CHAPTER XI.

THE FOUNDING OF ROME

I.

THE ORIGIN OF THE LATINS

ROMAN history does not begin at Rome. The genius of the people who rose from the insignificance of Latin villagers to the headship of an oecumenical State lends more than usual interest to the question of their origin; and, though race will not account for national character, the origin of the people is a subject of which we know so much that it cannot be ignored. In spite of the dubious nature of the evidence, which even now is capable of more interpretations than one, knowledge of Italian pre-history has progressed far enough during the last fifty years to establish the truth of at least a few propositions and to show that of the doctrines currently accepted during the nineteenth century some of the most fundamental were false. On dates and details of ethnic relationship precision is misleading and dogmatism wrong; but of such points those which are still at issue belong with few exceptions to the sphere of archaeology, within which the evidence chiefly lies, and their bearing on ethnological conclusions is so remote that for the present purpose they may be ignored.

To the history of Rome the antecedents of the populations found spread over the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula before the full Bronze Age are immaterial. In whatever relation these peoples, or any part of them, may have stood to their palaeolithic predecessors, and whatever cultural differences of a minor kind may be discernible at this time in different parts of the peninsula, it is enough for the present purpose to say that in the Neolithic Age the inhabitants of Italy were a long-headed folk whose unbroken practice in disposing of the dead was to bury them without cremation. The distribution of this people was peculiar. Though to north and south they spread from sea to sea, in the middle zone, for reasons perhaps not unconnected with volcanic activity on the central western coast, their western frontier ran roughly along a line formed by the Arno, the Apennine, and the Liris. In the area to the west of this, traces of their presence are noticeably scarce; and it is precisely in this area, whence the neolithic people seem almost to have been excluded, that the origin of the population is a matter peculiarly germane to the early history of Rome. It is elsewhere, however, that the next development takes place.

Not long before the opening of the Bronze Age itself a new element can be recognized in the southern foothills of the Alps. The pile-dwellings (palafitte) which first appear are those on the western lakes, but for the general purposes of Italian history they and their authors are not of the first importance. It is in the makers of the rather later palafitte to the east, who did not arrive until the Bronze Age had begun, that we should almost certainly see the emergence of the Indo-European stock which formed the basis of the peoples regularly regarded as Italic. This second set of newcomers, who probably reached the Po-valley by way of the Veneto, settled first on the Lago di Garda and other pieces of water in its neighbourhood, but by about the middle of the second millennium they had transferred their building technique to dry land and had produced the terramare. The terramaricoli, whose remains are found most freely south of the Po between the Trebbia and the Panaro, were a farming people. Of crops they grew wheat, flax and beans, and they had some slight acquaintance with the olive and the vine; of live-stock—besides dogs, cats and poultry —they kept horses, donkeys, oxen, pigs, goats and sheep. But for the present study more significant characteristics of these people are, first, their custom of cremating the dead, which is alien to Italy before the palafitte, and, secondly, the peculiar plan on which they laid out their settlements. In this plan there are points of resemblance to certain features of Roman practice which call for closer notice. The familiar fossa and vallum which surrounded the Roman camp find parallels in the moat and rampart of any terramare, and to the intersection at right-angles of the cardo and decumanus corresponds a similar intersection of the two main streets in these early settlements. Furthermore, it is impossible to overlook the remarkable repetition of details found in the terramare in the ideal scheme adopted by the Romans for the delimitation of cities at their foundation. It is true that the Roman practice is assigned by all but the earliest authority2 to an Etruscan origin, and also that in these days, when the debt of Rome to Etruria is frequently magnified to the greatest possible extent, this assignation is widely emphasized. But it is to be remembered that, small as they may be, there are certain indications, apart from the appearance of something similar in the terramare, which casts doubts upon an attribution of this Roman custom to any people who entered Italy after the Iron Age had begun. The well-attested use of a bronze plough in the operations which this ceremony involved is suggestive of a survival from times earlier at any rate than the earliest which the Romans called Etruscan; and the cinctus Gabinus, which Cato records to have been prescribed for the conditores, points definitely to the Latins and their ancestors. The ritual itself, of which perhaps the best account is given in Plutarch’s Romulus, in later times consisted first in marking out with a plough the limits of an augural templum, within which certain first-fruits were buried. To this precisely corresponds the mound, itself surrounded with a trench and having buried in it various objects of religious or magical significance, which normally appears on the eastern side of a terramare. In the second part of the ceremony the boundaries of the city itself were traced by another furrow drawn round the templum at a distance, and this again the terramare anticipate in the solco rituale still occasionally preserved at the foot of the encircling rampart.

The events which follow the full development of the terramare are still a subject of dispute. Questions of ethnic relationship cannot all be answered in detail, and dates are a matter of spacing between limits which, though themselves approximately fixed, allow wide variations within them. Soon, perhaps even before the terramare of the north had reached their full extension, terramaricoli and their kin began to spread into central and southern Italy to form, in all probability, the characteristic stratum among the peoples which in historical times are called Italic. For the present purpose, however, the general movement may be ignored and attention concentrated on archaeological evidence which confirms the conclusion naturally to be drawn from the similarities between the practices of the terramaricoli and those of Rome, and supports the view that between the terramare and Latium the connection was close. At a time which is probably not later than the twelfth century, there appears in Rome and on the Alban hills a people probably to be recognized again, not only in what later became Etruria, but also in a region north of the Apennine between Bologna and the Adriatic. The Iron Age has now begun, and of the groups into which its early remains from Italy naturally fall these three—the Latian, Tuscan and Bolognese (Villanovan proper)—though they are distinct, still hang loosely together and constitute a class to which the name Villanovan in a more general sense may be applied. Their authors, if not actually descended from the terramaricoli, as is probable, are at any rate nearly related to them, and they are beyond any reasonable doubt a section of the Indo-European people who, split into subdivisions long enough before to allow their linguistic histories to follow different lines, yet recently enough to keep their material culture recognizably one, did something at least to give their character to those parts of Italy which history knows as Umbria and Latium.

There now appears a complication. In neolithic times the Latin plain had scarcely been occupied by man. Its earliest settlers were the cremators from the north, but these cremators were quickly followed by an inhuming population whose affinities present a problem still unsolved. Their graves appear already on the Alban hills, at Ardea and at Lavinium: but here it is more noteworthy that they are found freely on the site of Rome. The region covered by their remains is one where the Oscan, and to some extent the Umbrian, dialects prevailed, but archaeology shows no evidence that these people marked by their burial rite entered Italy either after, or within a measurable time before, the cremators of the terramare. Their language is in Italy something recent; their material culture and their custom of inhumation finds its affinities in the neolithic age from which it seems to be directly and continuously descended. The way in which this people should be described is a matter of some indifference. They may be regarded as Italic invaders, who, as would be natural in a region where the previous inhabitants were strong, took over the customs and culture of the people among whom they settled; or they may be called survivors from the neolithic population with a new language acquired from immigrants who had advanced even farther than the people of the Alban hills. Two points may be stressed with such slight confidence as the existing evidence allows. The first is that the Italic settlers from the terramare preserved their own peculiarities most completely in these districts to the west of the Apennine where they were least closely in contact with their predecessors: the second that the inhuming population which is supreme to the south and east of Rome is the population to which the Sabines belonged, and that when the literary authorities speak of Sabine settlement at Rome—a settlement which is amply supported by archaeological fact—they indicate the coming of migrants from this inhuming region to join the pure Italic cremators.

The position may now be summarized. That the first newcomers to Latium at the opening of the Iron Age were Villanovans is almost certain; and it is probable that the links between the Villanovans and the terramaricoli were continuous. But if the Villanovans of Latium are not direct descendants of the terramaricoli, at any rate they are closely akin; and these Villanovans, whatever their precise origin may have been, are the first stratum in the Latin population. Their arrival was followed by that of an inhuming people, who soon looked down on the Campagna from the Sabine hills. And these two peoples in succession occupy the site of Rome. Thus questions about the making of the Roman people take a more definite shape. Apart from speculative theories about the origin of the name ‘Aventine,’ the evidence available recognizes no element in historical Rome before the cremators from the north. First, the respective contributions of these cremators and their inhuming neighbours must be considered,— which may best be done in connection with the site of Rome itself. And secondly, there arises the more thorny question of the debt owed by the resultant blend to Etruria. This, however, is a later story. The next step is to survey the geography of the region in which the Latian Villanovans and the Sabine inhumers are pre-eminent when documented history opens in the seventh century BC.

II.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF LATIUM

The region to which in this section the name Latium will be given is not merely the area wherein archaeology shows traces of the Latian Villanovans—this at present is little more than Rome and the Alban hills—but the district which, according to literary authorities, by some time near the end of the eighth century was in the hands of a people whom we believe, in spite of some mingling with another stock, to be their descendants—the Latins. The advance of these newcomers from their first settlements in the hills down into the plain which is now the Campagna di Roma will most conveniently be discussed later together with the development of fenced villages into walled towns. Before that it will be well to leave the course of events and consider some of the greater geographical factors by which events were largely affected.

