ST NEGATIVE NO 91-80106-2 MICROFILMED 1992 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States --- Title 17, United States Code - concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copynghted material..^. Columbia University Library reserves the riaht to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its^udgemient, fulffllment of the order would involve violation of the copvrisht law. AUTHOR: DYER, THOMAS HENRY TITLE: HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME PLACE: LONDON DATE: 1868 c:o ! . [jhim A \ : Ni 1 V i ■: K-;ni' 1 115 r .\ k i r^; IM^ESEHVATION DL-PARTMHNT JlllllJQGEAl!iiiC \I i C R OFORM TAR HFT Master Negalive U -_^L'i?JP_(^j_ Origiiiai Mait^riai as I'ilnied - Existing Bibliographic Record I ;874*01 iD98 Dyer, Thomas Henry, 1804-1888. The history of the kings of "Rome. "^.Vifli a prefaforr dissertation on its sources and evidence. By Tliottias Henry Dyer ... London , Bell and Dald\ , l^^f h, cxxxv,440p. ly-. Philadelphia, Lippincott. 1. Rome — Hist. — Kings, b. c. 753-510. I, 4-37251 Library of Congress — ^ DG233.D9 ixi'btrictiuiis on Use: TECHMC aTmICROFORM DATA FTl.N! SIZE: 'l£_*^_'n^ __ REDUCTION RATIO: H X IMAGE IT. ACl-MENT: lA @ IB IIB DATE FIEMED:,,.^_.__^_^lj_^ I INEIiAES >, . D C i'lIAllillliY: R[ SEARCH PUBLICATIONS, INC W( )( )1 )HRTnnF~rT r Association for information and Image Management 1100 Wayne Avenue, Suite 1100 Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 mi IIIIHIIIMIIIIIIIIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII liiiiliiiil 5 6 iiiliiiiliiiiliii 7 8 9 uiluuiuiiluuiuuu 10 llllllll 11 12 13 14 15 mm liiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiil Inches TIT I I I 2 1.0 I.I 1.25 1^ 2.8 2.5 y£ 1^ 3.2 2.2 iH 3.6 IZi ■^ III US III 4.0 2.0 u li .. i£;u,u. 1.8 1.4 1.6 YTTTJ MnNUFfiCTURED TO flllM STPNOnRDS BY fiPPLIED IMnCE, INC. K , " m !U. ^ m: 5»T; m &■;■ r.¥,i m ■""M i'Ws ::!&' K-itm ■M -% 4 .'A -K i ^^p'. ^S' Rff- Hml^ w,t,^ BM ^''' B' " Mi I 'H.JS last ' •plmH •'^iiff 1 1 w/^^H If i ^ P^ '/vf 1 i'l-:-' K ■ " m'f **' -* ' \ p r-^'- V'V'i ■;: BlwT'' ■■ 1* R|' ••5f; J. iii- 'tfel 8 14-, 01 :i]58 in the ffiitu of %Um Dovh %ihxux^ THE HISTORY vl- THE KINGS OF EOME. With A PKEFATOP.Y DISSERTATION ON ITS SOUIiCES AND EVIDENCE. If BY THOMAS HENRY DYER, LL.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 8T. ANDREWS. COL.COT4.. N.YORK, y PHILADELPHIA : J. B. LIPPINCOTT AND CO. 1868. PllErACH. I Si 'Si The design of most of tlio recent historians of Home appears to liave been to obliterate as much as they could of its ancient history. " Negemus omnia ; comburamus annales, iicta haec esse dicamus " — such seems to liave been the maxim of almost every critic and historian avIio has handled this subject since the days of Niebuhr. The Germans have of course taken the lead in this crusade, as in eveiything else connected with classical literature, and, in England at least, they have been almost implicitly followed; where the scholars who have ventured to assert any independence of thought are few indeed. Yet, after all, there is little originality in the C4erman scepticism. All the chief objec- tions to the early Roman history were urged by De Beaufort, a century before Niebuhr. The Germans following in his track have, with characteristic industry and perseverance, picked the bones of the quarry cleaner. And they have done worse than this. They have attempted to reconstruct, as well as to destroy, to dress out the skeleton with figments of their own, possessing generally not a tithe of i X: CO" ..^' •/ !- )H 3 20612 IV PKEFACE. PREFACE. the probability and consistency of the narrative wliich they are intended to supplant. We are thus threatened with a succession of Eoman histories, each totally unlike its predecessor. The work now offered to the public is written on a directly opposite plan. The object of it is to preserve, instead of to destroy, as much as it may be possible of the ancient history ; and in this respect at least it may lay claim to comparative novelty. Neither labour nor expense is spared in endeavour- ing to rescue from oblivion the smallest material relic of antiquity; a statue, a picture, a gem, or even the meanest implement of household use; yet, in what regards the traditions of ancient times, we appear to pursue an entirely opposite course. Hence it appeared to the author that an attempt to rescue the early Roman annals from the oblivion A\ith which they arc menaced might at all events be a hiudable one, and, if he should succeed only in some small part of his design, he will esteem himself abundantly re- compensed for his labour. Such an undertaking necessarily involved a large amount of critical discussion. The narrative l)art of the ])ook is, indeed, little more than a translation of Livy, intended only as a vehicle for the remarks appended to it. As a medium for these, Schwegler's " Romische Creschichte " has been selected, because it embraces in the completest detail all the objections which have been urged against the early history, and because it evidently suggested and partly supplied the materials for Sir G. C. Lewis's ^vovk on the " Credibility of the Early Roman History." The observations of the last-named writer, as well as those of other scholars, have been occasionally examined, where they appeared to supplement, or to offer any divergence from, Schwegler's arguments; and the author hopes it will be found that he has not evaded the discussion of any important objections. By way of introduction a dissertation on the sources of early Roman history, and on its internal evidence, has been prefixed to the book ; since without an examination of these, any work on the subject nmst necessarily be incomplete. London, October 1S67. vBt ; 'M CONTENTS. rAdi; Prefatory Dissertation on the Sources and Evidences OF EARLY Roman Hts^tory v— cxxxv SKCTION I. — The early Population of Italy 1 — 23 II. — Foundation of Rome 23— 5() III.— Reign of Romulus 57—135 IV. — The Interregnum l''^5 — 147 V. — Reign of Numa Pompilius 147—169 VI. — „ of Tullus Hostilius 169 — 215 YIj _ ^^ OF Angus Marcius 215—230 VIII. — „ OF Tarquinius Priscus 230—278 IX.— „ OF Servius Tullius and Inquiry into the Regal Constitution 278 — 384 X.— ,, of Tarquinius Superbus 384—440 -■is ,(•' A DISSERTATION /:^-. ON THE SOURCES OF EARLY ROMAN HISTORY, AND THE CREDIBILITY OF ITS INTERNAL EVIDENCE. >i Any inquiry into the authenticity and credibility of the His- tory of the Eoman Kings, as handed down to us by ancient authors, naturally divides itself into two parts, — namely, its external and its internal evidence. The first of these concerns the sources from wduch the history has been derived, such as annals, law^s, treaties, and other w^ritten documents ; to wdiicli may be added, as collaterally confirming them, public works and buildings, statues, and other monuments of the like kind. The second part of the inquiry concerns the probability of the narrative when tested by a critical examination of its consistency, as well with itself as with ordinary experience and the general tenor of political history. It is proposed to pursue, in this Dissertation, both these heads of inquiry in the order indicated. And first, of the EXTERNAL EVIDENCE. The gift of speech, without the art of waiting, w^ould be of comparatively little value in perpetuating the annals of man- kind. Oral tradition, besides being short-lived and evanescent, is ever liable to change and falsification ; against which the only safeguards are permanent records. Hence the first and most important questions wiiich present themselves in the present inquiry are. Were letters known at Home in the time of the kings? and, if they were, is there any reasonable ground for supposing that they were employed to record the political events of that period ? For answers to these questions h II X SOURCES OF ROMAN HISTORY. ART OF WHITING. XI we naturally turn to ancient authority, and, unless this can he successfully impugned, we have no right to reject it. In the opinion of some writers, the first Eomans were little better than illiterate barbarians. This view, however, appears to be very unreasonable. The mere fact of building a city implies a very considerable degree of civilization. Not to mention architectural art, it implies agriculture and trade, laws, and the requisite intelligence for civil and political government. Eome, too, in comparison with many other cities in Italy, was founded at a late period, and, as we shall endeavour to show, by a Greek race. At that time, Greece had made great progress in literature and art ; the influence of which, according to the opinion of Cicero, must have been felt in Italy. And, when we reflect that Cunia^ had been founded on the Italian coast perhaps three centuries before the building of Eome, this opinion seems in the highest degree probable. "Atque hoc," says Cicero, "eo magis est in Eomulo admirandum, quod ceteri, qui dii ex hominibus facti esse dicuntur, minus eruditis hominum s?eculis fuerunt, ut fingendi proclivis esset ratio, quum imperiti facile ad credendum impellerentur. Eomuli autem a?tateni minus his sexcentis annis, jam invetcratis litteris atque doctiinis, omnique illo antiquo ex inculta hominum vita errore sublato, fuisse cernimus." ^ Whence Cicero evidently considered that the influence of Greek literature had been felt at Eome at that period ; and we cannot consequently imagine him to have thought that the first Eomans were ignorant of the art of writing. But that letters were known at least in the time of Kuma appears from more direct testimony. Not to mention Nunia's reputation for learning, which was so great that he was thought, though wrongly, to have been a pupil of Pythagoras, we are expressly told that he committed his laws to writing.^ Ancus Marcius subsequently caused these laws to be copied out from Numa's Commentaries into an album, and posted up 1 DeRep. ii. 10, 18. 2 " Eiquo (Alarcio) sacra omnia exscripta exsignataquc dedit." — Liv. i. 20. in public ; ^ a fact which not only shows the use of the art of writing, but also a reading public. In like manner the treatv made between Tulhis Hostilius and the All)ans is said to have been recited from writing.^ If these accounts are true, no further proofs are wanting that letters were known at Eome in the time of the kings. We may, however, mention a few later instances, which rest not, like those just cited, merely on the testimony of historians, but -eonsist of docu- ments which survived till the imperial times, and were then seen by eye-witnesses. Such was the treaty of confederation made by Servius Tullius with the Latins, engraved in antique Greek characters on a brazen column, and preserved in the Temple of Diana on the Aventine, where it was inspected by Diony sins ; ^ who draws from it an argument that the Eomans could not have been barbarians. Also the treaty made by Tarquinius Superbus with the Gabines, written on an ox-hide stretched over a shield, and kept in the Temple of Sancus ; which likewise appears to have been seen by Dionysius.* The same author mentions that the treaty made by Tarquinius Superbus with the Latins was engraved on brazen pillars, but says not that he had seen it.^ Lastly, we may adduce the treaty between Eome and Carthage, executed in the first year of the republic, and preserved in the serarium of the Capi- toline Temple, where it was copied by Polybius ; who remarks that the language of it w^as so ancient as to be difficult of interpretation even by the most learned in such matters.^ All the passages in ancient authors relating to the subject assume, either directly or by implication, the use of the art of writing in the kingly period ; we are not aware of one in which it is denied or contested : the modern critic, therefore, who attempts to controvert it, is bound to establish his opinion 1 "Omnia ea (sacra publica ut a Numa instituta erant) ex commcntariis regis pontificem in album elata proponere in publico jubet."