Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/303

 The Western World and Rome 251 on the dock speaking Greek. He too learns the Greek words for the clothing offered for sale, for household utensils and pot- tery and other things connected with traffic. These words be- come part of the daily fund of Roman speech. The Latin peasant looks on with wonderment at all this world Greek of civilized life of which he knows so little — a world in which J-eiigton^^ these clever Greeks seem so much at home. Indeed, they bring in things which cannot be weighed and measured like produce, from a realm of which the Roman is but beginning to catch fleeting glimpses. For the -peasant hears of strange gods of the Greeks, and he is told that they are the counterparts or the originals of his own gods. For him there is a god over each realm in nature and each field of human life : Jupiter is the great sky-god and king of all the gods ; Mars, the patron of all w^arriors ; Venus, the queen of love ; Vesta presides over the household life, with its hearth fire surviving from the nomad days of the fathers on the Asiatic steppe a thousand years be- fore (p. 91); Ceres is the goddess who maintains the fruit- fulness of the earth, and especially the grain fields (compare English " cereal ") ; and Mercury is the messenger of the gods who protects intercourse and ;;/^/'r//andising, as his name shows. The streets are full of stories which the townsmen have learned from the Greeks, regarding the heroic adventures of these divinities when they were on earth. The peasant learns that Venus is the Greek Aphrodite, Mercury is the Greek Hermes, while Ceres is the Greek Demeter, and so on. The oracles delivered by the Greek Sibyl, the prophetess of Oracles Apollo of Delphi (Fig. 82), are deeply reverenced in Italy ; gathered in the Sibylline Books, they are regarded by the Roman townsmen as mysterious revelations of the future. There are also other means of piercing the veil of the future, for the towns- men tell the peasant how the Etruscans are able to discover in the liver or the entrails of a sheep killed for sacrifice hints and signs of the outcome of the next war ; but the peasant does not know as we do that this art was received by the Etruscans