Forty miles from its mouth the Tiber rounds Soracte, and Soracte may be said to mark the point at which the Tiber valley begins to open out into the broad basin which is the scene of early Roman history. From the summit of Soracte the stage may be surveyed. On the right bank, where the mountain stands, the southern lowlands of Etruria rise slowly up to the distant ridge which once was crowned by the Ciminian forest—a ridge which was Rome’s horizon to the north until the last quarter of the fourth century. On this region Rome for long was forced to turn her back. It is true that these lowlands are as much a part of the Tiber basin as the Latin plain itself; and it is true that the evidence of language, which proves the Faliscans to have been close kindred of the Latins, is supported by the discovery of characteristic Latin hut-urns in southern Etruria in suggesting ethnic affinities between the lands on both sides of the lower Tiber. But for purposes of early Latin history the right bank may be ignored, because from the eighth century at latest until the fourth it was politically divorced from the Latin plain. We hear indeed tales of Roman access even in the age of Romulus to the salt-pans north of the Tiber mouth, and there is evidence that, soon after the Roman villages became a single city, Rome held a bridge-head on the farther bank extending in one direction to the fifth milestone towards the coast1. But during these centuries, centuries in which the growth of Rome was given its direction, the whole of this country, with the possible exception of the merest fringe, lay under an Etruscan domination so complete that it was counted hostile territory from which Rome was excluded until the fall of Veii opened the way for an advance.

It was on the left bank that Rome emerged, and by the conformation of the lands on this side the course of history was to some extent determined. Here the mountains, which opposite Soracte rise close above the bank, fall back south-eastwards and leave between themselves and the river a plain which, though it is broken by the spur of the Monti Corniculani, gradually grows broader as it approaches the sea. Between the plain and Italy to the east and south communications lie through gaps in the southern barrier. Of such gaps there are two, which divide the chain into three sections and which are to be recognized to-day by the two main lines of railway from Rome to the Adriatic and Campania. From a point opposite Soracte the steep escarpment of the Sabine hills runs on unbroken until it reaches the cleft of the Anio, by which the first of the natural passages is approached. Here the Via Valeria of the Romans, along a route now roughly followed by the railway from Rome to Castellamare Adriatico, led through the mountains to eastern Italy. On such a road the entrance to the hills is a position of commercial possibilities as well as of strategic value; and in this case the entrance was dominated by the site of Tibur, whose early prosperity thereby is at least in part explained. From Tibur the barrier stretches on—here under the name of the Monti Prenestini —until it drops down to the second of the gaps—the broad col which connects the Sabine highlands with the volcanic hills of Alba. This col, by which the Via Labicana and the more familiar of the two railways to Naples reach the valley of the Trerus (Sacco) and so lead down to Casinum and Campania, was one of the two great avenues from Latium to the south; and, until at the end of the fifth century the Romans gave military significance to other sites like Labici, the key to it was Praeneste.

Beyond this lies the third section of the line—the massif of the Alban hills, which on their south-western side end the barrier by falling gently to the sea. These hills themselves are not impassable; across their midst lies a shallow depression—the pass of Mount Algidus—separating the heights of Tusculum from the mons Albanus proper. Through this gap the Via Latina passed, commanded by Tusculum and later by a Roman fort; but, since the road led nowhere beyond the Alban hills save down to the Via Labicana, its value was only local, and it is not to be counted among the natural routes from Latium to Campania. More important by far was the second natural way—the way which ran over the easy slopes between Aricia and the sea. Here, where round Ardea the Rutulan country lay, the foothills are so slight as to give easy access from the Tiber valley to the broad lands which stretch south from the Rio Tor to towards Anxur (Tarracina) until they sink into the Pomptine Marshes. In this region between the plains to north and south no natural boundary exists. Geographically they belong to a single whole, and round this gap between hills and sea much early history was enacted before geographical and political units became one under the hegemony of Rome. Along this passage Latin movement from the north and Volscian pressure from the south combined to produce warlike operations which are a constant feature of Italian history from the sixth century onwards, until in the fourth Rome finally asserted her authority up to the Liris and beyond.

Such in broadest outline is the geography of the region wherein Roman history begins; but within the region there were more peoples to be found than one, and their boundaries did not always coincide with frontiers provided by nature. To the Latins, who are the most important section of the population, part of the plain belonged; but the plain was not their centre, nor was the whole of it theirs. The kernel of their territory, as tradition and archaeology combine to show, was the Alban hills, round which in course of time they came to occupy an area stretching north and west and south for a distance of something like twenty miles. Northwards their frontier ran by the coast to the Tiber mouth; but across the river, though, as has been said, the population was to some extent their kin, the Latins with whom Rome had first to deal held no more than a fringe ending within a mile or two of the farther bank. From the sea the frontier roughly ran along the river up to the site of Rome; but soon it turned to the east. Three miles above the city the Anio joins the Tiber, and there is reason to believe that Augustus did not act without historical justification when he made the Anio a boundary between Latium-Campania, the first of the districts into which he divided Italy, and Samnium, the fourth. Across the Tiber were the Etruscans; across the Anio the Sabines; but, just as there was a doubtful strip beyond the Tiber to which the Latins had some claim, so there was also beyond the Anio. About twelve miles north of the confluence lay Eretum, and between this and the Anio were Crustumerium, Nomentum, Ficulea and Fidenae; but though Eretum was always, and though the rest of these cities were sometimes, described as Sabine, the last four are so often called Latin that there is no period of Latin history, after the merely archaeological age, at which it would be safe to deny any kind of Latin occupation on the northern bank. With so much by way of qualification the Anio may be regarded as the boundary up to the north-east corner of the Latin region where, probably not far from Varia (Vicovaro), the territory of Tibur bordered on the country of the Aequi. South of Tibur, Praeneste was the Latin outpost facing the Hernici of the Trerus valley; and the ager Praenestinus fetches back to the Alban hills.

It is on the south-eastern slopes of these that the limits of early Latium are hardest to define. Here lay the ager Rutulus; and though at Ardea, its centre, excavation has shown burials by inhumation, the presence of these side by side with cremations both at Rome and in the Alban hills makes it possible to believe Vergil when he connects the consanguinei Rutuli with the Latins, at least if the connection means no more than that this tract was early a part of the Latin world. The proposal to derive this people from the neolithic population on the strength of the termination of their name is unconvincing1; and, though there are slight suggestions of an Etruscan element among them, there is no valid reason for ascribing this to any other period than that of the Etruscan advance on Latium which began soon after the middle of the seventh century BC. But if Ardea and the ager Rutulus may be included in the Latin area, it is less clear how far east of this the area extended. Velitrae seems to have been a Volscian foundation: but, though on these sites too a Volscian dominion in the fifth century must be admitted, in spite of Livy’s approval it would be unsafe to reject outright the tradition, preserved by Diodorus and Vergil, which includes Cora and Pometia among the cities of the Prisci Latini. If this tradition is to be accepted, Latium passed south of the slopes between Aricia and the sea down into the plain beneath the Monti Lepini, where Pometia lay with Cora on the mountain-side above. But in this direction these two cities must be fixed as the limit of the Latins, if indeed Latins are to be seen anywhere south-east of the ager Rutulus: the advance to Signia and Norba is not recorded until the end of the regal period at Rome. Thus the circuit is complete; and though the frontier is often indistinct, it seems that the stage for the beginnings of Latin history was set in a region lying round the Alban hills as far as Praeneste, Tibur, Rome and Ardea, with a possible extension up to Cora and Pometia towards the southeast.

III.

EARLY LATIUM

At the dawn of the Iron Age the soil of Latium was young. The country lies on the line of the Italian volcanic system immediately round what, at least until late in the second millennium BC, was a centre of formidable activity. Monte Cavo, which dominates the Latin landscape, is only the most prominent of some fifty craters to be found in its neighbourhood, and these do not seem to have become finally extinct until times which are almost historical. Though the passages in which Livy has been thought to preserve hints of eruptions during the reign of Tullus Hostilius and again as late as 193 BC must be interpreted otherwise, more valuable evidence is provided by excavation, which reveals traces of serious havoc done not long before 1000 BC. And though again the suggestion cannot be accepted that it was the mountain, and not Rome as the Roman annalists asserted, which was responsible for the destruction of Alba, it is wholly probable that when the Villanovans arrived they found in the Alban hills a region which had only recently become habitable and where, in consequence, there was no strong body of the earlier inhabitants to dispute possession. However these things may be, it is certain that Latium had long received at intervals a deep covering of volcanic ash, which at once postponed the age of agriculture and ensured its prosperity when it came. Not until, after the eruptions at length had ceased to be catastrophic, the uppermost stratum of ashes had been overspread by jungle growth and the jungle in turn had formed a surface soil, was Latium ripe for cultivation.

