The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5). Theodor Mommsen

we are to form a judgment respecting the artistic endowments of the different Italian nations, we already at this stage perceive—what becomes indeed far more obvious in the later stages of the history of art—that while the Etruscans attained to the practice of art at an earlier period and produced more massive and rich workmanship, their works are inferior to those of the Latins and Sabellians in appropriateness and utility no less than in spirit and beauty. This certainly is apparent, in the case of our present epoch, only in architecture. The polygonal wall-masonry, as appropriate to its object as it was beautiful, was frequent in Latium and in the inland country behind it; while in Etruria it was rare, and not even the walls of Caere are constructed of polygonal blocks. Even in the religious prominence—remarkable also as respects the history of art—assigned to the arch(23) and to the bridge(24) in Latium, we may be allowed to perceive, as it were, an anticipation of the future aqueducts and consular highways of Rome. On the other hand, the Etruscans repeated, and at the same time corrupted, the ornamental architecture of the Greeks: for while they transferred the laws established for building in stone to architecture in wood, they displayed no thorough skill of adaptation, and by the lowness of their roof and the wide intervals between their columns gave to their temples, to use the language of an ancient architect, a "heavy, mean, straggling, and clumsy appearance." The Latins found in the rich stores of Greek art but very little that was congenial to their thoroughly realistic tastes; but what they did adopt they appropriated truly and heartily as their own, and in the development of the polygonal wall-architecture perhaps excelled their instructors. Etruscan art is a remarkable evidence of accomplishments mechanically acquired and mechanically retained, but it is, as little as the Chinese, an evidence even of genial receptivity. As scholars have long since desisted from the attempt to derive Greek art from that of the Etruscans, so they must, with whatever reluctance, make up their minds to transfer the Etruscans from the first to the lowest place in the history of Italian art.

      Notes for Book I Chapter XV

      1. I. XII. Priests

      2. I. XIII. Handicrafts

      3. Thus Cato the Elder (de R. R. 160) gives as potent against sprains the formula: -hauat hauat hauat ista pista sista damia bodannaustra-, which was presumably quite as obscure to its inventor as it is to us. Of course, along with these there were also formulae of words; e.g. it was a remedy for gout, to think, while fasting, on some other person, and thrice nine times to utter the words, touching the earth at the same time and spitting:—"I think of thee, mend my feet. Let the earth receive the ill, let health with me dwell" (-terra pestem teneto, salus hie maneto-. Varro de R. R. i. 2, 27).

      4. Each of the first five lines was repeated thrice, and the call at the close five times. Various points in the interpretation are uncertain, particularly as respects the third line. —The three inscriptions of the clay vase from the Quirinal (p. 277, note) run thus: -iove sat deiuosqoi med mitat nei ted endo gosmis uirgo sied—asted noisi ope toilesiai pakariuois—duenos med faked (=bonus me fecit) enmanom einom dze noine (probably=die noni) med malo statod.-Only individual words admit of being understood with certainty; it is especially noteworthy that forms, which we have hitherto known only as Umbrian and Oscan, like the adjective -pacer- and the particle -einom with the value of -et, here probably meet us withal as old-Latin.

      5. I. II. Art

      6. The name probably denotes nothing but "the chant-measure," inasmuch as the -satura- was originally the chant sung at the carnival (II. Art). The god of sowing, -Saeturnus- or -Saiturnus-, afterwards -Saturnus-, received his name from the same root; his feast, the Saturnalia, was certainly a sort of carnival, and it is possible that the farces were originally exhibited chiefly at this feast. But there are no proofs of a relation between the Satura and the Saturnalia, and it may be presumed that the immediate association of the -versus saturnius- with the god Saturn, and the lengthening of the first syllable in connection with that view, belong only to later times.

