II. EARLY LEGENDS OF ROME--ÆNEAS AND ROMULUS…

II. EARLY LEGENDS OF ROME--ÆNEAS AND ROMULUS

It is not easy to determine between either the facts or the writers, which of them deserves the preference: I am inclined to think that history has been much corrupted by means of funeral panegyrics and false inscriptions on statues; each family striving by false representations to appropriate to itself the fame of warlike exploits and public honours. From this cause, certainly, both the actions of individuals and the public records of events have been confused. Nor is there extant any writer, contemporary with those events, on whose authority we can certainly rely.--LIVY.

According to the legends immortalised by Virgil[f] if not by Livy,[c] Æneas, escaping from Troy, after its destruction by the Greeks (as narrated in the Homeric poems), fled to Italy, and there became the progenitor of the people afterwards to be known as the Romans. So firmly stamped did this legend become in classical literature that few or no writers share even Livy’s polite scepticism. For many centuries after the Roman Empire itself had passed away, the fabulous stories of the foundation of Rome were repeated by one generation after another of historians, as unequivocal fact.

It was only about a century ago, in an age of scepticism, that an iconoclastic critic arose to lay rude hands upon the time-honoured stories. This critic was the German Niebuhr.[e] He analysed legends not alone of the foundation, but of the supposed early history of Rome, and reached the indubitable conclusion that the familiar stories of early Roman kings and heroes were little better than pure fictions.

The work which Niebuhr began has been carried on by a school of successors, until it must be said that the entire fabric of once-accepted early Roman history has been torn into shreds. And in its place has been substituted--practically nothing. It is true that Niebuhr himself, iconoclast that he was, could not free himself from that hypothesis-forming tendency which is the heritage of all active minds, and put forward many prosaic guesses at the truth as substitutes for the old-time poetical guesses which he had dethroned. But these latter-day hypotheses, though accepted for the moment by many disciples of the master historian, have been treated with far scanter courtesy by the newer generation of critics, many of whom, however, have in turn supplied their own surmises. The net result of all the researches of the past century, and of all the surmises with which these researches have been supplemented, is to leave us practically without any acceptable hypothesis, except perhaps a meagre though consistent outline of institutional and civic development.

And scarcely less vague are the outlines of the story of the early growth of Rome, and of its internal government and external accomplishments during some centuries of its undoubted existence. That it was ruled in the early days by kings, has been accepted on the basis of universal tradition, but it can scarcely be said that any one of these kings is to be regarded to-day as a known historic personage. We are not even sure as to the time when the kings were banished and a republican form of government supplanted the monarchy, though the accepted dates ascribe this transition to the year 509 B.C.--which, curiously enough, was the time of the banishment of the Pisistratidæ from Athens. If this date be accepted, it would seem that the evolution of political ideas in Greece was curiously paralleled by the growth of the same spirit in Rome, and it would follow that the civilisations of the two peoples were more closely contemporaneous than they are usually considered to have been.

But the true fruitage of a nation is found in the permanent works which it transmits to posterity, and judged by this standard Rome surely did not come to its prime until Greece was on the path of its decadence. It may be true that Rome banished her kings and came under republican sway almost as early as Athens; but the Greek city had had a far longer preparation and burst at once into its full bloom of civilisation, as evidenced in the “Age of Pericles,” whereas the Roman civilisation had still to pass through many generations of development before it began to produce those lasting records which mark the difference between tradition and history. Even so, however, the gap in time between the Grecian and the Roman periods was not very great--there were but three centuries between Alexander and Cæsar. And in the time of the later emperors the two civilisations were curiously merged in the East, where the whole aspect of the Roman court became Grecian, and the Greek language even became the official medium of communication throughout the remnants of the Roman Empire.

Of these later phases of the development and decay of the Roman Empire, abundant and secure records are in evidence, as we shall see later on. Meantime, though the stories of the early or mythical period cannot be called history, in the narrower sense of the word, they were too long believed, and have too often been repeated to be suddenly ignored. They are no longer accepted as sober history, and yet the most sober historian dares not altogether discard them. As in the case of the Greek mythology, the happiest compromise seems to be that in which the more interesting tales are retained and repeated with the explicit qualification that they are to be accepted as legends only. This applies not merely to the stories of the foundation of Rome and of the earlier kings, but even, it must freely be admitted, to the hero tales of Horatius, the elder Brutus, Cincinnatus, Coriolanus, and the rest; though doubtless, as one comes down the years, the historical element makes itself more and more felt, and the legendary basis becomes less and less dominant. We have first to do, however, with a series of citations which, let it be said once for all, are purely legendary, and which each individual reader is quite at liberty to interpret as best suits his individual imagination.[a]

THE ÆNEAS LEGEND

When the fatal horse was going to be brought within the walls of Troy, and when Laocoön had been devoured by the two serpents sent by the gods to punish him because he had tried to save his country against the will of fate, then Æneas and his father Anchises, with their wives, and many who followed their fortune, fled from the coming of the evil day. But they remembered to carry their gods with them, who were to receive their worship in a happier land. They were guided in their flight from the city by the god Hermes, and he built for them a ship to carry them over the sea. When they put to sea the star of Venus, the mother of Æneas, stood over their heads, and it shone by day as well as by night, till they came to the shores of the land of the West. But when they landed the star vanished and was seen no more; and by this sign Æneas knew that he was come to that country wherein fate had appointed him to dwell.

The Trojans, when they had brought their gods on shore, began to sacrifice, but the victim, a milk-white sow just ready to farrow, broke from the priest and his ministers and fled away. Æneas followed her; for an oracle had told him that a four-footed beast should guide him to the spot where he was to build his city. So the sow went forward still she came to a certain hill, about two miles and a half from the shore where they had purposed to sacrifice, and there she lay down and farrowed, and her litter was of thirty young ones. But when Æneas saw that the place was sandy and barren, he doubted what he should do. Just at this time he heard a voice which said: “The thirty young of the sow are thirty years; when thirty years are passed, thy children shall remove to a better land; meantime do thou obey the gods, and build thy city in the place where they bid thee to build.” So the Trojans built their city on the spot where the sow had farrowed.

Now the land belonged to a people who were the children of the soil, and their king was called Latinus. He received the strangers kindly, and granted to them seven hundred jugera of land, seven jugera to each man, for that was a man’s portion. But soon the children of the soil and the strangers quarrelled; and the strangers plundered the lands round about them; and King Latinus called upon Turnus, the king of the Rutulians of Ardea, to help him against them. The quarrel became a war: and the strangers took the city of King Latinus, and Latinus was killed; and Æneas took his daughter Lavinia and married her, and became king over the children of the soil; and they and the strangers became one people, and they were called by one name, Latins.

But Turnus called to his aid Mezentius, king of the Etruscans of Cære. There was then another battle on the banks of the river Numicius, and Turnus was killed, and Æneas plunged into the river and was seen no more. However his son Ascanius declared that he was not dead, but that the gods had taken him to be one of themselves; and his people built an altar to him on the banks of the Numicius, and worshipped him by the name of Jupiter Indiges, which means,“the god who was of that very land.”

THE ASCANIUS LEGEND

The war went on between Mezentius and Ascanius, the son of Æneas; and Mezentius pressed hard upon the Latins, till at last Ascanius met him man to man, and slew him in single fight. At that time Ascanius was very young, and there were only the first soft hairs of youth upon his cheeks; so he was called Iulus, or “the soft-haired,” because, when he was only a youth, he had vanquished and slain his enemy, who was a grown man. At length the thirty years came to an end, which were foreshown by the litter of thirty young ones of the white sow. Ascanius then removed with his people to a high mountain, which looks over all the land on every side, and one side of it runs steep down into a lake: there he hewed out a place for his city on the side of the mountain, above the lake; and as the city was long and narrow, owing to the steepness of the hill, he called it Alba Longa, which is, “the white long city,” and he called it white, because of the sign of the white sow.

Ascanius was succeeded by a son of Æneas and Lavinia named Silvius, and the eleven kings of Alba who succeeded him all bore the surname of Silvius.

THE LEGEND OF ROMULUS AND REMUS

Numitor was the eldest son of Procas, the last king of Alba Longa, and he had a younger brother called Amulius. When Procas died, Amulius seized by force on the kingdom, and left to Numitor only his share of his father’s private inheritance. After this he caused Numitor’s only son to be slain, and made his daughter Silvia become one of the virgins who watched the ever-burning fire of the goddess Vesta. But the god Mamers, who is called also Mars, beheld the virgin and loved her, and it was found that she was going to become the mother of children. Then Amulius ordered that the children, when born, should be thrown into the river. It happened that the river at that time had flooded the country; when, therefore, the two children in their basket were thrown into the river, the waters carried them as far as the foot of the Palatine Hill, and there the basket was upset, near the roots of a wild fig tree, and the children thrown out upon the land. At this moment there came a she-wolf down to the water to drink, and when she saw the children, she carried them to her cave hard by, and gave them to suck; and whilst they were there, a woodpecker came backwards and forwards to the cave, and brought them food. At last one Faustulus, the king’s herdsman, saw the wolf suckling the children; and when he went up, the wolf left them and fled; so he took them home to his wife Larentia, and they were bred up along with their own sons on the Palatine Hill; and they were called Romulus and Remus.

When Romulus and Remus grew up, the herdsmen of the Palatine Hill chanced to have a quarrel with the herdsmen of Numitor, who stalled their cattle on the hill Aventinus. Numitor’s herdsmen laid an ambush, and Remus fell into it, and was taken and carried off to Alba. But when the young man was brought before Numitor, he was struck with his noble air and bearing, and asked him who he was. And when Remus told him of his birth, and how he had been saved from death, together with his brother, Numitor marvelled, and thought whether this might not be his own daughter’s child. In the meanwhile, Faustulus and Romulus hastened to Alba to deliver Remus; and by the help of the young men of the Palatine Hill, who had been used to follow him and his brother, Romulus took the city, and Amulius was killed; and Numitor was made king, and owned Romulus and Remus to be born of his own blood.

[Sidenote: [ca. 753-716 B.C.]]

The two brothers did not wish to live at Alba, but loved rather the hill on the banks of the Tiber where they had been brought up. So they said that they would build a city there; and they inquired of the gods by augury, to know which of them should give his name to the city. They watched the heavens from morning till evening, and from evening till morning; and as the sun was rising, Remus saw six vultures. This was told to Romulus; but as they were telling him, behold there appeared to him twelve vultures. Then it was disputed again, which had seen the truest sign of the gods’ favour; but the most part gave their voices for Romulus. So he began to build his city on the Palatine Hill. This made Remus very angry; and when he saw the ditch and the rampart which were drawn round the space where the city was to be, he scornfully leaped over them, saying, “Shall such defences as these keep your city?” As he did this, Celer, who had the charge of the building, struck Remus with the spade which he held in his hand, and slew him; and they buried him on the hill Remuria, by the banks of the Tiber, on the spot where he had wished to build his city.

The Sabines with their king dwelt on the hill Saturnius, which is also called Capitolium, and on the hill Quirinalis; and the people of Romulus with their king dwelt on the hill Palatinus. But the kings with their counsellors met in the valley between Saturnius and Palatinus, to consult about their common matters; and the place where they met was called Comitium, which means “the place of meeting.”

Soon after this, Tatius was slain by the people of Laurentum, because some of his kinsmen had wronged them, and he would not do them justice. So Romulus reigned by himself over both nations; and his own people were called the Romans, for Roma was the name of the city on the hill Palatinus; and the Sabines were called Quirites, for the name of their city on the hills Saturnius and Quirinalis was Quirium.

The people were divided into three tribes: the Ramnes, and the Tities, and the Luceres; the Ramnes were called from Romulus, and the Tities from Tatius; and the Luceres were called from Lucumo, an Etruscan chief, who had come to help Romulus in his war with the Sabines, and dwelt on the hill called Cælius. In each tribe there were ten curiæ, each of one hundred men; so all the men of the three tribes were three thousand, and these fought on foot, and were called a legion. There were also three hundred horsemen, and these were called Celerians, because their chief was that Celer who had slain Remus. There was besides a council of two hundred men, which was called a senate, that is, a council of elders.

Romulus was a just king, and gentle to his people; if any were guilty of crimes he did not put them to death, but made them pay a fine of sheep or of oxen. In his wars he was very successful, and enriched his people with the spoils of their enemies. At last, after he had reigned nearly forty years, it chanced that one day he called his people together in the Field of Mars, near the Goats’ Pool: when all on a sudden there arose a dreadful storm, and all was as dark as night; and the rain, and thunder, and lightning were so terrible, that all the people fled from the field, and ran to their several homes. At last the storm was over, and they came back to the Field of Mars, but Romulus was nowhere to be found; for Mars, his father, had carried him up to heaven in his chariot. The people knew not at first what was become of him; but when it was night, as one Proculus Julius was coming from Alba to the city, Romulus appeared to him in more than mortal beauty and grown to more than mortal stature, and said to him; “Go, and tell my people that they weep not for me any more; but bid them to be brave and warlike, and so shall they make my city the greatest in the earth.” Then the people knew that Romulus was become a god; so they built a temple to him, and offered sacrifice to him, and worshipped him evermore by the name of the god Quirinus.[b]

The Rape of the Sabines

The Roman state was become so powerful, that it was a match for any of the neighbouring nations in war, but, from the paucity of women, its greatness could only last for one age of man; for they had no hope of issue at home, nor had they any intermarriages with their neighbours. Therefore, by the advice of the fathers, Romulus sent ambassadors to the neighbouring states to solicit an alliance and the privilege of intermarriage for his new subjects, saying that cities, like everything else, rose from humble beginnings; that those which the gods and their own merit aided, gained great power and high renown; that he knew full well, both that the gods had aided the origin of Rome, and that merit would not be wanting; wherefore that, as men, they should feel no reluctance to mix their blood and race with men. Nowhere did the embassy obtain a favourable hearing: so much did they at the same time despise and dread, for themselves and their posterity, so great a power growing up in the midst of them. They were dismissed by the greater part with the repeated question; whether they had opened any asylum for women also, for that such a plan only could obtain them suitable matches. The Roman youth resented this conduct bitterly, and the matter unquestionably began to point towards violence.

Romulus, in order that he might afford a favourable time and place for this, dissembling his resentment, purposely prepares games in honour of Neptunus Equestris; he calls them Consualia. He then orders the spectacle to be proclaimed amongst their neighbours; and they prepare for the celebration with all the magnificence they were then acquainted with, or were capable of doing, that they might render the matter famous, and an object of expectation. Great numbers assembled, from a desire also of seeing the new city; especially their nearest neighbours, the Cæninenses, Crustumini, and Antemnates. Moreover the whole multitude of the Sabines came, with their wives and children. Having been hospitably invited to the different houses, when they had seen the situation, and fortifications, and the city crowded with houses, they became astonished that the Roman power had increased so rapidly. When the time of the spectacle came on, and while their minds and eyes were intent upon it, according to concert a tumult began, and upon a signal given the Roman youth ran different ways to carry off the virgins by force.

A great number were carried off at haphazard, according as they fell into their hands. Persons from the common people, who had been charged with the task, conveyed to their houses some women of surpassing beauty, destined for the leading senators. They say that one, far distinguished beyond the others for stature and beauty, was carried off by the party of one Talassius, and whilst many inquired to whom they were carrying her, they cried out every now and then, in order that no one might molest her, that she was being taken to Talassius; that from this circumstance this term became a nuptial one.

The festival being disturbed by this alarm, the parents of the young women retired in grief, appealing to the compact of violated hospitality, and invoking the god, to whose festival and games they had come, deceived by the pretence of religion and good faith. Neither had the ravished virgins better hopes of their condition, or less indignation. But Romulus in person went about and declared that what was done was owing to the pride of their fathers, who had refused to grant the privilege of marriage to their neighbours; but notwithstanding, they should be joined in lawful wedlock, participate in all their possessions and civil privileges, and, than which nothing can be dearer to the human heart, in their common children. He begged them only to assuage the fierceness of their anger, and cheerfully surrender their affections to those to whom fortune had consigned their persons. He added that from injuries love and friendship often arise; and that they should find them kinder husbands on this account, because each of them, besides the performance of his conjugal duty, would endeavour to the utmost of his power to make up for the want of their parents and native country. To this the caresses of the husbands were added, excusing what they had done on the plea of passion and love, arguments that work most successfully on women’s hearts.

The minds of the ravished virgins were soon much soothed, but their parents by putting on mourning, and tears, and complaints roused the states. Nor did they confine their resentment to their own homes, but they flocked from all quarters to Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines; and because he bore the greatest character in these parts, embassies were sent to him. The Cæninenses, Crustumini, and Antemnates were people to whom a considerable portion of the outrage extended. To them Tatius and the Sabines seemed to proceed somewhat dilatorily. Nor even do the Crustumini and Antemnates bestir themselves with sufficient activity to suit the impatience and rage of the Cæninenses. Accordingly the state of the Cæninenses by itself makes an irruption into the Roman territory. But Romulus with his army met them ravaging the country in straggling parties, and by a slight engagement convinces them that resentment without strength is of no avail. He defeats and routs their army, pursues it when routed, kills and despoils their king in battle, and having slain their general takes the city at the first assault.

From thence having led back his victorious army, and being a man highly distinguished by his exploits, and one who could place them in the best light, he went to the Capitol, carrying before him, suspended on a frame curiously wrought for that purpose, the spoils of the enemy’s general, whom he had slain; and there, after he had laid them down at the foot of an oak held sacred by the shepherds, together with the offering, he marked out the bounds for a temple of Jupiter, and gave a surname to the god: “Jupiter Feretrius.” He says, “I, King Romulus, upon my victory, present to thee these royal arms, and to thee I dedicate a temple within those regions which I have now marked out in my mind, as a receptacle for the grand spoils which my successors, following my example, shall, upon their killing the kings or generals of the enemy, offer to thee.” This is the origin of that temple, the first consecrated at Rome. It afterwards so pleased the gods both that the declaration of the founder of the temple should not be frustrated, by which he announced that his posterity should offer such spoils, and that the glory of that offering should not be depreciated by the great number of those who shared it. During so many years, and amid so many wars since that time, grand spoils have been only twice gained, so rare has been the successful attainment of that honour.

Whilst the Romans are achieving these exploits, the army of the Antemnates, taking advantage of their absence, makes an incursion into the Roman territories in a hostile manner. A Roman legion being marched out in haste against these also, surprise them whilst straggling through the fields. Accordingly the enemy were routed at the very first shout and charge; their town was taken; and as Romulus was returning, exulting for this double victory, his consort, Hersilia, importuned by the entreaties of the captured women, beseeches him to pardon their fathers, and to admit them to the privilege of citizens; that thus his power might be strengthened by a reconciliation. Her request was readily granted. After this he marched against the Crustumini, who were commencing hostilities; but as their spirits were sunk by the defeat of their neighbours, there was still less resistance there. Colonies were sent to both places, but more were found to give in their names for Crustuminus, because of the fertility of the soil. Migrations in great numbers were also made from thence to Rome, chiefly by the parents and relatives of the ravished women.

The last war broke out on the part of the Sabines, and proved by far the most formidable; for they did nothing through anger or cupidity, nor did they make a show of war, before they actually began it. To prudence stratagem also was added. Sp. Tarpeius commanded the Roman citadel; Tatius bribed his maiden daughter with gold, to admit armed soldiers into the citadel; she had gone by chance outside the walls to fetch water for sacrifice. Those who were admitted crushed her to death by heaping their arms upon her; either that the citadel might seem rather to have been taken by storm, or for the purpose of establishing a precedent, that no faith should, under any circumstances, be kept with a traitor. A story is added, that the Sabines commonly wore on their left arm golden bracelets of great weight, and large rings set with precious stones, and that she bargained with them for what they had on their left hands; hence that their shields were thrown upon her instead of the golden presents. There are some who say that in pursuance of the compact to deliver up what was on their left hands, she expressly demanded their shields, and that appearing to act with treachery, she was killed by the reward of her own choosing.

