Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/258

238 as to combine Greek races with, and eventually to a certain extent to substitute them for, an older mode of amusement—the "leap" (triumpus, P. 29), or possibly swinging, which was a primitive Italian custom and long continued in use at the festival on the Alban mount. Moreover while there is some trace of the use of the war-chariot in actual warfare in Hellas, no such trace exists in Latium. In fine the Greek term 🇬🇷 (Doric 🇬🇷) was at a very early period transferred to the Latin language, retaining its signification, as spatium; and there exists even an express statement that the Romans derived their horse and chariot races from the people of Thurii, although, it is true, another account derives them from Etruria. It thus appears that in addition to the impulses imparted by the Hellenes in music and poetry, the Romans were indebted to them for the fruitful idea of gymnastic competitions.

Thus there not only existed in Latium the same fundamental elements in which Hellenic culture and art originated, but Hellenic culture and art themselves exercised a powerful influence over Latium in very early times. Not only did the Latins possess the elements of gymnastic training, seeing that the Roman boy learned like every farmer's son to manage horses and waggon and to handle the huntingspear, and that in Rome every burgess was at the same time a soldier; but the art of dancing was from the first an object of public care, and a powerful impulse was further given to such culture at an early period by the introduction of the Hellenic games. The lyrical poetry and tragedy of Hellas grew out of songs similar to the festal lays of Rome; the ancestral lay contained the germs of epos, the masked farce the germs of comedy; and in this field also Grecian influences were not wanting.

In such circumstances it is the more remarkable that these germs either did not spring up at all, or were soon arrested in their growth. The bodily training of the Latin youth continued to be solid and substantial, but it remained altogether alien from the idea of an artistic bodily culture, such as was the aim of Hellenic gymnastics. The public games of the Hellenes, when introduced into Italy, changed not so much their normal form as their essential character. While they were intended to be competitions of burgesses and beyond doubt were so at first in Rome, they became contests of trained riders and trained boxers, and, while the