Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/19

 INTKODUCTIOX. 13 of an earlier age ; we must seek the roots of iheta lu the very distant past. The Greek and Italian popula- tions are many centuries older than Romulus and Horner. It was at an epoch more ancient, in an an- tiquity without date, that their beliefs were formed, and that their institutions were either estabiisiieU or prepared. But what hope is there of arriving at a knowiedge of tiiis distant past? Who can tell us what men thought ten or fifteen centuries before our era? Can we recover what is so intangible and fugitive — beliefs and opinions ? We know what the Aryas of the East thought thirty-five centuries ago: we learn this from the hymns of the Vedas, which are certainly very ancient, and from the laws of Mann, in which we can distinguish passages that are of an extremely early date. But where are the hymns of the ancient Hellenes 1 They, as well as the Italians, had ancient hymns, and old sacred books; but notliing oi' these has come down to ns. What tradition can remain to us of those gen- erations that have not left us a single written line ? Fortunately, the past never coinjiletely dies for man. Man may forget it, but he always preserves it within him. Foi', take him at any epoch, and he is the product, the ejiitouie, of all the earlier epochs. Let him look into his own soul, and he can find and distinguish these difterent epochs by what each of them has left within him. Let us observe the Greeks of the age of Pericles, and the Romans of Cicero's time; they carry within them the authentic marks and the nnmistakable vestiges of the most remote ages. The contemporary of Cicero (I speak especially of the man of the people) has an im- agination full of legends; these legends come to hira