THE EARLIEST HISTORY.

The Roman history goes back to Latium, and through Latium to Troy. Since Dio Chrysostom has started the question, whether Troy ever existed at all, a vast deal has been written on the subject; and also upon this other point, whether Æneas came to Italy. The treatise of Theodore Ryckius[40] about it is particularly well known. He deems the arrival of Æneas to be historical, in opposition to Bochart, who is one of the last highly gifted French philologists,[41] and at all events is superior to him in discernment. Bochart’s hypothesis concerning the influence of the Phœnicians, is doubtless carried too far. No one, however, will now any more put the question thus; but one must ask, has the legend that the Trojans came to this coast any historical foundation? and, moreover, has the legend arisen among the Greeks, and passed over to Italy; or is it a native Italian tradition which cannot, at least by us, be traced back to Greek sources? If the latter be the case, some truth must surely be at the bottom of it, and the less one takes these ancient accounts in their literal meaning, the more are they found to partake of possibility.

There is no question but that in the earliest times there were in Greece two peoples who were very nearly akin, but still distinct from each other; so much so that they did not understand each other’s language, as Herodotus positively asserts. One of these languages as opposed to the other was considered as barbarous; and yet, when looked upon from a different point of view, they may be said to be both of them closely related. There are still several living languages which stand in a similar degree of affinity,—the Polish and the Bohemian, the Italian and the Spanish, and, although we may not find the relationship to be so close, the Polish and Lithuanian. The two last languages are as wide as heaven and earth asunder; yet for all that they have a characteristic similarity. The grammar of both has the same development, the same peculiarities; the numerals are nearly the same; a great many words are common to both. These languages are therefore branches of the same stock, and yet the Poles do not understand the Lithuanians. Now this is the manner in which we solve the question so often mooted concerning the difference or identity of the Greeks and the Pelasgians. When Herodotus says that they were different, we must after all believe him; yet, on the other hand, he places the Hellenes and Pelasgians again side by side. The two nations cannot therefore be of different race.

In the earliest times, when the Greek history is yet veiled to us in impenetrable mystery, the greater part of Italy, perhaps the whole eastern shore of the Adriatic sea, Epirus, Macedon,[42] the southern coast of Thrace, the Macedonian peninsulas, the islands of the Ægean, and also the coasts of Asia Minor to the Bosporus were inhabited by Pelasgians.[43] The Trojans also are to be looked upon as Pelasgians. That they were no barbarians is the opinion of all the Greeks, as we also see already from Homer; their abode is quite in the Pelasgian country; their names are Greek. They are in close conjunction at one time with the Arcadians, another essentially Pelasgian people, then with the Epirots, then also with the Thessalians; and Æneas, according to one tradition, goes to Arcadia and dies there, according to another into Epirus, where Helenus settles. Thus, in like manner, we find in Pindar, in the poem on Cyrene, Aristæus, a Pelasgian hero from Arcadia, together with the Antenorides. The connexion of the Pelasgians with the Trojans extends very far. Samothrace in particular is the metropolis of Ilium; Dardanus comes from Arcadia, but passes through Samothrace, and from thence, married to Chryse, goes to Troas. The Samothracians, according to one of the grammarians, are a Roman people, acknowledged to be of kindred race with the Romans; that is to say, with the Troio-Tyrrhenian Pelasgians. This connexion has no other source but the common relationship between the Tyrrhenians, Trojans, and Samothracians. According to some accounts, Dardanus comes from Tyrrhenia to Troas; according to others, the Trojans come to Tyrrhenia. In the temple, and in the mysteries of Samothrace, there was a gathering point of many men from all quarters;[44] and it was for a great part of the world at that time as the Caaba of Mecca, the grave of the prophet at Medina, or as the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem. Samothrace and Dodona were for the Pelasgian races, what perhaps to the Hellenic world Delphi and Delos were. The distance of a considerable portion of those who are linked together by a common origin ought not to have much stress laid upon it in a case like this, as it is such as not to hinder the Mahometan from making the pilgrimage to the sacred spot.

This old stock of the Pelasgians which we may trace as far as Liguria, and which also dwelt on the coasts of Corsica and Sardinia, vanishes in the age of history as a component part of nations; but it consisted originally of a number of tribes which bore different names. A very wide spread name for that portion which was settled in Epirus, and in the southern part of modern Italy, as far as Latium and the coast of the Adriatic Sea, was that of Siculians (Siculi); also Vituli, Vitelli, Vitali, Itali, from the last of which Italy takes its name. Notwithstanding the wide spread of these Siculian or Italian names, Italia in the earliest times does not seem as at present to have designated the country to the foot of the Alps. It is indeed possible that the changes which followed upon the immigration of northern races severed the sea-coast from Etruria, and confined the name Italia to the country south of the Tiber, or rather, south of Latium. Yet this is only a supposition, though it is certain that Italy was once bounded on the north by a line from the Garganus on one side to Terracina on the other; and that the name, which had been restricted to within yet narrower limits in the times after Alexander the Great, before the sway of Rome had begun, was again extended to that wider range. It is probably of this earlier Italy that Pliny says, that it was querno folio similis,—a remarkable example of the manner in which Pliny wrote. He speaks at one time in his own name, and at another he gives excerpta. Yet his excerpta are unfortunately as little weighed by him in historical matters as in those of natural history. This statement he has without doubt taken from Timæus, with whom also the comparison of Sardinia to a sandal or a foot-print originates. That in his own time Italy could not by any means be so described, entirely escaped Pliny’s notice.

In the south of Italy, the earliest inhabitants were also called Œnotrians and Peucetians; in the north, without doubt they were likewise called Liburnians; and on the coasts of Latium, Tyrrhenians.

Whether the settlements on the coast north of the Tiber were the remnants of an expelled people, or perhaps mere colonies, can no longer now be ascertained; yet there appear in the middle of Italy, besides those people which were akin to the Greeks, some of a different kind by whom the former indeed were crushed. It seems that those migrations of the different races came about in the same manner as those in modern history. The people which directly precipitates itself upon the Siculians in Latium, and the Italians in Southern Italy proper, partly expelling, and partly absorbing and assimilating them, are the Opicans (Opici), a mixed race, which in fact as Opicans exists only in a few places, but is again absorbed by another people, and produces new tribes. They are the same whom we meet with under the name of Apulians; for the terminations, -icus and -ulus are equivalent. The Italian population therefore ends in Apulia; though it reaches in appearance as far as into Messapia, where part only of the Italians maintained themselves in an isolated settlement. Moreover they were in Samnium, Campania, and on the borders of Latium as Volscians and Æquians.

These Opicans were in their turn pushed forward by the Sabines (Sabellians), who called themselves aborigines, and traced their source from the highest Alps of Abruzzo near Majella and Gran Sasso d’Italia. Cato in a somewhat extraordinary manner makes them come from Little Amiternum. Whether the Sabellians and Opicans were about as distinct from each other as the Gauls and Ligurians; or in a less degree, like the Celts and Cymri; or whether they belonged to the same stock, and were only politically separated; are questions which we cannot solve. The ancients knew not, nor did they care much about it. When we want to see at any rate where no historical light is to be had, the mind’s eye is dimmed like that of the body when it is violently strained in the dark. Varro indeed distinguishes the Sabine from the Oscan language; but as he was very little of a judge of the earlier languages, in the sense in which we should apply the term to W. von Humboldt, we have also very little reason to rely upon any of his statements concerning the relationship of languages. From a general analogy, I conceive that the tide of emigration must have set in in several streams, and that thus the Sabines also may have been carried down from the higher north by its first rush. Yet this is mere conjecture.

The Umbrians may have belonged to the same stock as the Opicans. I would not lay too great a stress on the resemblance of names; the races which are nearest akin to each other have very often the most dissimilar names, and those which are the most remote quite similar ones. Thus the Getæ and the Goths were for a long time mistaken for the same people. Fifty years ago, it was the general belief in Ireland and Scotland that the Fir-Bolgs[45] were the old Belgians; yet this is false, and they are a Danish colony, as a very well-informed Englishman wrote to me. If I had no other reasons but the names, I should hesitate to pronounce for the identity of the Opicans and Umbrians. But Philistus called the people which overcame the Siculians in Latium, Ombricans, and the affinity of the languages may also be clearly made out from what remains of them.

These changes of the population, in which the earlier inhabitants are dislodged by another tribe, and the latter by some other one in its turn, make the history of the old Italian nations so indescribably obscure and difficult for us. At a time which we cannot fix with chronological certainty, in what was afterwards called Latium, which, however, perhaps bore this name from the earliest times, there existed a population of Siculians. The memory of it was preserved at Tibur, where according to Cato part of the town was called Siculio.[46] There are also elsewhere very many allusions in ancient authors, which place it beyond doubt that this people once existed there. Under the same name we find it in Southern Italy, and in the island which is to this day still called after them. According to one tradition, Sicelus came from Latium to the Œnotrians; according to another, the Siculians under different names were driven from their old abodes by the Opicans or Ombricans, and removed to that island. This migration is merely indicative of the combinations of those who tried to explain the contemporary existence of the same people in Latium and in Sicily. Possible it is, but it is also possible that it took quite a different direction. It is certain that in Homer’s time there were Siculians in Southern Italy; to prove which fact there exists a passage from Mnaseas, a pupil of Aristarchus, a learned grammarian and historian, whom the scholiast of the Odyssey quotes. He also says, that Echetus in Epirus was prince of the Siculians, so that he likewise acknowledged this name in those parts. From his explanation, we see that the poet of the Odyssey, when speaking of Siculians, does not mean the inhabitants of Sicily, a country concerning which he was in the dark; but those of Southern Italy, or the Pelasgians of Epirus.

