The distinction between the common inheritance of the nations and their own subsequent acquisitions, in manners and in language, is still far from having been wrought out in all the variety of its details and gradations. The investigation of languages, with this view, has scarcely begun, and history still derives in the main its representation of primitive times, not from the rich mine of language, but from what must be called for the most part the rubbish-heap of tradition. For the present, therefore, it must suffice to indicate the differences between the culture of the Indo-Germanic family in its earliest entireness, and the culture of that epoch when the Græco-Italians still lived together. The task of discriminating the results of culture which are common to the European members of this family, but foreign to its Asiatic members, from those which the several European groups, such as the Græco-Italian and the Germano-Slavonic, have wrought out for themselves, can only be accomplished, if at all, after greater progress has been made in philological and historical inquiries. But there can be no doubt that, with the Græco-Italians as with all other nations, agriculture became and in the mind of the people remained the germ and core of their national and of their private life. The house and the fixed hearth, which the husbandman rears instead of the light hut and shifting fireplace of the shepherd, are represented in the spiritual domain, and idealized in the goddess Vesta or Ἑστία, almost the only divinity not Indo-Germanic yet from the first common to both nations. One of the oldest legends of the Italian race ascribes to King Italus, or, as the Italians must have pronounced the word, Vitalus or Vitulus, the introduction of the change from a pastoral to an agricultural life, and shrewdly connects with
in Celtic, ar, aradar. Thus alongside of ligo stands our rake (German rechen), of hortus, our garden (German garten), of mola, our mill (German mühle, Slavonic mlyn, Lithuanian malunas, Celtic malin).
With all these facts before us, we cannot allow that there ever was a time when the Greeks in all Hellenic districts subsisted by purely pastoral husbandry. If it was the possession of cattle, and not that of land, that in Greece, as in Italy, formed the basis and the standard of all private property, the reason of this was, not that agriculture was of later introduction, but that it was at first conducted on the system of joint possession. Of course a purely agricultural economy cannot have existed anywhere before the separation of the stocks; on the contrary, pastoral husbandry was (more or less according to locality) combined with it to an extent relatively greater than was the case in later times.
