Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/38

18 metals employed as implements or ornaments by man. At least the names of copper (aes) and silver (argentum), perhaps also of gold, are met with in Sanscrit, and these names can scarcely have originated before man had learned to separate and to make use of the ores; the Sanscrit asis, Latin ensis, points, in fact, to the primeval use of metallic weapons.

No less do we find extending back into those times the fundamental ideas on which the development of all Indo-Germanic states ultimately rests; the relative positions of husband and wife, the arrangement in clans, the priesthood of the father of the household, the absence of a special sacerdotal class as well as of all distinctions of caste in general, slavery as a legalized institution, days for publicly dispensing justice at the new and full moon. On the other hand, the positive organization of the body politic, the decision of the questions between regal sovereignty and the sovereignty of the community, between hereditary privilege in royal and noble houses and the unconditional legal equality of the citizens, belong altogether to a later age.

Even the elements of science and religion show traces of a community of origin. The numbers are the same up to one hundred (Sanscrit çatam, êkaçatam, Latin centum, Greek 🇬🇷, Gothic hund); and the moon receives her name in all languages from the fact that men measure time by her (mensis). The idea of Deity itself (Sanscrit dêvas, Latin deus, Greek 🇬🇷), and many of the oldest conceptions of religion and of natural symbolism, belong to the common inheritance of the nations. The conception, for example, of heaven as the father and of earth as the mother of being, the festal processions of the gods, who proceed from place to place in their own chariots along carefully levelled paths, the shadowy continuation of the soul's existence after death, are fundamental ideas of the Indian as well as of the Greek and Roman mythologies. Several of the gods of the Ganges coincide even in name with those worshipped on the Ilissus and the Tiber:—thus the Uranus of the Greeks is the Varunas; their Zeus, Jovis pater, Diespiter is the Djâus pitâ of the Vedas. An unexpected light has been thrown or many an enigmatical form in the Hellenic mythology by recent researches regarding the earlier divinities of India. The hoary mysterious forms of the Erinnyes are no Hellenic invention; they were immigrants along with the oldest settlers from the East. The divine greyhound, Saramâ, who