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herself to a high state of civilization and advancement. These successive emigrations, none of them, reached Italy, to overlay the broad and rugged proportions of her pioneer colonization, as in Greece, with richer and deeper elements of national development. The home-growth of the Greek offshoot of the common original Graeco-Italic stock, was maintained constantly, under the powerful ministry of the most quickening and enlarging influences, ever flowing in upon it, in both its nascent and formative state. The home. growth, on the contrary, of the twin Italic offshoot of the same parent stock, was perfected entirely by itself, and with none of the overflow of a higher civilization, from age to age upon it, serving to enrich the soil in which it was planted.

The two principal branches of the Italic race were the Latin and the Umbrian, which last includes also the Marsi and the Samuites or Oscans. The more deeply investigators penetrate into the different dialects of this race, the more closely do they find them to be connected with the Latin. The remains of the Umbrian, and of the Samnite or Oscan dialects, are very scanty. Of the Volscian and Marsian dialects we have hardly sufficient traces, to be able to classify them with certainty. Of the Sabine, here and there, a solitary ray shines, glimmering in provincial Latin. The Latin stands related to all this Umbro-Samnite class of special dialects, as, in Greek, the Ionic to the Doric dialect; while the differences of the Oscan and Umbrian and their allied dialects, may be compared with those of the Doric dialect, as found in the two regions of Sicily and Sparta.

The peculiarities which individualize the whole Italic family of dialects, as a distinct branch of the Indo-European stock of languages, are worthy of notice. They are such as these: Aspirates were not originally favorite with them, while with the Greeks and Etruscans they were. The finer breath-sounds, s, v, y, which the Greeks disliked, they cherished. Sibilants, indeed, constitute a marked feature of the old Italian languages. Consonants they maintained, at the end of a word, with firmness. By the retrogressive tendency of their principles of accentuation in inflected and

compound words, end-syllables were weakened and shortened in Latin, much more than in Greek. Vowels, accordingly, at the end of words, except in flexion-endings, where they form diphthongs or represent contracted forms, are short. 1 The ingenious and compact mechanism of the Greek, in the preparation of the different tense-forms, by prefixes, suffixes, vowel-substitutions, and various consonantal changes, was unknown to them. The different tense-stems were formed, by compounding with the theme of the verb, the auxiliary roots es 2 and fu. The dual number, 3 both in the noun and verb, was rejected as superfluous. The ablative, which was lost in Greek, was here retained, while the sense of the original Sanscrit locative was also engrafted on it frequently, and so preserved with much more distinctness, as a case, than in Greek. The Substantive development also of the verb, in the gerund, was peculiar to the Latin.

The Latin and Umbrian have been spoken of, as being closely related to each other. They are indeed, and yet they are quite distinct from each other, in many of their forms. In the Umbrian the Latin q appears as p, as in pis 4 for quis, who, and nep for neque, nor. In the Samnite the genitive of words in us is-eis, in the Umbrian, es, and in

1 Hence the rules of prosody, that a and e final are short, while i final in the second declension (being contracted from Sanscrit sya in the genitive and in the plural nom. from Sanscrit as), and also u final, in the ablative (contracted from -ud, the original Latin ablative suffix) are long.

2 Es, as in sum (for esum); Greek ès, as in eiuí (for doμl); Sanscrit as, as in asmi, I am is the base of one of the two great verb-forms, signifying to be, which run through the whole range of the Indo-European languages; while the other is, in Latin fu-, in Greek pu- (as in ów), and in Sanscrit bhu; English be, Anglo-Saxon beo, German bin.

8 Mommsen describes this in a quaint way. He says, literally translated, that "the strong logic of the Italians seems to have found no reason for splitting the idea of moreness into two-ness and much-ness."

4 Cf., for a similar interchange of the labial and guttural, ëñoμai and iπños, Aeol. Ikkos, with sequor and equus (pronounced originally as if sekor and ckus); also Ionic kolos and Kóтepos with the Attic roos and Tóτepos, and Latin quinque with évre, five. In quispiam for quisquam and nempe for namque we have specimens of Umbrianized Latin.

Latin-i. 1 (for-is). In the Umbrian, R and H are of much more frequent occurrence, than in Latin. R is used not only in the conjugation and declension of the verb, as in Latin, but also in the declensions of nouns, in different cases; while in Latin, except in nouns whose root ends in R, it is found only in the genitive plural. L and B the Umbrians did not like, never using 1 at the beginning of a word or b at the end. Terminations also in the Umbrian were greatly mutilated or destroyed.

