The History of Rome

Art

Lastly, what holds good of real life is true also of its counterfeit in jest and play, which everywhere, and especially in the earliest period of full and simple existence, do not exclude the serious, but veil it. The simplest elements of art are in Latium and Hellas quite the same; the decorous armed dance, the "leap" (triumpus, thriambos, di-thyrambos); the masquerade of the "full people" (satyroi, satura), who, wrapped in the skins of sheep and goats, wound up the festival with their jokes; lastly, the pipe, which with suitable strains accompanied and regulated the solemn as well as the merry dance. Nowhere, perhaps, does the especially close relationship of the Hellenes and Italians come to light so clearly as here; and yet in no other direction did the two nations manifest greater divergence as they became developed.  The training of youth remained in Latium strictly confined to the narrow limits of domestic education; in Greece the yearning after a varied yet harmonious training of mind and body created the sciences of Gymnastics and Paideia, which were cherished by the nation and by individuals as their highest good.  Latium in the poverty of its artistic development stands almost on a level with uncivilized peoples; Hellas developed with incredible rapidity out of its religious conceptions the myth and the worshipped idol, and out of these that marvellous world of poetry and sculpture, the like of which history has not again to show.  In Latium no other influences were powerful in public and private life but prudence, riches, and strength; it was reserved for the Hellenes to feel the blissful ascendency of beauty, to minister to the fair boy-friend with an enthusiasm half sensuous, half ideal, and to reanimate their lost courage with the war-songs of the divine singer.

Thus the two nations in which the civilization of antiquity culminated stand side by side, as different in development as they were in origin identical. The points in which the Hellenes excel the Italians are more universally intelligible and reflect a more brilliant lustre; but the deep feeling in each individual that he was only a part of the community, a rare devotedness and power of self-sacrifice for the common weal, an earnest faith in its own gods, form the rich treasure of the Italian nation.  Both nations underwent a one-sided, and therefore each a complete, development; it is only a pitiful narrow-mindedness that will object to the Athenian that he did not know how to mould his state like the Fabii and the Valerii, or to the Roman that he did not learn to carve like Pheidias and to write like Aristophanes. It was in fact the most peculiar and the best feature in the character of the Greek people, that rendered it impossible for them to advance from national to political unity without at the same time exchanging their polity for despotism. The ideal world of beauty was all in all to the Greeks, and compensated them to some extent for what they wanted in reality.  Wherever in Hellas a tendency towards national union appeared, it was based not on elements directly political, but on games and art: the contests at Olympia, the poems of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, were the only bonds that held Hellas together. Resolutely, on the other hand, the Italian surrendered his own personal will for the sake of freedom, and learned to obey his father that he might know how to obey the state.  Amidst this subjection individual development might be marred, and the germs of fairest promise in man might be arrested in the bud; the Italian gained in their stead a feeling of fatherland and of patriotism such as the Greek never knew, and alone among all the civilized nations of antiquity succeeded in working out national unity in connection with a constitution based on self-government--a national unity, which at last placed in his hands the mastery not only over the divided Hellenic stock, but over the whole known world.

CHAPTER III The Settlements of the Latins

Indo-Germanic Migrations