— Liv. i. 32. 2 "Tabulis cerave."— Ibid. 24. 3 Lib. iv. 26. The use of the word ?im, for sine, noted by Festus (p. 165, Nesi) as appearing in some document in this temple, may, as Schwegler observes (B. i. S. 18, Anm.), have been referable to this treaty. 4 Lib. iv. 58. This treaty is also alluded to by Horace, Epp. ii. i. 25. " Lib. iv. 48. ^ Polyb. iii. 22, 26. h2 I/' ■'i ^ Xll SOUECES OF ROMAN HISTORY. by the most irrefragable proofs. Scliwegler has attemi)ted to do so, but his arguments are based only on inference and pro- bability. Thus he says : ^ " We are led to the same result — namely, that the history of the regal period had not been re- corded by any contemporary annalist — in another manner, when we consider the age of Eoman writing. It is not, indeed, precisely and credibly handed down at what time the Eomans became acquainted with the use of letters : since Evander and Hercules, to whom the introduction of them is ascribed, cannot of course pass for historical personages. Eut since the Etruscans, who were earlier civilized than tlie Eomans, according to tradition knew not the art of writing till about the 30th Olympiad, through the Bacchiad Demaratus, the father of Tarquinius Priscus ; and as this tradition, so far at least as relates to the time, has every probability in its favour, we are warranted in assuming that the liomans also were unacquainted with letters before the epoch of the Tar- quinian dynasty. We have the more ground for this assump- tion, since the Eomans, as may now be regarded as proved, derived not their alphabet from the Etruscans, but ap})arently from the Greeks of Campania, and probably from Cum^e ; and Eome's commerce with Campania did not begin before the Tarquinian dynasty. The oldest written monument at Eonie mentioned by credible tradition is the document re- lating to the foundation of the Dianium on the Aventine in the time of Servius Tullius. But, if the Eomans first became acquainted with writing only in the time of the elder Tarquin, it cannot of course be supposed that any extensive use of a new and difticult art could have been made during' the whole regal period. It cannot indeed be doubted that, under the last kings, writing was used for monumental purposes, — such as the recording of public treaties and alliances, dedicatory inscriptions, &c., — but not for literary purposes, or historical record. The want of writing materials forbids us to suppose that this could have existed. Besides brazen tablets or columns, the only materials employed for writing on in the very early times were wooden tablets, pieces of linen, the ^ B. i. Sect. 13. iW:H ART OF WRITING. xni skins of animals, and tablets made of the bark of trees. It is clear that such cumbersome and inconvenient materials would place almost insuperable obstacles in the way of any extensive use of writing ; and, under such circumstances, it is hardly possible to conceive any literature, i)roperly so called. If, therefore, what we cannot doubt, annalistic records were made in the pne-Gallic times, they must liave been in the last degree jejune and meagre, and could liave contained only the very briefest abridgment of facts. A real literature was impossible until the use of paper and parchment became general ; the former of which mate- rials was first discovered, according to Varro, in the time of Alexander the Great, the latter under his successors." The first argument is, that the Etruscans had no alphabet before the time of Demaratus ; and, as the Etruscans were earlier civilized than the Eomans, the latter could not pre- viously have known the art of writing. It is also insinuated that the art must have been introduced at Eome by the Tarquins. The authority for Demaratus having introduced writing among the Etruscans is contained in the following passage of Tacitus : ^ — " At in Italia Etrusci ab Corinthio Demarato, Aborio[ines Arcade ab Evandro didicerunt : et forma litteris Latinis, qme veterrimis Grsecorum." Now we must take the whole of this passage as containing the tradition ; we cannot say, at our pleasure, that one-half of it is tradition, and the other half not. The tradition, there- fore, was, that the aborigines, under whom, in the view of Tacitus, we must include the Eomans, did not obtain their alphabet from the Etruscans : consequently, it is quite beside the purpose whether Demaratus introduced letters into Etruria or not. According to tradition, Evander brought them into Latium ; and, whether Evander was a real personage or not, still he was the hero, or symbol, of a very high antiquity. Consequently the tradition amounts to this : that letters had been known in Latium time out of mind, and long before the arrival of Demaratus at Tarquinii. The assertion, therefore, ^ Ann. iii. 14. XIV SOURCES OF ROMAN HISTORY. ART OF WRITING. XV that the civilization of the Etruscans is of an earlier period than that of the Romans, is, so far as letters are concerned, entirely unfounded. The anecdote about Demaratus is nothing but a sort of sidewind insinuation of Schwegler's; since he believes, as we shall see further on, that the Tarquins were a Latin family, and came not from Etruria. And he admits the futility of it when he observes that the Romans " derived not their alphabet from the Etruscans, but from the Greeks." This, indeed, cannot be denied ; the passage in Dionysius already cited, where he speaks of the treaty in ancient Greek characters preserved in the Temple of Diana, is sufficient to prove it. And, as we hope to show in the course of this work that Romulus was the son, or at most the grandson, of a Greek, we need not go to Cum?e for the alphabet. It had, indeed, as Ave have already said, probably been naturalized in Latium long before the time of Romulus. That the Romans got their alphabet from Cumse in the time of the Tarquins is a mere conjecture, at variance with tradition, utterly destitute of proof, and invented merely to prop a theory. Dr. Mommsen, who has devoted gTcat attention to ancient alphabets and \yriting, places at an immemorial period their introduction into Italy. Reasoning from the adoption of abbreviations, he obsen^es : ^ '' We must, both as regards Etruria and Latium, carry back the commencement of the art of waiting to an epoch which more closely approximates to the first incidence of the Egyptian dog-star period within historical times, the year 1322 B.C. than to the year 776, with Avhich the chronology of the Olympiads began in Greece. The high antiquity of the art of writing in Rome is evinced otherwise by numerous and plain indications." He then proceeds to instance the treaties, &c. of the regal period, to which we have already alluded, the primitive marking of cattle {scriptum), the mode of addressing the Senate (Patres conscrij'iti), &c. On the whole, the use of writing at Rome, from the very earliest period, is established on the best evidence that can ^ History of Rome, B. i. eh. li, vol. i. p. 221, Dickboii'« Trans. ■AW 'V. '■■J'". reasonably be expected in a matter of such high antiquity. The argument drawn by Schwegler from the want of writuig materials is absurd. Even allowing that the articles which he enumerates are all that could be employed for the purpose —and he omits the waxen tablets mentioned in a passage before cited from Livy '— stiU, if linen could be prepared for writing on, as the Libri Lintel show, then the early Romans had a very good substitute for paper ; not to mention other substances, such as wooden tablets, the bark of trees, the skins of animals, &c. Nor can any argument be drawn, as is sometimes done,^ against the use of letters, from the ancient law bidding the Pra3tor Maximus drive a nail into the right- hand wall of the Capitoline Temple on the Ides of every Sep- tember. The annals of the Pontifex Maximus w^ere not open to public inspection after the close of each year ; and therefore the nail w^as a convenient mark to show the lapse of succes- sive years. We may infer from Livy's account that the first naQ was driven by the Consul M. Horatius, when he dedicated the temple in the year after the expulsion of the kings. But in fact it was a superstitious observance as much as anything else. And that it was not adopted as a substitute for writing is evident from the fact that it existed contemporaneously with the use of writing. For in the year B.C. 331, on the discovery of a system of poisoning among the Roman matrons, Cn. Quinctilius was created Dictator in order to drive a nail ; and the precedent was taken /ro7?i the annals in the time of the secessions of the idUU. (" Itaque memoria ex annalibus repetita, in secessionibus quondam plebis clavum ab dictatore fixum— dictatorem clavi figendi causa creari placuit."— Liv. viii. 18.) The driving of the nail was, therefore, recorded in writing in the annals of the time. And as it was necessary to refer to these annals, the precedent sought must have been beyond the memory of man, and would carry us up about a century. Now what is called the fourth secession— which, however, rests only on the authority of Ovid— occurred in B.C. 367, only thirty-six years before the period in question, and could not therefore have been the period alluded to by ^ Above, ]). xi. 'i Sec Liddell's Eomc, eh. xvL ; cf. Livy, viii. 3. 'n4 % XVI SOURCES OF ROMAN HISTORY. Li\y ; who, indeed, recognises no secession on this occasion, but says only that the matter came near to one.^ The third secession happened in the year B.C. 449 ; and, even allowing that it is to this, and not an earlier one, that Livy is referring, then there must have been annals extant in b c. 331 which reached back to B.C. 449, or more than half a century before the capture of the city by the Gauls. We do not mean to impugn Livy's inference from this custom, that letters were rare at that period. ^ But to assert that they were rare implies that they existed, and shows that Livy did not consider their existence to be disproved by the driving of the nail. And we are ready to admit Schwegler's view, that letters were not used " for literary purposes," if by that expression is meant the works of professed authors, written and circulated for public use. But, in the absence of literary history, there might still be historical record for which those " rarse liters " would have sufficed. We wish it to be remembered that we are not attempting to prove that the ancient works on the subject are a full and complete history of Eome ; on the contrary, we regard them as extremely deficient and fragmentary. All that we aim at establishing is, that the greater part of w^hat we do possess is genuine, and that there are no good grounds for the sweeping charges brought against it by some modern critics and historians : as, for instance, when Niebuhr asserts that " the names of the kings are perfectly fictitious ; no man can tell how long the lioman kings reigned, as we do not know how many there were; "3 or when Dr. Arnold says, even of the latter part of the regal period, "the general picture before us is a mere fantasy." ^ We believe that, without the aid of oral tradition, there were records enough to certify the names and order of succession of the kings, and the general truth of the leading events of their reigns. Before quitting this part of the subject, we may observe that Sir G. C. Lewis says little or nothing about the art of writing at ^ "Prope secessioiiem plebis res venit."— Lib. vi. 42. ' " Quia rar?e por ea tempora literao erant."