ted as a
guest or summoned to the senate. This domestic education was well
adapted to preserve man wholly for the household and wholly for
the state. The permanent intercommunion of life between father
and son, and the mutual reverence felt by adolescence for ripened
manhood and by the mature man for the innocence of youth, lay at the
root of the steadfastness of the domestic and political traditions,
of the closeness of the family bond, and in general of the grave
earnestness (-gravitas-) and character of moral worth in Roman life.
This mode of educating youth was in truth one of those institutions
of homely and almost unconscious wisdom, which are as simple as
they are profound. But amidst the admiration which it awakens we
may not overlook the fact that it could only be carried out, and
was only carried out, by the sacrifice of true individual culture
and by a complete renunciation of the equally charming and perilous
gifts of the Muses.
Dance, Music, and Song among the Sabellians and Etruscans
Regarding the development of the fine arts among the Etruscans
and Sabellians our knowledge is little better than none.(16) We
can only notice the fact that in Etruria the dancers (-histri-,
-histriones-) and the pipe-players (-subulones-) early made a trade
of their art, probably earlier even than in Rome, and exhibited
themselves in public not only at home, but also in Rome for small
remuneration and less honour. It is a circumstance more remarkable
that at the Etruscan national festival, in the exhibition of which
the whole twelve cities were represented by a federal priest, games
were given like those of the Roman city-festival; we are, however,
no longer in a position to answer the question which it suggests,
how far the Etruscans were more successful than the Latins in
attaining a national form of fine art beyond that of the individual
communities. On the other hand a foundation probably was laid in
Etruria, even in early times, for that insipid accumulation of learned
lumber, particularly of a theological and astrological nature, by
virtue of which afterwards, when amidst the general decay antiquarian
dilettantism began to flourish, the Tuscans divided with the Jews,
Chaldeans, and Egyptians the honour of being admired as primitive
sources of divine wisdom. We know still less, if possible, of
Sabellian art; but that of course by no means warrants the inference
that it was inferior to that of the neighbou
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