Note 402 — Chapter III
Reading edition
The fact that the Etruscans, like the other Italian peoples, remained at the stage of unintellectual formalism (Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 528-29; Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 273), suffices to show that not in race genius but in stage and conditions of culture lies the explanation. All early religion in official hands is formalist—witness the Pentateuch. The preoccupied Italians left their cults, as did the Phœnicians, to archæological officials, while the leisured Greeks carried them into poetry and art under conditions which fostered these activities.