it the original Italian legislation. We have another version of the same belief in the legend of the Samnite race which makes the ox the leader of their primitive colonies, and in the oldest Latin national names which designate the people as reapers (Siculi perhaps also Sicani), or as field-labourers (Opsci). It is part of the inconsistent character which attaches to the so-called legend of the origin of Rome, that it represents a pastoral and hunting people as founding a city.. Legend and faith, laws and manners, among the Italians as among the Hellenes, are associated throughout with agriculture.[1]
Cultivation of the soil cannot be conceived without some measurement of it, however rude. Accordingly, the measures of surface and the mode of setting off boundaries rest, like agriculture itself, on a like basis among both peoples. The Oscan and Umbrian vorsus of one hundredsquare feet corresponds exactly with the Greek plethron. The principle of marking off boundaries was also the same. The land-measurer rectified his position with reference to one of the cardinal points, and proceeded to draw in the first place two lines, one from north to south, and another from east to west, his station being at their point of intersection (templum, τέμενος from τέμνω); then he drew at certain fixed distances lines parallel to these, and by this process produced a series of rectangular pieces of ground, the corners of which were marked by boundary posts (termini, in Sicilian inscriptions τέρμονες, usually ὅροι). This mode of defining boundaries, which is indeed also Etruscan but is hardly of Etruscan origin, we find among the Romans, Umbrians, Samnites, and also in very ancient records of the Tarentine Heracleots, who are as little likely to have borrowed it from the Italians as the Italians from the Tarentines: it is an ancient possession common to all. A peculiar characteristic of the Romans, on the other hand, was their rigid carrying out of
- ↑ Nothing is more significant in this respect than the close connection in which the earliest epoch of culture placed agriculture with marriage and the founding of cities. Thus the gods in Italy immediately concerned with marriage are Ceres and (or?) Tellus (Plutarch, Romul. 22; Servius on Æn. iv., 166; Rossbach, Röm. Ehe., 257, 301), in Greece Demeter (Plutarch, Conjug. Præc. init.); in old Greek formulas the begetting of children is called "harvest" (p. 25, note); indeed, the oldest Roman form of marriage, the confarreatio, derives its name and its ceremony from the cultivation of corn. The use of the plough in the founding of cities is well known.
