No More Learning

But there is another source of tradition to which we may resort, and which yields information fragmentary but authentic; we mean the indigenous languages of the stocks settled in Italy from time immemorial. These languages, which have grown with the growth of the peoples themselves, have had the stamp of their process of growth impressed upon them too deeply to be wholly effaced by subsequent civilization. One only of the Italian languages is known to us completely; but the remains which have been preserved of several of the others are sufficient to afford a basis for historical inquiry regarding the existence, and the degrees, of
family relationship among the several languages and peoples. In this way philological research teaches us to dis
tinguish three primitive Italian stocks, the Iapygian, the Etruscan, and that which we shall call the Italian. The last is divided into two main branches,—the Latin branch, and that to which the dialects of the Umbri, Marsi, Volsci, and Samnites belong.
As to the Iapygian stock, we have but little information. 11pm»: At the south-eastern extremity of Italy, in the Messapian
or Calabrian peninsula, inscriptions in a peculiar extinct language1 have been found in considerable numbers; un doubtedly remains of the dialect of the Iapygians, who are
very distinctly pronounced by tradition also to have been
different from the Latin and Samnite stocks. State
ments deserving of credit and numerous indications lead to
the conclusion that the same language and the same stock
1 Some of the epitaphs may give us an idea of its sound; a: 020mm: artahaiki bennarrilrino and daxilwnar platorrilnl bollilu'.
I2 THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS 300:: i
were indigenous also in Apulia. What we at present know of this people suflices to show clearly that they were distinct from the other Italians, but does not suflice to determine what position should be assigned to them and to their language in the history of the human race. The inscriptions have not yet been, and it is scarcely to be expected that they ever will be, deciphered. The genitive forms, ar'fii and z71i, corresponding to the Sanscrit asya and the Greek ow, appear to indicate that the dialect belongs to the Indo-Gennanic family. Other indications, such as the use of the aspirated consonants and the avoiding of the letters m and t as terminal sounds, show that this Iapygian dialect was essentially different from the Italian and corresponded in some respects to the Greek dialects. The supposition of an especially close aifinity between the Iapygian nation and the Hellenes finds further support in the frequent occurrence of the names of Greek divinities in the inscriptions, and in the surprising facility with which that people became Hellenized, presenting a striking contrast to the shyness in this respect of the other Italian
$50 nations. Apulia, which in the time of Timaeus
was still described as a barbarous land, had in the sixth century of the city become a province thoroughly Greek, although no direct colonization from Greece had taken place; and even among the ruder stock of the Messapii there are various indications of a similar tendency. With the recognition of such a general family relationship or peculiar aflinity between the Iapygians and Hellenes recognition, however, which by no means goes so far as to warrant our taking the Iapygian language to be a rude dialect of Greek), investigation must rest content, at least in the meantime, until some more precise and better assured result he attainable. 1 The lack of information,
1 The hypothesis has been put forward of an affinity between the Iapygian language and the modern Albanian; based, however. on points
(400)
(a
can. u INTO ITALY
r3
however, is not much felt; for this race, already on the decline at the period when our history begins, comes before us only when it is giving way and disappearing.
The character of the Iapygian people, little capable of resistance, easily merging into other nationalities, agrees well with the hypothesis, to which their geographical position adds probability, that they were the oldest immigrants or the historical autochthones of Italy. There can be no doubt that all the primitive migrations of nations took place by land ; especially such as were directed towards Italy, the coast of which was accessible by sea only to skilful sailors and on that account was still in Homer's time wholly unknown to the Hellenes. But if the earlier settlers came over the Apennines, then, as the geologist infers the origin of mountains from their Stratifica
tion, the historical inquirer may hazard the conjecture that the stocks pushed furthest towards the south were the oldest inhabitants of Italy; and it is just at its extreme south-eastern verge that we meet with the Iapygian nation.
The middle of. the peninsula was inhabited, as far back as trustworthy tradition reaches, by two peoples or rather two branches of the same people, whose position in the Indo-Germanic family admits of being determined with greater precision than that of the Iapygian nation. We may with propriety call this people the Italian, since upon it rests the historical significance of the peninsula. It is divided into the two branch-stocks of the Latins and the
of linguistic comparison that are but little satisfactory in any case, and least of all where a fact of such importance is involved. Should this re lationship be confirmed, and should the Albanians on the other hand-a race also Indo-Germanic and on a par with the Hellenic and Italian races __be really a remnant of that Helleno-barbaric nationality traces of which occur throughout all Greece and especially in the northern provinces, the nation that preceded the Hellenes would be demonstrated as identical with that which preceded the Italians. Still the inference would not immediately follow that the Iapygian immigration to Italy had taken place across the Adriatic Sea
Italians.
14
THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS BOOK 1
Umbrians ; the latter including their southern offshoots, the Marsians and Samnites, and the colonies sent forth by the Samnites in historical times. The philological analysis of the idioms of these stocks has shown that they together constitute a link in the Indo-Germanic chain of languages, and that the epoch in which they still formed an unity is a comparatively late one. In their system of sounds there appears the peculiar spirant j: in the use of which they agree with the Etruscans, but decidedly differ from all Hellenic and Helleno-barbaric races as well as from the Sanscrit itself. The aspirates, again, which are retained by the Greeks throughout, and the harsher of them also by the Etruscans, were originally foreign to the Italians, and are represented among them by one of their elemfents— either by the media, or by the breathing alone or k. The finer spirants, s, 10,], which the Greeks dispense with as much as possible, have been retained in the Italian languages almost unimpaired, and have been in some instances still further developed. The throwing back of the accent and the consequent destruction of terminations are common to the Italians with some Greek stocks and with the Etruscans ; but among the Italians this was done to a greater extent than among the former, and to a lesser extent than among the latter. The excessive disorder of the terminations in the Umbrian certainly had no foundation in the original spirit of the language, but was a corruption of later date, which appeared in a similar although weaker tendency also at Rome. Accordingly in the Italian
languages short vowels are regularly dropped in the final sound, long ones frequently: the concluding consonants, on the other hand, have been tenaciously retained in the Latin and still more so in the Samnite ; while the Umbrian drops even these. In connection with this we find that the middle voice has left but slight traces in the Italian languages, and a peculiar passive formed by the addition
‘F3? ’
can. rr INTO ITALY I5
of r takes its place; and further that the majority of the tenses are formed by composition with the roots as and fir, while the richer terrninational system of the Greeks along with the augment enables them in great part to dispense with auxiliary verbs. While the Italian languages, like the Aeolic dialect, gave up the dual, they retained universally the ablative which the Greeks lost, and in great part also the locative. The rigorous logic of the Italians appears to have taken offence at the splitting of the idea of plurality into that of duality and of multitude; while they have continued with much precision to express the relations of words by inflections. A feature peculiarly Italian, and unknown even to the Sanscrit, is the mode of imparting a substantive character to the verb by gerunds and supines,— a process carried out more completely here than in any other language.
These examples selected from a great abundance of Relation“:
analogous phenomena suflice to establish the individuality of the Italian stock as distinguished from the other members of the Indo-Germanic family, and at the same time show it to be linguistically the nearest relative, as it is geographically the next neighbour, of the Greek. The Greek and the Italian are brothers; the Celt, the German, and the Slavonian are their cousins. The essential unity of all the Italian as of all the Greek dialects and stocks must have dawned early and clearly on the consciousness of the two great nations themselves; for we find in the Roman language a very ancient word of enigmatical origin, Graius or Graicus, which is applied to every Greek, and in like manner amongst the Greeks the analogous appellation ‘On-unis, which is applied to all the Latin and Samnite stocks known to the Greeks in earlier times, but never to the Iapygians or Etruscans.
Among the‘languages of the Italian stock, again, the Latin stands in marked contrast with the Umbro-Samnite
gig? “ Greek!
