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 25

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 Greece, were conceived as feminine.

But the time came in Greece, 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)

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 προφήτης; 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.

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