Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/41

Rh The distinction between the common inheritance of the nations and their own subsequent acquisitions, in manners and in language, is still far from having been wrought out in all the variety of its details and gradations. The investigation of languages, with this view, has scarcely begun, and history still derives in the main its representation of primitive times, not from the rich mine of language, but from what must be called for the most part the rubbish-heap of tradition. For the present, therefore, it must suffice to indicate the differences between the culture of the Indo-Germanic family in its earliest entireness, and the culture of that epoch when the Græco-Italians still lived together. The task of discriminating the results of culture which are common to the European members of this family, but foreign to its Asiatic members, from those which the several European groups, such as the Græco-Italian and the Germano-Slavonic, have wrought out for themselves, can only be accomplished, if at all, after greater progress has been made in philological and historical inquiries. But there can be no doubt that, with the Græco-Italians as with all other nations, agriculture became and in the mind of the people remained the germ and core of their national and of their private life. The house and the fixed hearth, which the husbandman rears instead of the light hut and shifting fireplace of the shepherd, are represented in the spiritual domain, and idealized in the goddess Vesta or 🇬🇷, almost the only divinity not Indo-Germanic yet from the first common to both nations. One of the oldest legends of the Italian race ascribes to King Italus, or, as the Italians must have pronounced the word, Vitalus or Vitulus, the introduction of the change from a pastoral to an agricultural life, and shrewdly connects with