— Ibid. •'' Lectures, vol. i. p. 4]. * Hist, of Rome, vol. i. p. 40. :■■■? - V : - ^J. i w- '£ ANNALES MAXIML XVll Bome, and expresses no opinion as to its antiquity; a clear proof that he thought the arguments in its favour incontrovertible, as he seizes every opportunity to damage the early history. Assuming, therefore, that the art of writing was known at Bome from the earliest period, the next step in our inquiry is, For wdiat kind of public records it was employed ? Of these the first in importance were the Annales Maximi. With regard to these Cicero observes : '' Ab initio rerum Boma- narum usque ad B. Mucium Bontificem Maximum, res onnies siiigulorum annorum liiandabat Uteris Bontifex Maximus elferebatque in alljuui et proponebat tabulani domi, potestas ut esset populo cognoscendi; iique etiam nunc Annales Maximi nominantur." ^ Hence we learn that from the very earliest times the Bontifex Maximus was accustomed to note down in a book all the public events, and thence to transfer, or, as we might say, post them into an album, or whitened tablet, which he set up before his house, so that everybody might read them. And these annals, as we perceive from the same passage, were still extant in the time of Cicero — " etiam nunc Annales Maximi nominantur." Their existence is further at- tested by other passages in the same author. Thus in the speech for Babirius (c. 5) : " Cum iste omnes et suppliciorum et verborum acerbitates non ex memoria vestra ac pat rum vestrorum, sed ex annaliuni moiutmentis atque ex rcguvi conv- mcntariis conquisierit." And in the De Legibus (i. 2, G) : " Nam post annales pontificum maximorum, quibus nihil potest esse jucundius " (or jejunius) " si aut ad Fabium . . . venias," &c., and in other places, one of which we shall have to cite further on. It must, how^ever, be admitted, that when, in the passage first cited, Cicero says that these annals existed from the be^inninfij of Bome — " ab initio rerum Boma- narum" — he could not of course have meant any higher period than the reign of Xuma ; since the Bontifices, as he himself says in another place,^ w^ere first instituted by that king. The existence of the Annales Maximi even down to the imperial times is attested by other authors. Thus Cato, as quoted by Aulus Gellius,^ referred to them in his Origines. 1 Dr Orat. ii. 12. 2 Dc Rep. ii. 12. 3 Noct. Alt. ii. 28. XVIU SOUKCES OF KOMAN IIISTOllY. ANNALES MAXIMI. XIX Dionysius of Halicarnassus cites them for the death of Aruns, son of Tarquiniiis Priscus, in the following passage : " eV 'yap ral^ iviavaiaLf; avwypacfiol'^ Kara tov reaaapaKoarov iviavjov Trj<; TvWcov dp'yri^ reTeXevrrj/cora irapeiXrjifiaixev" ^ where by dvaypacl)ai Dionysius means public annals, or State registers : since he distinguishes them in the following passage from the ;^ovo7/5a0m£', or annals of such writers as Licinius Macer, Gellius, and others, and points to them as the source w^hence such writers drew: aX)C eocKev 6 irpMro^; iv rat^ %poj/o7joaofestate, i^laced the second Opima Spolia in the Temple of Jupiter Feretrius in the year B.C. 437. But when Augustus Csesar inspected that temple previously to rebuilding it, he found therein a linen doublet, having on it an inscription respecting the spoils, in which Cossus was styled " consul.'* In a later edition of his book, Livy deferred to the imperial critic, though not with a very good grace. Augustus had, indeed, a sort of personal interest in the question. In his fourth consulship, ls\. Crassus slew, with his own hand, Deldo, king of the Bastarn?e. But, though Crassus on this occasion commanded the Roman army, Augustus allowed him not the honour of the Opima Spolia, alleging that the victory belonged to himself as consul, having been achieved under his auspices ; ^ against which decision the inscription on the doublet would have been a standing protest, if proof could have been drawn from .it that Spolia Opima might be claimed by a subordinate officer. But this by the way. For our purpose the material point is that an inscription placed in the Temple of Jupiter Fere- trius forty-eight years before the Gallic conflagration had been preserved down to the imperial times. It appears further that there were Annals and Libri Magistratuum, quoted by Licinius ]\Iacer, from which it appeared, in contradiction of the assertion of Augustus, that Cossus did not become consul till nine years later, or in B.C. 428. These annals must undoubtedly have been contemporary, as may be in- ferred both from the way in which Livy characterises them — " tain veteres annates "—and from the consideration that he would not have been so silly as to appeal against the authority 1 Dio Ca5?s. 11. 24. C \M f-i. XXVI SOURCES OF liOMAN HISTOr{V. ANN ALES MAXlMf. XXVll of a contemporary document to annals which were compiled a couple of centuries later. Amon^ the instances which Schwef^ler adduces in the same note from Dionysius to show that he does not allude to the Annates Maximi, he omits that which we have already quoted from Lib. iv. 30, where it is hardly possible that any- thing else can be meant. In the following passage from Lib. i. 73 : ifc iraXacwv 'Kojcov iv lepal^ he\T()C<; aco^o/uLevcjv, Dionysius rather meant, as we shall see further on, the Common tarii Pontificum than the Annates Lfaximi. The passage in Lib. i. 74 — eVl rov irapa toU ^Ajx^aevac Kei/mivov TTtvaKOi; — is corrupt ; but whether, with Niebuhr, we shoidd read apxi-^P^vo-c we will not preteud to determine. Schwegler proceeds : " Internal as well as external evi- dence makes it probable that the genuine annals of the pontiffs do not reach beyond the Gallic conflagration, and still less into the regal period." The internal evidence is derived from the alleged confusion and contradiction in the chronology of the regal period, and from its resting on mere combination of numbers, and a subtle system of computation. The chronoloov we shall have to examine further on, and need not therefore enter into the subject here. The com- bination of numbers and subtle system of com})utation arise, as we also hope to show, only from the fanciful views of German critics, and are not found in the ancient authors. But though Schwegler asserts that the genuine annals of the pontiffs do not reach beyond the Gallic conllagration, yet he soon afterwards quotes a passage from Cicero (L)e liep. i. IG), in which that author says that an eclipse of the sun was noted down in the Annates IMaximi in A.u.c. 350 ; tliat is, thirteen years before the capture of the city by the Gauls. And as S(ihwegler and other German critics use this passage as an argument against the existence of still earlier annals, they must of course consider it to be genuine ; otherwise their reasoning is unfounded and absurd. But if this entry is genuine, there can be no reason why entries of much earlier date should not also be genuine : for, if this part of the annals had escaped the fire, the whole might have been f. '.I. ' '■■' *■ ' *# !>!■■ 1 ■«,* m ■Si-. . 'US-. >' saved. ^loreover, we have already shown ^ that annals of some sort must have been extant in B.C. 449, or fiftv-nine years before the Gallic confUigration ; since they are quoted as furnishing a precedent for the driving of a nail by the dictator Quinctilius in B.C. 331 . Schwegler, however, ignores this evidence for the existence of annals before the conflai]^ration, foundin-^^ his arffument, or rather we should say, his conjecture, on the other side on a mistranslation of Livy. " It cannot be reasonably doubted," he observes, "that the wooden tablets on which the Annals of the I*ontifices were written perished in the Gallic con- flagration. They were kept in the dwelling of the Tontifex Maxinms, — that is, in the liegia, and in the hasty evacuation of the city were assuredly not saved ; since even the sacred utensils of the Temple of Yesta could be preserved only by burying them." This view, wrong and absurd as it is, has been adopted by all, or most, of the leading German critics ; as Niebuhr, Becker, and others. Niebuhr remarks : - — "Now I grant Antonius in Cicero says that this custom" (viz. of making annals) '"had subsisted from the beginning of the Iioman state : but it does not follow from this that Cicero meant to assert that the annals in possession of the Eoman historians, who did not begin to write till so late, reached thus far back. Those of the earlier times may have perished ; which Livy and other writers, without specific mention of the Annates ]\Iaximi, state as having happened at the destruction of the city by the Gauls : and certainly this fate may have befallen them at that time, as the tables perhaps were not yet transferred into books, and it is still less likelv that anv transcripts of such books should be in existence; besides they may not have been preserved in the Capitol, where the chief pontiff did not reside, and vrhere he had no occasion to keep his archives like the duumvirs of the Sibylline books. " I think we may now consider it as certain that those annals really met wdth such a fate, and that they were replaced by new ours." ^ Above, )). xvi. ^ Hist, of Rome, vol. i. j). 212 (Ei)g. Trans.). c 2 XX VI 11 SOURCES OF ROMAN IIISTOKY. ANXALES MAXnir. XXIX Let us advert for a moment to tins curious specimen of argumentation, where a conclusion considered as " certain " is deduced from a series of tlie loosest conjectures. Thus it is said that the earlier annals may have perished; that Livy and other writers state this to have happened, but without specific mention of the Annates Maximi ; that this fate "niaij have befallen them, as the tables perhaps were not yet transferred into books, and it is still less lil'chj that any transcripits of them were in existence ; besides, they may not have been preserved in the Capitol. From which series of conjectures follow the very satisfactory conclusion that it may now be considered as certain "those annals really met with such a fiite ! " But our main object in citing this passage is to show that Xiebuhr was of opinion that the Tontifex Maximus noted down the events which formed his Annals at once, and in the first instance, on an album or whitened board ; that these boards were kept year after year in tlie Eegia, and consequently at the time of the Gallic fire, supposing that they began with the reign of Tullus Hostilius, would have amounted to nearly 300, or many cartloads ; and, as they had never been copied into a book, and were too cumbersome to carry away, were then burnt. To the same purpose Becker remarks i^ ''If the assump- tion of the existence of these annals in the earliest times, and especially in the regal period, is destitute of all proba- bility, then Cicero's assertion, that they existed ab initio reruin Rmnanannn, becomes almost an impossibility by the fate which must and would have overtaken these tables. They were kept, according to the unanimous testimony of authors, in the dwelling of the Pontifex IVIaximus, — that is, in the Eegia, hard by the Temple of Yesta on the Eorum. We cannot suppose that there were any copies of them. The Eegia was the only record-office at Rome ; except, perhaps, that some religious corporations may have recorded a few things in sepai'ate commentaries. Now, even if we had no historical testimony to the fact, it would be very natural that ^ E6m. AlteitL. B. i. S. 7. p- tlds ponderous history should have been destroyed in the Gallic fire. It is not to be conceived that in the hasty evacuation of the city any tliought was taken for their pre- servation. In the midst of that panic the sacred utensils of Vesta's Temple were saved only by burying tliem ; and it may even be doubted whether the Twelve Tables, that dearly Xuirchased and most important monument, were not abandoned as a prey. Still less would those wooden tables have been thought of; and that they w^ere not, that the chronicle of the city was then destroyed, is decisively recognised by some authors." On this w^e may remark : first, that even had the Annales Maximi existed only on a quantity of boards, it by no means follows that they would have been destroyed by the Gaids ; since, as a professed topographer like l^ecker should have known, the Eegia was not burnt on that occasion, but existed till the fire in Xero's reign, when the destruction of that ancient monument is expressly recorded by Tacitus. ^ But, secondly : although Niebuhr, Becker, Schwegler, and other German critics often accuse Cicero and Livv of not understanding their own language, yet their view of tlie his- tory of the Annales Maximi — the egregious absurdity of which might, one would have supposed, have caused tliem to pause and inquire a little further— is founded on a gross mis- translation of a common Latin construction. Cicero, describ- ing the manner of making the Annals, in the passage already quoted, uses the words, " Ees omnes shigulorum annorum nian- dabat Uteris (Pontifex) efferebatque in album : " that is, first of all he wrote the events down, and then transferred, or posted them, into an album. It is singular how such . •* Dc Orat. 4t), lot). ^ Lib. vi. 1. ^ Lib. xxxiv. 