FIRST BOOK.

THE REGAL PERIOD.

CHAPTER I.

The Legend of Aeneas.

 

When, according to the counsel of the gods, Troy was conquered by the Greeks, the noble Aeneas, with a number of Trojans, fled from the burning city. He carried his father Anchises on his shoulders, and led his son Ascanius by the hand. Nor did he forget the sacred image of Pallas which had fallen from heaven, but he saved it from the hands of the conquering enemy. Therefore the gods loved him, and Mercury built him a ship, which he entered with his family and followers, that he might find a new home far from Troy. But his mother Venus showed him the direction in which he should steer, for she let her star shine before him till he reached a distant coast in Italy, not far from that part where the river Tiber flows into the sea. There the star suddenly disappeared. Aeneas landed with his people, and called the place Troy, in memory of his beloved home.

The king of the country was called Latinus. He received the strangers kindly, made a league with Aeneas against his enemies, and gave him his daughter Lavinia in marriage. Aeneas then built a town, and called it Lavinium; and he fought against the enemies of the country, and killed Turnus, the king of the Rutuli; and when Latinus had fallen in battle, Aeneas reigned in his stead over the united people of the natives and the Trojans, and he called them Latins after the name of Latinus.

When he had ruled for three years, he waged a war against Mezentius, the king of the Etruscans in Caere. Then it came to pass that in a battle on the river Numicius a storm and sudden darkness separated the combatants. When it became light again and they looked for the Aeneas, he was nowhere to be found. Then his people saw that the gods had taken him to themselves, and they built him an altar, and worshipped him from that time as the “native Jupiter”.

Ascanius the son of Aeneas, who was also called Iulus, left the town of Lavinium after thirty years, and built a new city, high on the hill near a deep lake; and he called the town Alba Longa, and there he and his descendants reigned three hundred years over the whole country of the Latins from the mountains to the sea, and all the Latin towns were subject to Alba. There were thirty of them, and they formed a league amongst themselves, and Alba was the chief town of the league, and upon the summit of the Alban hill they built a temple to Jupiter Latinus, for thus King Latinus was called after his death when he had become a god. In this temple the thirty Latin towns offered up an annual sacrifice and celebrated games in honor of the god. But the sacred relics of Troy, which Aeneas had rescued, remained still in Lavinium, the first place in Latium where they were worshipped; and whenever they were carried away from it to Alba Longa, they returned of their own accord to Lavinium in the night. So Lavinium remained a sacred town among the Latins, and the priests offered up yearly sacrifices for the whole of Latium in the sanctuaries of the Penates and the Lares, the tutelary gods of the Latin race.

 

Critical Examination of the Legend of Aeneas.

 

In the period of contemporary history the immigration of Aeneas and the Trojan colony was considered in Rome an undoubted fact. It was publicly recognised by the state as early as the first Punic War. At that time the Senate interceded with the Aetolians in favour of the Acarnaniaus, because among all the Greeks the Acarnanians had been the only people who had not taken part in the war against Troy. On several occasions the Romans conferred favours on the people of Ilium on the ground of their being of a kindred race. Many of the Roman families were proud to trace their descent from the Trojan colonists, and when the Julian house rose to the highest position in the state, the legend of Aeneas acquired more and more splendour and importance. At last it was celebrated by Virgil, and so interwoven with the existence and greatness of Rome that through the whole of antiquity and the middle ages, and in fact up to the time of the rise of historical criticism, it was universally recognised as an authentic tradition. Nevertheless, it can be satisfactorily proved that the legend, even in those parts which do not contain anything supernatural, is devoid of all historical foundation, and owes its origin wholly and entirely to the imagination.

The Roman legend of Aeneas is one of a numerous class of myths, which are found in different places, especially on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and which trace the foundation of towns back to the heroic age of Greece. The splendour of the epic poetry of Greece, especially that of Homer, was reflected on the islands and sea-coasts of the far West, where in the course of centuries Greek sailors had ventured or Greek emigrants had settled. Everywhere the settlers took their gods and their heroes with them, and even the surrounding barbarians were glad to exchange the shadowy forms of their own mythology and past history for the brilliant heroes of Greece or Troy.

Among the innumerable city-legends connected with the Greek and Trojan heroes of the epic age, that of the building of Rome has nothing especially to recommend it, on the score of inherent probability or external proof. Nothing but the greatness of Rome rescued it from the obscurity in which the other legends were buried by the lapse of time. If, instead of Rome, Tusculum had become the mistress of the world, Aeneas and his Trojans would have been forgotten, and Telegonus, the son of Ulysses, would most probably have occupied the place of founder of the Empire. In that case, instead of the Aeneid, we should have had songs celebrating Telegonus, and the noble families of Tusculum would have derived their descent from the companions of the far-travelled Ulysses.

If we ask for the actual evidence of the Trojan immigration, we find that the older Greek authors, from Homer downwards, know nothing of it, and indirectly contradict the Roman legend by making Aeneas rule as king, and die either in his own country or in other places.

The pretended settlements of Aeneas are as numerous as the towns which by their names seem to refer either to him or to his father Anchises, or to one of his companions. Thus it was said that he founded the town of Aenos in Thrace, the town of Aenea in Chalcidice; and that in the neighbourhood of Cumae he landed on the island Aenaria. In many places his tomb was shown, but more especially the numerous temples of his divine mother, Venus, found along the coast of the Mediterranean, were ascribed to him as their founder. While the older Greek authors know nothing of Aeneas as settling in Latium, we do not meet with any noteworthy writer who mentions this event before the third century B.C. The Greek historian Timaeus is the first who distinctly refers to the settlement of Aeneas in Italy, and the poet Naevius, a little later, is the first Roman authority. There is therefore no reasonable ground for supposing that for the space of eight or nine hundred years the legend of Aeneas had any existence at all. It would be useless to dwell longer on a narrative which in itself is so utterly void of historical foundation and internal probability, and which in fact is only interesting because in later times it was part of the national belief, and exercised an influence on the literature and politics of Rome.

The legend of a Trojan settlement in Latium in the form given above was the most generally received, but by no means the only version of the legend of Aeneas. No less than eighteen different forms of the legend of the foundation of Rome connect it directly with the wanderings of Aeneas or Ulysses, and place it therefore in the Trojan age. This conception was undoubtedly the oldest. But when the Romans discovered from the chronological tables of Greece that many centuries intervened between the destruction of Troy and the commencement of the period of the Roman kings, they found it necessary to fill up the gap by an imaginary line of Alban kings, and to place the Trojan immigration at a period anterior to the foundation of Rome. It appears that in Rome the descent of the founder from Alba was a received national tradition, before anybody thought of tracing it to Aeneas. The connection with Alba could not therefore be set aside, else it would have been easy to make Aeneas sail into the Tiber and found Rome, and in that case a line of Roman instead of Alban kings might have been invented to connect Aeneas with Romulus. It is therefore quite clear that the legend of Aeneas is of a comparatively recent date, later at least than the story of Romulus and Remus as the sons of the Alban Vestal virgin. It did not arise, in all probability, before the Romans became acquainted with the Italian Greeks; and after it had passed through the most varied and capricious forms, it at last assumed that shape in which, its principal features being preserved, it became the national belief of the Romans.   

 

CHAPTER II.

The Legend of Romulus.

 

Now when the time was fulfilled in which, according to the decree of the gods, Rome should be built, it came to pass that after the death of Procas, the king of Alba, a quarrel arose between his two sons concerning the throne. Amulius, the younger, took the government from his elder brother Numitor, killed his son and made his daughter Rhea Silvia a priestess of Vesta, to the end that she should remain a virgin all her life, engaged in the service of the goddess who presides over the city-hearth and loves purity and chastity in those who serve her. But the wicked king was not able to oppose the will of the gods. For Mars, the god of war, loved the virgin, and she bore twins. When Amulius heard this, he ordered the mother to be killed and the twins to be thrown into the river Tiber. But the water had risen and had formed shallow pools along the banks where it flowed but slowly. Here the servants of the king placed the basket with the children in the water, thinking that it would float down with the stream and then sink. But the gods watched over the children, and the basket floated to the foot of the Palatine hill, near the cave of the god Lupercus, and was caught by the branches of a fig-tree. This was the Ruminal fig-tree, which continued to grow for centuries, and bore witness to the miracle. The waters of the river now fell rapidly, and the two boys remained on dry land.

Attracted by their cry, there came a she-wolf out of the Lupercos and suckled the children with her own milk, and licked them with her tongue. And when Faustulus, a shepherd who tended his flocks hard by, saw it, he scared away the animal and brought the children to his wife Acca Laurentia, and called them Romulus and Remus, and brought them up as his own children. When the boys were grown up, they distinguished themselves among the shepherds of that country by their strength and courage; and they protected the weak against the strong who went out to pillage and plunder. Then it came to pass that their enemies lay in wait for them while they were celebrating the festival of the god Pan. And Remus was taken prisoner, and brought before his grandfather Numitor, and accused of having injured his cattle. But Romulus escaped. Then Faustulus delayed no longer, but told Romulus of his mother and how he was destined to death by Amulius and miraculously saved. And Romulus and his followers forced their way into the town of Alba, and set his brother free, and the two brothers slew the unjust and cruel Amulius, and placed their grandfather Numitor again upon the throne.

But the brothers would not remain in Alba, and determined to build a new city on one of the seven hills by the Tiber, near the spot where they had grown up among the brothers-shepherds, and they were joined by many from Alba and from the whole country of the Latins.

Now, as Romulus and Remus were twins, and as neither would yield to the other in honour and power, there arose a quarrel between them and their followers which of them should give his name to the new town and govern it. And they determined to let the gods decide by a sign from the sacred birds. Then Romulus with his followers observed the heavens from the Palatine hill, and Remus took his station on the Aventine, and thus they both waited for a sign from heaven, from midnight until morning. Then there appeared to Remus six vultures; and he rejoiced and sent messengers to his brother announcing that the gods had decided in his favour. But at the same moment Romulus saw twelve vultures, and therefore it was plain that the gods gave the preference to Romulus.

Therefore he built the town on the Palatine hill, and called it Rome after his own name, and drew a furrow round it with the sacred plough, and along by the furrow he built a wall and dug a trench. But when Remus saw the doings of his brother, he mocked him, and leaped over the wall and the trench to show him how easily the town might be taken. Then Romulus was wroth and slew his brother and said, “Thus may it be with anyone who dares to cross these walls”. And this remained a warning word for all future times, that no enemy should venture to attack Rome unpunished.

After this Romulus opened a place of refuge on the Capitoline hill. And there came a great many robbers and fugitives of all kinds from all the surrounding nations, and Romulus received them all and protected them and made them citizens of his town.

But there was a lack of women in the new community. Therefore Romulus sent messengers to the towns round his people asking the neighbours to give their daughters in marriage to the Romans. But the messengers were sent back contemptuously, and they were told that there could be no union and no friendship with a band of robbers and outcasts. When Romulus heard this answer he hid his anger, and invited the dwellers round about to come to Rome with their wives and children to see the games which the Romans wished to celebrate in honor of the god Consus; and a great number of Sabines and others came; and when all eyes were fixed on the games Romulus gave his people a sign which had been agreed upon. And suddenly there rushed out a number of armed men, who surrounded the place and carried away the young women of the Sabines. But the parents of the women hurried away from Rome with curses against the faithless town, and swore to take vengeance on Romulus and on his people.

First the men of Caenina rose, and would not wait until others were ready for war, but sent out an army to lay waste the Roman land. But Romulus went out against them and drove them back, and slew their king with his own hand. Then he returned triumphantly to the city, bearing the armour of the slain king on a pole, and brought it as an offering to Jupiter. Thus Romulus celebrated his first triumph over his enemies in the first war which he waged as a sign that Rome would subdue all her foes.

Now when the men of Crustumerium and Antemnae also went forth to take their revenge on the Romans for the and rape of the women, Romulus marched against them and subdued them in easy combat. But the Sabines, who lived further up the mountains in the direction of Cures, did not go forth till they had gathered a powerful army. And their king, Titus Tatius, pressed forward and encamped on the Quirinal hill, which lies opposite the Capitol. Now, one day, when Tarpeia, the daughter of the Roman captain on the Capitol, had gone out to draw water, the Sabines begged of her to open a gate and to let them into the citadel. This Tarpeia promised, having made them swear that they should give her what they wore on their left arms, meaning thereby their gold armlets and rings. Whereupon, when the Sabines had penetrated into the citadel, they threw their heavy shields which they wore on their left arms on Tarpeia and killed her with their weight. So the traitress met with her reward.

Now when the Sabines had won the Capitol, they fought with the Romans who lived on the Palatine, and the s fighting was up and down in the valley which separates the two mountains. The champion of the Sabines was Mettus Curtius, and that of the Romans Hostus Hostilius. When Hostus fell, the Romans were seized with a panic, and they fled back to the Palatine, carrying Romulus with them in their flight. But at the gate of the town Romulus stopped, raised his hands to heaven, and vowed that he would build a temple on this spot dedicated to Jupiter Stator, that is, the Stayer of Flight, if he would be helpful to the Romans. And behold, as if a voice from heaven had commanded them, the Romans stayed their flight, turned round against the advancing Sabines, and drove them back against the Capitoline hill. Then it came to pass, that Mettus Curtius sank with his horse into the marsh, which then covered the lower part of the valley, and he almost perished in the marsh. And the place where this happened was called for ever after the Lake of Curtius.

When the battle had come to a standstill, and Romans and Sabines were facing each other and ready to begin the battle afresh, behold, the Sabine women rushed between the combatants, praying their fathers and brothers on the one side, and their husbands on the other, to end the bloody strife or to turn their arms against them, the cause of the slaughter. Then the men were all quiet, for they thought the advice of the women reasonable; and the chiefs on each side came forward and consulted together, and made peace; and to put an end to all disputes for ever, they decided to make one people of the Romans and Sabines, and to live peaceably together as citizens of one town. Thus the Sabines remained in Rome, and the city was doubled in size and in the number of its inhabitants, and Titus Tatius, the Sabine king, reigned jointly with Romulus. But as Tatius and his people came from Cures, the city of the Sabines, high up among the mountains, the united people was called the Roman people of the Quirites, and the name remained in use for all times.

After this Tatius had a quarrel with the men of Laurentum, and when he brought offerings to the sanctuary 0f the Penates at Lavinium, he was slain by the Laurentines. From that time Romulus governed alone over the two peoples, and he made laws to govern them in peace and war. First of all he divided them into nobles and commons; the nobles he called Patricians, and the commons Plebeians. Then he divided the Patricians into three tribes, the Ramnians, the Titians, and the Lucerans, and in each of these tribes he made ten divisions, which he called Curies. And when the Patricians assembled together to administer justice and to make laws, they came each in his curia and gave their votes, and the votes of each curia were counted, and what the greater number had decided, that was taken to be the wish of each curia. All the Patricians were equal among themselves, and every father of a family governed those of his own house, his wife, his children, and his slaves; having power over life and death. And several families united together and formed Houses, and the houses had their own sanctuaries, customs, and laws. But the Plebeians Romulus portioned out as tenants and dependants among the Patricians, and called them Clients, and commanded them to serve their masters faithfully, and to help them in peace and in war; and the Patricians he recommended to protect their Clients against all injustice, and on that account he called them Patrons, that is, Protectors. And from among the Patricians he chose a hundred of the oldest and wisest men to be his Council of Senators, that is, Elders, and to advise him on all great matters of state, and to help him to govern the city in time of peace. But out of the young men he chose a legion or army of 3,000 foot soldiers and 300 horsemen, according to the number of the three tribes and the thirty curies, out of every curia 100 foot soldiers and ten horsemen, and for the captain of the horsemen he chose a Tribune of the Celeres, for Celeres was the name of the horsemen.

After the city had been so ordered and made strong to defend her freedom, Romulus governed wisely and justly for many years, and was beloved by his people as a father. He conquered his enemies in many wars, and won Fidenae, an Etruscan town on the left bank of the Tiber, not far from Rome.

Now when all that Romulus had to carry out was fulfilled according to the will of the gods, it came to pass that he assembled the people to a festival of atonement at the Goat-pool, on the field of Mars, which extends from the town towards the north, even to the Tiber. Then there arose suddenly a fearful storm, and the sun was darkened, and out of the clouds came lightning, and the earth quaked with the thunder. And the people were frightened, and waited anxiously till the storm should clear away. But when daylight returned Romulus had disappeared and was nowhere to be found. And his people mourned for him. Then Proculus Julius, an honourable man, came to them and said that Romulus had appeared to him as a god, bidding him tell his people not to mourn for him, but to worship him as Quirinus, to practise valour and all warlike virtues, that they might please him and might gain for themselves the power over all other nations. Then the Romans rejoiced, and erected on the Quirinal hill an altar to the god Quirinus, and worshipped him as their national hero and their protector for ever afterwards.

 

Critical Examination of the Legend of Romulus

 

In the preceding pages we have given the legend of the foundation of the town in its principal features, as it was probably first related by the oldest Roman historians, Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus, in the time of the second Punic war. We shall now proceed to show that it can make no claims to historical authenticity.

The Romans of the later republic already had given up as untenable all that was miraculous in the legend of Romulus, but they fancied that by a rationalistic interpretation of the supernatural they could gain a plausible account of at least possible or probable events. The God of War was explained away. It was not Mars who loved the Vestal virgin and became the father of the twin-founders of Rome, but some stranger disguised as Mars frightened and deceived Rhea Silvia. The miraculous nurse of the children was not a she-wolf but a woman of ill repute, for lupa was the name for both. Romulus was not taken away from the earth by the gods, but the patricians being dissatisfied with him, killed him, cut him in pieces, and carried these pieces away under their clothes. In those parts of the legend which contained nothing supernatural these critics saw no difficulty, and so they flattered themselves that they had worked out a genuine history of Romulus.

Such a proceeding cannot satisfy us. The first question of which historical criticism suggests is an inquiry into the evidence for an asserted fact, and the second is that of its internal probability. All evidence must in the end be traceable to contemporaries and eye-witnesses, and it must be such, that the judgment and truthfulness of the witnesses cannot be called in question. It is clear that no evidence whatever can prove that which to our comprehension appears impossible. Writers, therefore, who relate historical miracles, though they may claim to have been eye-witnesses, must be supposed to have been deceived or to wish to deceive. Where trustworthy evidence of contemporaries is wanting, and where the second or third hand evidence is full of contradictions, improbabilities, chronological and other errors, it were vain to believe that the story has any historical foundation.

No written chronicles dating as far back as the regal period ever existed in Rome. The date of the first historical documents of the time of the republic is extremely doubtful. So much, however, is certain, that they referred to contemporary events, and not to times long past. The writing of History, properly so called, was begun in Rome at a comparatively late period. The Romans, with all their attachment to old forms, customs, and laws, were deficient in the real historical spirit, and especially in critical investigation. The oldest annalistic accounts of past events, i.e. accounts in the form of annual reports, did not go further back than the beginning of the republic. Into the origin of the state nobody thought it worthwhile to inquire before Rome had risen in power and dignity above the other towns of Latium. When this was first attempted, not only the events but the laws and institutions of the regal period, the old religion with its customs, its gods, and even its language, had been forgotten or had become for the most part unintelligible. The first connected history of the foundation of Rome of which we have any knowledge, that of Fabius Pictor, dates from the time of the second Punic war, and is therefore 500 years later than the alleged date for the founding of Rome. It is probable, however, that when Fabius wrote, the story of Romulus was commonly received; for in the year 458 after the foundation of Rome, i.e. 296 B.C., a bronze cast representing the suckling she-wolf and the twins was set up at the foot of the Palatine hill. For a period therefore of at least four centuries we can discover no trace of the legend of Romulus in any monuments or authentic records. There is, for the whole of this long period, nothing but oral tradition by which the memory of historical events of the time of Romulus could have been preserved and handed down, and to oral tradition alone we are therefore compelled to trust if we would make out a ‘history’ of the foundation of Rome.