16
THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS 800! I
Relationof dialects. It is true that of these only two, the Umbrian $353‘: and the Samnite or Oscan, are in some degree known to
bro-Sam- mm"
us, and these even in a manner extremely defective and uncertain. Of the rest some, such as the Marsian and the Volscian, have reached us in fragments too scanty to enable us to form any conception of their individual peculiarities or to classify the varieties of dialect themselves with certainty and precision, while others, like the Sabine, have, with the exception of a few traces preserved as
in provincial Latin, completely dis A conjoint view, however, of the facts of
dialectic peculiarities
appeared.
language and of history leaves no doubt that all these dialects belonged to the Umbro-Samnite branch of the great Italian stock, and that this branch, although much more closely related to Latin than to Greek, was very decidedly distinct from the Latin. In the pronoun and other cases frequently the Samnite and Umbrian used ,9 where the Roman used 4, as pis for quit,- just as languages
otherwise closely related are found to differ; for instance, ,0 is peculiar to the Celtic in Brittany and Wales, k to the Gaelic and Erse. Among the vowel sounds the diphthongs in Latin, and in the northern dialects generally, appear very much destroyed, whereas in the southern Italian
dialects they have suffered little; and connected with this is the fact‘, that in composition the Roman weakens the radical vowel otherwise so strictly preserved,—a modifica tion which does not take place in the kindred group of languages. The genitive of words in a is in this group as among the Greeks as, among the Romans in the matured language ae; that of words in us is in the Samnite ais, in the Umbrian as, among the Romans ei; the locative dis appeared more and more from the language of the latter, while it continued in full use in the other Italian dialects ; the dative plural in bus is extant only in Latin. The Umbro-Samnite infinitive in um is foreign to the Romans 5
cl-IAI. ll INTO ITALY
11
while the Osco-Umbrian future formed from the root as after the Greek fashion (her-est like )té7-o-w) has almost, perhaps altogether, disappeared in Latin, and its place is supplied by the optative of the simple verb or by analogous formations from fuo (amabo). In many of these instances, however-in the forms of the cases, for example—the differences only exist in the two languages when fully formed, while at the outset they coincide. It thus appears that, while the Italian language holds an independent position by the side of the Greek, the Latin dialect within it bears a relation to the Umbro-Samnite somewhat similar to that of the Ionic to the Doric; and the differences of the Oscan and Umbrian and kindred dialects may be com pared with the differences between the Dorism of Sicily and the Dorism of Sparta.
Each of these linguistic phenomena is the result and the attestation of an historical event. With perfect cer tainty they guide us to the conclusion, that from the common cradle of peoples and languages there issued a stock which embraced in common the ancestors of the Greeks and the Italians; that from this, at a subsequent period, the Italians branched off; and that these again divided into the western and eastern stocks, while at a still later date the eastern became subdivided into Umbrians and Oscans.
When and where these separations took place, language of course cannot tell; and scarce may adventurous thought attempt to grope its conjectural way along the course of those revolutions, the earliest of which undoubtedly took place long before that migration which brought the ancestors of the Italians across the Apennines. On the other hand the comparison of languages, when conducted with accuracy and caution, may give us an approximate idea of the degree of culture which the people had reached when these separations took place, and so furnish us
VOL. I a
Indo Germanic culture.
I‘ THE EARLIEST MIGRATION S 300K I
with the beginnings of history, which is nothing but the development of civilization. For language, especially in the period of its formation, is the true image and organ of the degree of civilization attained; its archives preserve evidence of the great revolutions in arts and in manners, and from its records the future will not fail to draw in formation as to those times regarding which the voice of direct tradition is dumb.
During the period when the Indo-Germanic nations which are now separated still formed one stock speaking the same language, they attained a certain stage of culture, and they had a vocabulary corresponding to it. This vocabulary the several nations carried along with them, in its conventionally established use, as a common dowry and a foundation for further structures of their own. In it we find not merely the simplest terms denoting existence, actions, perceptions, such as sum, do, pater, the original echo of the impression which the external world made on the mind of man, but also a number of words indicative of culture (not only as respects their roots, but in a form
stamped upon them by custom) which are the common property of the Indo-Germanic family, and which cannot be explained either on the principle of an uniform develop ment in the several languages, or on the supposition of their having subsequently borrowed one from another. In this way we possess evidence of the development of pastoral life at that remote epoch in the unalterably fixed names of domestic animals; the Sanscrit gdus is the Latin has, the Greek ,Boiig; Sanscrit am': is the Latin ovis, Greek 5E9; Sanscrit Efl/GS, Latin equus, Greek t'mros ; Sanscrit har'isas, Latin anser, Greek xfiv; Sanscrit dtis, Latin anas, Greek vfiau-a ; in like manner pecm, sus, perms, taurus, canis, are Sanscrit words. Even at this remote period accordingly
the stock, on which from the days of Homer down to our own time the intellectual development of mankind has been
can. rr INTO ITALY
19
dependent, had already advanced beyond the lowest stage of civilization, the hunting and fishing epoch, and had attained at least comparative fixity of abode. On the other hand, we have as yet no certain proofs of the existence of
at this period. Language rather favours the negative view. Of the Latin-Greek names of grain none Occurs in Sanscrit with the single exception of $01, which philologically represents the Sanscrit yavas, but denotes in the Indian barley, in Greek spelt. It must indeed be granted that this diversity in the names of cultivated plants, which so strongly contrasts with the essential agreement in the appellations of domestic animals, does not absolutely preclude the supposition of a common original agriculture. In the circumstances of primitive times transport and acclimatizing are more diflicult in the case of plants than of animals; and the cultivation of rice among the Indians, that of wheat and spelt among the Greeks and Romans, and that of rye and oats among the Germans and Celts, may all be traceable to a common system of primitive tillage. On the other hand the name of one cereal common to the Greeks and Indians only proves, at the most, that before the separation of the stocks they gathered and ate the grains of barley and spelt growing wild in Mesopotamia,1 not that they already cultivated grain. While, however, we reach no decisive result in this way, a further light is thrown on the subject by our observing that a number of the most important words bearing on this
agriculture
of culture occur certainly in Sanscrit, but all of them in a more general signification. Agras among the Indians denotes a level surface in general; kflrnu, anything
1 Harley, wheat, and spelt were found growing together in a wild state on the right bank of the Euphrates, north-west from Anah (Alph. de Caudolle, Gfagrapltie botanique raironnle, ii. p. 934). The growth of barley and wheat in a wild state in Mesopotamia had already been mentioned by the Babylonian historian Berosus (up. Georg. Syncell. p.
50 Burn).
province
wm__ -I~u__—__,. _ -____ __
20 THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS BOOK I
pounded; arz'tram, oar and ship; vmas, that which is pleasant in general, particularly a pleasant drink. The words are thus very ancient; but their more definite application to the field (ager), to the grain to be ground (granum), to the implement which furrows the soil as the ship furrows the surface of the sea (aralrum), to the juice of the grape (vinum), had not yet taken place when the earliest divi sion of the stocks occurred, and it is not to be wondered at that their subsequent applications came to be in some instances very different, and that, for example, the corn intended to be ground, as well as the mill for grinding it (Gothic quairnus, Lithuanian gr'rnas received their names from the Sanscrit kfirnu. We may accordingly assume
as probable, that the primeval Indo-Germanic people were not yet acquainted with agriculture, and as certain, that, they were so, played but very subordinate part in their economy for had at that time held the place which afterwards held among the Greeks and Romans,
have left deeper impression upon the language.
On the other hand the building of houses and huts by
the Indo-Germans attested by the Sanscrit
Latin domus, Greek Mp0s; Sanscrit wifas, Latin vicus,
Greek 02mg; Sanscrit dz/aras, Latin fares, Greek
further, the building of oar-boats by the names of the boat, Sanscrit ndus, Latin nam's, Greek mils, and of the oar, Sanscrit aritram, Greek s’pe'rpés, Latin remus, tr1ires-mis and the use of waggons and the breaking in of animals for draught and transport the Sanscrit akslzas (axle and cart), Latin axis, Greek 55w, dip-115a; Sanscrit iugam, Latin iugum, Greek {v76v. The words that denote clothing Sanscrit vastra, Latin vestis, Greek £00139; as well as those that denote sewing and spinning-Sanscrit sia, Latin sua Sanscrit na/z, Latin flea, Greek wjaw, are alike in all Indo Gerrnanic languages. This cannot, however, be equally
[Scotch gum. Mr. Robertson. )
would
dam(as),
06pm
1
by
it
, ,; itifit
is
it
a
;
it
a
1),
crutr. " INTO ITALY 21
affirmed of the higher art of weaving. 1 The knowledge of the use of fire in preparing food, and of salt for seasoning primeval heritage of the Indo-Germanic nations;
and the same may be affirmed regarding the knowledge of the earliest metals employed as implements or ornaments by man. At least the names of copper (an) and silver (argentum), perhaps also of gold, are met with in Sanscrit, and these names can scarcely have originated before man had learned to separate and to utilize the ores the Sanscrit asis, Latin erisis‘, points in fact to the primeval use of metallic weapons.