6. ^?; Ixvi SOUKCES OF ROMAN HISTORY. LEGES REGI^.. Ixvii existence of Nimia's laws : " Et aiiimos, propositis legibus his, qitas in inonununtis liaheimis, arclentes consuetiidine et cupiditate bellaudi religionum cserimoniis mitigavit : " ^ and again : " Ilia autem diuturna pax Numse mater huic nrbi juris et religionis fuit : qui leguni etiam scriptor fuisset, qitas scitis extarer '^ Scliwegler, after Osann, thinks ^ that the word fuisset in the last passage shows that Xunia's laws could not have been written ; that we must supply, Numa would have Avritten them, if at that time wTiting had been in common use. The sentence is fragmentary, breaking off in the middle, so that w^e know not what Cicero was going to add. But we may be quite sure that it was not an objection to the possibility of Numa having written his law^s, because in the passage first quoted Cicero speaks of their positive existence, and because, in a passage before cited, we see that Cicero believed literoe and doctrince to have been already inveterafce in the time of Eomulus."^ And Li\y, in a passage, also before quoted,^ says that Numa delivered his laws written and signed to Marcius. Festus speaks of Numa's laws as written : " Itaque in Numie Pompili regis legibus scriptum esse," ^ &c. Tacitus alludes to a law of TuUus Hostilius, and speaks of Ancus Marcius and Servius TuUius as laAvgivers.''' Schwegler infers that the laws of Numa had been absorbed in the Pontifical books, citing in support of this opinion Festus (p. 189, Opima) and Plutarch (Marc. 8). But the passage in Festus leads to a directly opposite conclusion. It runs as follows : " Testimonio esse libros Pontificum, in quibus sit : Pro primis spoliis bovem (bove) pro secundis solitaurili- bus, pro tertiis agno publice fieri debere : esse etiam compelli reges (Pompilii regis ?) legem opimorum spoliorum talem : Cujus auspicio classe procincta opima spolia capiuntur, Jovi Feretrio darier oporteat," &c. Now, wdien a WTiter cites a passage from the Libri Pontificum, and then adds, there is also a law of King Pompilius (" esse etiam," &c.) on the same 1 De Rep. ii. 14. 3 B. i. S. 25, Aiim. 7 « P. 178, Occisnin. 2 Ibid. V. 2 ; cf. Dionys. ii. 24, 63, &c. * Do Rep. ii. 10, 18. « Lib. i. 20. " Ann. iii. 26 ; xii. 8. I Ui' subject of Opima Spolia, the necessary inference is that these tw^o documents w^ere distinct. Schwegler argues^ that the decemviral legislation shows the want of previous written law^s, and appeals to the testi- mony of Dionysius that, before the Twelve Tables, laws con- sisted only of the traditions of juristic practice, and that only a little having the force of law had been wTitten down in certain sacred books, the knowledge of which was confined to the patricians. But the language of Dionysius is not half so strong as this. He only says that all law was not comprised in writing — ovK ev ^pa^al<; airavra ra StKata Teray/jiipa (x. 1) — and this show^s that some w\as. All that we are con- tending for is, that there were certain w^ritten laws of the kings, not that there was a complete body of them, which might have sufficed for all subsequent time. And to this point another passage of the same Dionysius may be cited, not mentioned by Schwegler, when that historian alludes to a law of the kingly period having been incorporated into the Twelve Tables, and quotes a passage from the ivritfen laws of Numa.'-^ On this subject Sir G. C. Lewis observes:"^ "It was easy for a x^ontifical scribe, who entered a rule of consuetudi- nary law in his register, to dignify it with the name of a lex regia, and attribute it to Numa, Servius, or one of the other kings." But it is still more easy to make a conjecture of this sort, though it is not only against all evidence, but against all probability. For to think that codes of law, the most sacred of all human institutions, could be trifled w^ith — nay, could be forged — in this free and easy manner, and that too among a people who, as Sir G. C. Lewis tells us himself, "held so strictly to legal and constitutional precedent," is contrary to all experience, and in fact one of the most random and impos- sible suppositions that can be imagined. It will, perhaps, at all events be allowed that wdiat the iiomans called their Leges Eegi?e were older than the laws of the Twelve Tables ; for it is not improl)able that they had sense enough to discriminate whether they wxre prior or sub- 1 B. i. S. 26. 2 Iv of? kqX oirw y4ypairTa.i~ oiTfp ovk hv ^ypaxpfu. ii. 27. ■^ Vol. i. p. .'',26, 1 Ixviii SOURCES OF KOMAN HISTOliY. sequent to tliat great epoch in tlieir legislation. Nor would it have been easy after the promulgation of the Twelve Tables, by which tlieir jurisprudence was reduced to a more exact science, to pretend that a law passed by the assemblies of the people was a regal law; neitlier is it very obvious what motive there could have been for making such an attempt. But the period which elapsed between the expulsion of the kings and the decemviral legislation is only about half a century, and therefore it requires no great stretch of faith to believe that the Leges Regia3 were really what they professed to be. It is not disputed that the laws of the^Twelve Tables survived the (^allic conflagration. Sir G. C. Lewis observes : " That the decemviral legislation was preserved with perfect fidelity in the original authentic text cannot be doubted." ^ Where, then, is the improbability that laws only a century or two older may also have survived ? On tliis subject Niebuhr observes : " It would be arbitrary scepticism to doubt that the early Roman laws were written long before the time of the Decemvirs," ^ and, " The high antiquity of a col- lection of the laws of the kings compiled by one Papirius seems unquestionable."^ Mere antiquity cannot be alleged as a reason why the laws of the Roman kings should have perished, for there are Anglo-Saxon laws extant that are ten centuries old, and the interval between Numa and the historical times is only about half that period. Further collateral evidence in support of the history of the regal period is afforded by the treaties already mentioned, of Servius Tidlius with the Latins, of Tarquinius Superbus with the Gabines, and the treaty between Rome and Carthage con- cluded in the first year of the republic. A treaty made with the Latins in the consulship of Cassius and Cominius in B.C. 493, only seventeen years after the expulsion of the kings, may almost be said to belong to this epoch. Cicero speaks of it* as extant in his time, engraved on a brazen column which stood behind the rostra. It is also alluded to by Livy ^ and Dionysius,^ the latter of whom gives the sub- ^>^'■ : ■M' ' av *■• TREATIES — BUILDINGS — STATUES. Ixix 1 Vol. i. p. 112. * Pro Balbo, 23. Lect. vol. i. p, 6. Lib. i. 33. 3 Hist. vol. i. p. 211. « Lib. vi. 95. stance of it. Schwciiler's conclusion,^ that it coidd not have been extant in the time of tliese historians because Cicero, in the passage cited, says that it had lately stood behind the rostra — " (|Uod quidem nuper in columna aeiiea meminimus post rostra " — is not a very logical one, since its removal from that position does not imply its destruction. These are all the literary monuments of the regal period which it may be necessary to mention. It appears to us that they might have sufficed to preserve the memory of the kings and the principal events of their reigns ; at all events they might have prevented the history from being a mere blank, so that even the names of the kings should not be accurately known, and the whole narrative be nothing more than a fantasy. Schwegler, after reciting in the eighth section of his book, the treaties just mentioned, observes : " The im- portance of the documents just recited is not to be lightly prized from the point of view of historical criticism ; they are boundary stones, which restrain an unbridled and measure- less scepticism. The alliance of Servius Tullius with the Latins, the commercial treaty with Carthage, and the treaty of Sp. Cassius, will not be doubted by any discreet historical inquirer." But he has hardly uttered these words when he goes on to reverse his judgment by asserting that the tradi- tional history gains nothing by these monuments, and con- cludes the paragraph by saying that, so far from supporting it, they rather serve to show how little authenticity it has ! We shall inquire, in the course of the following work, how far this judgment may be well founded with regard to such of these documents as come within its scope. Besides literary records, there were also other monuments, architectural and plastic, of the regal period. Such were the walls and gates of the Palatine and Servian cities, the Vetus Capitolium, the temples erected by Romulus, Tatius, and !N'uma, the Curia Ilostilia, the Tullianum, the Cloaca Maxima, the Circus, the Capitoline Temple, &c. In the plastic way we may principally instance the statues of the kings which stood in the Capitol. These must have Itcen erected before the 1 S. 19, Anni. f). Ixx SOURCE.S OF ROMAN HISTORY. republican times, and most probably by Tarquinius Superbus when he finished the Capitol ; they would have borne witness to the number and names of the kin^s, and would have formed a trustworthy record, dating only between two and three centuries from tlie foundation of the city. There were, besides, the statue of Junius Brutus, of Attus Navius, the carved wooden image of Servius Tullius in the Temple of Fortune, &c. All these monuments would have told their own tale, and have been indissolubly connected with the names of their founders and prototypes. Such, then, were the principal materials with which we are acquainted, which might have been used by writers of a later period for the early history of Eome. In order to complete that portion of our dissertation which relates to the external evidence for that early period, it only remains to inquire how its history has been treated by the writers wlio made it their subject. The first historians of Eome were Greeks. Hieronymus, of Cardia, in the Thracian Chersonese, wdio. flourished in the fourth century B.C., appears to have been the first who gave a brief survey of Eoman affairs,^ in his history of the Epigoni, or Diadochi, as the successors of Alexander were called. His subject led him to treat of the invasion of Italy by Pyrrhus, and it was doubtless on this occasion that he adverted to the affairs of Eome. Timseus, of Tauromeniuni, in Sicily, was the next Greek writer who handled the same subject, in his history of Italian and Sicilian affairs, of which only a few fragments remain."^ Timaeus was probably born about the middle of the fourth century B.C., and consequently con- siderably less than half a century after the capture of Eome by the Gauls. His vicinity to ]Magna Crrtecia must have afforded him an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with Italian affairs in general, and his history probably con- tained some valuable information respecting the early times of Eome. He also wrote a history of the war of Pyrrhus with the Eomans. ^ Dionys. i. 6, seq.