Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/261

Rh by boys; the religious litanies also were chiefly executed by children. The musicians formed an incorporated, the dancers and the wailing women (præficæ) unincorporated, trades. While dancing, music, and singing remained constantly in (as they were originally also in Latium) reputable employments redounding to the honour of the burgess and of the community to which he belonged, in Latium the better portion of the burgesses recoiled from the practice of such vain arts, and that more decidedly in proportion as art came to be more publicly exhibited and more thoroughly penetrated by the quickening impulses communicated from other lands. The use of the native pipe was sanctioned, but the lyre remained despised; and while the national amusement of masks was allowed, the foreign amusements of the palæstra were not only regarded with indifference, but were esteemed disgraceful. While the fine arts in Greece became more and more the common property of the Hellenes individually and collectively, and thereby became channels for the diffusion of a universal culture, they gradually disappeared in Latium from the thoughts and feelings of the people; and, as they degenerated into utterly insignificant handicrafts, the idea of a general national culture to be communicated to youth never suggested itself at all. The education of youth remained thoroughly confined within the limits of the narrowest domesticity. The boy never left his father's side, and accompanied him not only to the field with the plough and the sickle, but also to the house of a friend or to the council-hall, when his father was invited as a guest or summoned to the senate. This domestic education was well adapted to train man wholly for the household and wholly for the state. The permanent intercommunion of life between father and son, and the mutual reverence felt by adolescence for ripened manhood and by the mature man for the innocence of youth, lay at the root of the steadfastness of the domestic and political traditions, of the closeness of the family bond, and in general of the grave earnestness (gravitas) and character of moral worth in Roman life. This mode of educating youth was in truth one of those institutions of homely and scarce conscious wisdom, which are as simple as they are profound. But amidst the admiration which it awakens we may not overlook the fact that it could only be carried out, and was only carried out, by the sacrifice of true individual culture, and