We shall not rashly venture on such an undertaking, if we bear in mind how fast, and how easily, even in times of great literary activity, historical events fall into oblivion, or are strangely distorted by the uneducated, whose memory is not guided and corrected by written documents.

Now, it cannot be denied that poetry, in the absence of writing, is calculated to keep up tradition in a comparatively pure and genuine form. Popular songs in praise of traditions, heroes of the past may live for centuries in the mouth of the people, and may save many an event from oblivion. It has been conjectured, therefore, that there existed in Rome at a very early period a great national epic poem, and that the oldest annalists drew some of their facts from poems of this sort, which recorded the exploits of Romulus and other great men, mixed up with fiction, but by no means entirely fictitious. This hypothesis was set up by Niebuhr, and it met with much approval. But at present it is almost universally abandoned, and for very good reasons. There is in favour of it neither sufficient external evidence nor internal probability. The character of the narrative itself speaks against it, for, with few exceptions, it is destitute of all poetical elements; it is dry, bald, jejune, unimaginative—in one word, unpoetical. It is really nothing more than a string of tales, in which an attempt is made to explain old names, religious ceremonies and monuments, political institutions and antiquities, and to account for their origin.

Thus even the name of the founder of Rome is evidently derived from the name of the town, not contrariwise, as the legend has it. In a similar manner, all the nations of antiquity invented a legendary ancestor for themselves; the Dorians claimed descent from Dorus, the Ionians from Ion, the Latins from Latinus, and the Sabines from Sabus. Of course the Romans had their own progenitor, who appropriately was called Romus or Romulus.

The miraculous portion of the legend of Romulus, of course, does not deserve serious consideration. It is connected with local sanctuaries and with the religious conceptions of the shepherds on the Tiber, and is not more historical than are the myths of Heracles, Theseus, Janus, Saturnus, and Latinus.

The story of the asylum is of a different kind. There is nothing supernatural in it, and though it was not flattering to the Roman pride, it was never doubted by the Romans. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to perceive that it deserves no more credit than the legend of the suckling she-wolf. It is strange at the very outset that the legend of the asylum is at variance with the alleged descent of the Romans from Alba. How can one imagine that a colony founded by the heirs of the Alban kings could be so forsaken and estranged from the parent town, and so hostile to it, as the legend of the asylum would imply? Either the Alban origin is a mere fiction, or the population of Rome could not to any large extent be made up of exiles from the neighbouring States. But independently of this consideration, the process of increasing the population of a town by means of such an asylum for the reception of fugitives and outcasts is in the highest degree improbable, and as it is not reported to have occurred in any second instance, it must have been uncongenial to the national sentiments and the practices of ancient Italy. The old Italian communities were by no means open to strangers. They were made up of tribes, houses and families firmly bound together, and admitting none but hereditary members to participation in the religious rites peculiar to each. It is not likely that crowds of vagrants infested the country, nor that an organization like that of the Roman patricians, with their tribes, curies, and gentes, could have grown out of such materials.

A still more forcible objection to the authenticity of the story of the asylum is the circumstance that the Romans, down to the time of the emperors, were practically unacquainted with the Greek custom of taking sanctuary, as the word ‘asylum’ shows, which they had to borrow from the Greeks. It can therefore hardly be doubted that the story of the asylum first arose when Greeks were busy in importing into the history of Rome their notions and their fables, their gods and their myths.

As according to the legend a part of the male population came to Rome through the asylum, so the women were carried off by force four months after the foundation of Rome. The story of the rape of the Sabines is therefore in a certain degree a parallel to that of the asylum. It is without all doubt a pure invention of later times, without the least foundation in fact. The date for the rape of the Sabines in the fourth month of Rome might seem to point to something like a tradition; but it is in fact only the result of the calculation that the festival of the Palilia, which was considered the day of the foundation of Rome, fell on the 21st of April, whilst that of the Consualia, on which the games were celebrated and the women ravished, took place four months later, in the month of Sextilis. Cneius Gellius was the only annalist who gave the fourth year instead of the fourth month as the date of this rape. He wisely thought it somewhat improbable that, after a reign of four months, Romulus would have already ventured upon such an act of violence, and accordingly he corrected the date given by his predecessors. With so much freedom was the pretended history of that time handled. But, unfortunately, it is not always so easy to discover the reason for assertions which were so long looked upon as simple statements of well-recorded facts.

The same freedom appears to be used in dealing with the statements as to the number of the ravished Sabines. The old legend mentioned only thirty, and traced the names of the thirty Curies to the names of these thirty Sabine women. The number thirty, which occurs so often in the stories of ancient Rome, betrays their legendary origin. Accordingly it was rejected by those who tried as much as possible to turn the legends into history. Livy considers thirty too small a number; he thinks there must have been many more, and he cannot discover on what grounds the selection was made of those whose names were to be given to the thirty Curies. The annalist, Valerius of Antium, who is pre-eminent among the Roman historians for circumstantial descriptions of unascertainable facts, and who is never at a loss for accurate numbers, informs us that the number of the Sabine women was five hundred and twenty-seven. This accuracy seems to settle the question. But Valerius found a rival in the historian Juba, the son of the Numidian king, who seems to have made equally erudite researches in Roman antiquities, and to have discovered that 688 was the right number. This uncertainty with regard to dates and numbers stamps the story of the rape of the Sabines as void of all historical truth. We cannot, therefore, agree with Niebuhr, who thinks he can discover some historical facts through this legendary mist. As he supposes, the inhabitants of the Palatine had not the right of intermarriage with their Sabine neighbours on the Capitoline and the Quirinal. This inferiority of the Palatine Romans to the Sabines of the Capitoline and Quirinal hills caused discontent and war. The right of intermarriage was obtained by force of arms, and this historical fact lies at the bottom of the tale of the rape of the Sabines.

Such a method of changing legends into history is of very doubtful utility. It seems more natural to explain the legend from the customs at the Roman marriage ceremonies. The Roman maiden was carried away from her parents by her bridegroom with pretended force; she was led by three youths to her new home and lifted over the threshold, her hair having been previously parted by the point of a spear. Under compulsion and with sorrow the Roman bride entered her husband’s dwelling. A woman could not be married on a day sacred to the celestial gods, because violence, lamentation, and mourning were as hateful to them as they were acceptable to the deities of the nether world. All these references to force and violence are so striking, that the ancient writers explained them by referring to the rape of the Sabines. We reverse the argument, and trace the story of the rape, which is evidently a fable, to the ceremonies which were assuredly customary, and did not arise from a single historical event, but from an ancient popular feeling interwoven with religious conceptions.

The only feature in the story of Romulus which is in a certain degree historical is the narrative of the advance of the Sabines under Tatius, and of their capture of the Capitol. It cannot be doubted that the Sabines, the inhabitants of the central mountains of Italy, penetrated in the earliest period into the plains, as they did repeatedly in historical times, and it is equally certain that a large portion of the Roman people were of Sabine origin. The Latins also, the inhabitants of the plain, were related to the Sabines, and had in early times immigrated from their native land. It appears that at the time which is assumed as that of the foundation of Rome, a body of these bold mountaineers settled on the Quirinal and Capitoline hills. The Quirinal indicates by its name, and by many Sabine sanctuaries on it, that it was inhabited by Sabines. Sabine altars were likewise consecrated on the Capitol. The distinguishing name of these Sabines was Quirites, a word either derived from the Sabine word quiris, a lance, or from the town of Cures, from which these conquerors are said to have come. The Quirites, who settled on the Quirinal and Capitoline hills, were a conquering race. Their god Quirinus became identified with Romulus, the patronymic hero of the Roman people; and their name of Quirites was joined with the name of Romans, to form the official designation of the united people, “the Romans and Quirites”. Much in the customs of the Romans may be traced back to the Sabines with tolerable certainty. The strict organisation of the Roman family, and of the gens, the enlarged family or house, was Sabine; as were also the laws of paternal authority and of property—the real groundwork of the Roman political discipline. The Roman religion is constantly declared by the Romans themselves to be Sabine in its most important elements, and its introduction is attributed to the Sabine king Numa. It may therefore be assumed that, at one time, when on one or another of the seven hills there were independent Latin communities, Sabine conquerors also settled in the same locality. But the Roman pride would not allow that Rome had ever been conquered by strangers. Accordingly the legend partially obliterates the Sabine invasion and conquest, and represents the two nations as joined together by a league between Romulus and Tatius; but through the mist of the early traditions, thus much seems manifest, that the conviction of a Sabine conquest of Rome was general at a very remote period.

What is reported of the legislation of Romulus rests on the plausible supposition that he, as founder of the state, must also have formed the constitution of the state and the groundwork of civil order. Accordingly Romulus is said to have divided the people into three tribes, the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres; that he formed three centuries of knights, of a hundred horsemen each, and a senate of a hundred members, which he doubled after the union with the Sabines. In these statements genuine traditions are altogether out of the question, inasmuch as irreconcilable contradictions prevail most capriciously among the different reports as to the original form and meaning of the several institutions. This is particularly evident in the reports about the institution of the senate and the origin of the three tribes.

In the organism of the state the most important member after the king was the senate. On this subject, therefore, one would expect certain information, however vague the traditions might be in other respects. Yet what our authorities say about the formation of the senate and the original number of its members shows that they report their speculations as if they were facts. Livy relates that Romulus selected a hundred senators, and he knows of no further extension in the reign of Romulus. Dionysius says that a hundred Sabine senators were added to the senate after the peace with Tatius. Others say that the new members only numbered fifty. Plutarch, in one place, makes the number of the senators to have been 150, in another 200. It is impossible to reconcile such contradictory statements, or to separate what is true in them from what is false. Every writer related capriciously, and almost at random, what appeared to him most probable, without having the least foundation for his assertions, and without even pretending to have trustworthy information.

With regard to the mode of appointing the senators, the same difference of opinion and the same caprice prevail. While Cicero, Livy, and most other authors leave to the king the free choice of the senators, the ingenuity of Dionysius has invented a most intricate mode of election. He says that each of the three tribes and each of the thirty curies chose three senators, and to these ninety-nine Romulus added the hundredth. Dionysius tried in this way to solve a difficulty which he felt, and to bring into arithmetical harmony the number of the hundred senators with that of the three tribes. In later times the senate consisted of three hundred members, and this number answers to the number of the three tribes and thirty curies, so that a proportion is manifested in the respective numbers which in a certain measure makes the senate represent the tribes. The number of a hundred senators, therefore, in the time of Romulus, is very surprising. The attempt which Dionysius made to solve this difficulty is of course a failure. There can be no doubt, that the oldest narrative which ascribed to Romulus the formation of the constitution, attributed to him also the nomination of a senate of three hundred members, just as it ascribed to him the division of the people into three tribes. But the origin of these three tribes (the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres) is as obscure as everything else. Concerning two of them there is indeed tolerable harmony of opinion among all writers, as from an apparently self-evident etymology the Romans were universally supposed to be the Ramnes of Romulus, and the Tities the Sabines of Tatius. But there is no clue to explain the tribe of the Luceres; and hence we have an abundance of conjecture. Some thought of the Etruscan Lucumo, whom Romulus is said to have brought to his help, and they made out to their own satisfaction that the Luceres were the Etruscan companions of this Lucumo, or Lucius. Others bethought themselves of the grove (lucus) of the asylum of Romulus, and made out the Luceres to be those strangers, fugitives, and robbers who were attracted to Rome by the protection of sanctuary. It would be useless to try to find out the truth. All trustworthy materials are wanting, and we should therefore gain nothing if to the old conjectures we should add a new one which would only add to our perplexity without adding to our knowledge.

The long reign of Romulus was by no means satisfactorily filled up by the martial deeds and political actions ascribed to him. It might be expected that the war­like son of Mars, who, in the midst of hostile nations, had trained a band of adventurers into an army and a community of warriors, could only have held his ground by constant wars, and must therefore have fought many battles and gained many victories. Nothing would have been easier for the fertile brain of a Greek than to invent a long succession of chequered campaigns and fierce battles, with events of exciting interest, like the tales of Theseus or Minos. The sterile imagination of the Roman annalists contented itself with borrowing a few traits of later chronicles, and ascribing to Romulus two wars, one with Fidenae and one with Veii. The town of Fidenae has been of good service to the annalists. Whenever there was little to relate of any particular year, there was always a war with Fidenae ready to fill up the gap. Accordingly in the annals this town is conquered no less than eight times. The war of Romulus with Fidenae is manifestly the same which is referred to the year 426 B.C. What we are to think of the war with Veii is apparent by the statement that Romulus slew “7,000 enemies with his own hand”. Such was the material used to fill up the gaps in the narrative. It is not to be wondered at that thoughtful men like Cicero were struck by the emptiness and vagueness of the so-called history of the kings, though they were far from discovering the real cause.

The ancient history of no people is written in the order of time, nor do the earliest accounts relate to the oldest periods. Curiosity and attention are turned first to events not far distant. The wish is then excited to know something of what happened before. Thus going back, history arrives by degrees at the foundation of a town, and the origin or immigration of a people. But even with this, speculation is not satisfied. It endeavours to penetrate into the darkness of the past, and supplies by fiction a primeval history, which, as it recedes further and still further, naturally becomes more and more cloudy and more and more mythical.

Rome also had such a primeval history, which in uncritical times was held to be as authentic as that of the kings. It told how, in the beginning, King Janus ruled over the shepherds of the district on the Janiculus, how Saturnus came to him from beyond the sea, taught his people agriculture, reigned on the Saturnian hill which was afterwards called the Capitoline, and that it was a time of peace, happiness, and justice. Picus, Faunus, and Latinus came then in order of succession, and, during the reign of the latter, Aeneas came to Latium and founded the Trojan colony in Lavinium. The Greeks had also something to say, and they brought their hero Heracles on his wanderings from the land of Hesperia with the cattle of Geryon to the banks of the Tiber. At that time there ruled on the Palatine, Evander, from Arcadia, the “good man”, and in a cave hard by lived Cacus, the “bad man” who stole the best oxen of Hercules, and dragged them into his cave by their tails, but was killed by the god. If these fables were received with less implicit faith than the stories of Romulus, the reason is, not that the latter are better authenticated, but because in them fiction is kept more within the bounds of probability and nature, and the narrative does not deal so much with beings who in later times were recognized only as gods and heroes.

The result of the preceding examination is that the so-called history of Romulus is wanting in all historical foundation, that not one feature in it can be supported by satisfactory evidence, with the single exception of the Sabine conquest, and that the details even of this historical fact have been lost or obscured by arbitrary fiction.

 

CHAPTER III.

The Legend of Numa Pompilius.

 

When Romulus had left the earth and had become a god, the fathers met together and nominated intermediate kings from the senate, to reign in turn for five days, in the place of the king, till a new king was chosen. And this intermediate government or interregnum lasted a whole year; for the Romans were at variance with the Sabines and quarrelled about the choice of the new king. At last they agreed that a Sabine should be taken, but that the Romans should choose him.

There lived at that time in the land of the Sabines a righteous man called Numa Pompilius, who was honoured and beloved by everyone on account of his wisdom and integrity. This man the Romans chose to be king over Rome. And when Numa had ascertained the consent of the gods by the flight of the holy birds, he called together an assembly of the thirty Curiae, and asked them whether they would willingly obey all his commands. Then the people consented, and Numa reigned in Rome forty-three years, until his death.

Now the Romans were a rude people, whose thoughts were intent on war and plunder, and might was more to them than right. Therefore Numa was grieved, and he undertook to accustom the people to milder habits, to a peaceful life, to strict discipline and justice and fear of the gods. But he was wise from his youth upwards, and as a proof of this his hair was grey from his birth, and he was trained in all the wisdom of the Greeks; for Pythagoras, the wisest of the Greeks, had instructed him. His wife was Egeria, a divine Camena; he met her every night in a cave, and she taught him the true worship of the gods and the duties of a pious life. He deceived Faunus and Picus, the prophesying spirits of the wood, by wine which he poured into the spring from which they drank; and he intoxicated them and bound them with fetters, till they told him the secret charms by which they compelled Jupiter to reveal his will.

But the people did not believe Numa, and mocked him. Then he prepared a simple meal, and invited guests to his house, and set before them plain food on earthen plates and water in stone bottles. Thereupon suddenly all the dishes were changed into silver and gold, the plain food into the choicest viands, and the water into wine. Then everyone knew that a divine power dwelt in Numa, and they were willing to receive his statutes.

Now in order to divert the people from their wild and rough life, and to bring them up to piety and righteousness, Numa taught them which gods they should adore, and how they should arrange their worship with prayers, sacrifices, and hymns, and other pious usages. And all bloody sacrifices and all human victims he forbade, and permitted only the fruits of the field, simple cakes, and milk and other like offerings to be presented to the gods. He allowed no images to be made of the gods, for he taught the people to believe that the gods had no bodies, and that as pure spirits they pervaded and ruled in the elementary powers of nature. Moreover he told the people what prayers, solemn words, and sacrifices they should use in all the concerns of their domestic life, and in their intercourse with men; and he ordained that the Romans should not undertake anything important without first calling on the gods and seeking their favor.

Then Numa instituted priests to Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, whom he called flamines, that is, kindlers of fire, because they were to kindle the fires for the sacrifices. And for the service of Vesta he chose pure virgins, who had to perform the service in the temple and to feed the holy flame on the altar of Vesta, the common hearth of the city. And in order to discover the will of the gods he instituted the office of augurs, and instructed them in the science of the flight of birds. And he appointed many more priests and servants of the altars, and prescribed to each what he should do. And that they might all know what was right in the service of the gods, and not from ignorance employ the wrong prayers, or at the sacrifices and other services leave out or neglect something whereby they might incur the anger of the gods and suffer great punishment, Numa wrote all his statutes in a book. This he handed over to Numa Marcius, and made him chief pontifex, that is, overseer and watcher over the service of the gods, and recommended him to pursue the study of divine things, and to guard the purity of the religion which he had founded.

Numa took care also of the peaceful arts, that the people might live by the produce of their labour, and not think of robbing from others. For this purpose he divided the land which Romulus had conquered among the citizens, and bade them cultivate it; and he consecrated the stones which marked the boundaries of the fields, and erected an altar on the Capitoline hill to Terminus, the god of boundaries.

In the same manner he took care of all artisans in the town who possessed no land. He divided them into guilds, and set masters over them according to each kind of trade, and set apart for them markets, sacrifices, and festivals; and in order that truth and good faith might be practiced in common intercourse, and that promises might be kept as sacred as oaths, he founded the service of the goddess Fides, or Faith, and built a temple to her on the Capitol.

While Numa was thus occupied with works of peace, the weapons of war lay idle, and the neighbouring people were afraid of disturbing the rest of this righteous king. So the gate of Janus remained closed, for it was the custom among the Romans to open it only in time of war.

Thus the reign of Numa was a time of peace and of happiness, and the gods testified their pleasure in the pious king and his people; for they guarded the country from all plagues and sicknesses, and they sent health and good harvests, and blessing and prosperity upon all that the people undertook.

Now, when Numa had become old and weak, he died calmly, without illness and without pain, and the Romans mourned for him as for a father, and buried him on the Janiculus beyond the Tiber, on that side which lies towards the west.

 

Critical Examination of the Legend of Numa Pompilius.

 

Numa Pompilius is evidently the complement of Romulus. As Romulus was the founder of the state and of political and military order, so the legend regards Numa as the founder of the national religion. His uneventful reign of thirty-nine or forty-three years was entirely devoted to the organization of public worship. All the neighbours lived in peace with the righteous king. It was a golden age, in which the gate of Janus remained closed, and the sword rested in its sheath. Only the arts of peace were practiced. Agriculture and trade prospered. Right and justice ruled. The gods themselves held intercourse with the pious priest-king and revealed to him their divine wisdom.