The Siculians are the same as those whom Cato calls Aborigines. This name is interpreted γενάρχαι, ancestors; or also, wanderers, aberrigines; and likewise those who are from the very beginning, ab origine. The nominative singular, according to the Latin idiom, must have been aboriginus. There was a tradition that Latium had originally been inhabited by Autochthones; but Cato and C. Sempronius[47] said, that the aborigines had emigrated from Achaia, by which was meant the whole of the Peloponnesus, then named by the Romans Achaia. Others called the different places which were formerly termed Siculian, Argive; and Cato had done that with regard to Tibur itself. Argos and Larissa are Pelasgian names, which we meet with wherever there are Pelasgians;—Argos probably meaning town, and Larissa borough. As long as the Peloponnesus was Pelasgian, it was called Argos; even so was Thessaly. In this meaning the Argives are Pelasgians, and the Ἀργεῖοι Πελασγοί are in the old tragedy always named in conjunction. The one was most likely the general, and the other the special appellation.

Hesiod says of Latinus, πᾶσι Τυῤῥηνοῖσιν ἀγακλειτοῖσιν ἀνάσσει. All that we know of the Latins is this, that they had a number of towns from Tibur to the river Tiber. How far they extended in the earliest time to the Liris is lost in obscurity. Cato (in Priscian) says, that the plain of the Volscians formerly belonged to the aborigines; certainly all the towns along the coast were at an early period Tyrrhenian, as Antium, Circeii, and many others. At that time, therefore, the name of Latium spread far, and so late as immediately after the Roman kings, even to Campania; it having been first limited in consequence of the great popular migrations soon after the expulsion of the kings. Hesiod of course refers to the earlier time. In the treaty of Rome with Carthage, the coast beyond Terracina, probably as far as Cumæ, was called Latium, and the inhabitants Latins.

By the Greeks the Pelasgian inhabitants of the whole western coast of Italy were called Tyrrhenians; by the Latins, Turini, Tusci, i. e. Tusici from Tusus, or Turus; for s in the ancient language stands for r, as in Fusius for Furius.

We must bear well in mind that the Pelasgians and Aborigines are one and the same people. If we look over the legends of nations, we repeatedly find the same stories told in different ways which are entirely opposed to each other. The story of a Jew who takes ruthless revenge upon a Christian, as we know it from Shakspeare, in a Roman novel shortly before his time, is found just reversed, so that the Christian wants to cut off the flesh from the Jew. The migrations of the Goths, according to some, proceed from Scandinavia to the south; according to others, from the south to Scandinavia. Wittikind says that the Saxons had come out of Britain into Germany; the usual account makes them out to have been invited thither from Germany. The Pelasgians near the Hymettus near Athens are represented to have come from Tyrrhenia to Athens, and from thence to Lemnos; in another tradition, the Tyrrhenians go from the Meonian coast to Italy. Thus Cyrene, according to one legend, is colonized from Thera; in another, Thera rises out of a clod of earth from Libya. In the earlier account, the Symplegades were in the Eastern Sea, and the Argo sails through them on her voyage out; in the later, they are in the Western Sea, and impede the progress of the Argo on her voyage home. This exchange of polarity is manifested also with regard to the aborigines. In spite of etymology, Dionysius so calls the people which, issuing from the interior of the country, conquered the ancient inhabitants. Varro did the same, and yet worse than Pliny. He had read an immense deal; but learned he ought not to be called on account of his confusedness.[48] Varro knows about the close alliance of two of the Latin nations, but he makes a jumble of every thing; the aborigines are for him the conquering, and the Siculians the conquered people. Then, following Hellanicus, he brings over the aborigines from Thessaly; yet they then migrate from the Upper Anio to the Upper Abruzzo, whither they are driven by the Sabines. This tradition has a local and plausible character; for there were many small towns to be found there: large cities, on the contrary, such as the Etruscans possessed, are always a proof of immigration, as the immigrating people rather settles in a few considerable places. Trent and several other cities are large Lombard colonies. Dionysius may be excused, as he relies on Varro’s authority; the latter alone is answerable for the mistake. Here also the designation of the people, the conquering and the conquered one, is confounded.

The conquerors were probably called Cascans. This name Servius has preserved from Saufeius, a grammarian who seems to belong to the first century of the Christian era. They are also met with under the name of Sacranians, and to this the expression in Dionysius refers, that it had been a ἱερὰ νεότης. Part of the people which under the name of Opicans and Oscans inhabited the interior of Italy, or was more likely pushed down from the north, and wedged in between the old Pelasgian places, settled in the Apennines round the lake Fusinus (at present called Celano), towards Reate. Their chief town was called Lista: they bordered on the Siculians, who inhabited the country as far as beyond Tibur. There was a legend concerning them, that in the war with the Sabines, who had already taken from them Reate, and were driving them before them further and further, they had made a vow of a ver sacrum. This custom of the Italian nations when evil times befel them, was kept up also among the Romans. It was vowed to consecrate to the gods all cattle, in short, all that should be produced in the ensuing spring; and to send out in colonies the male children born at that period, as soon as ever they were grown up: the produce was either to be offered up, or redeemed. Thus devoted, the Sacranians marched against Latium, and subjected to themselves the Siculians. In Latium they settled among the old inhabitants, and became united with them into one people, which received the name of Prisci Latini; for, the Cascans must also have been called Prisci. To take Prisci Latini in Livy for Old Latins would be an absurdity: he has borrowed the formula of the declaration of war by the Fetiales, in which the expression first occurs, from the ancient rituals; it goes back to the time of Ancus Marcius, whilst before that of Tarquin the Proud, there were certainly no Latin colonies which we may suppose to have been placed in opposition to the rest of the people. Prisci Latini stands for Prisci et Latini, as the Latin language always expresses two necessary contra-positions, or two notions inseparably combined, by an immediate juxtaposition of the two words. The earliest Romans made as little use of cement in their language, as in their buildings. Brissonius has very clearly shown this, and has thereby fixed the formula Populus Romanus Quirites; only that he goes too far when he asserts that Populus Romanus Quiritium had never been said, which has been justly controverted by J. F. Gronovius. In the same manner, patres conscripti, instead of qui patres, quique conscripti sunt; and in legal forms, locati conducti, emti venditi, &c. Priscus and Cascus mean in after times very old, quaint, as Gothic or old Franconian, do in German; hence we have casce loqui, vocabula casca.—These conquerors spoke Oscan; and from the fusion of their language with the Siculo-Pelasgian arose that extraordinary medley which we call Latin, in which the grammar in some measure, but still more the etymology, contains such a considerable Greek element; a subject on which O. Müller has made those fine enquiries in the first volume of his Etruscans. The ancient Oscan language still exists in some old monuments: in Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are a couple of inscriptions, and the tablet of Bantia (Oppido) may be fully interpreted. Of the two elements in Latin, that which is Greek and that which is not, the latter agrees with the Oscan language. All the words which refer to agriculture, domestic animals, fruits, &c., are either Greek or akin to Greek. We evidently see a conquered agricultural people, and a conquering one from the mountains which was not engaged in agriculture.

From henceforth the trace of the tradition is lost to us, being effaced by the account of the Trojan immigration. This legend has no authenticity whatever, and is merely a later figment to express the relationship between the Trojans and the Latins as Pelasgians. The story of a Trojan colony is found on so many points of Italy, that it is by mere chance that this legend has been more definitely fixed upon Latium; and it was fostered by the wide circulation of the Greek poems, which spread much farther than we generally think.

Among the Romans the legend of the Trojan settlement is comparatively ancient. Nævius, in his poem on the Punic war, gave it already at considerable length; and the Ilians pleaded it with the Romans in their wars against Seleucus Callinicus. If any one should feel inclined to treat these accounts of the foundation of Rome by Æneas seriously, we cannot follow him: some traditions in them have a very national character, but the distance of time is too great between the events and those who described them. Nævius wrote from 950 to 980 years after the period at which the destruction of Troy is generally fixed. It is little known how very much Virgil changed the old legend of the settlement of Æneas in Latium, in which as a poet he was fully warranted; for its features were rude and harsh, as that Latinus had fallen in the war against Æneas, and that Lavinia, first betrothed to Æneas, and then refused, became the prize of the conqueror. The oldest tradition besides speaks of the settlement as a very small one. According to Nævius, Æneas arrived with one ship only; and the tract of land assigned to him consisted, as Cato stated, of not more than seven hundred jugera. Suppose this to have been true, how could any remembrance of it have lasted after nine hundred years?

