THE EARLIEST HISTORY. (continued 3)

Well worth our attention is the Etruscan tradition concerning Servius Tullius, and the fragment of Claudius’ speech on the tablets at Lyons, which contains the notices of Cæles Vibenna and Mastarna from Etruscan historians.[81] I never was so much surprised by any literary discovery as by this. Not a soul had taken any heed of it before;—people don’t look at such square letters, especially when they are those of the silly Claudius. I at that time still believed in the Etruscan origin of Rome, and thought that quite a new light would thus be shed upon the whole of the Roman history. Cælius Vibenna must be an historical person: mention is made of him too frequently and too distinctly; his name also is such that the Romans could not have invented it, as the Etruscan language was as foreign to them, as the Celtic to us Germans. Nor is it perhaps to be doubted that he had a friend Mastarna. But when I search into the legislation which is ascribed to Servius Tullius,—whatever abatements may be made on the score of historical precision, especially with regard to chronology, although the fact is unquestionable that Servius reigned before the last king, and was overthrown by the thoroughly historical Tarquin the Proud,—this legislation was yet so peaceful and so free, that I cannot bring myself to believe that a condottiere, a captain of freebooters (for such were those enlisted troops) should have made such mild laws, and intended to change the monarchy into a republic. The whole civil and political legislation of Servius Tullius bears the impress of a thoroughly Latin stamp; the relation also to the Latins bespeaks a Latin lawgiver. He may have been a Corniculan, and have ascended the throne in a manner which was contrary to the established custom. He may have sprung from a marriage of disparagement between one of the Luceres with a woman of Corniculum before the connubium was conceded, and this may be at the bottom of the history of his descent; but a foreigner, or a leader of marauders, he certainly was not. I do not in the least doubt Claudius’ honesty, nor do I impugn the importance of the Etruscan books; yet we must not rate their value too high. What they really were could not be known before Mai discovered the Veronese Scholia on the Æneid (1818). In these are found quotations from two Etruscan historians, Flaccus and Cæcina, which considerably lower our expectations concerning the value of the Etruscan books for the early times. It seems that just as the Romans misunderstood the old Latin history, and substituted the Tyrrhenian one, thus also the Etruscans kept to the traditions of the Tyrrhenians whom they had brought under their yoke, and made Tarchon, him who plays his part in Virgil, and may be met with in the Roman tradition as Tarquinius Priscus, the founder of their empire from Tarquinii. If Claudius had really at hand the old Etruscan rolls written from right to left, of which Lucretius speaks, he was on very slippery ground; but how much more so, if he followed Flaccus and Cæcina, who wrote without any sort of criticism. The books of the Etruscans are for the most part dated too early. Etruria had from the war of Hannibal to that of Sylla, for more than a hundred years, enjoyed profound peace under the supremacy of the Romans; in this time most of the works of Etruscan literature must be placed. Before the Social War, as Cicero states, the sciences flourished all over Italy, of which we have no more any detailed knowledge; certainly histories were written in the whole of Italy, just as in Rome. Now if any one read in the Etruscan books Cæles Vibenna and Mastarna, and chose to put things together, he might have thought with some vanity, “what has become of this Mastarna? very likely he is that Servius Tullius, whose birth has been shrouded in mystery.” Somebody may thus have stumbled upon this idea quite by himself, and Claudius indeed, addle-headed as he was, was sure to believe such a thing. Thus he also says of the tribuni militares consulari potestate, “qui seni sæpe octoni crearentur.” But there have always either been six of these, half of whom were patricians and half plebeians, or promiscue; or else only three patricians, making four with the præfectus urbi: once only we know of eight, when the two censors were reckoned with them, as Onuphr. Panvinius has shown.[82] This may have happened once or twice besides; but at all events it was an anomaly. From this we see that Claudius did not understand the Fasti. Our notice of Mastarna therefore is according to all appearances based upon very slight authority. The Etruscan annals from which Claudius drew may have been old; but that they really were so, is nowhere stated.

