French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language;
while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a
chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the
fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which
resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of
the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought
in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its
linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate,
Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have
reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the
re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is
concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was
set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the
region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe
has brought not peace, but a sword.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right
lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they
co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the
North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves
of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to
the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we
get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If
northern genealogies are any guide,--and they are not likely to have
reduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its full
extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in
building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War.
In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical