by the slight development of any national culture
of its own, and partly also perhaps by its nationality
presenting a character less alien to the Greek stock
than that of the rest of Italy.(45) We have already
called attention(46) to the fact that the southern
Sabellian stocks, although at the outset in concert
with the tyrants of Syracuse they crushed and destroyed
the Hellenism of Magna Graecia, were at the same time
affected by contact and mingling with the Greeks,
so that some of them, such as the Bruttians and Nolans,
adopted the Greek language by the side of their native
tongue, and others, such as the Lucanians and a part
of the Campanians, adopted at least Greek writing
and Greek manners. Etruria likewise showed tendencies
towards a kindred development in the remarkable vases
which have been discovered(47) belonging to this period,
rivalling those of Campania and Lucania; and though
Latium and Samnium remained more strangers to Hellenism,
there were not wanting there also traces of an incipient
and ever-growing influence of Greek culture.
In all branches of the development of Rome during
this epoch, in legislation and coinage, in religion,
in the formation of national legend, we encounter
traces of the Greeks; and from the commencement of
the fifth century in particular, in other words, after
the conquest of Campania, the Greek influence on Roman
life appears rapidly and constantly on the increase.
In the fourth century occurred the erection of the
“-Graecostasis-”—remarkable
in the very form of the word—a platform
in the Roman Forum for eminent Greek strangers and
primarily for the Massiliots.(48) In the following
century the annals began to exhibit Romans of quality
with Greek surnames, such as Philipus or in Roman
form Pilipus, Philo, Sophus, Hypsaeus. Greek
customs gained ground: such as the non-Italian
practice of placing inscriptions in honour of the
dead on the tomb—of which the epitaph of
Lucius Scipio (consul in 456) is the oldest example
known to us; the fashion, also foreign to the Italians,
of erecting without any decree of the state honorary
monuments to ancestors in public places —a
system begun by the great innovator Appius Claudius,
when he caused bronze shields with images and eulogies
of his ancestors to be suspended in the new temple
of Bellona (442); the distribution of branches of
palms to the competitors, introduced at the Roman national
festival in 461; above all, the Greek manners and habits
at table. The custom not of sitting as formerly
on benches, but of reclining on sofas, at table; the
postponement of the chief meal from noon to between
two and three o’clock in the afternoon according
to our mode of reckoning; the institution of masters
of the revels at banquets, who were appointed from
among the guests present, generally by throwing the
dice, and who then prescribed to the company what,
how, and when they should drink; the table-chants
sung in succession by the guests, which, however,
in Rome were not -scolia-, but lays in praise of ancestors—all