Of the forest in which scattered clearings must have seen the first attempts at agriculture small remains may be recognized in the sacred thickets freely mentioned in literature. As late as the third century BC, according to Theophrastus, Latium was renowned for the timber of its beech-woods: but even before the growth of population in Rome began to make heavy calls on the productivity of the surrounding plain Latium was, for those early times, so thickly inhabited, and the need for food must consequently have been so great, that the winning of woodland to cultivation had probably gone far enough for the country fairly to be called agricultural. That the population was large there is sufficient evidence to show. Though it should probably be regarded only as a minimum, the heredium of the bina iugera, whether ownership was vested in the family or the individual, is so small as to suggest that land was scarce. But perhaps the most cogent of the proofs that the inhabitants of Latium were spread thick is to be found in the remains of drainage-works which may be seen from Etruria to the Monti Lepini. Sometimes these works are channels cut in the rock along some slope, at others they are dams of masonry built on a valleyfloor to protect some strip of land beside the river-bed; but in all cases alike their purpose seems to have been the preservation of the soil from the destructive torrents in which rain-water came down from the mountain sides. Indications are abundant that in the early days of Rome the Latin climate was wetter than it is at present. Whatever the circumstances of this may have been, whether the evidence of Californian sequoias is enough to prove a rainy age in Latium during the regal period at Rome or whether, as is more probable, the deforestation of the hills has reduced what once was a fertile region to the doubtful value of the Campagna to-day, the rainfall in Latium for the greater part of the last millennium BC was more than enough to meet the needs of agriculture. And when food was plentiful the population grew, until at length it became necessary to undertake hydraulic measures on a great scale in order to save for cultivation a few acres here and a few more there.

The corn grown in Latium for human consumption was one of the coarser wheats which pass under the general name of ‘spelt’; but millet seems also to have been used, and the aes hordearium of the Roman knights suggests that, when the horse appeared, barley was the regular fodder for it, if not for every kind of beast. Yet, though the production of corn was large, it is impossible to believe that, when trade developed, corn was normally available for exportation after the needs of the inhabitants had been met. It was in other forms of wealth that the cost of imports must have been paid. Latin timber has been mentioned already, and to this only few additions can be made. The olive is not among them. Though the wild olive has probably left traces in the terramare, Fenestella’s tale that the tree was unknown to Latium in the time of the first Tarquin finds some support in the Greek origin of amurca, trapetum, and other words connected with the olive trade. This evidence, which is not unique, suggests the conclusion that the olive reached Latium late and from the south. The vine, on the other hand, came early: on this point Roman writers are agreed, and their agreement is confirmed by the presence of grapestones, if such they really be, in one of the burials of the Roman Forum. But that viticulture assumed any large dimensions before republican times is by no means certain. In the absence of independent support, tales to the effect that in primitive Latium wine was only used for medicinal purposes2 might be regarded as no more than edifying anecdotes of moralists who found virtue in the past; but there are other facts which forbid such an explanation. Though the appearance of the Vinalia in the Calendar of Numa proves that the vine had been assimilated by Roman agriculture by the seventh century BC, the frequent use of cow’s milk for ritual purposes in some of the oldest cults is a hint that even after the Latin settlement there may have been a period in which wine had not yet taken the place it afterwards achieved; and again, the taboo placed on wine-drinking by women in historical times3 seems to show that even then there clung to wine something of the suspicion which forms round innovations. The only other product of the soil which can be assigned with confidence to primitive Latium is the fig, which plays a part in early Roman legend large enough to vouch for its familiarity. But to fruits and crops the Latins added flocks and herds. The history of the goat in Latium is not to be recovered, though the Tomba del Duce at Vetulonia proves its use by the Etruscans, as by the terramaricoli. In the terramare again the horse is found, but in Latium its connection is almost wholly with war, and its advent late. The famous taboo which forbade the presence of a horse in the precinct of Diana at Aricia1, the prohibition against horse-riding under which the Flamen Dialis was placed, are indications enough of a time when the horse was a new-comer. On the other hand the rite of the Suovetaurilia shows the early presence of pigs, sheep and oxen. From the beginning of the Latin occupation the ox was probably the draught-beast which it still remains, and the penalties enacted for its wrongful slaughter are evidence of the value it possessed. It is not a matter for surprise that oxen and sheep together were the currency of exchange until a pecuniary system in the modern sense was introduced.

The social history of early Latium is a subject on which conjecture too often has to take the place of knowledge. When the necessary evidence is not wholly lacking, it either is the unsupported statement of some Roman annalist or antiquarian, or at best lies in the surviving institutions of historical times from which the previous conditions may be inferred with varying degrees of probability. That the dominant element in the population of Latium was regarded as ethnically one, even if its unity was the result of fusion, is clear from the general use of the words ‘Latium’ and ‘Latini’ as well as from the title ‘Latiaris’ which came to be borne by the chief of their divinities. On the other hand, there is evidence no less clear in the whole history of the Latins and their leagues that at first the ethnic unit was split into political fractions, of which the origins are not recorded. It is probable that, when the Italic! arrived in Latium, they came in small bands of the kind which are better seen in the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese. These bands, which seem everywhere to have been the earliest form of social and political organization, preceded the family; and though in the case of the Latins this must have happened long before they settled in the Tiber Valley, it was within these bands, round centres provided by stable sexual relations, that the family was formed. Such groups, which did not necessarily all reach their destinations at the same time, each appropriated a tract of territory, and in course of time by fusion with neighbouring groups they produced societies large enough to be dignified with the name of populus.

The form of habitation which the people used was preserved at Rome in the casa Romuli of the Palatine and is familiar to us both from the hut-urns which are a regular feature of the early iron age in Latium and also from their descendants—the capanne (huts) of the Campagna today: but how these huts were at first distributed—whether in clusters or in isolation, each on its own occupants’ estate—is a question to which the answer has been made a matter of needless controversy. Attempts to prove that in primitive times the regular grouping of the Italic peoples was in isolated households or again that it was always in villages are wholly misdirected. Archaeological facts generally favour the latter view, but the literary authorities show that both are right: there is no reason whatever for refusing to believe that practice varied according to circumstances, and the custom in a particular district can only be discovered from local evidence. On this point excavation in Latium and especially on the site of Rome indicates beyond dispute that here at least, in the days before cities had grown up, the people lived in villages and not in scattered households. By historical times a populus was normally called after the city to which its several villages had given place, but the recorded names of the ‘Laurentes Lauinates’ and of the ‘populus Ardeatis Rutulus’ suggest that, before this happened, the peoples had each borne a name proper to themselves and not derived from that of their central town. Even at this stage the Latins seem to have chosen for their villages sites like those on which we find the cities that afterwards became famous. Advantage of position undoubtedly was one of the factors which determined that a village should grow into something more; but, whether the reason was convenience for defence or that the flat lands needed drainage to fit them for human habitation, the earliest settlements, like the cities which succeeded them, are generally to be found on high ground—either on some knoll in the Campagna or on the slopes of the surrounding hills.

So far as its initial stages are concerned, the process by which the early settlers formed themselves into communities of the size familiar in recorded history is veiled in impenetrable darkness: it cannot have been long before the eighth century that Latium first approached a condition of which our authorities allow us to draw a picture in any kind of detail, and even then the details are so blurred as scarcely to be worthy of the name. In an age where smaller groups, in the manner best illustrated by the history of the site of Rome, were steadily coalescing into larger, no precise number of populi can be true of more than a brief space of time. Nevertheless, it is from numbers alone that we are able to deduce the dimensions of the political units in Latium at the "first stage of which it is possible to speak. The material is scanty. However good their evidence might be—and it varies from excellence to utter worthlessness—the list of eighteen Alban colonies given by Diodorus and the lists, preserved by Cato and Dionysius, of Latin states allied against Rome at the beginning of the fifth century would have no bearing in the age before Rome had emerged1. With none but the smallest help from other sources we are left with the catalogues of Pliny. In the course of his description of the eleven regions into which imperial Italy was divided, Pliny deals at length with Latium, which was the first. The basis of his survey was a document compiled at the order of Augustus, but to this must be added some other source or sources for his information about cities which had disappeared in the early days of Rome. Calculations from Pliny’s text are hazardous and the margin of error is wide, but in the upshot the conclusion to be drawn is that some sixty communities, more or less, may have divided among themselves the territory of early Latium. The region which these people shared, exclusive of the doubtful fringes discussed above, covers less than 650 square miles which, split among sixty groups, would provide an average of about 10 square miles for each.

So much is enough to give an indication of the size attained by the Latin populi at a time which, although it must be placed several centuries after the settlement, is still the earliest at which their scale can be discerned. It has, indeed, been asserted that the primitive political units in Latium were large and that their disruption was due to Rome; but there can be no doubt that in reality the development was in the opposite direction. Within the territorial units which were probably the basis of the social structure, the small groups in which the settlers arrived coalesced to form villages, and the villages in turn were merged into still larger organizations which, when they are surrounded by walls of stone, may claim the name of cities. But though it is to be admitted that by the seventh century at latest the centripetal tendency of the population had caused a reduction in the number of settlements over which the Latins had originally been spread, the full city-age cannot be carried back beyond the sixth. By now there is a general agreement that the differences between so-called Cyclopean and polygonal masonry and between the latter and masonry built in regular courses is due not to age but to the varying formations of local stones, which in some cases are laminated in a way which makes easy the cutting of rectangular blocks and in others are not. Stone walls seem to be a development of the sixth century, though it is not to be denied that before then villages may often have been protected with earthworks of the kind which at Rome left traces in the murus terreus of the Carinae.

