Cultivation of the soil cannot be conceived without some measurement of it, however rude.  Accordingly, the measures of surface and the mode of setting off boundaries rest, like agriculture itself, on a like basis among both peoples.  The Oscan and Umbrian -vorsus-of one hundred square feet corresponds exactly with the Greek —­plethron—.  The principle of marking off boundaries was also the same.  The land-measurer adjusted his position with reference to one of the cardinal points, and proceeded to draw in the first place two lines, one from north to south, and another from east to west, his station being at their point of intersection (-templum-, —­temenos—­ from —­temno—­); then he drew at certain fixed distances lines parallel to these, and by this process produced a series of rectangular pieces of ground, the corners of which were marked by boundary posts (-termini-, in Sicilian inscriptions -termones-, usually —­oroi—­).  This mode of defining boundaries, which is probably also Etruscan but is hardly of Etruscan origin, we find among the Romans, Umbrians, Samnites, and also in very ancient records of the Tarentine Heracleots, who are as little likely to have borrowed it from the Italians as the Italians from the Tarentines:  it is an ancient possession common to all.  A peculiar characteristic of the Romans, on the other hand, was their rigid carrying out of 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.

Other Features of Their Economy

It is not solely in agriculture, however, that the especially close relationship of the Greeks and Italians appears; it is unmistakably 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 Graeco-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 earliest Romans further agreed with the Cretans and Laconians in taking their meals