Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/245

Rh scratched (exarare, scribere, akin to scrobes ) or painted (linere, thence littera) on leaves (folium), inner bark (liber), or wooden tablets (tabula, album), afterwards also on leather and linen. The sacred records of the Samnites as well as of the priesthood of Anagnia were inscribed on linen rolls, and so were the oldest registers of the Roman magistrates preserved in the temple of the goddess of recollection (Iuno Moneta) on the Capitol. It is scarcely necessary to recall further proofs in the primitive marking of the pastured cattle (scriptura), in the mode of addressing the senate, "fathers and enrolled" (Patres conscripti), and in the great antiquity of the books of oracles, the gentile registers, and the Alban and Roman calendars. When the Roman tradition already about the time of the expulsion of the kings speaks of halls in the Forum, where the boys and girls of the nobles were taught to read and write, the statement may be, but is not necessarily to be deemed, an invention. We have been deprived of information as to the early Roman history, not in consequence of the want of a knowledge of writing or even perhaps of the lack of documents, but in consequence of the incapacity of the historians of the succeeding age (which was called to investigate the history) to work out the materials furnished by the archives, and the perversity which led them to ransack tradition for the delineation of motives and of characters, for accounts of battles and narratives of revolutions, and in pursuit of these to miss such information as it would not have refused to yield to the serious and self-denying inquirer.

The history of Italian writing thus furnishes in the first place a confirmation of the weak and indirect influence exercised by the Hellenic character over the Sabellians as compared with the more western peoples. The fact that the former received their alphabet from the Etruscans and not from the Romans is probably to be explained by supposing that they had obtained it before they entered upon their migration along the ridge of the Apennines, and that the Sabines and Samnites accordingly took it along with them when they were sent forth from the mother-land. On the other hand this history of writing contains a salutary warning against the adoption of the hypothesis, originated by the later Roman culture in its devotedness to Etruscan mysticism