No less do we find extending back into those times the fundamental ideas on which the development of all Indo Germanic states ultimately rests; the relative position of husband and wife, the arrangement in clans, the priesthood of the father of the household and the absence of sacerdotal class as well as of all distinctions of caste in general, slavery as legitimate institution, the days of publicly dispensing justice at the new and full moon. On the other hand the positive organization of the body politic, the decision of the questions between regal sovereignty and the sovereignty of the community, between the hereditary privilege of royal and noble houses and the unconditional legal equality of the citizens, belong altogether to later age.
Even the elements of science and religion show traces of a community of origin. The numbers are the same up to one hundred (Sanscrit fatam, ékapztam, Latin centum,
If the Latin vim, vimen. belong to the same root as our wear/e (German weéen) and kindred words, the word must still, " when the Greeks and Italians separated, have had the general meaning to plait," and cannot have been until a later period, and probably in different regions independently of each other, that assumed that of "weaving. " The cultivation of flax, old as is, does not reach back to this period, for the Indians, though well acquainted with the flax-plant, up to the present day use only for the preparation of linseed-oil. Hemp probably became known to the Italians at still later period than flax; at least cannabir looks quite like a borrowed word of later date.
special
a
it
a
it 1
is a
it
it
a
a
;
it,
Graeco Italian culture.
as THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS BOOK]
Greek é-m-rév, Gothic hand) ; and the moon receives her name in all languages from the fact that men measure time by her (mantis). The idea of Deity itself (Sanscrit divas, Latin deus', Greek 0:69), and many of the oldest conceptions of religion and of natural symbolism, belong to the common inheritance of the nations. The conception, for example, of heaven as the father and of earth as the mother of being, the festal expeditions of the gods who proceed from place to place in their own chariots along carefully levelled paths, the shadowy continuation of the soul’s existence after death, are fundamental ideas of the Indian as well as of the Greek and Roman mythologies. Several of the gods of the Ganges coincide even in name with those worshipped on the Ilissus and the Tiber :—thus the Uranus of the Greeks is the Varunas, their Zeus, Jovis Diespiter is the Djaus pita of the Vedas. An unexpected light has been thrown on various enigmatical forms in the Hellenic mythology by recent researches regarding the earlier divinities of India. The hoary mysterious forms of the Erinnyes are no Hellenic invention; they were immi grants along with the oldest settlers from the East. The divine greyhound Saramé, who guards for the Lord of heaven the golden herd of stars and sunbeams and collects for him the nourishing rain-clouds as the cows of heaven to the milking, and who moreover faithfully conducts the pious dead into the world of the blessed, becomes in the hands of the Greeks the son of Saramd, Saraméyas, or Hermeias ; and the enigmatical Hellenic story of the steal ing of the cattle of Helios, which is beyond doubt con nected with the Roman legend- about Cacus, is now seen to be a last echo (with the meaning no longer understood) of that old fanciful and significant conception of nature.
The task, however, of determining the degree of culture which the Indo-Germans had attained before the separation of the stocks properly belongs to the general history of the
pater,
cIIAr. II INTO ITALY
23
ancient world. It is on the other hand the special task of Italian history to ascertain, so far as it is possible, what was
the state of the Graeco-Italian nation when the Hellenes
and the Italians parted. Nor is this a superfluous labour;
we reach by means of it the stage at which Italian civiliza
tion commenced, the starting-point of the national history. m
While it is probable that the Indo-Gerrnans led a Agri pastoral life and were acquainted with the cereals, if at all, only in their wild state, all indications point to the con clusion that the Graeco-Italians were a grain-cultivating, perhaps even a vine-cultivating, people. The evidence of
this is not simply the knowledge of agriculture itself common to both, for this does not upon the whole warrant the inference of community of origin in the peoples who may exhibit An historical connection between the Indo-Germanic agriculture and that of the Chinese, Aramaean, and Egyptian stocks can hardly be disputed; and yet these stocks are either alien to the Indo-Germans, or at any rate became separated from them at time when agriculture was certainly still unknown. The truth that the more advanced races ancient times were, as at the present day, constantly exchanging the implements and the plants employed in cultivation; and when the annals of China refer the origin of Chinese agriculture to the intro
duction of five species of grain that took place under particular king in particular year, the story undoubtedly depicts correctly, at least in general way, the relations subsisting in the earliest epochs of civilization. A common knowledge of agriculture, like common knowledge of the alphabet, of war chariots, of purple, and other implements and ornaments, far more frequently warrants the inference of an ancient intercourse between nations than of their original unity. But as regards the Greeks and Italians, whose mutual relations are comparatively well known, the hypothesis that agriculture as well as writing and coinage
aa
a
a
in
a is,
it.
"i-——_-—— -__ _-___. . _
24
THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS 300! i
first came to Italy by means of the Hellenes may be characterized as wholly inadmissible. On the other hand, the existence of a most intimate connection between the agriculture of the one country and that of the other is attested by their possessing in common all the oldest expressions relating to it; agar, d7pds; are aratrum, dptiw dporpov; h1g0 alongside Of haxalvw; iwrtus, xdpros; kordeum, xprflfi ; milium, IuMw; ; rapa, fiadmvis; mall/a, pakéx'q ; w'num, ofvos. It is likewise attested by the agree ment of Greek and Italian agriculture in the form of the plough, which appears of the same shape on the old Attic and the old Roman monuments; in the choice of the
most ancient kinds of grain, millet, barley, spelt; in the
custom of cutting the ears with the sickle and
them trodden out by cattle on the smooth-beaten threshing floor; lastly, in the mode of preparing the grain puls rrélt-ros, pinso rr-rt'ao-w, mola [1. 15M ; for baking was of more recent origin, and on that account dough or pap was always used in the Roman ritual instead of bread. That the
culture of the vine too in Italy was anterior to the earliest Greek immigration, is shown by the appellation “wine' land” (Olympia), which appears to reach back to the oldest visits of Greek voyagers. It would thus appear that the transition from pastoral life to agriculture, or, to speak more correctly, the combination of agriculture with the earlier pastoral economy, must have taken place after the Indians had departed from the common cradle of the nations, but before the Hellenes and Italians dissolved their ancient communion. Moreover, at the time when agriculture originated, the Hellenes and Italians appear to have been united as one national whole not merely with each other, but with other members of the great family; at least, it is a fact, that the most important of those terms of cultivation,
while they are foreign to the Asiatic members of the Indo Germanic family, are used by the Romans and Greeks in
having
cluir. rr INTO ITALY
25
common with the Celtic as well as the Germanic, Slavonic, and Lithuanian stocks. 1
The distinction between the common inheritance of the nations and their own subsequent acquisitions in manners and in language is still far from having been wrought out in all the variety of its details and gradations. The investiga tion of languages with this view has scarcely begun, and history still in the main derives its representation of primitive times, not from the rich mine of language, but from what must be called for the most part the rubbish-heap of tradi tion. For the present, therefore, it must suflice to indicate the differences between the culture of the Indo-Germanic family in its oldest undivided form, and the culture of that epoch when the Graeco-Italians still lived together. The task of discriminating the results of culture which are common to the European members of this family, but foreign to its
Asiatic members, from those which the several European
such as the Graeco-Italian and the Germano Slavonic, have wrought out for themselves, can only be accomplished, if at all, after greater progress has been made in linguistic and historical inquiries. But there can be no doubt that, with the Graeco-Italians as with all other nations, agriculture became and in the mind of the people remained the germ and core of their national and of their private life. The house and the fixed hearth, which the husbandman
1 Thus am, aralrum reappear in the old German arm (to plough, dialectimlly aren), wide, in Slavonian orali, oradlo, in Lithuanian arti, arimnas, in Celtic ar, aradar. Thus alongside of liga stands our rake (German recite”). of hartur our garden (German gartzn), of mala our mill (German mil/r12, Slavonic mlyn, Lithuanian malunar. Celtic mah'n).
