To be sure the Latins apparently had few myths or fairy tales, such as have arisen to aid literary effort in certain other regions. Perhaps a penchant for silent doing, a respect for logic and fact may be posited to explain this lack—though such an explanation merely begs the question. We still do not know what is meant by the inheritance of mental qualities. What “myth-making” is we also do not know. In Greece, where myths grew everywhere to clothe poetic invention, we know at least that the migrant tribes had come in and inherited from the peoples of the Aegean world scores of anthropomorphic deities and heroes that in time aggregated into cycles of more or less related groups. Hittite heroes emerge as Greek gods and Cretan gods as Greek heroes. I do not mean to imply that accident explains all of Greek mythology, for the Greeks enjoyed tales and preserved them. But where the early contacts of the Greeks were fortunate, those of the Romans were not. The Romans on their arrival in central Italy knew no deities in personal form about which tales could gather, and when anthropomorphism came it was imposed by the Etruscans in connection with deities that were never wholly assimilated. The Romans stepped almost from primitive animism to sophistication, and presently to skepticism, and that experience denied them the poetic pabulum which has always been the most envigorating in early art. Of primitive vocal expression in artistic form at Rome we know but little. It was as thoroughly obliterated by the onrush of Greek as was the native English epic and lyric by the Norman conquest; indeed more, since, not being written, it vanished, while the old English material survived at least in part in dusty archives. Old Romans later said they remembered having heard heroic ballads, and we believe them because the first Hellenizers found a native ballad meter (the Saturnian) which was so well established that they could use it for a translation of the Odyssey and for a native epic. Non-Romans like Livius and Naevius[1] would not have employed the Saturnian verse unless the popular ear had been accustomed to it and demanded it. There were also religious songs accompanied by dancing. A fragment of one of these songs in honor of Mars has survived in a late copy of an early ritual. In Greece a similar ritualistic song had the good fortune of being addressed to Dionysus, a more genial deity, and it seems to have developed into the dithyramb and ultimately gave rise to the drama. On Mars, however, poetry was wasted.