Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/259

Rh proof of free and Hellenic descent formed the first condition for participating in the Greek festal games, those of Rome soon passed into the hands of freedmen and foreigners and even of persons not free at all. Consequently the circle of fellow-competitors became converted into a public of spectators, and the chaplet of the victorious champion, which has been with justice called the true badge of Hellas, was afterwards hardly ever mentioned in Latium.

A similar fate befel poetry and her sisters. The Greeks and Germans alone possess a fountain of song that wells up spontaneously; from the golden vase of the Muses only a few drops have fallen on the green soil of Italy. There was no formation of legend in the strict sense there. The Italian gods were abstractions and remained such; they never became elevated into or, as some would prefer to say, never were obscured under a true personal shape. In like manner men, even the greatest and noblest, remained in the view of the Italians without exception mortals, and were not, as in Greece, through longing recollection and affectionately cherished tradition elevated in the conception of the multitude into godlike heroes. But above all no development of national poetry took place in Latium. It is the deepest and noblest effect of the fine arts and above all of poetry, that they do away with the barriers of civil communities, and create out of tribes one nation and out of the nations one world. As in the present day by means of our cosmopolitan literature the distinctions of civilized nations are done away, so Greek poetic art transformed the narrow and egotistical sense of tribe-relationship into the consciousness of an Hellenic nation, and that again into the consciousness of a broad humanity. But in Latium nothing similar occurred. There might be poets in Alba and in Rome, but there arose no Latin epos, nor (even what were still more conceivable) a catechism for the Latin farmer of a kind similar to the Works and Days of Hesiod. The Latin federal festival might well have become a national festival of the Muses, like the Olympia and Isthmia of the Greeks. A cycle of legends might well have gathered around the fall of Alba, such as was woven around the conquest of Ilion, and every community and every noble gens of Latium might have discovered or inserted the story of its own origin there. But neither of these results took place, and Italy remained without national poetry or art.