The Sabines, however, kept possession of the citadel, and on the day after, when the Roman army, drawn up in order of battle, filled up all the ground lying between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, they did not descend from thence into the plain, till the Romans, fired with resentment, and with a desire of retaking the citadel, advanced to attack them. Two chiefs, one on each side, animated the battle--viz., Mettus Curtius on the part of the Sabines, Hostus Hostilius on that of the Romans. The latter, in the front ranks, supported the Roman cause by his courage and bravery, on disadvantageous ground. As soon as Hostus fell, the Roman line immediately gave way and was beaten to the old gate of the Palatium. Romulus, himself too carried away with the general rout, raising his arms to heaven, says, “O Jupiter, commanded by thy birds, I here laid the first foundation of the city on the Palatine Hill. The Sabines are in possession of the citadel, purchased by fraud. From thence they are now advancing hither, sword in hand, having already passed the middle of the valley. But do thou, father of gods and men, keep back the enemy at least from hence, dispel the terror of the Romans, and stop their shameful flight. Here I solemnly vow to build a temple to thee as Jupiter Stator, as a monument to posterity, that this city was saved by thy immediate aid.”

Having offered up this prayer, as if he had felt that his prayers were heard, he cries out, “At this spot, Romans, Jupiter, supremely good and great, commands you to halt, and renew the fight.” The Romans halted as if they had been commanded by a voice from heaven; Romulus himself flies to the foremost ranks. Mettus Curtius, on the part of the Sabines, had rushed down at the head of his army from the citadel, and driven the Romans in disorder over the whole ground now occupied by the Forum. He was already not far from the gate of the Palatium, crying out, “We have defeated these perfidious strangers, these dastardly enemies. They now feel that it is one thing to ravish virgins, another far different to fight with men.” On him, thus vaunting, Romulus makes an attack with a band of the most courageous youths. It happened that Mettus was then fighting on horseback; he was on that account the more easily repulsed: the Romans pursued him when repulsed; and the rest of the Roman army, encouraged by the gallant behaviour of their king, rout the Sabines. Mettus, his horse taking fright at the din of his pursuers, threw himself into a lake; and this circumstance drew the attention of the Sabines to the risk of so important a person. He, however, his own party beckoning and calling to him, acquired new courage from the affection of his many friends, and made his escape. The Romans and Sabines renewed the battle in the valley between the hills; but Roman prowess had the advantage.

At this juncture the Sabine women, from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children. “If you are dissatisfied with the affinity between you, if with our marriages--turn your resentment against us; we are the cause of war, of wounds and of bloodshed to our husbands and parents. It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you.” The circumstance affected both the multitude and the leaders. Silence and a sudden suspension ensued.

Upon this the leaders came forward in order to concert a treaty, and they not only concluded a peace, but formed one state out of two. They associated the regal power, and transferred the entire sovereignty to Rome. The city being thus doubled, that some compliment might be paid to the Sabines, they were called Quirites, from Cures. As a memorial of this battle, they called the place where the horse, after getting out of the deep marsh, first set Curtius in shallow water, the Curtian Lake. This happy peace following suddenly a war so distressing, rendered the Sabine women still dearer to their husbands and parents, and above all to Romulus himself. Accordingly, when he divided the people into thirty curiæ, he called the curiæ by their names. Since, without doubt, the number of the Sabine women was considerably greater than this, it is not recorded whether those who were to give their names to the curiæ were selected on account of their age, or their own or their husbands’ rank, or by lot. At the same time three centuries of knights were enrolled, called Ramnes from Romulus; Tities, from Titus Tatius. The reason of the name and origin of the Luceres is uncertain.[c]

A Critical Study of the Legends

From the bare account of these two famous legends, it is interesting to turn to their critical consideration. The myth of the Trojan colony is said to have been handed down from generation to generation, but it nowhere bears the characteristic features of genuine popular tradition. It is wholly devoid of poetic feeling, it has every appearance of being a made-up thing, the result of a dispassionate study of facts, customs, cults, antiquities, memorials, and names of places, out of which a spurious history has been spun. If real heroic deeds, performed by Æneas in the home-land of Latium, had passed from mouth to mouth, in what different and how much richer colours would the story have been painted. The sow of Lavinium and her thirty piglings would not play such a prominent part as it does. Æneas never became the national hero of the Romans: not all the art of Virgil could accomplish that. None of the numerous Roman festivals, none of the public games, celebrate his memory. Doubtless the tradition of him and his settlement in Latium rests upon no real historical tradition. In considering the Roman tradition of Æneas we must bear in mind the fact that it is not the only one of its kind.

A host of Italian towns date their origin from the heroes of Greek legends, particularly those of the Homeric period. Thus Tusculum was supposed to have been built by Telegonus, the son of Ulysses and Circe; Præneste by the same Telegonus, or by a grandson of Ulysses and Circe, named Prænestes; Lanuvium by Diomedes; Ardea by the son of Circe so named, or by Danaë, the mother of Perseus; Antium by a son of Ulysses and Circe; Politorium by Polites son of Priamus; the towns of the Veneti by Antenor; the names of Diomedes, Ulysses, Philoctetes constantly appear in the myths of the foundations of the cities.

There is no lack of supposed settlements of fugitive Trojans. Besides the city of Segesta, and the tribe of the Elymi in Sicily, the town of Siris on the river Siris was a supposed Trojan settlement; and Cora owed its foundation to Dardanians. The tradition of the settlement of Æneas in Latium is to be judged by the same criterion as these sagas, which were no doubt generally credited in the various towns concerned. It is, however, no better authenticated or more worthy of belief than the rest, which have no historical foundation, and only arose from the attempt of many Italian cities to trace their origin to the figures of Greek mythology, and especially to connect themselves with the Trojan myth. The analogy therefore forces us to realise that the connection of the story of the settlement in Latium with the Æneas myth has no better authority.

The argument that this story became the state religion of the Romans eight hundred years later rests on a very slight foundation; moreover the religion of the Roman state taught that Mars was the father of the founder of the city. There are countless traditions which (albeit at one time officially recognised) are mere historical fictions.

The test of the historical accuracy of a tradition is the age and the authenticity of the witness for it, not the universality of its recognition at a time in which there was neither the demand for, nor the means of, critical examination. Granted, for example, that Rome had been the city of Tusculum, which owed its origin to Telegonus, and that Rome was the seat of the Mamilii, who traced their descent from the same Telegonus, the Telegonus legend would then no doubt have been invested with the same glory as that of Æneas, and as much honour would have fallen to the Mamilii as was reflected on the Julii from Æneas in Rome.

The Swiss national story of Tell shows how easily romances of this kind grow from popular tales into popular beliefs, and even popular dogma, when they flatter the self-esteem of a people.

Confidently as we may speak of the want of historical foundation for the Roman legend of Æneas, we must recollect the many difficulties in the way of establishing its origin and motive. The Latin legend of Æneas cannot be satisfactorily explained unless light be thrown upon the relation of Æneas to Lavinium.

Lavinium was the Lares and Penates of the whole of Latium. According to Latin religious ideas, every city, every household, every greater community, every street, every crossway, every quarter of the town, had its Lares. In like manner public Lares were appointed for the political family to which all Latium belonged, and we must suppose that at the foundation of the Latin league a spot was appointed for the cult of the Lares of the community. Lavinium bore for Latium the same significance as the temple of Vesta and the temples of the Penates and the Lares bore for Rome. It was the religious centre, the spiritual capital of the Latin confederation.

The Lares and Penates of Rome, as a member, were naturally represented in the Lavinium sanctuary of the confederation. Hence solemn sacrifices were offered annually to the Penates, in the name of the Roman people, by the Roman augurs and flamens, and other sacred rites were performed in their honour. The Roman consuls, prætors, and dictators offered sacrifices to Vesta and the Penates on assuming and resigning office, as did also the Roman emperors when they visited the provinces. The custom may have originated at the time when Rome was a co-ordinate member of the Latin confederation, the members of which alternately appointed the prætor or general of the confederation, who had of course to sacrifice in his official capacity.

The miracles which occurred at the foundation of Lavinium likewise arose from the idea of a city of the Lares and Penates. The first of these prodigies is the sow which indicated the seat of the Penates at the foundation of the city. That a four-footed animal should indicate the seat of a colony is not unprecedented. At Ephesus it was a wild boar; the part is often played by an ox, a fact which led to the frequent appearance of the sacrificial ox in Latin legends. The choice of the sow to indicate the site of the city of the Lares and Penates at the building of Lavinium has its ground in the close association of swine with the Lares.

The second prodigy is the birth of the thirty pigs. It is evident that these thirty pigs symbolise the thirty cities of the confederation of which Lavinium was the religious capital. By ancient writers they are generally held to refer to the thirty years, which, according to tradition, elapsed between the foundation of Lavinium and Alba. But this secondary meaning does not affect the original significance of the symbolical miracle. Timæus (as we see in Lycophron) rightly associates the thirty pigs with the thirty states of Latium; and according to another version, the sow did not give birth to the thirty pigs on the site of the future Lavinium but on the site of the future Alba Longa. A bronze statue of the Lavinian sow and pigs existed in the time of Varro, and no doubt in the time of Timæus also, in a public place at Lavinium. It symbolised the position of Lavinium as the mother of the thirty states of which Latium was composed, and which had their Lares represented as their guardian spirits there. According to Cassius Hemina, a Roman annalist, the prodigy of the thirty pigs was adopted by Rome. “When the shepherds,” he says, “appointed Romulus and Remus as kings, a miracle took place: a sow gave birth to thirty pigs and a sanctuary was erected to the grunting Lares.” These thirty pigs refer apparently to the political division of the thirty curiæ into which the newly built city was divided.

The prodigy of the spread table is an outcome of worship of the Penates, to whom the table was sacred. At every meal it was the custom to leave some food, doubtless as an offering to the Penates. In their honour a salt-cellar and a plate of food were always left standing. Dry bread and cakes were given to the Penates; they were called mensæ panicæ (“tables of bread”). These no Roman would eat unless in great straits; it was in the eyes of the Romans a sign of the greatest need or poverty. Therefore the most ancient and authentic form of the story of Æneas seems to be that in which the eating of “the tables” (mensæ) was prophesied with ominous meaning. In Virgil, the harpy Calæno tells the voyagers that it is decreed that they are not to find a home before they have suffered the extremest misery, and that their utter homelessness is to be the turning-point of their fate.

Explanation of the Æneas Legend

We will return now to the starting-point of our inquiry, the question of why the origin of Lavinium is referred to Æneas. The answer must take us back to the previously mentioned fact that a large number of Italian or Latin states ascribed their origin to heroes of the Greek and particularly of the Trojan collection of stories.

This fact cannot be fully explained; psychologically it is nothing really incomprehensible, and is not without analogy. We can well understand how the Italian cities and races, as they came into nearer communication with the Grecian colonies of lower Italy and thus became acquainted with the heroic legends and the epic cycle of the Greeks, thought it an honour to connect their remote origin with the brilliant, much-lauded names of Greek heroes. The epic poems of the Greeks exercised a far greater influence in ancient Italy than is generally thought. When they were looking for the founder of the Penates city of the land of Latium, no other hero seemed so fit as Æneas. The chief deed which shed such glory on his name was the rescue of the holy images of Troy. The most ancient poets who sang of the fall of Troy relate it, so does Stesichorus, as one may see on the Ilian tablet where Anchises carries in his hands or on his shoulders a little chapel-shaped ædicula. In short nobody seemed better qualified to be the founder of the city of the Penates than the honoured saviour of the Trojan Penates.

Virgil’s Æneid shows clearly that this is the leading reason for the introduction of Æneas into the Latin legend and his position as founder of Lavinium and father of Latin glory. His greatest achievement consists in bringing the gods and sacred treasures to Latium. As the reputed founder of Lavinium, he could also be credited with bringing to honour its Latin name, for Latium as a political community only existed after the establishment of the Latin league and the founding of Lavinium as the sanctuary of the league.

One word in conclusion on the Trojan families. The tradition of the settlement of Æneas gave the vanity of the Roman families the wished-for ground for glorifying their pedigree. Thus the Cæcilii, Clodii, Gerganii, Memmii, Sergii, Cluentii, Junii, and Nautii, all traced their line back to Æneas. Dionysius says that at the foundation of Rome about fifty Trojan families came from Alba Longa to settle there, a number which is evidently exaggerated, as it exceeds the sum total of Roman patrician families in the time of Augustus. But it is evident from the writings of Varro and Hyginus on The Trojan Families, that a great number of Roman families boasted of Trojan descent.

We cannot of course ascertain what led to this belief among these families, but with many it was only a similarity of name. This is seen in the case of the origin of the Nautii. The worship of Minerva was in vogue among them. From the etymology of the name the founder of the family must have been a seaman, and so we come to the well-known story of Nautius, the companion of Æneas, taking away the palladium from Troy, or, according to another tradition, being intrusted with it by Diomedes.

O. Müller supposes that there was a similar ground in the worship of Apollo for the descent of the Julii from Æneas. Augustus, at any rate, refers very explicitly to Apollo as the tutelary god of the Julian family. Julius Cæsar, on the contrary, always speaks of Venus as the foundress of his family. So that the worship of Venus or Aphrodite can be attributed to the Julii with equal reason.

The connection of the Julian family with Æneas could be very simply established by the fiction that the eponymous founder of the family Iulus was one and the same person as Ascanius, the son of Æneas, who consequently had two names. The advantage gained by the Julian race from this fiction was considerable. The descent from Æneas gave a certain appearance of legitimacy to the claims of Julius Cæsar upon the sovereignty. Therefore Cæsar used every opportunity of certifying this origin of his race. Virgil’s Æneid has also the subordinate political aim of investing the monarchy of Augustus with the halo of legitimacy by basing it to a certain extent on the idea of succession.

The Romulus Legend Examined

The deeds and institutions ascribed by the Romans to Romulus are the outcome of their conception of him. In the first two kings of the Roman state legend has personified the two fundamental elements of the Roman state--the warlike spirit of the nation, and its religious character.

Accordingly the first king was made to found the Roman state on the power of arms, imbuing it with the spirit of conquest and the ambition for ascendency in arms, whilst the second, founding it on religion and morality, was made to give it a second birth.

Warlike activity is the chief feature of the influence of Romulus, his last word to his Romans and his political testament was the call to a zealous following of the art of war. A truthful conception incontestably lay at the root of this tradition.

The conditions of every state are in accordance with its origin, nothing can alter its historical basis; and if it be true that a kingdom must be maintained by the means by which it was founded, the opposite conclusion--that the means by which a state is maintained are those upon which its foundation was based--seems no less to be a truth. Hence a state which is maintained by the sword must owe its origin to the sword. In the legends of their origin many nations exhibit a very just knowledge of their national character and their mission in history. The trade and artifice claimed as the foundation of Carthage were a happy emblem of the spirit of this commercial race.

Rome was founded by the sword, a warrior hero made it, and no other founder was worthy of so great a military state. But Romulus, the first king, was not only credited with the foundation and military organisation of the rising state, but with the establishment of its fundamental political institutions. Accordingly he was supposed to have divided the people into tribes and curiæ, and some writers go so far as to credit him with their division into the two classes of patricians and plebeians, as well as the institution of patronage and clientage. Religion and religious law were attributed to Numa for the most part, though the Rome of Romulus could not have been quite destitute of religious worship. Some temples (those of Jupiter Feretrius and of Jupiter Stator) are unanimously reported by tradition to have been founded by Romulus. He is also said to have erected several chapels and altars, instituted festivals and services, founded priesthoods, the sacra of the curiæ, and, in particular, to have instituted the order and manner of the worship of the gods. But the particular form of worship which he is supposed to have introduced is not specified more clearly. There is even some doubt as to whether Romulus or Numa instituted the worship of Vesta, the primal worship of every colony.

On the other hand it is impossible for the institution of the augurs, which was wholly religious, to have originated with Numa. For the foundation--i.e., the existence of the Roman state, no less than that of her fundamental institutions, must have rested upon divine sanction, and been consecrated by divine protection, if the Roman nation’s consciousness of being a chosen people under the protection and guidance of the immortal gods has any historical foundation. The faith of the Romans in their divine origin and the institution of their state by providence necessarily involves the augustum augurium which decided the foundation of Rome and was the groundwork of Roman faith. Hence Romulus must have built the city after consulting the augurs, and in settling all the early institutions he must have been the first and best augur.

The warrior king must moreover have organised the war department of the young state as well as the political constitution; it is really his principal achievement. Directly after the foundation of the city he organised all men capable of bearing arms into a military system. According to Dionysius they numbered three thousand foot-soldiers and three hundred horsemen--a fact which clearly shows that this was the strength of the oldest legion. For it was supposed that the original fighting strength of Rome was a legion, each of the three tribes contributing a thousand foot-soldiers and a hundred horsemen. It is clear that these three thousand foot-soldiers and three hundred horsemen were originally regarded by tradition as the collective contingent of the three tribes, and it follows from the number itself, and from Plutarch’s account, that the original colony of Romulus consisted of three thousand householders--i.e., armed men. But later tradition has misunderstood that fact, and has falsely reported that the legion was doubled to six thousand foot-soldiers and six hundred horsemen on the arrival of the Sabines; hence the original number should have been tripled at the arrival of the third tribe. Plutarch, contrary to his aforementioned report, speaks of several legions at the foundation of Rome, every one consisting of three thousand foot-soldiers and three hundred horsemen.

Dionysius goes further still, and says that the Roman army at the death of Romulus consisted of forty-six thousand foot-soldiers and not much less than one thousand horsemen--a stupid and in every respect an unskilfully calculated number, in which the careless hand of Valerius Antias is clearly perceptible.

In Dionysius’ account, which represents the cavalry as consisting of not much less than “a thousand horsemen,” we have the nine hundred horsemen according to the later tradition, being three hundred for the contingent of every tribe.

On the other hand the more ancient account only speaks of three hundred horsemen in the whole of Romulus’ three centuriæ of knights. They are the three centuriæ, the equites of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres. It is evident that these three hundred knights (centuriæ equitum) could not have existed before the recognition of the three tribes. If, therefore, the third tribe was only added after Romulus (about the time of the Albans),[4] there could only have been one centuria equitum (Luceres) from that time. The oldest name for these horsemen, or knights, was celeres. When Livy and Plutarch take the celeres for the bodyguard of the king, and distinguish these three hundred celeres or bodyguards from the three hundred horsemen, it is doubtless an error according to the etymological meaning of the name, as, according to better-informed authorities, the three hundred celeres and the three centuriæ equitum of Romulus are one and the same. The story of the bodyguard of Romulus rests partly upon the misconception of the archaic word “celeres,” and partly on the tradition that Romulus became a despot in the latter years of his reign, and was therefore obliged to have a bodyguard like the Greek tyrants. The leader of the three hundred celeres was called a tribunus celerum.

It is a fiction of later historians to credit Romulus with certain statutes of civil and sacred law, as, for example, those pertaining to the family and to marriage, as well as with the political and military system.

All these so-called Romulean laws are nothing more than ancient laws of custom which were not specified in writing or defined by legal acts. They may have existed in the Papirian collection, although of this we can only be absolutely certain in the case of one Romulean law; whilst the comparatively late origin of this collection itself can be proved to demonstration. The Tabula Marliani cannot be thought worthy of serious consideration at the present day.