In this description fiction is so evident that serious discussion is almost out of place. The supernatural and the miraculous do not challenge more scepticism than the all-prevailing peace in an age of incessant wars. That which appears most of all historical, the intercourse of Numa with Pythagoras, was invented when it was not known that Pythagoras is said to have lived nearly two hundred years after the assumed age of Numa.

The idea that the religion of the Romans was created by one individual lawgiver who could be named, is even less tenable than that the political institutions and the civil order were produced in the brain of the founder of the state. The religion of a people is not adventitious or a chance attribute. It is one of the essential elements which determine national individuality and national existence. It is impossible to imagine a people without religious conceptions and practices. It can be shown that the Roman religion is older in its principal features than the Roman state, and older even than the Roman people, as we find it in Rome and in Latium. It is essentially Italian, common to all the branches of the Sabine stock, as are also the elements of the Roman language. It cannot, therefore, have originated in Rome. The Romans brought it with them into the valley of the Tiber, and there was no period of time when the Roman state existed without the religious forms which were ascribed to Numa. Accordingly the legend of Romulus mentions not only some of the principal deities, as Jupiter, Janus, Faunus, and Vesta, but also the auguries, the most important part of the Roman state religion. Other parts of the Roman ceremonial law were ascribed to other kings, as for instance that which regulated the intercourse with neighbouring people, and especially prescribed the form of the declaration of war. As this did not seem to suit the peace-loving Noma, the Roman legend-makers did not hesitate to ascribe it to King Tullus or Ancus, of whom there were at least wars to relate.

As the personality of Numa resolves itself into that of an ideal priest-king, the founder of the sacred rites and laws, whom the pontifices, the keepers and guardians of these laws, regarded as their legislator, it follows that the law books, which in later times contained the precepts and were attributed to Numa, cannot have been genuine. Writings of this kind belong, it is true, to the oldest products of civilization; nevertheless, it is certain that what passed in Rome as writings of Numa Pompilius, did not originate even in the regal period. It is tolerably certain that at that time the art of writing was not yet practiced in Rome, but was brought from Southern Italy shortly before the downfall of the monarchy. In the uncritical ages of the republic, nobody hesitated to ascribe to the kings any documents which seemed to be very ancient. Even an audacious forgery belonging to the year 181 B.C. seems to have been looked upon as a genuine document. In that year a stone coffin, containing Greek and Latin writings of Numa on religious and philosophical subjects, was discovered in a field at the foot of the Janiculus. But their contents appeared to the Praetor Q. Petillius to be so much at variance with the prevailing religious views, and with the whole system of the state religion, that, with the consent of the senate, he ordered the books to be publicly burned. They were evidently considered as real, in spite of their being written on paper, which was not used for writing for many centuries after the alleged time of Numa, and although the paper looked quite new and fresh. Nobody seems to have been surprised that in Numa’s time—long before Greek prose was written in Greece—Romans should have written Greek fluently. Nor did it apparently seem surprising that Numa’s Latin was so smooth and easy to be read, although the priests themselves were not able to understand the hymns ascribed to the same Numa. The pretended discovery was evidently a scheme for the purpose of religious innovation, but the whole of the Roman people took for granted, with child­like simplicity, the authenticity of the writings of Numa. This occurrence in the year 181 BC, 500 years after Numa, shows what care is needed in the examination of the statements of the Roman chroniclers concerning their older history, before we can receive them as well-founded and credible.   

 

CHAPTER IV.

The Legend of Tullus Hostilius.

 

After Numa’s death the Romans chose for their king Tullus Hostilius, the grandson of Hostus Hostilius, who had fought in the battle with the Sabine, Mettius Curtius. Now the time of peace and quietness was at an end, for Tulius was not like Numa, but like Romulus, and he loved war and glory beyond everything. Therefore he looked for causes of dispute among the neighbours, for he thought that in a long peace the Romans would grow effeminate, and lose their ancient courage.

Now when some Roman and Alban country people quarrelled with one another, and each one accused the other of robbery, and each complained that he suffered wrong, Tulius sent fetiales, or heralds, to Alba, to demand compensation for the plunder. The Albans did the same, and sent messengers to Rome to complain and to insist on justice.

Then Tulius employed a fraud; for he received the messengers with great kindness and treated them with such hospitality that they delayed the execution of their disagreeable commission. But the Roman fetiales who were sent to Alba, demanded without delay satisfaction from the Albans, and when this was refused they declared war in the name of the Roman people. When Tulius heard of this, he asked the Alban ambassadors what their commission was, and, having heard it, he sent them home without satisfaction, because the Albans had first refused it, and had thus provoked an unjust war. Now the Romans and Albans met together in the field. The Albans, led by their king Cluilius, encamped with their army on the frontier of the Roman territory, and made a deep trench round their camp. And the trench was called, for ever after, the trench of Cluilius. But in the following night the king of Alba died. Then they chose in his place a dictator, whose name was Mettius Fufetius.

Now when Tullus advanced, and the two armies stood arrayed against one another, and the bloody fight between the kindred nations was about to begin, the leaders came forward and consulted together, and determined to decide the war by a single combat of Albans and Romans, that so much blood might not be spilt. There were by chance in the Roman army three brothers born at one birth, and likewise in the Alban army three brothers born at one birth. These were the sons of twin sisters, and equal in age and strength. Therefore they were chosen as the combatants, and the Romans and Albans bound themselves by a sacred oath that the nation whose champions should be victorious should rule over the other. Then began the decisive battle between the three Horatii, who fought on the side of the Romans, and the three Curiatii, who fought for the Albans. Quite at the beginning two of the Horatii fell and the three Curiatii were all wounded. Then the surviving Horatius took to flight, and the Curiatii pursued him. But he turned suddenly round and killed the one of the three who was the most slightly wounded and had hurried on before the others. Then he ran towards the second and conquered him also, and at last he killed the third, who, on account of his wounds, was able to pursue him but very slowly. Then the Romans rejoiced and welcomed Horatius as conqueror, and they collected the spoils of the slain Curiatii and carried them before Horatius, and led him in triumph to Rome.

When the procession came near the gate of the city, the sister of Horatius went forth to meet it. She was betrothed to one of the Curiatii who had been killed. And when she saw the bloody coat of her lover, which she herself had embroidered, she sobbed and moaned and cursed her brother.

At this Horatius fell into a violent rage, and drew his sword and stabbed his sister, because she had wept over a fallen enemy. But the blood of the slain sister called for vengeance, and Horatius was accused before the criminal judge, who sentenced him to death. The people, however, rejected the sentence of the judge out of compassion for the old father of Horatius, who would thus lose three of his children in one day, and because they would not that the man should be led to death who had ventured his life for the greatness of his native country, and had gained the victory over Alba with his own hand. But to atone for the death of his sister, Horatius had to do public penance, to pass under a yoke, and to offer up expiatory sacrifices to the manes of his murdered sister. The beam of the yoke under which Horatius went, remained as a token till the latest times, and was called the “sister beam”. But the memory of the heroism of Horatius was also preserved; and the arms of the Curiatii were hung up on a pillar in the Forum; and the pillar was called the pillar of Horatius for all time.

Thus Alba became subject to Rome, and the Albans were obliged to help the Romans in their wars. But Mettius Fufetius, the dictator of the Albans, meditated treason, and hoped to overthrow the power of Rome. Therefore, when war had broken out between the Romans and the Etruscans of Fidenae and Veii, and when the Romans and Albans stood opposite to the enemy, and the battle was raging fiercely, Mettius kept his army back from the fight, and hoped that the Romans would be subdued. But Tullus, perceiving the treason, bade his soldiers be of good courage, and conquered the Etruscans. And when Mettius came to him after the battle to wish him joy on account of the victory, thinking that Tullus had not discovered his treachery, Tullus ordered him to be seized and torn to pieces by horses, as a punishment for wavering in his fidelity between the Romans and their enemies. Then the Albans were disarmed, and Tullus sent horsemen to Alba, who burned the whole town, with the exception of the temples, and led the inhabitants away to Rome. From that time Alba Longa was desolate, but the Albans became Roman citizens, and their nobles were received among the patricians, and Albans and Romans became one people, as at one time the Romans and the Sabines had become under the dominion of Romulus.

After this Tullus waged many wars with his neighbours, the Etruscans and the Sabines, and he became proud and haughty, and forgot the gods and their service, and regarded not justice and the precepts of Numa. Therefore the gods sent a plague among the people, and at last they smote him also with a grievous disease. Then he became aware that he had sinned, and he tried to investigate the will of Jupiter according to the spells of Numa. But Jupiter was wroth at his sinful attempt, and struck him with lightning, and destroyed his house, so that it left no trace behind. Thus ended Tullus Hostilius, after he had been king for thirty-two years; and Ancus Marcius, the grandson of Numa Pompilius, succeeded him in the kingdom.

 

Critical Examination of the Legend of Tullus Hostilius.

 

As Romulus is the hero of the legend which refers to the foundation of the city, and as the introduction of religious order is ascribed to Numa, so the name of Tullus Hostilius serves to introduce the legend of the destruction of Alba Longa in Roman history. There was nothing else to be related of Tullus Hostilius. All the rest which is told of him is a repetition of the story of Romulus in a slightly changed form; and even the Alban war, as we shall presently see, reminds us so much of the legend of Romulus, that it loses its weight as evidence to prove the real existence of King Tullus Hostilius.

The position of Alba in Roman history is an inexplicable mystery. Rome is described as a colony of Alba, but from the moment of the foundation of Rome, Alba completely disappears. The legend mentions nothing of any assistance of the parent town in the pressing danger that Rome was in, nor does it explain how Romulus was shut out from the throne of Alba after the race of Aeneas became extinct with Numitor. Under Romulus and Numa, Alba and Rome were entire strangers to each other, and in the legend of the fall of that town no Silvii are reigning there, but C. Cluilius, or Mettius Pufetius as praetor or dictator.

In like manner the story of the conquest of Alba by the Romans under Tullus does not agree with the fact that the Romans subsequently were not in possession of the Alban territory. The Latins hold their federal meetings near the ruins of Alba, at the spring of Ferentina, whence Niebuhr draws the conclusion that Alba was not destroyed by Rome, but by its revolted Latin subjects. But in the utter lack of trustworthy testimony, and even probable tradition, it would be lost labour to investigate more minutely the discrepancies and contradictions of these prehistoric legends, with the object of finding in them historical truth.

The story of the destruction of Alba, which is, as we have seen, at variance with the events supposed to have preceded and followed it, bears moreover in itself the stamp of fiction. It turns upon the combat between the Horatii and the Curiatii, who, by their relationship as sons of twin sisters, represent symbolically the blood connection between the Romans and the Albans. Thus the twin brothers Romulus and Remus had fought for the possession of power. The Romans and Sabines, who had become related by intermarriage, fought in a similar manner under Romulus and Tatius. At that time the chief combatants of the two nations were Hostus Hostilius and Mettius Curtius; and it is significant that these two men are mentioned by name, whereas in general so very few names occur in the ancient legends. In the oldest form the war between Sabines and Romans was most likely described as settled by single combat, after the general battle was stopped by the intervention of the women. And it is clear, from the slightly altered names of the chiefs, that the legends of Romulus and of Tullus are in reality simply two versions of the same story. In the Hostus Hostilius of the army of Romulus we easily recognize the King Tullus Hostilius, and the Sabine Mettius Curtius turns up again as Mettius Fufetius. Now, if we reflect that the Albans were of Sabine origin, we cannot fail to recognize in the story of Romulus and Tullus a tradition referring to the union of the Romans with the Sabines. For the Albans are transferred to Rome, and the city is doubled, just as it was under Romulus.

Legendary history plays in the most lively colours, and these sometimes change most unexpectedly. Seen from different points of view, a story frequently turns into the very opposite. An example of this is exhibited in the story of the Sabine war of Tullus Hostilius. At the festival of Feronia in the country of the Sabines, frequented by many strangers on account of the games and the traffic, Roman citizens were robbed and taken prisoners by the Sabines. The Sabines would not listen to the ambassadors of Tullus, and the consequence was a war between the two nations. Here we have the corresponding picture to the rape of the Sabine women. Instead of women, men are carried away; instead of Sabines, Romans are the victims; instead of its taking place in Rome, it takes place in the land of the Sabines.

If the stories of the war of Tullus with the Albans and Sabines are only different forms of the same legend which figured in the tale of Romulus as the Sabine war, there remains nothing peculiar to Tullus Hostilius, and he appears only as the shadow of Romulus. Even the ancients recognized the similarity between the two, as they were also struck with that between Numa Pompilius and Ancus Marcius. In the story of Tullus, it is true, all that is wonderful and supernatural is suppressed; but his identity with Romulus is nevertheless manifest. He, like Romulus, grows up among the shepherds. Like Romulus, he wages war with Fidenae and Veii. Like Romulus, he doubles the number of Roman citizens and joins the Mons Coelius to the city, he organizes the army, he introduces the insignia of royal power, an act which is ascribed to Romulus and also to Tarquinius Priscus. Even in his conquest of Alba, he is anticipated by Romulus, who in some versions of the legend appears to have caused the destruction of that town. According to some accounts, Romulus degenerated into a tyrant; of Tullus this is the common report. Finally the identity of the two warlike kings appears in their death. They were both removed from the earth in the midst of thunder and lightning, and were never seen again.

The legend Thus, wherever we begin, and whichever portion we examine of the legends of Romulus and Tullus, we arrive always at the same result; viz., that the alleged histories of these two kings are simply different versions of the same old legend, in which the most careful research can discover no trace of genuine historical truth.

 

 

CHAPTER V.

The Legend of Ancus Marcius.

 

Ancus Marcius was a just and peaceful king, and his first care was to restore the service of the gods, according to the precepts of Numa; for Tullus had not honoured them, nor kept their worship pure. For this reason Ancus caused the sacred laws of Numa to be written on wooden tablets, and to be exhibited before the people; and he endeavoured to preserve peace and the peaceful arts, as Numa had done, whose example he wished to follow in all things.

But it was not vouchsafed to him always to avoid war. For when the Latins heard that Tullus was succeeded by a peace-loving king, who passed his time quietly at home in prayer and sacrifice, they fell upon the country of the Romans, and thought they could plunder it with impunity. Then Ancus left the management of the public worship to the priests, and took up arms, and fought with his enemies, and conquered their towns and destroyed them. And many of the inhabitants he brought to Rome, and gave them dwellings on the Aventine hill. Therefore Ancus enlarged the city, and dug a deep trench in that part where the slope of the hills was not steep enough to protect Rome from her enemies. After this he fortified the hill Janiculus on the right bank of the Tiber, and built a wooden bridge over the river; and he conquered all the land between Rome and the sea, and planted a colony at the mouth of the Tiber, which he called Ostia, and made there a harbour for sea-going ships. And when Ancus had been king for four-and-twenty years, he died calmly and happily like Numa, and the Romans honoured his memory, for he was just in time of peace, and courageous and victorious in time of war.

 

Critical examination of the Legend of Ancus Marcius.

 

The story of Ancus Marcius is entirely destitute of miracles. All events lie within the bounds of possibility, perhaps even of probability. But in proportion as it is credible, it is scanty. The story contains nothing characteristic, there is nothing in it which could call forth surprise or admiration, horror or fear, and might on that account live for centuries in the mouth of the people. Ancus is the dullest and most prosaic of all the Roman kings.

He is called the grandson of Numa, and is indeed only a second Numa. As such he betrays himself by his name Marcius, for this is the name of Numa Marcius, the first high pontiff, and friend of king Numa, to whom Numa confided the sacred books; in reality this Numa Marcius is the same person as Numa Pompilius, and appears as an independent person only because the founder of the Roman religion was represented sometimes as a priest and sometimes as a king. The legend clearly identifies Ancus with the royal priest, for it makes him literally a bridge-builder (pontifex) by ascribing to him the build­ing of the first wooden bridge over the Tiber.

It is especially in his priestly functions that Ancus coincides with his supposed grandfather Numa. He discharges the duties of a priest in person, he causes the ceremonial law to be recorded, he introduces the international law of the fetials, he endeavours to maintain peace, he encourages agriculture, and lastly he and Numa were the only two Roman kings who died a natural death. The story of Ancus is stripped of the miraculous element. Even the account of the uninterrupted peace which prevailed during the reign of Numa is not repeated without modifications. Ancus is represented as peaceful, but at the same time as ready and able to fight. There is by this means nothing left to provoke scepticism, while at the same time an opportunity is given to attribute to this king the introduction of the fetials, and the laws of peace and war. Hence a war with the Latins is attributed to Ancus, in which he is said to have conquered four a towns, and to have transplanted their inhabitants to Rome. Dionysius, moreover, tells long and tedious stories of wars with Fidenae, the Sabines, Volscians, and Veientines, with all of which wars Livy is unacquainted. What is further related of Ancus, viz., that he built a prison, founded Ostia, and established saltworks, belongs to a class of statements which, for reasons that are not always intelligible, the annalists apparently referred at random, now to one king, now to another. Thus, for instance, the excavation of a trench (the so-called Fossa Quiritium) is ascribed not to Ancus alone, but to Numa, to Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius Superbus, with this difference, that it is called at one time a sewer constructed in Rome, at another a ditch for the fortification of the Quirinal, at another a ditch surrounding Ostia. Thus the credit of having added the hill Coelius to the town is claimed for Romulus, for Tullus Hostilius, for Ancus Marcius, and for the elder Tarquin. The Etruscan captain, Coeles Vibenna, from whom the name of the hill is generally derived, has no settled place in the chronicles of the regal period, and by Festus is even split into two persons, called respectively Coeles and Vibenna. According to Dionysius, Varro, and Paulus Diaconus, he came to Rome under Romulus; according to Tacitus, under Tarquinius Priscus.

What we have said is sufficient to show the worth of the alleged history of Ancus Marcius. We might now take leave of this king, if the high authority of Niebuhr did not compel us to examine an hypothesis concerning the origin of the Roman plebs, which he has ventured to base on the story of King Ancus, and which has been adopted by most modern historians.

The ancients, and all modern writers before Niebuhr, were opinion that from its very beginning the Roman people consisted of patricians and plebeians. According to this view the plebeians were clients, that is, dependants or tenants of the patricians, bound to perform special services, in return for which they enjoyed the protection of the patricians, especially in cases of legal prosecutions.

This view, though simple and intelligible, is rejected by Niebuhr as untenable, and altogether wrong. He puts in its place a theory for which no evidence can be found in the ancient writers, and which has not even the merit of clearness, simplicity, and probability. According to this theory, there was at first no plebs in Rome at all, and the people consisted only of patricians and clients. It was Ancus Marcius, according to Niebuhr, who added the plebs to the original inhabitants, by transplanting the conquered Latins to Rome, under new conditions and on a new legal footing, neither placing them as patricians and clients in the existing three tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, nor making a new tribe of them, as Tullus had done with the Albans, but forming them into a distinct class of citizens, with peculiar rights and duties. From this time forward there were three classes of citizens in Rome,—the patricians, their clients, and the plebeians, whose political contests make up the principal part of the internal history of Rome. To establish this theory Niebuhr brings the following arguments.

In historical times the Aventine Hill was the principal quarter of the Roman plebs. This hill was peopled by Ancus Marcius with the conquered Latins. Ancus was unable to form them into a new tribe; for, by the establishment of the third tribe, that of the Luceres under Tullus Hostilius, the framework of political organization was complete, and could be disturbed no more. Ancus was consequently compelled to create a new legal status for the citizens whom he had incorporated, and this he did by placing them as plebeians by the side of the patricians and their clients.

