Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/49

embraced in the abstraction, the higher rose the god, and the reverence paid by man. Thus Jupiter and Juno are the abstractions of manhood and womanhood; Dea Dia, or Ceres, the creative power; Minerva, the power of memory; Dea Bona, or among the Samnites Dea Cupra, the good Divinity. While to the Greek everything assumed a concrete and corporeal shape, the Roman could only make use of abstract, completely transparent formulæ; and while the Greek for the most part threw aside the old legendary treasures of primitive times, because they embodied the idea in too transparent a form, the Roman could still less abide by them, because holy thoughts seemed to him dimmed even by the lightest veil of allegory. Not a trace has been preserved among the Romans even of the oldest and most generally diffused myths, such as that current among the Indians, the Greeks, and even the Semites, regarding a great flood and its survivor, the common ancestor of the present human race. Their gods could not marry and beget children, like those of the Hellenes; they did not wander unseen among mortals; and they needed no nectar. But that they, nevertheless, in their spirituality—which only appears to be tame to dull apprehension—had a powerful hold on men's minds, a hold more powerful perhaps than the gods of Hellas created after the image of man, would be attested, even if history were silent on the subject, by the Roman designation of faith (the word and the idea alike foreign to the Hellenes), Religio, that is to say, "binding." As India and Iran developed from one and the same inherited store, the former, the richly varied forms of its sacred epics, the latter, the abstractions of the Zend-Avesta; so in the Greek mythology the person is predominant, in the Roman the idea; in the former freedom, in the latter necessity.

Art. Lastly, what holds good of real life is true also of its counterfeit in jest and play, which everywhere, and especially in the earliest period of full and simple existence, do not exclude the serious, but veil it. The simplest elements of art are in Latium and Hellas quite the same; the decorous armeddance, the "leap" (triumpus, θρίαμβος, διθύραμβος); the masquerade of the "full people" (σάτυροι, satura), who, enveloped in sheep and goat skins, wound up the festival with their jokes; lastly, the pipe, which with suitable strains