the individual attained, in presence of the clan,
an inward independence and freedom of personal development
far earlier and more completely in Greece than in
Rome—a fact reflected with great clearness
in the Greek and Roman proper names, which, originally
similar, came to assume very different forms.
In the more ancient Greek names the name of the clan
was very frequently added in an adjective form to
that of the individual; while, conversely, Roman scholars
were aware that their ancestors bore originally only
one name, the later -praenomen-. But while in
Greece the adjectival clan-name early disappeared,
it became, among the Italians generally and not merely
among the Romans, the principal name; and the distinctive
individual name, the -praenomen-, became subordinate.
It seems as if the small and ever diminishing number
and the meaningless character of the Italian, and
particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared
with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of
the Greeks, were intended to illustrate the truth
that it was characteristic of the one nation to reduce
all to a level, of the other to promote the free development
of personality. The association in communities
of families under patriarchal chiefs, which we may
conceive to have prevailed in the Graeco-Italian period,
may appear different enough from the later forms of
Italian and Hellenic polities; yet it must have already
contained the germs out of which the future laws of
both nations were moulded. The “laws of
king Italus,” which were still applied in the
time of Aristotle, may denote the institutions essentially
common to both. These laws must have provided
for the maintenance of peace and the execution of justice
within the community, for military organization and
martial law in reference to its external relations,
for its government by a patriarchal chief, for a council
of elders, for assemblies of the freemen capable of
bearing arms, and for some sort of constitution.
Judicial procedure (-crimen-, —krinein—,
expiation (-poena-, —poinei—),
retaliation (-talio-, —talao—,
—tleinai—, are Graeco-Italian
ideas. The stern law of debt, by which the debtor
was directly responsible with his person for the repayment
of what he had received, is common to the Italians,
for example, with the Tarentine Heracleots.
The fundamental ideas of the Roman constitution—a
king, a senate, and an assembly entitled simply to
ratify or to reject the proposals which the king and
senate should submit to it—are scarcely
anywhere expressed so distinctly as in Aristotle’s
account of the earlier constitution of Crete.
The germs of larger state-confederacies in the political
fraternizing or even amalgamation of several previously
independent stocks (symmachy, synoikismos) are in
like manner common to both nations. The more
stress is to be laid on this fact of the common foundations
of Hellenic and Italian polity, that it is not found
to extend to the other Indo-Germanic stocks; the organization
of the Germanic community, for example, by no means
starts, like that of the Greeks and Romans, from an
elective monarchy. But how different the polities
were that were constructed on this common basis in
Italy and Greece, and how completely the whole course
of their political development belongs to each as
its distinctive property,(10) it will be the business
of the sequel to show.