The Umbrians occupied, in ancient times, the northern half of Italy, from the Tiber to the Po; and spread in their course along the Apennines southerly. The Latin race extended along the western coast of Italy, in the same direction. They covered, early, the ground from the Tiber to the Volscian mountains; and, from the names of places already existing there, they seem to have occupied Campania, before the Samnite or Hellenic irruption into it. Latium proper occupied but a small district, between the Tiber, the Apennines, Mount Alba and the sea, and was situated on a broad plain, as the name itself (latus) seems to indicate. This plain is surrounded by mountains, on every side, except where it is bounded by the Tiber and the sea. It is level, on an extended view, but, when surveyed in detail, it is found to be broken up into many unevennesses, filled with innumerable little pools, which, from want of a sufficient watershed for drainage, breed in summer, now, as in ages past, a fatal malaria, which overhangs its plains for months together, breeding disease and death. And yet, on this narrow plain, with the sea on one side and the mountains on the other such surroundings as environed also the Grecian mind-was to be developed a race, which should conquer the world by arms, as the Hellenes had by arts; and, long after it had lost its civil power, should yet hold, in its iron grasp, the souls of men over all the earth: a race that, in one form or another, was destined to leave its impress on every people and every individual, every hamlet, and every institution, in the civil

1 Dominus, gen. domini was archaically domino-s, gen. domino-is, dat. domino-i, etc.

ized world. In this narrow space, as their native home, the Roman eagles nestled and grew to greatness, for almost a thousand years; and when those eagles ceased to appear, in all the earth, there came forth, in their stead, from that same breeding-place of wonders, where it still lives and riots in its work of ruin, a scarlet-colored beast, having seven heads and ten horns, bearing a woman drunk with the blood of saints, and trampling upon the necks of prostrate kings and princes. The climate of Latium is fitted to arouse the physical energies and to develop an active, busy, restless style of life. It traverses a wide range of temperature, throughout the year, and frequently in either direction, through every point in the scale, from the highest to the lowest degree, as in our North American atmosphere, in a few hours. In the true season for out-door life, everything around and above seems bright and exhilarating. Ethnology and philology thus maintain, in all countries, the closest possible connections with climatology. Indeed, as on the bosom of a quiet summer stream, all the trees and herbage of the bank are seen mirrored, in clear corresponding perspective, so, in the poetry, and not in this only, but also in the very history, character, and language of each people, the skies and seas, the hills and dales, the flora and fauna, the mists and shades, the lights and heats and airs, of surrounding nature, are reflected. Man is deeply and tenderly receptive of her influence. And at the basis of all just interpretations of different national developments, viewed as historical problems, lies, rightly understood, a true, philosophic, divinely ordained, materialism. It is, in other words, amid different types of nature, that God casts, as in a mould, the different mental types of mankind.

Rome itself was situated on the Tiber, chiefly on its eastern bank. Down to the times of the emperor Aurelian, it was built on seven hills, and, from his time to the present, it has extended over ten. It was, like the other great cities of ancient times, built, for the sake of safety from invasion by water, at a little distance from the sea. To the Romans the world is indebted, beyond any other nation, for the princi

ples of law and order, and for the whole frame-work of organized social life. The Roman mind as instinctively tended towards mechanism in every thing, as a salt, under appropriate chemical influences, does to crystallization. The syntactical structure, accordingly, of the Latin, is as sharp, definite, and uniform, in its angles, as the laws of crystallogeny themselves would demand a given crystal always to be. The language itself is of a harder material than the Greek. Its characteristics are gravity, solidity, and energy, while those of the Greek are a wonderful vitality, elasticity, individuality, and permanency. The Latin, by the greater contact of its people with other men, as they penetrated with their victories and their laws among them, while giving out everywhere its own light and heat to all parts of the conquered world, received in return an impress, which was never left upon the more mobile Greek, from the other languages whose tides of influence it encountered.

The Latin language, as we have it, is far more unaltered and ancient in its features, than the classic or Hellenic Greek. And yet it must not be forgotten, that, while the ultimate roots remained the same, the forms themselves of the original words were so altered, in the Augustan age, that is, the classic or golden age of Roman literature, as to require, for the right comprehension even of the scholars of that day, special helps and explanations. The oldest specimens of Latin literature that we have, do not date further back than two hundred years before Christ. And in the 6th century after Christ, the Latin became extinct, as the vernacular of the people of Italy. Even English, as it was three hundred years ago, or in the times of Shakspeare, two hundred and fifty years ago, is very much of it unintel

1 It will interest the classical reader to see a specimen or two of old Latin. (1) From the laws of Numa (700 B. C.): Sci qui hemonem loebesum dolo sciens mortei duit, pariceidas estod. This in classical Latin becomes: Si quis hominem liberum dolo sciens morti dederit, parricida esto.

(2) A Tribunitian law (493 B. C.): Sei qui aliuta faxit, ipsos Jovei sacer estod, et sei qui im, quei co plebei scito sacer siet, ocisit, pariceidas ne estod. That is: Si quis aliter fecerit, ipse Jovi sacer esto; et si quis eum qui co plebis scito sacer sit, occiderit, parricida ne sit.

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