considerable

quantity, and of a quality at least relatively good; but at the period

at which this luxury arose, the power of independent reproduction

wholly failed--as the isolated vases provided with Etruscan

inscriptions show--and they contented themselves with buying

instead of making them.

North Etruscan and South Etruscan Art

But even within Etruria there appears a further remarkable distinction

in artistic development between the southern and northern districts.

It is South Etruria, particularly in the districts of Caere,

Tarquinii, and Volci, that has preserved the great treasures of art

which the nation boasted, especially in frescoes, temple decorations,

gold ornaments, and painted vases. Northern Etruria is far inferior;

no painted tomb, for example, has been found to the north of Chiusi.

The most southern Etruscan cities, Veii, Caere, and Tarquinii, were

accounted in Roman tradition the primitive and chief seats of Etruscan

art; the most northerly town, Volaterrae, with the largest territory

of all the Etruscan communities, stood most of all aloof from art

While a Greek semi-culture prevailed in South Etruria, Northern

Etruria was much more marked by an absence of all culture. The causes

of this remarkable contrast may be sought partly in differences of

nationality--South Etruria being largely peopled in all probability by

non-Etruscan elements(42)--partly in the varying intensity of Hellenic

influence, which must have made itself very decidedly felt at Caere in

particular. The fact itself admits of no doubt. The more injurious on

that account must have been the early subjugation of the southern half

of Etruria by the Romans, and the Romanizing--which there began very

early--of Etruscan art. What Northern Etruria, confined to its own

efforts, was able to produce in the way of art, is shown by the copper

coins which essentially belong to it.

Character of Latin Art

Let us now turn from Etruria to glance at Latium. The latter, it is

true, created no new art; it was reserved for a far later epoch of

culture to develop on the basis of the arch a new architecture

different from the Hellenic, and then to unfold in harmony with that

architecture a new style of sculpture and painting. Latin art is

nowhere original and often insignificant; but the fresh sensibility

and the discriminating tact, which appropriate what is good in others,

constitute a high artistic merit. Latin art seldom became barbarous,

and in its best products it comes quite up to the level of Greek

technical execution. We do not mean to deny that the art of Latium,

at least in its earlier stages, had a certain dependence on the

undoubtedly earlier Etruscan;(43) Varro may be quite right in

supposing that, previous to the execution by Greek artists of the clay

figures in the temple of Ceres,(44) only "Tuscanic" figures adorned

the Roman temples; but that, at all events, it was mainly the direct

influence of the Greeks that led Latin art into its proper channel,

is self-evident, and is very obviously shown by these very statues as

well as by the Latin and Roman coins. Even the application of graving

on metal in Etruria solely to the toilet mirror, and in Latium solely

to the toilet casket, indicates the diversity of the art-impulses that

affected the two lands. It does not appear, however, to have been

exactly at Rome that Latin art put forth its freshest vigour; the

Roman -asses- and Roman -denarii- are far surpassed in fineness and

taste of workmanship by the Latin copper, and the rare Latin silver,

coins, and the masterpieces of painting and design belong chiefly to

Praeneste, Lanuvium, and Ardea. This accords completely with the

realistic and sober spirit of the Roman republic which we have already

described--a spirit which can hardly have asserted itself with equal

intensity in other parts of Latium. But in the course of the fifth

century, and especially in the second half of it, there was a mighty

activity in Roman art. This was the epoch, in which the construction

of the Roman arches and Roman roads began; in which works of art like

the she-wolf of the Capitol originated; and in which a distinguished

man of an old Roman patrician clan took up his pencil to embellish a

newly constructed temple and thence received the honorary surname of

the "Painter." This was not accident. Every great age lays grasp on

all the powers of man; and, rigid as were Roman manners, strict as was

Roman police, the impulse received by the Roman burgesses as masters

of the peninsula or, to speak more correctly, by Italy united for the

first time as one state, became as evident in the stimulus given to

Latin and especially to Roman art, as the moral and political decay of

the Etruscan nation was evident in the decline of art in Etruria.

As the mighty national vigour of Latium subdued the weaker nations,

it impressed its imperishable stamp also on bronze and on marble.

Notes for Book II Chapter IX

1. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

2. The account given by Dionysius (vi. 95; comp. Niebuhr, ii. 40) and

by Plutarch (Camill. 42), deriving his statement from another passage

in Dionysius regarding the Latin festival, must be understood to apply

rather to the Roman games, as, apart from other grounds, is strikingly

evident from comparing the latter passage with Liv. vi. 42 (Ritschl,

Parerg. i. p. 313). Dionysius has--and, according to his wont when in

error, persistently--misunderstood the expression -ludi maximi-.