The little world which these villages composed remained long in comparative isolation. In culture it was backward; and whether because Latium was poor in the mineral resources which abounded in Northern Tuscany or for some other reason, from the beginning of the Iron Age down to the end of the seventh century BC the Latins lagged behind their more favoured neighbours across the Tiber. The date at which Cumae received its first settlers from the eastern Mediterranean, the measure of Cretan influence on Italy, and the visits of Semitic traders from Asia—visits which even north of Sicily were certainly free in the period before the close connection of Etruria and Carthage—are matters which, for all their importance in the general history of Italian relations with the outer world, scarcely concern Latium at all. Latium lay outside the stream of traffic. To the lack of natural wealth by which trade might be attracted was added a lack of harbours. The Tiber, with a current which needed the special favours vouchsafed to Aeneas to make navigation possible for early ships, flowed into the sea through an estuary more valuable for the salt-marshes on either side than for such harbourage as its mud-banks might afford; and even the creeks below the Alban hills seem rarely to have received visitors from the sea. The Latins were not sailors; most of their cities were inland, like Rome; and of such few as were within reach of the coast Satricum alone shows some tardy signs of trade. At the end of the ninth century, when Tarquinii was already feeling foreign influence from Asia, and again a hundred years later when Etruria was learning from Cumae how to write, Latium still kept almost wholly to itself. Even such intercourse as passed by land left Latium untouched, though new wares were coming—we may conjecture from the Etruscan cities—as near as the Faliscan territory. Soon after 700 the first effects of the higher culture begin to appear in the deposits of Latium and of Rome itself. By the middle of the century Praeneste had fallen into Etruscan hands and had become one of the great cities of central Italy, and thereafter Latium slowly enters deeper into the system of commercial relations of which Etruria was the focus, until some time before 600 BC the Etruscan period begins in Rome itself.

IV.

THE BEGINNINGS OF LATIN UNITY

With the social institutions of early Latium there is no need to deal here at length. Much of our information is of doubtful value at best. When the Roman writers insist on the prevalence of aristocracies in the Latin towns, their account may well be true: but it would be rash to say that their statements rest on any knowledge of the facts and are not rather to be explained as inferences from the patrician control of early republican Rome. Such social forms as are of any relevance to Roman history may best be mentioned in connection with their developments in the religion, the society and the constitution of Rome. In the present place only one feature calls for detailed notice—the various movements towards a Latin federation. The sanctuary of Juppiter Latiaris on the Monte Cavo, whose antiquity as the centre of a widespread Latin cult cannot be doubted, is only one among several high places round which the Latins seemed to have grouped themselves for political purposes. Apart from less important, and probably later, institutions like the common worship of Venus at Lavinium, we hear in particular of various places at which the cult of Diana seems to have been a bond uniting to some degree or other various sections of the Latin population. First, and most famous, is the precinct of Diana at Aricia, but to this must be added another on Mount Corne, in the territory of Tusculum1, and also the temple on the Aventine whose foundation is ascribed by tradition to Servius Tullius. There can be no doubt that the unions which grew up round these centres of worship were primarily religious in character, but it is no less clear that in some cases at least a common cult led on to a kind of political federation. The early history of the Latin leagues is a subject about which certainty will never be attained, but its relevance to the rise of Rome demands some consideration of the evidence. When tradition places the earliest religious centre of the Latins on the Monte Cavo, tradition is confirmed both by probability and by the results of excavation. It is in every way plausible that the tendencies to a common Latin festival should have been attracted to the shrine whose position dominates the whole Latin region, and archaeology adds support by showing that the Alban hills were the central point of Latin settlement.

But though round the sanctuary of Juppiter Latiaris some kind of Latin unity developed, the nature of the union and its dimensions are unknown. That it was religious in origin is clear, but how far membership involved any political obligations beyond that of keeping peace during the period of actual celebrations cannot be said with assurance. Certainly there are grave objections to the Roman version that the league was definitely political, with Alba Longa at its head, and that by her conquest of this city Rome herself succeeded to the headship. There is no reason, indeed, to doubt the historical existence of Alba Longa. Tradition is strong in its favour, and the survival of an ager Albanus into historical times adds confirmation. But though Alba Longa may be accepted, and though its site may with some confidence be fixed in the neighbourhood of Castel Gandolfo, there are difficulties in the way of believing that so early as the seventh century it was the head of a league which deserves to be called political. It is a minor objection that the cult-centre itself seems to have been in the territory, not of Alba, but of Cabum: Athens might fairly be called head of the Delian Confederacy even before the Confederacy passed from the protection of Apollo at Delos to that of Athena at Athens. But it is more serious that the Roman destruction of Alba does not seem to have conferred on Rome the formal primacy of Latium. That Rome thereafter was a considerable power is probable; but it will be seen that there is reason for believing in a Latin league still free of Roman domination for a considerable time after Alba disappeared. It seems then that by the seventh century the Mons Albanus had become the religious centre of the Latins, but that the extent to which the federation of Latin cities was political and the degree of control exercised by Alba Longa are both easy to exaggerate.

The names and number of the cities which joined in the Latin festival were also vague. Dionysius, indeed, in an account of which much must be rejected, says that towards the end of the sixth century the members of the Alban league were forty seven; but though the number is plausible, the reference to cities of the Volsci and Hernici in the same chapter makes it impossible to accept this figure for the period of Alba Longa. Nor does the list of Pliny give any serious help. The thirty or thirty-one ‘carnem in monte Albano soliti accipere populi (Albenses)’ are apparently only a selection, made from a larger catalogue, of certain peoples who had disappeared by the first century A.D., and the larger catalogue itself is shown by the alphabetic order of the names to be a late compilation. The evidence here is too weak to justify speculation, even if it were worth while. But names and numbers are fortunately Unimportant. There is only one point on which our ignorance is to be regretted. Was Rome at this stage counted a member or not?

It is not to be suggested that all the Latin peoples without exception took part in the festival of the Latiar, nor again can it be maintained that the Latiar was the only celebration held in common by a number of Latin communities. Still less will the evidence prove that the sanctuary of Diana at Aricia served as a political centre at the time when the Alban league was purely religious, though it does suggest that Aricia from very early times was a cult-centre widely recognized in Latium. Our first clear information about the Arician league is contained in the inscription preserved by Priscian from Cato’s, and probably refers to the closing years of the sixth century. Though, as has often been observed, the absence from the list of Signia and Norba, whose foundation is to be placed early in the fifth, proves that the league here in question is very little later than the end of the regal period at Rome, even when the absence of cities like Gabii, Bovillae and Praeneste has been explained by various considerations, the small number of members—who only amount to eight—shows that the political geography of Latium had greatly changed since the days when the Alban festival was celebrated by forty peoples or more. Since that early stage the process of centralization had gone far, and the time required for this development forbids the league of eight to be fixed much before 500 BC. But if the precinct of Diana entered on a new period of its history as a federal centre towards the beginning of the fifth century, it seems to have served this purpose before.

On the slopes of the Aventine at Rome, looking over what is now the Jewish Cemetery across the Circus Maximus to the Palatine, there stood the most famous of the Roman temples to Diana. By tradition its establishment is regularly ascribed to Servius Tullius, and on the justice of this ascription much depends. It matters nothing what the name of the king responsible may have been, but it is of the first importance to decide whether the regal origin of the temple can or cannot be accepted. The unanimity of tradition carries weight, but in this case it is confirmed. The testimony of Dionysius that in his time the temple contained a fifth-century document—the lex Icilia de Aventino publicando, the date of which was about 456 BC—suggests that the temple was in use within a hundred years of Servius; but another of its contents, also mentioned by Dionysius, seems to carry its date still farther back. This was a treaty with the Latins attributed to Servius himself and preserved on a stele. The words in which this stele is described by Dionysius1 point to an alphabet as early as that found on the cippus beneath the lapis niger, which on account of the Fidenae tufa of which it is composed may be dated with much probability to the sixth century. If such a date is right, and if the document is more or less contemporary with the Latin treaty, the temple of Diana contained a document of the Servian age and so may well, as tradition asserts, be of that age itself.

The relevance of this dating to the history of the Latin Leagues is due to a consideration first emphasized by Wissowa. Like the sanctuary of Aricia, the Aventine establishment, according to Varro, was a ‘commune Latinorum Dianae templum,’ and at both the dies natalis was celebrated on the Ides of August. Even if the probability be neglected that with this cult the nymph Egeria was brought from Aricia to Rome, so much is enough to show the plausibility of the suggestion that the Aventine foundation was a direct imitation of the Arician cult. For its transference to Rome or for its reproduction there political reasons are the most obvious, and they are also the reasons indicated by tradition; but they are only cogent if it can be inferred that the sanctuary of Diana at Aricia was a federal centre of the Latins at the time to which Servius Tullius must be assigned. In spite of the criticisms to which conclusions of this kind have been freely subjected, the inference still seems sound, and in that case it may be said that, whatever other centres at Lavinium, Tusculum or elsewhere had attracted the allegiance of the Latins, in the sixth century Aricia was the focus of a league which could claim importance enough to make its hegemony an object of Roman aspiration. More than this about the early movements towards unity in Latium must rest on conjecture so uncertain that it may be omitted: the later developments will best be discussed with the rise of Rome.