The original tradition is that Æneas had first lived for three years in a small town called Troy; then, that taking a higher flight, he had founded Lavinium, and thirty years afterwards Alba; and that the three hundredth year after Alba, was that of the building of Rome. This regular progression of the numbers betokens a field which is not that of history. Three thousand years also were certainly fixed as the duration of Rome. There are two different numerical systems in these legends:—the Etruscan with a sæculum of a hundred and ten years, and the Greek, or the Tyrrhenian, in which the sæculum consisted of thirty years. This number thirty had at all times considerable weight on account of the period of the revolution of Saturn, which according to the then existing opinion, as Servius records, was completed within thirty years. Thirty common years constituted among the Greeks a Saturnian, and a hundred Saturnians a grand year. With this the scale of numbers from the foundation of Lavinium to the building of Rome is connected. The earliest Alban history is a nonentity, as the sagacious Dodwell (de Cyclis, diss. X.) has already shown, who indeed on other occasions only too often spoils by his subtleties what he has well begun. The chronology of the Alban-kings in Dionysius, for instance, is mere absurdity and forgery, the names of them being patched together in every possible way. This forgery, as we see from Servius, was committed in a later age by a freedman of Sylla, L. Cornelius Alexander of Miletus, who readily found acceptance at a period when people were glad to have histories of those times of which nothing could be known.

Alba, on the Alban Lake, was in my opinion the capital of the ruling conquerors. It is not accidental that it bears the same name as the town on the Lake Fucinus, from whence the Sacranians had issued. When they were obliged to yield their abode to the Sabines, they founded the Alba again on the banks of a lake; as the Pœni did a New Carthage, the Milesians a New Miletus on the Black Sea, and as is so frequently the case in the New World. This Alba Longa is therefore the seat of the Cascans or Sacranians, and the older Latin towns which lay within its territory have probably had a double fate. Some may have derived part of their population from the immigrants; others may have been subjected without receiving colonies. We find in tradition that these Latin towns had been thirty in number, all of them colonies of Alba, a tradition which is contradicted by the other, which states all of them to have been originally Argive. Both of these might be maintained in this sense, that an ἀποδασμός of the dominant race had settled in each of the towns. Be this as it may, Alba had thirty boroughs (δῆμοι) which belonged to the town as immediate dependencies or cantons: these are the populi Albenses which I have discovered in Pliny. It is not to be doubted, but that the Albans were to their dependencies as the populus of Rome to the plebs, or as Rome in later times to Latium.

At the mention of Alba, few are proof against the prejudice by which I also was beguiled for a long time, that so very much of the history of Alba is lost, that one can only speak of it in connexion with the Trojan or anti-Trojan times; as if every thing said of it by the Romans were based upon delusion and errors of judgment. Indeed, the foundation of Alba by Ascanius; the whole series of the Alban kings with the years of their reigns; the story of Numitor and Amulius; the account of the destruction of the town; all this does not belong to history. Yet the historical existence of Alba is for all that not in the least to be doubted, nor have the ancients ever had a doubt about it. The sacra Albana, the Albani tumuli atque luci bear witness to it. Ruins do not indeed exist any more; yet the situation of the town in the valley of Grotta Ferrata is still to be traced at this day. Between the lake and a long ridge of hills, near the convent Palazzuolo, one still sees even now the rock below towards the lake completely scarped, evidently by the hand of man, so that on that side an attack on the town was impossible; on the other side, on the summit, stood the Arx. That the Albans had the dominion over Latium is a tradition which we may deem authentic, as it rests on the authority of Cincius.[49] The Latins occupied afterwards the spot and the temple of Jupiter. The accounts also that Alba had shared with the thirty towns the flesh of the sacrifices on the Alban mount, and that the Latins after the fall of Alba, had themselves chosen their magistrates, are glimpses of history. The exceedingly ancient Emissarius is still preserved, and through its vault a canal was drawn, fossa Cluilia. In this vault, beneath the centroni, we have still a traceable work, more ancient than any Roman one. Yet that Alba was the capital; that it had the dominion over Latium; that its temple of Jupiter was the central point of the nations under its rule; and the gens Silvia the reigning family, is all that can be said about Alba and the Latins of that time.

It is not to be doubted, that the number of the Latin towns was really thirty, as well as that of the Alban boroughs. This number afterwards is again met with in the later Latin towns, and in the thirty Roman tribes; and it is also at the bottom of the account of Lavinium’s being founded by thirty households, in which the union of the two races may be traced.[50] The account that Lavinium was a Trojan colony, and afterwards abandoned, but again restored by Alba; that, moreover, the sanctuary could not be transferred from thence to Alba; however much it may bear the stamp of antiquity, is after all merely an adaptation of the Trojan and the native tradition. For, Lavinium is nothing else but a general name for Latium, as Panionion for Ionia. Latinus, Lavinus, Lavicus are one and the same name; as Servius also acknowledges. Lavinium was the central point of the Prisci Latini, and without doubt there existed in earlier times, when Alba had not yet the rule over Lavinium, a communion of worship in Alba and Lavinium; as afterwards in Rome at the temple of Diana in the Aventine, and at the Roman and Latin holidays on the Alban mount.

The characters therefore in the Trojan legend are thus to be analysed. Turnus is no other than Turinus, the Τυῤῥηνός of Dionysius; Lavinia, the beautiful maiden, is the name of the Latin people; perhaps they are so distinguished as the inhabitants of the coasts are more especially called Tyrrhenians, those of the interior country, Latins. As the Latins after the battle at the Regillus, are found together with thirty towns in the league with Rome, we cannot doubt but that the number of those towns, of which the dominion belonged in the earliest times to Alba, was also thirty. Only there were not always the same towns in this league; many afterwards perished, others were received in their stead.

Here the same instinct of substituting the fallen off members of political organizations is at work, which is to be perceived every where so long as institutions quietly go on in accordance with the old traditionary forms, and not with the actual wants of the times. Thus also in the twelve Achæan towns, in the seven Frisian maritime provinces, when one is ruined, the number is made up by splitting another. Where once a fixed number exists, although a unit may fall off, it is not given up, but it is always renewed. We may add, that the state of the Latins lost in the west, and gained in the east; we therefore take Alba as having thirty boroughs, and the thirty Latin towns as a state which at first was in league with Alba, and was afterwards subjected to its sovereignty.

The old places of the aborigines were, according to Cato’s important statement in Dionysius, small villages scattered on the hills. Such a place lay upon the Palatine, and had the name of Roma, certainly a Greek one. Not far off, there are several other places with Greek names, Pyrgi and Alsium; nor is it an erroneous supposition that Terracina had formerly been called Τραχεινή, the rough place, or that Formiæ is to be derived from ὅρμος, anchorage, roadstead. As certainly as Pyrgi meant towers, as certainly did Roma the place of strength.[51] Rome is described as a Pelasgian place where Evander lived, the founder of learning and civilization. The first step in civilization, according to the legend, began with Saturn. In the tradition found in Virgil, which is to be taken quite literally, the first men grew out of trees (gensque virum truncis et duro robore creti). As in Greece the μύρμηκες were changed into myrmidons, and the stones of Deucalion into men and women, thus the trees also by some Divine energy grew men. These half men acquired by degrees human manners, and that they owe to Saturn. Yet really liberal cultivation they considered to have originated with Evander, who must not be looked upon as coming from Arcadia, but as the good man. He was the inventor or teacher of the use of letters.

Among the Romans, the conviction prevailed that Romulus, the founder of Rome, had been born of a maiden ravished by a god; that he had been wonderfully preserved alive, rescued from the floods, and suckled by a she-wolf. The ancient date of this poetry cannot be doubted. But did the legend at all times call Romulus the son of Rea Silvia, or of Ilia? Perizonius has first remarked against Ryckius, that Rea Ilia never occurred in combination; that Rea Silvia was the daughter of Numitor, Ilia of Æneas. He is perfectly right. Both Nævius and Ennius, call Romulus the son of Ilia the daughter of Æneas, as Servius in his notes on Virgil, and Porphyrion in those on Horace (Carm. 1, 2.), bear witness. Yet it must not thence be inferred, that this was also a national Roman belief; those poets who were familiar with the Greeks, might have annexed their legends to the Greek poems. But the old Romans could not possibly have made the mother of the founder of their city a daughter of Æneas, whose time was dated 333 or 360 years earlier. Dionysius says that his narrative, which was that of Fabius, is found in the sacred songs; it is also consistent with itself. Fabius cannot, as Plutarch asserts, have borrowed it from a wretched unknown Greek writer, Diocles. The statue of the she-wolf was erected in 457, long before Diocles wrote; at least a hundred years before Fabius. Certainly, therefore, this tradition is the older Roman one, and it places Rome in connection with Alba. There has lately been a monument discovered at Bovillæ, an altar which the gentiles Julii erected lege Albana; a religious reference therefore of a Roman family to Alba. The relation between the two towns goes as far back as to the founder. The well known legend, with the old poetical details of which Livy and Dionysius already leave out much, because they were afraid of accumulating marvels, is the following.

Numitor and Amulius were both of them candidates for the throne. Numitor is a prænomen; but the name of Amulius says nothing in proof of his having belonged to the gens Silvia; I question therefore if the old tradition took them for brothers. Amulius, so it is said, had got possession of the throne, and had made Rea Silvia the daughter of Numitor, a vestal, in order that the Silvian race might become extinct. This shows a want of knowledge of public law, as a daughter surely could not convey gentilician rights. The name Rea Silvia is old, yet Rea is only a cognomen; rea femina is in Boccaccio, and still to this day in Tuscany, a woman who has lost her honour. A priestess Rea in Virgil is ravished by Hercules. Whilst Rea in a grove was drawing water for a sacrifice, an eclipse of the sun took place, and she fled from a wolf into a cavern where Mars overpowered her. At her delivery, the sun is again eclipsed, and the image of Vesta covers its eyes. Livy here has left out the wonderful part. The tyrant threw Rea with her children into the Anio: she lost her life in the river; but the river god took her soul, changed her into an immortal goddess, and made her his wife. This is now modified by the tale of her imprisonment, which is prosaic enough to be of later invention. The Anio bore the cradle, just as if it were a boat, into the Tiber, on which it was drifted to the foot of the Palatine, the waters being high in consequence of a flood; and there it was overturned at the root of a fig-tree. The she-wolf takes the children forth, and suckles[52] them: Mars sends a woodpecker, which brings them food, and the bird parra,[53] who keeps them free from vermin. These details are scattered: the narrators have as much as possible stripped them of the marvellous. Faustulus, the legend goes on to say, found the boys nursed with the milk of the strong brute; he brought them up with his twelve sons, and they became the stoutest of them all. As chiefs of the herdsmen of the Palatine, they had a quarrel with those of Numitor on the Aventine;—the Palatine and the Aventine are always hostile;—Remus is led away a prisoner to Alba; Romulus rescues him; the descent from Numitor is discovered, and the latter restored to the government. They receive permission to settle at the foot of the Palatine hill, the place of their rescue.

From this beautiful poem the falsifiers tried to make out something credible; even the unprejudiced and poetical Livy sets aside as much as possible whatever was most marvellous. But the falsifiers went yet a step beyond. In those days when no one any more believed in the ancient deities, they sought to discover something rational in the old legends; and thus they here got up a story which Plutarch received with predilection, and which Dionysius also does not disdain, who, however, likewise relates the old legend in a mutilated form. Dionysius says that many people believed in demons, and that such a demon might forsooth be the father of Romulus. Yet he himself is far from believing in it. On the contrary, his version is that Amulius had in disguise offered violence to Rea Silvia, playing off conjuror’s tricks of thunder and lightning; that he had done so in order to have a pretext for doing away with her, but had then been asked by his daughter not to drown her, and had thereupon imprisoned her for life; that the herdsman whom he commissioned to expose the children, had preserved them at the entreaty of Numitor, and put two others in their stead; and that Numitor’s grandsons had been taken to a guest-friend at Gabii, who had educated them according to their rank, and caused them to be instructed in Greek literature. It was really attempted to introduce this into history; and indeed some of the details of this silly story have found their way into the narrative of the historians, e. g. that the old Alban nobility had emigrated with the two brothers to Rome. Had this been the case, no asylum would have been wanting, and it would not have been necessary to obtain the connubium with the other nations by force.

More historically important on the other hand is the difference of opinion between the two brothers concerning the building of the city, and the spot on which it is to be founded. According to the old legend, both are equally heads of the colony, both of them kings. Romulus is generally stated to have wished to build on the Palatine; and Remus is said by some to have decided in favour of the Aventine, by others, of the Remuria. This is, according to Plutarch, a hill three miles south of Rome, and can be no other than the eminence which lies obliquely from St. Paul’s; and this is the more likely, as this hill, though in a country elsewhere very unhealthy, is remarkable for the healthiness of the air,—a very important consideration in researches concerning the old Latin towns; as it may safely be inferred, that where the air is now wholesome, it was also the same at that time, and that where it is now unwholesome, it was then no better. The general account of tradition is that a quarrel had arisen between Romulus and Remus, as to which of the two should give the name to the city, as well as where it was to be built. Without doubt there also existed therefore on that hill a town called Remuria; and at a subsequent period we find this name transferred to the Aventine, as was so often done. According to the common story, Auguries were to decide the matter. Romulus watched on the Palatine, Remus on the Aventine. The latter watched the whole of the night, but saw nothing; towards sunrise he saw six vultures flying from the north to the south, and he sent word to Romulus. But his brother, vexed that no sign had appeared to him, fraudulently sent him a message that he had seen twelve vultures; and in fact, at the very moment when the messenger of Romulus reached Remus, twelve vultures made their appearance, and these he claimed for himself. This is, however, impossible; for as the Palatine and the Aventine lie so near each other, every Roman only knew too well, that whatever any one saw high in the air on either of the two mountains, could not in any way escape notice on the other. The legend cannot therefore be old: it is only to be upheld by substituting Remuria for the Aventine. As the Palatine was the seat of the noblest patrician tribe, and the Aventine exclusively the city of the plebeians, there reigned between the two an undying enmity; and thus in aftertimes that scene was transferred from the Remuria, which was far off from the city, to the Aventine. According to Ennius, the Aventine was the very spot from which Romulus watched the heavens, so that the station of Remus must have been at Remuria, and Romulus, when he had observed the Augury, threw his javelin towards the Palatine. This is the old tradition which the later authors neglected. He takes possession of the Palatine. That the javelin took root, and grew into a tree which stood to the time of Nero, is symbolical of the imperishableness of the new city, and of the help of the gods. That Romulus had played false, is a later addition: the fine poem of Ennius in Cicero de Divinatione[54] knows nothing of the circumstance. From hence it now follows that in the earliest times there were two towns, Roma and Remuria; the latter a good way outside the city, and far from the Palatine.

Romulus now drew the boundaries of his city; but Remus leaped in mockery over the ditch, for which Celer slew him, an intimation that no one should step with impunity over the bulwarks of Rome. Romulus, however, fell into grief on the death of Remus, instituted festivals for him, and caused an empty throne to be raised at the side of his own. Thus we have a double rule, which ends with the overthrow of Remuria.

The next question is, what were these two cities,—Roma and Remuria? They were evidently Pelasgian towns. There is an old tradition, that Sicelus had come from Roma on the south to the Pelasgians; that is to say, the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians are driven to the Morgetians in Lucania and in the island, who were allied to them in blood. Among the Greeks, according to Dionysius, the belief was general that Rome was a Pelasgian, i. e. a Tyrrhenian city; but the writers from whom he had this information are lost to us. There is a fragment, however, in which it is stated that Rome was a sister-town of Antium and Ardea. We have also to quote here the notice from the Chronicle of Cumæ, that Evander had had his palatium on the Palatine. As an Arcadian he is likewise a Pelasgian. To us he appears less important than he is in the legend: he is one of the benefactors of the people, and to the Pelasgians in Italy he brought the use of letters and the arts, as Damaratus did to the Tyrrhenians in Etruria. In this meaning, therefore, Rome is indeed a Latin town; and that not a mixed, but a purely Tyrrheno-Pelasgian one. The after fortunes of this settlement are indicated in the allegories.

Romulus found the band which he had with him much too small. To the numbers of three thousand foot and three hundred horsemen, which Livy got from the Commentarii Pontificum, no regard should be given; for this is merely the sketch of the later Roman military array, dated back to the earliest times. According to the old tradition, his little troop was too small for him, and he opened an asylum on the Capitol. This asylum, according to the old description, only took in a very small space; a proof that these things were not at all understood as history. Therein were all sorts of people gathered together,—thieves, murderers, in short, rogues and vagabonds. This is the simple account of the way in which clientship began. In the bitterness with which the different classes afterwards regarded each other, this has been applied to the Patricians, as though their earliest ancestors had been scoundrels. But the Patricians would naturally be deemed descendants of the free companions of Romulus. Those who took refuge there are men who placed themselves as dependants under the protection of the really free citizens. But wives were now wanting to them, and they tried to get the right of intermarriage (connubium) with the neighbouring towns; especially perhaps with Antemnæ, which was only four (Roman) miles distant from Rome, with the Sabines and others. This was refused. Romulus, therefore, had recourse to stratagem: he gave out that he had discovered the altar of Consus, the god of counsel, an allegory to denote his usual craftiness. In the midst of the festival, the Sabine maidens were carried away, thirty in number; for this is the genuine old tradition, a proof how small people pictured to themselves old Rome to have been. From these the Curies received their names. Afterwards the number was found to be too little; and it was cunningly made out that these thirty had been chosen by the drawing of lots to give their names to the Curies, and Valerius Antias fixes the numbers of those who were carried off at five hundred and twenty-seven. The Rape is placed in the fourth month of the city, because the Consualia were kept in August, and the festival in commemoration of the foundation of the city in April; afterwards it was made four years later, as by Cn. Gellius, and Dionysius finds this much more worthy of belief. Wars arise from it; first with the neighbouring towns, which yielded one after the other; at last with the Sabines. There is no trace in the old tradition of the latter having been carried on to any length; yet in later times it was necessary to assume it, because another standard was then adopted. Lucumo and Cælius march forth to join Romulus, an allusion to the inroad of Cæles Vibenna, which, however, took place much later. Tatius, by means of treason, gains a settlement on the hill which was called the Tarpeian stronghold. Between the Palatine and the Tarpeian rock an indecisive battle is fought, until at length the Sabine women threw themselves between the combatants, and the strife was put an end to by an agreement that the rule should be shared between the Romans and the Sabines. This happened according to the annals in the fourth year. But it lasted a short time only; Tatius was slain at a sacrifice at Laurentum, and his throne was left vacant. Before that time, each king had a senate of a hundred members, which after having deliberated separately, joined together in what was called a comitium. Romulus reigned alone all the remaining time. The old legend knows nothing of his having been a tyrant: on the contrary, according to Ennius, he continued to be a mild and benevolent king, and Tatius was a tyrant. The ancient tradition had nothing more than the beginning and the end of the reign of Romulus: all that lies between, the war with the Veientines, Fidenates, &c. are silly stories of the later annalists; and whilst the poem itself is beautiful, this narrative is quite tasteless. It says, for instance, that Romulus slew with his own hand ten thousand Veientines, and more of the same stuff. The old poem proceeds at once to the period when Romulus fulfils his career, and when to Mars the promise given him by Jupiter was granted, that Romulus might be the only man whom he should dare to introduce among the gods. According to this ancient story, the king once reviewed his army at the marsh of Capræ, when, as at the time of his conception, an eclipse of the sun came on; and then likewise arose a whirlwind, in which Mars rode down in a chariot of fire, and took him up with him to heaven. From this beautiful lay, the most pitiful interpretations were wrested. It was said that Romulus had been among the senators, who had stabbed him, cut him in pieces, and carried him off beneath their togas. This silly story has become the general one. In order that a cause for such a deed of horror might not be wanting, it was now told that Romulus in his latter days had become a tyrant, and that the senators had revenged themselves upon him in this manner.

