Jura dabant.” ——
Dionysius of Halicarnassus particularly points out the difference between the religion of the Greeks and the Romans. The latter, he informs us, “did not admit into their creed those impious stories told by the Greeks of the castration of their gods, or of destroying their own children, of their wars, wounds, bonds, and slavery, and such like things as are not only altogether unworthy of the divine nature, but disgrace even the human. They had no wailing and lamentations for the sufferings of their gods, nor like the Greeks, any Bacchic orgies, or vigils of men and women together in the temples. And if at any time they admitted such foreign pollutions, as they did with regard to the rites of Cybele and the Idæan goddess, the ceremonies were performed under the grave inspection of Roman magistrates; nor even now does any Roman disguise himself to act the mummeries performed by the priests of Cybele[46]”. Dionysius, who refers every thing to Greece, thinks that the early Roman was just the Greek religion purified by Romulus, to whom, in fact, his country was more indebted than to Numa for its sacred institutions. In reality, however, this superior purity of rites and worship was not occasioned by any such lustration of the Greek fables, but from their being founded on Italian, and not on Grecian superstitions.
But although the Etruscan mythology may have been more pure, and its rites more useful, than those of Greece, its fables were not so ingenious and alluring. Ora, the goddess of health and youth, was less elegant than Hebe; and even the genius of Virgil, who has chosen the Italian Myths for the machinery of the Æneid, could hardly bestow grace or dignity on the prodigy of the swarm of bees that hung in clusters from the Laurentian Laurel—on the story of the robber Cacus vomiting flames, the ships metamorphosed into nymphs, the sow which farrowed thirty white pigs, and thereby announced that the town of Alba would be built in thirty years, the puerile [pg 31]fiction of the infancy of Camilla, or the hideous harpy which hovered round the head of Turnus, and portended his death. Accordingly, when the Romans were allured by the arts of Greece, the rude and simple traditions of Italian mythology yielded to the enticing and voluptuous fictions of a more polished people[47]. The tolerant spirit of Polytheism did not restrict the number of gods, and the ministers of superstition seemed always ready to reconcile the most discordant systems. Hence the poet interwove the national traditions with the Greek fables, and concentrated in one the attributes of different divinities. Thus, the Greek Kronos was identified with Saturn; the rustic deities, Sylvanus and Faunus, peculiar to Latium, being confounded with Pan, the Satyrs, and Silenus, were associated with the train of Bacchus; Portumnus was converted into Palemon—a deity whom the Greeks had received from Phœnicia; Bona Dea was transformed to Hecate, and Libitina to Proserpine; and the Camesnæ, or Camenæ, of the family of Janus, who prophesied in Saturnian verse on the summit of Mount Janiculum, were metamorphosed into Muses[48]. Hercules, Jupiter, and Venus, gods of power and pleasure, occupied, with their splendid temples, the place of the peaceful and pastoral deities of Numa. Still, however, the national religion was in some measure retained, and Apollo and Bacchus, in particular, continued to be decorated with the characteristic emblems of Etruria.
The Etruscans do not seem to have believed, like the Greeks, that they were possessed of those interpretations of passing events or revelations of futurity which were obtained by immediate inspiration, whether delivered from the hill of Dodona, or the Delphian shrine. Their divination was supposed to be the result of experience and observation; and though not destitute of divine direction or concurrence, depended chiefly on human contrivance. Among them peculiar families, like the tribe of Levi, the Peruvian Incas, and the descendants of Thor and Odin, were depositaries of the secrets and ceremonies of religion. Their prognostics were taken from the flight of birds[49], the entrails of animals, and observations on thunder. [pg 32]In the early ages of Rome, a band of Patrician youths was sent to Etruria, to be initiated in the mysteries of its religious rites[50]. The constant practice of consulting the gods on all enterprizes, public or private,—the belief, that prodigies manifested the will of heaven, and that the deities could be appeased, and their vengeance averted by expiations or sacrifices, were common to the Tuscan and Roman creeds. In short, the fervent spirit of Etrurian superstition passed undiminished to the Romans, who owed to its influence much of their valour, temperance, and patriotism. To this, Cicero in a great degree ascribes their political supremacy. The Romans, says he, were not superior in numbers to the Spaniards, in strength or courage to the Gauls, in address to the Carthaginians, in tactics to the Macedonians; but we surpass all nations in that prime wisdom by which we have learned that all things are governed and directed by the immortal gods.
To the same singular people from whom they derived their customs and superstitions, the Romans were much indebted for their majestic language. As their writers in a great measure owe their immortality to the lofty tones and commanding accents of the Latin tongue, it would be improper entirely to neglect its origin in entering on the literary history of Rome.