V.

THE SITE OF ROME AND THE GROWTH OF THE CITY

On the lower reaches of the Tiber, where the river divides the Latin region from its neighbours to the west, nature has marked out one site before all others for human occupation. The hills of Rome, elusive as they may be among the buildings of the modern city, are more than the mere knolls which alone 'relieve the flatness of the Campagna to the east. The Palatine in particular was a position of outstanding strength. Its summit was broad enough to receive a considerable community behind the protection of its cliffs, and the stronghold it offered was in a peculiarly profitable situation, because it dominated the river at the point where the ford below the Tiber-island offered the easiest of all crossings from the Latin plain to the west. Though it is not to be denied that the earliest settlers were attracted by the defensive value of the hills, it has also to be remembered that in later times, when intercourse across the river had developed and trade was free, both strategic and commercial facts contributed something to the importance of Rome. And when the advantages of the position collected a larger population than the original settlement could hold, other elements in the hill-system provided sites which it was easy to bring within the circuit of a single wall.

To the history of the city’s expansion the complicated details of Roman topography are irrelevant; but the main features are essential, and on them the story depends. Fifteen miles in a direct line from the modern coast the Tiber encounters a ring of hills through which it breaks its way. The ring is a rough ellipse, with its major axis running north and south and with its periphery indented on the north-east and south-west sides. The western limits and the south-western flattening are formed by the ridge which from north to south now bears the successive names of Monte Mario, the Vatican, Janiculum and Monte Verde; close below these the river flows. On the other bank, where the city lay, from a point to the north opposite the Monte Mario to another on the south facing the Monte Verde, the eastern heights stretch round in a broad curve, from the line of which spurs project towards the centre. These spurs in order are the Pincian, Quirinal, Viminal, Cispius, Oppius and Caelius, of which the Oppius and Cispius spring from a section of the surrounding plateau which bears Esquiline as its special name. Finally the gap between the Caelius and the Tiber is filled by the Aventine, which lies opposite the Monte Verde and so completes the circuit. Within this ring the Palatine and Capitoline are enclosed. The isolation, which makes these two hills today, with the possible exception of the Aventine, the most impressive of all, owes little if anything to the handiwork of man. Though Trajan’s engineers undoubtedly cut back the southern escarpment of the Quirinal, Boni’s excavations in the Forum Ulpium have produced conclusive refutation of the theory, which the inscription on the base of the Trajan column was formerly supposed to confirm, that until the second century A.D. Quirinal and Capitoline were connected by a col so pronounced as virtually to merge the two hills into a single ridge. About the Palatine there is no dispute. The only link which joins it to the surrounding heights still remains what it has been since the earliest Roman times. This is the narrow saddle of the Velia, which runs from the Oppius to the north-eastern angle of the Palatine and provides it with a natural approach which is yet narrow enough to be easy of defence.

In the legends of the city’s foundation the rivalry of Romulus and Remus bulks large. According to the story, when it had been agreed that augury should decide the disputed primacy, Remus chose the Aventine for his templum and Romulus the Palatine. The tale serves at least to call attention to the hills between which the first settlers on the vacant site of Rome would have to choose. The Capitoline is so small, and its approaches were probably so inconvenient, that its escape from the attention of early seekers for a home is intelligible. Of the other eminences, the Palatine and Aventine alone have claims. They alone stand clear of their surroundings, and offer no easy access to an enemy from the surrounding heights. These are the natural strongholds of Rome; but in strength, as well as in convenience of situation, the difference between them is so great that their respective claims scarcely need examination. The slopes of the Aventine, which are gradual on all sides except that towards the Tiber, are useless for defence without the help of an extensive wall. The Palatine, on the other hand, rises on three sides in formidable cliffs, the height of which is even now impressive and whose protective value was greater still before the level of the surrounding valleys was raised to the extent which excavation has revealed; and beneath these cliffs, until the Etruscan age, lay the marshes which later on became the Forum, the Velabrum and the Circus Maximus. Except by such artificial approaches as the Scalae Caci and the winding ramp at the western end, access to the Palatine was only possible by the Velia, where the col is so narrow that its protection against attack was well within the capacity of a village of the size which the Palatine would hold. Moreover, the position of the Palatine was not less attractive than its natural strength. Though it was farther from the river than the Aventine, it was the nearest of all the hills to the ford below the Tiber-island. Thus the ancient view that on the Palatine the beginnings of Rome should be sought seems to find every confirmation in considerations of general probability.

The summit of the Palatine has an area of roughly twenty-five acres and is divided by a natural depression into an eastern and a western section, of which the former was Palatium proper and the latter bore the name ‘Cermalus.’ There is evidence to suggest that at first the communities of these two sites were distinct; but though the name ‘Cermalus’ survived even into imperial times it is clear that the whole population of the hill was very early united. The scarcity of material evidence for primitive occupation must be ascribed in part to the intensity of the use to which the Palatine was put throughout the classical period, at least until the foundation of New Rome; but nevertheless there remains enough to lend archaeological support to the view of the literary authorities. The only authentic burial discovered on the hill itself is an inhumation which cannot be carried back farther than the fifth century, but it is not within the limits of the settlement that its cemetery must be sought. Below the slopes of the Velia on its western side there came to light in 1902 a burial place whose full dimensions cannot be ascertained: but the fragment exposed beside the temple of Antoninus and Faustina may be assumed to be typical of the whole. In this sepulcretum there is a series of cremations, with which the Volcanal near by has plausibly been connected and which show an undeniable affinity with the cremations of the Alban hills. Though the Alban series has deposits which are definitely earlier than the first at Rome, the cremations of the Forum have begun by the close of the second millennium and extend in all probability into the ninth century BC at least, and perhaps beyond.

At a date which the evidence both from Rome and from other parts of Central Italy seems to fix in the neighbourhood of 800 BC the sepulcretum began to receive the dead of a population distinct from the cremators—of a people whose progress towards Latium can be traced in some detail and the mark of whose presence is inhumation of the body unburnt. From the eighth century these inhumations continue till the sixth, when the cemetery was given up for good. With the draining of the low ground north of the Palatine by the cloaca maxima, the history of the Roman Forum begins, and in the history of the business centre of the city the graveyard has no part.

Though demonstrative proof is impossible, there is much plausibility in the view which assigns the cremations of the Forum to the early community of the Palatine. The absence of remains on the hill directs the search for a cemetery outside the limits of the settlement itself, and beyond these limits no site is more obvious than one close by the col which served to connect the Palatine with the surrounding country. But the identification does not depend on probability alone. In the necropolis of the Forum the priority of the earlier cremations is proved both by the lower levels at which they are found and by the fact that at the time of the inhumation the cremation-deposits had so far been forgotten that at least one of them was broken into by a later grave. The oldest inhumations at Rome are probably to be sought on the Esquiline, but from the Esquiline they spread rapidly round the heights to the Forum and the Quirinal. The striking fact about the deposits on the outer hills is that, whereas inhumations are freely found, traces of cremation, and especially of cremations belonging to a time before the burying people arrived, are extremely rare. From this it may be inferred that when, about the end of the ninth century, the inhuming immigrants reached the site of Rome they found the hills of the outer ring only lightly occupied by scattered stragglers of a people whose main settlement was elsewhere, and whose dead lay at the foot of the slopes north of the later Forum. The problem then is to find the home of these cremators. The festival of the Septimontium preserves the memory of a time, early indeed in the history of Rome, but still one at which seven communities had grown up round the site and which consequently is later the age of the first cremators. Besides the Palatine, the only hills which the necropolis of the Forum might conceivably have served are the Capitoline and Quirinal; but since these two hills, according at least to the most credible of our authorities, were not occupied by any of the seven villages which joined to celebrate the Septimontium, it seems to follow that they cannot claim the first village of all. Thus the Palatine remains, and the consensus of antiquity finds support.

The arguments advanced by those who look for the beginnings of Rome elsewhere are as weak as the suggestion—made in the interests of the traditional account—that the cremating immigrants were attracted to the Palatine by its similarity in shape to the terramare of their ancestors. The existence of a porta Esquilina at Tibur cannot be accepted as proof that the earliest inhabitants of Rome lived on the Esquiline, though it may be admitted that our evidence, such as it is, points to the Esquiline as the first home of the later inhuming population. Nor again is the primacy of the Quirinal to be deduced either from the course of the Via Salaria or from its association with some of the earliest Roman cults. That the salt route passed over the Quirinal is admitted; but farther south it runs close to the Palatine round the eastern side of the Capitoline. And if inferences are to be made from the lines of ancient tracks, an argument against the claim of the Quirinal must be found in the road which led under the south side of the Palatine along the Vallis Murcia and provided the earliest communication between these and the Alban hills. To the final charge against the traditional view—the charge that the Palatine is not, as might have been expected, the home of the oldest Roman cults—it is possible to reply by quoting the Lupercal, the Ficus Ruminalis, the Tugurium Faustuli and the Casa Romuli. Those who lack the courage to assert that some historical significance is to be seen in the secondary Casa Romuli of the Capitoline must at least admit that the Palatine alone can claim association with the traditional founder of the city. For the present question, however, the evidence of cult is of little value. The issue is whether the first settlers on the site of Rome, whose cremations are found in the Forum, lived on the Palatine or elsewhere. It is admitted that the inhumers who followed them had reached the outer hills by the end of the ninth century, and unless it could be proved of the so-called earliest cults that they belonged not to these inhumers but to their cremating predecessors the situation of the cult-centres gives no clue to the whereabouts of the village in which the cremators lived. At present such proof is not forthcoming.

