The Italian gods were abstractions and remained such; they never became elevated into or, as some may prefer to say, obscured under, a true personal shape.

In like manner men, even the greatest and noblest, remained in the view of the Italian without exception mortal, and were not, as in the longing recollection and affectionately cherished tradition of Greece, elevated in the conception of the multitude into god-like heroes.

But above all no development of national poetry took place in Latium.

It is the deepest and noblest effect of the fine arts and above all of poetry, that they break down the barriers of civil communities and create out of tribes a nation and out of the nations a world.

As in the present day by means of our cosmopolitan literature the distinctions of civilized nations are done away, so Greek poetic art transformed the narrow and egoistic sense of tribal relationship into the consciousness of Hellenic nationality, and this again into the consciousness of a common humanity.