Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/227

Rh appears to have been from the first influenced by Greek ideas; and his animal festival seems even to have been fixed on the idea of May, because the Hellenic poets celebrated him as the son of the beautiful Maia.

It thus appears that Italy in very ancient times derived its articles of luxury, just as imperial Rome did, from the East, before it attempted to manufacture for itself after the models which it imported. In exchange it had nothing to except its raw produce consisting especially of copper, silver, and iron, but including also slaves and timber for ship-building, amber from the Baltic, and grain, in the event of had harvests occurring abroad.

From the relations thus subsisting between the demand for commodities and the equivalents to be offered in return for them, we have already explained why Italian traffic assumed in Latium a form differing from that which it presented in Etruria. The Latins, who were deficient in all the chief articles of export, could carry on only a passive traffic, and were obliged even in the earliest times to procure the copper, which they necessarily required, from the Etruscans in exchange for cattle or slaves (we have already mentioned the very ancient practice ling the latter on the right bank of the Tiber at P. 110). On the other hand the balance of trade must necessarily have been very favourable for the Etruscans at Cære and Populonia, at Capua and Spina. Hence the rapid development of prosperity in these regions and their powerful commercial position; whereas Latium remained pre-eminently an agriural country. The same contrast recurs in all their individual relations. The oldest tombs constructed and furnished in the Greek fashion, only with an extravagance to which the Greeks were strangers, are to be found at Cære, while (with the exception of Præneste, which appears to occupied a peculiar position, and to have been very intimately connected with Falerii and southern Etruria) the i land exhibits not a single tomb of a luxurious type belonging to the earlier times; and there as among the Sabel-