With all these facts before us, we cannot allow that there ever was a time when the Greeks in all Hellenic cantons subsisted by purely pastoral husbandry. If it was the possession of cattle, and not of land, which in Greece as in Italy formed the basis and the standard of all private property, the reason of this was not that agriculture was of later intro duction, but that it was at first conducted on the system of joint posses sion. Of course a purely agricultural economy cannot have existed any where before the separation of the stocks; on the contrary, pastoral husbandry was (more or less according to locality) combined with it to an extent relatively greater than was the case in later times.
groups,
36 THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS 300K I
constructs instead of the light but and shifting fireplace of the shepherd, are represented in the spiritual domain and idealized in the goddess Vesta or ‘Eerie, almost the only divinity not Indo-Germanic yet from the first common to both nations. One of the oldest legends of the Italian stock ascribes to king Italus, or, as the Italians must have
the word, Vitalus or Vitulus, the introduction of the change from a pastoral to an agricultural life, and shrewdly connects with it the original Italian legislation. We have simply another version of the same belief in the legend of the Samnite stock which makes the ox the leader of their primitive colonies, and in the oldest Latin national names which designate the people as reapers (Siculi, perhaps also Sicam), or as field-labourers (0pm). It is one of the characteristic incongruities which attach to the so-called legend of the origin of Rome, that it represents a pastoral and hunting people as founding a city. Legend and faith, laws and manners, among the Italians as among the I-Iellenes are throughout associated with agriculture. 1
Cultivation of the soil cannot be conceived without some measurement of however rude. Accordingly, the measures of surface and the mode of setting off boundaries rest, like agriculture itself, on like basis among both
The Oscan and Umbrian versus of one hundred square feet corresponds exactly with the Greek plat/iron. The principle of marking ofi‘ boundaries was also the same. The land-measurer adjusted his position with reference to one of the cardinal points, and proceeded to draw in the
Nothing more significant in this respect than the close connection of agriculture with marriage and the foundation of cities during the earliest epoch of culture. Thus the gods in Italy immediately concerned with marriage are Ceres and (or Tellns (Plutarch, Ramul. 2a; Servius on Aen. iv. 166 Rossbach, Rfim. Elle, 257, 301), in Greece Demeter (Plu tarch, Conjug. Praec. z7iz7. ); in old Greek formulas the procreation of children called dpo'ros (p. 30 note); indeed the oldest Roman form of marriage, mnfrrreatio, derives its name and its ceremony from the culti vation of corn. The use of the plough in the founding of cities well known.
pronounced
peoples.
is
is
;
is
? )
1
a
it,
CHM’. II INTO ITALY
27
first place two lines, one from north to south, and another
from east to west, his station being at their point of inter
section (templum, -répevo; from -ré,u. vw) ; then he drew at certain fixed distances lines parallel to these, and by this process produced a series of rectangular pieces of ground, the corners of which were marked by boundary posts (termini, in Sicilian inscriptions ‘répfwves, usually 5pm). This mode of defining boundaries, which is probably also Etruscan but is hardly of Etruscan origin, we find among the Romans, Umbrians, Samnites, and also in very ancient records of the Tarentine Heracleots, who are as little likely to have borrowed it from the Italians as the Italians from the Tarentines: it is an ancient possession common to all. A peculiar characteristic of the Romans, on the other hand, was their rigid carrying out of the principle of the square; even where the sea ora river formed a natural boundary, they did not accept but wound up their allocation of the land with the last complete square.
It not solely in agriculture, however, that the especi- other ally close relationship of the Greeks and Italians appears; 238$
unmistakably manifest also in the other provinces of economy. man's earliest activity. The Greek house, as described by
Homer, differs little from the model which was always
adhered to in Italy. The essential portion, which originally
formed the whole interior accommodation of the Latin house, was the atrium, that the “blackened” chamber, with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals, and the hearth and precisely similar the Homeric megaron, with its household altar and hearth and smoke begrimed roof. We cannot say the same of shipbuilding. The boat with oars was an old common possession of the Indo-Germans but the advance to the use of sailing vessels can scarcely be considered to have taken place during the Graeco-Italian period, for we find no nautical terms origin ally common to the Greeks and Italians except such as are
;
;
it,
is
is,
it is
is
Difference of the Italian and the Greek character‘.
38
THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS BOOK 1
also general among the Indo~Germanic family. On the other hand the primitive Italian custom of the husbandmen having common midday meals, the origin of which the myth connects with the introduction of agriculture, is compared by Aristotle with the Cretan Syssitia ; and the earliest Romans further agreed with the Cretans and Laconians in taking their meals not, as was afterwards the custom among both peoples, in a reclining, but in a sitting posture. The mode of kindling fire by the friction of two pieces of wood of different kinds is common to all peoples; but it is cer tainly no mere accident that the Greeks and Italians agree in the appellations which they give to the two portions of the touch-wood, “the rubber” (rptirrayov, terebra), and the “ under-layer ” (o-répevs, io-xépa, Iabula, probably from tmdere,
In like manner the dress of the two peoples is essentially identical, for the tum'ca quite corresponds with the [11z70n, and the toga is nothing but a fuller kimation. Even as regards weapons of war, liable as they are to fre quent change, the two peoples have this much at least in common, that their two principal weapons of attack were the javelin and the bow,—a fact which is clearly expressed, as far as Rome is concerned, in the earliest names for warriors (pilumni-arquites),1 and is in keeping with the oldest mode of fighting which was not properly adapted to a close struggle. Thus, in the language and manners of Greeks and Italians, all that relates to the material founda tions of human existence may be traced back to the same primary elements; the oldest problems which the world proposes to man had been jointly solved by the two peoples at a time when they still formed one nation.
It was otherwise in the mental domain. The great prob lem of man-how to live in conscious harmony with him
1 Among the oldest names of weapons on both sides scarcely any can be shown to he certainly related; lanaa, although doubtless connected with M7707, is, as a Roman word, recent, and perhaps borrowed from the Germans or Spaniards.
'ré‘rtlflat).
CHAP- Ir INTO ITALY
29
self, with his neighbour, and with the whole to which he
belongs—admits of as many solutions as there are provinces in our Father’s kingdom; and it is in this, and not in the material sphere, that individuals and nations display their divergences of character. The exciting causes which gave rise to this intrinsic contrast must have been in the Graeco Italian period as yet wanting ; it was not until the Hellenes and Italians had separated that that deep-seated diversity of mental character became manifest, the effects of which continue to the present day. The family and the state, religion and art, received in Italy and in Greece respectively a development so peculiar and so thoroughly national, that the common basis, on which in these respects also the two peoples rested, has been so overgrown as to be almost con cealed from our view. That Hellenic character, which sacrificed the whole to its individual elements, the nation to the township, and the township to the citizen; which sought its ideal of life in the beautiful and the good, and, but too often, in the enjoyment of idleness; which attained its political development by intensifying the original indi viduality of the several cantons, and at length produced the internal dissolution of even local authority; which in its view of religion first invested the gods with human attributes, and then denied their existence; which allowed full play to the limbs in the sports of the naked youth, and gave free scope to thought in all its grandeur and in all its awfulness ; —and that Roman character, which solemnly bound the son to reverence the father, the citizen to reverence the ruler, and all to reverence the gods ; which required nothing and honoured nothing but the useful act, and compelled every citizen to fill up every moment of his brief life with unceasing work; which made it a duty even in the boy modestly to cover the body; which deemed every one a bad citizen who wished to be different from his fellows; which regarded the state as all in all, and a desire for the
The family and the
state’s extension as the only aspiration not liable to censure, —who can in thought trace back these sharply-marked contrasts to that original unity which embraced them both, prepared the way for their development, and at length pro duced them? It would be foolish presumption to desire to lift this veil ; we shall only endeavour to indicate in brief outline the beginnings of Italian nationality and its connec tions with an earlier period-to direct the guesses of the discerning reader rather than to express them.