The wars conducted by Romulus are purely fictitious, like so many supposititious accounts of the monarchy; they are a garbling of events of the historical period. The campaign against Fidenæ is evidently an imitation of the successful campaign of the year 328, in which a cleverly managed ambuscade was the decisive factor, and Fidenæ was likewise conquered by the Romans entering the gates on the heels of the fleeing foe. The fall and conquest of Fidenæ is an event which so constantly recurs in history that we cannot avoid the suspicion that the annalists purposely multiplied it to swell the empty chronicles of the years of the monarchy. The tale that Veii was called to arms by the fall of Fidenæ is also borrowed from later history, in which Veii appears more than once in league with Fidenæ.

The traditional story of Romulus’ campaign against Veii is moreover quite devoid of colour and character. The hundred years’ truce is mentioned at random. Dionysius makes the condition of it the surrender of the Septem Pagi[5] and Salt plains, another incident borrowed from subsequent history. And yet these two short and uneventful campaigns are supposed to have occupied the long reign of a monarch so warlike, restless, and active, a monarch of whom it was said that he barbarised the Roman nation by his incessant wars. Not only is it clear that there exists no authentic account of these wars, but no mention is made of them in ancient tradition, which only records the entrance of Romulus into the world and his exit from it. The interregnum is occupied for the most part by literary inventions made to fill up the gaps in tradition and to present a complete historical account.

The method of Romulus’ departure from the world is the natural consequence of his earthly existence. He who had come into the world by a miracle could only leave it by a miracle. To accentuate the singularity of both events an eclipse celebrates both his arrival and his departure. Hercules is a parallel instance in Greek mythology. A thundercloud transports him to heaven, where he is reconciled to his enemy Hera, whose daughter Hebe he takes to wife.

Either this or a cognate myth in Greek mythology was in the mind of the Roman poets, because the conception of such an apotheosis was as foreign to the Italian religions as was the idea of sexual intercourse between gods and men, and the conception of men by gods. Both ideas are creations of Greek mythology. It was doubtless Ennius, learned in Greek lore, who first cast into poetic shape the apotheosis of Romulus and introduced the idea of it to Rome.

The deified Romulus was called Quirinus. As Romulus was the eponymous hero of the Palatine Romans, so Quirinus was the chief and most highly venerated, and perhaps the eponymous divinity of the Quiritian Sabines; hence the identification. It is a figure of the amalgamation of the two nations into one, a symbol of their complete unity in constitution and religion. The wife of Quirinus, the deified Romulus, was called Hora or Horta. She was presumably a female divinity united in the religion of the Sabines to Quirinus. The festival of the people’s flight (Poplifugia) or the Caprotinæ nones, which tradition has confused with the death of Romulus, is an ancient feast of purification; for, according to the story, Romulus disappeared during a feast of purification which he had ordained on that day. From other customs it is evident that the festival was chiefly a festival of female fecundity, to which purification from every pollution and sin was held to be conducive, by averting all pernicious influences, by propitiating the fructifying powers, and in short by purification or lustration. The festival of the Caprotinæ nones was very like the Lupercalian festival in purpose and significance. The particular resemblance between them was the part played by the goat, the symbol of animal fecundity. At the Lupercalia a goat was sacrificed, and the luperci (the priests who officiated) ran through the streets, clothed in goatskins, lashing the women with whips made with the skins of the victims. There is a connection with the same festival in the name of the Caprotinæ nones. The Goats’ Pool on the Field of Mars was the place where it was held, the sacrifice was offered under a pine tree (caprificus), the milk of the tree was used, and under the shade of the pine trees the women and maidens were solemnly regaled.

Moreover, the symbolical people’s flight which figures in the festival customs of the Caprotinæ nones is suggestive of a similar rite in the Lupercalia--i.e., the running away (discurrere) of the luperci after the offering of the sacrifice. But the ancients say nothing definite concerning this symbolical flight of the people; they only explained it as due either to the sudden and fearful disappearance of Romulus, or to panic at the threatened attack of some neighbouring cities on Rome when she was exhausted and feeble from the Gallic reverse, or after a defeat at the hands of the Etruscans. A more exact interpretation is impossible. But if we are forced to assign the ceremony to the Caprotinan festival, it can only have been a ceremony of lustration. Probably, when the sin and impurity of the people had been symbolically laid upon a vicarious victim (like a sacrificial animal) the flight of the people symbolised their freedom and deliverance from sin. It had probably the same meaning as the flight of the rex sacrificulus from the Comitium. In the Greek religion we find the same ceremony of symbolical flight and there it is certainly a rite of lustration.

We now arrive at the question of how tradition came to celebrate the disappearance of Romulus at this festival of the Poplifugia or the Caprotinæ nones. What connection had the name or person of Romulus with this feast? Unfortunately the darkness which envelops the earliest religion of the Romans excludes all light on the question. One can only say that the same reason which conduced to the association of Romulus with the Lupercalian festival lay at the root of his connection with the kindred ceremony in the festival of the Caprotina.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[4] [Cf. page 51, note.]

[5] “Pagus,” old word for “canton.”

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III. LEGENDARY HISTORY OF THE KINGS

NUMA POMPILIUS

Egeria! sweet creature of some heart Which found no mortal resting-place so fair As thine ideal breast; whate’er thou art Or wert,--a young Aurora of the air, The nympholepsy of some fond despair; Or, it might be, a beauty of the earth, Who found a more than common votary there Too much adoring; whatsoe’er thy birth, Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.

--BYRON. Childe Harold.

[Sidenote: [ca. 716-673 B.C.]]

When Romulus was taken from the earth, there was no one found to reign in his place. The senators would choose no king, but they divided themselves into tens; and every ten was to have the power of king for five days, one after the other. So a year passed away, and the people murmured, and said that there must be a king chosen.

Now the Romans and the Sabines each wished that the king should be one of them; but at last it was agreed that the king should be a Sabine, but that the Romans should choose him. So they chose Numa Pompilius; for all men said that he was a just man, and wise, and holy.

Some said that he had learned his wisdom from Pythagoras, the famous philosopher of the Greeks; but others would not believe that he owed it to any foreign teacher. Before he would consent to be king, he consulted the gods by augury, to know whether it was their pleasure that he should reign. And as he feared the gods at first, so did he even to the last. He appointed many to minister in sacred things, such as the pontifices who were to see that all things relating to the gods were duly observed by all; and the augurs, who taught men the pleasure of the gods concerning things to come; and the flamens, who ministered in the temples; and the virgins of Vesta, who tended the ever burning fire; and the salii, who honoured the god of arms with solemn songs and dances through the city on certain days, and who kept the sacred shield which fell down from heaven. And in all that he did, he knew that he should please the gods; for he did everything by the direction of the nymph Egeria, who honoured him so much that she took him to be her husband, and taught him in her sacred grove, by the spring that welled out from the rock, all that he was to do towards the gods and towards men. By her counsel he snared the gods Picus and Faunus in the grove on the hill Aventinus, and made them tell him how he might learn from Jupiter the knowledge of his will, and might get him to declare it either by lightning or by the flight of birds. And when men doubted whether Egeria had really given him her counsel, she gave him a sign by which he might prove it to them. He called many of the Romans to supper, and set before them a homely meal in earthen dishes; and then on a sudden he said that now Egeria was come to visit him; and straightway the dishes and the cups became of gold or precious stones, and the couches were covered with rare and costly coverings, and the meats and drinks were abundant and most delicious. But though Numa took so much care for the service of the gods, yet he forbade all costly sacrifices; neither did he suffer blood to be shed on the altars, nor any images of the gods to be made. But he taught the people to offer in sacrifice nothing but the fruits of the earth, meal and cakes of flour, and roasted corn.

For he loved husbandry, and he wished his people to live every man on his own inheritance in peace and in happiness. So the lands which Romulus had won in war, he divided out amongst the people, and gave a certain portion to every man. He then ordered landmarks to be set on every portion; and Terminus the god of landmarks had them in his keeping, and he who moved a landmark was accursed. The craftsmen of the city, who had no land, were divided according to their callings; and there were made of them nine companies. So all was peaceful and prosperous throughout the reign of King Numa; the gates of the temple of Janus were never opened, for the Romans had no wars and no enemies; and Numa built a temple to Faith, and appointed a solemn worship for her, that men might learn not to lie or to deceive, but to speak and act in honesty. And when he had lived to the age of fourscore years, he died at last by a gentle decay, and he was buried under the hill Janiculum, on the other side of the Tiber; and the books of his sacred laws and ordinance were buried near him in a separate tomb.

TULLUS HOSTILIUS

[Sidenote: [ca. 673-641 B.C.]]

When Numa was dead, the senators again for a while shared the kingly power amongst themselves. But they soon chose for their king Tullus Hostilius, whose father’s father had come from Medullia, a city of the Latins, to Rome, and had fought with Romulus against the Sabines. Tullus loved the poor, and he divided the lands which came to him as king amongst those who had no land. He also bade those who had no houses to settle themselves on the hill Cælius, and there he dwelt himself in the midst of them.

Tullus was a warlike king, and he soon was called to prove his valour; for the countrymen of the Alban border and of the Roman border plundered one another. Now Alba was governed by Caius Cluilius, who was the dictator; and Cluilius sent to Rome to complain of the wrongs done to his people, and Tullus sent to Alba for the same purpose. So there was a war between the two nations, and Cluilius led his people against Rome, and lay encamped within five miles of the city, and there he died. Mettius Fuffetius was then chosen dictator in his room; and as the Albans still lay in their camp, Tullus passed them by, and marched into the land of Alba. But when Mettius came after him, then, instead of giving battle, the two leaders agreed that a few in either army should fight in behalf of the rest, and that the event of this combat should decide the quarrel. So three twin brothers were chosen out of the Roman army, called the Horatii, and three twin brothers out of the Alban army, called the Curiatii.[b]

The Combat of the Horatii and the Curiatii

The treaty being concluded, the twin brothers, as had been agreed, took arms. Whilst their respective friends exhortingly reminded each party that their country’s gods, their country and parents, all their countrymen both at home and in the army, had their eyes then fixed on their arms, on their hands. Naturally brave, and animated by the exhortations of their friends, they advanced into the midst between the two lines. The two armies sat down before their respective camps, free rather from present danger than from anxiety; for the sovereign power was at stake, depending on the valour and fortune of so few. Accordingly, therefore, eager and anxious, they have their attention intensely riveted on a spectacle far from pleasing.

The signal was given; and the three youths on each side, as if in battle array, rushed to the charge with determined fury, bearing in their breasts the spirits of mighty armies: nor did the one nor the other regard their personal danger; the public dominion or slavery is present to their mind, and the fortune of their country, which was ever after destined to be such as they should now establish it. As soon as their arms clashed on the first encounter, and their burnished swords glittered, great horror struck the spectators; and, hope inclining to neither side, their voice and breath were suspended. Then having engaged hand to hand, when not only the movements of their bodies and the rapid brandishings of their arms and weapons, but wounds also and blood were seen, two of the Romans fell lifeless, one upon the other, the three Albans being wounded. And when the Alban army raised a shout of joy at their fall, hope entirely, anxiety however not yet, deserted the Roman legions, alarmed for the lot of the one whom the three Curiatii surrounded. He happened to be unhurt, so that, though alone he was by no means a match for them all together, yet he was confident against each singly.

In order therefore to separate their attack, he took to flight presuming that they would pursue him with such swiftness as the wounded state of his body would suffer each. He had now fled a considerable distance from the place where they had fought, when, looking behind, he perceived them pursuing him at great intervals from each other; and that one of them was not far from him. On him he turned round with great fury. And whilst the Alban army shouted out to the Curiatii to succour their brother, Horatius, victorious in having slain his antagonist, was now proceeding to a second attack. Then the Romans encouraged their champion with a shout such as is usually given by persons cheering in consequence of unexpected success; he also hastened to put an end to the combat. Wherefore before the other, who was not far off, could come up, he despatched the second Curiatius also. And now, the combat being brought to an equality of numbers, one on each side remained, but they were equal neither in hope nor in strength. The one his body untouched by a weapon, and by double victory made courageous for a third contest; the other dragging along his body exhausted from the wound, exhausted from running, and dispirited by the slaughter of his brethren before his eyes, presented himself to his victorious antagonist. Nor was that a fight. The Roman, exulting, said, “Two I have offered to the shades of my brothers: the third I will offer to the cause of this war, that the Roman may rule over the Alban.” He thrust his sword down into his throat, whilst faintly sustaining the weight of his armour, he stripped him as he lay prostrate.

The Romans received Horatius with triumph and congratulation; with so much the greater joy, as success had followed so close on fear. They then turned to the burial of their friends with dispositions by no means alike; for the one side was elated with the acquisition of empire, the other subjected to foreign jurisdiction: their sepulchres are still extant in the place where each fell; the two Roman ones in one place nearer to Alba, the three Alban ones towards Rome; but distant in situation from each other, and just as they fought.[6][c]

Then the Romans went home to Rome in triumph, and Horatius went at the head of the army, bearing his triple spoils. But as they were drawing near to the Capenian Gate, his sister came out to meet him. Now she had been betrothed in marriage to one of the Curiatii, and his cloak, which she had wrought with her own hands, was borne on the shoulders of her brother; and she knew it, and cried out, and wept for him whom she had loved. At the sight of her tears Horatius was so wroth that he drew his sword, and stabbed his sister to the heart; and he said, “So perish the Roman maiden who shall weep for her country’s enemy.” But men said that it was a dreadful deed, and they dragged him before the two judges who judged when blood had been shed. For thus said the law:

“The two men shall give judgment on the shedder of blood. If he shall appeal from their judgment, let the appeal be tried. If their judgment be confirmed, cover his head. Hang him with a halter on the accursed tree; Scourge him either within the sacred limit of the city or without.”

So they gave judgment on Horatius, and were going to give him over to be put to death. But he appealed, and the appeal was tried before all the Romans, and they would not condemn him because he had conquered for them their enemies, and because his father spoke for him, and said that he judged the maiden to have been lawfully slain. Yet as blood had been shed, which required to be atoned for, the Romans gave a certain sum of money to offer sacrifices to atone for the pollution of blood. These sacrifices were duly performed ever afterwards by the members of the house of the Horatii.

The Albans were now become bound to obey the Romans; and Tullus called upon them to aid him in a war against the people of Veii and Fidenæ. But in the battle the Alban leader, Mettius Fuffetius, stood aloof, and gave no true aid to the Romans. So, when the Romans had won the battle, Tullus called the Albans together as if he were going to make a speech to them; and they came to hear him, as was the custom, without their arms; and the Roman soldiers gathered around them, and they could neither fight nor escape. Then Tullus took Mettius and bound him between two chariots, and drove the chariots different ways, and tore him asunder. After this he sent his people to Alba, and they destroyed the city, and made all the Albans come and live at Rome; there they had the hill Cælius for their dwelling-place, and became one people with the Romans.

After this Tullus made war upon the Sabines, and gained a victory over them. But now, whether it were that Tullus had neglected the worship of the gods whilst he had been so busy in his wars, the signs of the wrath of heaven became manifest. A plague broke out among the people, and Tullus himself was at last stricken with a lingering disease. Then he bethought him of good and holy Numa, and how, in his time, the gods had been so gracious to Rome, and had made known their will by signs whenever Numa inquired of them. So Tullus also tried to inquire of Jupiter, but the god was angry and would not be inquired of, for Tullus did not consult him rightly; so he sent his lightnings, and Tullus and all his house were burned to ashes. This made the Romans know that they wanted a king who would follow the example of Numa; so they chose his daughter’s son Ancus Marcius to reign over them in the room of Tullus.

ANCUS MARCIUS

[Sidenote: [ca. 642-616 B.C.]]

Ancient history does not tell much of Ancus Marcius. He published the religious ceremonies which Numa had commanded, and had them written out upon whited boards, and hung up round the Forum, that all might know and observe them. He had a war with the Latins and conquered them, and brought the people to Rome, and gave them the hill Aventinus to dwell on. He divided the lands of the conquered Latins amongst all the Romans, and he gave up the forests near the sea which he had taken from the Latins, to be the public property of the Romans. He founded a colony at Ostia, by the mouth of the Tiber. He built a fortress on the hill Janiculum, and joined the hill to the city by a wooden bridge over the river. He secured the city in the low grounds between the hills by a great dyke, which was called the dyke of the Quirites. And he built a prison under the hill Saturnius, towards the Forum, because as the people grew in numbers, offenders against the laws became more numerous also. At last King Ancus died, after a reign of three-and-twenty years.

L. TARQUINIUS PRISCUS

[Sidenote: [ca. 616-578 B.C.]]

In the days of Ancus Marcius there came to Rome from Tarquinii, a city of Etruria, a wealthy Etruscan and his wife. The father of this stranger was a Greek, a citizen of Corinth, who left his native land because it was oppressed by a tyrant, and found a home at Tarquinii. There he married a noble Etruscan lady, and by her he had two sons. But his son found that for his father’s sake he was still looked upon as a stranger; so he left Tarquinii, and went with his wife Tanaquil to Rome, for there, it was said, strangers were held in more honour. Now as he came near to the gates of Rome, as he was sitting in his chariot with Tanaquil his wife, an eagle came and plucked the cap from his head, and bore it aloft into the air; and then flew down again and placed it upon his head, as it had been before. So Tanaquil was glad at this sight, and she told her husband, for she was skilled in augury, that this was a sign of the favour of the gods, and she bade him be of good cheer, for that he would surely rise to greatness.

Now when the stranger came to Rome, they called him Lucius Tarquinius, and he was a brave man and wise in council; and his riches won the good word of the multitude; and he became known to the king. He served the king well in peace and war, so that Ancus held him in great honour, and when he died he named him by his will to be the guardian of his children.

But Tarquinius was in great favour with the people; and when he desired to be king, they resolved to choose him rather than the sons of Ancus. So he began to reign, and he did great works both in war and peace. He made war on the Latins, and took from them a great spoil. Then he made war on the Sabines, and he conquered them in two battles, and took from them the town of Collatia, and gave it to Egerius, his brother’s son, who had come with him from Tarquinii. Lastly, there was another war with the Latins, and Tarquinius went round to their cities, and took them one after another; for none dared to go out to meet him in open battle. These were his acts in war.

He also did great works in peace; for he made vast drains to carry off the water from between the Palatine and the Aventine, and from between the Palatine and the Capitoline hills. And in the space between the Palatine and the Aventine, after he had drained it, he formed the Circus, or great race-course, for chariot and for horse races. Then in the space between the Palatine and the Capitoline he made a forum or market-place, and divided out the ground around it for shops or stalls, and made a covered walk round it. Next he set about building a wall of stone to go round the city; and he laid the foundations of a great temple on the Capitoline Hill, which was to be the temple of the gods of Rome. He also added a hundred new senators to the senate, and doubled the number of the horsemen in the centuries of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, for he wanted to strengthen his force of horsemen; and when he had done so, his horse gained him great victories over his enemies.

Now he first had it in his mind to make three new centuries of horsemen, and to call them after his own name. But Attus Navius, who was greatly skilled in augury, forbade him. Then the king mocked at his art, and said, “Come now, thou augur, tell me by thy auguries, whether the thing which I now have in my mind may be done or not.” And Attus Navius asked counsel of the gods by augury, and he answered, “It may.” Then the king said, “It was in my mind that thou shouldst cut in two this whetstone with this razor. Take them, and do it, and fulfil thy augury if thou canst.” But Attus took the razor and the whetstone, and he cut, and cut the whetstone asunder. So the king obeyed his counsels, and made no new centuries; and in all things afterwards he consulted the gods by augury, and obeyed their bidding.

