Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/50

30 accompanied and regulated the solemn as well as the merry dance. Nowhere, perhaps, does the eminently close relationship of the Hellenes and Italians come to light so clearly as here; and yet in no other direction did the two nations manifest greater divergence as they became developed. The training of youth remained in Latium strictly confined to the narrow limits of a domestic education; in Greece, the yearning after a varied yet harmonious training of mind and body created the sciences of Gymnastics and Paideia, which were fostered by the nation and by individuals as their highest good. Latium, in the poverty of its artistic development, stands almost on a level with uncivilized peoples. Hellas developed with incredible rapidity, out of its religious conceptions, the myth and the worshipped idol, and out of these that marvellous world of poetry and sculpture, the like of which history has not again to show. In Latium no other influences were powerful in public and private life but prudence, riches, and strength; it was reserved for the Hellenes to feel the blissful ascendancy of beauty, to minister to the fair boy-friend with an enthusiasm half sensuous, half ideal, and to reanimate their lost courage with the warsongs of the divine singer.

Thus the two nations, in which the civilization of antiquity culminated, stand side by side as different in development as they were in origin identical. The points in which the Hellenes excel the Italians are more universally intelligible, and reflect a more brilliant lustre; but the deep feeling in each individual that he was only a part of the community, a rare devotedness and power of self-sacrifice for the common weal, an earnest faith in its own gods, formed the rich treasure of the Italian nation. Both nations received a one-sided, and therefore each a complete, development; it is only a pitiful narrow-mindedness that will object to the Athenian, that he did not know how to mould his state like the Fabii and the Valerii; or to the Roman, that he did not learn to carve like Phidias and to write like Aristophanes. It was in fact the most peculiar and the best feature in the character of the Greek people, which rendered it impossible for them to advance from national to political unity without at the same time exchanging their polity for despotism. The ideal world of beauty was all in all to the Greeks, and compensated them to some extent for what they wanted in reality. Wherever in Hellas a tendency towards national