Ancient Rome and Modern Italy 57 



at two widely separated periods of that country's history I have 

 correlated with our ancient data some of the information which I 

 have gathered during years of acquaintance with many parts of 

 the Italian peninsula and Sicily and from a lifetime of reading in 

 the voluminous literature which has been written in various lan- 

 guages about their inhabitants. I have written as a lover of the 

 Italian land and people, but I have written inevitably as a fallible 

 alien who realizes that even as a well-wisher who is determined to 

 be as free from bias as possible, he will need charitable judgment 

 from critics who have seen things with different eyes, heard things 

 with different ears, and interpreted what they have seen and heard 

 from a different point of view. So far as antiquity is concerned, 

 my account was bound to be at least somewhat uneven, because 

 that ever churlish fellow, Father Time, has allowed to survive in 

 Latin literature such disparate amounts of information about the 

 different topics which we have treated. No doubt I have offended 

 the spirits of the dead more often than the feelings of the living. 

 But of ghosts I have no dread, not even of that of "imperious 

 Caesar, dead and turned to clay." In fairness, however, to Italy 

 my readers must also remember that my modern analogies and 

 apparent survivals have been found, as a rule, in the life of the less 

 favored classes of the community. Lack of education makes the 

 proletariat of any country cling to traditional beliefs and habits; 

 poverty compels them to follow primitive ways of life. 350 Among 

 people too poor to travel much beyond their own town or village, 

 campanilismo, "church-steeple-ism", is an enduring characteristic 

 that makes them wary of anything that is foreign to the com- 

 munity where they live. 



We have dealt rather fully with superstitious beliefs and prac- 

 tices which affected and are still affecting the well-being of mother 

 and child, because neither classical scholars nor writers on modern 

 Italian life seem to have had much knowledge of such matters. 

 Since no man can know the extent to which the prescriptions and 

 directions of doctor, quack, or witch were actually followed by the 

 ancients, our repetition of them may appear, at first thought, to 

 be of minor importance, no matter how entertaining they happen 

 to be. But when we find that so much of the nonsense survives 

 among those who may be called the descendants and intellectual 

 heirs of the old Romans, it must concern anybody who is interested 



