Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/176



, as such, cannot reproduce the life of a people in the infinite variety of its details; it must be content with exhibiting the development of that life as a whole. The doings and dealings, the thoughts and imaginings of the individual, however strongly they may reflect the characteristics of the national mind, form no part of history. Nevertheless it seems necessary to make some attempt to indicate (although it were only in the most general outlines) the features of individual life in the case of those earlier ages which are, so far as history is concerned, all but lost in oblivion; for it is in this field of research alone that we acquire some idea of the breadth of the gulf which separates our modes of thinking and feeling from those of the civilized nations of antiquity. Tradition, with its confused mass of national names and its dim legends, resembles withered leaves which we with difficulty recognize to have once been green. Instead of threading that dreary maze, and attempting to classify those of humanity, the Chones and Œnotrians, the Siculi and the Pelasgi, it will be more to the purpose to inquire how the life of the people in ancient Italy expressed itself, practically, in their jurisprudence and, ideally, in their religion; how they farmed and how they traded; and whence the several nations there derived the art of writing and other elements of culture. Scanty as our knowledge in this respect is in reference to the Roman people, and still more so in reference to the Sabellians and Etruscans, even the slight and very defective information which is attainable will enable the mind to associate with these names some more or less clear conception