constitution--a king, a senate, and an assembly entitled simply to
ratify or to reject the proposals which the king and senate should
submit to it--are scarcely anywhere expressed so distinctly as
in Aristotle's account of the earlier constitution of Crete. The
germs of larger state-confederacies in the political fraternizing
or even amalgamation of several previously independent stocks
(symmachy, synoikismos) are in like manner common to both nations.
The more stress is to be laid on this fact of the common foundations
of Hellenic and Italian polity, that it is not found to extend to
the other Indo-Germanic stocks; the organization of the Germanic
community, for example, by no means starts, like that of the Greeks
and Romans, from an elective monarchy. But how different the
polities were that were constructed on this common basis in Italy
and Greece, and how completely the whole course of their political
development belongs to each as its distinctive property,(10) it
will be the business of the sequel to show.


Religion


It is the same in religion. In Italy, as in Hellas, there lies
at the foundation of the popular faith the same common treasure
of symbolic and allegorical views of nature: on this rests that
general analogy between the Roman and the Greek world of gods and
of spirits, which was to become of so much importance in later
stages of development. In many of their particular conceptions
also,--in the already mentioned forms of Zeus-Diovis and Hestia-Vesta,
in the idea of the holy space (--temenos--, -templum-), in various
offerings and ceremonies--the two modes of worship do not by mere