rectangular pieces of ground, the corners of which were marked by
boundary posts (-termini-, in Sicilian inscriptions -termones-,
usually --oroi--). This mode of defining boundaries, which is
probably 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
the principle of the square; even where the sea or a river formed
a natural boundary, they did not accept it, but wound up their
allocation of the land with the last complete square.

Other Features of Their Economy

It is not solely in agriculture, however, that the especially close
relationship of the Greeks and Italians appears; it is unmistakably
manifest also in the other provinces of man's earliest activity.
The Greek house, as described by Homer, differs little from the
model which was always adhered to in Italy. The essential portion,
which originally formed the whole interior accommodation of the
Latin house, was the -atrium-, that is, the "blackened" chamber,
with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals,
and the hearth; and precisely similar is the Homeric --megaron--,
with its household altar and hearth and smoke-begrimed roof. We
cannot say the same of ship-building. The boat with oars was an
old common possession of the Indo-Germans; but the advance to the
use of sailing vessels can scarcely be considered to have taken
place during the Graeco-Italian period, for we find no nautical
terms originally common to the Greeks and Italians except such
as are also general among the Indo-Germanic family. On the other
hand the primitive Italian custom of the husbandmen having common
midday meals, the origin of which the myth connects with the
introduction of agriculture, is compared by Aristotle with the
Cretan Syssitia; and the earliest Romans further agreed with the
Cretans and Laconians in taking their meals not, as was afterwards
the custom among both peoples, in a reclining, but in a sitting
posture. The mode of kindling fire by the friction of two pieces
of wood of different kinds is common to all peoples; but it is
certainly no mere accident that the Greeks and Italians agree in the
appellations wh