This reasoning is exposed to several serious objections;

1. The plebeians did not dwell on the Aventine alone, but in every part of the city, and especially in the country.

2. The Aventine and the valley which lay between it and the Palatine were far too small to receive the many thousand Latins whom Ancus is said to have settled there.

3. It was not before the Icilian law, fifty-one years after the expulsion of the kings, that the Aventine appears to have become the principal plebeian quarter. Up to that time it had been mostly arable land and pasture.

4. The story of the transplanting of conquered populations to Rome deserves no credit. It is not at all probable that the cultivators of the surrounding districts were taken away from their fields and their farms, and made to live in the city, where they could only be a useless rabble. Nor can we imagine that a hostile population, just conquered in war, were transplanted in great numbers to Rome to be settled on such a hill as the Aventine, which formed a respectable stronghold, where they might have become troublesome or dangerous. In historical times the Romans were accustomed to adopt a policy the very reverse of that ascribed to Ancus. Instead of carrying their conquered enemies to Rome, they sent Roman colonists into the conquered towns. The unauthenticated accounts of the regal period which speak of the reception of Sabines, Albans, and Latins in Rome, are either invented to explain the alleged rapid growth of the city, or they proceed from a misunderstanding. The expression that the conquered Latins were received into the city, implying that they were made Roman citizens, may have been erroneously interpreted as meaning that they were bodily transferred to Rome.

5. There is no ground for supposing that the conquered Latins were received under conditions different from those under which the alleged transfer of Albans took place under Tullus, even if we allow, for argument’s sake, that they were brought to Rome at all by Ancus. If it be true, as Niebuhr supposes, that Tullus formed the tribe of the Luceres out of the Albans, it is difficult to see why Ancus could not have formed a fourth tribe out of the Latins, or what prevented him from distributing them equally among the three existing tribes.

6. There was no difference in historical times, in point of constitutional rights, between Clients and Plebeians. It is a groundless assumption that any such difference existed in the time of the early kings, of which we possess no authenticated records.

7. All accounts concerning King Ancus are unhistorical. If Ancus was only the reflected image of Numa, and Numa himself only the personification of an imaginary religious lawgiver, the story of the settlement of Latins in Rome falls to the ground, and it would be unsafe to base upon such doubtful facts any hypothesis about the origin and the rights of the different classes of citizens in ancient Rome. The stories of Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius are like shadowy forms, which vanish into nothing as we approach them. Perhaps even the names and the order of succession of the seven kings, and the character of the story, as it is found in Livy and Dionysius, are the result of mere chance. By some other chance Romulus might have been succeeded by Servius, and instead of Tullus the third king might have been called Coelius. We must altogether cast aside the notion that the neatly adjusted series of events in the regal period is even so much as an outline of real events. The whole history of the kings is of the regal worthless in its detail. All that we can hope to do is to form from the various materials a rough picture of the Roman people, its constitution and religion, at the beginning of the republic. But how the different parts arose one after another, how they were modified and enlarged, is not to be learnt from the traditional story of the kings. The ancients themselves knew nothing of it, and endeavoured to supply by guesses the want of evidence.

Whether with such a view as this we gain or lose is a question with which we are not concerned; for the search after truth is independent of all calculations of the possible gain. Yet it is a real gain to get rid of deception, and to draw the line between that which precedes and that which follows the beginning of genuine history.

 

 

CHAPTER VI.

The Legend of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus.

 

At the time when Ancus Marcius was king, there lived in the town of Tarquinii, in the land of the Etruscans, a rich and intelligent man called Lucumo, the son of Demaratus, a noble of the race of the Bacchiads of Corinth, who had been driven by the tyrant Kypselos out of his native town, and had fled to Etruria. Now, because Lucumo was the son of a stranger, the people of Tarquinii despised him, and refused him every place of honour and dignity. His wife Tanaquil therefore advised him to leave the town of Tarquinii and to emigrate to Rome, where strangers were kindly received. Thus Lucumo went to Rome. And when he had come to the hill of Janiculus, near the town, an eagle shot down from the air, and took his hat from his head and flew away with it; and after he had wheeled about for a time over the carriage in which Lucumo and his wife Tanaquil sat, he flew down again and replaced the hat on the head of Lucumo. Then Tanaquil, who was familiar with heavenly signs, knew that her husband was destined to attain high honors in Rome.

Now in Rome Lucumo altered his name, and called himself Lucius Tarquinius, after his native town, and he was soon highly regarded, for he was wise in council, himself courageous in war, as well as kind and generous towards his inferiors. For this reason King Ancus took him for his counsellor, confided to him the most weighty matters, and before he died appointed him the guardian of his sons. Then Tarquinius so contrived that the people chose him, and not one of the sons of Ancus, for their king; and thus the divine omen which Tanaquil, his wife, had explained to him, was fulfilled.

Now when Tarquinius had become king, he carried on w with the Latins and conquered many of their towns. He made war also on the Sabines, who had invaded the Roman country with a large and powerful army, and had penetrated even to the walls of the city. And when Tarquinius was at war with them and was in great danger, he vowed a temple to Jupiter, and so he overcame his enemies. Then he waged war against the Etruscans, and subdued the whole land of Etruria, so that the Etruscans recognised him as their king and sent him the royal insignia, the golden crown, the sceptre, the ivory chair, the embroidered tunic, and the purple toga, and the twelve axes in the bundles of rods. Thus these emblems of royal power came to Rome, and remained to the Roman kings as a sign of their dominion over the people.

when all enemies were conquered, and Rome had increased in power, in size, and in the number of its citizens, Tarquinius determined to arrange the people anew and to appoint other tribes in the place of the tribes of the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres which Romulus had ordained. But the gods sent unfavourable signs, and the augur Attus Navius opposed the king, and forbade an alteration of the old division of the people against the will of the gods. Then Tarquinius thought to mock and to humble the augur, and told him to consult the sacred birds, whether what he had now in his mind could come to pass. And when Attus Navius had consulted the birds and had obtained a favourable answer, Tarquinius gave him a whetstone and a razor, and said, “This is what I had in my mind; you shall cut through the stone with this knife”. Then Attus cut the stone through with the knife and compelled Tarquinius to give up his intentions. But the knife and the stone were buried in the Forum, and hard by the spot a statue of Attus Navius was set up in remembrance of the miracle he wrought.

As Tarquinius could not alter the names of the old tribes nor increase their number, he doubled the number of the noble houses in each tribe, and called those which he now admitted the younger houses of the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres. And the centuries of the knights he doubled also, and the senate, so that the division of the people which Romulus had made remained unaltered with the old names, only in each division was the number of the houses doubled.

And to fulfil the vow that he had made in the war with the Sabines, Tarquinius began to build a temple to Jupiter on the Capitoline hill. And he levelled a place on the hill to lay the foundation of the temple. And as they were digging into the mountain, they found a human head. This was interpreted as a sign that that place should be the head of all the earth. And the old sanctuaries which stood in the place where the temple of Jupiter was to be built were transferred to other places, according to the sacred rites which the pontifices prescribed. But the altars of the god of youth and of the god of boundaries could not be transferred, so they had to be left in their places, and were enclosed in the temple of Jupiter. This was a sign that the boundary-line of the Roman commonwealth would never recede, and that its youth would be everlasting.

Tarquinius built large sewers underground, and drained the lower valleys of the city which lay between the hills, and which, till then, were marshy and uninhabitable. And in the valley between the Capitoline and the Palatine hills, he laid out the Forum for a market-place, and surrounded it with covered walks and booths. He drained also the valley of Murcia, between the Aventine and the Palatine, and there he levelled a race-course, and introduced games like those of the Etruscans. These were celebrated every year, and were called the Roman games. Thus Tarquinius gained great renown in peace and in war, and he reigned for thirty-seven years, until he reached a great age.

 

Critical examination of the Legend of Tarquinius Priscus.

 

The story of Tarquinius Priscus has at the first glance the appearance of a plausible historical tradition. Yet upon closer examination this picture also vanishes before our eyes, and resolves itself into the elements of legend and fiction. There are two distinct political measures which, apart from his wars, are ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus; namely, the alterations he made in the constitution, and the works and buildings with which he improved the town. With reference to the former, Tarquinius appears like another Romulus or Tullus Hostilius, and with reference to the latter he is identical with Tarquinius Superbus.

The substance of the internal reform is nothing more than a doubling of the number of citizens, and is, therefore, a measure similar to those which are ascribed to Romulus after the Sabine war, and to Tullus after the conquest of Alba. Nor is it possible to discover in the acts of the three kings any essential difference. Different writers represent the innovation in different ways, namely:—

1. As a doubling of the three old tribes of the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres.

2. As a doubling of the corresponding three centuries of knights.

3. As an increase of the senate.

These different representations do not contradict each other. For as the tribes, the centuries of knights, and the senate were all organized on the basis of the three­fold division of the people, in such manner that the numbers of each were three, or multiples of three, it is clear that an alteration in any one of these parts implied a corresponding alteration in the other parts. It was therefore sufficient for a writer to refer to the change in one or the other body in order to characterise the whole reform. Now, as the writers of the republican period had but a dim recollection of the old tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, but were familiar with the centuries of knights, they naturally, for the most part, represent the reform of Tarquinius Priscus exclusively with reference to the change which he made in these centuries.

We find that even the ancients endeavoured to harmonise the increase of the knights effected by Tarquinius with the traditions concerning the number of knights under Romulus and Tullus Hostilius. Modern writers have followed in the same track, which in the end could only lead to the discovery that the traditional numbers reported with reference to the gradual increase of the knights are not derived from positive testimony, but are only worked out to show the gradual development of the organization as it existed at a later period, and that all the statements with reference to it are the result of conjectural calculation.

It is not difficult to prove that this is perfectly true. In the constitution of Servius there were eighteen centuries or companies of knights, namely, six old centuries— the so-called six “suffrages”, which are generally supposed to be the original patrician centuries of knights—and twelve new centuries. Romulus had at first made only three such centuries. It was, therefore, requisite to show how the later number had gradually arisen out of the former. The process was supposed to be the following. The 300 knights of the three centuries of Romulus were doubled after the conquest of Alba by Tullus Hostilius, and brought, therefore, to the number of 600. Tullus left the old centuries of Ramnian, Titian, and Luceran knights unchanged in name and organization. He effected his purpose by simply doubling the number of knights in each century. His proceeding, therefore, was precisely the same as that ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus.

The next step was taken by Tarquinius, who acted like his predecessor, and, without altering either name or organization, doubled the number of 600, composing the three centuries of Ramnian, Titian, and Luceran knights, which Tullus Hostilius had formed. He had, therefore, now 1,200 knights nominally in three centuries, but really in twelve centuries, and these are the twelve centuries of knights which are found in the constitution of Servius Tullius apart from the six suffrages. This is the report of Festus, and there is perfect order and symmetry in this calculation. But unfortunately it is contradicted by the statement of Livy, which appears to have been more generally accepted, that Servius Tullius, when he reorganized the constitution, did not find twelve but six centuries of knights, viz., the six old suffrages, and that he added to them twelve new centuries of knights. This view cannot be made to agree with the statements which ascribe a doubling of the number of knights, first to Tullus Hostilius, and then to Tarquinius Priscus, for the rules of arithmetic are inexorable, and according to them twice three are six, and twice six are twelve. We are lost here in a labyrinth, out of which we can extricate ourselves only by the discovery that the doubling of the original three centuries, which according to all accounts took place at one time or another, was erroneously ascribed by some writers to Tullus Hostilius, by others to Tarquinius, and that by later compilers these statements were combined. Thus the number of the centuries of the knights being supposed to have been doubled twice, no longer agreed with the commonly received accounts of the Servian constitution.

The same difficulties present themselves if we attempt to explain the gradual increase of the number of senators from 100 under Romulus to 800 under Tarquinius. According to the common account, the senate of Romulus consisted at first of 100 members. This number was doubled after the union with the Sabines. At the accession of Tarquinius, accordingly, the senate counted 200 members. The usual number afterwards was 300. It was therefore clear that Tarquinius did not double the number of senators, as by doing so he would have raised their number to 400. Consequently it was alleged that he only added 100 members. Yet we find it also stated that Tarquin doubled the number of senators. To make this statement tally with the normal number of 800, it was necessary to suppose that before the time of Tarquin the senate consisted of 150 members. These, again, were made to consist of 100 Roman senators appointed by Romulus, and fifty Sabines added to the original 100 after the union of the two nations. It is evident that all these calculations and theories are worthless. Wherever we turn, and whatever part of the narrative we examine, everywhere we meet with contradictions and impossibilities, which one and all arise from the circumstance that the doubling of the number of citizens was related several times instead of being related once. That this duplication took place at one time seems to be certain. The memory of it was kept alive by the designation of senior and junior houses. But whenever this union really took place, it doubled the patrician houses and the number of fighting men only once. It raised the army from one legion to two, and the knights from 300 to 600. It made no alteration in the existing division of the people into three tribes, which seems to have been primeval. All attempts to trace a successive development of the fundamental, political, and military organization under Tullus Hostilius and Tarquinius Priscus break down and involve us in inextricable confusion. The fact is that these two kings are not historical but legendary, and the actions and measures ascribed to them are repetitions of the actions and measures of the ideal founder of the city.

As to the public works of Tarquinius Priscus they are the ascribed not only to him, but also to the younger Tarquin. This contradiction was supposed to be removed by the hypothesis that the elder Tarquin began, and the younger finished them—an idea plausible enough, because the grandeur of such works as the public sewers and the Capitoline temple seems to have surpassed the resources of one king. But this hypothesis will hardly command our approval when we bear in mind that, according to the usual statement, these works were interrupted and at a standstill during the whole period of the reign of Servius Tullius. It is clear that the oldest tradition ascribed those works simply to King Tarquinius. Afterwards, when instead of one Tarquinius, two kings of that name were inserted into the list of Roman sovereigns, and for the sake of distinction were denominated respectively the “elder Tarquin” and the “tyrant Tarquin”, the annalists indulged their favourite propensity, by ascribing the same facts to both, although the long reign of Servius Tullius intervened between the two Tarquins. It would have been easy to remove the doubts which this interruption of the works suggests. Servius might have been made to take up and continue the buildings of his predecessor. The fact that this was not done shows that the tradition must have been firmly established which ascribed the great public works to the Tarquins alone, whose character as Etruscans is thereby marked, and kept distinct from the other kings of Rome.

Our inquiry has led us to the same conclusion, namely, that the accounts of Tarquinius Priscus are unsupported by historical evidence. The strength of this conclusion is not impaired by the statements regarding the wars of Tarquinius Priscus. On the contrary, if anything is perceptible in them, it is the dim reflection of the wars of Romulus. The Sabine war of Tarquinius reminds us more especially of the war of Romulus with Tatius. The Sabines advanced as far as the walls of Rome, just as Tatius had advanced to the very gate of the town on the Palatine hill; and in his distress, Tarquin, like Romulus, vows a temple to Jupiter. In his Etruscan wars Tarquin gains the insignia of the royal dignity precisely as Tulius Hostilius, and even Romulus, had done before. Thus, then, the three kings resolve themselves into one in this respect also, and it is confirmed on all sides that the alleged story of Tarquinius Priscus is nothing but a version of the same old legend which furnished the materials for the stories of Romulus and of Tullus Hostilius.

The alleged descent of the Tarquinii from Corinth deserves no more credit than the intercourse of Numa with Pythagoras, and the landing of Aeneas in Latium. The chronology of the Tarquinian dynasty (if we can speak of such a thing) is in utter and hopeless confusion. If we take the story as Livy gives it, nobody will think it possible that the father of the second Tarquin, expelled in 495 B.C., can be the son of a Corinthian citizen expelled by Kypselos about 650 B.C., that is 155 years before. Moreover, the genuine Roman tradition represents the Tarquinii always as Etruscans, and never as Greeks. The story of their Corinthian origin is due, no doubt, to Greek imagination, which has adorned the older history of Rome with a variety of unhistorical facts, intended to show the intimate connection between the mighty Roman people and their humble admirers and subjects beyond the Ionian Sea.   

 

CHAPTER VII.

The Legend of Servius Tullius.

 

In the house of King Tarquinius was a virgin, called Ocrisia, who watched the holy fire sacred to the house-hold god. Once, as she sat by the hearth, the god appeared to her in the flame. And she loved him and bore him a son, who grew up in the house of the king, and they called him Servius, because he was the son of a slave. One day, when the boy had fallen asleep in a chamber in the king’s house, a flame played about the head, till he awoke from his sleep. And Tanaquil, the king’s wife, saw from this that Servius was destined for great things. On this account, when he was grown up to manhood, Tarquinius gave him his daughter for his wife, and entrusted to him the most important business, so that Servius was in the highest repute among the elders, as well as among the people. When this became known to the sons of King Ancus, who were wroth with Tarquinius because he had deprived them of their paternal heritage, they were afraid that Tarquinius would name Servius as his successor. For this reason they resolved to have their revenge, and they hired two murderers, who came to the king disguised as shepherds, and said they had a dispute, and that the king should judge between them. Now, as they were wrangling with one another, and Tarquinius was attending to what one of them was saying, the other struck him with an axe, and they both took to flight.

As now the king lay in his blood, and a noise and tumult arose, Tanaquil ordered the gates of the royal house to be shut, to keep out the people. And she spoke to the people out of an upper window, and said the king was not dead, but wounded, and he had ordered that Servius should reign in his stead until he had recovered. Therefore Servius filled the king’s place, sitting as judge on the royal throne, and he conducted all affairs as the king himself was wont to do. When it became known, however, after some days, that Tarquinius had died, Servius did not resign the royal power, but continued to rule for a time, without being appointed by the people and without the consent of the senate. But after he had won over a large number of the people by all kinds of promises and by grants of land, he held an assembly and persuaded the people to choose him for their king.

Thus Servius Tullius became King of Rome, and he ruled with clemency and justice. He loved peace, like his predecessors Numa and Ancus, and waged no wars, except with the Etruscans. These he compelled to be subject to him, as they had been to King Tarquinius before him. But with the Latins he made a treaty, that the Romans and the Latins should live always in friendship with one another. And, as a sign of this union, the Romans and the Latins built a temple to Diana on the Aventine, where they celebrated their common festivals, and offered up sacrifices every year for Rome and for the whole of Latium.

Then Servius built a strong wall from the Quirinal to the Esquiline, and made a deep trench, and added the Esquiline to the town, so that all the seven hills were united and formed one city. This city he divided into four parts, which he called tribes, after the old division of the people, and he divided the land round about the city into twenty-six districts, and ordered common sanctuaries and holy days, and headmen for the inhabitants of the districts which he had made.

Now, as Servius was the son of a bondmaid, he was a friend of the poor and of the lower classes, and he established equitable laws and ordinances to protect the common people against the more powerful. Therefore the commons honoured him and called him the good King Servius, and they celebrated the day of his birth as an annual festival. But the greatest work that Servius did was to make a new division of the people, according to the order of the fighting men, as they were to be arranged in the field of battle, and as they should vote in the assembly of citizens when the king consulted them concerning peace or war, or laws, or elections, or other important things. For this purpose Servius divided the whole people of the patricians and the plebeians into five classes, according to their property, without regard to their blood or descent, so that from that time forward the three tribes of Romulus—the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres—and their thirty curies, formed no longer the principal assembly of citizens, but lost their power in most matters that affected the government.