All that may be called the patriarchal element in the state rested in Greece and Italy on the same foundations. Under this head comes especially the moral and decorous arrangement of social life,1 which enjoined monogamy on the husband and visited with heavy penalties the infidelity of the wife, and which recognized the equality of the sexes
and the sanctity of marriage in the high position which it assigned to the mother within the domestic circle. On the other hand the rigorous development of the marital and still more of the paternal authority, regardless of the natural rights of persons as such, was a feature foreign to the Greeks and peculiarly Italian; it was in Italy alone that moral subjection became transformed into legal slavery. In the same way the principle of the slave being completely destitute of legal rights—a principle involved in the very nature of
3O
THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS BOOK 1
maintained by the Romans with merciless rigour and carried out to all its consequences; whereas among the Greeks alleviations of its harshness were early introduced both in practice and in legislation, the marriage of slaves, for example, being recognized as a legal relation.
On the household was based the clan, that the com munity of the descendants of the same progenitor and out of the clan among the Greeks as well as the Italians arose the state. But while under the weaker political develop
Even in details this agreement appears; e. g.
, in the designation of lawful wedlock as marriage concluded for the obtaining of lawful children" (76410: M ralflww 'ymcrlwr drpbrwahimnium liberrmml quamndorum cam-a).
slavery—was
‘'
1
;
is,
can. 11 INTO ITALY
31
ment of Greece the clan-bond maintained itself as a cor porate power in contradistinction to that of the state far even into historical times, the state in Italy made its appearance at once complete, in so far as in presence of its authority the clans were quite neutralized and it exhibited an association not of clans, but of citizens. Conversely, again, the individual attained, in presence of the clan, an inward independence and freedom of personal development far earlier and more completely in Greece than in Rome— a fact reflected with great clearness in the Greek and Roman proper names, which, originally similar, came to assume
very different forms. In the more ancient Greek names the name of the clan was very frequently added in an adjective form to that of the individual ; while, conversely, Roman scholars were aware that their ancestors bore origin ally only one name, the later praenomen. But while in Greece the adjectival clan-name early disappeared, it became, among the Italians generally and not merely among the Romans, the principal name ; and the distinctive individual name, the praenomm, became subordinate. It seems as if the small and ever diminishing number and the meaningless char acter of the Italian, and particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of the Greeks, were intended to illustrate the truth that it was characteristic of the one nation to reduce all to a level, of the other to promote the free development of personality.
The association in communities of families under patriar chal chiefs, which we may conceive to have prevailed in the Graeco-Italian period, may appear different enough from the later forms of Italian and Hellenic polities; yet it must have already contained the germs out of which the future laws of both nations were moulded. The “laws of king Italus,” which were still applied in the time of Aristotle, may denote the institutions essentially common to both. These laws must have provided for the maintenance of peace
3:
THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS BOOK 1
and the execution of justice within the community, for mili tary organization and martial law in reference to its external relations, for its government by a patriarchal chief, for a council of elders, for assemblies of the freemen capable of bearing arms, and for some sort of constitution.
Religion.
Judicial procedure (crimm, Kpr'vew), expiation (puma, wor'vq), retalia
tion (talio, raluiw, rkfivat), are Graeco~Italian ideas. The stern law of debt, by which the debtor was directly re sponsible with his person for the repayment of what he had received, is common to the Italians, for example, with the Tarentine Heracleots. The fundamental ideas of the Roman constitution-a king, 11 senate, and an assembly entitled simply to ratify or to reject the proposals which the king and senate should submit to it--are scarcely anywhere expressed so distinctly as in Aristotle's account of the earlier constitution of Crete. The germs of larger state-confeder acies in the political fraternizing or even amalgamation of several previously independent stocks (symmachy, synoikis mos) are in like manner common to both nations. The more stress is to be laid on this fact of the common foundations of Hellenic and Italian polity, that it is not found to extend to the other Indo-Germanic stocks; the organization of the Germanic community, for example, by no means starts, like that of the Greeks and Romans, from an elective monarchy. But how different the polities were that were constructed on this common basis in Italy and
Greece, and how completely the whole course of their political development belongs to each as its distinctive property,1 it will be the business of the sequel to show.
It is the same in religion. In Italy, as in Hellas, there
I Only we must, of course, not forget that like pre-existing conditions lead everywhere to like institutions. For instance, nothing is more certain than that the Roman plebeians were a growth originating within the Roman commonwealth, and yet they everywhere find their counterpart where a body of mztaeci has arisen alongside of a body of burgesses. As a matter of course, chance also plays in such cases its provoking game.
CHAP- u INTO ITALY
3
lies at the foundation of the popular faith the same common treasure of symbolic and allegorical views of nature: on this rests that general analogy between the Roman and the Greek world of gods and of spirits, which was to become of so much importance in later stages of development. In many of their particular conceptions also,—in the already mentioned forms of Zeus-Diovis and Hestia-Vesta, in the idea of the holy space (-répevos, templum), in various offerings and ceremonies-the two modes of worship do not by mere accident coincide. Yet in Hellas, as in Italy, they assumed a shape so thoroughly national and peculiar, that but little even of the ancient common inheritance was preserved in a recognizable form, and that little was for the most part misunderstood or not understood at all. It could not be otherwise; for, just as in the peoples themselves the great contrasts, which during the Graeco-Italian period had lain side by side undeveloped, were after their division distinctly evolved, so in their religion also a separation took place between the idea and the image, which had hitherto been but one whole in the soul. Those old tillers of the ground, when the clouds were driving along the sky, probably expressed to themselves the phenomenon by saying that the hound of the gods was driving together the startled cows of the herd. The Greek forgot that the cows were really the clouds, and converted the son of the bound of the gods- a form devised merely for the particular purposes of that conception—into the adroit messenger of the gods ready for every service. When the thunder rolled among the mountains, he saw Zeus brandishing his bolts on Olympus ; when the blue sky again smiled upon him, he gazed into the bright eye of Athenaea, the daughter of Zeus; and so powerful over him was the influence of the forms which he had thus created, that he soon saw nothing in them but human beings invested and illumined with the splendour of nature's power, and freely formed and transformed them
vol. I
3
34
THE RARLIEST MIGRATIONS sooK I
according to the laws of beauty. It was in another fashion, but not less strongly, that the deeply implanted religious feeling of the Italian race manifested itself; it held firmly by the idea and did not suffer the form to obscure As the Greek, when he sacrificed, raised his eyes to heaven, so the
‘/Roman veiled his head; for the prayer of the former was contemplation, that of the latter reflection. Throughout the whole of nature he adored the spiritual and the univer sal. To everything existing, to the man and to the tree, to the state and to the store-room, was assigned spirit which came into being with and perished along with the counterpart of the natural phenomenon in the spiritual domain; to the man the male Genius, to the woman the female Juno, to the boundary Terminus, to the forest Silvanus, to the circling year Vertumnus, and so on to every object after its kind. In occupations the very steps of the process were spiritualized: thus, for example, in the prayer for the husbandman there was invoked the spirit of fallowing, of ploughing, of furrowing, sowing, covering-in, harrowing, and so forth down to that of the in-bringing, up-storing, and opening of the granaries. In like manner marriage, birth, and every other natural event were endowed with sacred life. The larger the sphere embraced in the abstraction, the higher rose the god and the reverence paid by man. Thus Jupiter and Juno are the abstractions of manhood and womanhood; Dea Dia or Ceres, the creative power; Minerva, the power of memory; Dea Bona, or among the Samnites Dea Cupra, the good deity. While to the Greek everything assumed concrete and corporeal shape, the Roman could only make use of abstract, completely trans parent formulae; and while the Greek for the most part threw aside the old legendary treasures of primitive times, because they embodied the idea in too transparent form, the Roman could still less retain them, because the sacred conceptions seemed to him dimmed even the lightest
by
a
a
a
a
it
it,
it.
can. It INTO ITALY
35
veil of allegory. Not a trace has been preserved among the Romans even of the oldest and most generally diffused myths, such as that current among the Indians, the Greeks, and even the Semites, regarding a great flood and its survivor, the common ancestor of the present human race. Their gods could not marry and beget children, like those of the Hellenes ; they did not walk about unseen among mortals ; and they needed no nectar. But that they, never theless, in their spirituality-which only appears tame to dull apprehension—gained a powerful hold on men's minds, 9. hold more powerful perhaps than that of the gods of Hellas created after the image of man, would be attested, even if history were silent on the subject, by the Roman designation of faith (the word and the idea alike foreign to the Hellenes), Relzgfo, that is to say, "that which binds. " As India and Iran developed from one and the same inherited store, the former, the richly varied forms of its sacred epics, the latter, the abstractions of the Zend-Avesta; so in the Greek mythology the person is predominant, in the Roman the idea, in the former freedom, in the latter necessity.