After the death of Romulus, there was for a long time a feud between the Romans and the people of Tatius; the Sabines wishing for a king from among themselves, since no new election had been made to fill the room of Tatius, whilst the Romans would have one of their own race. Then, it is said, it was at last agreed that one people was to elect the king from the other people.

And here we must speak of the relation of the two nations to each other, as it in reality existed.

All the nations of antiquity lived in fixed forms, and their political communities were always organized, down to the lowest ranks. When cities rise into nations, we always find at first a division into tribes. Herodotus mentions such tribes when Cyrene was colonized, and in later times this was also the case at the founding of Thurii; yet when a city any where existed as such, its claim to this character consisted in this, that its citizens were at a certain time divided into communities (γένη), which had a common chapel and the worship of a common hero. In the higher stages of these organizations, the clans were also in certain numerical proportions united into Curies (φράτραι). These clans are not families, but free associations, sometimes close, sometimes open; and in certain cases the general assembly of the state might assign them new members; as in Venice the great council was a close body, and it was so likewise in many of the oligarchical states of antiquity.

All the communities had a council and a commonalty, that is to say, a small and a great council, or a council and a popular assembly, the latter of which consisted of the guilds or clans; and these again were united as it were into parishes. The Latin towns have all a council of a hundred persons. This was divided into ten decuries; and these gave rise to the term decurions, which was continued to the latest times for the magistrates of the towns, and also passed by the lex Julia into the constitution of the Italian municipalities. That this council consisted of a hundred persons is shown by Savigny in the first volume of his history of Roman jurisprudence. This constitution survived until late in the middle ages, and was abolished when corporations of the different trades came into the place of the municipal constitution. Giovanni Villani says, that before the revolution in the twelfth century there had been in Florence a hundred buoni uomini, who managed the affairs of the town. There is nothing in our German cities corresponding to this constitution. We must not consider these hundred as gentlemen; but they were, as in the small free cities of the empire, an assembly of the burghers and husbandmen, each representing a clan. They are called by Propertius patres pelliti. The Curia at Rome, which was thatched with straw (recens horrebat regia culmo in Virgil), was a faithful remembrance of the times when Rome, buried in what may be deemed the night of history, stood like a small country town surrounded by its fields.

The earliest event which we are enabled to make out from the forms of allegory, by comparison with what happened in other places in Italy, is a consequence of the continued great movement of the different races. It did not stop when the Oscans were driven from the Fucinus to the Alban Lake; it went much farther. The Sabines may have rested for some time, but they pressed on far beyond the countries of which we have traditions. They begin as one of the smallest of peoples, and become afterwards one of the greatest in Italy. The Marrucinians, Caudinians, Vestinians, Marsians, Pelignians, in short all the Samnite peoples; the Lucanians, the Oscan part of the Bruttians, the Picenians and others, have all sprung from the Sabine stock: and yet we have traditions only about the founding of some of them. This people was down to the period at which we must fix the foundation of Rome, in a state of expansion. It is said the Sabines, guided by a bullock, had advanced into Opica, and had thus founded the country of the Samnites. Yet earlier perhaps, they had moved down below the Tiber, so that we there find Sabine towns mixed with Latin ones; and we meet with some of them also on the banks of the Anio. Into the country of the later Sabines, they in all likelihood only came subsequently; for Falerii is a Tuscan town, and certainly its population had once been entirely Tyrrhenian.

At the advance of the Sabines, some of the Latin towns maintained their ground, others gave way. Fidenæ belongs to the former class: north of it all is Sabine. Now we find at the side of Old Roma a Sabine town on the Quirinal and Capitoline, hard by the Latin one; yet the existence of this town is all that we know of it. A tradition is extant, that before that there had once been a Siculian town, Saturnia,[55] on the Capitoline; this then must have been conquered by the Sabines. Whatever may have been the case with regard to this, and to the existence of an old town on the Janiculum, there were here a number of small towns. The two cities could exist together, as there was a deep marsh between them.

The town on the Palatine may have been for a long time dependent on the Sabine conqueror, who, according to tradition, was Titus Tatius, and hence it is that his memory has been so hated. He was slain at the sacrifice of Laurentum. Ennius calls him a tyrant in the well-known line:

The existence of a Sabine town on the Quirinal hill is confirmed by the number of Sabine chapels which undoubtedly stood there, as Varro still knew, who proved from this fact that the Sabine ritual was received by the Romans. This Sabine element in the Roman worship has almost always been mistaken.[56]

The legend that by the rape of the virgins war had arisen between the Sabines and Romans, is without doubt a symbolical account of the relation between the two places, when as yet there was no intermarriage between them. The Sabines had the upper hand, and denied it; the Romans conquered it by force of arms. The Sabines were certainly originally the masters; but by some movement of the Romans, other Sabine places like Antemnæ and Fidenæ, were subjected, and the Sabines were thus isolated from their countrymen. The Romans again insisted upon their independence, and from thence arose war, the issue of which may have been that which is handed down to us,—only that Romulus is to be set aside,—namely, that both places formed a sort of confederacy as two closely united towns, each with a senate of a hundred men and a king, with an offensive and defensive alliance; and that in common deliberation, the assembly of their clans met on that spot between the two cities which afterwards bore the name of Comitium. Thus they formed against the foreigner only one state.

The account of a double state existed already among the ancients; yet the only proofs of it which have been preserved are scattered notices here and there, chiefly among the scholiasts. The head of Janus which in the earliest times is represented on the Roman As, is symbolical of it. Roman antiquaries have quite correctly understood this. The empty royal throne by the side of the Curule seat of Romulus refers to the time when there was one king only, and is emblematical of the equal but dormant right of the other people.[57]

It is also historical that this agreement was not of long duration; and that the Roman king usurped the rule over the Sabines; and that the two councils combined and formed one senate under one king, it being also settled that the king should by turns be a Roman and a Sabine; and that each time the king should be chosen by the other people, yet that no one should be forced upon the non-electing people whom they did not like, but that he should only be able to enter upon the imperium, if in the first place the auguries were favourable, and moreover the whole people had confirmed him. The other tribe had therefore the right of recognising or rejecting the king elect. This is told of Numa as a fact; yet it is merely a representation of the right taken from the books of rituals. This strange double act of election, which seems such a riddle, and was formerly so entirely misunderstood, is in this manner quite intelligible.

When the two states amalgamated, after having existed separately perhaps for ages, the towns ceased to be towns, and the collective mass of their clans formed itself into tribes. The nation consisted therefore of two tribes. From the earliest times the style of addressing the Roman people was, Populus Romanus Quirites, out of which, when the origin was forgotten, Populus Romanus Quiritium was made; just as lis vindiciæ afterwards was into lis vindiciarum. This change is older than Livy; yet the correct use of the phrase is still met with in his time, though much encroached upon by the false one. The old tradition says that the name Quirites had after the union of the two tribes been adopted as a common one. But this is false. The name first becomes common at a very late period only. When for a long time there had been no more difference between Romans and Sabines, nor between these and the Luceres; and even later, when that between the patricians and plebeians had become almost wholly extinct, this denomination still remained, and was transferred to the plebeians. Thus the two towns stood side by side as tribes (tribus), and it is merely in acknowledgment of the old tradition that we call the Latins Ramnes, and the Sabines Tities. That the derivation from Romulus and T. Tatius is incorrect, does not impair the truth of the main assertion.

Dionysius, who had good materials, and made use of very many of them, must indeed, for the time of the Consuls, have sometimes had more than he gives; especially concerning one important change in the constitution, where he has a few words only, and has either not seen clearly, or has been careless.[58] Yet with regard to the olden times of the kings he was clear. He says that there had been a dissension between the two tribes concerning the senates, which Numa had compromised, by not taking any thing for the Ramnes as the first tribe, but bestowing honours upon the Tities. This is perfectly plain. The senate, which at first consisted of one hundred, but now of two, was divided into ten decuries, each of which had a president. These are the decem primi, and these were taken from the Ramnes. They formed among themselves the Collegium, which, when there was no king, held the government by rotation; each for five days, yet so that the same always came back in their turn, as we must correctly assume with Livy. As for Dionysius, he brings in his Greek notions, taken from the Attic Prytanies; and Plutarch quite misunderstands the matter.