The first class Servius made to consist of forty centuries of the younger men, who were under forty-six years of age, and of forty centuries of the elder; the latter for the defence of the town, the former for service in the field. The second, third, and fourth classes he divided each into twenty centuries, ten of the older men and ten of the younger. But he made the fifth class stronger, for he gave it thirty centuries, fifteen of the older men and fifteen of the younger. The arming of the centuries was not the same in all five classes. Only the men of the first class wore complete armour, composed of breast-plate, helmet, shield, and greaves, with javelin, lance, and sword; the second class fought without the breast-plate, and with a lighter shield; the third without the greaves, and so on, so that the men of the fifth class were but lightly armed. Now, as the citizens had to procure their own equipments for war, and as the complete armour was very expensive, Servius chose for the first class only the richest citizens, whose properly was estimated at more than a hundred thousand asses, that is, pounds of copper. The assessment for each of the following classes was twenty-five thousand asses less, so that in the fifth class were those citizens who were assessed at less than twenty-five thousand asses. But those who had less than eleven thousand asses Servius arranged in no class at all, but made of them a separate century—the century of the Proletarians—and these he exempted from all military service.

Thus Servius arranged the infantry in 170 centuries, and for the horse he took the six double centuries of horsemen which Tarquinius had established, and to them he added twelve new centuries, chosen out of the highest and richest families. And the horsemen consisted all of younger men, as they had to fight only in the field.

As it was necessary also to have in the army trumpeters, armourers, and carpenters, Servius made four centuries of them, so that altogether 193 centuries were formed. Of the

That was the military order of the people. And when they assembled for making laws or for elections, they observed the same order, and each century had a vote, and the chief influence was in the hands of the wealthiest, who formed the eighty centuries of the first class, and the eighteen centuries of knights. But the poorer people, although much more numerous, had but few votes, and their influence in the assembly was small, and the greatest number had not the greatest power. Nor was this arrangement unjust, for the rich provided themselves with heavy armour and fought in the foremost rank, and when a war tax was laid on, they contributed in proportion to their property. And Servius showed his wisdom especially in this, that in the assembly of citizens he placed the older men and the younger on an equality in the number of their votes, although there were fewer of the older, according to the nature of things. For he wished that the experience and moderation of the older citizens should restrain the rashness of the younger. In this manner the people were arranged as an army for the protection of their country, and at the same time as an assembly of citizens, to decide in all matters which concerned the well-being of the city; and no man was entirely shut out from the commonwealth, but to each one were assigned such burdens and services as he might be able to bear, and such a measure of rights and privileges as was just. The order of centuries which Servius Tullius had made, remained for many ages the foundation of the Roman commonwealth; and although, in the course of time, it was altered in many ways, it was never entirely abolished, so long as the people of Rome retained their freedom.

 

Critical Examination of the Legend of Servius Tullius.

 

In the story of Servius Tullius we look in vain for traces of a genuine historical tradition. It is as meagre and vague as that of any of the preceding kings. In some respects it resembles the legend of Numa Pompilius. Numa Servius Tullius is the name of an imaginary author of the constitution of centuries and of the laws which appeared to the Romans to be more or less connected with it, precisely as Numa represents the author of the ceremonial laws of the Roman religion.

The legend of the wonderful birth of Servius Tullius presents him clearly as the founder of the city. It is in all essentials the same legend as that of the birth of Romulus, of Caeculus, the founder of Praeneste, and of Modius, the founder of Cures; and it shows the conception which the Latins and Sabines had of the divine descent generally attributed by them to the hero to whom they ascribed the origin of their towns. As the domestic hearth, the symbol of family union, was consecrated to the lar or genius of the house, so every state, as a political community, had a common hearth, and a virgin of the hearth gave birth to the founder of the commonwealth. Servius Tullius, therefore, was considered the originator of the Roman commonwealth, and this conception was so far justified as he passed for the founder of that constitution which, differing in its groundwork from the constitution of Romulus, marks the starting-point for the political development of the plebeians. Just as Romulus was considered the author of the patrician tribes, curies, and houses, which were the groundwork of the Roman constitution in the regal period; so Servius Tullius is represented by the legend as the author of a new division of the people, which was the germ of the development in the republican period.

The Soman legend of the birth of Servius Tullius, which represents him as a Latin by descent, is directly opposed to an Etruscan tradition which the Emperor Claudius discovered in Etruscan annals. According to this tradition Servius Tullius, originally called Mastarna, came from Etruria, with the remnants of the army of Coeles Vibenna, settled on the Coelian hill, and, after assuming the name of Servius Tullius, acquired the royal dignity in Rome. It would be useless to attempt to decide which of these traditions is most entitled to credit. They prove only one thing, namely, that the story of Servius Tullius rests entirely on the imagination of the earliest writers, and that Servius was inserted among the kings of Rome chiefly because it was considered necessary to name an author of the constitution of centuries.

Concerning the origin of this constitution we have no tradition which deserves to be called historical. It is as improbable that it was due to a single act of legislation as it is unlikely that all the religious ordinances were established by Numa. It grew out of the constitution of curies which preceded it in the course of a gradual and natural development.

The thirty patrician curies furnished the original army, the legion of 3,000 men. In these curies the plebeians were included as members bound to perform political services, but enjoying no political rights. As the number of patricians diminished, plebeians were added as light armed soldiers to the patrician legion, and for a time patricians and plebeians formed each an equal number of companies or centuries which stood side by side in the army. Gradually the plebeian warriors acquired an influence in the divisions of the popular assembly formed by the divisions of the army, especially in decisions regarding peace and war. In proportion as the number of the plebeian fighting men increased, this influence naturally increased. Thus, by taking a share in the defence of the country, the plebeians gradually acquired a share in the suffrages of the popular assembly. Still there was a distinct line of separation between the two classes, as descent and blood marked every man as belonging either to one class or to the other. This was removed by the introduction of the census, which made property instead of descent the principle of the new division. From this time forward the plebeians could no longer be kept separate as a distinct and inferior caste. In proportion to the amount of their property they were ranged side by side with the patricians in one of the five classes of citizens where nothing prevented them from reaching the highest.

The introduction of the census, therefore, is the starting-point of the Servian constitution properly so called. When this development of the old organization took place, and to whom it is due, we are unable to discover; but so much seems probable, that the establishment of the new principle involved in it did not take place without civil struggles. In these struggles the plebeians must have had a champion, and perhaps we may be permitted to call such a champion Servius Tullius, and to look upon him as the great innovator. But the history of the civil contests has not been handed down to us. The principle of the constitution ascribed to Servius Tullius is perfectly plain. It is the distribution of political rights according to the measure of political duties. It holds a middle course between the pure aristocracy of hereditary nobility, and pure democracy which only counts heads. Property is the only available test for judging of the comparative qualification of citizens for a share in the government. This test, therefore, was successfully applied in Greece as well as in Rome, and also in most of the constitutions of modern Europe. When it was introduced in Rome the old constitution, based on the comitia of curies, was superseded. Though these comitia were not altogether abolished, they possessed now no more power than other relics of antiquity which owed their preservation to the influence of religion and the respect for old forms which was characteristic of the Romans. They were assembled from time to time to go through certain formalities, especially those of a religious character, but they were stripped of all political power. This power passed over to the comitia of centuries, and as long as these enjoyed life and vigour the Roman commonwealth grew and prospered.

It follows from what has been said that the original form of the comitia of centuries is involved in obscurity. The numbers preserved by Livy and Dionysius are evidently taken from a much later time. The so-called “Commentaries”, or books, of Servius Tullius, mentioned by some writers, are no more genuine than the commentaries of Numa. If Fabius Pictor and other writers report that in the first census made by Servius Tullius the number of citizens capable of bearing arms was eighty thousand, we feel sure that this evident exaggeration is sufficient to show how thoughtless and unskilful those annalists were who drew upon their imagination for the materials of the so-called history of the Roman kings.

Besides the introduction of the comitia of centuries, other measures are ascribed to Servius Tullius, such as the division of Rome into four tribes or quarters, that of the Roman territory into twenty-six districts, the distribution of the plebeians in small communities of villages and wards , and, lastly, the organization of guilds or companies. In short, he was looked upon as a great legislator, to whom everything might be referred of which it was impossible to name another author.

With regard to his foreign policy, the only measure of importance ascribed to Servius Tullius is the conclusion of a treaty with the Latins, which is said to have been ratified by the erection of a temple of Diana on the Aventine as a federal sanctuary. In proof of this statement an historical document is quoted which is alleged to be the original charter of confederation, engraved on a pillar of brass, and preserved in its original state at the time when Dionysius wrote his history, that is, under the reign of Augustus. On a close examination we find that this statement, apparently so well attested, is entirely delusive, and in no way calculated to convert by its authority the tissue of fables with which it is surrounded into real history.

Of all the ancient writers Dionysius alone quotes this document, which, if it had been genuine, and had really existed at the end of the republic, could not have failed, as the oldest written monument of antiquity, to attract general attention. It is clear, however, that Dionysius never saw the actual document himself. It is not even certain, from his expressions, that it was in existence at the time he wrote. If it had existed, the most learned antiquarians would not have been able to read it, as is proved by the fact that a document from the year 348 BC, more than two hundred years later, was, at the time of Polybius, almost unintelligible on account of its obsolete language.

A treaty of confederation between Rome and the Latin cities would certainly have contained the names of the members of the league, and would have enabled Dionysius to give these names. As he omits to do this, the authenticity of the document to which he refers must be called in question. We must, therefore, consider the statement of Dionysius as one of the downright frauds of which he is frequently guilty, and with which he endeavors to palm off the fables of antiquity as well-authenticated and trustworthy historical records.

The story of the violent death of Servius Tullius belongs to the period of the succeeding king, and will there be discussed.

 

CHAPTER VIII

The Legend of Tarquinius Superbus.

 

 

Servius Tullius had two daughters; one was good and gentle, and the other was haughty, imperious, and heartless. In like manner Aruns and Lucius, the two sons of the elder Tarquinius, were of different character; the one was good-tempered, and the other was vicious and violent. These sons of Tarquin Servius Tullius married to his own daughters, thinking to soften the hearts of the wicked by the gentle sweetness of the good; and so he gave to the wicked Lucius the sweet Tullia to wife, and the proud Tullia he married to the good-natured Aruns.

But matters turned out differently from what Servius had expected. The wicked ones longed for each other’s company, and they despised their amiable consorts as wife of weak and mean-spirited. Therefore the bad Lucius murdered his wife and his brother, and he took to wife the daughter of Servius, who had a like disposition to his own. Now this reckless pair excited one another mutually to new enormities. They desired to possess power, and they practiced deceit and cunning, and made for themselves a party among the nobles and those of the people who were the enemies of Servius on account of his innovations.

Now when everything was prepared, Lucius Tarquinius entered the market-place clothed in the royal robes, and, surrounded by a band of armed men, summoned the senate to appear before him, and harangued them as king. At the report of this usurpation, Servius was alarmed and hurried to the spot, and there arose a quarrel in the senate-house between him and his son-in-law. Then Tarquinius seized the weak old man, and cast him down the steps of the senate-house, and sent after him men who overtook him on his way to his own house, and slew him in the street, and let him lie in his blood. But the wicked Tullia, the daughter of Servius, full of joy at what had happened, hurried to the market-place in her carriage, and welcomed her husband as king. And as she was driving home through the street where her father was lying dead, she gave orders that the horses should not be turned aside, and she drove on over the corpse of her father, so that the carriage and her dress were spattered with his blood. And from this the street was called for ever after the street of crime.

Thus Tarquinius gained the royal power without the consent of the senate, and without the choice of the people; and as he had acquired it so he exercised it; so that the people called him the Proud, and hated and detested him as long as he lived. For he regarded neither justice nor equity, nor the laws and ordinances of good King Servius, nor did he summon the senate for counsel, but reigned entirely according to his own will, and oppressed all, whether high or low. Moreover, he surrounded himself with a body-guard, after the custom of the Greek tyrants; and those among the citizens who were against him, or whose wealth provoked his avarice, he punished, upon false accusation, either inflicting heavy fines, or driving them into exile, or putting them to death. The poor he compelled to work at his buildings, and made them serve like slaves beyond their strength, so that many killed themselves out of despair.

After Tarquinius had established his power in Rome, he turned against the Latins; and those that did not willingly submit he made war upon, and made them subject to himself. But the people of Gabii resisted him manfully, and he could not prevail against them. Then his son Sextus devised a stratagem. He went to Gabii, as if fleeing from his father, and he showed his back covered with bloody stripes, and begged the people of Gabii, with supplications and tears, to protect him from his father and to receive him into their town. Thus the people of Gabii were deceived, and they trusted his words, and befriended him, and made him the commander of a company. But the Romans fled when Sextus led the men of Gabii, because it had thus been agreed upon between Sextus and his father. When Sextus had thus gained the confidence of the Gabine people and possessed great power in Gabii, he sent a messenger to his father to ask what he should do. The king was walking in his pleasure-ground when the messenger came, and, instead of giving him an answer in words, Tarquin struck off with his stick the tallest poppies and sent the man back. But Sextus understood the meaning of his father’s reply, and began to bring false charges against the first and noblest of the men of Gabii, and so caused them to be put to death; and when he had done this, he surrendered the helpless town to his father.

In order now to strengthen his power, Tarquinius united himself to Octavius Mamilius, who reigned in Tusculum, and gave him his daughter to wife; and he established the festival of the Latin games, which were solemnized every year on the Alban hill at the temple of Jupiter Latiaris, and in which all the Latin cities took part. After this he waged war on the Volscians, a powerful people who lived in the south of Latium. And he conquered Suessa Pometia, their greatest and richest town; and the spoils he gained in war were very large; and he used them to finish the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, which his father had begun. And he sent for artists from the towns of Etruria to decorate the temple with works of art, and for the summit of the temple he ordered a chariot with four horses to be made of clay in the town of Veii. Now when the chariot was in the oven to be baked, it did not shrink as clay always does, but it expanded and became so large that it could not be taken out again without breaking down the oven. Then a prophet announced to the Veientines that the chariot was a pledge of fortune and power, and therefore they would not give it up to the Romans. But when a chariot race took place in Veii, and the charioteer who won the race drove away from the course, his horses suddenly took fright and could not be held, and they ran straight to the Roman Capitol and at the Ratumenian gate they over­turned the chariot, and the driver was hurled down dead on the ground. Then the Veientines saw that the vengeance of the gods threatened them if they kept the clay chariot against the laws of justice and the will of Fate, and they brought it to Rome, where it was placed on the gable of the temple.

After this the large sewers, which the elder Tarquinius had begun, were finished by Tarquinius Superbus, and so strong and firmly were they built that they exist even to the present day, bringing the water from the lower parts of the town into the Tiber. And then Tarquinius completed the Forum, which was used for buying and selling and for the general assemblies of the people; and he improved the large race-course in the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine hills; he also adorned the town with many other buildings, for he loved pomp and splendour, and he thought by his great extravagance and by compulsory labour to make the people poor and helpless, that he might govern them more easily.

Now, when he was in full possession of power, there appeared one day before him a strange woman and offered him nine books of divine prophecy, which the inspired Sibyl of Cumae had written on loose leaves. But, because she asked a high price, Tarquinius laughed at her and let her go. Then the woman burnt three of the books before his eyes, and returned and offered to sell the other six for the same price which she had at first asked for the nine. But Tarquinius laughed at her still more, and thought she was mad. She then burnt three more of the books, and offered the last three for the original price. Then Tarquinius began to reflect, and he felt persuaded that the woman was sent to him by the gods, and he bought the books. In this manner he obtained the books of Sibylline prophecy, which were consulted in stress of war, or in time of plague or famine, in order to ascertain how the wrath of the gods was to be appeased. They were carefully preserved, and two men who knew the language of the Greeks, in which the books were written, were appointed to take care of them and to consult them when necessary.

Up to this time Tarquinius had been always fortunate in his undertakings, and he became ever more and more proud and overbearing. Then he was frightened by dreams and great signs and wonders, and he determined to consult the oracle of the Greeks at Delphi. For this purpose he sent his two sons to Delphi, and with them Junius, his sister’s son, who, on account of his stupidity, was called Brutus. But the stupidity of Brutus was only a pretence to deceive the tyrant, who was an enemy of all wise men, because he feared them. Now when the king’s sons brought costly presents to the Delphian god, Brutus gave only a simple staff. The others ridiculed him, but they did not know that the staff was hollowed out and filled with gold, as an emblem of his own mind. After the king’s sons had executed the commission of their father, they asked the god who would reign in Rome after Tarquinius. And the answer of the oracle was, that he should reign who would be the first to kiss his mother. Then the two brothers agreed to draw lots, which of them should first kiss his mother on arriving at home. But Brutus perceived the real meaning of the oracle, and when they had left the temple, he pretended to stumble, and he fell down and kissed the ground, for the earth, he thought, was the common mother of all men.

Now when Tarquinius had reigned twenty-four years, it came to pass that he besieged Ardea, the town of the his wife Rutuli, in Latium; and one evening, when the king’s sons were supping with their cousin, Tarquinius Collatinus, who lived in Collatia, they talked of their wives, and each praised the virtue and thriftiness of his own wife. Thereupon they agreed to go and see which of the ladies deserved the highest praise. Without delay they mounted their horses and galloped quickly to Rome, and then to Collatia to take the ladies by surprise. They found the daughters-in-law of the king enjoying themselves at a feast, but Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, they found sitting up late at night with her maids busy with spinning and other household work. Therefore Lucretia was acknowledged to be the matron most worthy of praise.

 

Sextus Tarquinius wronged Lucretia.

 

But Sextus Tarquinius, when he had seen Lucretia, conceived a base design against her, and so he came again one evening to Collatia. After he had been kindly received and led into his chamber, he rose in the middle of the night, when every one was asleep in the house, and came into Lucretia’s room and surprised her alone. And when she refused to yield herself to him, he threatened to murder her and to put a murdered slave to lie beside her, and then to accuse her to her husband that he had found her with a slave. Then Lucretia resisted no longer. The next morning Sextus went away and returned to the camp before Ardea.

But Lucretia sent messengers to Rome and to Ardea to fetch her father Lucretius and her husband Collatinus. These two hastened to Collatia, and with them came Junius Brutus, and the noble Publius Valerius Poplicola, and they found Lucretia in her room clothed in deep mourning. And when they were all collected together, Lucretia told them of the deed of Sextus, and of the shame brought upon her, and she challenged the men to swear that they would avenge her. And when she had ended her words, she drew a knife and plunged it into her heart and died.

Then the men were seized with grief, and they carried her corpse to the market-place, and told the people what had happened, and sent messengers with the news to the army at Ardea. But Brutus assembled the people together and spoke to them, and called upon them to resist the tyrant. And the people determined to expel King Tarquinius and his whole house, to abolish the regal power, and to suffer no king any more in Rome. And they chose, in the place of a king, two men who should exercise the royal power for one year, and should be called not kings but consuls; and for the management of the sacrifices, which the king had to offer, they chose a priest, who should be called the king of sacrifices, but should have no power in the state, and should be subject to the high pontiff. Otherwise they altered nothing in the laws and ordinances of the state, but they let them all remain as they had been during the time of the kings. And for the first consuls they chose Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. These consuls shut the gates against Tarquinius, and the Roman army before Ardea abandoned Tarquinius and went back to Rome. Thus the death of Lucretia was avenged, and Rome became a free city after it had been subject to kings for two hundred and forty years.

 

Critical Examination of the Legend of Tarquinius Superbus.

 

The reign of the Tarquins immediately precedes the establishment of the republic, that is, the time in which the history of Rome is suddenly changed in character and assumes the form of contemporary historical narrative, for from this time forward the names of the annual magistrates and the most important events are recorded year after year, in the form of annals or annual registers. Hence it might be inferred that the dawn of genuine history ought to penetrate as far as the reign of the last Tarquin, and this has indeed been the general opinion of recent historians. Nevertheless, if we examine closely the alleged events, we find neither in their matter nor in their form an essential difference from the traditions of the earlier kings. The personal adventures of Tarquinius Superbus, it is true, are a little more varied and interesting. This is, however, the result not of a more authentic tradition, but of tales borrowed from ancient Greek writers.