The unity of the poem of the Tarquins from the arrival of Tarquinius Priscus to the fight at the Regillus cannot be mistaken,—a noble theme for an epic poet, much more worthy of being treated by Virgil than the Æneid. The account seems credible, and to have been derived from old traditions, that the legislation of Servius Tullius had to be carried through almost by force; that he arbitrarily formed his centuries; and then that these for the second time acknowledged him as king, and ratified his laws. All such changes among the ancients have been brought about in the same way. Moreover it is said that the patricians were angry at this legislation, although it took nothing from them, and merely gave something to the second order; and that they made attempts to murder the king, for which he compelled them to dwell, not on the Esquiline where his house stood, but in the valley below it. All this, as a tradition, has much probability from its intrinsic consistency. Yet the tragedy itself has its origin in the king’s own house. His two daughters, one of them good, the other wicked, are married to the two sons of Tarquinius Priscus; the good one to the younger L. Tarquin, a brave but ambitious young man, the wicked daughter to Aruns the elder brother. The latter saw that Aruns was disposed to give up his claims to the throne, and on this she offered L. Tarquin her hand to be gained by murdering her husband; he accepted it, and carried out her intentions. Tarquin, we are told, now formed a party among the patricians, and arranged with them for the murder of Servius Tullius; the king, when he made his appearance in the Curia, was flung down the steps, and the body guards dispatched him in the street; and Tullia went to greet her husband as king, and as she was returning drove over the corpse, owing to which the street got the name of vicus sceleratus.

That Servius lost his life in a rebellion of Tarquin, and that the latter was supported by the whole body of the citizens, in particular by the Luceres, his own party (factio regis, gentes minores), so that these reaped the fruits of the revolution, and the two first tribes thought themselves hardly dealt with, may be looked upon as historical. Yet I am far from considering as such all the details which are given about the daughters of the old king: they are no more so than the tale of Lady Macbeth. There is so wide a gulf between our manners and the crimes of the South, that we have not a notion of their possibility or impossibility; yet even if those accounts were possible, historical they are not. That the rule of Tarquin the Proud was brilliant but frightfully oppressive, and that he trampled the laws of Tullius under foot, may belong to history; but those appalling massacres of his cannot but be poetry. Tarquin has perhaps the misfortune of an awful poetical celebrity, much worse than he may have deserved. Yet he cannot have entirely abolished the laws of Servius at once. There may be some truth in the statement that he put down the meetings of the plebeian tribes; that he did away with their festivals; and that he did not call them together for legislation and the election of their magistrates. Nor, in fact, was there much occasion for these last, the criminal judges being chosen by the patricians. When it is recounted, that Tarquin undertook immense works, that he built the magnificent Capitoline temple, after having arranged the site for it, it is possible that he used the plebeians as his bondmen, that many of them committed suicide on that account, and that in order to prevent this he had the corpses fastened upon a cross. We must here proceed with caution and circumspection; the details will always remain uncertain, and all that cannot be set aside as impossible, is not therefore necessarily true. That Tarquin did not abolish the division into classes, seems to me certain; partly because it was advantageous for him to have the improved military organization, and partly because from the connection which he entered into with Latium, we are to conclude that the constitutions of the two states were the same; so that either Servius Tullius gave to the Romans a Latin constitution, or Tarquin to the Latins the Roman one. Even if Tarquin the Proud and his revolution in favour of the patricians, especially those of the third order, are quite historical, yet it is still singular that the third order should seem nevertheless after that revolution to have been inferior to the two others. This very fact, that the interests of the two first tribes clashed with those of the third, paved the way for a popular revolution.

