THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

I. The Period Anterior to the Abolition of the Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter XV - Art

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Page 24

In like manner men, even the greatest and noblest, remained in the view of the Italian without exception mortal, and were not, as in the longing recollection and affectionately cherished tradition of Greece, elevated in the conception of the multitude into god-like heroes. But above all no development of national poetry took place in Latium. It is the deepest and noblest effect of the fine arts and above all of poetry, that they break down the barriers of civil communities and create out of tribes a nation and out of the nations a world.

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 Greek 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.

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