* 2 Siiidus, Ti^aios ; cf. Gellius, N.A. xi. 1, ** Timaeus in historiis quas oratione Grppra de rohiis popiili Romani composuit. " ;-f\ GREEK HISTOIMANS. Ixxi ■fv'P The great historians of Greece proper knew little or nothing about the Eomans. Neither Herodotus nor Thucvdidcs once mentions them, although the former historian spent the last years of his life at Thurii. The existence of Eome is, how- ever, sometimes recognised by early Greek writers. Hella- nicus, who flourished in the fifth century B.C., is said to have recorded in his chronicle of the priestesses of Juno at Argos, thatzEneas was the founder of Eome.^ Cephalon of Gergithes, Demagoras of Samos, and the Arcadian poet Agathylhis, seem also to have alluded to Eome ; but though these were early writers, their exact date is uncertain.- Damastes of Sigeum, a contemporary of Hellanicus and Herodotus, also spoke of the foundation of Eome.^ Antiochus of Syracuse,^ and the geographer Seylax mentioned the name of that city.^ Tlieo- pompus adverted to the capture of Eome by the Gauls.^ Aristotle, wlio was a contemporary of Theopompus, men- tioned the same event, and also adverted to the le^^end of the burning of the ships by the Trojan women on the coast of Italy.^ Heraclides of Pontus also mentioned the Gallic cata- strophe,^ which would therefore appear to have created a great sensation in Greece. Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, is said by Pliny ^ to have been the first Greek who treated Eoman affairs at all diligently. Antiiiconus, Silenus, and Diodes of Peparethus, touched upon the same subject ; but we have no accurate information of the nature of their works, or even of the period in which they lived. Polybius, who flourished B.C. 204 — 122, is the first extant Greek historian from whom we derive any information at all valuable respecting the early history of Eome. Polybius was one of the Achoean hostages sent into Italy in B.C. 167, and he resided seventeen years in the house of ^milius Paulus, at Eome. In his " Universal History " he treated of the Second Punic War, and prefaced it with a sketch of the early Eoman history from the burning of the city ; but the only part of 1 Dionys i. 72. ^ i^^j,] 4 Id. i. 12, 73. * Peripl. 5. 7 Dionys. i. 72 ; Pint. Cam. 22. » H. N. iii. 9, 57. 3 Ibid. « Plin. H.N. iii. 9, 57. s Pint. ibid. Ixxii SOUUt'ES OF KOMAN IILSTOKY. liis work still extant that is of any use for the history of the kings, is the account of the Carthnginian treaty already alluded to, which, as we shall have occasion to show further on, confirms in general the accounts of the progress of Rome during the regal period. We are now arrived at Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who, to judge from bulk alone, should be by far the most important of all the writers on early Eoman history. Of the life of Dionvsius little more is known than w^hat he himself tells in the introduction to his w^ork. The date of his birth is not exactly known, and has been placed in the rather wide interval between 78 and 54 B.C. He appears to have arrived in Italy soon after the battle of Actiuni (B.C. 31), and to have lived at Rome two and twenty years ; during w^hich period he made himself master of the Latin tongue, and employed himself in collecting the materials for his history, by studying the ancient annals, and conversing with the most learned of the Romans. He mentions in his preface ^ the second consulship of Claudius jSTero, which fell in B.C. 7, and his book was therefore probably published about this time. He probably subsisted by teaching the art of rhetoric, which he professed ; a calling which has not tended to enhance his merits as an historian. It can scarcely be doubted that the work of Dionysius ap- peared after that of Livy ; for Niebuhr's opinion that Livy did not commence his history till he was fifty years of age, is alto- gether untenable. The earlier portions of it must have been written before the conclusion of the civil wars. How else could he have said in his Prsefatio : " Festinantibus ad licec nova, quibus jam pridem priBvalentis populi vires s^i}?^^ confi- ciunt .• " or, " Ego contra hoc quoque laboris praemium petam, ut me a conspectii malorum qiicc nostra per tot annos vidit cetas, iantisper certe, dum prisca ilia tota mente repeto, avertaTti 1 " The forces of a people which are still employed in their ow^n destruction, the desire to avert the eyes from misfortunes w^hich had so long afflicted, and must have still continued to afflict, the state, can refer only to the civil wars. At the same time, the first book affords evidence that an edition of it must 1 Lib. i. c. 3. -*■ s^ DIONYSIUS OF HALICAKNASSUS. Ixxiii i r! 1 , s'". hfll* have been republished at a considerably later period. Thus on the question of the Spolia Opiina achieved by Cornelius Cossus, Livy tells us that he had first related the story as he found it in })revious writers, but afterwards he varied from it, when he heard that Augustus had inspected the linen breast- plate of Cossus in the Temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and had in consequence introduced a new version.^ The w^ords in this chapter, from " Omnes ante me," evidently belong to a late edition. And because Livy in the nineteenth chapter of his first book adverts to the shutting of the Temple of Janus, after the battle of Actiuni in B.C. 29, saying that it was the second occasion of that ceremony since the reign of Numa, while he does not notice a subsequent closing of that temple by Augustus in B.C. 25, it has been concliuled that this first book of the history was WTitten betw^een the dates mentioned. But another passage, tow^ards the end of the same book, must have been added after the complete establishment of the empire. For Livy there suppresses some parts of Brutus's invective against Tarquinius Superbus, observing that the present posture of affairs rendered it difficult for writers to insert them.^ But to return from this digression. The main oljject of Dionysius in writing his book w^as, he tells us, to make the Greeks better acquainted with the Romans, to disabuse them of a prejudice that that jjeople were no better than barbarians ; nay, to show that they were not only Greeks, but even more Hellenic than the Greeks them- selves.^ His work embraced the history of Rome from the earliest times down to the First Punic War, and w\as intended as a supplement to that of Polybius, whose account of the events previous to that epoch was a mere sketch. Of the twenty books in which Dionysius comprised his history, only the first eleven are now extant, and the last two of these in a somewhat mutilated condition. Of the other nine books, only some fragments remain. 1 Lib. iv. 20. 2 " His, atrocioribiisqiic, credo, .aliis, qua? prccscns rerum indignitas haud- qiiaquam relatu scriptoribus facilia siibjicit, memoratis." — Lib. i. 59. 3 Thus Pyrrhus i.s made to speak of them as dt/6pwirovi offKardrovs 'EWi^vuy Koi 5i/ca the Consuls Brutus 1 H. i. S. 10!). 2 ]3„(^^i^ 11 § i4_ DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS. Ixxv and Valerius. In iv. 21 the constitution of Servius Tullius is said to have been a trick to deceive the people, while in other places he is represented as a most democratic king (iv. 34, 37, 40, &c.), and in v. 75 is called SrjfioTiKcaraTOf; ^aGi\€vv\dKiov eVl rov KoWivov \6(\)ov (if the reading be correct) ; or of Dins Fidius, eV iepco Atb<; YIlcttlov, ov 'VcofiatoL ^dyKTov KoXovaiv (iv. 58). The double narrative also concerning Cincinnatus (x. 17 and 24), is doubtless a misapprehension.^ When such errors can be pointed to, we cannot avoid the suspicion that where his accounts are unsupported, or contradicted by those of other writers, a misapprehension may be possible. For the rest, his great industry, and his zealous desire to attain the greatest possible accuracy, deserve to be recognised. He seems, by his allusions to them, to have often consulted documents, when such existed ; and this would ap])ear still more plainly if that part of his work was extant which treated of the times when such public sources were more abundant. Nor did he neglect private documents, as he appeals expressly to the Commen- tarii Censorum." ^ Sir G. C. Lewis also gives a depreciating character of Dionysius as an historian,-^ though he often avails himself of the authority of that writer to controvert a statement of Livy, or to found on the discrepancy of these two authors an im- putation of discrepancy in the tradition. In fact, Dionysius has done more harm to the early Eoman history by his inven- tions, mistakes, and ^;r«^7?^rt^^s7?^^f5, than he has done good by ^ For other siiiiihir blunders see Waelismutli, Aelt. Gesch. d. 2, St. S. 47. 2 Rijui. Alterth. B. i. S. 49, f. ^ Credibility, kv. vol. i. p. 240. ■a#:i'' Ixxx SOURCES OF ROMAN HISTORY. FIRST LATIN WRITERS. Ixxxi the few additional sources that he has indicated, or by his testimony to the existence of ancient documents and historical memorials. The remaining Greek writers of Eoman history need not detain us. Diodorus, who was a somewhat older contemporary of Dionysius, probably gave an account of the Eoman kings in the earlier books of his " Universal History ; " ^ but of these a few excerpts are all that remain. Diodorus appears to have been as injudicious an historian as Dionysius, and we have not, perhaps, much reason to regret the loss of his account of the regal period. Plutarch, several of whose biographies, as well as his ''Eoman Questions," and "Fortune of the Eomans," relate to early Eoman history and antiquities, was probably born about A.D. 46. Since by his own confession ^ he was only imperfectly acquainted with the Latin tongue, his writings cannot be regarded as an authentic source of Eoman history. Owing to this defect, he had recourse chiefly to Greek writers for his materials ; as Diodes of Peparethus, Zeiio- dotus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others ; and especially to Juba II. king of Mauritania, who, among other things, wrote in Greek a history of Eome. Plutarch, however, sometimes cites Eoman authorities; as Fabius Pictor, who also wrote in Greek, Calpurnius Piso, Valerius Antias, and Yarro. His frequent use of the romancer Valerius Antias shows how little reliance can be placed on his judgment and knowledge. Niebuhr remarks of Plutarch : " He worked with great carelessness, and therefore requires to be read with much discretion.^ Appian, who lived a generation after Plutarch, gave in the first book of his Eoman history an account of the regal period. It is lost, and, even if it had survived, it would hardly have been of much service, as it was probably a mere abridgment of Dionysius. The only Greek work, besides that of Polybius, treating of the early period of Eoman history, whose loss need occasion us ' Heyne, De font. Hist. Diod. in Diod. 0]>p. i. p. Ixxvi. f. (ed. Bip.). 2 Yit. Demosth. 2. ^ Lectures, vol. i. p. 70. ■■■i '5s* much regret, is that of Dion Cassius. This author wrote in the early part of the third century. His history of Eome in eighty books began from the earliest period and was carried down to A.D. 229 ; but, unfortunately, of the first twenty-four books only fragments remain. Niebuhr says of him : '' He did not acquiesce in the information he gathered from Livy : he went to the sources themselves ; he wrote the early period of Eoman history quite independent of his predecessors, and only took Fabius for his guide. The early constitution was clear to him, and when he speaks of it, he is very careful in his expressions. He has great talents as an historian." ^ But Niebuhr's assertion about his sources is evidently a random one ; and other German writers are of opinion that he made, at all events, no critical use of the older writers. ^ Yet he appears not to have servilely followed either Livy or Dionysius. Later Greek compilers, such as Zonaras and Lydus, it is not necessary to mention, and we will now advert to the Eomans who have treated of their own history. The first Latin literature, like that of most nations, was in verse, and its earliest productions were dramatic. Livius Andronicus first brought upon the stage a play in the Latin tono-ue about the vear B.C. 240. He was soon followed by Kievius, and at a somewhat later period by Ennius, who is thought to have been born the year Livius began to exhibit. The last two poets are connected with our subject by their having written historical poems. Naivius composed a history of the First Punic War in Saturnian metre, and Ennius a history of Eome in eighteen books in hexameter verse, which he called Annales. The first Eoman historians who wrote in prose, Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus, were about contemporary with Ennius ; ^ but they adopted the 1 Lectures, vol. i. ji. 73. 