It has already been remarked that the oldest tradition knew only one Tarquin; and that at a later time, when the history of the kings was arranged into a connected story, two Lucii Tarquinii were substituted for one, and separated from one another by the insertion of the reign of Servius Tullius. Thus it is explained that some events are referred to the elder and also to the younger Tarquin, as, for instance, the construction of the great public works, and the purchase of the Sibylline books. Hence arise also the chronological difficulties which Dionysius attempted to remove by inserting a whole generation between the elder and the younger Tarquin, and by making the latter not the son but the grandson of the former; for, he argued, if Tarquinius Priscus came to Rome as a middle-aged man, and reigned thirty-seven years, he could not at his death leave little children, one of whom, after the lapse of forty-four years, occupied by the reign of Servius, became king, reigned twenty-five years, and died several years afterwards in exile, so that from the birth of the father to the death of the son about a century and a half must be supposed to have elapsed.

The Greek colouring of the legend is unmistakable, and appears to be of comparatively late origin. It represents Tarquin like a Greek tyrant of the older period. He seizes the government by force without any regard to legal forms, assisted by a number of partisans, and by a body­guard; he is hard and cruel to the old nobility and to the rich; he oppresses the people by forced labour; endeavours to strengthen himself by family connections with foreign rulers; he loves magnificence, is a patron of art, bold and successful in his foreign politics, and victorious in war. This conception of Tarquin was formed at a comparatively late period under the influence of Greek ideas. There was however an older national, and less unfavourable, conception of him, according to which he was not a tyrant, but a vigorous king, like Romulus. This view of Tarquinius was embodied in the history of the elder king of this name, who is never represented as an unjust tyrant. It is not improbable that this difference of conception has contributed to make two Tarquins out of one. The story of the stratagem by which Gabii was conquered is probably taken from Herodotus, who relates a similar story with regard to the capture of Babylon by Cyrus. The same Greek author tells the story of the poppy-heads, which he relates, with slight variations, of Periander and Thrasybulus. Not more authentic is the account of the alleged embassy to Delphi, which was inserted for the purpose of showing the hidden wisdom of Brutus. The embassy leads to nothing; it is accounted for not by political events, but by dreams and miracles. It was evidently of Greek origin. There was no lack of native Italian prophets, especially in Etruria. Rome had at that time no intercourse with Greece proper, whatever may have been its relation to Italian Greeks. It is utterly impossible, therefore, that in such an early period an isolated instance of an embassy to the Delphic sanctuary should have occurred. In like manner the narrative of the purchase of the Sibylline books by Tarquin is very suspicious, although the general tradition speaks in its favor, and only one author, the Greek lexicographer Suidas, informs us that, according to some statements, this purchase took place in the time of the republic. Yet the reason for assigning it to Tarquinius is apparently only an inference made from the circumstance that the Sybilline books were preserved in the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter. Nothing seemed more natural than to suppose that Tarquin, who built the temple, purchased the sacred books of the Sybill.

From the Greek tales in the history of Tarquin has been argued that, in the Tarquinian period, a lively intercourse took place between Greeks and Romans, and that Rome then received the first impression of Greek Civilization. We hold that this inference is erroneous, and we consider the stories upon which is based as so many attempts to represent the aboriginal Romans as connected with Greece, attempts which we have met with in the Legend of Aeneas, in the alleged intercourse of Numa and Pythagoras, in the legend of the temple of Diana on the Aventine, built, as it is said, after the model of that of the Ephesian Artemis, and the alleged descent of the Tarquins from Demarathus of Corinth. At what time and in what manner Greece began to exercise her influence upon Rome, is a question for the solution of which we obtain no materials from the unauthenticated history of the regal time. The alphabet, the system of weights and measures used in Rome, appear to have been introduced from the Greek cities in Southern Italy, but we have as yet no evidence to show how and when.

If, from what we have said, it must be conceded that the history of the reign of Tarquinius Superbus is unauthentic, it follows that the account of his expulsion is likewise without foundation. It is contrary to all experience, and to the laws of human nature, that a powerful dynasty should have been expelled without any difficulty, without any internal struggles, simply by a resolution of the people, and that a monarchy which had lasted for centuries should have been changed, as by magic, into a republic in complete working order, with responsible annual magistrates and the laws necessary to secure the permanence of these institutions.

We venture to conjecture that the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome implied not merely a change in the constitution, but that it was connected with a national rising of the Latino-Sabine people against the Etruscans, who for a time had held dominion over Latium. This, it is true, cannot be proved with absolute certainty. The evidence to which we must refer is too vague and untrustworthy; it depends too much upon individual conceptions, and may often be interpreted in various ways. We must, therefore, rest contented if the result of our investigations satisfy the rules of probability, and if we get rid of conceptions which our judgment rejects as untenable and false.

The Etruscans or Tuscans, called by the Greeks Tyrrhenians, differed in descent, language, and manners from all the other races of Italy, and from the Greek settlers on Italian soil. They had spread themselves at the time of their greatest power over the wide plain of the Po in the north of Italy; in the south they occupied Campania; and in central Italy the land of Etruria, to which they gave its name. In each of these three districts they built towns at a very early period, which were ruled by kings and formed several confederacies. At the time of their immigration they had either expelled or conquered the original inhabitants; and in some districts—for instance, in southern and eastern Etruria—they had amalgamated with them to a certain extent. In the settlements north of the Apennines the Etruscans were gradually overpowered by successive invasions of Gauls; in Campania their dominion seems to have been of short duration, and to have been broken towards the end of the regal period by the Greek colonies in union with the advancing Sabellians; but in Etruria proper—between the Arno, the Tiber, the sea, and the Apennines—the Etruscans reached a high degree of national development. Here were situated the maritime cities, which commanded the western sea, called after them the Tyrrhenian, by which they extended their commerce, as well as their piratical excursions, to the furthest shores. In this country, which still bears a name derived from them, they left traces of their national peculiarities, bearing witness to the present day of their ingenuity and their wealth.

Of the history of the Etruscans we know hardly anything. The Greek and Roman writers give but a scanty and untrustworthy account of them. Like the Egyptians, they are known to us chiefly by the ruins of their buildings and by the numerous sepulchral monuments which are still preserved. Their literature has perished entirely, and even their language, which was spoken down to the time of the civil wars of Marius and Sulla, gradually died away, and was so neglected that we have no key to decipher the inscriptions they have left behind. The Etruscans, therefore, have become in many respects a mysterious people, and will remain so until some fortunate accident, like the discovery of the Rosetta stone, shall come to our help. It follows that we must speak with great reserve of this nation, of their character, their religion, and their civil institutions, and that it is difficult to judge with certainly of the influence which they exercised on Rome.

Concerning the origin of the Etruscans, historical science has not yet arrived at a final and satisfactory result, although this question has been most eagerly discussed from the oldest times to the present day. The ancients were satisfied that the Etruscans migrated from Asia Minor to Italy, and that they were of kindred blood with the Tyrrhenians spread in all directions over the eastern shores and islands of the Mediterranean. Since Niebuhr wrote, the hypothesis has been very generally accepted that the Etruscans migrated into Italy from the mountainous districts of Rhaetia, and that they gradually advanced in the peninsula from north to south. It is impossible to decide which of these two views is correct. Whatever the original country of the Etruscans was, we know them only after they had settled in Italy, and the history of Rome is not concerned with the events which preceded this settlement.

In all probability the Etruscans were first brought into contact with the Latins when, after the conquest of the whole of Etruria as far as the Tiber, they penetrated farther southward towards Campania. It is most likely that the Etruscans reached Campania by land, that their dominion extended at one time without interruption from the foot of the Alps to Mount Vesuvius, and that consequently the coast districts of Latium were once Etruscan. These southern conquests of the Etruscans, however, were not permanent like those in Etruria proper. They appear not to have been made by a migration of the whole people, or by a settlement in great numbers; but rather seem to have had the character of a military occupation, effected at a time when the colonization of Etruria proper had absorbed the principal strength of the Etruscan race. Even the southern part of Etruria, between the Ciminian hill and the Tiber, appears to have been subdued considerably later than the northern parts of the country, and to have adopted the Etruscan language and manners but partially and imperfectly. Thus it is explained that the Etruscan power in Campania and Latium was overthrown at a comparatively early period, and left few traces behind.

The memory of Etruscan rule over Latium was preserved in the old popular tradition of the Etruscan tyrant, Mezentius, who in the time of Aeneas subdued the Latins, imposed a tribute on them, and was at last, after a hard struggle, defeated and expelled from Latium. Another mythical character of similar nature was Turnus, evidently a Tyrrhenian by his very name, who, as prince of the Rutuli in Ardea, fought against Aeneas. As Etruscan conquerors of Latium, we have already met with Mastarna and the Lucumo Coeles Vibenna. In the current narrative the two Tarquins were inserted among the Roman kings, as Etruscan conquerors of Latium; and lastly we shall find that the conquest of Rome by Porsenna is nothing but another version of the same popular tradition which has preserved the memory of Etruscan dominion in Latium.

 

 

CHAPTER IX.

The attempts of Tarquinius to regain the Royal Power.

 

 

When the wicked Tarquin had been driven, with his whole house, out of Rome, he did not give up all hope of regaining his power. He had still a strong party in Rome, especially among the younger patricians, who had lived to bring evil lives under his rule. Therefore he sent messengers to Rome, who should pretend to apply for the restoration of his movable property, but who consulted secretly with his adherents how the king could be brought back to Rome. One day, when the conspirators were conferring privately together, they were overheard by a slave, who betrayed them to the consuls. Then they were all seized and thrown into prison. But the slave was rewarded with freedom and the Roman citizenship.

Then Brutus, who was consul with Tarquinius Collatinus, showed how a true Roman must love his country more than his own blood. For when it was found that his two his sons, sons were among those who wished to bring Tarquin and his family back to Rome, he condemned them to death as traitors, even as he condemned the other conspirators, and did not ask mercy of the people for them, but had the youths bound to the stake before his eyes, and then gave orders to the lictor to scourge them and to cut off their heads with the axe.

Now the people were still more embittered against the banished Tarquins, and the senate declined to give up their movable goods, and divided them among the people. But the field between the town and the Tiber, which belonged to the Tarquins and was sown with corn, they consecrated to the god Mars, and called it the field of Mars, and the corn they caused to be cut down and thrown into the Tiber. It drifted down the bed of the river to a shallow place, where it became fixed; and as, in the course of time, mud and earth collected there, an island was formed in the river, which was afterwards surrounded by embankments and walls, so that large buildings and temples could be erected on it.

Now, after the conspiracy had been discovered and punished, the senate and the people made a law that all those who were Tarquinian race should be banished for all time to come. And all the secret adherents of the royal party escaped from the town, and collected around the expelled Tarquin. But Tarquinius Collatinus, who was consul with Brutus, was a friend of the people and an enemy of the banished king and his house, on account of the shame which Sextus Tarquinius had brought upon his wife Lucretia. But as he was of the race of the Tarquins, he obeyed the law, laid down his office, and went into exile, and the people chose Publius Valerius to be consul in his place.

Now when the plan of Tarquinius to regain the dominion cunning and fraud had been defeated, he went in the land of the Etruscans, which was the home of his father, and he excited the people of Tarquinii and of Veii to make war upon Rome. Then the Romans marched out against the Etruscans, and fought with them near the wood Arsia. And in the battle Aruns, the son of Tarquinius, saw Brutus at the head of the Roman army, and thinking he would revenge himself upon the enemy of his house, he put spurs to his horse and ran against him with his spear. And when Brutus saw him, he did the same, and each pierced the other through the body with his spear, so that both fell down dead from their horses. But the battle was fierce and bloody, and lasted until the evening without being decided. And in the night, when both armies were encamped on the field of battle, a loud voice of the god Silvanus was heard coming out of the wood, saying that the Romans had conquered, for among the Etruscans one man more was slain than among the Romans. Then the Etruscans went away to their homes, and the Romans also went home, taking the body of Brutus with them, and the Roman women wept and mourned for him a whole year, because he had so bravely avenged the dishonour of Lucretia.

Thereupon Tarquin the tyrant betook himself to Clusium to King Porsenna, who ruled over all the Etruscans, and he implored help of him against the Romans. And Porsenna collected a powerful army, and marched towards against Rome to restore Tarquin to his kingdom. And as the Etruscans approached, they took the hill Janiculus, which lies on the right side of the Tiber opposite the Capitol, and they drove the Romans back over the wooden bridge into the city. Then the Romans were seized with great fear; and they did not venture to oppose the enemy, and to defend the entrance of the bridge, but they fled across the bridge back into the city. When Horatius, who was surnamed Cocles, saw this, he placed himself opposite to the enemy at the entrance of the bridge, and two warriors, who were called Larcius and Herminius, stayed with him. These three men stirred not from the place, but fought alone with the whole army of the Etruscans, and held their position, while the Romans pulled down the bridge behind them. And when only a few planks were left, Larcius and Herminius hurried back, but Horatius would not move until the bridge was broken down and fell into the river. Then he turned round, and, with his arms upon him, just as he was, sprang into the Tiber and swam back to Rome unhurt. Thus Horatius saved the city from the Etruscans, and the Romans rejoiced and led him in triumph into the city, and afterwards they erected a monument to him on the Comitium, and gave him as much land as he could plough in one day.

Meanwhile, the town was hard pressed by Porsenna, and there arose a famine in Rome, and the people were driven to despair. Then Mucius, a noble Roman, determined to kill King Porsenna, and he went into the Etruscan camp, even into the king’s tent. But, as he did not know him, he slew the treasurer of the king, who sat near him, and who was distributing the pay to the soldiers. And he was seized and threatened with death. Then he stretched out his right hand into the flame which was burning on an altar, until it was burnt to ashes. Porsenna was so much amazed at the courage of the youth that he forgave him, and allowed him to return free. And Mucius, in gratitude for the magnanimity of Porsenna, revealed to him that 300 Roman youths had sworn to attempt the same deed that he had undertaken, and that they would not rest until they had taken his life. When Porsenna heard this, he feared to distress the Romans any longer, and made peace with them. He took no land from them, except seven villages of the Veientines, which the Romans had conquered in former times; and, having made them give hostages, he insisted no longer that they should receive Tarquin again as their king.

Among the hostages was a noble virgin called Cloelia, who would not suffer herself to be kept captive among the Etruscans. Therefore, when the night came, she slipped out of the camp, reached the river, and swam across to Rome. But the Romans, although they honoured her courage, blamed her conduct, and brought her back to Porsenna, because she had acted in opposition to the treaty and to the right. Then Porsenna admired the faith of the Romans, and released Cloelia, and also as many of the other hostages as she selected; and when he went away from Rome, he left his camp there, and gave to the Romans all the things contained in it. The senate sold these goods to the people, and thus it became customary to say at public sales, “The goods of King Porsenna are being sold.”

When Porsenna had become tired of the war, he went home to Clusium; but he sent his son Aruns with an army against Aricia, a town of the Latins, where all the people of Latium were accustomed to meet together. But Aristodemus, the Greek tyrant of Cumae, helped the Latins, and the Etruscans were beaten in a great battle, so that few escaped alive. These the Romans received hospitably, nursed them and healed their wounds, and to those who wished to remain in Rome, they gave dwelling in that part of the town which, after them, was called the Etruscan quarter.

But Tarquin had not given up all hopes of regaining Rome. For this reason he went to Tusculum, to his son-in-law Octavius Mamilius, and excited the Tusculans and. the other Latins to make war upon Rome. And the Romans trembled before the strength of the Latins; and as they thought that perhaps the two consuls might not agree in war, they nominated a dictator, who should have power over Rome like a king, and be sole leader of the army, for six months. And for this post they chose Marcus Valerius. After this a great battle was fought near the Lake Regillus, between the Romans and the Latins; and the Romans began to give way when the banished king, at the head of a band of Roman exiles, came against them. Then the Roman dictator vowed a temple to Castor and Pollux, if they would assist the Romans in battle. And behold! two youths rode on white chargers at the head of the Roman horse, and pressed down upon the enemy. And the Romans saw that they were the sacred twins, and took courage and overthrew the Latins, and conquered and killed many of them. Now, when the battle was lost, Tarquin gave up all hope of coming back again to Rome, and he went to Cumae, to the tyrant Aristodemus, and dwelt there till he died.

When the battle was yet hardly ended, two youths appeared in Rome on white chargers, and announced the victory over the Latins; and when they had washed their Rome horses at the spring of Juturna in the Forum, they suddenly disappeared and were never seen again. Then the Romans knew that they had seen Castor and Pollux, and they built them a temple on the place where they had washed their horses. From this time the Romans were no more troubled by Tarquin and his house. And they made new laws and ordinances, that they might keep the freedom which they had gained and never again be under the power of kings.

 

Critical examination of the Story of the attempts of Tarquinius to regain the royal power.

 

The stories of the various attempts of the expelled Tarquin to regain his lost dominion are not without some traces of a true and genuine tradition pointing to the circumstance that the revolution was by no means limited to a change of the constitution. The conspiracy among the nobles, in favor of Tarquin, appears not to have been formed by young men, as it is represented, but by the younger patrician houses. These younger houses, which are said to have been added to the old nobility by the first Tarquin, appear to have been Etruscans, and to have settled in Rome at the time of the Etruscan conquest. Their union with the older population is the circumstance so often mentioned as an augmentation of the senate and of the knights, and ascribed to Romulus, to Tullus, and to the first Tarquinius. It cannot be doubted that such an increase of the noble houses by the addition of Etruscans took place, and it was these younger houses who took the side of Tarquinius, and were banished with him in great numbers. Thus Rome regained about this time its original nationality; it became again a Latin town. The Etruscan element, which had never penetrated the body of the people, was cast out again, leaving only those few traces behind which, at a later period, kept alive the memory of the Etruscan conquest.

In the usual narrative the last Tarquinius is charged with having humbled and degraded the senate, banished and murdered many senators, and with having reigned at last without consulting the senate at all. Hence, as it is said, it became necessary for Brutus to nominate a considerable number of new senators for the purpose of restoring the senate to its own functions in the commonwealth. This story cannot be accepted as it stands. It was neither possible nor desirable for a Roman king to reign without a senate. A tyrant like Tarquinius might fill the senate with his adherents, and might avail himself of them for his tyrannical purposes, but it would have been a mad and suicidal policy in him to weaken a body of men whom he could make useful instruments of his policy. If, therefore, the senate was not complete under Tarquinius, the cause of it must have been the absence from it of the representatives of the old Latin nobility. After the revolution, when most of the Etruscan noble families had emigrated, there were again numerous vacancies, which were filled by the nomination of national senators.

The war with the Etruscan cities Tarquinii and Veii, which endeavoured to restore the expelled king by force of arms, need not occupy us long. It is entirely fabulous, as is apparent from the circumstance that the voice of a god proclaimed the Romans as conquerors. But the war would not have been introduced into the narrative, if the insurrection against the Tarquins had not been looked upon as a national struggle of the Latins with the Etruscans.

 

 

CHAPTER X.

THE WAR OF PORSENNA.

 

Porsenna belongs to those parts of the history of the Roman kings which were first successfully attacked by modern criticism as unauthentic. The story betrays itself on the first glance as fictitious. The heroic deeds of Horatius Cocles, of Mucius Scaevola, and of Cloelia, are indeed not miracles, but are of such a nature that, upon the evidence which we possess of them, we cannot receive them as historical. Moreover, the entire war, in its causes, its whole course, and in its conclusion, as it is commonly represented, appears mysterious and contradictory. Porsenna, the powerful King of the Etruscans, warmly espouses the cause of his expelled countryman and of the kingly power, makes war upon the Romans, but allows himself to be so terrified by the attempt of Mucius Scaevola to murder him, that he makes peace, abandons the cause of Tarquinius, and shows himself to the Romans as a most magnanimous enemy.