Not only the senate, but also the augurs and pontiffs, were doubled in number; so that each college consisted of four members, two of them from the Ramnes, and two from the Tities. These changes were attached indeed by Dionysius and Cicero to the names of certain kings; yet this must not hinder us from acknowledging them as quite historical.

Thus was Rome in the second stage of its development. This state of compromise is that of peace, and is described as the reign of Numa. Concerning him the traditions are simple and short. They had the ideal of a peaceful period, with a holy man at the head of affairs like Nicholas Von der Flue in Switzerland. People pictured to themselves Numa inspired by the goddess Egeria, whom he married in the grove of the Camenæ; who introduces him among the quire of her sisters, afterwards melts into tears at his death, and gives her name to a well springing from them. Such a peace of forty years, during which no people had risen against Rome, because Numa’s piety had had its influence upon the other nations, is a fine idea; but it is historically impossible at that time,—evidently a poetical fiction.

With Numa the first sæculum closes, and quite a new epoch begins; just as in Hesiod the ages succeed each other. The age of the heroes is followed by the iron era: it is evidently a period;—quite a different order of the world is supposed to be commencing. Hitherto we had mere poetical fiction; but now with Tullus Hostillus a sort of history begins, i. e. events which on the whole must be taken as historical, being foreign to history only from the light in which they appear. Thus the destruction of Alba is historical, very probably also the reception of the Albans into Rome. The conquests of Ancus Marcius are very credible: this point of real history stands like an oasis in the midst of legends. Something like this we once find in the Chronicle of Cologne. In the Abyssinian annals, there occurs in the thirteenth century one story, quite explicitly given, which we recognise as a piece of contemporary narrative. Before and after that, nothing historical is met with.

The history which now follows is like an image seen from behind, like phantasmagoria. The names of the kings are entirely fictitious. How long the Roman kings have reigned, no mortal man can know, as we do not know how many have reigned. For seven was fixed upon for the sake of the number only, which is found in connexion with many proportions, especially some important astronomical ones. The chronological dates are therefore utterly worthless. One ought to look upon the interval, from the origin of Rome to the times when people were able to execute those gigantic works which were really executed under the kings, and which vied with those of the Egyptians,—the sewers, the wall of Servius, and other buildings, as at least a succession of centuries. Romulus and Numa are to be wholly set aside; yet there follows a long period in which the races gradually amalgamate with each other, and spread, until the regal government disappears, and makes way for a republic.

For remembrance sake, we must, however, give the history as we have it. Between Rome and Alba there is not the least connexion, not even in those writers who suppose Rome to be an offshoot from Alba. Yet all at once, under Tullus Hostilius, they appear as enemies; each of the nations seeks for war, and the only question is to gain the favour of Fortune, on the strength of each party pretending to be the injured one, and wishing to declare war. Both mutually sent envoys to demand satisfaction for depredations committed. The form was, that these envoys, the Fetiales, told to every one they met the grievances of their town; then they proclaimed them in the market-place of the foreign town, and if after three times ten days no satisfaction were given, they said, “We have done enough and now return,” whereupon the senators at home deliberated about the manner of the satisfaction. In this formula, therefore, the res, the giving up of the guilty, and the restitution of the body was to be demanded. Now we are told, that the two nations at exactly the same time, sent such envoys; but that Tullus Hostilius had for a while detained the Albans sent to him, until he had learned for certain that the Romans had not had right done them at Alba, and had there declared war. He now first admitted the envoys into the senate, and to their complaints it was answered, that they themselves had not redressed the grievances of the Romans. Livy therefore thus continues: bellum in trigesimum diem dixerant. Yet the formula is post trigesimum diem; why did Livy or the annalist whom he followed, alter this? Quite naturally. One rides from Rome to Alba in a couple of hours; so that it was impossible that the Alban envoys should have been detained in Rome for thirty days, without being apprised of what was in the meanwhile going on at Alba. Livy saw this, and therefore altered the formula. But to the old poet this was of no consequence: he did not let it trouble him. He enlarged in his imagination the distance, and made Rome and Alba great states.

Just as undeniably poetical is the whole representation of the state of affairs in which Alba’s fate was decided. We shall dwell a little on this point, in order to show how a semblance of history may be got up.

There was between Rome and Alba a ditch, fossa Cluilia or Cloelia; and moreover there must have been a tradition that here the Albans had pitched their camp. In Livy and Dionysius we find it mentioned, that a general of the Albans, Cluilius, had given it this name, and had also died in that spot. The latter circumstance must have been told to account for the general being afterwards a different man, Mettius Fuffetius, and yet that it should be still possible to connect the name of that ditch with the Albans. The two states commit the issue of the feud to single combat. Dionysius says that the traditions were not unanimous, as to whether the Roman champions were called Horatii or Curiatii; yet he as well as Livy gives them the name of Horatii, in all likelihood, because the larger number of the annalists so had it. Who, without that passage of Dionysius, would have guessed any thing of that uncertainty? The combat of the three twin-born children is symbolical of both the states being at that time divided into three tribes. Attempts have indeed been made to clear away the improbability by denying the triple birth,—one of them is even mentioned as the youngest; yet the legend goes still farther, the brothers being said to have been the sons of two sisters, and to have been born on the same day. This is to represent the absolute equality between Rome and Alba. The issue was the complete subjection of Alba. Yet Alba did not remain faithful. In the struggle with the Etruscans which followed, Mettius Fuffetius shows himself a traitor to Rome; but he is prevented from executing his plan, and afterwards falls on the fugitive Etruscans; Tullus by way of punishment caused him to be torn in pieces, and Alba to be demolished; and the most distinguished Alban clans were transferred to Rome.

Equally poetical is the legend of the death of Tullus. He foolishly undertakes conjurations like Numa, and thereby draws the thunderbolt upon his own head.

If we try to make out the historical substance of these legends, we come to a period when Rome no longer stands alone, but has already colonies with Roman settlers, who possess a third of the soil, and who hold the sway. This is the case with a number of towns, most of them old Siculian ones. So much is certain, that Alba was destroyed, and that after its fall, the towns of the Prisci Latini formed an independent and compact confederacy. How Alba was destroyed is involved in great obscurity. Whether, as it is said, it was ever forced to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome; whether it was destroyed by Romans and Latins combined, or by Latins or Romans alone, are questions which no human sagacity can solve. The destruction by the Latins rising against Alba’s superiority is the most probable; but whether in that case Rome received the Albans into her bosom, will ever remain uncertain. That Alban clans were settled at Rome we cannot doubt, as little as that the Prisci Latini from henceforth existed as a consolidated state. Yet if we consider that Alba lies in the middle of the Latin country; that the Alban hill was their common sanctuary, the grove of Ferentina their place of assembly; the greater probability is this, that Rome did not destroy Alba, but that the latter perished in the insurrection of the Latin towns, and that the Romans strengthened themselves by the admission of the Albans.

Whether the Albans first built on the Cælius, is more than we can ascertain. The account which places the foundation of the town on the Cælius in the times of Romulus, tends to prove that before the reception of the Albans, a town already existed here. But what weight has that account? A third tradition represents it as an Etruscan colony of Cæles Vibenna.

The destruction of Alba had an extraordinary effect on the greatness of Rome. At all events there now existed a third town on the Cælius and part of the Esquiliæ, which seems to have been very populous. Such a settlement quite close to other towns was made for the sake of mutual protection. Between the two older towns there was a perpetual marsh and morass; the Roman town was likewise bordered on its south side by a piece of stagnant water; but between the third town and Rome there was dry ground. Rome had also a considerable suburb towards the Aventine, behind a wall and ditch, as is represented in the legend of Remus. The latter is a personification of the plebeians: he jumps from the side of the Aventine over the ditch.

The Sabine town had without doubt the name of Quirium; for the πολιτικόν of it is Quiris. This is certain. Almost as little do I doubt but that the town on the Cælius was Lucerum; because, when it was united with Rome, its citizens were called Lucertes (Luceres). The ancients derive this name from Lucumo king of the Tuscans, or from Lucerus king of Ardea. The meaning of the latter may perhaps be this, that the tribe was Tyrrheno-Latin, since Ardea was the chief town of that tribe. Thus Rome was enlarged by a third element, which is not, however, on an equal footing with the other two, but is in subjection to them, just as Ireland was to Great Britain before the year 1782. Yet although they were obliged to acknowledge this supremacy, they were already looked upon as being a part of the whole, as a third tribus with an independent administration, though with inferior rights. What here shows us our way is the statement of Festus, who on the subject of Roman antiquities is very trustworthy, inasmuch as he makes extracts from Verrius Flaccus. In a few points only has one of the two in my opinion made a mistake; all the rest may be accounted for by the deficiency of the extract, as Festus did not always understand Verrius Flaccus. The statement of Festus, which I am now speaking of, is this, that Tarquin the Proud had reduced the number of the vestals to six, so that each tribe might have two of them. In connexion with this is to be taken the passage in the tenth book of Livy, which asserts that the augurs were to represent the three tribes. The numbers in the Roman priestly colleges may always be divided either by two or by three: by three, those of the vestal virgins, of the great flamens; by two, those of the augurs, the pontiffs, the fetiales; these last represented only the two first tribes. Before the passing of the Ogulnian law, there were only four augurs; and when afterwards five plebeian ones were added, the basis of this increase was indeed a different[59] one; yet the ancient form of divisibility by three was kept up. The pontiffs, of whom there were likewise four, had at that time only four added to them. This then would seem to be an inconsistency; but a passage of Cicero on the subject has been overlooked, in which he tells us that the number of those added had been five, evidently counting the Pontifex Maximus with them, which Livy does not.—In the same manner there were twenty Fetiales, ten for each tribe; and Numa added to the Palatine Salii, another brotherhood of the same kind on the Quirinal. Every where the two first tribes are plainly opposed to each other on an equal footing, while the third is left in the background.

