While the Italians thus continued the rhetorical and legal studies of the ancients, they did not forget that they were representatives and descendants of the Romans. The Republic and the Empire were for them the two most glorious epochs of their own history; and any attempt which they made to revive either literature or art, was imitative of the past. They were not in the position to take a new departure. No popular epic, like the Niebelungen of the Teuton, the Arthurian legend of the Celt, the Song of Roland of the Frank, or the Spanish Cid, could have sprung up on Italian soil. The material was wanting to a race that knew its own antiquity. Even when an Italian undertook a digest of the Tale of Troy or of the Life of Alexander, he converted the metrical romances of the middle ages into prose, obeying an instinct which led him to regard the classical past as part of his own history.[3] In like manner, the recollection of a previous municipal organization in the communes, together with the growing ideal of a Roman Empire, which should restore Italy to her place of sovereignty among the nations, proved serious obstacles to the unification of the people. We have already seen that this reversion of the popular imagination to Rome may be reckoned among the reasons why the victory of Legnano and the Peace of Constance were comparatively fruitless.[4] Politically, socially, and intellectually, the Italians persisted in a dream of their Latin destiny, long after the feasibility of realizing that vision had been destroyed, and when the modern era had already formed itself upon a new type in the federation of the younger races. Of hardly less importance, as negative influences, were the failure of feudalism to take firm hold upon Italian soil, and the defect of its ideal, chivalry. The literature of trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers grew up and flourished in the castles of the North; nor was it until the Italians, under the sway of the Hohenstauffen princes, possessed something analogous to a Provençal Court, that the right conditions for the development of literary art in the vernacular were attained. From this point of view Dante's phrase of _lingua aulica_, to express the dialect of culture, is both scientific and significant. It will further appear in the course of this chapter that the earliest dawn of Italian literature can be traced to those minor Courts of Piedmont and the Trevisian Marches, where the people borrowed the forms of feudal society more sympathetically than elsewhere in Italy.