Lastly, what holds good of real life is true also of its An. 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 The simplest elements of.
art are in Latium and Hellas quite the same; the decorous armed dance, the “leap ” (triumpus 0pt'apflos, 8t-06papfloe);
the masquerade of the “ full people ” (d‘é‘rvpot, satura), who, wrapped in the skins of sheep and goats, wound up the festival with their jokes lastly, the pipe, which with suitable
and regulated the solemn as well as the merry dance. Nowhere, perhaps, does the especially
strains accompanied
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
close relationship
;
it.
36
THE EARLIEST MIGRATIONS 300K I
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 indi viduals as their highest good. Latium in the poverty of its artistic development stands almost on a level with un civilized 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 re served 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 char acter 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
can. u INTO ITALY
37
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.
Indo-GQ manic mi
‘rations.
CHAPTER 111
m sn'rrmmnn'rs or THE m'rnrs
THE HOME of the Indo-Germanic stock lay in the western portion of central Asia; from this it spread partly in a south-eastern direction over India, partly in a north western over Europe. It is diflicult to determine the
seat of the Indo-Germans more precisely: it must, however, at any rate have been inland and remote from the sea, as there is no name for the sea common to the Asiatic and European branches. Many indications point more particularly to the regions of the Euphrates; so that, singularly enough, the primitive seats of the two most important civilized stocks,—the Indo-Germanic and the Aramaean,—almost coincide as regards locality. This circumstance gives support to the hypothesis that these races also were originally connected, although, if there was such a connection, it certainly must have been anterior to all traceable development of culture and
We cannot define more exactly their
nor are we able to accompany the individual stocks in the course of their migrations. The European branch probably lingered in Persia and Armenia for some consider able time after the departure of the Indians; for, accord
ing to all appearance, that region has been the cradle of agriculture and of the culture of the vine. Barley, spelt, and wheat are indigenous in Mesopotamia, and the vine to
primitive
SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATLNS BOOK r
language. original locality,
CRAP. Ill SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS
39
the south of the Caucasus and of the Caspian Sea: there too the plum, the walnut, and others of the more easily transplanted fruit trees are native. It is worthy of notice that‘the name for the sea is common to most of the European stocks--Latins, Celts, Germans, and Slavonians; they must probably therefore before their separation have reached the coast of the Black Sea or of the Caspian. By what route from those regions the Italians reached the chain of the Alps, and where in particular they were settled while still united with the Hellenes alone, are questions that can only be answered when the problem is solved by what route—-whether from Asia Minor or from the regions of the
Danube-the Hellenes arrived in Greece. It may at all events be regarded as certain that the Italians, like the
Indians, migrated into their peninsula from the north
The advance of the Umbro-Sabellian stock along the central mountain-ridge of Italy, in direction from north
to south, can still be clearly traced; indeed its last phases belong to purely historical times. Less known regarding the route which the Latin migration followed. Probably
proceeded in a similar direction along the west coast, long, in all likelihood, before the first Sabellian stocks began to move. The stream only overflows the heights when the lower grounds are already occupied; and only through the supposition that there were Latin stocks already settled on the coast are we able to explain why the Sabellians should have contented themselves with the rougher mountain districts, from which they afterwards issued and intruded, wherever was possible, between the Latin tribes.
well known that Latin stock inhabited the country Extension
from the left bank of the Tiber to the Volscian of the mountains Latins in
but these mountains themselves, which appear to have been Italy. neglected on occasion of the first immigration when the plains of Latium and Campania still lay open to the settlers,
were, as the Volscian inscriptions show, occupied by stock
13).
a
(p.
;
It is
a
it
it
a is
4o
SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS BOOK 1
more nearly related to the Sabellians than to the Latins. On the other hand, Latins probably dwelt in Campania before the Greek and Samnite immigrations ; for the Italian names Novla or 1V0la (new-town), Campam' Capua, Vol turnus (from ooh/ere, like Iuturna from iuvare), Opm' (labourers), are demonstrably older than the Samnite in vasion, and show that, at the time when Cumae was founded by the Greeks, an Italian and probably Latin stock, the Ausones, were in possession of Campania. The primitive inhabitants of the districts which the Lucani and
Bruttii subsequently occupied, the Itali proper (inhabitants of the land of oxen), are associated by the best observers not with the Iapygian, but with the Italian stock ; and there is nothing to hinder our regarding them as belonging to its Latin branch, although the Hellenizing of these districts which took place even before the commencement of the political development of Italy, and their subsequent inun dation by Samnite hordes, have in this instance obliterated the traces of the older nationality.
totally Very ancient legends bring the similarly extinct stock of the Siculi into relation with Rome. For instance, the earliest historian of Italy Antiochus of Syracuse tells us that a man
named Sikelos came a fugitive from Rome to Morges king of Italia (tie. the Bruttian peninsula). Such stories appear to be founded on the identity of race recognized by the narrators as subsisting between the Siculi (of whom there were some still in Italy in the time of Thucydides) and the Latins. The striking affinity of certain dialectic peculiar ities of Sicilian Greek with the Latin is probably to be ex plained rather by the old commercial connections subsisting between Rome and the Sicilian Greeks, than by the ancient identity of the languages of the Siculi and the Romans. According to all indications, however, not only Latium, but
probably also the Campanian and Lucanian districts, the Italia proper between the gulfs of Tarentum andLaus, and the
can. m SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS
4r by
Destinies very dissimilar awaited these different branches. Those settled in Sicily, Magna Graecia, and Campania came into contact with the Greeks at a period when they were unable to offer resistance to their civilization, and were either completely Hellenized, as in the case of Sicily, or at any rate so weakened that they succumbed without marked resistance to the fresh energy of the Sabine tribes. In this way the Siculi, the Itali and Morgetes, and the Ausonians never came to play an active part in the history of the peninsula. It was otherwise with Latium, where no Greek colonies were founded, and the inhabitants after hard struggles were successful in maintaining their ground against the Sabines as well as against their northern neighbours. Let us cast a glance at this district, which was destined more than any other to influence the fortunes of the ancient world.
The plain of Latium must have been in primeval times the scene of the grandest conflicts of nature, while the slowly formative agency of water deposited, and the erup tions of mighty volcanoes upheaved, the successive strata of that soil on which was to be decided the question to what people the sovereignty of the world should belong. Latium is bounded on the east by the mountains of the Sabines and Aequi which form part of the Apennines; and on the south by the Volscian range rising to the height of 4000 feet, which is separated from the main chain of the Apennines by the ancient territory of the Hernici, the table land of the Sacco (Trerus, a tributary of the Liris), and stretching in a westerly direction terminates in the pro montory of Terracina. On the west its boundary is the sea, which on this part of the coast forms but few and indifferent harbours. On the north it imperceptibly nerges into the broad hill-land of Etruria. The region thus en
eastern half of Sicily were in primitive times inhabited different branches of the Latin nation.
Latium.
43
SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS BOOK 1
closed forms a magnificent plain traversed by the Tiber, the “mountain-stream ” which issues from the Umbrian, and by the Anio, which rises in the Sabine mountains. Hills here and there emerge, like islands, from the plain; some of them steep limestone cliffs, such as that of Soracte in the north-east, and that of the Circeian promontory on the south-west, as well as the similar though lower height of the Janiculum near Rome; others volcanic elevations, whose extinct craters had become converted into lakes which in some cases still exist; the most important of these is the Alban range, which, free on every side, stands forth from the plain between the Volscian chain and the river Tiber.