Apart from some cuttings in the rock which have been interpreted as the pole-sockets of primitive capanne, nothing has been found in the Palatine earlier than the various cisterns and sundry pieces of wall which may perhaps be dated to the sixth century. The earliest inhabitants probably depended for protection on the natural strength of the hill, assisted by some small defences, probably no more than rough earthworks of the kind still remembered in classical times near the site of one of the Esquiline settlements. On which summit of the Palatine, if both were not occupied, the first village was pitched there is no indication to show, but we may conjecture that before long huts spread over the whole habitable surface of the hill. This brings us to Roma Quadrata.

Roma Quadrata was the name of a shrine on the Palatine containing various objects connected with the foundation of the city; but the term was also used to describe the earliest city recognized by tradition, the city whose limits were those of the Palatine hill. The antiquity of this use has been doubted, and it must be confessed that Varro is the best and earliest authority in its favour. But the common criticisms of Varro carry little weight. Whatever date should be assigned to the origin of the ritual conducted by the Argei, the fact that one of their chapels is located ‘in Cermalo’ does not prove that Cermalus and Palatine had yet to become parts of a larger whole: and the appearance of the Cermalus in Festus’ list of eight communities which celebrated the Septimontium is inconclusive because, though suspicion here usually and reasonably falls on the Subura, it is at least possible that in the original form of the document Palatium denoted the whole hill and that Cermalus, which breaks the geographical sequence, should be rejected as the intruder. Varro’s evidence is not to be ignored; and in any case Roma Quadrata may be accepted as the name used by him and his followers to distinguish the Palatine settlement at the beginning of the last millennium BC from the larger Rome in which it was subsequently merged.

By a date which falls somewhere within the limits of the eighth century, the outer hills had been freely planted with settlements of the inhuming ‘Sabines’, and the next stage in the history of Rome is marked by the formation of a union, apparently religious in character, to include both the cremators of the Palatine and at least a section of the newcomers. The survival by which the memory of this union was preserved in republican Rome was the festival of the Septimontium; but the evidence for this celebration is so confused that conclusions of historical relevance can only be drawn from it by more or less hazardous conjecture. There is general agreement that the rites of the Septimontium were performed on seven different hills, and it is obvious that from the earliest days of the institution the communities living on these hills must have been in some way connected. But at this point speculation begins. If, on the ground of its lateness, we may ignore the view which sees the seven hills in the seven main heights of classical Rome, and which therefore includes Janiculum in the list, there remains the account preserved in an unsatisfactory form by Festus. According to the passage as it stands, the hills were: Palatium, Velia, Fagutal, Subura, Cermalus, Caelius, Oppius, Cispius; but emendation is clearly demanded by the presence of eight names instead of seven, if not also by the fact that the Subura of later times was a' valley and not a hill at all. The means, however, by which these difficulties of detail are removed do not affect the wider implications of the passage, which are that the hills of the Septimontium should be found in the Palatine, and certain spurs of the outer heights which lay round about the northern end of the Velia, together with the Velia itself. It is in all ways probable that when Palatine Rome began to grow into something larger the first stage in the expansion was a loose union of the Palatine community with others round about, and as a record of this stage the festival of the Septimontium may be accepted.

Thus far it is possible to go with tradition; but the further suggestion that the seven communities formed a single city, and that Septimontium was its name, must be rejected. It cannot be doubted that in the late republic, if not before, the word Septimontium was capable of a local signification, but in this sense it properly denoted a district and nothing more. Whatever political or religious ties may have bound the seven villages to one another, the total lack of evidence for any common system of defence indicates the essential difference between the Septimontium and the late Servian City. Individually, of course, the villages may have been fenced, and it is even possible that the stretch of earthwork which survived into historical times had originally belonged to the people of the Subura or the Oppius. But on the nature of the Septimontium in general nothing need be added to the account of Varro—rightly understood—that Septimontium was a name used to denote a certain area at a time in its history before that area was included in the walls of a later city.

The theory which seems to have won credence in classical Rome suggests that the enclosure of the Palatine and other settlements within a single boundary came with the formation of what may be called the City of the Four Regions. For this development the evidence is vague and scanty, but attempts to discredit the Four Regions City as an antiquarian invention have not achieved success. To the defence of the traditional view arguments based on religion do not contribute much. From the sites of the cultcentres recognized in the so-called Calendar of Numa no conclusions about the dimensions of the city can be drawn: for cultcentres might lie outside the boundaries as well as within. The cogent case for the City of the Four Regions rests on the pomerium of republican times. In its original sense pomerium seems to have meant the divine boundary of a city, and since it marked the limits of the area specially protected by the city’s gods, Varro is wholly plausible in saying that the pomerium properly ran outside, and not inside, the defensive walls where such existed. Thus a pomerium which encloses a smaller area than that within the Servian wall must be connected with a city earlier in date than this defensive system. It will be seen that the remains of the Servian defences contain evidence for the extent of sixth-century Rome; and since one large region—the Esquiline—is outside the pomerium but inside the sixth-century circuit it seems to follow that the pomerium must be assigned to something earlier than the so-called Servian Cit2. In addition to the districts of the Septimontium, the pomerium of the Republic included Capitoline, Quirinal and Viminal, as well as certain low-lying districts between the hills, of which the Forum is the most important; and such archaeological material as these districts provide suggests that the origin of this city is to be placed in the seventh century.

The choice of a name for this stage of Rome’s development is a matter of small importance. ‘City of the Four Regions’ is a modern label, justified to some extent by the fact that, with the possible exception of the Mons Capitolinus and the Roman Forum, the whole area within the pomerium which formed the boundary of the seventh-century city, was divided in republican times between the regiones Suburana, Esquilina, Collina and Palatina. The exception is of some interest. If the ritual of the Argei is early, and not an institution of the third century BC, as Wissowa has essayed to show, Varro’s list of chapels visited by the procession on 16 and 17 March throws valuable light on the city’s growth when it suggests that the Capitoline and the low ground beneath it to the east were not included in any one of the Regions. Though a city from which the Capitoline was omitted may be surprising, the explanation of its omission is so obvious as to confirm the suggestion of the evidence. Before the draining of the Forum by the canalization of what later became the Cloaca maxima, the Mons Capitolinus was almost worthless, too small to be an independent stronghold and too isolated to be made part of the Quirinal group. Though no certainty can be attained, it is at least possible that in the earliest city the Capitoline had no place and that its inclusion was due to the later kings with whose building activities it is closely associated. Against such inferences from our knowledge of the four regions no objection can be drawn from the fact that the regions bear the same names as the four urban tribes. Whatever the date of the urban tribes, there is no reason to think that the regions drew their names from the tribes and not vice versa. It seems then that in the pomerium we have evidence for a city earlier than that of the sixth century, and that in the conjectural limits of the regions there is a hint that this first Rome excluded the Capitoline, which may, like the Esquiline, have been added at the time with which tradition at least connects Servius Tullius.

That the City of the Four Regions was protected by more worldly defences than its pomerium there is nothing to show. Evidence for a continuous fortification embracing part of the outer heights is wholly lacking until the sixth century brings the wall of Servius. The Servian wall in its final form was an elaborate work which varied in construction according to the demands of the terrain. Wherever possible the line gave advantage of position to the defence by following the contours of the hills rather more than half-way up the slopes, and in these sections the wall was the sole protection. But on level ground the works were of a more formidable type, which may be seen in the extant remains south of the Colline Gate. First a ditch was dug, said to have been thirty feet deep and a hundred wide, and next the spoil from this excavation was piled behind it to form an agger. Both faces of the agger were then supported by retaining walls of which the outer one is built in the same style as the defences on those sections of the circuit where no agger is found. The inner wall is of rougher technique. The date of these defences in their final form can be fixed with some assurance. Since the material of the outer wall throughout is tufa from the quarries of Grotta Oscura which lay in the territory of Veii, it has been argued that the construction belongs either to the period of Etruscan supremacy in Rome or to a time after the destruction of Veii, and that consequently it must be placed either in the sixth century or after the beginning of the fourth. To support the later date there is ample evidence, and evidence independent of all questions about the relations between Rome and Veii. The use of the Roman foot, which had almost certainly not superseded the old Italic foot when the foundations of the Capitoline temple were laid in the sixth century, points to a date after the foundation of the Republic. The fourth century is indicated in particular both by the forms of the letters used on the blocks as quarry-marks or for some similar purpose, and by a comparison of the structural technique with that shown by fourth-century walls in other Italian cities; and it is in the fourth century that Livy records, not indeed with the lucidity which might be desired, extensive repairs to the fortifications of Rome. There can be little doubt that the Servian wall in its familiar form is a monument of Rome’s recovery after the Gallic invasion.