Tarquinius reigned long and prospered greatly; and there was a young man brought up in his household, of whose birth some told wonderful tales, and said that he was the son of a god; but others said that his mother was a slave, and his father was one of the king’s clients. But he served the king well, and was in favour with the people, and the king promised him his daughter in marriage. The young man was called Servius Tullius. But when the sons of King Ancus saw that Servius was so loved by King Tarquinius, they resolved to slay the king, lest he should make this stranger his heir, and so they should lose the crown forever. So they set on two shepherds to do the deed, and these went to the king’s palace, and pretended to be quarrelling with each other, and both called on the king to do them right. The king sent for them to hear their story; and while he was hearing one of them speak, the other struck him on the head with his hatchet, and then both of them fled. But Tanaquil, the king’s wife, pretended that he was not dead, but only stunned by the blow; and she said that he had appointed Servius Tullius to rule in his name, till he should be well again. So Servius went forth in royal state, and judged causes amidst the people, and acted in all things as if he were king, till after a while it was known that the king was dead, and Servius was suffered to reign in his place. Then the sons of Ancus saw that there was no hope left for them; and they fled from Rome, and lived the rest of their days in a foreign land.

SERVIUS TULLIUS

[Sidenote: [ca. 578-534 B.C.]]

Servius Tullius was a just and good king; he loved the commons, and he divided among them the lands which had been conquered in war, and he made many wise and good laws, to maintain the cause of the poor, and to stop the oppression of the rich. He made war with the Etruscans, and conquered them. He added the Quirinal and the Viminal hills to the city, and he brought many new citizens to live on the Esquiline; and there he lived himself amongst them. He also raised a great mound of earth to join the Esquiline and the Quirinal and the Viminal hills together, and to cover them from the attacks of an enemy.

He built a temple of Diana on the Aventine, where the Latins, and the Sabines, and the Romans, should offer their common sacrifices; and the Romans were the chief in rank amongst all who worshipped at the temple.

He made a new order of things for the whole people; for he divided the people of the city into four tribes, and the people of the country into six-and-twenty. Then he divided all the people into classes, according to the value of their possessions; and the classes he divided into centuries; and the centuries of the several classes furnished themselves with arms, each according to their rank and order: the centuries of the rich classes had good and full armour, the poorer centuries had but darts and slings. And when he had done all these works, he called all the people together in their centuries, and asked if they would have him for their king; and the people answered that he should be their king. But the nobles hated him, because he was so loved by the commons; for he had made a law that there should be no king after him, but two men chosen by the people to govern them year by year. Some even said that it was in his mind to give up his own kingly power, that so he might see with his own eyes the fruit of all the good laws that he had made, and might behold the people wealthy and free and happy.

Now King Servius had no son, but he had two daughters; and he gave them in marriage to the two sons of King Tarquinius. These daughters were of very unlike natures, and so were their husbands: for Aruns Tarquinius was of a meek and gentle spirit, but his brother Lucius was proud and full of evil; and the younger Tullia, who was the wife of Aruns, was more full of evil than his brother Lucius; and the elder Tullia, who was the wife of Lucius, was as good and gentle as his brother Aruns. So the evil could not bear the good, but longed to be joined to the evil that was like itself: and Lucius slew his wife secretly, and the younger Tullia slew her husband, and then they were married to one another, that they might work all the wickedness of their hearts, according to the will of fate.

Then Lucius plotted with the nobles, who hated the good king; and he joined himself to the sworn brotherhoods of the young nobles, in which they bound themselves to stand by each other in their deeds of violence and of oppression. When all was ready, he waited for the season of the harvest, when the commons, who loved the king, were in the fields getting in their corn. Then he went suddenly to the Forum with a band of armed men, and seated himself on the king’s throne before the doors of the senate house, where he was wont to judge the people. And they ran to the king, and told him that Lucius was sitting on his throne. Upon this the old man went in haste to the Forum, and when he saw Lucius, he asked him wherefore he had dared to sit on the king’s seat. And Lucius answered that it was his father’s throne, and that he had more right in it than Servius. Then he seized the old man, and threw him down the steps of the senate house to the ground; and he went into the senate house, and called together the senators, as if he were already king. Servius meanwhile arose, and began to make his way home to his house; but when he was come near to the Esquiline Hill, some whom Lucius had sent after him overtook him and slew him, and left him in his blood in the middle of the way.

Then the wicked Tullia mounted her chariot, and drove into the Forum, nothing ashamed to go amidst the multitude of men, and she called Lucius out from the senate house, and said to him, “Hail to thee, King Tarquinius!” But Lucius bade her to go home; and as she was going home, the body of her father was lying in the way. The driver of the chariot stopped short, and showed to Tullia where her father lay in his blood. But she bade him drive on, for the furies of her wickedness were upon her, and the chariot rolled over the body; and she went to her home with her father’s blood upon the wheels of her chariot. Thus Lucius Tarquinius and the wicked Tullia reigned in the place of the good king Servius.

LUCIUS TARQUINIUS THE TYRANT

[Sidenote: [ca. 534-510 B.C.]]

Lucius Tarquinius gained his power wickedly, and no less wickedly did he exercise it. He kept a guard of armed men about him, and he ruled all things at his own will; many were they whom he spoiled of their goods, many were they whom he banished, and many also whom he slew. He despised the senate, and made no new senators in the place of those whom he slew, or who died in the course of nature, wishing that the senators might become fewer and fewer, till there should be none of them left. And he made friends of the chief men among the Latins, and gave his daughter in marriage to Octavius Mamilius of Tusculum; and he became very powerful amongst the Latins, insomuch that when Turnus Herdonius of Aricia had dared to speak against him in the great assembly of the Latins, Tarquinius accused him of plotting his death, and procured false witnesses to confirm his charge; so that the Latins judged him to be guilty, and ordered him to be drowned. After this they were so afraid of Tarquinius, that they made a league with him, and followed him in his wars wherever he chose to lead them. The Hernicans also joined this league, and so did Ecetra and Antium, cities of the Volscians.

Then Tarquinius made war upon the rest of the Volscians, and he took Suessa Pometia, in the lowlands of the Volscians, and the tithe of the spoil was forty talents of silver. So he set himself to raise mighty works in Rome; and he finished what his father had begun, the great drains to drain the low grounds of the city, and the temple on the Capitoline Hill. Now the ground on which he was going to build his temple was taken up with many holy places of the gods of the Sabines, which had been founded in the days of King Tatius. But Tarquinius consulted the gods by augury whether he might not take away these holy places to make room for his own new temple. The gods allowed him to take away all the rest, except only the holy places of the god of youth, and of Terminus the god of boundaries, which they would not suffer him to move. But the augurs said that this was a happy omen, for that it showed how the youth of the city should never pass away, nor its boundaries be moved by the conquest of an enemy. A human head was also found, as they were digging the foundations of the temple, and this too was a sign that the Capitoline Hill should be the head of all the earth.[7] So Tarquinius built a mighty temple, and consecrated it to Jupiter, and to Juno, and to Minerva, the greatest of the gods of the Etruscans.

At this time there came a strange woman to the king, and offered him nine books of the prophecies of the Sibyl for a certain price. When the king refused them, the woman went and burned three of the books, and came back and offered the six at the same price which she had asked for the nine; but they mocked at her and would not take the books. Then she went away, and burned three more, and came back and asked still the same price for the remaining three. At this the king was astonished, and asked of the augurs what he should do. They said that he had done wrong in refusing the gift of the gods, and bade him by all means to buy the books that were left. So he bought them; and the woman who sold them was seen no more from that day forwards. Then the books were put into a chest of stone, and were kept underground in the Capitol, and two men were appointed to keep them, and were called the two men of the sacred books.

Now Gabii would not submit to Tarquinius, like the other cities of the Latins, so he made war against it; and the war was long, and Tarquinius knew not how to end it. So his son Sextus Tarquinius pretended that his father hated him, and fled to Gabii; and the people of Gabii believed him and trusted him, till at last he betrayed them into his father’s power. A treaty was then made with them, and he gave them the right of becoming citizens of Rome, and the Romans had the right of becoming citizens of Gabii, and there was a firm league between the two people.

Thus Tarquinius was a great and mighty king; but he grievously oppressed the poor, and he took away all the good laws of King Servius, and let the rich oppress the poor, as they had done before the days of Servius. He made the people labour at his great works: he made them build his temple and dig and construct his drains; and he laid such burdens on them, that many slew themselves for very misery; for in the days of Tarquinius the tyrant it was happier to die than to live.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[6] The two Roman champions, we have seen, fell in the one place, super alium alius; consequently were buried together; whilst the Curiatii fell in different places, as Horatius contrived to separate them to avoid their joint attack.

[7] [“After the work had been carried down to a great depth there was found the head of a man newly killed, with the face like that of a living man, and the blood which flowed from the abrasion warm and fresh.”--DIONYSIUS.[d]]

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IV. THE BANISHMENT OF THE KINGS--CRITICISMS OF MONARCHIAL HISTORY

TARQUINIUS CONSULTS THE ORACLE

[Sidenote: [ca. 510 B.C.]]

While King Tarquinius was at the height of his greatness, it chanced upon a time that from the altar in the court of his palace there crawled out a snake, which devoured the offerings laid on the altar. So the king thought it not enough to consult the soothsayers of the Etruscans whom he had with him, but he sent two of his own sons to Delphi, to ask counsel of the oracle of the Greeks; for the oracle of Delphi was famous in all lands. So his sons Titus and Aruns went to Delphi, and they took with them their cousin Lucius Junius, whom men called Brutus, that is, the dullard; for he seemed to be wholly without wit, and he would eat wild figs with honey. This Lucius was not really dull, but very subtle; and it was for fear of his uncle’s cruelty, that he made himself as one without sense; for he was very rich, and he feared lest King Tarquinius should kill him for the sake of his inheritance. So when he went to Delphi he carried with him a staff of horn, and the staff was hollow, and it was filled with gold, and he gave the staff to the oracle as a likeness of himself; for though he seemed dull, and of no account to look upon, yet he had a golden wit within. When the three young men had performed the king’s bidding, they asked the oracle for themselves, and they said, “O Lord Apollo, tell us, which of us shall be king in Rome?” Then there came a voice from the sanctuary and said, “Whichever of you shall first kiss his mother.” So the sons of Tarquinius agreed to draw lots between themselves, which of them should first kiss their mother, when they should have returned to Rome; and they said they would keep the oracle secret from their brother Sextus, lest he should be king rather than they. But Lucius understood the mind of the oracle better; so as they all went down from the temple, he stumbled as if by chance, and fell with his face to the earth, and kissed the earth; for he said, “The earth is the true mother of us all.”

Now when they came back to Rome, King Tarquinius was at war with the people of Ardea; and as the city was strong, his army lay a long while before it, till it should be forced to yield through famine. So the Romans had leisure for feasting and for diverting themselves; and once Titus and Aruns were supping with their brother Sextus, and their cousin Tarquinius of Collatia was supping with them. And they disputed about their wives, whose wife of them all was the worthiest lady. Then said Tarquinius of Collatia, “Let us go, and see with our own eyes what our wives are doing, so shall we know which is the worthiest.” Upon this they all mounted their horses, and rode first to Rome; and there they found the wives of Titus, and of Aruns, and of Sextus, feasting and making merry. They then rode on to Collatia, and it was late in the night, but they found Lucretia, the wife of Tarquinius of Collatia, neither feasting, nor yet sleeping, but she was sitting with all her handmaids around her, and all were working at the loom. So when they saw this, they all said, “Lucretia is the worthiest lady.” And she entertained her husband and his kinsmen, and after that they rode back to the camp before Ardea.

THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA

But a spirit of wicked passion seized upon Sextus, and a few days afterwards he went alone to Collatia, and Lucretia received him hospitably, for he was her husband’s kinsman. At midnight he arose and went to her chamber, and he said that if she yielded not to him, he would slay her and one of her slaves with her, and would say to her husband that he had slain her in her adultery. So when Sextus had accomplished his wicked purpose, he went back again to the camp.

Then Lucretia sent in haste to Rome, to pray that her father Spurius Lucretius would come to her; and she sent to Ardea to summon her husband. Her father brought along with him Publius Valerius, and her husband brought with him Lucius Junius, whom men call Brutus. When they arrived, they asked earnestly, “Is all well?” Then she told them of the wicked deed of Sextus, and she said, “If ye be men, avenge it.” And they all swore to her, that they would avenge it. Then she said again, “I am not guilty; yet must I too share in the punishment of this deed, lest any should think that they may be false to their husbands and live.” And she drew a knife from her bosom, and stabbed herself to the heart.

At that sight her husband and her father cried aloud; but Lucius drew the knife from the wound, and held it up, and said, “By this blood I swear, that I will visit this deed upon King Tarquinius, and all his accursed race; neither shall any man hereafter be king in Rome, lest he do the like wickedness.” And he gave the knife to her husband, and to her father, and to Publius Valerius. They marvelled to hear such words from him whom men called dull; but they swore also, and they took up the body of Lucretia, and carried it down into the Forum; and they said, “Behold the deeds of the wicked family of Tarquinius.” All the people of Collatia were moved, and the men took up arms, and they set a guard at the gates, that none might go out to carry the tidings to Tarquinius, and they followed Lucius to Rome. There, too, all the people came together, and the crier summoned them to assemble before the tribune of the Celeres, for Lucius held that office. And Lucius spoke to them of all the tyranny of Tarquinius and his sons, and of the wicked deed of Sextus. And the people in their curiæ took back from Tarquinius the sovereign power, which they had given him, and they banished him and all his family. Then the younger men followed Lucius to Ardea, to win over the army there to join them; and the city was left in the charge of Spurius Lucretius. But the wicked Tullia fled in haste from her house, and all, both men and women, cursed her as she passed, and prayed that the furies of her father’s blood might visit her with vengeance.[b]

NIEBUHR ON THE STORY OF LUCRETIA

This entire story, which Shakespeare himself put into poetry, has met with the wholesale scepticism that has visited all the Roman legends. But the incredulous Niebuhr, for one, accepts it: “It may easily be believed,” he says, “that Sextus Tarquinius committed the outrage on Lucretia, for similar things are still of every-day occurrence in Turkey, and were frequently perpetrated in the Middle Ages by Italian princes down to the time of Pietro Luigi Farnese (in the sixteenth century); in antiquity similar crimes are met with in oligarchies and tyrannies, as is well known from the history of Demetrius Poliorcetes at Athens. Cicero is quite right in saying that it was a misfortune that Sextus hit upon a woman belonging to one of the most powerful families. It may readily be believed that the woman tried to avenge herself, but the whole of the subsequent events, by which the story acquired individuality and its connection with the campaign against Ardea, are of no historical value. The king is said to have been encamped before Ardea, and to have concluded a truce for fifteen years; but Ardea was dependent upon Rome before that time, since it occurs among the towns on behalf of which Rome concluded the treaty with Carthage. All therefore that remains and bears the appearance of probability, is that Lucretia was outraged, and that her death kindled the spark which had long been smouldering under the ashes.

“We are in the same perplexity in regard to the person of Brutus. He is said to have feigned stupidity in order to deceive the king, and there were several traditions as to the manner in which he attempted to accomplish this object. His mission to Delphi along with the sons of Tarquinius, although the mission from Agylla at an earlier period cannot be doubted, seems to betray a later hand, and probably the same as introduced the stories from Herodotus into Roman history. It is further said that Tarquinius, in order to render the dignity of tribunus celerum the highest after that of the king, powerless for mischief, gave the office to Brutus. But there is every reason for believing that the whole story of Brutus’ idiocy arose solely from his name. Brutus is undoubtedly an Oscan word connected with the same root as Bruttii; it signifies ‘a runaway slave,’ a name which the insolent faction of the king gave to the leader of the rebels because he was a plebeian. How is it conceivable that a great king, such as Tarquinius really was, should have raised an idiot whom he might have put to death to the dignity of tribunus celerum--for the purpose of rendering it contemptible? Tarquinius was not a tyrant of such a kind as to be under the necessity of weakening the state in order to govern it; he might have given it power and vigour and yet ruled over it by his great personal qualities; nor did the Romans think differently of him, for his statue continued to be preserved in the Capitol.”[f]

THE BANISHMENT OF TARQUINIUS

Meanwhile King Tarquinius set out with speed to Rome to put down the tumult. But Lucius turned aside from the road, that he might not meet him, and came to the camp; and the soldiers joyfully received him, and they drove out the sons of Tarquinius. King Tarquinius came to Rome, but the gates were shut, and they declared to him, from the walls, the sentence of banishment which had been passed against him and his family. So he yielded to his fortune, and went to live at Cære with his sons Titus and Aruns. His other son, Sextus, went to Gabii, and the people there, remembering how he had betrayed them to his father, slew him. Then the army left the camp before Ardea, and went back to Rome. And all men said, “Let us follow the good laws of the good king Servius; and let us meet in our centuries, according as he directed, and let us choose two men year by year to govern us, instead of a king.” Then the people met in their centuries in the field of Mars, and they chose two men to rule over them, Lucius Junius, whom men called Brutus, and Lucius Tarquinius of Collatia.

But the people were afraid of Lucius Tarquinius for his name’s sake, for it seemed as though a Tarquinius were still king over them. So they prayed him to depart from Rome, and he went and took all his goods with him, and settled himself at Lavinium. Then the senate and the people decreed that all the house of the Tarquinii should be banished, even though they were not of the king’s family. And the people met again in their centuries, and chose Publius Valerius to rule over them together with Brutus, in the room of Lucius Tarquinius of Collatia.

Now at this time many of the laws of the good king Servius were restored, which Tarquinius the tyrant had overthrown. For the commons again chose their own judges, to try all causes between a man and his neighbour; and they had again their meetings and their sacrifices in the city and in the country, every man in his own tribe and in his own district. And lest there should seem to be two kings instead of one, it was ordered that one only of the two should bear rule at one time, and that the lictors with their rods and axes should walk before him alone. And the two were to bear rule month by month.

Then King Tarquinius sent to Rome, to ask for all the goods that had belonged to him; and the senate after a while decreed that the goods should be given back. But those whom he had sent to Rome to ask for his goods, had meetings with many young men of noble birth, and a plot was laid to bring back King Tarquinius. So the young men wrote letters to Tarquinius, pledging to him their faith, and among them were Titus and Tiberius, the sons of Brutus. But a slave happened to overhear them talking together, and when he knew that the letters were to be given to the messengers of Tarquinius, he went and told all that he had heard to Brutus and to Publius Valerius. Then they came and seized the young men and their letters, and so the plot was broken up.

After this there was a strange and piteous sight to behold. Brutus and Publius sat on their judgment seats in the Forum, and the young men were brought before them. Then Brutus bade the lictors to bind his own two sons, Titus and Tiberius, together with the others, and to scourge them with rods, according to the law. And after they had been scourged, the lictors struck off their heads with their axes, before the eyes of their father; and Brutus neither stirred from his seat nor turned away his eyes from the sight, yet men saw as they looked on him that his heart was grieving inwardly over his children. Then they marvelled at him, because he had loved justice more than his own blood, and had not spared his own children when they had been false to their country, and had offended against the law.

When King Tarquinius found that the plot was broken up, he persuaded the people of Veii and the people of Tarquinii, cities of the Etruscans, to try to bring him back to Rome by force of arms. So they assembled their armies, and Tarquinius led them within the Roman border. Brutus and Publius led the Romans out to meet them, and it chanced that Brutus, with the Roman horsemen, and Aruns, the son of King Tarquinius, with the Etruscan horse, met each other in advance of the main battles. Aruns, seeing Brutus in his kingly robe, and with the lictors of a king around him, levelled his spear, and spurred his horse against him. Brutus met him, and each ran his spear through the body of the other, and they both fell dead. Then the horsemen on both parts fought, and afterwards the main battles, and the Veientines were beaten, but the Tarquinians beat the Romans, and the battle was neither won nor lost; but in the night there came a voice out of the wood that was hard by, and it said, “One man more has fallen on the part of the Etruscans than on the part of the Romans; the Romans are to conquer in the war.” At this the Etruscans were afraid, and believing the voice, they immediately marched home to their own country, while the Romans took up Brutus, and carried him home and buried him; and Publius made an oration in his praise, and all the matrons of Rome mourned for him for a whole year, because he had avenged Lucretia well.