Here settled the stock which is known to history under the name of the Latins, or, as they were subsequently called by way of distinction from the Latin communities beyond the bounds of Latium, the “Old Latins”
But the territory occupied by them, the district of Latium, was only a small portion of the central plain of Italy. All the country north of the Tiber was to the Latins a foreign and even hostile domain, with whose inhabitants no lasting alliance, no public peace, was possible, and such armistices as were concluded appear always to have been for a limited period. The Tiber formed the northern boundary from early times; and neither in history nor in the more reliable traditions has any reminiscence been preserved as to the period or occasion of the establishment of a frontier line so important in its results. We find, at the time when our history begins, the flat and marshy tracts to the south of the Alban range in the hands of Umbro-Sabellian stocks, the Rutuli and Volsci; Ardea and Velitrae are no longer in the number of originally Latin towns. Only the central portion of that region between the Tiber, the spurs of the Apennines, the Alban Mount, and the sea—a district of about 700 square miles, not much larger than the present
(prisd Latim').
can. in SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS
43
canton of Zurich-was Latium proper, the “plain,”1 as it appears to the eye of the observer from-the heights of Monte Cavo. Though the country is a plain, it is not monotonously flat. With the exception of the sea-beach which is sandy and formed in part by the accumulations of the Tiber, the level is everywhere broken by hills of tufa moderate in height though often somewhat steep, and by deep fissures of the ground. These alternating elevations and depressions of the surface lead to the formation of lakes in winter; and the exhalations proceeding in the heat of summer from the putrescent organic substances which they contain engender that noxious fever-laden atmosphere, which in ancient times tainted the district as it taints it at the present day. It is a mistake to suppose that these miasmata were first occasioned by the neglect of cultivation, which was the result of the misgovernment in the last century of the Republic and under the Papacy. Their cause lies rather in the want of natural outlets for the water ; and it operates now as it operated thousands of years ago.
it
be banished by thoroughness of tillage——a fact which has not yet received its full explanation, but may be partly accounted for by the circumstance that the working of the surface accelerates the drying up of the stagnant waters. It must always remain a remarkable phenomenon, that a dense agricultural population should have arisen in regions where no healthy population can at present subsist, and where the traveller is unwilling to tarry even for a single night, such as the plain of Latium and the lowlands of Sybaris and
is true, however, that the malaria may to a certain extent
We must bear in mind that man in a low stage of civilization has generally a quicker perception of
what nature demands, and a greater readiness in conforming
1 Like ldtus (side) and rhird; (flat); it denotes therefore the flat country in contrast to the Sabine mountain-land, just as Campania, the " plain," forms the contrast to Samnium. Um, formerly rtllihu, has no
connection with Latium.
Metapontum.
Latin settle merits
to her requirements; perhaps, also, a more elastic physical constitution, which accommodates itself more readily to the conditions of the soil where he dwells. In Sardinia agri culture is prosecuted under physical conditions precisely similar even at the present day; the pestilential atmosphere
exists, but the peasant avoids its injurious effects by caution in reference to clothing, food, and the choice of his hours of labour. In fact, nothing is so certain a protection against the “aria cattiva” as wearing the fleece of animals and keeping a blazing fire; which explains why the Roman countryman went constantly clothed in heavy woollen stuffs, and never allowed the fire on his hearth to be extinguished. In other respects the district must have appeared attractive to an immigrant agricultural people: the soil is easily laboured with mattock and hoe and is productive even without being manured, although, tried by an Italian standard, it does not yield any extraordinary return: wheat yields on an average about five-fold. 1 Good water is not abundant; the higher and more sacred on that account
was the esteem in which every fresh spring was held by the inhabitants.
No accounts have been preserved of the mode in which the settlements of the Latins took place in the district which
1 A French statist, Dureau de la Malle (Econ. Pol. dcs Rmins, ii. 226), compares with the Roman Campagna the district of Limagne in Auvergne, which is likewise a wide, much intersected, and uneven plain, with a superficial soil of decomposed lava and ashes-the remains of extinct volcanoes. The population, at least 2500 to the square league, is one of the densest to be found in purely agricultural districts: property is subdivided to an extraordinary extent. Tillage is carried on almost en tirely by manual labour, with spade, hoe, or mattock ; only in exceptional cases a light plough is substituted drawn by two cows, the wife of the peasant not unfrequently taking the place of one of them in the yoke. The team serves at once to furnish milk and to till the land. They have two harvests in the year, corn and vegetables; there is no fallow. The average yearly rent for an arpent of arable land is we francs. If instead of such an arrangement this same land were to be divided among six or seven large landholders, and a system of management by stewards and day labourers were to supersede the husbandry of the small proprietors, in a hundred years the Limagne would doubtless be as waste, forsaken, and miserable as the Campagna di Roma is at the present day.
44
SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS 300K 1
can. III SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS
45
has since home their name ; and we are left to gather what we can almost exclusively from d posteriori inference re garding them. Some knowledge may, however, in this way be gained, or at any rate some conjectures that wear an aspect of probability.
The Roman territory was divided in the earliest times
into a number of clan-districts, which were subsequently villages.
employed
in the formation of the earliest “rural wards”
Tradition informs us as to the tribu: Claudia, that it originated from the settlement of the Claudian
clansmen on the Anio; and that the other districts of the earliest division originated in a similar manner is indicated quite as certainly by their names. These names are not, like those of the districts added at a later period, derived from the localities, but are formed without exception from the names of clans; and the clans who thus gave their names to the wards of the original Roman territory are, so far as they have not become entirely extinct (as is the case with the Camilz'i, Galeriz', Lemom'i, Pal/ii, Pupim'i, Voltinii), the very oldest patrician families of Rome, the Aemilii,
Cornelii, Fabiz', Horalii, . lllenem'i, Papiriz', Romilii, Sergr'r', Vaturii. It is worthy of remark, that not one of these clans can be shown to have taken up its settlement in Rome only at a later epoch. Every Italian, and doubtless also every Hellenic, canton must, like the Roman, have been divided into a number of groups associated at once by locality and by clanship ; such a clan-settlement is the “ house ” (oim’a) of the Greeks, from which very frequently the Kid/MIL and 85pm originated among them, like the tribus in Rome. The corresponding Italian terms “house” (vicus) or “district” (pagus, from pangere) indicate, in like manner, the joint settlement of the members of a clan, and thence come by an easily understood transition to signify in common use hamlet or village. As each household had its own portion of land, so the clan-household or village had a
(tribus rustime).
cantons.
clan-land belonging to which, as will afterwards be shown, was managed up to comparatively late period after the analogy of household-land, that on the system of joint-possession. Whether was in Latium itself that the clan-households became developed into clan-villages, or whether the Latins were already associated in clans when they immigrated into Latium, are questions which we are just as little able to answer as we are to determine what was the form assumed by the management on joint account, which such an arrangement required,1 or how far, in addition to the original ground of common ancestry, the clan may have been based on the incorporation or co-ordination from without of individuals not related to by blood.
These clanships, however, were from the beginning regarded not as independent societies, but as the integral parts of political community (cim'tas, populas). This first presents itself as an aggregate of-a number of clan-villages of the same stock, language, and manners, bound to mutual observance of law and mutual legal redress and to united action in aggression and defence. A fixed local centre was quite as necessary in the case of such canton as in that of
clanship; but as the members of the clan, or in other words the constituent elements of the canton, dwelt in their villages, the centre of the canton cannot have been place of joint settlement in the strict sense-a town. It must, on the contrary, have been simply place of common assembly, containing the seat of justice and the common sanctuary
In Slavonia, where the patriarchal economy retained up to the present day, the whole family, often to the number of fifty or even a hundred persons, remains together in the same house under the orders of the house-father (Goszpodar) chosen by the whole family for life. The property of the household, which consists chiefly in cattle, administered by the house-father; the surplus distributed according to the family branches. Private acquisitions by industry and trade remain separate property. Instances of quitting the household occur, in the case even of men, eg. by marrying into a stranger household (Csaplovies, Slammien,
106, 179). —Under such circumstances, which are probably not very widely different from the earliest Roman conditions, the household approximates in character to the community.
