Mayas and Aztecs compared to Greeks and Romans.
A remarkably close analogy may be drawn between the Mayas and Aztecs in the New World and the Greeks and Romans in the Old, as regards character, achievements, and relations one to the other. The Mayas, like the Greeks, were an artistic and intellectual people who developed sculpture, painting, architecture, astronomy and other arts and sciences to a high plane. Politically, both were divided into communities or states that bickered and quarreled. There were temporary leagues between certain cities, but real unity only against a common enemy. Culturally, both were one people, in spite of dialectic differences, for the warring factions were bound together by a common religion and a common thought. To be sure the religion of the Mayas was much more barbaric than that of the Greeks but in each case the subject matter was idealized and beautified in art.
[Plate XXXIX.]
Page from the Codex Telleriano-Remensis showing a Native Manuscript with Explication by the Spaniards. The death of Chimalpopoca and the election of his successor, Itzcouatl, is recorded, as well as the capture of Atzcapotzalco.
The Aztecs, like the Romans, were a brusque and warlike people who built upon the ruins of an earlier civilization that fell before the force of their arms and who made their most, notable contributions to organization and government. The Toltecs stand just beyond the foreline of Aztecan history and may fitly be compared to the Etruscans. They were the possessors of a culture derived in part from their brilliant contemporaries that was magnified to true greatness by their ruder successors.