The possibility, however, that Livy is right in regarding the works of the fourth century as no more than repairs, and that an earlier wall had stood on the line of the ‘Servian’ enceinte^ is by no means to be ignored. At various points in the circuit there appear short stretches of masonry whose peculiar characteristics point to a different date, and the difficulties of regarding them as contemporary are too great to be seriously weakened by the fact that these fragments are at times worked into the later construction. The materials provide the most significant evidence; for whereas the fourth-century remains are of Veientane tufa throughout, the masonry now in question is uniformly of the local cappellaccio. And even if this difference of material did not suggest a difference of date, there would still remain the constructional technique to show that the wall to which these traces belong was built at least a century before the later repairs were carried out. The smallness of the blocks, whose height is only ten inches or thereabouts against two feet in the restorations, and the irregularity of the courses combine to indicate an origin in the sixth century or the fifth. In the absence of pottery from the foundations of this wall, so far as they have been explored, the material evidence will not authorize a more definite date than this; but it may be said that at present no valid archaeological objection can be brought against the connection of these survivals with the wall ascribed by tradition to the sixth of the kings of Rome. To this stage the addition of the Esquiline, and possibly of the Capitoline, belongs.

Whatever view may be taken of the details related by Livy and Dionysius about the Icilian rogation of 456 the story probably rests on a basis sound enough to justify the conclusion that in the middle of the fifth century the Aventine was still more or less unoccupied. If this is so, the tale that Anous Marcius added the Aventine to the city becomes incredible, as indeed it always has been in the light of archaeological evidence for the expansion of Rome; and there is much plausibility in the theory that this hill was first included when the Servian defences were re-organized after the Gallic retreat. The question of the Aventine and its incorporation affects the interpretation of the cappellaccio wall because there are traces of this work on the Palatine which could not easily be assigned to a circuit including the Aventine massif. Even if proof were forthcoming that the Aventine formed part of the city as early as the sixth century, it would be possible to connect the Palatine remains with the independent defences which that hill may have boasted even after the coming of the Gauls: but if, on the other hand, the Aven tine remained outside the defences until the fourth-century reconstruction, then it is possible to say that the whole series of these cappellaccio survivals lie on the trace of the fourth-century enceinte, except on the slope above the Vallis Murcia where the line was altered, at the time of the restoration, to take in the last of the Roman hills. With the City of the Four Regions this wall can have nothing to do, because the clearest of all the signs it has left are north of the Baths of Diocletian, at a point where the Servian circuit extends as far beyond the pomerium as it does anywhere in its course. For the present, and until more light is won, it would be unwise to rule out the possibility that the first wall of Rome which included not only the Palatine but part of the outer heights was built in the sixth century, and that an extension on the Esquiline, as Livy asserts, together possibly with one to include the Capitoline, was really an achievement of the regal period.

Such were the changes of five hundred years. The Palatine settlement, founded not long before the end of the second millennium BC, had been joined in about 800 by the younger communities of the outer hills. In the eighth century seven of these had begun the common celebration of the Septimontium, and in the seventh these villages, together with those of the Quirinal and Viminal, with or without the Capitoline, had been merged into a single city lying behind a continuous pomerium. Next, possibly in the sixth century, a defensive wall was built which, unless the Capitoline was now for the first time annexed, only deserted the line of the pomerium in the north-east, where it was carried forward to enclose a large section of the Esquiline; and finally, in the fourth century, when this wall was renewed, one more addition was made by the inclusion of the Aventine to the south. Thereafter Rome still grew: but when the fourth-century works had saved the city from the menace of Hannibal, the need for defences slowly disappeared, and Rome became something like the open city which it remained until the Alemannic danger produced the fortifications of Aurelian and Probus.

VI.

THE FOUNDATION LEGENDS

The legends which grew up round the origin of Rome have so slight a value as evidence for the history of the city that they can claim little space: all that is needed is to make their irrelevance plain. The arrival of the Greeks in the western Mediterranean gradually brought Italy within the ambit of Greek myth, and it is on Greek foundations that the whole saga of early Rome is based. To extend the geographical range of Hellenic legend the most obvious expedient was to continue the tale of the Nostoi, and this expedient in the end affected other places in Latium than Rome: Telegonus, for instance, became the recognized founder of Tusculum. The westward progress of Odysseus and Aeneas, so far as details are concerned, may be ignored before the fifth century, when Hellanicus of Lesbos brings Aeneas to the site of Rome to found a city called after one of the Trojan women. From the fifth century, with unimportant changes in its main outlines, the tale was elaborated by the Greeks until soon after 230 BC, when under the influence of Hellas a Roman literature was coming into existence, it was taken over by Naevius and Fabius Pictor .

At this time the fusion of Greek and Latin legend was still imperfect, but although the final version had not yet been evolved, something had been done to meet the most serious difficulty of all. This was chronological. Before the establishment of the Republic in the last decade of the sixth century Roman tradition could tell of nothing more than seven kings—or eight at most; and these were by no means enough to span the gap between the Trojan war and the expulsion of the second Tarquin. To fill the lacuna drastic measures were taken. Aeneas, whose first advent to Latium had been as founder of Rome itself, was shorn of this proud privilege. He might visit the site, indeed, as he does under Vergil’s guidance, but for four centuries or so he and his descendants are condemned to drag out a misty existence elsewhere, until the time arrives when Romulus at long last may carry out the task for which Aeneas originally had come. In the search for a local habitation to which the waiting progeny of Aeneas might be consigned it was both natural and appropriate that men should turn to the hills which dominate the Latin landscape. If Aeneas had reached Latium too soon, and if, in consequence, the founder of Rome was to rise from some neighbouring city, no home could be more suitable than one which lay close to the greatest of the religious centres in the region. At one time, it is true, the sanctuary of Juppiter Latiaris seems to have lain within the territory of Cabum, but it was undoubtedly the proximity of this establishment which conferred on Alba Longa its prestige. According to the account which finally prevailed, Alba Longa was founded by Ascanius, son of Aeneas, who had settled with his father at Lavinium; and it was at Lavinium that Aeneas ended his earthly career either by drowning in the river Numicus or by bodily assumption to heaven after death at the hands of the Etruscan Mezentius. The choice of Lavinium, the city of the Laurentes, for the honour of this association does not admit of certain explanation. Though it would be wrong to say that the advent of Aeneas to the western Mediterranean was due to his connection in Greek minds with any locality which could boast a cult capable of identification with that of Aphrodite, in Greek mythology the hero’s connection with his divine mother was undoubtedly close. Somewhere between Lavinium and Ardea was what Strabo (v, p. 232) calls a ‘shrine of Aphrodite shared by the Latins’, and it is conceivable that therein should be seen the reason for Aeneas’ presence at this particular spot. The cult, however, does not seem to have been important; and since the date of its origin cannot be ascertained, it must be regarded as possible that this was not the cause, but the result, of the connection of Lavinium with Aeneas. If the worship of Aphrodite at Lavinium was generated by the presence of Aeneas, Lavinium may be no more than an obvious stepping-stone between the site of Rome, where the hero first arrived, and the home of his immediate descendants —Alba Longa.

No light is thrown on the origins of Rome by the legends of Hercules, Cacus and Evander, the tenants of the site before Romulus appears. Hercules is Greek, and though Cacus seems originally to have been an Italic fire-spirit, he does not enter into the legend localized at Rome until he has taken on the character of the Greek Typhoeus. Evander again comes from Arcadia. In origin he seems to have been a form of Pan, and his translation to Rome is to be explained by the similarity of name between Pallanteion, the home of his cult near Tripolitza, and the Mons Palatinus at Rome. The theory that the Roman associations of Evander are to be explained in whole or part by his resemblance to Faunus is to be treated with the greatest caution: it depends wholly on the assumption, questioned by Warde Fowler, that Faunus was early involved in the Lupercalia and was consequently recognized in Rome for an indefinite time before the temple on the Tiber-island was built in 196 BC.

It is only with Romulus that the legends of the city proper rise to importance. In the fifth century, before the presence of Aeneas in Latium had been finally accepted, the foundation of Rome was vaguely ascribed to an eponymous Rhomos, of whom our earliest mention is derived from an unknown source through Agathocles of Cyzicus. Rhomos, therefore, was known in Greece by the end of the fifth century; but in Latium this form of the name found no acceptance. Instead, perhaps through familiarity with a name which appears in Etruscan monuments as rumina and in later Latin as Romilius, the Romans chose ‘Romulus’ as the appellation of their founder. The ancient view that it was Romulus who gave his name to Rome, and more modern suggestions that the legendary ancestor of the Romilii was somehow assigned the honour of the city’s foundation, may both be set aside. Romulus indeed may be a form suggested by a proper name common among the early settlers in Latium and its surroundings; but, whatever the word ‘Roma’ may mean, and whether or not there be any value in the theory that its origin is Etruscan, the Romulus of legend, both in function and in name, is nothing more than eponym of the city. The identification of Romulus with Quirinus, apparently the title under which a deity corresponding to Mars was worshipped by the people of the outer hills, cannot be proved before the Ciceronian age, and is to be explained partly by the ease with which Quirinus could be made eponym of the Quirites and partly by a desire to turn Romulus, whose ancestry was early said to be divine, into a god himself.