46
SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS BOOK I
i. a 1
is
it, a
is is
is,
a
it
a
a
it
a
crur. m SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS
47
of the canton, where the members of the canton met every eighth day for purposes of intercourse and amusement, and where, in case of war, they obtained for themselves and their cattle a safer shelter from the invading enemy than in the villages: in ordinary circumstances this place of meeting was not at all or but scantily inhabited. Ancient places of refuge, of a kind quite similar, may still be recognized at the present day on the tops of several of the hills in the highlands of east Switzerland. Such a place was called in Italy “height” (mpilolium, like input, the mountain-top), or “stronghold” (arx, from arcere) ; it was not a town at first, but it became the nucleus of one, as houses naturally
round the stronghold and were afterwards surrounded with the “ring” (urbs, connected with urvus, rur'uus, perhaps also with orbis). The stronghold and town were visibly distinguished from each other by the number of gates, of which the stronghold has as few as possible, and the town many, the former ordinarily but one, the latter at least three. Such fortresses were the bases of that cantonal constitution which prevailed in Italy anterior to the existence of towns: a constitution, the nature of which may still be recognized with some degree of clearness in those provinces of Italy which did not until a late period reach, and in some cases have not yet fully reached, the stage of aggregation in towns, such as the land of the
Marsi and the small cantons of the Abruzzi. The country 3f the Aequiculi, who even in the imperial period dwelt not in towns, but in numerous open hamlets, presents a number of ancient ring-walls, which, regarded as “deserted towns” with their solitary temples, excited the astonishment of the Roman as well as of modern archaeologists, who have fancied that they could find accommodation there, the former for their “primitive inhabitants” (aborigines), the latter for their Pelasgians. We shall certainly be nearer the truth in recognizing these structures not as walled towns,
gathered
Localities of the oldest can tons.
but as places of refuge for the inhabitants of the district, such as were doubtless found in more ancient times over all Italy, although constructed in less artistic style. It was natural that at the period when the stocks that had made the transition to urban life were surrounding their towns with stone walls, those districts whose inhabitants continued to dwell in open hamlets should replace the earthen ramparts and palisades of their strongholds with buildings of stone. When peace came to be securely established throughout the land and such fortresses were no longer needed, these places of refuge were abandoned and soon became a riddle to after generations.
These cantons accordingly, having their rendezvous in some stronghold, and including a certain number of clan ships, form the primitive political unities with which Italian history begins. At what period, and to what extent, such cantons were formed in Latium, cannot be determined with precision; nor is it a matter of special historical interest. The isolated Alban range, that natural stronghold of Latium, which offered to settlers the most wholesome air, the freshest springs, and the most secure position, would doubtless be first occupied by the new comers. Here
accordingly, along the narrow plateau above Palazzuola, between the Alban lake (Lago di Caste/l0) and the Alban mount (Monte Cave), extended the town of Alba, which was universally regarded as the primitive seat of the Latin stock, and the mother-city of Rome as well as of all the other Old Latin communities; here, too, on the slopes lay the very ancient Latin canton-centres of Lanuvium, Aricia, and Tusculum. Here are found some of those primitive works of masonry, which usually mark the beginnings of civilization and seem to stand as a witness to posterity that in reality Pallas Athene, when she does appear, comes into the world full grown. Such is the escarpment of the wall of rock below Alba in the direction of Palazzuola, whereby
Alba.
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SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS BOOK I
CRAP. m SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS
49
the place, which is e-vdered naturally inaccessible by the steep declivities of Monte Cavo on the south, is rendered equally unapproachaore on the north, and only the two narrow approaches on the east and west, which are capable of being easily defended, are left open for traflic. Such, above all, is the large subterranean tunnel cut—so that I. man can stand upright within it—through the hard wall of lava, 6000 feet thick, by which the waters of the lake formed in the old crater of the Alban Mount were reduced to their present level and a considerable space was gained for tillage on the mountain itself.
The summits of the last offshoots of the Sabine range form natural fastnesses of the Latin plain ; and the canton strongholds there gave rise at a later period to the con siderable towns of Tibur and Praeneste. Labici too, Gabii, and Nomentum in the plain between the Alban and Sabine hills and the Tiber, Rome on the Tiber, Laurentum and Lavinium on the coast, were all more or less ancient centres of Latin colonization, not to speak of many others less famous and in some cases almost forgotten.
All these cantons were in primitive times politically The Latin sovereign, and each of them was governed by its prince
with the co-operation of the council of elders and the assembly of warriors. Nevertheless the feeling of fellowship
based on community of descent and of language not only pervaded the whole of them, but manifested itself in an important religious and political institution—the perpetual league of the collective Latin cantons. The presidency belonged originally, according to the universal Italian as well as Hellenic usage, to that canton within whose bounds lay the meeting-place of the league ; in this case it was the canton of Alba, which, as we have said, was generally
as the oldest and most eminent of the Latin cantons. The communities entitled to participate in the league were in the beginning thirty—a number which we,
regarded
not. t
4t
5o
SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS 300: I
find occurring with singular frequency as the sum of the constituent parts of a commonwealth in Greece and Italy. What cantons originally made up the number of the thirty old Latin communities or, as with reference to the metro politan rights of Alba they are also called, the thirty Alban colonies, tradition has not recorded, and we can no longer ascertain. The rendezvous of this union was, like the Pamboeotia and the Panionia among the similar con federacies of the Greeks, the “Latin festival”
at which, on the “Mount of Alba” Albanus, Monte Cam), upon a day annually appointed
the chief magistrate for the purpose, an ox was offered in sacrifice by the assembled Latin stock to the “ Latin god ”
Latinae),
(ferz'ae (Mons
Each community taking part in the ceremony had to contribute to the sacrificial feast its fixed
(fupiter Latiaris).
of cattle, milk, and cheese, and to receive in return a portion of the roasted victim. These usages continued down to a late period, and are well known; respecting the more important legal bearings of this associa tion we can do little else than institute conjectures.
From the most ancient times there were held, in connec tion with the religious festival on the Mount of Alba, assem blies of the representatives of the several communities at the neighbouring Latin seat of justice at the source of the Ferentina (near Marino). Indeed such a confederacy cannot be conceived to exist without having a certain power of superintendence over the associated body, and without
a system of law binding on all. Tradition records, and we may well believe, that the league exercised jurisdiction in reference to violations of federal law, and that it could in such cases pronounce even sentence of death. The later communion of legal rights and, in some sense, of marriage that subsisted among the Latin communities may perhaps be regarded as an integral part of the primitive law of the league, so that any Latin man could beget lawful
proportion
possessing
by
cHAP. III SETTLEMENTS OF THE LATINS
5|
children with any Latin woman and acquire landed property and carry on trade in any part of Latium. The league may have also provided a federal tribunal of arbitration for the mutual disputes of the cantons ; on the other hand, there is no proof that the league imposed any limitation on the sovereign right of each community to make peace or war. In like manner there can be no doubt that the constitution of the league implied the possibility of its waging defensive or even aggressive war in its own name; in which case, of course, it would be necessary to have a federal commander in-chief. But we have no reason to suppose that in such an event each community was compelled by lawto furnish a contingent for the army, or that, conversely, any one was interdicted from undertaking a war on its own account even
a member of the league. There are, however, indications that during the Latin festival, just as was the case during the festivals of the Hellenic leagues, “a truce of God ” was observed throughout all Latium ;1 and probably on that occasion even tribes at feud granted safe conducts to eachother.
It is still less in our power to define the range of the privileges of the presiding canton ; only we may safely affirm that there is no reason for recognizing in the Alban presidency a real political hegemony over Latium, and that possibly, nay probably, it had no more significance in Latium than the honorary presidency of Elis had in Greece. 2 On the whole it is probable that the extent of this
1 The Latin festival is expressly called " armistice " (indutiae, Macrob. Sat. i.