When Brutus was dead, Publius ruled over the people himself; and he began to build a great and strong house on the top of the hill Velia, which looks down upon the Forum. This made the people say, “Publius wants to become a king, and is building a house in a strong place, as if for a citadel where he may live with his guards, and oppress us.” But he called the people together, and when he went down to them, the lictors who walked before him lowered the rods and the axes which they bore, to show that he owned the people to be greater than himself. He complained that they had mistrusted him, and he said that he would not build his house on the top of the hill Velia, but at the bottom of it, and his house should be no stronghold. And he called on them to make a law, that whoever should try to make himself king should be accursed, and whosoever would might slay him. Also, that if a magistrate were going to scourge or kill any citizen, he might carry his cause before the people, and they should judge him. When these laws were passed, all men said, “Publius is a lover of the people, and seeks their good”: and he was called Publicola, which means, “the people’s friend,” from that day forward.

Then Publius called the people together in their centuries, and they chose Spurius Lucretius, the father of Lucretia, to be their magistrate for the year, in the room of Brutus. But he was an old man, and his strength was so much gone, that after a few days he died. They then chose in his room Marcus Horatius.

Now Publius and Marcus cast lots which should dedicate the temple to Jupiter on the hill of the Capitol, which King Tarquinius had built; and the lot fell to Marcus, to the great discontent of the friends of Publius. So when Marcus was going to begin the dedication, and had his hand on the doorpost of the temple, and was speaking the set words of prayer, there came a man running to tell him that his son was dead. But he said, “Then let them carry him out and bury him”; and he neither wept nor lamented, for the words of lamentation ought not to be spoken when men are praying to the blessed gods, and dedicating a temple to their honour. So Marcus honoured the gods above his son, and dedicated the temple on the hill of the Capitol; and his name was recorded on the front of the temple.

PORSENNA’S WAR UPON THE ROMANS; THE STORY OF HORATIUS AT THE BRIDGE, AS TOLD BY DIONYSIUS

But when King Tarquinius found that the Veientines and Tarquinians were not able to restore him to his kingdom, he went to Clusium, a city in the farthest part of Etruria, beyond the Ciminian forest, and besought Lars Porsenna, the king of Clusium, to aid him. So Porsenna raised a great army, and marched against Rome, and attacked the Romans on the hill Janiculum, the hill on the outside of the city beyond the Tiber.[b]

When the two armies charged, they both fought bravely and sustained the shock for a considerable time, the Romans having the advantage of their enemies both in experience and perseverance, and the Tyrrhenians and Latins being much superior in number. And, many being killed on both sides, fear seized the Romans; first, those on the left wing, when they saw their two commanders, Valerius, and Lucretius, carried out of the field wounded; after which, those on the right wing, who had already the advantage over the forces commanded by Tarquinius, seeing the flight of their friends, were possessed with the same terror. And all of them, hastening to the city, and endeavouring to force their way in a body over the same bridge, the enemy made a strong attack upon them; and the city having no walls in that part next the river, was very near being taken by storm, which had certainly happened if the pursuers had entered it at the same time with those who fled. But three men put a stop to the pursuit of the enemy and saved the whole army; two of these were Spurius Lartius and Titus Herminius among the elders, who had the command of the right wing; and of the younger, Publius Horatius, who was called Cocles from the loss of one of his eyes, which had been struck out in a battle; a person, of all men, the most remarkable for the fine proportion of his limbs, and for his bravery. This man was nephew to Marcus Horatius, one of the consuls, but derived his high birth from Marcus Horatius, one of the three brothers who overcame the three Albans. These three without other assistance, placing their backs against the bridge, stopped the passage of the enemy for a considerable time, and stood their ground while a shower of all sorts of weapons fell upon them, and numbers also pressed them sword in hand, till the whole army passed the river.

When they judged their own men to be in safety, two of them, Herminius, and Lartius, their defensive arms being now rendered useless by continual strokes, retreated leisurely; while Horatius alone, though not only the consuls, but the rest of the people, solicitous above all things to preserve such a man for his country and his parents, called to him from the city to retire, could not be prevailed on, but remained upon the same spot where he first stood, and directed Herminius and Lartius to desire the consuls, as from him, to order that part of the bridge which was next the city immediately to be cut off (for there was but one bridge at that time, which was built of wood, and mortised together with timber alone, without iron, which the Romans preserve even to this day in the same condition) and that, when the greatest part of the bridge was broken down and little of it remained, they should give him notice of it by some signals, or by speaking louder than ordinary; as to the rest, he told them he would take care of it. Having given these directions to these two persons, he stood upon the bridge itself, and when the enemy advanced upon him, he struck some of them with his sword, and beating down others with his shield, he repulsed all who attempted to pass the bridge; for these looking upon him as a madman, and one who had devoted himself to destruction, durst no longer approach him; at the same time, it was not easy for them to come near him, because the river defended him on the right and left, and before him lay a heap of arms and dead bodies. But standing all at a distance, they threw spears, darts, and large stones at him, and those who were not supplied with these, threw the swords and bucklers of the slain. But he fought still, making use of their own weapons against them; and throwing these among the crowd, he could not fail, as may well be supposed, to hit somebody. And now, overwhelmed with missive weapons, and having a great number of wounds in many parts of his body, but one particularly, occasioned by a spear, which, passing over the top of his thigh, pierced the forepart of one of his hips, and putting him to great pain, impeded his motion. When hearing those behind him call out that the greatest part of the bridge was broken down, he leaped, with his arms, into the river, and swimming across the stream with great difficulty (for the current, being divided by the piles, ran swift, and formed large eddies), he landed without losing any of his arms.

This action gained him immortal glory, for the Romans immediately crowned him, and conducted him into the city with songs, as one of the heroes; and all the inhabitants ran out of their houses, desiring to have the last sight of him before he died, for it was thought he could not long survive his wounds. And when he was recovered, the people erected a brazen statue of him all armed, in the most conspicuous part of the Forum, and gave him as much of the public land as he himself could plough around in one day with a yoke of oxen. Besides these things bestowed upon him by the public, every particular man and woman in the city, at a time when they were all the most oppressed by a dreadful scarcity of necessary provisions, gave him as much as would maintain each of them one day, the number of people in the whole amounting to more than three hundred thousand. Thus Horatius, who had shown so great valour upon that occasion, was looked upon by the Romans with all possible admiration; but rendered useless by his lameness in the subsequent affairs of the commonwealth, and by reason of his calamity, he obtained neither the consulship nor any other military command.[g]

Caius Mucius and King Porsenna

But the Etruscans still lay before the city, and the Romans suffered much from hunger. Then a young man of noble blood, Caius Mucius by name, went to the senate, and offered to go to the camp of the Etruscans, and to slay King Porsenna. So he crossed the river and made his way into the camp, and there he saw a man sitting on a high place, and wearing a scarlet robe, and many coming and going about him; and, saying to himself, “This must be King Porsenna,” he went up to his seat amidst the crowd, and when he came near to the man he drew a dagger from under his garment, and stabbed him. But it was the king’s scribe whom he had slain, who was the king’s chief officer; so he was seized and brought before the king, and the guards threatened him with sharp torments, unless he would answer all their questions. But he said, “See now, how little I care for your torments”; and he thrust his right hand into the fire that was burning there on the altar, and he did not move it till it was quite consumed. Then King Porsenna marvelled at his courage, and said, “Go thy way, for thou hast harmed thyself more than me; and thou art a brave man, and I send thee back to Rome unhurt and free.” But Caius answered, “For this thou shalt get more of my secret than thy tortures could have forced from me. Three hundred noble youths of Rome have bound themselves by oath to take thy life. Mine was the first adventure; but the others will each in his turn lie in wait for thee. I warn thee therefore to look to thyself well.” Then Caius was let go, and went back again into the city.

But King Porsenna was greatly moved, and made the Romans offers of peace, to which they listened gladly, and gave up the land beyond the Tiber which had been won in former times from the Veientines; and he gave back to them the hill Janiculum. Besides this the Romans gave hostages to the king, ten youths and ten maidens, children of noble fathers, as a pledge that they would truly keep the peace which they had made. But it chanced as the camp of the Etruscans was near the Tiber, that Clœlia, one of the maidens, escaped with her fellows and fled to the brink of the river, and as the Etruscans pursued them, Clœlia spoke to the other maidens, and persuaded them, and they rushed all into the water, and swam across the river, and got safely over. At this King Porsenna marvelled more than ever, and when the Romans sent back Clœlia and her fellows to him, for they kept their faith truly, he bade her go home free, and he gave her some of the youths also who were hostages, to choose whom she would; and she chose those who were of tenderest age, and King Porsenna set them free. Then the Romans gave lands to Caius, and set up a statue of Clœlia in the highest part of the Sacred Way; and King Porsenna led away his army home in peace.

After this King Porsenna made war against the Latins, and his army was beaten, and fled to Rome; and the Romans received them kindly, and took care of those who were wounded, and sent them back safe to King Porsenna. For this the king gave back to the Romans all the rest of their hostages whom he had still with him, and also the land which they had won from the Veientines. So Tarquinius, seeing that there was no more hope of aid from King Porsenna, left Clusium and went to Tusculum of the Latins; for Octavius Mamilius, the chief of the Tusculans, had married his daughter, and he hoped that the Latins would restore him to Rome, for their cities were many, and when he had been king he had favoured them rather than the Romans.

So, after a time, thirty cities of the Latins joined together and made Octavius Mamilius their general, and declared war against the Romans. Now Publius Valerius was dead, and the Romans so loved and honoured him that they buried him within the city, near the hill Velia, and all the matrons of Rome had mourned for him for a whole year: also because the Romans had the Sabines for their enemies as well as the Latins, they had made one man to be their ruler for a time instead of two; and he was called the master of the people, or the commander, and he had all the power which the kings of Rome had in times past. So Aulus Postumius was appointed master of the people at this time, and Titus Æbutius was the chief or master of the horsemen; and they led out the whole force of the Romans, and met the Latins by the lake Regillus, in the country of Tusculum: and Tarquinius himself was with the army of the Latins, and his son and all the houses of the Tarquinii; for this was their last hope, and fate was now to determine whether the Romans should be ruled over by King Tarquinius, or whether they should be free forever.

There were many Romans who had married Latin wives, and many Latins who had married wives from among the Romans. So before the war began, it was resolved that the women on both sides might leave their husbands if they chose, and take their virgin daughters with them, and return to their own country. And all the Latin women, except two, remained in Rome with their husbands: but the Roman women loved Rome more than their husbands, and took their young daughters with them, and came home to the houses of their fathers.

THE BATTLE OF LAKE REGILLUS

Then the Romans and the Latins joined battle by the lake Regillus. There might you see King Tarquinius, though far advanced in years, yet mounted on his horse and bearing his lance in his hand, as bravely as though he were still young. There was his son Tarquinius, leading on to battle all the band of the house of the Tarquinii, whom the Romans had banished for their name’s sake, and who thought it a proud thing to win back their country by their swords, and to become again the royal house, to give a king to the Romans. There was Octavius Mamilius, of Tusculum, the leader of all the Latins, who said, that he would make Tarquinius, his father, king once more in Rome, and the Romans should help the Latins in all their wars, and Tusculum should be the greatest of all the cities whose people went up together to sacrifice to Jupiter of the Latins at his temple on the high top of the mountain of Alba. And on the side of the Romans might be seen Aulus Postumius, the master of the people, and Titus Æbutius, the master of the horsemen. There also was Titus Herminius, who had fought on the bridge by the side of Horatius Cocles, on the day when they saved Rome from King Porsenna. There was Marcus Valerius, the brother of Publius, who said he would finish by the lake Regillus the glorious work which Publius had begun in Rome; for Publius had driven out Tarquinius and his house, and had made them live as banished men, and now they should lose their lives as they had lost their country. So at the first onset King Tarquinius levelled his lance, and rode against Aulus; and on the left of the battle, Titus Æbutius spurred his horse against Octavius Mamilius. But King Tarquinius, before he reached Aulus, received a wound into his side, and his followers gathered around him, and bore him out of the battle. And Titus and Octavius met lance to lance, and Titus struck Octavius on the breast, and Octavius ran his lance through the arm of Titus. So Titus withdrew from the battle, for his arm could no longer wield its weapon; but Octavius heeded not his hurt, but when he saw his Latins giving ground, he called to the banished Romans of the house of the Tarquinii, and sent them into the thick of the fight. On they rushed so fiercely that neither man nor horse could stand before them; for they thought how they had been driven from their country, and spoiled of their goods, and they said that they would win back both that day through the blood of their enemies.

Then Marcus Valerius, the brother of Publius, levelled his lance and rode fiercely against Titus Tarquinius, who was the leader of the band of the Tarquinii. But Titus drew back, and sheltered himself amidst his band: and Marcus rode after him in his fury, and plunged into the midst of the enemy, and a Latin ran his lance into his side as he was rushing on; but his horse stayed not in his career, till Marcus dropped from him dead upon the ground. Then the Romans feared yet more, and the Tarquinii charged yet more vehemently, till Aulus, the leader of the Romans, rode up with his own chosen band; and he bade them level their lances, and slay all whose faces were towards them, whether they were friends or foes. So the Romans turned from their flight, and Aulus and his chosen band fell upon the Tarquinii; and Aulus prayed, and vowed that he would raise a temple to Castor and to Pollux, the twin heroes, if they would aid him to win the battle; and he promised to his soldiers that the two who should be the first to break into the camp of the enemy should receive a rich reward. When behold there rode two horsemen at the head of his chosen band, and they were taller and fairer than after the stature and beauty of men, and they were in the first bloom of youth, and their horses were white as snow. Then there was a fierce battle, when Octavius, the leader of the Latins, came up with aid to rescue the Tarquinii; for Titus Herminius rode against him, and ran his spear through his body, and slew him at one blow; but as he was spoiling him of his arms, he himself was struck by a javelin, and he was borne out of the fight and died. And the two horsemen on white horses rode before the Romans; and the enemy fled before them, and the Tarquinii were beaten down and slain, and Titus Tarquinius was slain among them; and the Latins fled, and the Romans followed them to their camp, and the two horsemen on white horses were the first who broke into the camp. But when the camp was taken, and the battle was fully won, Aulus sought for the two horsemen to give them the rewards which he had promised; and they were not found either amongst the living or amongst the dead, only there was seen imprinted on the hard black rock, the mark of a horse’s hoof, which no earthly horse had ever made; and the mark was there to be seen in after ages. And the battle was ended, and the sun went down.

Now they knew at Rome that the armies had joined battle, and as the day wore away all men longed for tidings. And the sun went down, and suddenly there were seen in the Forum two horsemen, taller and fairer than the tallest and fairest of men, and they rode on white horses, and they were as men just come from the battle, and their horses were all bathed in foam. They alighted by the temple of Vesta, where a spring of water bubbles up from the ground and fills a small deep pool. There they washed away the stains of the battle, and when men crowded round them, and asked for tidings, they told them how the battle had been fought, and how it was won. And they mounted their horses, and rode from the Forum, and were seen no more; and men sought for them in every place, but they were not found.

Then Aulus and all the Romans knew how Castor and Pollux, the twin heroes, had heard his prayer, and had fought for the Romans, and had vanquished their enemies, and had been the first to break into the enemies’ camp, and had themselves, with more than mortal speed, borne the tidings of their victory to Rome. So Aulus built a temple according to his vow to Castor and Pollux, and gave rich offerings, for he said, “These are the rewards which I promised to the two who should first break into the enemies’ camp; and the twin heroes have won them, and they and no mortal men have won the battle for Rome this day.”

So perished the house of the Tarquinii, in the great battle by the lake Regillus, and all the sons of King Tarquinius, and his son-in-law Octavius Mamilius, were slain on that battle-field. Thus King Tarquinius saw the ruin of all his family and of all his house, and he was left alone, utterly without hope. So he went to Cumæ, a city of the Greeks, and there he died. And thus the deeds of Tarquinius and of the wicked Tullia, and of Sextus their son, were visited upon their own heads; and the Romans lived in peace, and none threatened their freedom any more.[b]

Before leaving the Roman monarchy it is necessary to give a critical discussion of the myths of the kings as well as an estimate of their historical value. To do this we draw upon two of the most famous students of this period, Schwegler[c] and Otto Gilbert.[d]

THE MYTHS OF THE ROMAN KINGS CRITICALLY EXAMINED

Against Schlegel[h] we have maintained the position that, in the first place, the traditional history of primitive Rome was not the work of a Greek but an indigenous product of Roman national life,[8] in the second, that in its original form it was not the product of any literary activity whatever; against Niebuhr[f] that it is not a creation of popular poetry but a result of deliberate reflection. The process by which it came into being we may conclude--conjecturally, of course--to have been as follows.

The genuine and veracious tradition of the foundation and earliest fortunes of Rome seems to have soon perished--if indeed it ever existed. This could hardly have been otherwise. It had neither been safeguarded against destruction or travesty by written records, nor cast into fixed traditional form, in song at least, by becoming the subject of popular poetry; and it was therefore in the nature of things that during the course of generations it should pass into silence and oblivion.

It is possible--it is even probable--that as far back as the decemvirate the Romans had no trustworthy information concerning the origin of their city. But they did not rest content in their ignorance. They felt the need of affirming something definite about that period and those events none the less strongly for their lack of historical knowledge, and on the foundation of dim memories and isolated legends that had survived, of proper names, monuments, institutions, and customs, they therefore elaborated a superstructure of history to supply the gaps of tradition. There is not the slightest suggestion of conscious deceit or deliberate falsification of history in this; on the contrary they held in good faith that in these tales they had made successful guesses at the actual facts and thus reconstructed the original story--a naïve proceeding characteristic of myth-invention in general.

It is obvious that a history made up in this artificial fashion would not start as the connected whole presented to us in Roman historical works; this whole, in which the legend of the settlement of Æneas is brought into circumstantial relation with the founding and history of Alba Longa, and the dynasty of the Alban kings with the founding of Rome, so that the history of Rome and that of the antecedent period from the landing of Æneas to the fall of the younger Tarquin are held together by an unbroken thread of continuous historical narrative--this systematised whole must naturally have come into existence by a process of linking and welding together, the result, in part no doubt, of literary effort and reflection.

If we resolve this history into its component parts and examine each of these parts separately as to its origin and genetic motive, we perceive that the Roman legends and traditions take origin from very diverse sources and demand very diverse explanations.

First of all, we cannot but recognise that certain fundamental facts in the traditional history of the monarchy are historically true and derived from historical reminiscence. The memory of the most vital moments in the development of the Roman constitution survived, though much confused, down to the age of written records. Hence we cannot refuse a certain amount of credence to traditions relating to public law. The double state formed by the union of Romans and Sabines, the three original tribes, the succession in which they originated, the three centuries of knights, the successive augmentations of the senate till it reached the number of three hundred, the rise of a plebeian class,[9] the creation of the inferior gentes, the introduction of the censorship, the fall of the monarchy, and the establishment of the republic--these fundamental facts of early constitutional history are in all likelihood historical in essence, even though the circumstantial details (more particularly the estimates of numbers) with which they are adorned and the relation of cause and effect in which they are placed by the historian may be due to the ingenuity, or construed according to the opinion, of posterity. Round this stock of fact, however, has twined a luxuriant growth of fiction, a garland of legend, the origin of which we will forthwith proceed to examine, and so exhibit it in the germ.