      7. I. XII. Foreign Worships

      8. I. XIV. Introduction of Hellenic Alphabets into Italy

      9. The statement that "formerly the Roman boys were trained in Etruscan culture, as they were in later times in Greek" (Liv. ix. 36), is quite irreconcilable with the original character of the Roman training of youth, and it is not easy to see what the Roman boys could have learned in Etruria. Even the most zealous modern partizans of Tages-worship will not maintain that the study of the Etruscan language played such a part in Rome then as the learning of French does now with us; that a non-Etruscan should understand anything of the art of the Etruscan -haruspices- was considered, even by those who availed themselves of that art, to be a disgrace or rather an impossibility (Muller, Etr. ii. 4). Perhaps the statement was concocted by the Etruscizing antiquaries of the last age of the republic out of stories of the older annals, aiming at a causal explanation of facts, such as that which makes Mucius Scaevola learn Etruscan when a child for the sake of his conversation with Porsena (Dionysius, v. 28; Plutarch, Poplicola, 17; comp. Dionysius, iii. 70). But there was at any rate an epoch when the dominion of Rome over Italy demanded a certain knowledge of the language of the country on the part of Romans of rank.

      10. The employment of the lyre in ritual is attested by Cicero de Orat. iii. 51, 197; Tusc. iv. 2, 4; Dionysius, vii. 72; Appian, Pun. 66; and the inscription in Orelli, 2448, comp. 1803. It was likewise used at the -neniae- (Varro ap. Nonium, v. -nenia- and -praeficae-). But playing on the lyre remained none the less unbecoming (Scipio ap. Macrob. Sat. ii. 10, et al.). The prohibition of music in 639 exempted only the "Latin player on the pipe along with the singer," not the player on the lyre, and the guests at meals sang only to the pipe (Cato in Cic. Tusc. i. 2, 3; iv. 2, 3; Varro ap. Nonium, v. -assa voce-; Horace, Carm. iv. 15, 30). Quintilian, who asserts the reverse (Inst. i. 10, 20), has inaccurately transferred to private banquets what Cicero (de Orat. iii. 51) states in reference to the feasts of the gods.

      11. The city festival can have only lasted at first for a single day, for in the sixth century it still consisted of four days of scenic and one day of Circensian sports (Ritschl, Parerga, i. 313) and it is well known that the scenic amusements were only a subsequent addition. That in each kind of contest there was originally only one competition, follows from Livy, xliv. 9; the running of five-and-twenty pairs of chariots in succession on one day was a subsequent innovation (Varro ap. Serv. Georg. iii. 18). That only two chariots—and likewise beyond doubt only two horsemen and two wrestlers—strove for the prize, may be inferred from the circumstance, that at all periods in the Roman chariot-races only as many chariots competed as there were so-called factions; and of these there were originally only two, the white and the red. The horsemanship-competition of patrician youths which belonged to the Circensian games, the so-called Troia, was, as is well known, revived by Caesar; beyond doubt it was connected with the cavalcade of the boy-militia, which Dionysius mentions (vii. 72).

      12. I. VII. Servian Wall

      13. I. VI. Time and Occasion of the Reform

      14. I. II. Religion

      15. -Vates- probably denoted in the first instance the "leader of the singing" (for so the -vates- of the Salii must be understood) and thereafter in its older usage approximated to the Greek—propheiteis—; it was a word be longing to religious ritual, and even when subsequently used of the poet, always retained the accessory idea of a divinely-inspired singer—the priest of the Muses.

      16. We shall show in due time that the Atellanae and Fescenninae belonged not to Campanian and Etruscan, but to Latin art.

      17. Literally "word-crisping," in allusion to the -calamistri Maecenatis-.

      18. I. III. Alba

      19. Of this character were the Servian walls. They consisted partly of a strengthening of the hill-slopes by facing them with lining-walls as much as 4 metres thick, partly—in the intervals, above all on the Viminal and Quirinal, where from the Esquiline to the Colline gate there was an absence of natural defence—of an earthen mound, which was finished off on the outside by a similar lining-wall. On these lining-walls rested the breastwork. A trench, according to trustworthy statements of the ancients 30 feet deep and 100 feet broad, stretched along in front of the wall, for which the earth was taken from this same trench.—The breastwork has nowhere been preserved; of the lining-walls extensive