In the fourth century the Latin Romulus joins Rhomos in Greece—not indeed as brother but, in the first place, apparently as grandfather1. In the third century Rhomos disappears, and in his stead there enters Remus—twin brother of Romulus. Such evidence as survives tends strongly to suggest that at first the founder of the city was unique, that Rhomos and Romulus are alternatives, and that the connection of both with the choosing of a site is a comparatively late development. In its final form the story contains many details which need not detain us. Akki’s rescue of Sharrukin, the vicissitudes of Moses, and the early adventures of Cyrus the Great are reminders enough that miraculous preservation is a feature in the early life of famous men by no means peculiar to the Greek and Roman worlds. In this case, however, the parallels from Greece are the most relevant, and in Greece the nearest may be found in the tale of Neleus and Pelias. This pair, twin sons of Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus, by Poseidon, were turned adrift on the Enipeus; and, when at length the stream cast them ashore, they were suckled the one by a bitch, the other by a mare. The resemblance here is close enough to suggest that, like most of the speculations current in antiquity about the founders of Rome, the tale of Romulus and Remus in form at least is Greek, but to this it must be added that details such as the choice of a she-wolf for foster-mother and the association with the ficus ruminalis are Italian.

The version which makes the two founders twins cannot be shown to have existed before the end of the fourth century. The ‘Lupa Capitolina,’ a work to be dated about 500 BC, would be our earliest evidence if it were evidence at all: but it is very doubtful whether this monument in its original form included any children or child. The figures of the twins now to be seen in the Palazzo dei Conservatori are works probably of the Quattrocento, and the view that they are not mere additions, but took the place of children contemporary with the wolf itself, is hard to reconcile with the general design. In the long series of monuments which show the suckling of the twins, the wolf regularly turns its head back towards its haunches, in an attitude wholly unlike that of the Capitoline bronze. Of the Capitoline type no copy or even reminiscence survives; and the difficulty of believing that this should be so if the group enjoyed the fame which would have belonged to one of the earliest sculptured representations of a famous scene, together with the suggestion of the wolf’s position that it was not in the act of giving suck at all, compels the conclusion that the bronze is irrelevant to the history of Romulus and Remus in Roman legend. After this, another monument deserves mention because, though it cannot be connected with the twins or even with Rome, it is our first instance in art of the suckling wolf in the familiar pose, and also sound evidence for wolf-children in the tales of Italy. This is the Etruscan stele from the Certosa di Bologna, now in the Bologna Museum, which probably belongs to the first half of the fourth century and shows a she-wolf with back-turned head giving milk, not to twins indeed, but to a single child.

If the Romano-Campanian coinage, on which the wolf and twins appear, belongs to the period of the Pyrrhic war and does not follow immediately on Rome’s entry into Campania, our earliest valid evidence for the story of the twins at Rome is the monumental group set up by the brothers Ogulnii, when aediles in 296 BC. According to Livy ‘ad ficum Ruminalem simulacra infantium conditorum urbis sub uberibus lupae posuerunt’; and, so far as the motive is concerned, probability is on Livy’s side, though his account has been disputed. The view that the Ogulnii meant the two children to symbolize some dualism—for instance, the partnership of patricians and plebeians in the priesthoods—and that a misinterpretation of these figures subsequently gave rise to the story of the twin founders of the city is hard to reconcile with the fact that less than a century later the vulgate version of the city’s origin found a place in the Histories of Fabius Pictor. The dedication may be accepted as our earliest evidence for Romulus and Remus at Rome; and this interpretation is to some extent confirmed by the appearance of the suckling wolf on Romano-Campanian didrachms of the heavy series. It may be assumed that whatever meaning the type was intended to convey must have been one easy for the uninstructed to grasp, and it is more reasonable to see in it a reference to a legend which soon won wide acceptance than to argue that it indicates some other union which is not known with certainty even to have been represented in art.

In the first stage of the development Rhomos is alone. In the second, when Rhomos and Romulus are competing claimants to the founder’s place, the former is slowly ousted by the latter. And in the third, to those at least who are unmoved by arguments designed to prove the priority of Remus to his brother, Remus joins Romulus and the pair are twins. No wholly satisfactory account of this duplication can be given. The view which sees in it an attempt to find authority for the collegiate magistracy of later times fails before the fact that Remus, though brother of Romulus, is nowhere represented as his partner in rule and is, indeed, rather a rival aspirant to monarchy. Remus, in fact, is too little like Titus Tatius for this theory to be true. Nor again is it easy to agree that the brothers stand for two racial elements in the population of Rome. It is most improbable that the Romans of the fourth century desired to emphasize the early distinction between the cremating and inhuming inhabitants of the city, and the suggestion that the twins record the reception by the Roman people, already more or less united, of Sabine invaders soon after the foundation of the Republic hangs together with a version of fifth-century Latin history which is by no means proved. So far as our scanty information goes it rather points to a simpler conclusion. After Greece had given Rhomos to Rome and Rome had returned him to Greece under the Italian name Romulus, the Greeks found two figures associated with the foundation of the city. By this pair they were reminded of legends in which a part was played by twins, and therefore this relationship between Rhomos and Romulus was established. At Rome, however, Rhomos was not an accepted name. Romulus had already been invented as an alternative, and when the twins reached Italy as Rhomos and Romulus another variant was needed. This was found in Remus—a form which, just as Romulus had been influenced by the name Romilius, was commended by its likeness to the name Remmius or Remnius (cf. Ramnes), if it was not actually modelled thereon.

Thus far the story has been of legends devised by the theorists of Greece to provide some account of Roman origins. The Italian element they contain is small and their historical value is negligible. Of the other tales in which the name of Romulus appears the majority bear either on the constitutional development or on the history of Roman expansion during the regal period, and in these connections they will be mentioned. All that remains for notice here is the Rape of the Sabine Women, with its pendent—the asylum inter duos lucos. It was a foible of the Romans—and a foible which has seriously distorted the tradition—to represent their ancestors as rude warriors of the sort which appropriately might found an imperial race, and in this spirit they suggest that the followers of Romulus—the first citizens of Rome—were high-spirited youths moved by a thirst for glory to leave their Alban home. When they were safely settled in the new city, the festival of the Consualia, to which neighbouring peoples had been invited, was chosen as an opportunity for seizing the Sabine women to make good a scarcity of wives. The reasons for this coup are variously given. Some said that in their eagerness for adventure the first settlers had come without womenfolk at all, others that it was for newcomers who had taken refuge at the asylum that wives were needed, and others again that Romulus indulged in this escapade simply in order to provoke a war. The details do not matter. In outline the story seems to be no more than an attempt by means of legendary history to explain various features of the Roman marriage rite. The tale is conditioned by the military character of the first settlement, wherein women were rare. The choice of Sabines as the victims is made plausible by the early intimacy of this people with Rome. The rape is a supposed precedent for the force put upon a bride before she entered her husband’s house—force which probably had its origin in a desire to free her effectively from the magical conditions of the virgin state she was about to lose. The hero Talasius, who appears in the account of Livy and elsewhere, is an antiquarian invention to account for the mysterious cry ‘Talassio’ raised by marriage processions at Rome. And the choice of the Consualia as the occasion of this affair is perhaps due to one of the two annual celebrations of this festival—that on 21 August—having been a merry-making after harvest, whereat the ordinary rules of behaviour were to some extent relaxed.

The Rape of the Sabines makes an early appearance: there is evidence enough to show that it was accepted by Ennius in the first half of the second century BC For this reason it can claim priority to the tale that, in order to increase the population of his city, Romulus founded an asylum in the depression between the two summits of the Mons Capitolinus—a tale which cannot be traced back beyond the first century BC. There is, indeed, no reason to believe that the particular asylum here concerned was ever used as such; and, in spite of what Lang admits to be no more than a guess about the nemus at Aricia, the evidence for sanctuaries of this sort in Italy is so weak that the institution itself, like its name, may well be an importation from Greece. It is a plausible conjecture that, when the idea of an asylum had grown familiar at Rome, the erection of such a place was ascribed to Romulus in order that the fugitives whom it would attract might be available to explain the need for women implied by the legend of the rape; and its localization on the Capitoline may well be due, as De Sanctis has suggested2, to nothing more than the presence there, in a very prominent position, of a bidental or some similar enclosure.

Of the early legends no more need be said. The evidence they supply is less valuable for the beginnings of Roman history than for the entry of Rome into the intellectual heritage of Greece. Far more important is the native tradition on which our knowledge of the next subject depends—the history of Rome in the regal age.

CHAPTER XII

THE KINGS OF ROME