Of the relative poverty of early Roman art, the cause is seen even by Mommsen to lie partly in the religious environment, religion being the only incentive which at that culture stage could have operated (and this only with economic fostering); but the nature of the religious environment he implicitly sets down as usual to the character of the race,[399] as contrasted with the character of the Greeks. Obviously it is necessary to seek a reason for the religious conditions to begin with; and this is to be found in the absence from early Rome of exactly those natural and political conditions which made Greece so manifold in its culture. We have seen how, where Greece was divided into a score of physically "self-contained" states, no one of which could readily overrun the others, Rome was placed on a natural career of conquest; and this at a culture stage much lower than that of Ionic Greece of the same period. Manifold and important culture contacts there must have been for Hellenes before the Homeric poems were possible; but Rome at the beginning of the republican period was in contact only with the other Italic tribes, the Phoenicians, the Grecian cities, and the Etruscans; and with these her relations were hostile. In early Ionia, again, Greek poetry flourished as a species of luxury under a feudal system constituted by a caste of rich nobles who had acquired wealth by conquest of an old and rich civilisation. Roman militarism began in agricultural poverty; and the absorption of the whole energies of the group in warfare involved the relegation of the arts of song and poetry to the care of the women and boys, as something beneath adult male notice.[400] Roman religion in the same way was left as a species of archæology to a small group of priests and priestly aristocrats, charged to observe the ancient usages. It would thus inevitably remain primitive--that is, it would remain at a stage which the Greeks had mostly passed at the Homeric period; and when wealth and leisure came, Greek culture was there to over-shadow it. To say that the Latins racially lacked the mythopoeic faculty is to fall back on the old plan of explaining phenomena in terms of themselves. As a matter of fact, the mere number of deities, of personified forces, in the Roman mythology is very large,[401] only there is lacking the embroidery of concrete fiction which gives vividness to the mythology of the Greeks. The Romans relatively failed to develop the mythopoeic faculty because their conditions caused them to energise more in other ways.[402]