Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Egyptians ? There are a good many things, of course, which would assist in framing an answer to this question, but no one of them is more valuable than what is suggested by the presence, in the Latin language and in the Greek of Sicily and Campania, of many words, mutually borrowed, which signify the commodities and instruments of commerce. If the Romans incorporated in their language the forms of Greek words, which were employed in the Doric section of Magna Graecia, and borrowed nothing from the Achaean cities; and if, at the same time, the Achaean dialects bear no traces of contact with the Latin, while the Sicilian Greek had many terms such as the Romans used for the purposes of trade, we have here testimony of the highest order for the subject under consideration. This will prove, perhaps better than anything else could, that the Romans knew the Dorian Greeks who lived in Italy and met them in commerce, at this early time, at least more closely than they did the other races which surrounded them. 10. Etymological Evidence.—Or let us take a single word, and see what its etymology teaches about social usages with which, at first glance, it has no connection. In the view of Roman law, property was divisible into res mancipi and res nee mancipi, or into things the sale of which had to be accompanied by a certain prescribed ceremony in order to insure its validity, and those which passed freely without any such ceremony. In historical times, even if the owner agreed to sell and the purchaser paid the price demanded, such things asland, buildings, slaves, horses, and cattle could not be acquired unless the sale was made in the presence of five witnesses, and with the minute observance of a series of formalities which we need not describe, but which were included in late Latin un...