intensity in other parts of Latium.  But in the course of the fifth century, and especially in the second half of it, there was a mighty activity in Roman art.  This was the epoch, in which the construction of the Roman arches and Roman roads began; in which works of art like the she-wolf of the Capitol originated; and in which a distinguished man of an old Roman patrician clan took up his pencil to embellish a newly constructed temple and thence received the honorary surname of the “Painter.”  This was not accident.  Every great age lays grasp on all the powers of man; and, rigid as were Roman manners, strict as was Roman police, the impulse received by the Roman burgesses as masters of the peninsula or, to speak more correctly, by Italy united for the first time as one state, became as evident in the stimulus given to Latin and especially to Roman art, as the moral and political decay of the Etruscan nation was evident in the decline of art in Etruria.  As the mighty national vigour of Latium subdued the weaker nations, it impressed its imperishable stamp also on bronze and on marble.

Notes for Book II Chapter IX

1.  I. XV.  Earliest Hellenic Influences

2.  The account given by Dionysius (vi. 95; comp.  Niebuhr, ii. 40) and by Plutarch (Camill. 42), deriving his statement from another passage in Dionysius regarding the Latin festival, must be understood to apply rather to the Roman games, as, apart from other grounds, is strikingly evident from comparing the latter passage with Liv. vi. 42 (Ritschl, Parerg. i. p. 313).  Dionysius has—­and, according to his wont when in error, persistently—­misunderstood the expression -ludi maximi-.

There was, moreover, a tradition which referred the origin of the national festival not, as in the common version, to the conquest of the Latins by the first Tarquinius, but to the victory over the Latins at the lake Regillus (Cicero, de Div. i. 26, 55; Dionys. vii. 71).  That the important statements preserved in the latter passage from Fabius really relate to the ordinary thanksgiving-festival, and not to any special votive solemnity, is evident from the express allusion to the annual recurrence of the celebration, and from the exact agreement of the sum of the expenses with the statement in the Pseudo-Asconius (p. 142 Or.).

3.  II.  III.  Curule Aedileship

4.  I. II.  Art

5.  I. XV.  Metre

6.  I. XV.  Masks

7.  II.  VIII.  Police f.

8.  I. XV.  Melody

9.  A fragment has been preserved: 

-Hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra Camille metes-

We do not know by what right this was afterwards regarded as the oldest Roman poem (Macrob.  Sat. v. 20; Festus, Ep. v.  Flaminius, p. 93, M.; Serv. on Virg.  Georg, i. 101; Plin. xvii. 2. 14).

10.  II.  VIII.  Appius Claudius

11.  II.  VIII.  Rome and the Romans of This Epoch