The third rank accordingly consisted of free citizens; yet it had not the same rights as the two first. Nevertheless it thought itself better than all other people; it stood in the same position as that in which the Venetian citizens of the mainland did to the nobili. The nobleman of Venice treated one of these citizens with more regard than he showed to any of the others, so long as he did not take upon himself to claim to have a voice in political matters. Whoever belonged to the Luceres called himself a Roman; and if the dictator of Tusculum had come to Rome, the man of the third tribe in it would have looked down upon him as an inferior, although he himself was of no account.

Tullus is succeeded by Ancus. Tullus makes his appearance as one of the Ramnes, as a descendant of Hostus Hostilius, one of the companions of Romulus; but Ancus on the contrary is a Sabine, and a grandson of Numa. His story has an historical air: there is none of the colouring of poetry in it. The development of the state advances in his reign another step. Rome and the Latin towns are, according to the old description, at war with each other, and the Romans carry it on with success. How many of the details of which we are told here, are historical, I cannot decide: that a war took place is credible enough. It is said that Ancus after this war led away many thousand Latins, and established them on the Aventine. The ancients judged differently of him: he at one time appears as captator auræ popularis, and at another he is called bonus Ancus. Like the three first kings, he is also stated to have been a lawgiver: of the later ones this is no more mentioned. He is said besides to have founded the colony of Ostia, and therefore to have extended his rule to the mouth of the Tiber.

Ancus seems, like Tullus, to be historical; only we can hardly suppose that the one was the immediate successor of the other, and that the events which are placed in their reigns really belonged to those times. These events must be considered in the following manner. When at the end of the fourth reign, the Romans, after a long feud, came to an agreement with the Latins about the renewal of the long neglected league, Rome dropped her claims to a dominion which she could not preserve, and in exchange enlarged herself on another and a safer side. The eastern colonies coalesced with the preserved Latin towns, although this is nowhere expressly stated. Part of the Latin country was yielded to Rome, the rest entered into relations of friendship, and perhaps of isopolity with it. Rome in this acted wisely, as England did when she acknowledged the United States of North America.

In this manner Rome acquired a distretto (district). The many thousand settlers whom Ancus is said to have led to the Aventine, are the population of the Latin towns which fell to Rome, a much more numerous one than that of the two old tribes, even with the addition of the third, which was already much the largest. In this rural district lay the strength of Rome; from it was the army raised with which the Romans carried on their wars. Now it would have been natural to admit this population as a fourth tribe, but this did not please the Romans: the constitution of the state was closed, and it was looked upon as a trust in which nothing must be changed. As our forefathers in their different tribes clung to their own peculiar laws (the emperor Otho made a question arising out of the law of inheritance to be decided by an appeal to the judgment of God), so was it likewise among the Greeks and Romans. A town in Sicily had Chalcidian Nomima, another had Doric ones, although the population was entirely mixed: in the former there were four; in the latter, three tribes.[60] The division into three tribes was an indigenous Latin one; but it may be that the Sabines in their towns had the division into four.

Here we have the first beginning of the plebes. Although the story that Ancus led the Latins away from their homes, and transplanted them in Rome, deserves no credit, because it is impossible; yet it is not to be doubted that Ancus Marcius is justly mentioned as the builder of a town on the Aventine. Here arose a town, which to the very latest times kept itself politically separated from Rome proper, and which for a very long period, as a byetown, was not comprehended in the Pomœrium.

Ancus is succeeded by Tarquinius Priscus, who is represented as a half Etruscan, son of an Etruscan woman and of Damaratus. The latter is said to have been a Bacchiades, who in the revolution of Cypselus had left Corinth with great treasures, and emigrated to Tarquinii. His heir was his son Lucius Tarquinius, as an elder son, Aruns, had previously died, leaving behind him a wife whom the father did not know to be with child. This account is very generally believed, because Polybius, though a Greek, mentions Tarquin as a son of Damaratus, and because the time corresponds. Yet this is after all merely an illusion. The whole agreement hinges upon the correctness of our chronological dates of the Roman kings, according to which Tarquinius Priscus ascended the throne in the year of the city 132; but if we must place him at a later time, the story of Damaratus and Cypselus, which pretty certainly belongs to the thirtieth Olympiad, falls at once to the ground. Now it has already been remarked in the general review of the sources of Roman history, that all the old annalists, with the single exception of subtle Piso, have never doubted but that Tarquin the Proud was the son of Tarquinius Priscus; and consequently the date assigned for the latter must be altogether incorrect. And therefore the connexion with Damaratus becomes impossible.

Damaratus belongs to the old tradition about the connexion between Greece and Etruria, and of the civilization which came from Greece to Etruria. As Evander did to the Latins, so does Damaratus bring the letters of Cadmus to the Etruscans, or Tyrrhenians; and he also belongs, according to the most ancient Greek tradition, to equally early times. The alleged connexion with Tarquinius Priscus arose from the circumstance that the old legend speaks of Tarquinii as the place where Damaratus settled. Of his descent as a Bacchiad, the tradition certainly knew nothing: it was added by later historizing accounts, which every where tried to keep up a sort of link with history. The reason for referring Damaratus to Tarquinii was partly this, that Tarquinii was an important town, and partly also that between Tarquinii and Corinth there is a connexion not to be mistaken. Formerly the vases and vessels found in Tuscany were taken for Etruscan; but afterwards people most justly gave up that opinion, though they now believed that such vases had never existed in ancient Etruria. But there have been vessels dug up at Corneto which are perfectly similar to the oldest Greek ones,—not to those which were formerly called Etruscan but to the real Greek ones from the earliest times, especially to the Corinthian ones which Dodwell has copied.[61] Fragments of the same kind are only found there near the old Tarquinii. In all the rest of Tuscany such a vessel has hardly been met with more than once or twice; whilst in the north-eastern part of the country, near Arezzo and Fiesole, the Arretinian vessels of baked red clay with embossed figures of quite a peculiar style of art are quite common, which, on the other hand, are nowhere found near the coast. This connexion of the art of Tarquinii with that of Greece, especially Corinth, explains the tradition that the artists Eucheir and Eugrammos had accompanied Damaratus from Corinth.

When once Tarquinius Priscus was connected with Tarquinii, and the tradition besides was remembered, that the solemn worship of the Greeks had first been introduced by him, it was said, “this is the work of the old Greeks;” and now it became necessary to compare the Roman chronology, as laid down in the books of the pontiffs, with the Greek one, which could already be done, as Timæus had written. Then it was found that the connexion became possible, if Damaratus was made the father of Tarquin. This Tarquinius Priscus or Lucumo, it was said, had with his wife Tanaquil, an Etruscan soothsayer, betaken himself to Rome, being only a half citizen at Tarquinii; and on his journey thither, a miracle happens to him. Of his reign many glorious things are told. Yet here the accounts differ: one, that of Livy, is very modest; another makes him conquer all the Etruscan towns. This is to be read at length in Dionysius; the story of it has its place in the Roman annals, so that Augustus even had these victories marked in the triumphal Fasti as three triumphs with definite dates, as we see from the fragments which remain.[62] Now the Romans had so much the more reason for believing these statements, as Tarquinius Priscus is always mentioned as the man who united the two towns, that of the Sabines, and that of the Romans, and built the gigantic works by which also the valleys were filled up.

The same account, generally calls Tarquinius Priscus Lucumo; yet this was never a name, but the Etruscan title of a prince. Whenever the Romans want to invent any thing about the Etruscans, they always call the men Lucumo, Aruns, or Lars. The last of these probably means king. Aruns is a common name, as we may see from the inscriptions of the Etruscan tombs, of which we cannot indeed understand one word, but yet may recognise the names. I have looked over all the Etruscan inscriptions, and have arrived at this conviction, that there is in them an entirely different language, of which we can only guess some words: for instance, ril avil means vixit annos. Lucumo is nowhere found on them; and the old philologians also, as Verrius Flaccus, knew that it was no name. The Romans had several traditions concerning a Lucumo who acts a part in Roman history; one, for instance, was a companion of Romulus. No one else is meant by any of them but Lucius Tarquinius Priscus; that is to say, the tradition referred every thing to him that was told of the others. Livy says that he had given himself at Rome the name of L. Tarquinius Priscus, for which the philologians reproach him as guilty of a great oversight, which, however, is only to be deemed one if we suppose that he had explained Priscus to mean “The Old.” Yet Livy might often in the first book have written down the narrative under the conviction that all that had not really so happened, and that something different might be understood as its meaning. Priscus is a common name with the Romans. Among the Patricians we find it in the family of the Servilii; Cato was called Priscus before he got the name of Cato, i. e. Catus, the prudent one, with the emphatic termination o; and besides these a whole series of families bear this cognomen. I am convinced that Tarquinius has been brought into connexion with Tarquinii only because of his name, and that on the contrary he was in reality a Latin. This is supported by the mention of Tarquinians, who after the expulsion of the kings reside at Laurentum; and likewise by the fact that Collatinus betook himself to Lavinium, a Latin town. The whole story of the descent of Tarquinius Priscus from Damaratus falls besides to the ground, as Cicero, Varro, and even Livy acknowledge the existence of a gens Tarquinia; and how utterly different is a gens indeed from a family which only consists of two houses, that of the kings and that of Collatinus? Varro says expressly, omnes Tarquinios ejecerunt, ne quam reditionis per gentilitatem spem haberet.