A distinction is generally and rightly drawn between legend and myth. The legend is a reminiscence of remarkable events transmitted from generation to generation by oral tradition, especially by means of popular poetry, tinged with the marvellous by the imaginative faculty, more or less arbitrarily, though without conscious intention. The myth is the exact opposite. Where the legend has a kernel of historic fact, merely adorned and exaggerated by the accompaniment of fiction, the kernel and genetic motive of the myth is, on the contrary, a particular idea, and the facts of the story are merely the medium or material used by the poet to set forth and impress this idea.

If we consider the primitive history of Rome from this point of view we cannot deny that it contains both legends and myths, according to the definition just given. To take some examples--the heroic deeds of a Horatius Cocles, a Mucius Scævola, or a Clœlia, may rank as legends; Brutus is a legendary figure; the battle of Lake Regillus is coloured with the hues of legend; as are Coriolanus’ career of conquest, the destruction of the Fabii; and the march of Cincinnatus to Mount Algidus. On the other hand, we have a specimen of the myth in the begetting of Servius Tullius by the tutelary god of the Regia, a myth which expresses the idea that in this king the inmost spirit of the Roman monarchy was embodied.

A pure myth, again, and one which takes its rise from nature-symbolism, is the battle of Hercules (i.e., of Sancus the sky-god) with Cacus who belches forth fire and smoke. We have an instance of the historic myth in that which refers the disparate elements of Roman national character, in which military and political capacity were so curiously blended with religious superstition, to the disparate personality of the two original founders of Rome, the one a military ruler, regulating the state and military affairs, the other a prince of peace, regulating the religion and the worship of the gods.

But the majority of Roman traditions fall neither under the definition of legend nor of purely notional myth. Most of these traditions are what we may call ætiological myths, that is to say, they relate events and transactions which have been devised or worked up to explain genetically some present fact, the existence or the name of a ceremony, a custom, a cult, an institution, a locality, a monument, a sanctuary, and so forth. The ætiological myth is a curious variety of the myth proper. It is a myth in so far as the actual occurrences which it narrates are pure invention, but it differs from the genuine myth in this, that its starting-point and motive is not an idea or mental conception, but some external accident which the narrative is intended to show cause for and explain.

Ætiological myths are primitive, and for the most part puerile attempts at historical hypothesis. The early history of Rome is very rich in ætiological myths of this sort; the settlement of Evander, the presence of Hercules in Rome, the story concerning the Potitii and Pinarii, the Nautians taking charge of and rescuing the Palladium, the sow with the litter of thirty, the rape of the Sabines, the fair one of Talassius, the fable of the Tarpeian, the foundation of the temple of Jupiter stator, the legends concerning the origin of the name of Lacus Curtius, the miracle of Attus Navius, and other legends of the same character may serve as examples, and will be explained from this point of view in the course of the present inquiry. Plutarch’s[e] Roman Questions is a rich and instructive collection of such ætiological myths.

A sub-variety of the ætiological myth is the etymological myth, which takes as its starting-point a particular proper name and tries to explain the origin of it by a substructure of actual fact. The primitive history of Rome is rich in myths of this class also, and a multitude of the fables contained in it have been spun out of proper names. Such are the fables of Argos, Evander’s host; of the Argive colony in Rome; of the birth of Silvius Postumus in the forest; of the relations between the good Evander and the evil Cacus; the suckling of Romulus; the relation of the sucklings to the sacred fig-tree (Ficus ruminalis), the pretended origin of the Fossa Cluilia; the origin of the Tarquins from Tarquinii; the discovery of the head of Olus; the birth of Servius Tullius from a slave girl; the building of the Tullianum by the king of that name; the imbecility of Brutus; the burning of Scævola’s right hand; the conquest of Corioli by Coriolanus; and so forth.

There is another variety of Roman legend which must be distinguished from the ætiological and etymological myth: the legend which may be described as the mythic garb of actual conditions and events, and which thus stands midway between legend and myth. To this class belong, for example, the legend of the Sibyl who comes to Rome in the time of the younger Tarquin, and would have him buy nine books of divine prophecies for a great price, and who, being mocked by him, burns three books before his eyes, and yet another three, and finally sells the three remaining books to the king for the price she had asked at the beginning. There is not the slightest doubt that this legend is based on a substratum of fact, the fact that the Sibylline prophecies were probably brought from Cumæ to Rome under the second Tarquin, but this fact is clothed in a garb of poetical fiction; it is a cross between legend and myth. The same may hold good of the number of the Roman kings; these seven kings stand for and figure forth the seven fundamental facts of the ancient (pre-republican) history of Rome which have been held in historic remembrance.

Generally speaking, indeed, it is the peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of Roman myths that they are not, as a rule, pure inventions, not creations of the fancy, not, above all, like most of the tales of Greek mythology, myths based on natural philosophy or on nature-symbolism, but that they are historical myths, that a certain contemplation of actual conditions and real events lies at the bottom of them, either as the genetic motive or the raw material of the narrative. For instance, the figures of Romulus and Tatius are in themselves mythical; they never really existed, but the twofold sway ascribed to them has nevertheless something of historic truth in it; it is the mythical expression of actual historic conditions, the twofold state of the united Latins and Sabines. The same criticism applies to the conflict of Tarquinius Priscus with the augur Attus Navius; in the form in which it has been handed down it can hardly be historical; the story of the whetstone is a manifest fable, but none the less a real occurrence is imaged in it--namely, the historical conflict between the pre-Tarquinian hierarchy and the political ideas of the Tarquinian dynasty. In this way most of the myths and legends of primitive Roman history contain a deposit of historic memories and views, which can be recovered if each myth is traced back to the general fundamental conception which forms its genetic motive.

It should hardly be necessary to vindicate this view of primitive Roman history, and of the myth in general, against such objections as have recently been brought forward, as when the objectors profess to find the “frivolity” and the “vain and idle play of fancy” displayed in such myth-invention incompatible with the severity of manners and the practical genius of the old Roman races. These objections would only hit the mark if the myths were arbitrary and conscious inventions--if they were deliberate falsehoods. But this is so little their character that we may rather say that they are the only language in which a race in a certain stage of civilisation could give expression to its thoughts and ideas. For example, at the stage which the Roman people had reached when the myth was invented, they had no vocabulary which could have furnished them with a definite and exhaustive exposition of the conflict between Tarquinian and pre-Tarquinian ideas in the body politic; and they therefore had recourse to the expedient of symbolising that conflict and the course of events connected with it, and presenting them in a single significant scene, a scene which, regarded empirically, is certainly non-historic, but which is nevertheless at bottom historically true.

Let us imagine any people feeling, in a particular stage of civilisation, the need of contemplating its original character, of forming a mental image of primitive conditions concerning which it has no historical knowledge, of basing its political and religious traditions upon their first causes--how can it satisfy this need except by myth-invention? As long as it is not intellectually mature enough to advance the statements which, on the basis of its present consciousness, it makes concerning its origin as historical hypotheses, it must of necessity express these statements in symbolical form, that is, in the language of myth.

In the foregoing pages we have shown the various motives and modes of origin of the Roman legends and traditions. The legends which originated in these ways were then spun out and linked together by rational reflection; and thus there gradually came into being the whole body of legendary lore which the Roman historians found ready to their hand and set down in writing. The legend of Silvius Postumus, the ancestor of the Alban Silvii, may serve as an example of this spinning-out process. This Silvius, the story goes, was so-called because he was born in the forest--evidently an etymological myth. Therefore, the deduction proceeds, at the time of his birth his mother Lavinia must have been sojourning in the forest; therefore, she must have fled thither, presumably after the death of her husband Æneas; therefore, probably in fear of her stepson Ascanius.

It is obvious that all these statements are not founded upon tradition but are mere sophistries. Similarly, the legend of the reputed origin of Rome from a mixed rabble, and the tale that for this reason the ambassadors whom Romulus sent with offers of connubium (the right to intermarry) to the neighbouring peoples were repulsed with scornful words, is certainly based on nothing but deductions and conclusions drawn from the (purely mythical) story of the rape of the Sabines. Again, the despotic power which Romulus is said to have exercised in the latter years of his reign, and the bodyguard with which he surrounded himself, seem to be mere inferences drawn from the legend (likewise mythical in origin) of the tearing of his body piecemeal, to serve as an explanation for that enigmatical proceeding.

It is self-evident that it would be impossible to clear up every single point of the traditional history; but the mode of origin of the whole will have been made sufficiently plain by the foregoing observations.[c]

The Historical Value of the Myths

Although as we proceed with critical examination we find abundant confirmation of a general kind for the assumption that the names of the Roman kings correspond severally to a like number of originally independent communities, it is nevertheless necessary to note at this stage more precisely a hypothesis which is of the greatest moment and consequence in the consideration and investigation of the early history of the city.

In the first place, there can be no doubt that the Tarquins are real historical personages, and must therefore be conceived of in quite another fashion than the more ancient figures about which the various genealogical legends centre, and whose historical existence is due to personification alone. By adding their names to the older names the pontifices arbitrarily connected two entirely different elements, which ought in reality to be kept quite apart. The more ancient figures only--Romulus, Titus Tatius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, and Servius Tullius--are personifications, and of them only does the statement hold good that they are the representatives of diverse and distinct communities and of diverse elements of nationality. Here as everywhere legend and history meet and mingle, combining into a single line personifications and genuine historical figures, which were originally cognate but not equivalent ideas.

As for the actual names of the kings, they, as we shall presently see in individual cases, are either the real names of the communities personified, or appellations taken from special conditions which characterised such communities; they always furnish some pregnant hint concerning the nature of the people personified. It is easy to understand how these names would ultimately stand forth as the names of kings: the “king” was the representative of the community before gods and men, and the nation, if personified, would naturally appear in the status and dignity of its legal representative. Accordingly, in the several Roman kings we must recognise a representation of the several communities under kingly rule which went to make up Rome, set forth under the figure of separate reigning monarchs.

Firmly as we must now hold to the kernel of historic truth underlying these regal figures, we must not disregard the possibility that they have been disguised, overlaid, and distorted, to a very great extent, by a quantity of extraneous accessories, mythical and fictitious.

The first point which we must bear in mind is that every legend of a nation, race, or community, is intimately connected with the religion of that nation or race. In other words, the legends of the ancestral hero, the eponym, tend to be confounded with the myths of the tribal divinity in course of time, the latter are set to the credit (in part at least) of the hero of the former, and the residuum of actual historic fact in the legend becomes more and more distorted and confused. This holds good in the case of the Roman kings. In considering them therefore these mythical elements must be discarded and left out of account.

We are next confronted by a unanimous tendency to make the kings, i.e. the communities personified in them, appear as Romans from the outset. The tendency is comprehensible: the name Roman took its rise originally from one community, but in the course of time it had become an honourable title common to all, the descriptive cognomen of all citizens of the conjoint city, and every man desired to pose as a Roman of the old stock, a good citizen of the Roman commonwealth. This was, however, in direct contravention of history. The greater number of these kings, i.e. of these communities, were in reality originally strangers or even enemies, the destiny of the city had frequently accomplished itself through deadly feuds and bloody battles, and if it had been thought desirable to insist on these facts the ancient history of the city would have worn a very different aspect from that with which we are familiar. But in that case a very questionable light would have been thrown on most of the elements out of which it had grown; and hence there was naturally a general endeavour to obliterate the traces of ancient conflict. The remembrance of those old-world struggles was intentionally confused, or effaced by fictitious additions, modified by tradition, or rejected altogether.

In the only, or almost the only version in which it is known to us, the picture drawn by later hands of the most ancient history of Rome, both of the monarchy and the early days of the republic, conveys no hint, or at least only the remotest, of the crises which the city and state must have passed through before taking the form in which it became the basis of a common life and activity to all elements of the community alike. The attitude assumed by this false patriotism is chiefly responsible for the falsification of the earlier history, especially the records connected with the names of the kings.

Again, a third force which we must take into consideration as exercising a dubious influence on the form into which the primitive history of the city was cast, is the singular love of combination which distinguished the Roman priests and antiquaries. The true and original meaning of the ancient traditions, institutions, and antiquated terms in civil and ecclesiastical law, had passed out of mind in the lapse of years, and yet there was a general desire for enlightenment and a right understanding of these things. Whereupon sacerdotal wisdom, which seldom rose above the level of the schoolboy, combined with an absolute freedom, nay, an amazing boldness of arbitrary interpretation, and attempted by this means to render the ancient and extinct legends, institutions, and ideas, clear and comprehensible. From its confined point of view the most superficial likenesses, the most trivial relations, were naturally the most highly favoured in the interpretation of these traditions, ideas, and institutions. Above all, we must lay stress in this connection upon the incredible passion of these exponents for etymology. The remotest assonance of words or phrases sufficed to bring the underlying ideas into connection in their minds and to make them derive the one circumstantially from the other. These combinations and interpretations are handed on to us by antiquaries who either made them out for themselves or borrowed them as authoritative explanations and definitions from the priestly circles, or the writings of pontifices, augurs, etc. In every single case the keenest critical acumen is required to separate these manufactured combinations and deductions from the genuine deposit of older traditions.

Finally we must mention, as the last force which contributed to the distortion of primitive Roman history, the unbounded vaingloriousness of later times. The Romans suffered--the expression is permissible--from the vastness of the proportions of their state and city at a subsequent period. Theoretically they could still persuade themselves and believe that Rome had once been small, but the realisation of the fact in practical detail was beyond them. Thus, in the idea of the city current in later days, it appears as a metropolis from the time of its foundation; the peasant fights become mighty wars skilfully conducted between powerful states and cities, detail and colour being provided by the observation and technical knowledge of a later date. Before attempting to explain the conditions of the Roman monarchy we must therefore always reduce them from the scale on which they are presented to us in this picture to the scale which really befits their original proportions. The gradual rise of the city, its inception and growth step by step from the federal union of villages and settlements, must first be sought for and studied in such instances as have remained free from the influence of sacerdotal handling and vainglory.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[8] [In his desire to claim an origin for Roman legends separate from the Greek, Schwegler exaggerates the position of his opponent. In his lecture on The Influence of the Greeks over the Romans, Schlegel repeatedly admits that the debt of Rome to Greece for legendary material does not imply a total absence of original Roman matter.]

[9] [Myth, or tradition, however, represents the plebeian class as existing from the beginning of the city, though most modern writers have assumed that the plebs rose later as a class of aliens or conquered slaves.]

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V. CIVILISATION OF THE REGAL PERIOD

ORGANISATION OF THE STATE

[Sidenote: [ca. 753-510 B.C.]]

The people or citizens of Rome were divided into the three tribes of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres,[10] to whatever races we may suppose them to belong, or at whatever time and under whatever circumstances they may have become united. Each of these tribes was divided into ten smaller bodies called curiæ; so that the whole people consisted of thirty curiæ: these same divisions were in war represented by the thirty centuries which made up the legion, just as the three tribes were represented by the three centuries of horsemen; but that the soldiers of each century were exactly a hundred, is apparently an unfounded conclusion.

We have said that each tribe was divided into ten curiæ; it would be more correct to say that the union of ten curiæ formed the tribe. For the state grew out of the junction of certain original elements; and these were neither the tribes, nor even the curiæ, but the gentes[11] or houses which made up the curiæ. The first element of the whole system was the gens or house, a union of several families who were bound together by the joint performance of certain religious rites. Actually, where a system of houses has existed within historical memory, the several families who composed a house were not necessarily related to one another; they were not really cousins more or less distant, all descended from a common ancestor. But there is no reason to doubt that in the original idea of a house, the bond of union between its several families was truly sameness of blood: such was likely to be the earliest acknowledged tie; although afterwards, as names are apt to outlive their meanings, an artificial bond may have succeeded to the natural one; and a house, instead of consisting of families of real relations, was made up sometimes of families of strangers, in the hope that law, and custom, and religion, might together rival the force of nature.

Thus the state being made up of families, and every family consisting from the earliest times of members and dependents, the original inhabitants of Rome belonged all to one of two classes: they were either members of a family, and, if so, members of a house, of a curia, of a tribe, and so, lastly, of the state; or they were dependents on a family; and, if so, their relation went no further than the immediate aggregate of families, that is, the house: with the curia, with the tribe, and with the state, they had no connection.

These members of families were the original citizens of Rome; these dependents on families were the original clients.

The idea of clientship is that of a wholly private relation; the clients were something to their respective patrons, but to the state they were nothing. But wherever states composed in this manner, of a body of houses with their clients, had been long established, there grew up amidst, or close beside them, created in most instances by conquest, a population of a very distinct kind. Strangers might come to live in the land, or more commonly the inhabitants of a neighbouring district might be conquered, and united with their conquerors as a subject people. Now this population had no connection with the houses separately, but only with a state composed of those houses: this was wholly a political, not a domestic relation; it united personal and private liberty with political subjection. This inferior population possessed property, regulated their own municipal as well as domestic affairs, and as free men fought in the armies of what was now their common country. But, strictly, they were not its citizens; they could not intermarry with the houses; they could not belong to the state, for they belonged to no house, and therefore to no curia, and no tribe; consequently they had no share in the state’s government, nor in the state’s property. With whatever belonged to the state in its aggregate capacity, these, as being its neighbours merely, and not its members, had no concern.

Such an inferior population, free personally, but subject politically, not slaves, yet not citizens, was the original plebs, the commons of Rome.[12]

The mass of the Roman commons were conquered Latins. These, besides receiving grants of a portion of their former lands, to be held by them as Roman citizens, had also the hill Aventinus assigned as a residence to those of them who removed to Rome. The Aventine was without the walls, although so near to them: thus the commons were, even in the nature of their abode, like the Pfahlbürger of the Middle Ages--men not admitted to live within the city, but enjoying its protection against foreign enemies.

It will be understood at once, that whatever is said of the people in these early times, refers only to the full citizens, that is, to the members of the houses. The assembly of the people was the assembly of the curiæ; that is, the great council of the members of the houses; while the senate, consisting of two hundred senators, chosen in equal numbers from the two higher tribes of the Ramnes and Tities, was their smaller or ordinary council.

Within the walls every citizen was allowed to appeal from the king, or his judges, to the sentence of his peers; that is, to the great council of the curiæ. The king had his demesne lands, and in war would receive his portion of the conquered land, as well as of the spoil of movables.

THE STATUS OF THE MONARCHY

The dominion and greatness of the monarchy are attested by two sufficient witnesses; the great works completed at this period, and still existing; and the famous treaty with Carthage, concluded under the first consuls of the commonwealth, and preserved to us by Polybius.[f] Under the last kings the city of Rome reached the limits which it retained through the whole period of the commonwealth, and the most flourishing times of the empire. What are called the walls of Servius Tullius continued to be the walls of Rome for nearly eight hundred years, down to the emperor Aurelian. They enclosed all those well-known Seven Hills, whose fame has so utterly eclipsed the Seven Hills already described of the smaller and more ancient city.

