As in the present day by means of our cosmopolitan literature the distinctions of civilized nations are done away, so Greek poetic art transformed the narrow and egoistic sense of tribal relationship into the consciousness of Hellenic nationality, and this again into the consciousness of a common humanity.  But in Latium nothing similar occurred.  There might be poets in Alba and in Rome, but there arose no Latin epos, nor even—­what were still more conceivable—­a catechism for the Latin farmer of a kind similar to the “Works and Days” of Hesiod.  The Latin federal festival might well have become a national festival of the fine arts, like the Olympian and Isthmian games of the Greeks.  A cycle of legends might well have gathered around the fall of Alba, such as was woven around the conquest of Ilion, and every community and every noble clan of Latium might have discovered in it, or imported into it, the story of its own origin.  But neither of these results took place, and Italy remained without national poetry or art.

The inference which of necessity follows from these facts, that the development of the fine arts in Latium was rather a shrivelling up than an expanding into bloom, is confirmed in a manner even now not to be mistaken by tradition.  The beginnings of poetry everywhere, perhaps, belong rather to women than to men; the spell of incantation and the chant for the dead pertain pre-eminently to the former, and not without reason the spirits of song, the Casmenae or Camenae and the Carmentis of Latium, like the Muses of Hellas, were conceived as feminine.  But the time came in Hellas, when the poet relieved the songstress and Apollo took his place at the head of the Muses.  In Latium there was no national god of song, and the older Latin language had no designation for the poet.(15) The power of song emerging there was out of all proportion weaker, and was rapidly arrested in its growth.  The exercise of the fine arts was there early restricted, partly to women and children, partly to incorporated or unincorporated tradesmen.  We have already mentioned that funeral chants were sung by women and banquet-lays by boys; the religious litanies also were chiefly executed by children.  The musicians formed an incorporated, the dancers and the wailing women (-praeficae-) unincorporated, trades.  While dancing, music, and singing remained constantly in Greece—­as they were originally also in Latium—­reputable employments redounding to the honour of the burgess and of the community to which he belonged, in Latium the better portion of the burgesses drew more and more aloof from these vain arts, and that the more decidedly, in proportion as art came to be more publicly exhibited and more thoroughly penetrated by the quickening impulses derived from other lands.  The use of the native pipe was sanctioned, but the lyre remained despised; and while the national amusement of masks was allowed, the foreign amusements of the -palaestra- were not