The supporters of the various systems with regard to the first peopling of Etruria, of course discover the elements of the Etruscan language in that of the different nations by whom they believe it to have been colonized. Lord Monboddo, for example, deduces both the Latin and Etruscan from the old Pelasgic; which language, he asserts, was first brought into Italy by a colony of Arcadians, seventeen generations before the Trojan war. He considers the Latin as the most ancient dialect of the Greek; and he remarks, that as it came off from the original stock earlier than the Doric, or Æolic, or any other Greek dialect now known, it has more of the roughness of the primitive Hebrew, from which he believes the Pelasgic to be derived[51]. Lanzi also thinks that both the Latin and Etruscan flowed from the Greek, and that the resemblance between the Etruscan and Latin was not occasioned by the derivation of the latter from the former, but was the necessary consequence of both having sprung from a common source.
It certainly is not easy to discover the primary elements of the Latin or any other language; but its immediate origin [pg 33]may easily be traced. The inscriptions on the most ancient monuments which have been discovered, from the Alps to Calabria, shew that, from the time of the Etruscan supremacy, there was an universal language in Italy, varied, indeed, by dialects, but announcing a common origin in the inflections of words and the forms of characters. The language of the Etruscans had been so widely spread by their conquests, that it might almost be regarded as the general tongue of Italy, and the Latian, Oscan, and Sabine idioms, were in a great measure the same with the Etruscan. From these the early Latin language was chiefly formed; and what little Greek existed in its original composition came through these languages from the Pelasgic colonies, which in the remotest periods had intermixed with the Etruscans, and with the inhabitants of ancient Latium. “It is a great mistake,” says Horne Tooke, “into which the Latin etymologists have fallen, to suppose that all the Latin must be found in the Greek, for the fact is otherwise. The bulk and foundation of the Latin language is Greek; but great part of the Latin is the language of our northern ancestors grafted on the Greek; and to our northern languages the etymologist must go for that part of the Latin which the Greek will not furnish[52].” This author is correct, in affirming that all the Latin cannot be found in the Greek; but he is far in error if he mean to maintain that any part of the Latin came directly from the language of the Celts, or that their uncouth jargon was grafted on the Greek. The northern tongues, however, whether Celtic or Sclavonic, may have contributed to form those dialects of Italy which composed the original elements of the imperial language, and were exhibited in great variety of combinations for five centuries with little admixture of the Greek. The eminent grammarian is still farther mistaken in declaring that the foundation of the Latin language is Greek. That much of the Augustan Latin is derived from the Greek, is true. Gataker, who strenuously contends for the Greek origin of the whole Latin language, has, as a specimen, attempted to shew, that every word in the first five lines of Virgil’s Eclogues is drawn from the Greek[53]; and though part of his etymologies are fanciful, [pg 34]yet in a very considerable portion of them he has been completely successful. But the case is totally different with the ancient remnants of the Latin language previous to the capture of Tarentum. In the song of the Fratres Arvales, the oldest specimen of the language extant, there seem to be only two words which have any analogy to the Greek—sal from ἅλς and sta from ἱστημι. That there was little Greek incorporated with the Latin during the first ages of the Republic, is evident from the circumstance, that the Latin inscriptions of a former period were unintelligible to the historian Polybius, and the most learned Romans of his age. Now, as he himself was a Greek, and as the most learned Romans, by his time, had become good Greek scholars, any Grecisms in the ancient inscriptions would have been perfectly intelligible. It is evident, therefore, that the difficulty arose from the words of the old Italian dialects occurring instead of the new Greek terms, suddenly introduced after the capture of Tarentum, and to which the Romans having by that time become habituated, could not understand the language of a preceding generation. Besides, when Rome was originally filled with Latian bands—when the Etruscans and Oscans were immediately beyond the walls of Rome,—when, as early as the time of Romulus, the Sabines were admitted within them,—when all the women then in Rome were Sabines, (from which it may be presumed that much of the conversation was carried on in the Sabine dialect,) and, above all, when the Romans, for many centuries, had little intercourse with any other people than the Italian nations, it is not to be supposed that they would borrow their colloquial language from the Celts, on the other side of the Alps, or the Greeks, from whom they were separated by the Adriatic Gulf, and who, as yet, had established only remote, insignificant, and scattered colonies, in Italy. Varro, too, has shewn the affinity between the Sabine and the Latin languages[54]. That the Oscan resembled the old Latin, is proved from its being constantly employed in the most popular dramatic representations at Rome, and from the circumstance that almost every word of its few relics which remain, is the root of some equivalent Latin term. Thus Akeru produced acerra—Anter, inter—Phaisnam, fanum—Tesaur, Thesaurus—Famel, famulus—Multa, mulcta—Solum, (totus,) solus—Facul, Facultas—Cael, cœlum—Embratur, imperator.[55] The copious admixture of Greek only took place [pg 35]after the taking of Tarentum, when the poets of Magna Græcia settled at Rome, and were imitated by native writers,
“—— Cum lingua Catonis et Enni
Sermonem patrium ditaverit, et nova rerum
Nomina protulerit.”