Ancient legends of Roman history . but which (to state my opinionfrankly) gives me the impression of being still more recent. The persistency of such archaic characters among thepeoples of the Peninsula cannot be explained by the isola-tion in which they lived. For, even laying aside many otherconsiderations, it is well known that the coast of Venetiawas visited by the Corcyraei and Tarentini as early as thefifth century, and was finally settled by the , the civilization of the Sabine races during thefourth century is explicitly testified to by the ancients. Thepersistency o
Ancient legends of Roman history . but which (to state my opinionfrankly) gives me the impression of being still more recent. The persistency of such archaic characters among thepeoples of the Peninsula cannot be explained by the isola-tion in which they lived. For, even laying aside many otherconsiderations, it is well known that the coast of Venetiawas visited by the Corcyraei and Tarentini as early as thefifth century, and was finally settled by the , the civilization of the Sabine races during thefourth century is explicitly testified to by the ancients. Thepersistency of forms which in Greece tend to disappear inthe latter half of the fifth century is especially due to thefact that the Italic races retained for a long time the orig- 24 ANCIENT LEGENDS OF ROMAN HISTORY inal forms,—forms which they employed at the time whenthey directly or indirectly learned the art of writing fromthe Greeks. The Veneti, as we learn from a bilingual in-scription, continued to write with archaic letters and from. right to left after they had learned to write Latin inscrip-tions, with letters of more recent form, and in the directionfrom left to right. For this same reason, the Oscans andEtruscans continued the use of archaic characters and thedirection from right to left as late as the third century. If,then, among these and other races of Italy there came, later, atime when they perfected and elaborated their graphic char-acters, such elaboration is not to be attributed to the suc-cessive modifications of the Hellenic alphabets, but ratherto a local evolution of characters learned ab antico fromthe Greeks. In short, the comparison with the Greek inscriptions onthe one hand, and with the Italic dialectic inscriptions on theother, does not present a single fact which compels us tobelieve that the Roman stele belongs to the sixth , or to an even more remote age. It obliges us, rather,to consider whether, perchance, it be not later than the
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