According to Livy and Dionysius, the Latins, with the exception of Gabii, were induced to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome and of Tarquin; on the other hand, Cicero in the books De Republica says, universum Latium bello subegit. Whether this war was merely passed over by the others, or whether Cicero let fall the expression from carelessness only, cannot now be decided. It is probable that there have always existed discrepancies between the narrations of poetry and history: the tale of Turnus Herdonius has a highly poetical colouring. Whilst under Servius there was an alliance with reciprocity, Latium now entered into that relation in which afterwards the Socii Italici stood, when they bound themselves ad majestatem populi Romani comiter colendam. It seems also that the Latins, when there was a change of rulers at Rome, had refused to renew the alliance concluded under the late king.

In the alliance between Rome and Carthage, (of which the original treaty was kept among the archives of the ædiles, which also Polybius, as he states himself, not without a great deal of trouble, translated into Greek, since even the Romans themselves could hardly decypher and tell the meaning of the old writing; an alliance which was to be renewed from time to time, as in our days is still the case with those with the Barbary states,) we see the whole coast, not only of the Prisci Latini, but as far as Terracina, which at that time perhaps was still Tyrrhenian and not Volscian, in the possession of Rome; its inhabitants are called in the Greek translation ὑπήκοοι. Rome concludes the alliance for them as well as for herself; it is stipulated that, if the Carthaginians should make conquests in Latium, they were to give them up to the Romans. This treaty is as authentic as any thing can be: it is a strange whim of an otherwise estimable man,[83] to take it for an invention of Polybius. Here, therefore, Latium is still dependent on Rome, to which dependence Livy also bears witness: it was a relation newly established. Afterwards, when all as far as Antium rise up in hostility against Rome, we again recognise a decline of Roman power. The Feriæ Latinæ are an assembly of all the Latin nations, not merely of the Prisci Latini on the Alban Hill, where we know that the Latin authorities must needs have had the presidency. Yet Dionysius tells us that Tarquin had established the festival; that a bullock was killed, of which the delegates of the several towns each received a piece (carnem Latinis accipere). The Milanese Scholiast on Cicero’s oration for Plancius[84] says, that with regard to this there had been a different tradition; that some had ascribed the festival to Tarquinius Priscus,—this is a mere falsification for Tarquinius Superbus out of spite against the latter, just as the foundation of the Capitol was referred to the former king,—others to the Prisci Latini, which consequently would place it in the earliest times. The latter are perfectly right. The festivals existed long before Tarquin, as long as there was a Latin people. Yet, at the same time, the other opinion has arisen from a mistake which is very easily accounted for; for if Tarquin the Proud obtained the supremacy over Latium, he would also naturally preside at the sacrifices as the Ætolians did at Delphi during their hegemony, from whence the well known expression in the inscriptions, ἱερομνημονούντων Αἰτωλῶν.

In order to make a full use of Latium for his own ends, whilst yet he did not quite trust the Latins, he did not wish to admit their troops in distinct legions, under their own officers. He therefore combined the Roman with the Latin legions, and then divided these again into two parts. The Latins had a similar organization to that of the Romans: the system of centuries among the latter was based upon the thirty tribes, among the former upon the thirty towns. He united two centuries into a maniple, the Roman officer being primus centurio; as in the East Indian possessions of the English, the officers are exclusively Europeans.[85] Livy confounds the primus centurio with the primipilus. Here the maniples now first make their appearance; and this is the plain meaning of what Livy tells in a confused manner, but which may certainly be unravelled.

We are, however, not a little puzzled as to what we are to believe of the detached accounts. It is stated that Tarquin had established colonies at Signia and Circeii, and that he had taken Gabii by stratagem. The latter is false, and the accounts are compiled out of two in Herodotus of Zopyrus and of Thrasybulus of Miletus. Authentic is the alliance with Gabii, from which we see that Gabii was out of the union of the thirty towns, the relation with which had been already settled before. Still in the times of Horace, the original treaty, one of the few which had been preserved, was kept in a temple. It is clear from it, that Gabii had acquired isopolity by a formal compact.