2 Becker, B. i. S. 53 ; Wilmans, De fontt. et auctorit. Dionis Cassii. 3 We cannot here enter into the questions whether Q. Fabius I'ictor wrote in Greek or Latin, or in both languages ; or wliether there was more than one annalist so named. Against the express testimony of Dionysius that he wrote in Greek (i. 6), we see but little force in the arguments from induction, most of which are very easily answered. On this subject see ^ «.!><" # Ixxxii SOURCES OF ROMAN HISTORY. FABIUS, CINCIUS, CATO, ETC. Ixxxiii Greek language ; a fact wliicli shows that no Latin prose literature yet existed. It can hardly be doubted that the works of the first Eoman historians contained the substance of the history of the regal period much as we find it in the narratives of later authors. The question therefore arises, From ^^hat sources did they derive their materials ? If there is any truth in the view which we have adopted, that there existed a collection of public annals, of which, at all events, a considerable part had escaped the Gallic conflagration, while that which was burnt had been restored so well as circumstances would permit, there will be no difficulty in answering this question. They must have drawn from the sources thus provided. Indeed, we have the express testimony of Dionysius that they did so.^ Livy expressly tes- tifies to the diligence of Cincius in consulting ancient monu- ments. From that annalist mentioning the driving of the davits at Volsinii, it appears that his researches were not confined to Eome ; and therefore, a fortiori^ we may give him credit for an industrious use of Eoman monuments. The assertion of Plutarch ^ that Fabius Pictor mostly followed Diodes of Peparethus — an author mentioned by nobody else, for the insertion of his name in Festus is the work of Scaliger or Ursinus — is too absurd to demand attention ; though it is of course eagerly seized on by the sceptical critics.^ If it be denied that any public or private monuments were in existence, or that they were used by the first literary annalists, then only two hypotheses remain by which we can account for the origin of the early Eoman history : it must either have been founded upon popular tradition, or it must have been nothing but a fiction and a forgery. These two sources do not, of course, exclude each other, and it might be asserted Vossius, De Hist. Lat. lib. i. c. 3 ; Closset, Historiogr. des Remains, Developpement, No. ii. ; Becker, Ei3m. Altertli. B. i. S. 39, Aniii. 72, &c. ^ As in a passage before quoted : toctoutov ix6vov iv reus apxaio'^^ (vpojv ava- ypa ; x.wiii. 10, &c. PISO, ETC. — CICERO — VARRO. Ixxxv in spite of its briefness, as being the only extant account of that period, though in a mutilated condition, from the hand of a Latin writer before the time of Livy. From a passage in it some writers have concluded^ that the sub- stance of it was taken from Polybius ; but all the inference the passage justifies is, that Cicero followed the chronology of the Greek historian. Niebuhr, on the other hand, is of opinion^' that Cicero derived the greater part of his infor- mation from Atticus, who had likewise investigated Roman history. We may at all events conclude that Cicero did not make any original researches for so slight a sketch. Its chief value therefore is, that it shows Cicero's notions of the early history to have agreed in most of the essential points with the narrative of Livy : though there are a few marked discrepancies, and probably mistakes, which ])eihaps arose from carelessness. Occasional references to Roman history are also found in Cicero's other works ; but he does not seem to have made a thorough study of it, or even of the Roman constitution. About this time a vast number of historians (" scriptorum turba," Liv. Praef.) appears to have arisen, each endeavouring to throw some new light on Roman history; but for the most part their works have perished, and the names only of a few, with some fragments of their writings, have come down to us. M. Terentius Varro, a contemporary of Cicero, styled from his great learning " doctissimus Romanorum," wrote many books on Roman antiquities. The only works of his which could really be called historical were his Annales, which must have been tolerably copious for the early history, as it appears from Charisius^ that the reign of Servius Tullius occurred in the third book ; and a history of the Second Punic War. His other works cannot properly be called historical, though they contained valuable materials for history. Such were his De Vita Populi Romani, De Initiis 1 See Schwegler, B. i. S. 94, The passage, wliich refers to the years of Numa, runs as follows : " Sequamur enim potissiiiunn Polybium nostnim, quo nemo fnit in exquirenJis temporibns diligentior," Rep. ii. 14 ; cf. Becker, i. 48. 2 Lectures, i. 45. ^ Lib i. Ixxxvi SOURCES OF ROMAN HISTORY. TITUS LIVIUS. IxXXVL Urbis EoiiicT, De Eebus Urbanis, De Eepiiblica, De Eebiis Trojanis, &c. ; some of which, however, were probably only portions of his Antiquitates. His book De Lingua Latina, of which a considerable part is extant, contains many notices of Eoraan antiquities. Titus Pomponius Atticus, the friend of Cicero, appears to have drawn up a scheme of Eoman history apparently in a tabular form, which he called Annalis. It recorded in chronological order every law, every treaty, and every war, while the histories of distinguished families were interwoven in it.^ He seems also to have written the history of several Eoman families separately, as that of the Gens Junia, at tlie request of Brutus ; of the Marcelli, Fabii, ^milii, &c. ^Materials for such biographies must therefore have been extant. It may be said that such sources were polluted by partiality and family pride ; but one biography of a leading family would be corrective of another, and there would always be critics enough to denounce and expose pretensions that were too egregious. Indeed Pliny tells us that IVIessalla Corvinus, who flourished in the reign of Augustus, wrote his book De Eomanis Familiis for that very purpose.^ About the same time, Q. ^lius Tubero wrote a history of Eome from its origin, which is sometimes quoted by Livy and Dionysius. The w^ork of Sallust did not touch upon the early period of Eome. Cornelius ISTepos, the friend of Cicero, Atticus, and Catullus, wrote an epitome of universal history, in which the facts of the early Eoman history must have been inserted. We are now arrived at the greatest of the Eoman historians, whose authority and reputation have been so much attacked in recent times. As Livy is the chief and best source for the history of Eome, his work has, of course, been sub- jected to the most minute and searching examination by the sceptical critics. That from such an ordeal it should have come out totally unscathed was liardly to be expected. Livy's materials, in the earlier part of his subject, were too scanty and unsatisfactory not to leave here and there a loop- 1 Corn. Kep. Att, 18. 2 jj. N. xxxv. 2, § 8; cf. xxxiv. 38. r- liole for attack; and yet we will venture to say, that the success of his assailants has not been very great or astonish- ing. A considerable part of their charges is founded on their own misconceptions of the Eoman history and con- stitution. Thus we find Schwegler enumerating ^ among Livy's '' blunders " that he holds the Patres who assumed the government when the tlirone was vacated to have been the Senate (Lib. i. 17, 32) ; that the Patres Auctores who con- firmed the resolutions of the people were also senators (Lib. i. 17) ; that he misunderstands in like manner the term patres, when he considers Patres IMinorum Gentium to be the hundred new senators created by Tarquinius Priscus. Both these acts, it is said, cannot have been identical, be- cause Tarquin, according to consentient tradition, doubled the patrician races (the Patres), but augmented the Senate only by a third. We have examined these points in their proper places in the sequel of this work, and need not therefore enter here into a discussion of them. AVe have endeavoured to show that the Patres who became Interreges were really the Senate ; that the Patres who gave their audoritas were also the senators, as w^ell as the Patres Minorum Gentium created by Tarquin; that it is not true, nor handed down by "consentient tradition," that Tarquin doubled the patrician races, or stem tribes, and augmented the Senate only by a third. ^ It may be true, as Schwegler goes on to complain, that Livy, when speaking of ancient matters, sometimes uses phrases per- taining to them in the more modern sense which they had in his own time ; but the question is, wliether such a use of them would for a moment have puzzled a Eoman, though such may be its effect upon us, who know the language only through dictionaries. We cannot believe that Livy should not have known the true meaning of such words as coiicilium, jpopulus, contio, &c., and the imputation on his knowledge is probably only the result of our own ignorance. It w^ould be impossible within our limits to examine every charge of this 1 B. i. S. 1C8, f. 2 See helow, p. 130, seq. ; 254, scqq. ; 287, srq. ; 347, scq. Ixxxviii SOURCES OF ROMAN IIISTORV. sort ; such an undertaking would rather belong to a regular edition of Livy ; and even if it should be proved that he may now and then have inadvertently used a word improperly, still, in any candid view of the matter, this forms no serious drawback to the general value of his testimony. ISTor will we enter into the question whether Livy's con- ception of Roman history was that of a philosopher or a statesman. For the purpose of the present volume it suffices to inquire whether he related the facts of the early history with sood faith and also with discrimination. His work is universally allowed to be characterized by simplicity, can- dour, and a love of truth ; and those qualities are better guarantees for the fidelity of his narrative than all the philo- sophy in the world. His pre-eminent merit, so far as our object is concerned, is, that he faithfully followed the ancient sources. This is admitted by Schwegler, who says: "Er iribt die alte Sme verhaltnissmassig treu und unverfalscht wieder."^ To the same effect Lachmann observes, in his elaborate treatise on Livy and his sources : " Sunima in eo erat rerum et auctorum antiquorum reverentia, et fides ac religio, qua eos sequutus est, nee nova mirabiliaque narrandi, nee causas rationesque rerum ex suo ingenio addendi cupi- ditate, nee pnejudicatis opinionibus partiumque studio cor- rupta" . . . "Cum fide antiquos sequitur, et veritatem sub mythorum involucris latentem non eruit sed illa?sam servavit, ubi Dionysius recentiorum exornationes aut ingenium suum sequutus omnia auxit et ipsis verbis recentiora teinpora pro- duxit." ^ Wachsmuth admits that Livy's annalistic method, though not philosophical, is a proof that he followed his sources, and hence accords to him an authority equal to that of the old annalists.3 And Sir G. C. Lewis is also of opinion* that Livy framed his narrative after Fabius Pictor, Cincius, and Cato, quoting in corroboration of it the following sentence from Niebuhr : " One may assume that Livy took every circumstance in his narrative from some of his predecessors, 1 B. i. S. 105. 