But in Latium nothing similar occurred.

There might be poets in Alba and in Rome, but there arose no Latin epos, nor even--what were still more conceivable--a catechism for the Latin farmer of a kind similar to the "Works and Days" of Hesiod.

The Latin federal festival might well have become a national festival of the fine arts, like the Olympian and Isthmian games of the Greeks.

A cycle of legends might well have gathered around the fall of Alba, such as was woven around the conquest of Ilion, and every community and every noble clan of Latium might have discovered in it, or imported into it, the story of its own origin.

But neither of these results took place, and Italy remained without national poetry or art.
The inference which of necessity follows from these facts, that the development of the fine arts in Latium was rather a shrivelling up than an expanding into bloom, is confirmed in a manner even now not to be mistaken by tradition.