The reason of Tarquin’s being connected with Etruria was, besides his name, the necessity of accounting for an Etruscan influence on Rome. The Romans made Servius Tullius, who was an Etruscan, a Latin from Corniculum; and vice versa, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, who was a Latin, an Etruscan. Thus the whole story of his descent is a fiction, and this is also decidedly the case with Tanaquil, inasmuch as the Romans so name every one of the women who were stated to have been Etruscans, it being a common Etruscan name, which is often met with in inscriptions. In the old native tradition Tarquin was married to a Latin woman, Caia Cæcilia, a name which must be traced back to Cæculus the founder of Præneste. Her image was set up in the temple of Semo Sancus; for she was worshipped as the guardian goddess of female domestic virtue. This bears a genuine stamp of nationality. In the old legend, she is such a familiar personage that the girdle of her brazen image was filed off, and the filings were used as remedies.

It is therefore a matter of history, that there was a Latin Tarquinius Priscus; yet he in all likelihood belongs to the Luceres. He introduces the Luceres into the senate; to the two hundred councillors a hundred more are added, summoned by the king as gentes minores after the gentes of the two first tribes; in the rebellion of his son against Servius Tullius, they are his faction. His time seems to be parted from the former one by a great gulf: in his reign, Rome appears under quite a different form from what she had before. The conquests which are ascribed to Ancus Marcius are confined within a very narrow space. He first conquers the mouth of the Tiber, and fortifies Ostia. But now a state of things is mentioned, the consequences of which we still see, even to this hour. To this very day there stands unchanged the great river vault, the Cloaca maxima, with the name of which one incorrectly associates a base meaning. It is not a mere sewer, though it is also used as such. Its real object was no less than that of draining the great branch of the river’s bed, which went forth from the Tiber between the Capitoline, the Aventine, and the Palatine, and between the Palatine and Capitoline, and then extended in marshes to the space between the Quirinal and the Viminal, and of thereby gaining solid ground. This work consisting of three half circles of huge blocks of free stone without mortar, which even to this present moment have not given way the breadth of the back of a knife, drew off the water from the surface, received it under ground, carried it into the Tiber, and formed a firm soil. At the same time, because the Tiber had also muddy banks, a great wall was built as a dyke, the greater part of which is still in preservation. This construction is equal in extent and bulk to the pyramids; in difficulty it very far surpasses them. It is such a gigantic fabric, that one does not comprehend it when one sees it: even the aqueducts of the Emperors are indeed nothing great when compared to it. They were of brick, with a cast of mortar in the middle; but here, all is of hewn Alban freestone, with immensely deep foundations.

Whether the Cloaca Maxima was executed by Tarquinius Priscus, or by his son Superbus, is a point in which the ancients differ from each other, and we also can decide nothing. This much, however, we may say, that the building must have been completed before the town was enclosed within the circuit of the seven hills, and formed a whole; yet this was done by the last king but one, and therefore, if we will avail ourselves of the personification, in the time of Tarquinius Priscus. But such a work could not possibly have been executed with the resources of the State as we know it to have been at that period, when its territory extended from the river about two leagues in breadth, and at most six to eight leagues in length, and consequently was not as large as that of Nuremburg; especially if we think of all the difficulties of an age in which trade and commercial wealth were in no wise in existence. Here are evidently all the intervening stages leaped over, and we see at once an Empire before us quite different from the former one, in which Rome rules far and wide. Of this sway we find no mention in Livy, although he too is astonished at these buildings. Livy fancies that time to be a state of childhood for the city, and is therefore under the same delusion by which Cicero, and the later writers especially are beguiled; that the period of the kings was to be looked upon as the age of Rome’s greatest weakness. Much more correct might be the account given by Dionysius, according to which the Etruscan towns, the Latins, and the Sabines paid homage to Tarquinius Priscus. Only all the narratives of the manner in which this had come to pass are so fabulous, that one cannot be mistaken as to their being invented by those who had wished to solve the riddle. Here history entirely fails us. But whatever relation Tarquinius Priscus may have to the Tuscan legends of the conquests of Tarchon, this much we may say; that Rome itself ruled at that time with an extensive sway, or else that it was the seat of foreign rulers, so that at all events a state of things had existed in which Rome was the centre of a foreign empire.

Another undertaking quite as enigmatical is assigned to the same reign of Tarquinius Priscus. It is said that Tarquin had wished to double the Romulean Tribus, that is to say, to add three new tribes bearing his own and his friend’s names. To this the Augur Attius Navius had objected, as three tribes were enjoined by the auspices. Probably the legend was not as Livy, but as Dionysius has it; that Tarquin had himself cut through the whet stone, and in doing so had wounded his hand. The king had not indeed then formed three new tribes, but had annexed new centuries to the old ones. In this legend therefore the immutability of the tribes is spoken of, as well as the intention of the ruler to double the community by new citizens, which scheme the old citizens set their face against, pleading the sacred character of the original number. But we see here a ruler, who is not a mere magistrate, but governs by arbitrary force:—he yields as to the form, but alters the substance, making second centuries. Centuries and tribes are originally the same thing, since the tribus had a hundred clans. How it was with the second centuries is utterly hidden from us. One hypothesis is this, that as many of the old clans had died away, Tarquin formed new ones; for instance, that when the Ramnes had dwindled to fifty, he added to fill up the number fifty new clans, as secundi Ramnes. We have the example of the Potitii, who became extinct in the time of Appius Claudius, though they still consisted, as we are told, of twelve families. The rolls of exclusive families show with what rapidity they become extinct. In Styria there were formerly two thousand noble families, and now there exist scarcely a dozen of them; in the duchy of Bremen, the equestrian body admissible to the diet dwindled within fifty years to half its number, merely because they intermarried only with those of their own cast. In Luneburg the government formerly belonged to the noble houses; now there is only one house left. Perhaps Tarquin collected the remnants of the old Curies, and then made up clans which were wanting. What recommends this supposition is this, that there remained some difference between the old and new clans. Certainly the new centuries had not the weight which they would have had as independent tribes.

It is a very uncertain thing to seek allegories in historical statements, and to try and draw from them again historical facts. Thus as Ancus Marcius is the founder of the plebes, and the murder of Tarquin is said to have been brought about by the Marcii, one might surmise that Tarquin, who was one of the Luceres and had introduced them into the senate, had perished owing to rebellion of the plebeians. Yet this is one of the most hazardous hypotheses, and therefore I did not choose to have it printed. In proffering it, I support myself on a credit to which he may lay claim, who for eighteen years has almost incessantly devoted himself to these researches, after having been fondly attached to them for many a year before.

The legend which makes Tarquin the acknowledged chief of the twelve Etruscan towns, leads us to speak of the Etruscans. They are perhaps of all the nations of antiquity that on which the most different disquisitions have been made with the smallest apparatus of authorities, and about which also the greatest number of deceptions have been circulated. The forgeries of one Annius of Viterbo, of one Inghirami, and others, are impudent in the highest degree; and yet they have nevertheless become the sources of many later works. By them Dempster, and by him Winkelmann in his turn, was led astray. In the eighteenth century, the Italians did not indeed forge any more documents; but with the greatest recklessness they gave themselves the air of being able to explain what could never be explained. Indeed, many written documents existed of the Etruscans; yet only a few great ones. Five years ago an altar was dug up, written all over on three sides; a cippus in Perugia; a coffin at Bolsena, &c.; and descriptions have been published of them, some separately, and some collectively; especially by Lanzi. On works of art also, inscriptions are found. To interpret these is a matter of great interest, since, if we could read them, much light would dawn upon us; but this has given rise to the definite presupposition that they were capable of being explained, and thus the most arbitrary things were done. Eastern languages, and the Celtic were applied to it; at last Lanzi acted on the supposition that it was a sort of Greek, and, in defiance of all the rules of grammar, he formed at his own pleasure a spurious Greek. With all these relics, we stand without knowing any thing, as we did with regard to the hieroglyphics, until Champollion arose. Long inscriptiones bilingues only could help us out. We may positively assert that the Etruscan has not the least resemblance to the Latin and Greek, nay, to any language which is known to us, as Dionysius already has justly observed. This passage of Dionysius has purposely been overlooked, or its absolute meaning has been wrested into a conditional one. The Umbrian on the Eugubian tablets, has some resemblance to the Latin.