On the other hand, the report that the Romans had to give hostages to Porsenna, showing that they were conquered implies a totally different result of the war. Moreover, two statements have been preserved by Pliny and Tacitus, from which we see that, not only was Rome conquered by the Etruscan king, but completely overthrown. So thoroughly were they at the mercy of the conqueror that they were obliged to give up their arms, and were allowed the use of iron only for agricultural purposes. We may rest assured that no Roman has invented this story, so injurious to national pride. We certainly cannot assume that the alleged treaty with Porsenna, which contained the hard conditions of subjection, was preserved in any authentic form; but we cannot help believing that the tradition existed of an Etruscan conquest in Rome, and that in the account of the victory of Porsenna we have one of the numerous versions of the dominion of Mezentius over Latium.

If this be the case, it is clear that the war of Porsenna had originally no fixed date in the Roman chronicles, and was introduced arbitrarily and unskilfully into the history of the Tarquins. It is in no way connected with the preceding or with the subsequent attempts of the Tarquins to regain their power. Porsenna appears as a foolish adventurer. From pure magnanimous sympathy with a countryman he undertakes a war, is victorious in it, yet makes no use of his victory, either for himself or for the expelled king. On the other hand, conquered and humbled Rome is able at once to carry on a great war with the Latin confederacy. More than that; Porsenna’s son Aruns marches with the Etruscan army from Rome against the Latins, who appear soon afterwards as allies of Tarquinius in his new attempt against the Romans, and he is beaten by them and the Greeks from Cumae, under Aristodemus, at Aricia.

If we suppose that the story of an Etruscan conquest, as it is represented in the legends of Mezentius and Porsenna, rests on a real tradition, and points to actual events, then the question arises to what age does it belong? Certainly not to the first period of the republic, with the events of which it can in no way be reconciled. It seems much rather to belong to the period which we can designate as that of the Etruscan dominion, and which preceded the beginning of the republic. If thereby Porsenna is removed to a still darker and more fabulous age, it can hardly be considered an injustice to him; for he appears in various particulars as an entirely mythical personage. It may be a mere accident that the current story places Porsenna in the first years of the republic, and that no contradictory statement has been preserved. But, in like manner, it is related that the Claudian family was received at this time into the Roman state; and by a mere chance we learn from Suetonius that, according to another opinion, their reception took place in the time of Titus Tatius; that is to say, at the commencement of Roman history, almost two centuries and a half earlier.

Whatever we may think of the possible events to which the story of Porsenna refers, thus much is certain, that the common narrative throws no historical light on the first years of the republic, but is entirely incomprehensible and incredible.

 

 

CHAPTER XI.

The War with the Latins.

 

 

The war with the Latins was celebrated and rendered conspicuous in the oldest annals especially by the battle of the Lake Regillus, with which it ended. The thirty towns of united Latium insisted on placing Tarquin on the throne of Rome. Tusculum was particularly attached to him, for Octavius Mamilius, the son-in-law of Tarquin, reigned in that town. As the Romans would not consent to the demand of the Latins, there arose a great war between Rome and united Latium. In a hard-fought battle at the Lake Regillus, in the neighbourhood of Tusculum, the Latins were completely conquered, and from that time the freedom of Rome was for ever after secure from the Tarquins.

In the narratives of this war considerable uncertainty in the chronology is discovered by Livy, who honestly confesses it; while Dionysius, in his smooth description, does not allow the reader to guess from what a chaos of conflicting accounts he has taken it. Livy places the battle of Regillus in the year 499 BC., while by other historians it was placed in the year 496. But what do a few years matter at a time when history is only beginning to get disentangled from legends and myths? We should be contented if apart from the chronology everything else were authenticated. How much is wanting in this respect will be seen from what follows.

It is singular that this war is not brought into any sort Latins of connection with the other attempts to restore Tarquin to his kingdom. Neither in the war with the towns of Tarquinii and Veii nor in that with Porsenna does it appear that the Latins took any part. They allowed Tarquinius to exhaust all his other resources, and then, when Rome had got rid of her other enemies, they took up arms. If there is any historical truth in this narrative, the Tarquins must have called upon their friends in Latium to unite with their Etruscan allies in fighting against Rome. But is it likely that all Latium, as one man, stood up for the tyrant? The dominion which the Tarquins exercised in Latium was assuredly not milder than their tyranny in Rome. They had subjected the whole of Latium by force of arms. The story of the treacherous conquest of Gabii by the cunning and deceit of Sextus Tarquinius points to the existence of an enmity between the Tarquins and Latium. And is this not expressed in the legend of the siege of Ardea? After the expulsion of the kings, this town is said to have concluded a peace with the Romans for sixteen years; is it likely, supposing all the stories to have been authentic, that this town fought against Rome on the side of the Tarquins? Moreover, there was the town of Praeneste, which, like Tusculum, Ardea, and Aricia, was at that time hardly inferior to Rome itself. According to a meager report preserved by Livy, which by its very meagreness betrays a good annalistic source, Praeneste joined the Romans. This town, therefore, did not take the side of united Latium against Rome. Of Gabii we may suppose the same; for, according to the legend, the Gabines avenged the treachery of Sextus, by killing him soon after the expulsion of his family from Rome.

In Lavinium there lived, according to the legend, Collatinus, the colleague of Brutus, after he had voluntarily resigned his office, and had left Rome. This town also must, therefore, be supposed to have been friendly to Rome. And if we had more accurate reports of the events of this time, we should probably find that many other Latin towns were united with Rome in the struggle for national independence and political liberty. It is due only to the national vanity of the Roman annalists, that the whole of Latium is mentioned as hostile, whereas perhaps only a few towns opposed, and the majority supported, Rome. In some towns, indeed, it may be that a strong Tarquinian party was in favour of a war against Rome. This may especially be supposed of Tusculum, a town in the hands of Tarquin’s son-in-law, Octavius Mamilius. The same can easily be believed of Fidenae, for it was perhaps more Etruscan than any other town on the left bank of the Tiber. With others other motives may have operated. We cannot guess the detail of these events, but from a few traces that are preserved it appears clear that the war cannot be considered as one between Rome and united Latium. On the contrary, it seems that the dominion of the Tarquins was detested, not only in Rome, but everywhere in Latium, on account of its despotism, and from national hostility; that rebellion took place, as for instance, in Ardea, and that at last, in a great decisive battle, the national element of the Latins and the aristocratic republic gained the victory over the Etruscan monarchy. Let us try to discover what gave the first impulse to this movement.

In the period of the fall of Tarquin, as far as we can trust the uncertain chronology, Aristodemus was Tyrant of Cumae. Of him Dionysius relates a long story, how he possessed himself of power, killed the nobles, expelled their sons from the town, but fell at last a victim to their revenge. This Aristodemus is said to have driven back a powerful army of Umbrians, Daunians, and Tyrrhenians, who marched against Cumae; afterwards he went to assist the Latins against the Etruscans, who, under Aruns, the reputed son of Porsenna, besieged Aricia. Here Aristodemus, with his allies, gained a victory over the Etruscans. At last, Aristodemus supported the Romans against the Etruscans, who wished to restore the expelled Tarquins.

These statements suggest the conclusion that Etruscans, after the conquest of Rome and Latium, advancing southward, came in contact with the towns of Campania, especially with Cumae. Repulsed here, they began to lose their hold on Latium. Several towns, such as Ardea and Aricia, rebelled. Then Rome rose against them. Praeneste and other towns joined the party which opposed the Etruscan kings, perhaps more from national than political enmity. In the war which arose, the towns of Etruria proper seem to have taken no part; the Latins were divided and stood on both sides. In the battle of Regillus the victory was decided in favour of Roman and Latin independence. It was not a victory of the Romans over Latium. Consequently when, a few years later (493 B.C.), a league was concluded with the Latins under the consul Sp. Cassius, the Latins were treated as an independent nation. The Romans were satisfied with having again obtained their independence by the help of the Latins, and they made no attempt to regard themselves as the heirs of the power of the Tarquins over Latium.

As for the detail in the narrative of this war, it is full poetry, as may be expected at this period. The description of the battle of Lake Regillus reminds us of Homer’s battle-scenes. The armies fight, but the leaders decide the battle. It is a succession of single combats in which the heroes of that period perished. The old King Tarquin fought and fell. Even the gods took part in the battle: Castor and Pollux stormed the enemy’s camp, and appeared in Rome as the first messengers announcing the victory. A horse’s footprint in stone testified in later times to their presence in the battle.       

 

CHAPTER XII.

The Sabine War.

 

We have not yet done with the wars, which, in the beginning of the republic follow one upon another with marvellous rapidity. According to the received chronology, the Latin war which we have just referred to was preceded by a dangerous war with the Sabines, which lasted from the year 505 to 501 B.C. Dionysius and Plutarch give detailed accounts of this war, full of vivid descriptions of marches, stratagems, battles, victories, and triumphs. Livy mentions it in few words, and Zonaras appears to give it the place of the war with the Latins, which he entirely passes over. The war will find but little mercy at the hands of historical criticism.

It is at the very outset surprising that this war, although coming between that of Porsenna and that of the Latins, appears unconnected with the exertions of the Tarquins to regain their power in Rome. The shrewd Dionysius alone has endeavoured to remove this objection, by making Sextus Tarquinius take part in it. But in the older unsophisticated account this war has no connection with the Tarquinians. The Sabines harass Rome for four years; Tarquinius waits until they are defeated, and then he makes his attack upon Rome in conjunction with the Latins. This is clearly most improbable. The whole story is not, however, to be condemned on account of a chronological error. If we could save the war by placing it after the war with the Latins instead of before it, we should be satisfied. But even with such a transposition very little is gained. The foul spot is in the subject-matter itself, and cannot be removed by transposing the war to another place.

The descriptions of the war connect it especially with the name of the Valerian house. In the first campaign (505 B.C.) the Consul M. Valerius, the brother of Poplicola, beats the Sabines in two great battles; in the second of these the Sabines lose 13,000 men, but the Romans not one man. In the following year (504 B.C.) the same story is repeated, with this difference, that instead of M. Valerius, his brother, the principal hero of the Valerian house, P. Valerius Poplicola, is mentioned as consul and conqueror over the Sabines. This time also, according to Dionysius, 113,000 Sabines are killed; but Dionysius is too shrewd a writer to discredit his report by adding that the Romans lost not a single man. He is silent about this, and, to make his report more plausible, he adds the number of 4,200 prisoners.

It might be supposed that, after such defeats, Sabines must have been reduced to submission. But it is not so. The war begins afresh in the following year, and the indefatigable Dionysius relates new victories and triumphs.4 It was only in the fourth year of the war (502 B.C.) that peace was concluded, after the Sabines had been again signally beaten, and had again lost 13,000 men in battle, and about 4,000 prisoners.

What is to be thought of the whole of this war? Can any historical foundation be brought to light by removing exaggerations, or have we to deal with a simple fiction?

Niebuhr remarks, in reference to the early wars (before Tarquinius Priscus), that it is difficult to see how Romans and Sabines could get into collision, so long as independent towns, like Tusculum and Nomentum, separated both nations. With this opinion we must agree, if we limit the name of Sabines to the inhabitants of the highlands on the east side of the mountain range stretching from Tibur to Narnia. Yet in the lowlands also, between this chain of hills and Rome, there were Sabines who had invaded this country, and had established themselves in Rome itself. Nomentum, Cures, Collatia, Caenina, Crustumerium, and Antemnae are mentioned as Sabine towns. Fidenae seems to have been Sabine and Etruscan at different times. Dionysius names the Anio as the boundary between the Sabines and the Romans. But even south-west of the Anio, the town Regillum, in the region of Tusculum, was called Sabine, and that Sabines lived there follows from a passage in Dionysius, where he relates that the Aequians had to march to Rome through the country of Tusculum and that of the Sabines.

The fact that we find Sabines in the very heart of Latium agrees with the view already expressed, that the Sabines in the oldest time overran Latium and settled there. In course of time the Sabines and Latins became one people, and for a time the name of Latins was just as appropriate to designate them as that of Sabines. In the oldest sources referring to the intercourse of the Romans with their easterly and southerly neighbors, there was an uncertainty in the name which was applied to the latter; they were sometimes called Latins, and sometimes Sabines. This is evident from the story of the temple of Diana, which was built by Servius Tullius on the Aventine as a common sanctuary of the Romans and Latins. At that time it came to pass that a certain Sabine had a cow of unusual size, and the soothsayers predicted that whoever sacrificed this cow to Diana would secure the supremacy to his nation. The Sabine brought the cow to Rome to the common sanctuary of the Romans and Latins on the Aventine, but was out­witted by the Roman priest, who sent him down to the Tiber for purification, and in his absence offered up the cow in the name of Rome. In this story the Sabines and the Latins are evidently looked upon as the same nation. We cannot, therefore, be surprised that Sabine towns, like Nomentum, were reckoned among the thirty allied Latin towns, and that Collatia is called Sabine as well as Latin. We conclude from this uncertainty in the designation of the neighbouring people, that a Latin war could easily be called a war with the Sabines. But if once the words “Sabine war” were uttered, descriptions of battles and triumphs would follow as a matter of course. We arrive at the same result if we pursue another line of argument.

The Latin war was especially famous on account of the battle of the Lake Regillus under the dictatorship of Aulus Postumius Albus Regillensis. The names Regillum and Regillensis were, therefore, intimately connected in the memory of this war. The people of Regillum were Sabines. They were the bitter enemies of Rome, and before the beginning of the war they expelled the house of Claudius which counselled peace with Rome, and, therefore, emigrated to that city. The stories of both these wars, therefore, have reference to the same locality. Still clearer proof of the identity of the two wars is contained in the name of the Roman general, who is said to have conquered the Sabines as well as the Latins, as consul or dictator. This was Postumius, called at one time Aulus, at another Fublius, and surnamed either Albus Regillensis or Tubertus. The best known and the most celebrated name for the conqueror in the battle of Regillus was A. Postumius Albus Regillensis. But the first and third of the before-mentioned campaigns against the Sabines (505 and 503 B.C.) are also ascribed to a Postumius who was called P. Postumius Tubertus. In addition to this we find that in the year 495 B.C., immediately after the battle of Regillus, under the consuls Appius Claudius Sabinus, and P. Servilius Priscus, there occurs another Sabine war, although in the year 502 peace had been concluded. The war is, indeed, represented as nothing more than a night attack of the Sabines on the Roman territory, which was quickly repulsed. Yet its identity with the great Latin war is perceptible; for it is not one of the two consuls for the year, but Postumius again, who beats the enemy, though in this year he held no public office. Can there be any doubt that the P. Postumius of 503, and the A. Postumius of 496 and 495 are one and the same person, and that the victories ascribed to them are repetitions of the same fact?

The defeat of the Latins at Lake Regillus was followed in 493 B.C. by the conclusion of the treaty which joined Latium and Rome as allies, enjoying equal rights. We have already seen that this equality of the two nations is a proof that Latium was not subjected to Rome, but that Latins and Romans united together to free themselves from the Etruscan dominion. Now the man who in the Roman annals was celebrated for the conclusion of this treaty was the consul Sp. Cassius Viscellinus. How strange that the same man is said to have concluded the peace with the Sabines in the year 503!

What we have said of the improbability of a collision of the Romans and the Sabines proper, in the first period of the republic, is applicable to the whole of the first century, that is up to the time when the territory of Rome extended to Cures. All the Sabine wars of that early period are exposed to the suspicion that they were received into the annals by the same process as the first Sabine war, viz., by confounding Sabines with Latins, or even Aequians, a kindred and neighbouring race. This suspicion is confirmed by the observation, that Sabine wars are mentioned especially in those years when members of the great Valerian house were magistrates, as, besides the years 505 and 504, a member of this family is named in the Fasti, in the years 475, 470, 460, 458, and 449; and again in the attack on the Capitol, when it was seized by the Sabine Appius Herdonius in the year 460, a Valerius is said to have been slain. On the other hand, after the consulate of L. Valerius and M. Horatius, 449 B.C. a whole century passes without mention being made of Sabine wars. Niebuhr concluded from this circumstance that in the year 449 BC the Sabines suffered such a complete overthrow that their strength was for ever broken. But, by a curious coincidence, no member of the Valerian house is mentioned in the Fasti from 449 to 414. Is not the conjecture justified that the absence of Valerii in the Fasti is the real cause of the absence of the Sabine wars; that the domestic records of the Valerian house were the principal, if not the only, source of the stories of these wars; that the author of the family document was in the habit of using the designation Sabine, instead of Latin or Aequian; and that after the great break in the domestic annals (from 449 to 414) another writer continued the family records, and avoided the error of his predecessor?

If this conjecture is well founded, it suggests a conclusion with reference to the age of the Roman family chronicles, viz., that, in the Valerian house, such writings were in existence before 414 BC. At what period these documents originated, it is impossible to ascertain, but probably they were not much younger than the decemviral legislation, when the last of the Valerii mentioned in them was consul. If we take this time as the date of the composition of these annals, the contradictions and uncertainties of the statements referring to the earlier Valerii are accounted for. Half a century could not elapse without obscuring the memory of events to an extent which favoured the exaggerating fictions and excused the confusion of the family annalists.       

 

 

CHAPTER XIII.

The Roman People in the Time of the kings.

 

Hitherto the result of our researches has been almost exclusively negative. We have seen that the so-called History of the Kings is neither in itself credible nor supported by such evidence as to make us believe statements which in themselves are improbable. It rests neither on authentic records nor on real tradition, but it was put together at a comparatively late period, according to a certain artificial design. It consists mainly in attempts to explain, in a connected historical narrative, the origin of political institutions, religious and social customs, the names of places and buildings, and generally the vague conceptions of the people concerning their own antiquities. Hence the great poverty and baldness of these stories, and, in spite of many contradictory statements, a general harmony of the narrative, which gives rise to the suspicion that the whole was worked out according to a uniform plan and design. The History of the Kings is therefore entirely worthless, in so far as it lays claim to be an account of a gradual development, and to relate events in their regular succession and connection. The whole of the regal period is to us only the given point of departure for the development of the republic, and we must be satisfied if we succeed in gaining out of the scanty materials a picture of the political life, the social condition, and the religions views and culture of the Romans in this early period which precedes the beginning of real history.

When the Romans first appear on the stage of history as a separate people, they had passed through a long period of national development, along with kindred races, and the groundwork of their religious, legal, and social life was already formed. A division of the people into a ruling and a subordinate class may be traced to the very beginning, and points indisputably to a conquest of the lands, and to the subjection of the former inhabitants, an event which had been preserved in the recollection of the people, and gave rise to the stories of the advance of the Sabines to the Capitol and of the conquest of Latium by the Etruscans.

Thus there arose the contrast between citizens and Divisions subjects, Patricians and Plebeians. The body of the people, plebeians, again, consisted of two classes. They were either clients, i.e. dependants of patrician houses, or they had no special connection with individual patricians, and were subject only to the body of patricians as a whole, i.e. to the Roman state. It was the latter class which, being free from all special subjection to patrician patrons, formed the body of the independent plebs, and carried on the contest for political equality with the privileged order of citizens.

We find similar arrangements among different peoples of antiquity. Where a state was founded by conquest (and this was the general rule), the aboriginal inhabitants were reduced to a state of dependence on the conquerors, which in some places, as for instance in Sparta, was a complete servitude, but under more favourable circumstances was a more or less oppressive political inferiority. The most usual plan was, that the subject population resigned a part of their lands, and kept the rest only under certain onerous conditions. These conditions were principally services to be rendered and portions of the produce of the land to be paid. From this obligation to pay arose the debts of the subject population and the oppression under which they languished at all times. The lords of the soil were always exerting themselves to increase the services to be rendered by the clients, which in all cases were fixed either by contract or by custom. Thus arose the inability of the clients to pay, and their gradual eviction from their inherited and original landed properly, the absorption of small freeholds, a corresponding enlargement of estates in the hands of the ruling body, and a more general employment of slaves in agriculture.