2 De Fontibus Hist. T. Livii, Pars Prior, p. 83.' 3 Aeltere Gesch. S. 37, 42. * Credibility, &c. vol. i. p. 248. TITUS LIVIUS Ixxxix and never added anything of his own except the colouring of his style." We may consider, then, that we possess in Livy's narrative of the regal period the substance of the history as given by the earliest annalists ; and its general resemblance to what we find in other authors —as, for example, Cicero and Diony- sius — confirms this assumption. In this view of the matter, the credibility of the early lloman history rests almost entirely on the good faith of the annalists in question, a subject to which we have aleady alluded, and to which we shall again have occasion to advert in the second part of this dissertation. But in Livy's work we also possess the advantage of having these early traditions winnowed from the heap after a searching critical examination. This is evident from a comparison of his narrative with that of Dionysius. Livy was a highly judicious, not to say sceptical, writer. His incredulity has, in fact, been of no slight service to the assailants of the history, who have eagerly caught at all his doubts and admissions in support of their arguments. But this scepticism renders what remains all the more valu- able. And though we find in Livy's work some of those fables which his countrymen believed to be inseparably connected with their glory, yet the attentive reader will easily discriminate what traditions the historian himself accepted, and what he rejected. Of the remaining Latin historians of Rome it is not necessary to speak. Those of any note that are still extant contain only passing allusions to the earlier history ; while such com- pilers as Florus, Eutropius, Orosius, and others of the like stamp, merit not the attention of the critical inquirer. We will therefore pass on to the second part of the subject of this dissertation, and proceed to examine the internal evidence connected with the early Roman history. INTERNAL EVIDENCE. The critics who deny that the early Roman history was derived from the sources before enumerated are necessarily fJ xc INTERNAL EVIDENCE. NIEBUHU'S POETICAL THEORY. XCl bound to show in what manner it originated. For this purpose several hypotheses have been formed. They rest, of course, on an examination of the history such as it has come down to us in the works of the extant historians, and are therefore for the most part founded on inference and conjec- ture ; supported, so far as it may be possible, by any passages in ancient authors that may seem to favour these conjectures. The objections to the extant history, which are supposed to be fatal to the assumption that it can have been founded on any authentic records, are drawn from its alleged general improba- bility, and sometimes even impossibility, which are said to be displayed in the supernatural events wliich it records, in the contradictions which it contains, and in the confusion whicli marks its chronology. The extant history being deemed, from these considerations, to be in great part, if not wholly, ficti- tious, though some small part of it may possibly rest on oral tradition, some critics are of opinion that the great bulk of it must have been derived from ancient poems, others that it is a downright forgery, and others again — which seems to be now the favourite hypothesis — that it is founded on aetiology and symbolization ; that is, either on fables intended to explain the origin and causes of the different names that are found in the early history, or of stories invented to symbolize some abstract ideas Avhich the early Eomans are supposed to have been incapable of expressing in words. We will examine each of these hypotheses in their order, and we will then proceed to investigate the charge of improbability or im- possibility. The theory that the early Eoman history is founded on ancieht poems was brouglit forward by Niebuhr,^ and enjo3^ed awhile immense favour. AVe may be indebted to it in this country for Dr. Arnold's " History," and for Lord Macaulay's " Lays of Ancient Eome." But it is now going out of fashion, 1 It did not altogether originate with Niebnhr ; Perizonins had alhuled to such a source in his Animadvv. Hist. c. 6. See Niebuhi's Rom. Gesch. B. i. S. 268, flf. (4te Aufi.) and his Lectures (Eng. transl. edited hy Dr. Schmitz), vol. i. pp. 12, 17, &c. 4 '.-c^- ■^ ■5* and indeed, as we shall endeavour to show, it is altogether untenable.^ One sort of historical songs, according to Niebuhr, were those sung at banquets in praise of distinguished men, as we learn on the authority of Cato, quoted in the following pas- sage from Cicero :— " Gravissimus auctor in Originibus dixit Cato, morem apud majores hunc epularum fuisse, ut deinceps, qui accubarent, canerent ad tibiam clarorum virorum laudes atque virtutes."^ The custom is also alluded to by Varro : ^ " (Aderant) in conviviis pueri modesti ut cantarent carmina antiqua, in quibus laudes erant majorum, assa voce, et cum tibicine." The proper office of the Camenae was supposed to be to sing the praises of the ancients.^ But, among his quotations on this subject, Niebuhr has omitted one which shows that this kind of songs, and the singers of them, were held in no great esteem. Cicero, in another passage of his Tusculan Questions, says : — " Quam- quam est in Originibus, solitos esse in epulis canere convivas ad tibicinem de clarorum hominum virtutibus : honorem tamen huic generi non fuisse declarat oratio Catonis, in qua objecit, ut probrum, Marco Nobiliori, quod is in provinciam poetas duxisset."^ But if in these songs the Roman history was embodied, Cato could hardly have objected to them, who was fond of that subject, and wrote a book upon it. Nor does his account of them convey the remotest hint that they were in any way connected with history. That they were lyrical songs, and not epic rhapsodies, appears from the fact of their being sung to the flute ; and no connected history could have been conveyed in snatches of songs after dinner. 1 For a more elaborate refutation the reader may consult Sir G. C. Lewis, Credibility, &c. vol. i. ch. 6, s. 5 ; and Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. Band. i. Buch i. § 23. 2 Brutus, 19 ; Tusc. Q. iv. 2. 3 Ap. Non. ii. 70, assa voce. 4 "Camense, musje, quod canunt antiquorum laudes."— Paul. Diac. p. 43, "Camense." When Niebuhr adds : "and among these also of kings," he does not state on what authority he makes that addition. It is not in Paullus. That Ennius sang the kings, and that Lucretius mentions them with honour, are no proofs that they were celebrated in these banqueting songs. ^ Tusc. Q. i. 2. r/2 xcu INTERNAL EVIDENCr:. Besides, the narrative of the regal period is for the most part exceedingly prosaic. The chief exceptions are some parts of the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, which contain materials that might be adapted to a poetical subject, just like the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, and several other modern sovereigns. What, for instance, could prove a more striking or better defined rhapsody in a national epopee than the Hundred Days, Bonaparte's escape from Elba, his landing in France, his march to Paris, his final struggle and over- throw, and his banishment to St. Helena? Yet these are facts which have occurred in the memory of the present generation, or, at least, of the more elderly among them. But to sing the reign of Tarquin would not agree w^ith Cato's description, which was to sing the virtues of famous men, a description which unfortunately at once banishes from these songs a great part of history, the actors in which are fre- quently more remarkable for their vices than for their virtues. And though it may be allowed that the Piomans had a few songs concerning historical personages, as those in lionour of Eomulus, mentioned by Fabius Pictor as still sung in liis time,^ yet these would be very for from making a history. iN'iebuhr discovers another sort of historical songs in the ncemce, or dirges, sung at funerals. But the Romans could not have been always singing funereal dirges. They would not have formed very lively entertainments at a dinner-party, nor can we imagine any other occasion, except the actual funeral, on which people would have assembled for the plea- sure of hearing them. The preeficae and their pipers would have to be hired, and the whole affair would have been a sort of profanation of a sacred rite. These naenise, therefore, how- ever great the individual in whose honour they were suno-, could not have been very extensively known among the people at large, and consequently covild not have formed the basis of any popular history. Mebuhr thinks he discovers such n^enise, or remnants of them, in the inscriptions found in the tombs of the Scipios. But, even allowing this to be so, when they began to be engraved they ceased to be only songs, 1 Dionvs. i. 79. nikbuhk's poetical theory. XCllI and might take their place, for so much as they were worth, among written funeral orations, busts with titles, and other family records, as materials for history. All that we contend for is that, in the shape of songs, they could have afforded no such materials. Besides these festive and these funereal songs, Niebuhr tliinks that the whole history of the kings was conveyed in a series of rhapsodies.^ The reign of Pomulus formed of itself an epopee. Numa was celebrated only in short songs. Tullus, the story of the Horatii, and the destruction of Alba, formed an epic whole, like the poem of Komulus ; nay, we have even a fragment of it preserved in Livy,^ in the ^' lex horrendi carminis." After this, however, there is unfortunately a gap. 'Jlie reign of Ancus has not the slightest poetical colouring, aud the question how it came down to us nnist therefore remain, according to this hypothesis, a mystery. But the ])oetry begins again with L. Tarquinius Priscus, forming a magnificent epopee which terminates with the battle of Itegillus. Its parts are, the arrival of Tarquin at Ptome, his deeds and victories, his death, the supernatural history of Servius, the criminal marriage of Tullia, the murder of the righteous king, the whole history of the last Tarquin, the tokens of his fall, Lucretia, the disguise of Brutus, his death, the war of Porsena, and lastly, the quite Homeric battle of Pegillus. These formed a poem which hi depth and brilliancy of fancy far surpassed anything that Rome afterwards pro- duced. Deficient in the unity of the most perfect Grecian poem, it is divided into sections, which correspond with the adventures of the Niebelungenlied ; and should any one, says Niebuhr, have the boldness to restore this poem, he would commit a great error if he chose any other plan than this noble form. On this we may remark, that for the existence of the banqueting songs and the nsenia? before spoken of there is at least some evidence ; but where shall we find any for the existence of these supposed epopees ? To use a slang quasi- philosoi>hical phrase of the day, Niebuhr seems to have ^ B. i. S. 272, f. 2 Lib. i. 26. XCIV INTEKNAL EVIDENCE. developed them out of his " inner consciousness." The only passage which he adduces in support of his view is the fol- lowing one from Ennius : — " Scripsere alii rem Versibu', qiios olim Faiini Vatesque caiiebaut Quom neque Musanini scopulos quisquam siiperarat Nee dicti studiosus erat." But the rem, or subject, here alluded to cannot be any of these ancient epopees, because the word smpsere can refer only to some written poem, and indeed a passage in Cicero's Brutus ^ shows that Ennius was referring to the poem of Nsevius on the First Punic War. The whole value of the passage, there- fore, in relation to Niebuhr's view, is that there existed long before the time of Ennius verses sung by Fauni and Vates — Fauns and poets, or prophets. Now these surely were not epopees. For the verses of the Fauns, as we learn from Varro, were those in which they delivered their oracles in woods and solitary places ; and they were in the rugged Saturnian metre, in which Naevius had composed the poem alluded to.