The line of the mound or rampart may still be distinctly traced, and the course and extent of the walls can be sufficiently ascertained; but very few remains are left of the actual building. But the masonry with which the bank of the Tiber was built up, a work ascribed to the elder Tarquinius, and resembling the works of the Babylonian kings along the banks of the Euphrates, is still visible. So also are the massy substructions of the Capitoline temple, which were made in order to form a level surface for the building to stand on, upon one of the two summits of the Capitoline Hill. Above all, enough is still to be seen of the great cloaca or drain, to assure us that the accounts left us of it are not exaggerated. The foundations of this work were laid about forty feet under ground, its branches were carried under a great part of the city, and brought at last into one grand trunk which ran down into the Tiber exactly to the west of the Palatine Hill. It thus drained the waters of the low grounds on both sides of the Palatine; of the Velabrum, between the Palatine and the Aventine; and of the site of the Forum between the Palatine and the Capitoline. The stone employed in the cloaca is in itself a mark of the great antiquity of the work; it is not the peperino of Gabii and the Alban hills, which was the common building stone in the time of the commonwealth; much less the travertino, or limestone of the neighbourhood of Tibur, the material used in the great works of the early emperors; but it is the stone found in Rome itself, a mass of volcanic materials coarsely cemented together, which afterwards was supplanted by the finer quality of the peperino. Such a work as the cloaca proves the greatness of the power which effected it, as well as the character of its government. It was wrought by task-work, like the great works of Egypt; and stories were long current of the misery and degradation which it brought upon the people during its progress. But this task-work for these vast objects shows a strong and despotic government, which had at its command the whole resources of the people; and such a government could hardly have existed, unless it had been based upon some considerable extent of dominion.

What the cloaca seems to imply, we find conveyed in express terms in the treaty with Carthage. As this treaty was concluded in the very first year of the commonwealth, the state of things to which it refers must clearly be that of the latest period of the monarchy. It appears then that the whole coast of Latium was at this time subject to the Roman dominion: Ardea, Antium, Circeii, and Tarracina, are expressly mentioned as the subject allies (ὑπήκοοι) of Rome. Of these, Circeii is said in the common story to have been a Roman colony founded by the last Tarquinius; but we read of it no less than of the others as independent, and making peace or war with Rome, during the commonwealth down to a much later period. Now it is scarcely conceivable that the Romans could thus have been masters of the whole coast of Latium, without some corresponding dominion in the interior; and we may well believe that Rome was at this time the acknowledged head of the Latin cities, and exercised a power over them more resembling the sovereignty of Athens over her allies than the moderate supremacy of Lacedæmon. On the right bank of the Tiber the Romans seem to have possessed nothing on the coast; but the stories of Etruscan conquests which we find in the common accounts of Servius Tullius, are so far justified by better testimony as to make it probable that in the direction of Veii the Roman dominion had reached beyond the Tiber, and that the territory thus gained from the Etruscans formed a very considerable part of the whole territory of Rome. It is well known that the number of local tribes established by the later kings was thirty; whereas a few years after the beginning of the commonwealth we find them reduced to twenty. Now, as even the common account of the war with Porsenna describes the Romans as giving up to the Veientines a portion of territory formerly conquered from them, it becomes a very probable conjecture that the Etruscans, soon after the expulsion of the kings, recovered all the country which the kings had taken from them; and that this was so considerable in extent, that by its loss the actual territory of the Roman people was reduced by one-third from what it had been before.

It may thus be considered certain that Rome under its last kings was the seat of a great monarchy, extending over the whole of Latium on the one side, and possessing some considerable territory in Etruria on the other. But how this dominion was gained it is vain to inquire. There are accounts which represent all the three last kings of Rome, Servius Tullius no less than the two Tarquins, as of Etruscan origin. Without attempting to make out their history as individuals, it is probable that the later kings were either by birth or by long intercourse closely connected with Etruria, inasmuch as at some early period of the Roman history the religion and usages of the Etruscans gave a deep and lasting colouring to those of Rome; and yet it could not have been at the very origin of the Roman people, as the Etruscan language has left no traces of itself in the Latin; whereas if the Romans had been in part of Etruscan origin, their language, no less than their institutions, would have contained some Etruscan elements.

The Etruscan influence, however introduced, produced some effects that were lasting, and others that were only temporary; it affected the religion of Rome, down to the very final extinction of paganism; and the state of the Roman magistrates, their lictors, their ivory chairs, and their triumphal robes, are all said to have been derived from Etruria. A temporary effect of Etruscan influence may perhaps be traced in the overflow of the free constitution ascribed to Servius Tullius, in the degradation of the Roman commons under the last king, and in the endeavours of the patricians to keep them so degraded during all the first periods of the commonwealth. It is well known that the government in the cities of Etruria was an exclusive aristocracy, and that the commons, if in so wretched a condition they may be called by that honourable name, were like the mass of the people amongst the Slavonic nations, the mere serfs or slaves of the nobility. This is a marked distinction between the Etruscans, and the Sabine and Latin nations of Italy; and, as in the constitution of Servius Tullius a Latin spirit is discernible, so the tyranny which, whether in the shape of a monarchy or an aristocracy, suspended that constitution for nearly two centuries, tended certainly to make Rome resemble the cities of Etruria, and may possibly be traced originally to that same revolution which expelled the Sabine gods from the Capitol, and changed forever the simple religion of the infancy of Rome.

RELIGION

It is a remarkable story that towards the end of the sixth century of Rome, the religious books of Numa were accidentally brought to light by the discovery of his tomb under the Janiculum. They were read by A. Petillius, the prætor urbanus, and by him ordered to be burned in the comitium, because their contents tended to overthrow the religious rites then observed in Rome. We cannot but connect with this story what is told of Tarquinius the elder, how he cleared away the holy places of the Sabine gods from the Capitoline Hill, to make room for his new temple; and the statement which Augustine quotes from Varro, and which is found also in Plutarch, that during the first hundred and seventy years after the foundation of the city, the Romans had no images of their gods.

All these accounts represent a change effected in the Roman religion; and the term of one hundred and seventy years, given by Varro and Plutarch, fixes this change to the reigns of the later kings. It is said also that Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the three deities to whom the Capitoline temple was dedicated, were the very powers whose worship, according to the Etruscan religion, was essential to every city; there could be no city without three gates duly consecrated, and three temples to these divinities. But here again we gain a glimpse of something real, but cannot make it out distinctly.

Images of the gods belong rather to the religion of the Greeks than of the Etruscans; and the Greek mythology, as well as Grecian art, had been familiar in the southern Etruscan cities from a very early period, whether derived from the Tyrrhenians, or borrowed directly from Hellas or the Hellenic colonies. Grecian deities and Greek ceremonies may have been introduced, in part, along with such as were purely Etruscan. But the science of the haruspices, and especially the attention to signs in the sky, to thunder and lightning, seems to have been conducted according to the Etruscan ritual; perhaps also from the same source came that belief in the punishment of the wicked after death, to which Polybius ascribes so strong a moral influence over the minds of the Romans, even in his own days. And Etruscan rites and ordinances must have been widely prevalent in the Roman commonwealth, when, as some writers asserted, the Roman nobility were taught habitually the Etruscan language, and when the senate provided by a special decree for the perpetual cultivation of the Etruscan discipline by young men of the highest nobility in Etruria; lest a science so important to the commonwealth should be corrupted by falling into the hands of low and mercenary persons.

CONSTITUTION

Nothing is more familiar to our ears than the name of the classes and centuries of Servius Tullius; nothing is more difficult, even after the immortal labour of Niebuhr,[c] than to answer all the questions which naturally arise connected with this part of the Roman history. But first of all, in considering the changes effected in the Roman constitution during the later period of the monarchy, we find another threefold division of them presenting itself. We have, first, the enlargement of the older constitution, on the same principles, in the addition to the number of senators and of the centuries of the knights, commonly ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus. Second, we have the establishment of a new constitution on different principles, in the famous classes and centuries of Servius Tullius. And, third, we have the overthrow, to speak generally, of this new constitution, and the return to the older state of things, modified by the great increase of the king’s power, in the revolution effected by Tarquinius Superbus, and in his subsequent despotism.

The old constitution was enlarged upon the same principles, in the increase of the number of senators, and of the centuries of the knights. It has been already shown that the older constitution was an oligarchy, as far as the clients and commons were concerned; it is no less true, that it was democratical, as far as regarded the relations of the citizens, or members of the houses, to each other. Both these characters, with a slight modification, were preserved in the changes made by Tarquinius Priscus. He doubled, it is said, the actual number of senators, or rather of patrician houses; which involved a corresponding increase in the numbers of the senate; but the houses thus ennobled, to use a modern term, were distinguished from the old by the title of the “lesser houses”; and their senators did not vote till after the senators of the greater houses.

According to the same system, the king proposed to double the number of the tribes, that is, to divide his newly created houses into three tribes, to stand beside the three tribes of the old houses, the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres. Now as the military divisions of the old commonwealths went along with the civil divisions, the tribes of the commonwealth were the centuries of the army; and if three new tribes were added, it involved also the addition of three new centuries of knights or horsemen; and it is in this form that the proposed change is represented in the common stories. But here it is said that the interest of the old citizens, taking the shape of a religious objection, was strong enough to force the king to modify his project. No new tribes were created, and consequently no new centuries; but the new houses were enrolled in the three old centuries, so as to form a second division in each, and thus to continue inferior in dignity to the old houses in every relation of the commonwealth. It may be fairly supposed, that these second centuries in the army were also second tribes and second curiæ in the civil divisions of the state; and that the members of the new houses voted after those of the old ones no less in the great council, the comitia of the curiæ, than in the smaller council of the senate.

The causes which led to this enlargement of the old constitution may be readily conceived. Whether Tarquinius was a Latin or an Etruscan, all the stories agree in representing him as a foreigner, who gained the throne by his wealth and personal reputation. The mere growth of the Roman state would, in the natural course of things, have multiplied new families, which had risen to wealth, and were in their former country of noble blood; but which were excluded from the curiæ, that is, from the rights of citizenship at Rome; the time was come to open to them the doors of the commonwealth; and a foreign king, ambitious of adding to the strength of his kingdom, if it were but for the sake of his own greatness, was not likely to refuse or put off the opportunity. Beyond this we are involved in endless disputes and difficulties; who the Luceres were, and why Tarquinius raised them to a level with the old tribes, we never can determine.

That there were only four vestal virgins before, and that Tarquinius made them six, would certainly seem to show, that a third part of the state had hitherto been below the other two-thirds, at least in matters of religion; for it was always acknowledged that the six vestal virgins represented the three tribes of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, two for each tribe. But in the additions made to the senate and to the centuries, the new citizens must have been more than a third of the old ones; and indeed here the story supposes that in military matters, at any rate, the Luceres were already on an equality with the Ramnes and Tities. It is enough therefore to say, that there had arisen at Rome so great a number of distinguished families, of whatever origin, or from whatever causes, that an extension of the rights of citizenship became natural and almost necessary: but as these were still only a small part of the whole population, the change went no further than to admit them into the aristocracy; leaving the character and privileges of the aristocracy itself, with regard to the mass of the population, precisely the same as they had been before.

But a far greater change was effected soon afterwards; no less than the establishment of a new constitution, on totally different principles. This constitution is no doubt historical, however uncertain may be the accounts which relate to its reputed author. “The good king Servius and his just laws,” were the objects of the same fond regret amongst the Roman commons, when suffering under the tyranny of the aristocracy, as the laws of the good king Edward the Confessor amongst the English after the Norman conquest; and imagination magnified, perhaps, the merit of the one no less than of the other: yet the constitution of Servius was a great work, and well deserves to be examined and explained. Servius, like Tarquinius, is represented as a foreigner, and is said also, like him, to have ascended the throne to the exclusion of the sons of the late king. According to the account which Livy[d] followed, he was acknowledged by the senate, but not by the people; and this, which seemed contradictory so long as the people, populus, and the commons, plebs, were confounded together, is in itself consistent and probable, when it is understood that the people, who would not acknowledge Servius, were the houses assembled in their great council of the curiæ, and that these were likely to be far less manageable by the king whom they disliked, than the smaller council of their representatives assembled in the senate. Now supposing that the king, whoever he may have been, was unwelcome to what was then the people, that is, to the only body of men who enjoyed civil rights, it was absolutely necessary for him, unless he would maintain his power as a mere tyrant, through the help of a foreign paid guard, to create a new and different people out of the large mass of inhabitants of Rome who had no political existence, but who were free, and in many instances wealthy and of noble origin; who therefore, although now without rights, were in every respect well fitted to receive them.

The principle of an aristocracy is equality within its own body, ascendency over all the rest of the community. Opposed to this is the system, which, rejecting these extremes of equality and inequality, subjects no part of the community to another, but gives a portion of power to all; not an equal portion however, but one graduated according to a certain standard, which standard has generally been property. Accordingly, this system has both to do away with distinctions and to create them; to do away, as it has generally happened, with distinctions of birth, and to create distinctions of property. Thus at Rome, in the first instance, the tribes or divisions of the people took a different form.

The old three tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, had been divisions of birth, real or supposed; each was made up of the houses of the curiæ, and no man could belong to the tribe without first belonging to a curia, and to a house; nor could any stranger become a member of a house except by the rite of adoption, by which he was made as one of the same race, and therefore a lawful worshipper of the same gods. Each of these tribes had its portion of the Ager Romanus, the old territory of Rome. But now, as many others had become Romans in the course of time, without belonging to either of these three tribes, that is, had come to live under the Roman kings, many in Rome itself, and had received grants of land from the kings beyond the limits of the old Ager Romanus, a new division was made including all these; and the whole city and territory of Rome, except the Capitol, were divided into thirty tribes, four for the city, and twenty-six for the country, containing all the Romans who were not members of the houses, and classing them according to the local situation of their property. These thirty tribes corresponded to the thirty curiæ of the houses; for the houses were used to assemble, not in a threefold division, according to their tribes, but divided into thirty, according to their curiæ: and the commons were to meet and settle all their own affairs in the assembly of their tribes, as the houses met and settled theirs in the assembly of their curiæ.

Thus then there were two bodies existing alongside of each other, analogous to the House of Lords and the House of Commons of England’s ancient constitution, two estates distinct from and independent of each other, but with no means as yet provided for converting them into states-general or a parliament. Nor could they have acted together as jointly legislating for the whole nation; for the curiæ still regarded themselves as forming exclusively the Roman people, and would not allow the commons, as such, to claim any part in the highest acts of national sovereignty.[13] There was one relation, however, in which the people and the commons felt that they belonged to one common country, in which they were accustomed to act together, and in which therefore it was practicable to unite them into one great body. This was when they marched out to war; then, if not equally citizens of Rome, they felt that they were alike Romans.

It has ever been the case, that the distinctions of peace vanish amidst the dangers of war; arms and courage, and brotherhood in perils, confer of necessity power and dignity. Thus we hear of armies on their return home from war stopping before they entered the city walls to try, in their military character, all offences or cases of misconduct which had occurred since they had taken the field: whereas when once they had entered the walls, civil relations were reassumed, and all trials were conducted according to other forms, and before other judges. This will explain the peculiar constitution of the comitia of centuries, which was a device for uniting the people and the commons into a national and sovereign assembly in their capacity of soldiers, without shocking those prejudices which as yet placed a barrier between them as soon as they returned to the relations of peace.

THE ORGANISATION OF THE ARMY

But in order to do this with effect, and to secure in this great assembly a preponderance to the commons, a change in the military organisation and tactics of the army became indispensable. In all aristocracies in an early stage of society, the ruling order or class has fought on horseback or in chariots and their subjects or dependents have fought on foot. The cavalry service under these circumstances has been cultivated, that of the infantry neglected; the mounted noble has been well armed and carefully trained in warlike exercises, whilst his followers on foot have been ill armed and ill disciplined, and quite incapable of acting with equal effect. The first great step then towards raising the importance of the infantry, or in other words, of the commons of a state, was to train them to resist cavalry, to form them into thick masses instead of a thin extended line, to arm them with the pike instead of the sword or the javelin. Thus the phalanx order of battle was one of the earliest improvements in the art of war; and at the time we are now speaking of, this order was in general use in Greece, and must have been well known, if only through the Greek colonies, in Italy also. Its introduction into the Roman army would be sure to make the infantry from henceforward more important than the cavalry; that is, it would enable the commons to assert a greater right in Rome than could be claimed by the houses, inasmuch as they could render better service. Again, the phalanx order of battle furnished a ready means for giving importance to a great number of the less wealthy commons, who could not supply themselves with complete armour; while on the other hand it suggested a natural distinction between them and their richer fellows, and thus established property as the standard of political power, the only one which can in the outset compete effectually with the more aristocratical standard of birth; although in a later stage of society it becomes itself aristocratical, unless it be duly tempered by the mixture of a third standard, education and intelligence. In a deep phalanx, the foremost ranks needed to be completely armed, but those in the rear could neither reach or be reached by the enemy, and only served to add weight to the charge of the whole body. These points being remembered, we may now proceed to the details of the great comitia of Servius.

The traditional reformer, Servius Tullius, found the knights of Rome divided into three centuries of horsemen, each of which, in consequence of the accession to its numbers made by the last king, contained within itself two centuries, a first and a second. The old citizens, anxious in all things to keep up the old form of the state, had then prevented what were really six centuries from being acknowledged as such in name; but the present change extended to the name as well as the reality; and the three double centuries of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, became now the six votes (sex suffragia) of the new united assembly. To these, which contained all the members of the houses, there were now added twelve new centuries of knights,[14] formed, as usual in the Greek states, from the richest members of the community, continuing, like the centuries below them, to belong to the thirty tribes of the commons.

Classes of Foot-soldiers

It remained to organise the foot-soldiers of the state. Accordingly, all those of the commons whose property was sufficient to qualify them for serving even in the hindmost ranks of the phalanx, were divided into four classes. Of these the first class contained all whose property amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ weight of copper. The soldiers of this class were required to provide themselves with the complete arms used in the front ranks of the phalanx; the greaves, the coat of mail, the helmet, and the round shield, all of brass; the sword, and the peculiar weapon of the heavy-armed infantry, the long pike. And as these were to bear the brunt of every battle, and were the flower of the state’s soldiers, so their weight in the great military assembly was to be in proportion; they formed eighty centuries; forty of younger men, between the ages of fifteen and forty-five years complete; and forty of elders, between forty-five and sixty: the first to serve in the field, the second to defend the city. The second class contained those whose property fell short of 100,000 pounds of copper, and exceeded or amounted to 75,000 pounds. They formed twenty centuries, ten of younger men, and ten of elders; and they were allowed to dispense with the coat of mail, and to bear the large oblong wooden shield called scutum, instead of the round brazen shield, clipeus, of the first ranks of the phalanx. The third class contained a like number of centuries, equally divided into those of the younger men and elders; its qualification was property between 50,000 pounds of copper, and 75,000 pounds; and the soldiers of this class were allowed to lay aside the greaves as well as the coat of mail. The fourth class again contained twenty centuries; the lowest point of its qualification was 25,000 pounds of copper, and its soldiers were required to provide no defensive armour, but to go to battle merely with the pike and a javelin. These four classes composed the phalanx; but a fifth class divided into thirty centuries, and consisting of those whose property was between 25,000 pounds of copper and 12,500, formed the regular light-armed infantry of the army, and were required to provide themselves with darts and slings.[15]

The poorest citizens, whose property fell short of 12,500 pounds, were considered in a manner as supernumeraries in this division. Those who had more than 1,500 pounds of copper, were still reckoned amongst the taxpayers (assidui), and were formed into two centuries, called the accensi and velati. They followed the army, but without bearing arms, being only required to step into the places of those who fell; and in the meantime acting as orderlies to the centurions and decurions. Below these came one century of the proletarii, whose property was between 1,500 pounds and 375 pounds. These paid no taxes, and in ordinary times had no military duty; but on great emergencies arms were furnished them by the government, and they were called out as an extraordinary levy. One century more included all whose property was less than 375 pounds, and who were called capite censi; and from these last no military service was at any time required, as we are told, till a late period of the republic.

