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 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 Camenæ of Latium and 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, however, there was no national god of song, and the language of the land had no current word of native growth to designate the poet who composed what he sang.[1] That the power of song appeared there weak out of all proportion, and was rapidly arrested in its growth, is most clearly attested by the early restriction of the exercise of the fine arts 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
- ↑ It is a circumstance common to all languages that the idea and the name of the poet are late in presenting themselves; but it is a circumstance peculiar to the Latin that it has not produced any name at all for the poet, but has borrowed its appellations for him from neighbouring languages. Poeta, which is in use already in Ennius, is, as everybody knows, borrowed from the Greek; the other term similarly employed, vates, is most probably of Celtic origin. Vates, having no demonstrable root or analogy in the Latin language, sounds altogether foreign to it. On the other hand, it corresponds exactly (as Zeuss has observed in his Gramm. Celtica, i. p. 57) to the old Erse word of the same meaning, faith, and Strabo (iv. 4, 4, p. 197, Casaub.) names, doubtless on the authority of Posidonius, as the three prominent orders among the Celts, the Bards, Vates, and Druids. Moreover vates denoted both among the Celts and the Romans primarily the soothsayer, as is indicated both by Strabo's explanation (l. c. ἱεροποιὸι καὶ φυσιόλογοι) and by the older usus loquendi in Latin. Ennius, for instance (Trag. 356, Vahlen), speaks of superstitiosi vates impudentesque arioli; and in a similar sense of reproach rather than of commendation, he uses the term at two other passages (Ann. 222, 370, Vahlen) as it is al«o employed by Cato (Fragm. p. 77, Jordan). Vates denoted the poet only in so far as the oracle was frequently given forth in verse; in this sense, and with special reference to the vates Marcius, Ennius, at the second of the passage! cited, speaks of the verses quos olim Faunci vatesque canebant. The nobler significance of the word, and the habit of applying it directly to the godinspired singer, belong to the age of the empire.
The hypothesis, moreover, that words from the Celtic languages already in early times passed over into the languages of Italy, has nothing in it startling, because the two peoples early came into contact in Lombardy. Besides, the certainly Celtic word ambactus is likewise found in Ennius.
