From the point of view of the ethnologist, Greeks and Romans had strong points of difference. The Greeks were dominated by a temperament perhaps more acute and sensitive than that of any other nation of the ancient world. They developed the fine arts in all their main branches--pottery, sculpture, architecture, grammar, and philosophy--to a height which has never been excelled by any subsequent people. But they paid the penalty of their sensibility and their versatility by an instability of purpose, a lack of civic discipline, which speedily worked their downfall. The Romans developed comparatively little culture. Almost all the lasting monuments of the Romans were partly inspired by intercourse with the Greeks. On the other hand, as might have been expected of a people whose home was within the walls of a city, they were as eminent in the framing of laws, and in the art of government, as the Greeks were in the fine arts. The versatility and levity of the Greek, and his undisciplined life of individual freedom, ruined the nation of the noblest promise in all history. The virile stability of the Roman, and his conception of freedom as subordinate to the duties of patriotism, made him master of the civilised world for many centuries. To these two nations the world owes, perhaps, an equal debt. The peoples of modern Europe arose from the ruins of the Roman empire, and inherited from it the soundest laws and the best examples of government; which, in some respects, they have been able to improve upon; and, when they had progressed far enough in civilisation, they discovered the culture of the Greeks and developed it, each nation in accordance with its genius and its needs, into the civilisation of the later centuries. The testimony of language has been accepted as proving that the Romans were Aryans, but that term itself has come to have a somewhat doubtful meaning, as we have already seen. The affinity of their language seems to make it clear that the Romans were more closely allied to the Greeks than to any other of their known contemporaries, and it has been assumed as proven that the ancestors of these two peoples remained in contact with each other long after their separation from the primitive Aryan swarm. But the problem in its entirety deals with many questions that are obscure in the extreme: just when or just how these supposititious Aryans migrated into Italy; what manner of people--what race even--they found there; to what extent they commingled ethnically with the races which they there met and conquered; these are all questions to which authentic history can give but the vaguest answers.[a] THE LAND OF ITALY