Three centuries of a different character from all the rest remain to be described, centuries defined not by the amount of their property, but by the nature of their occupation; those of carpenters and smiths (fabrorum); of hornblowers (cornicines); and of trumpeters (tubicines), or, as Cicero calls them (liticines). The first of these was attached to the centuries of the first class, the other two to the fourth. The nature of their callings so connected them with the service of the army, that this peculiar distinction was granted to them.[16]

The position held in the comitia by the patricians’ clients is involved in great obscurity. We know that they had votes, and probably they must have been enrolled in the classes according to the amount of their property, without reference to its nature: at the same time Niebuhr[c] thinks that they did not serve in the regular infantry along with the plebeians. It would seem from the story of the three hundred Fabii, and from the adventures related of Caius Marcius, that the clients followed their lords to the field at their bidding, and formed a sort of feudal force quite distinct from the national army of the commons, like the retainers of the nobles in the Middle Ages, as distinguished from the free burghers of the cities.

Such is the account transmitted to us of the constitution of the comitia of centuries. As their whole organisation was military, so they were accustomed to meet without the city, in the Field of Mars; they were called together, not by lictors, like the comitia of the curiæ, but by the blast of the horn: and their very name was “the Army of the City,” Exercitus Urbanus.

It is quite plain that this constitution tended to give the chief power in the state to the body of the commons, and especially to the richer class among them, who fought in the first ranks of the phalanx. For wherever there is a well-armed and well-disciplined infantry, it constitutes the main force of an army; and it is a true observation of Aristotle, that in the ancient commonwealths the chief power was apt to be possessed by that class of the people whose military services were most important: thus when the navy of Athens became its great support and strength, the government became democratical; because the ships were manned by the poorer classes.

POPULAR INSTITUTIONS

Other good and popular institutions were ascribed to the reign of Servius. As he had made the commons an order in the state, so he gave them judges out of their own body to try all civil causes; whereas before they had no jurisdiction, but referred all their suits either to the king or to the houses. These judges were, as Niebuhr[c] thinks, the centumviri, the hundred men of a later period, elected three from each tribe, so that in the time of Servius their number would probably have been ninety.

To give a further organisation to the commons, he is said also to have instituted the festivals called Paganalia and Compitalia. In the tribes in the country, many strongholds on high ground, pagi, had been fixed upon as general refuges for the inhabitants and their cattle in case of invasion. Here they all met once a year to keep festival, and every man, woman, and child paid on these occasions a certain sum, which being collected by the priests gave the amount of the whole population. And for the same purpose, every one living in the city paid a certain sum at the temple of Juno Lucina for every birth in his family, another sum at the temple of Venus Libitina for every death, and a third at the temple of Youth for every son who came to the age of military service. The Compitalia in the city answered to the Paganalia in the country, and were yearly festivals in honour of the Lares or guardian spirits, celebrated at all the compita, or places where several streets met.

Other laws and measures are ascribed to Servius, which seem to be the fond invention of a later period, when the commons, suffering under a cruel and unjust system, and wishing its overthrow, gladly believed that the deliverance which they longed for had been once given them by their good king, and that they were only reclaiming old rights, not demanding new ones. Servius, it is said, drove out the patricians from their unjust occupation of the public land, and ordered that the property only, and not the person, of a debtor should be liable for the payment of his debt.

Further, to complete the notion of a patriot king, it was said that he had drawn out a scheme of popular government, by which two magistrates, chosen every year, were to exercise the supreme power, and that he himself proposed to lay down his kingly rule to make way for them. It can hardly be doubted that these two magistrates were intended to be chosen the one from the houses and the other from the commons, to be the representatives of their respective orders.

But the following tyranny swept away the institutions of Servius, and much more prevented the growth of that society for which alone his institutions were fitted. No man can tell how much of the story of the murder of the old king and of the impiety of the wicked Tullia is historical; but it is certain that the houses, or rather a strong faction among them, supported Tarquinius in his usurpation: nor can we doubt the statement that the aristocratical brotherhoods or societies served him more zealously than the legal assembly of the curiæ; because these societies are ever to be met with in the history of the ancient commonwealths, as pledged to one another for the interests of their order, and ready to support those interests by any crime. Like Sulla in after-times, he crushed the liberties of the commons, doing away with the laws of Servius, and, as we are told, destroying the tables on which they were written; abolishing the whole system of the census, and consequently the arrangement of the classes, and with them the organisation of the phalanx; and forbidding even the religious meetings of the Paganalia and Compitalia, in order to undo all that had been done to give the commons strength and union.

Further it is expressly said by Dionysius[e] that he formed his military force out of a small portion of the people, and employed the great bulk of them in servile works, in the building of the circus and the Capitoline temple, and the completion of the great drain or cloaca; so that in his wars, his army consisted of his allies, the Latins and Hernicans, in a much greater proportion than of Romans. His enmity to the commons was all in the spirit of Sulla; and the members of the aristocratical societies, who were his ready tools in every act of confiscation, or legal murder, or mere assassination, were faithfully represented by the agents of Sulla’s proscription, by L. Catilina and his patrician associates. But in what followed, Tarquinius showed himself, like Critias or Appius Claudius, a mere vulgar tyrant, who preferred himself to his order, when the two came into competition, and far inferior to Sulla, the most sincere of aristocrats, who, having secured the ascendency of his order, was content to resign his own personal power, who was followed therefore by the noblest as well as by the vilest of his countrymen, by Pompey and Catulus no less than by Catiline.

Thus Tarquinius became hated by all that was good and noble amongst the houses, as well as by the commons; and both orders cordially joined to effect his overthrow. But the evil of his tyranny survived him; it was not so easy to restore what he had destroyed as to expel him and his family; the commons no longer stood beside the patricians as an equal order, free, wealthy, well armed, and well organised; they were now poor, ill armed, and with no bonds of union; they therefore naturally sank beneath the power of the nobility, and the revolution which drove out the Tarquins established at Rome not a free commonwealth, but on the other hand an exclusive and tyrannical aristocracy.

THE WEALTH OF THE ROMANS AND ITS SOURCES

Niebuhr[c] has almost exhausted the subject of the Roman copper money. He has shown its originally low value, owing to the great abundance of the metal; that as it afterwards became scarce, a reduction in the weight of the coin followed naturally, not as a fraudulent depreciation of it, but because a small portion of it was now as valuable as a large mass had been before. The plenty of copper in early times is owing to this, that where it is found, it exists often in immense quantities, and even in large masses of pure metal on the surface of the soil. Thus the Copper Indians of North America found it in such abundance on their hills that they used it for all domestic purposes; but the supply thus easily obtained soon became exhausted.

The small value of copper at Rome is shown not only by the size of the coins, they having been at first a full pound in weight, but also by the price of the war-horse, according to the regulation of Servius Tullius, namely ten thousand pounds of copper.[17] This statement, connected as it is with the other details of the census, seems original and authentic; nor considering the great abundance of cattle, and other circumstances, is it inconsistent with the account in Plutarch’s life of Publicola, that an ox in the beginning of the commonwealth, was worth one hundred oboli, and a sheep worth ten; nor with the provisions of the Aternian law, which fixed the price of the one at one hundred asses and the other at ten.

The sources of wealth amongst the Romans, under their later kings, were agriculture, and also, in a large proportion, foreign commerce. Agriculture, indeed, strictly speaking, could scarcely be called a source of wealth; for the portions of land assigned to each man, even if from the beginning they were as much as seven jugera, were not large enough to allow of the growth of much superfluous produce. The ager publicus, or undivided public land, was indeed of considerable extent, and this as being enjoyed exclusively by the patricians might have been a source of great profit. But in the earliest times it seems probable that the greatest part of this land was kept as pasture; and only the small portions of two jugera, allotted by the houses to their clients, to be held during pleasure, were appropriated to tillage.[18] The low prices of sheep and oxen show that cattle must have been abundant; the earliest revenue according to Pliny[g] was derived from pasture; that is, the patricians paid so much to the state for their enjoyment of the ager publicus, which was left unenclosed as pasture ground; and all accounts speak of the great quantities of cattle reared in Italy from time immemorial. Cattle then may have been a source of wealth; but commerce must have been so in a still greater degree.

The early foundation of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, ascribed to Ancus Marcius, could have had no object, unless the Romans had been engaged in foreign trade; and the treaty with Carthage, already alluded to, proves the same thing directly and undeniably. In this treaty the Romans are allowed to trade with Sardinia, with Sicily, and with Africa westward of the Fair Headland, that is, with Carthage itself, and all the coast westward to the Pillars of Hercules; and it is much more according to the common course of things that this treaty should have been made to regulate a trade already in activity, than to call it for the first time into existence. By this commerce great fortunes were sure to be made, because there were as yet so many new markets open to the enterprising trader, and none perhaps where the demand for his goods had been so steadily and abundantly supplied as to destroy the profit of his traffic.

But although much wealth must thus have been brought into Rome, it is another question how widely it was distributed. Was foreign trade open to every Roman, or was it confined to the patricians and their clients, and in a still larger proportion to the king? The king had large domains of his own, partly arable, partly pasture, and partly planted with vines and olives; hence he was in a condition to traffic with foreign countries, and much of the Roman commerce was probably carried on by the government for its own direct benefit, as was the case in Judea in the reign of Solomon. The patricians also, we may be sure, exported, like the Russian nobility, the skins and wool of the numerous herds and flocks which they fed upon their public land, and were the owners of trading ships, as it was not till three centuries afterwards that a law was passed with the avowed object of restraining senators, a term then become equivalent with patricians, from possessing ships of large burden.

All these classes then might, and probably did, become wealthy; but it may be doubted whether the plebeian landholders had the same opportunities open to them. Agriculture was to them the business of their lives; if their estates were ill cultivated, they were liable to be degraded from their order.

Beyond this we have scarcely the means of proceeding. Setting aside the tyranny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering that it was his policy to deprive the commons of their lately acquired citizenship, and to treat them like subjects rather than members of the state, the picture given of the wealth and greatness of Judea under Solomon may convey some idea of the state of Rome under its later kings. Powerful amongst surrounding nations, exposed to no hostile invasions, with a flourishing agriculture and an active commerce, the country was great and prosperous; and the king was enabled to execute public works of the highest magnificence, and to invest himself with a splendour unknown in the earlier times of the monarchy. The last Tarquinius was guilty of individual acts of oppression, we may be sure, towards the patricians no less than the plebeians; but it was these last whom he laboured on system to depress and degrade, and whom he employed, as Solomon did the Canaanites, in all the servile and laborious part of his undertakings. Still the citizens or patricians themselves found that the splendour of his government had its burdens for them also; as the great majority of the Israelites, amid all the peace and prosperity of Solomon’s reign, and although exempted from all servile labour, and serving only in honourable offices, yet complained that they had endured a grievous yoke, and took the first opportunity to relieve themselves from it by banishing the house of Solomon from among them forever.[b]

ROMAN EDUCATION

The aim of education in the family and in public life was to repress the freedom of the individual in the interest of the state, to make a nation of brave warriors and of dutiful citizens. The highest results of this stern training were reached in the Samnite wars,--a period known thereafter as the golden age of virtue and of heroism. A citizen of this time was, in the highest degree, obedient to authority, pious, frugal, and generally honest. But though he was willing to sacrifice his life for the good of the state, he was equally ready to enrich himself at the expense of his neighbours; the wealthy did not hesitate to sell the poor into slavery for debt, till they were forbidden to do so by law. Their hard, stern souls knew neither generosity nor mercy. Severe toward the members of their family, cruel in the treatment of slaves, and in their business transactions shrewd and grasping, the Romans of the time, however admirable for their heroic virtues, were narrow, harsh, and unlovable. Greed was one of their strongest motives for conquest. Not for glory,--much less for the good of their neighbours,--did they extend their power over Italy; it was rather that more of the peasants might be supplied with farms and that the nobles might be given larger tracts of the public land and a greater number of places of honour and of profit to use and to enjoy.

As long as they remained poor and under strict discipline, they were moral. In the following period they were to gain greater freedom from the control of their magistrates and, at the same time, power and wealth. These new conditions were to put their virtue and even their government to the severest test.[i]

MORALS AND POLITICS OF THE AGE

It is difficult to form a clear idea of the moral character of the Roman people under its kings, because we cannot be sure that the pictures handed down to us of that period were not copied from the manners of a later time, and thus represent in fact the state of the Commonwealth rather than that of the Monarchy. Thus the simple habits of Lucretia seem copied from the matrons of the republic in the time of its early poverty, and cannot safely be ascribed to the princesses of the magnificent house of the Tarquinii. Again, we can scarcely tell how far we may carry back the origin of those characteristic points in the later Roman manners, the absolute authority possessed by the head of a family over his wife and children. But it is probable that they are of great antiquity; for the absolute power of a father over his sons extended only to those who were born in that peculiar form of marriage called connubium, a connection which anciently could only subsist between persons of the same order, and which was solemnised by a peculiar ceremony called confarreatio; a ceremony so sacred, that a marriage thus contracted could only be dissolved by certain unwonted and horrible rites, purposely ordered as it seems to discourage the practice of divorce.

All these usages point to a very great antiquity, and indicate the early severity of the Roman domestic manners, and the habits of obedience which every citizen learned under his father’s roof. This severity, however, did not imply an equal purity; connubium could only be contracted with one wife, but the practice of concubinage was tolerated, although the condition of a concubine is marked as disreputable by a law so old as to be ascribed to Numa. And the indecency of some parts of the ancient religious worship, and the licence allowed at particular festivals, at marriages, and in the festal meetings of men amongst themselves, belong so much to an agricultural people, as well as to human nature in general, that these too may be safely presumed to be co-eval with the very origin of the Roman nation.

But the most striking point in the character of the Romans, and that which has so permanently influenced the condition of mankind, was their love of institutions and of order, their reverence for law, their habit of considering the individual as living only for that society of which he was a member. This character, the very opposite to that of the barbarian and the savage, belongs apparently to that race to which the Greeks and Romans both belong, by whatever name, Pelasgian, Tyrrhenian, or Sicelian, we choose to distinguish it. It has indeed marked the Teutonic race, but in a less degree: the Celts have been strangers to it, nor do we find it developed amongst the nations of Asia: but it strongly characterises the Dorians in Greece, and the Romans; nor is it wanting among the Ionians, although in these last it was modified by that individual freedom which arose naturally from the surpassing vigour of their intellect, the destined well-spring of wisdom to the whole world. But in Rome, as at Lacedæmon, as there was much less activity of reason, so the tendency to regulate and to organise was much more predominant.

Accordingly we find traces of this character in the very earliest traditions of Roman story. Even in Romulus, his institutions go hand in hand with his deeds in arms; and the wrath of the gods darkened the last years of the warlike Tullus, because he had neglected the rites and ordinances established by Numa. Numa and Servius, whose memory was cherished most fondly, were known only as lawgivers; Ancus, like Romulus, is the founder of institutions as well as the conqueror, and one particular branch of law is ascribed to him as its author, the ceremonial to be observed before going to war. The two Tarquinii are represented as of foreign origin, and the character of their reigns is foreign also. They are great warriors and great kings; they extend the dominion of Rome; they enlarge the city and embellish it with great and magnificent works; but they add nothing to its institutions; and it was the crime of the last Tarquinius to undo those good regulations which his predecessor had appointed.

THE FINE ARTS

It is allowed, on all hands, that the works of art executed in Rome under the later kings, whether architecture or sculpture, were of Etruscan origin; but what is meant by “Etruscan,” and how far Etruscan art was itself derived from Greece, are questions which have been warmly disputed. The statue of Jupiter in the Capitol, and the four-horsed chariot on the summit of the temple, together with most of the statues of the gods, were at this period wrought in clay; bronze was not generally employed till a later age. There is no mention of any paintings in Rome itself earlier than the time of the commonwealth; but Pliny[g] speaks of some frescoes at Ardea and at Cære, which he considered to be older than the very foundation of the city, and which in his own age preserved the freshness of their colouring, and in his judgment were works of remarkable merit. The Capitoline temple itself was built nearly in the form of a square, each side being about two hundred feet in length; its front faced southwards, towards the Forum and the Palatine, and had a triple row of pillars before it, while a double row enclosed the sides of the temple. These, it is probable, were not of marble, but made either of the stone of Rome itself, like the cloaca, or possibly from the quarries of Gabii or Alba.

Of the Roman mind under the kings, Cicero knew no more than we do. He had seen no works of that period, whether of historians or of poets; he had never heard the name of a single individual whose genius had made it famous, and had preserved its memory together with his own. A certain number of laws ascribed to the kings, and preserved, whether on tables of wood or brass in the Capitol, or in the collection of the jurist Papirius, were almost the sole monuments which could illustrate the spirit of the early ages of the Roman people. But even these, to judge from the few extracts with which we are acquainted, must have been modernised in their language; for the Latin of a law ascribed to Servius Tullius is perfectly intelligible, and not more ancient in its forms than that of the fifth century of Rome; whereas the few genuine monuments of the earliest times, the hymns of the Salii, and of the Brotherhood of Husbandry, Fratres Arvales, required to be interpreted to the Romans of Cicero’s time like a foreign language; and of the hymn of the Fratres Arvales we can ourselves judge, for it has been accidentally preserved to our days, and the meaning of nearly half of it is only to be guessed at. This agrees with what Polybius says of the language of the treaty between Rome and Carthage, concluded in the first year of the commonwealth; it was so unlike the Latin of his own time, the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century of Rome, that even those who understood it best found some things in it which with their best attention they could scarcely explain. Thus, although verses were undoubtedly made and sung in the times of the kings, at funerals and at feasts, in commemoration of the worthy deeds of the noblest of the Romans and although some of the actual stories of the kings may perhaps have come down from this source, yet it does not appear that they were ever written; and thus they were altered from one generation to another, nor can any one tell at what time they attained to their present shape. Traces of a period much later than that of the kings may be discerned in them; and we see no reason to differ from the opinion of Niebuhr,[c] who thinks that as we now have them they are not earlier than the restoration of the city after the invasion of the Gauls.

If this be so, there rests a veil not to be removed, not only on the particular history of the early Romans, but on that which we should much more desire to know--and which in the case of the Greeks stands out in such full light--the nature and power of their genius, what they thought, what they hated, and what they loved.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[10] [Cf. page 51, note 1.]

[11] [According to Meyer,[h] Botsford,[i] and others, however, the gens was not primitive, but a growth of the late regal and early republican periods; the city developing from the canton, a group of villages with a common place of refuge on a hill-top.]

[12] [Though this view of the status of the social ranks is that of the majority of modern authorities, certain prominent historians like Meyer[h] are returning to the theory of the ancient writers--that the clients and the plebeians were citizens from the beginning, with the right of voting in the curiæ, and that the patricians were simply the nobles.]

[13] [Cf. page 104, note.]

[14] [According to some writers this was not done till a century later.]

[15] [Doubtless in the original organisation the classes were based not upon the money value of property but upon the amount of land possessed by the citizens, the value being later represented by its money equivalent. It is also asserted that the first three classes formed the phalanx of heavy-armed infantry, whereas the last two classes composed the light-armed force. It is asserted further that the centuriate organisation applied only to the army in the field. Towards the end of the regal period, then, the army in active service would consist regularly of eighty-four centuries of infantry and six centuries of cavalry. All scholars agree that the so-called Servian organisation was purely military, and that the comitia centuriata gradually developed from it. The army and the comitia were never strictly identical in composition: cf. Soltau.[j]]

[16] [There being in public life no difference between clients and plebeians, such stories as that of the Fabii and their clients may indicate the survival of a primitive military organisation after the phalanx was introduced.]

[17] [This valuation, however, originated after the coins had been lightened.]

[18] [More probably the clients received two jugera as private, hereditary property, while they tilled, as tenants or for hire, the arable lands of their lord.]

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