The Roman clients, according to the ideal conception, described by Dionysius, were supposed to be united to their patrons by bonds of mutual affection and trust, and to regard them as their natural protectors, as sons regard their fathers. They were placed under the paternal authority of the head of the family, but also under his protection. They formed with the whole family a distinct community on a small scale, represented in the larger community of the state by the patron. The state as such did not interfere with the relations of the client to his patron. On this score, therefore, the client was without any protection from the law, and exposed to any act of injustice, as he had no legal redress against his master. But his claim to mild and equitable treatment was acknowledged by the religion of the community, which threatened the unjust masters with the vengeance of the gods. What such protection of the gods could effect, it is hard to say. The treatment of the client depended, no doubt, less on the generosity, the equity, or the religious scruples of the masters, than on their interest, on custom, and public opinion. It is unlikely that the protection of religion could preserve them effectually from oppression and injustice. The abuse of irresponsible power is too deeply rooted in human nature to make it probable that the Roman patricians conscientiously observed a self-imposed moderation, merely from a feeling of justice and religious duty. The history of Rome is full of proofs to the contrary, and shows that the patricians were not guided by such moderation, and that a sense of justice never controlled their selfishness.

Even during the regal period, as it seems, the ties that united clients and patrons began to be loosened. The impulse towards this change was given by the organization of the army according to centuries, which subjected the clients to military service without reference to their dependence on their patrons. Subsequently, when, by the establishment of the tribunes of the people, the plebs collectively obtained patrons recognized by the state, the institution of the old clientship began by degrees to disappear, and to sink into oblivion, so that even our oldest historians could obtain no clear conception of it.

It appears that slavery, the greatest curse of antiquity, had reached no great development in ancient Rome, as long as the clients were to some extent the substitutes for slaves. It was only after the successful wars with Etruscans, Volscians, and Samnites, in which numerous prisoners were made, that slavery became more and more common in Rome, while at the same time the old clientship disappeared. We may take for granted that, during the regal period, the number of slaves in Rome was very inconsiderable.

The Roman people, properly so called, consisted at the time of the kings, of patrician houses. The patricians alone were citizens in the enjoyment of all political rights. They alone had access to the gods of the state. They alone were in possession of the auspices, by means of which the intercourse between gods and men was effected. They were invested with a peculiar sanctity and dignity, which could not be communicated to strangers, but was transmitted only to natural descendants. Purity of blood was, therefore, above all things important, and inter-marriages with plebeians were not only degrading but sinful. The patrician people were divided into tribes (tribus), houses (gentes), and families (families), and each of these divisions was consecrated by religious rites, and had its peculiar sanctuaries. In the Roman family the father of the house ruled with patriarchal authority over his wife and children, his clients and his slaves. Even a grown­up and married son, with his whole family, was subject to his father, as long as he lived; and no position in the state, no public office and no dignity, could modify the subjection of a member of the family to the common head. The father was priest and judge in his own house, with power of life and death. All the earnings of the members of the family belonged by law to the head. This dependence was dissolved only by death, and then the sons became independent heads of families. Every Roman woman was, either as wife, or daughter, or sister, in the power of her nearest male relative. Marriage was held sacred. Polygamy was unknown. A strictly regulated family was the foundation of a healthy political life. The virgin and the matron enjoyed proper respect. They were subject to the father and the husband, but as free agents, not as slaves. The wife was priestess by the side of the husband, and at the domestic hearth, which was also the family altar, attended to the service of the Penates, the household gods. In the temple of Vesta, which symbolized the common hearth of the whole people, pure virgins watched the eternal flame.

The Roman state was built up on the moral and severe organization of the family. Several families, united together, joined themselves into one House (gens), on the ground of real or supposed relationship. The house represented a higher unit than the family, less strictly bound together, and without a monarchical head, but the members were united by common sanctuaries and rights of inheritance, and marked as relations by a common family name (nomen gentile). In this manner arose a family pride which was quite distinct from the national pride. Not only had the Valerii, Claudii, Fabii, and Furii their own sanctuaries, legends, and traditionary politics, but even the way of thinking and the character of a Roman seemed differently coloured according to the house to which he belonged.

A certain number of houses joined together formed a Curia. Thirty of these curiae made up the whole people of the patricians. The curia again was regarded as an enlarged family; the members of each, the Curiales, met, at stated times, for common festivals and sacrifices, for which purpose priests were appointed at the sanctuary of Juno Curitis. Of any political functions of the curiae there is, however, nothing known. The thirty curiae formed collectively the body of the Roman people, and this assembly decided on all matters which did not belong to the current business of the executive, especially on the election of the sovereigns, and questions of peace and war; it was the legislative body, and at the same time the supreme court of justice. The subject population was not entitled to vote in the assembly of the curiae. But it is possible, and indeed probable, that, during formal business and religious ceremonies, those plebeians who were clients were admitted by their patrons, and that on the whole they were not shut out from a certain passive presence in the assemblies. They were in a similar position to those Latins, and other foreigners, who were received in considerable numbers into the Roman state after the great Latin war. They were citizens without the right of voting; they shared the burdens, but not the honors and privileges of the patricians, with whom they did not really form one people, until they were enrolled into the centuries of Servius Tullius.

By a farther union of ten curiae into one body was formed a tribe. There were consequently three tribes—the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres—whose almost forgotten names sounded strange in the ears of the later Romans, and were as unconnected with the existing political divisions and institutions of later times as the kingdoms of Mercia, Northumberland, and Wessex are with the England of our days. The Roman antiquarians knew nothing of their origin and practical working in the state, nor have modern critics arrived at a satisfactory theory. Probably the divisions had reference only to the army. Originally the Roman legion is said to have consisted of 3,000 foot and 300 horse. This made 1,000 foot soldiers for each tribe and 100 horse. The military tribunes, six in number in each legion, appear from their names to have been officers of the tribe. The eighteen centuries of horse—being the six original centuries and twelve younger ones—appear to have been formed out of the three tribes, so that it may be presumed that the division of the Roman people into three parts had reference to the military organization. The oldest popular assembly of the Romans therefore, as well as the later one of the centuries, had for its basis the organization, into an army, of the men capable of bearing arms.

No state of Greece or of Italy could dispense with a council of elders, which, on account of the unwieldy character of large popular assemblies, was in reality called upon to conduct the government. The Roman senate consisted, as alleged, in the regal period, of three hundred members. These, the real, if not the acknowledged, representatives of the people, the heads of the first families, and therefore appropriately called Patres, i.e. Fathers, were chosen by the king for life, and exercised no doubt a decided influence on his policy.

In the time of the republic the senate was the centre of political life. In the regal period its power was probably less, considering that the executive was in the hands period, not of annually changing magistrates like the consuls, but of princes elected for life. Unimportant, however, it could not have been, as the crown was not hereditary, and the choice of each new king lay de facto in the hands of the senate.

In the absence of trustworthy traditions regarding the regal period, it is not possible to form a clear view of the position and functions of the kings. It may, however, be assumed with certainty, that, at the time of the establishment of the republic, the kingly power continued in the consulship, and was only lessened by being divided between two colleagues, and by the limitation of the office to one year. This diminution, however, was very important. The king, who had neither to apprehend any interference from a colleague, nor to look forward to the time when he would be obliged to retire into private life and give an account of his acts, stood invested with a power which placed all the resources of the people at his disposal, if he understood how to make their interests his own. Still we must not think of him as of an Asiatic despot, placed by the slavish submission of his subjects above the control of all law, or as a Greek tyrant, trampling on the established liberties of his country, and ruling by sheer force and violence in defiance of law and justice. Both these forms of absolute power were made impossible in Rome by the strictly legal mode of electing the sovereign, which excluded hereditary right on the one side and arbitrary assumption of it on the other. The Roman kings were placed under the authority of the laws, and were bound by the terms of a contract with their people, which, if not formally expressed in words, was fully implied and understood. The consent of the gods to the election of a king, given in the solemn auspices, the voluntary homage on the part of the citizens (the lex curiata de imperio), the obedience of the citizen-army, were given to the king only on condition that he did not abuse the power entrusted to him. Moreover, an aristocracy like that of the Roman patricians was incompatible with unlimited kingly power. The Romans were formed by nature to be governed not by arbitrary will, but by laws. For their guidance in all the incidents of social and political life they elaborated legal maxims and enforced them on all contracting parties; nay, even their intercourse with the gods was not an unconditional service, no simple subjection, but a performance of certain services on the part of men for which a corresponding service on the part of the gods was claimed as a right. Accordingly, it must be presumed, even without direct evidence, that the Roman kings had to rule according to law and justice, and not by arbitrary will. As high priests they were mediators between the gods and men, just as every father of a family was in his own house; as judges they decided on important cases of dispute and breaches of the peace, either personally or by deputies, according to unwritten but fixed principles of law; as commanders of the armed citizens, they conducted the wars, which had been previously discussed by the elders and determined on by the people.

As a sign of their supreme military and judicial power legislative over life and death, the Roman kings had a retinue lictors with bundles of rods and axes, and in every respect they exhibited royal pomp before the people. Much has been said respecting the personal legislation of the kings: how Romulus organized the state, how Numa established the religion and introduced other parts of public law; but none of these reports are borne out by satisfactory evidence. They were invented to account for the origin of institutions, and cannot prove that new principles of public or private law could be introduced by the kings without the consent of the senate and the people.

Perhaps the most important limitation of the kingly power was exercised through the forms which religion supplied to the ruling aristocracy. Without the divine sanction no important act could be undertaken in private life. It was, of course, still more important for all public measures to obtain the divine consent. But the access to the gods through the auguries was open to the body of patricians. The possession of the auspices was their birth right; it was, for political purposes, exercised in their behalf by priests and augurs, who were members of their body, and chosen for life as well as the kings. It would, therefore, have been no easy matter for a Roman king to emancipate himself from the restraints which the patricians were able to put upon him through the national religion.

The Romans were an eminently religious people. Their minds were penetrated by religious feelings, and their co sciences bound up in religious duties. This was indicated by the name itself, for religio meant spiritual bondage; it implied pangs of conscience and terror of the divine wrath. It exhibited itself in a conscientious attention to all observances prescribed in the service of the gods, in the right interpretation of the divine will as revealed by extraordinary natural phenomena, in the offerings, supplications, prayers, and purifications which the priests prescribed. The Romans saw everywhere, and in all things, the agency and direction of the gods. The whole of nature was to them pervaded by divine power. The heavens, the earth, the water—all things swarmed with divine beings. Every change in nature—growth, decay, and death—was the work of some deity. Wherever man turned, whatever he undertook, he was everywhere controlled by the Deity, in the whole course of his life, from the cradle to the grave.

But the Romans had only an abstract conception of the Deity; they did not see it revealed in a form palpable to the senses, and within reach of human sympathies. To them the gods were only mysterious spiritual beings without human forms, without human feelings and impulses, without human virtues or weaknesses. They emerged from the all-surrounding and all-pervading spiritual world to influence human life, like the unfeeling elements of nature; and before the eye of man had caught their form, and the heart had drawn near to them, they retired from sight and contact, to merge in the godhead of the universe, like a wave in the ocean.

Roman religion, therefore, has gods, but no mythology. Though the divine beings were conceived as male or female they did not join in marriage or beget children. They did not live together like the Greek gods in Olympus, after the manner of men; they had no intercourse with mortals. No genuine Roman legend tells of any race of nobles sprung from the gods; no oracle uttered a divine revelation by the mouth of inspired prophets. For the inspiration of prophecy was substituted the dry formal science of augury, which aims at nothing but the discovery of the simple assent or dissent of the gods, by means of the anxious observation and almost mechanical interpretation of a strictly defined set of phenomena, and which gave no hint, no warning, no advice, as a sign of the divine sympathy in the affairs of men.

Such an unimaginative conception of the Deity could not create ideal pictures or statues of the gods. A simple spear, even a rough stone sufficed as a symbol; a consecrated space, a sacrificial hearth, as temple or altar. For 170 years, it is said, Rome knew no religious images. Afterwards, when the Romans had learnt from the Etruscans to represent the gods as men after the Greek fashion, the old views and ideas still remained in the hearts of the people. The gods transplanted from Greece took no root in the minds of the Roman people. They remained external ornaments, recommended by Greek literature, by foreign influence, by fashion, by love of show; and these external additions gathered around the kernel of the Roman religion, without affecting or transforming its inmost core. The Greek gods never were truly domesticated in Rome. At the household hearth the Lares and Penates continued to be worshipped, their presence was only dimly seen in the glowing ashes, and always filled the heart with secret awe.

Thus the Roman people could not create a national epic. No Roman Homer ever sang the heroic deeds of bygone generations. With all the pride of ancestry which animated the Romans, with all their respect for epic tradition and the past, the Romans never had heroic songs, because they lacked the most important element of poetic imagination. When they extolled their ancestors, they never rose beyond a jejune enumeration of their deeds, honours, and virtues, just as they could draw up only dry lists of the powers, peculiarities, and rites due to the gods and were never inspired to real religious poetry. Religion, therefore, it is true, had among the Romans a powerful influence over men. It governed them entirely in all their doings, in all public and social relations. It made them courageous, constant, firm, and confident of the divine protection as long as they fulfilled their prescribed duties. It was designed for use in practical life. To the husband­man it promised a rich harvest, to the shepherd increase of his flocks, to the housewife plenty in her stores, to the warrior victory, to the state prosperity. It offered protection from all evils and sufferings, from sickness among men and cattle, from blight and vermin, from poverty and disgrace. Piety consisted in appeasing the evil spirits, and procuring the favor of the good. This was done by strictly prescribed prayers and rites. But of any intimate relationship between man and God, of purity in thought, word, and deed, of the consciousness of sin, of hearty penitence and reform, of a sanctified love of virtue and truth for their own sake, of untiring aspirations after the knowledge of God and union with Him, of all that is most exalted, most heavenly, and most beautiful, in a greater or smaller degree, in the religion of other nations—of all this there is hardly a trace among the Romans. They were, therefore, even to the end, a heartless, cold, calculating, and uncharitable people, without enthusiasm themselves, and awakening none in others, great and powerful only by their self-control, their intelligence, and their iron will.

Art is an offspring of religion. When the first necessities of life are satisfied, when bare existence is secured, man rises to the enjoyment of the beautiful. His first leisure he devotes with grateful zeal to the service of the Deity. The dwellings of the gods are the first which he endeavours to adorn. At the festival of the gods he throws off the anxieties connected with his daily toil, and enjoys the pleasures which life offers him. Here poetry and music spring up hand-in-hand with architecture, sculpture, and painting. The temples and holy images and religious songs are, among all nations, the first products of art. Amongst a people, therefore, like the Romans, whose gods had assumed no human form, where strictly prescribed litanies checked the free effusion of the heart in prayer, there is no fruitful soil for art to flourish.

The oldest Roman festivals of which we hear were rustic games. At the Lupercalia, youths ran through the streets dressed in goats’ skins, beating all those they met with strips of goats’ leather. The dances of the Saliarian priests, the perambulations of the Ambarvalian brethren, the processions with the holy shields appear, as the scanty remains of the old hymns indicate, to have been without any artistic element. The flute, the public games, the solemn processions, and magnificent robes were first made known to the Romans by the Etruscans; and down to a comparatively late period, the Romans continued to be dependent on their Etruscan neighbours, and learned from them the first lessons of dramatic art. In architecture likewise the Romans were pupils of the far more advanced Etruscans, and for a long period, Etruscan sculptors made for Rome the holy images and executed the decorations of the temples. Rome never produced real artists. Even at the time when the streets and palaces were filled with Greek masterpieces, the true feeling for art was wanting, both as regards appreciation and productive skill. A true Roman may be said to have enjoyed the possession of rare, costly, and famous works of Greek art, rather than to have comprehended their intrinsic beauty.

In the time of the kings, therefore, and even late in the time of the republic, Rome stood on a very low level with regard to art, and was dependent on foreign, chiefly on Etruscan, models. Works of art are indeed ascribed to the regal period; for example, a statue of the augur Attus Navius, the figure of the Ephesian Diana on the Aventine, and an equestrian statue of Cloelia, are named. But all these works, if they really did exist, date from a later period, like the augural staff and the hut of Romulus, and the Capitoline she-wolf.

The great public works, erected for the use and defense of the town, the sewers and the walls, were constructed at the time of Etruscan dominion. The temple of the Capitoline Jupiter was probably the first edifice of architectural pretensions in Rome. Nothing can be further from the truth than the idea that Rome in the regal period was an imposing city. Inside the line of fortifications which were formed partly by the steep declivities of the hills, and partly by walls and ditches, different villages, separated from one another by fields and meadows, lay on the several hills, and in them distinct local traditions, customs, and religious ceremonies were for a long time preserved. The town was full of consecrated places and altars of the simplest construction, either of stone or turf. The dwellings of the Roman peasants were miserable straw huts, where the family assembled at meal times and offered sacrifices around the hearth in the smoky atrium.

The Roman peasants however did not spent much time in their houses, beyond the hours for eating and sleeping. By day the farmer was in the field or at the market, where he bought and sold, and attended to the transaction of public affairs. Agricultures was much esteemed among the Romans. The proudest patrician practiced it with his own hand, and with the help of his sons. Trade, on the contrary, was despised. Clients and freedmen might occupy themselves with it, but for a patrician it was thought to be degrading. On this account the industrial arts could not flourish in Rome, as they did in Athens, Corinth, and the Etruscan towns. The trades of the artisans never rose to the dignity either of art or of industrial pursuits on a large scale.

Commerce could not prosper without the existence of a profitable industry. Rome was never a commercial city. The indispensable exchange of the products of agriculture and of trade could not be developed into an active intercourse with foreign states, as Rome possessed no articles for exportation; moreover, in the regal period, the Etruscans ruled the Western Mediterranean. The Romans could not have competed with them, if even their geographical situation had been more favourable for commerce.

Although the Romans in the regal period were still in the infancy of civilization, they had already laid the foundation for great excellence at least in one art, that of war. They knew the importance of strict organization, and indiscriminate subordination of the individual will to that of the whole for all purposes of defence and attack. The basis of the political organization was formed by military requirements. The old constitution of curiae corresponded with the form of the Roman legion. This becomes still more evident in the constitution of centuries, which, down to the smallest detail, exhibits its military character. If the Roman generals were deficient in strategic skill, the army made up for this fault by such admirable bearing and calm bravery, that even great blunders of the commander seldom endangered the safety of the army, and the soldiers often gained a victory which the generals had lost.

The annals of the older Roman history contain hardly anything but accounts of wars and descriptions of battles. The wars of that time were no doubt frequent, as in the case of small, independent, half-barbarian nations seems to be unavoidable. But it is surely a mistake to suppose that the wars were uninterrupted. The Roman annalists, who thought it incumbent on them to report battles and sieges for every year, did not hesitate to invent wars, victories, and triumphs, and, as can be satisfactorily shown, made frequent use of the simple expedient of repeating the same story several times. In many of these successive narratives it is easy to recognise the same materials, worked up and varied with more or less skill, boldness, and impudence. If allowance is made for these numerous inventions, and if we bear in mind how the most trifling events were exaggerated, and how many of these wars were only plundering expeditions, which ended without great harm being done, we can understand that, in spite of the wars, a certain degree of prosperity was possible among the Roman people. There must have been times of rest and of peaceful industry; otherwise Rome would not have emerged from barbarism, but would indeed have remained a nest of robbers, such as it appears in the legend of the asylum of Romulus.

But Rome grew and grew, not only by the warlike qualities of its armies, but also by the peaceful industry of its citizens. As it increased externally by the force of arms, it grew internally in the elements of culture and of public well-being; otherwise its history would not have become what it is, a great epoch in the development of the human race.