Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/205

Rh faith, on which that curse was based, would in earlier times have power even over natures frivolous and wicked; and the civilizing agency of religion must have exercised an influence deeper and purer precisely because it was not contaminated by any appeal to the secular arm. But it performed no higher service in Latium than the furtherance of civil order and morality by such means as these. In this field Hellas had an unspeakable advantage over Latium; it owed to its relinot merely its whole intellectual development, but also itional union, so far as such an union was attained at all; the oracles and festivals of the gods, Delphi and Olympia, and the Muses, daughters of Faith, were the centres round which revolved all that was great in Hellenic life and all in it that was the common heritage of the nation. And yet Latium had as compared with Hellas its own advantages. The Latin religion, reduced as it was to the level of ordinary perception, was completely intelligible to every one, and accessible in common to all; and therefore the Roman community preserved the equality of its citizens, while Hellas, where religion rose to the level of the highest thought, had from the earliest times to endure all the blessing and curse of an aristocracy of intellect. The Latin religion like every other had its origin in the effort to fathom the abyss of thought; it is only to a superficial view, which is deceived as to the depth of the stream because it is clear, that its transparent spirit-world can appear to be shallow. This deeply-rooted faith disappeared indeed with the progress of time, as necessarily as the dew of morning disappears before the rising sun; and in consequence the Latin religion came at length to wither; but the Latins preserved their simplicity of faith longer than most peoples and longer especially than the Greeks. As colours are effects of light and at the same time dim it, so art and science are not merely the creations, but also the destroyers of faith; and, much as this process at once of development and of destruction is swayed by necessity, by the same necessity certain results have been reserved to the epoch of early simplicity—results which subsequent epochs make vain endeavours to attain. The mighty intellectual development of the Hellenes, which created their religious and literary unity (ever imperfect as that unity was), the very thing that made it impossible for them to attain to a genuine political union; they sacrificed thereby the simplicity, the tractableness, the self-devotion, the power of