There was, moreover, a tradition which referred the origin of the

national festival not, as in the common version, to the conquest of

the Latins by the first Tarquinius, but to the victory over the Latins

at the lake Regillus (Cicero, de Div. i. 26, 55; Dionys. vii. 71).

That the important statements preserved in the latter passage from

Fabius really relate to the ordinary thanksgiving-festival, and not to

any special votive solemnity, is evident from the express allusion to

the annual recurrence of the celebration, and from the exact agreement

of the sum of the expenses with the statement in the Pseudo-Asconius

(p. 142 Or.).

3. II. III. Curule Aedileship

4. I. II. Art

5. I. XV. Metre

6. I. XV. Masks

7. II. VIII. Police f.

8. I. XV. Melody

9. A fragment has been preserved:

-Hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra

Camille metes-

We do not know by what right this was afterwards regarded as the

oldest Roman poem (Macrob. Sat. v. 20; Festus, Ep. v. Flaminius,

p. 93, M.; Serv. on Virg. Georg, i. 101; Plin. xvii. 2. 14).

10. II. VIII. Appius Claudius

11. II. VIII. Rome and the Romans of This Epoch

12. The first places in the list alone excite suspicion, and may have

been subsequently added, with a view to round off the number of years

between the flight of the king and the burning of the city to 120.

13. I. VI. Time and the Occasion of the Reform, II. VII. System of

Government

14. II. VIII Rome and the Romans of This Epoch. According to the

annals Scipio commands in Etruria and his colleague in Samnium, and

Lucania is during this year in league with Rome; according to the

epitaph Scipio conquers two towns in Samnium and all Lucania.

15. I. XI. Jurisdiction, second note.

16. They appear to have reckoned three generations to a hundred years

and to have rounded off the figures 233 1/3 to 240, just as the epoch

between the king's flight and the burning of the city was rounded off

to 120 years (II. IX. Registers of Magistrates, note). The reason why

these precise numbers suggested themselves, is apparent from the

similar adjustment (above explained, I. XIV. The Duodecimal System)

of the measures of surface.

17. I. XII. Spirits

18. I. X. Relations of the Western Italians to the Greeks

19. The "Trojan colonies" in Sicily, mentioned by Thucydides, the

pseudo-Scylax, and others, as well as the designation of Capua as a

Trojan foundation in Hecataeus, must also be traced to Stesichorus

and his identification of the natives of Italy and Sicily with

the Trojans.

20. According to his account Rome, a woman who had fled from Ilion

to Rome, or rather her daughter of the same name, married Latinos,

king of the Aborigines, and bore to him three sons, Romos, Romylos,

and Telegonos. The last, who undoubtedly emerges here as founder

of Tusculum and Praeneste, belongs, as is well known, to the legend

of Odysseus.

21. II. IV. Fruitlessness of the Celtic Victory

22. II. VII. Relations between the East and West

23. II. VII. The Roman Fleet

24. II. II. Political Value of the Tribunates, II. II.

The Valerio-Horatian Laws

25. I. XIV. Corruption of Language and Writing

26. In the two epitaphs, of Lucius Scipio consul in 456, and of the

consul of the same name in 495, -m and -d are ordinarily wanting in

the termination of cases, yet -Luciom- and -Gnaivod- respectively

occur once; there occur alongside of one another in the nominative

-Cornelio- and -filios-; -cosol-, -cesor-, alongside of -consol-,

-censor-; -aidiles-, -dedet-, -ploirume- (= -plurimi-) -hec- (nom.

sing.) alongside of -aidilis-, -cepit-, -quei-, -hic-. Rhotacism is

already carried out completely; we find -duonoro-(= -bonorum-),

-ploirume-, not as in the chant of the Salii -foedesum-, -plusima-.

Our surviving inscriptions do not in general precede the age of

rhotacism; of the older -s only isolated traces occur, such as

afterwards -honos-, -labos- alongside of -honor-, -labor-; and the

similar feminine -praenomina-, -Maio- (= -maios- -maior-) and -Mino-

in recently found epitaphs at Praeneste.

27. -Litterator- and -grammaticus- are related nearly as elementary

teacher and teacher of languages with us; the latter designation

belonged by earlier usage only to the teacher of Greek, not to a

teacher of the mother-tongue. -Litteratus- is more recent, and

denotes not a schoolmaster but a man of culture.

