Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/43

Rh the principle of the square; even where the sea or a river formed a natural boundary, they did not accept it, but wound up their allocation of the land with the last complete square.

It is not solely in agriculture, however, that the especially close relationship of the Greeks and Italians appears; it is unmistakeably manifest also in the other provinces of man's earliest activity. The Greek house, as described by Homer, differs little from the model which was always adhered to in Italy. The essential portion, which originally formed the whole interior accommodation of the Latin house, was the atrium, that is, the "blackened" chamber, with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals, and the hearth; and precisely similar is the Homeric megaron, with its household altar and hearth and smoke-begrimed roof. We cannot say the same of ship-building. The boat with oars was an old common possession of the Indo-Germans; but the advance to the use of sailing vessels can scarcely be considered to have taken place during the Græco-Italian period, for we find no nautical terms originally common to the Greeks and Italians, except such as are also general among the Indo-Germanic family. On the other hand, the primitive Italian custom of the husbandmen having common midday meals, the origin of which the myth connects with the introduction of agriculture, is compared by Aristotle with the Cretan Syssitia; and the ancient Romans further agreed with the Cretans and Laconians in taking their meals not, as was afterwards the custom among both peoples, in a reclining, but in a sitting posture. The method of kindling tire by the friction of two pieces of wood of different kinds is common to all peoples; but it is certainly no mere accident that the Greeks and Italians agree in the appellations they give to the two portions of the touch-wood, the "rubber" (🇬🇷, terebra), and the "under-layer" (🇬🇷, 🇬🇷, tabula, probably from tendere, 🇬🇷). In like manner the dress of the two peoples is essentially identical, for the tunica quite corresponds with the chiton, and the toga is nothing but a fuller himation. Even as regards weapons of war, liable as they are to frequent change, the two peoples have this much at least in common, that their two principal weapons of attack were the javelin and the bow,—a fact which is clearly expressed, as far as Rome is concerned, in the earliest names for warriors (quirites,