28. It is at any rate a true Roman picture, which Plautus (Bacch. 431)

produces as a specimen of the good old mode of training children:--

... -ubi revenisses domum,

Cincticulo praecinctus in sella apud magistrum adsideres;

Si, librum cum legeres, unam peccavisses syllabam,

Fieret corium tam maculosum, quam est nutricis pallium-.

29. I. XIV. The Oldest Italo-Greek Calendar

30. I. XIV. The Oldest Italo-Greek Calendar

31. I. XV. Plastic Art in Italy

32. II. VIII. Building

33. II. VIII. Building

34. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

35. I. VII. Servian Wall

36. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

37. The round temple certainly was not, as has been supposed, an

imitation of the oldest form of the house; on the contrary, house

architecture uniformly starts from the square form. The later Roman

theology associated this round form with the idea of the terrestrial

sphere or of the universe surrounding like a sphere the central sun

(Fest. v. -rutundam-, p. 282; Plutarch, Num. 11; Ovid, Fast. vi. 267,

seq.). In reality it may be traceable simply to the fact, that the

circular shape has constantly been recognized as the most convenient

and the safest form of a space destined for enclosure and custody.

That was the rationale of the round --thesauroi-- of the Greeks as

well as of the round structure of the Roman store-chamber or temple of

the Penates. It was natural, also, that the fireplace--that is, the

altar of Vesta--and the fire-chamber--that is, the temple of Vesta

--should be constructed of a round form, just as was done with the

cistern and the well-enclosure (-puteal-). The round style of building

in itself was Graeco-Italian as was the square form, and the former

was appropriated to the store-place, the latter to the dwelling-house;

but the architectural and religious development of the simple -tholos-

into the round temple with pillars and columns was Latin.

38. I. XV. Plastic Art in Italy

39. II. V. Complete Submission of the Campanian and Volscian Provinces

40. I. XII. Nature of the Roman Gods

41. Novius Plautius (II. VIII. Capital in Rome) cast perhaps only the

feet and the group on the lid; the casket itself may have proceeded

from an earlier artist, but hardly from any other than a Praenestine,

for the use of these caskets was substantially confined to Praeneste.

42. I. IX. Settlements of the Etruscans in Italy

43. I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences

44. I. VI. Time and Occasion of the Reform

End of Book II

* * * * *

THE HISTORY OF ROME: BOOK III

From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek

States

Preparer's Note

This work contains many literal citations of and references to

foreign words, sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from many

languages, including Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and

Greek. This English Gutenberg edition, constrained to the characters

of 7-bit ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:

1) Except for Greek, all literally cited non-English words that do

not refer to texts cited as academic references, words that in the

source manuscript appear italicized, are rendered with a single

preceding, and a single following dash; thus, -xxxx-.

2) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic

equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following double-

dash; thus, --xxxx--. Note that in some cases the root word itself

is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as --xxx-xxx--

3) Simple unideographic references to vocalic sounds, single

letters, or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic

references are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x,

or -xxx.

4) Ideographic references, referring to signs of representation rather

than to content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. "id:" stands for

"ideograph", and indicates that the reader should form a picture based

on the following "xxxx"; which may be a single symbol, a word, or an

attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters. For example,

--"id:GAMMA gamma"-- indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form followed

by the form in lowercase. Some such exotic parsing as this is

necessary to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol

may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages,

or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different

times. Thus, "-id:GAMMA gamma" might very well refer to a Phoenician

construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually

stabilized as an uppercase Greek "gamma" juxtaposed to one of

lowercase. Also, a construct such as --"id:E" indicates a symbol

that with ASCII resembles most closely a Roman uppercase "E", but,

in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.

5) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.;

that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be

753 B. C. The preparer of this document, has appended to the end

of each volume a table of conversion between the two systems.

CONTENTS

BOOK III: From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage

and the Greek States

CHAPTER

I. Carthage

II. The War between Rome and Carthage Concerning Sicily

III. The Extension of Italy to Its Natural Boundaries

IV. Hamilcar and Hannibal

V. The War under Hannibal to the Battle of Cannae

VI. The War under Hannibal from Cannae to Zama

VII. The West from the Peace of Hannibal to the Close

of the Third Period

VIII. The Eastern States and the Second Macedonian War

IX. The War with Antiochus of Asia

X. The Third Macedonian War

XI. The Government and the Governed

XII. The Management of Land and of Capital

XIII. Faith and Manners

XIV. Literature and Art

BOOK THIRD

From the Union of Italy to the Subjugation of Carthage and the Greek

States

Arduum res gestas scribere.

--Sallust.

CHAPTER I

Carthage

The Phoenicians