^ The "annosa volumina vatum" mentioned by Horace,^ are also cited by Niebuhr in support of his view,' though with the admission that these were probably prophe- tical books, like those of the Marcii — an admission which is doubtless correct. For such is the view taken by Cicero of what Ennius meant by the word vates, as appears from the following passage : — '' Eodem enim modo multa a vaticinan- tibus spepe preedicta sunt neque solum verbis, sed etiam * Veisilm', qiios olim Fauni vatesque canebant.' Shniliter Marcius et Publicius vates cecinisse dicimtur."*" Ennius therefore was alluding to the metrical predictions of iVIarcius and Publicius, of the former of which we have a specimen in Livy,^ and not to any historical epopees. Moreover, had these epic poems ever e.xisted, it is most 1 Cap. 19, 75, seq. ■^ " Fauni dei Latinorum, ita ut Faunus et Fauna sit ; hos versibus, quos rocant Saturnios, in silvestribus locis traditum est solitos fari futura a quo fando Faunos dictos." — L.L. vii. 36. 3 Epp. ii. 1, 26. ^ B. i. S. 274, Anm. 688. ^ De Div. i. 50, 114, scq. * Lib. xxv. 12. •;fv if 1 • V.i \'i ii mebuhr's poetical theory. xcv extraordinary that they should not only have entirely dis- appeared, but that not even a hint of their former existence should be found in any ancient author. Niebuhr would fain point to some traces of them in the " lex horrendi car- minis," quoted by Livy in his narrative of the trial of Uoratius ; and he has taken tlie liberty of altering it a little, sub silentio, in order to make it square with his theory. But carmen is a common expression for any legal, constitutional, or religious formula ; ^ nor can the substance of the law, even with Niebuhr's ad lihitmn emendation, be tortured into metre. Its form, though perhaps ratlier more antique, very much resembles that of the specimens of Roman laws given by Cicero in the third book of his Be Legibus. We might as well contend that Liv}^'s history was originally written in hexameters, because his preface opens with an imperfect one,^ as infer a metrical history from a law like this. The assump- tion of such a history is quite at variance with the unpoetical nature of the Eoman mind, and especially in the earlier days of Eome. But we need not any longer detain the reader with an examination of this theory. It was partially abandoned, or at all events very extensively modified, by Niebuhr himself, at the beginning of his second volume, and we believe that it is now pretty universally rejected by scholars. Some authors are of opinion that the early Eoman history, or at all events the best materials for it, is a direct and bare- faced forgery. Thus Sir G. C. Lewis remarks : ^ " It has been already mentioned that Clodius, the author of a work on Itoman chronology, described the early records as having perished in the Gallic conflagration, and as having been after- wards replaced by registers fabricated with the view of doing honour to particular persons. We have likewise cited Cicero's account of the early eclipses having been calculated back from a certain solar eclipse recorded in the Annales Maximi. These testimonies lead to the inference that, after the early annals had been destroyed, or when a demand arose for annals 1 See the authorities collected by Sir G. C. Lewis, vol. i. p. 224, note 126. ^ " Facturusne opcne prctium sim," &c. * Criidibility, &c. vol. i. p. 165, scq. XCVl l^^TEli^AL EVIDE^'CE. .» ^vllicb never had existed, forgeries were executed, by whicli a record of this kind for the early period of Home was supplied." " Ecce iterum Crispinus !" This Clodius is too valuable a witness to let drop, though nobody knows who he is, and though the only voucher, even for his existence, is such a writer as Plutarcli. But it is evident, even from the testi- mony of Clodius himself, that tiiere had once been annals, or how could they be said to have been destroyed ? Sir G. C. Lewis has two strings to his bow, for fear that one should break ; but it only makes his weapon the weaker. For if there were no annals, as Sir G. C. Lewis in another place has attempted to show% from the passage in Cicero about eclipses, which we have already examined,^ then the inference from Clodius that they were replaced by fabricated ones is absurd ; aud if tiiere were annals, then the inference from Cicero that they did not exist is good for nothing. It is evident that either the one or the other of these witnesses must be dis- carded ; either Clodius, who says that annals once existed, were destroyed, and replaced by forged ones, or Cicero, who, by inference and construction, is supposed to say that they never existed at all. But we have shown before that the passage in Cicero will admit of no such interpretation. We will assume, however, for a moment, even for the sake of Sir G. C. Lewis's hypothesis, that '^arly annals had existed and been destroyed ; at what period could it have been that a demand arose for them, which w^as supplied by means of forgery ? and who could have been the forgers ? It is plain that a demand for annals must have existed from the very first day that a line of them was written, or why should they have been kept at all ? Sir G. C. Lewis, however, appears to think that nobody cared anything about them, till certain persons took it into their heads to write a Ii(mian history for the public ; and as they wanted materials for the earlier part, they must have applied to the Pontifex Maximus, and that personage, not having any Annates earlier than the Gallic conflagration, very obligingly supplied them ^ Above, p. xxxvii. >///. * Ml Sill G. C. LEWIS S T1IE3KY OF FORGERY. XCVll :m with a forged set ! For it is evident that no private indi- vidual could have forged them, since, first, there would have been no demand for such things — that is, in the sense meant by Sir G. C. Lewis — before the commencement of historical writing for the public ; and, secondly, Fabius Pictor, Cencius Alimentus, Cato, and others, must have been very foolish persons, to say no worse, if, knowing that the IVmtifex Maximus was the only person privileged to keep such annals, they had accepted any from a private individual. It might be said that the early history, as recorded by the first writers, was a forgery of a different kind ; that it was not founded on any documents or records at all, but was, for the most part at least, a pure literary invention. But such a supposition is at once overthrown by considering the essential agreement in the narratives of the earliest writers. It is impossible that several authors, writing independently, should have adopted almost exactly the same tale, even if we could imagine that a grave author like Cato, for instance, should have lent himself to such a thing. Nor does the character of tlie history bear the appearance of invention. Much of it is dry detail, which even the most impudent forger of a highly literary age would not have had the hardihood to invent. Any motive for such a forgery could only have been the gain expected from it. But it is im]3ossible to attribute such a motive to the first lioman annalists, who were men of dis- tincti(jn, and not needy and venal litttratcurs, seeking a living by their pen. Another hypothesis is, that the early Poman history was entirely derived from Greek writers. This view has been adopted by A. W. Sclilegel,^ and other German critics ; but, with all our respect for Schlegel's critical talents, we must avow our entire disbelief in his theory. According to him, the early Roman history is nothing but a " Greek romance," derived by the barbarous liomans from Greek writers, when, aft^r the war with Pyrrhus, they came to be better acquainted with that nation. But the early Roman history, even that of 1 Wcrke, B. xii. S. 447, seq., 486, scqq. ; cf. Daliliiiaiin, Forschuiigeii uiif a.in Gfbict.'dci- Go«cli. ii. 1, S. Vl\\ f. "^A XCVlll INTERNAL EVIDENCE. SCHWEGLERS J:TIULUG1CAE THKUKY. XCIX the kings, contains many details concerning constitutional, legal, consuetudinaiy, and topographical points, which could not possibly have proceeded from any but a native pen. We mean not, however, to deny that some particulars may have been supplied by Greek writers, and especially, as we have already observed, by Tim^us. But whatever in Timseus, or in any other Greek writer, w^ould have approved itself to a Roman understanding, must have been derived, immediately or remotely, from a Eomaii source. Schlegel's idea that the Eomans could have been indebted for any part of their history to the needy Greeks who flocked to Eome about the age of Augustus, is altogether preposterous. We will now proceed to examine Schwegler's view^ of the origin of the early history. It is constructed wdth much plausibility, and as it has to a considerable extent been adopted by Sir G. C. Lewis, we will give it at length in a translation •} — " The true and genuine tradition of the foundation of Eome, and of its earliest fortunes,— if indeed such a tradition ever existed, appears to have been soon lost. And this could scarcely be otherwise. Being neither secured against destruc- tion or falsification by being committed to writing, norliaving become the subject of popular poetry, and thus obtained a firm traditional form at least in song, it must, from the nature of the case, have become mute and been extinguished in the course of generations. It is very possible, nay probable, that in the time of the Decemvirs the Eomans no longer knew anything certain respecting the origin of their city. But in this ignorance they did not acquiesce. It was felt necessary to say something more definite respecting a period and events of which no historical knowledge existed ; and therefore, on a foundation of obscure remembrances and unconnected legends which had been preserved, a history was subtly constructed from proper names, monuments, institutions, and usages, wdierewith to fill up the gap of tradition. In this process, conscious deceit and designed falsification are not for an in- stant to be imputed ; on the contrary, a iiill persuasion was '^ See Rom. Gcsch. Biicli i. ^ 2ti. entertained that in these narratives the real course of events had been felicitously divined, and the original history recon- structed. It is of course to be understood that a history devised in such a manner w^as not at first a connected wdiole, such as is presented to us in the w^orks on Eoman history. This whole,— in which the legend of /Eneas' settlement is brought into pragmatical connexion wdth the foundation and history of Alba Longa, and the line of the Alban kings with the foundation of Eome, so that the story, from the landing of Ancus to the overthrow of the younger Tarquin, is strung together by the thread of a continuous, unbroken historical narrative, — this systematic whole was of course first deve- loped by a knitting of it together, and a common working at it, and partly also, no doubt, by literary industry and reflection. " If we resolve this history into its component parts, and examine each separate part by itself, with regard to its origin and genetic motives, it appears that the Eoman legends and traditions are of very different grow^th, and require very different explanations. " And first of all it must be recognised that certain funda- mental things in the traditional history of the kings are historical, and derived from historical memory. Some remem- brance, though a very confused one, of the principal points in the development of the Eoman constitution was preserved till the literary times. Hence we cannot withhold from the constitutional traditions a certain degree of credibility. The united kingdom of the Eomans and Sabines ; the three stem- tribes, and their successive origin; the three centuries of knights; the successive augmentation of the Senate till it reached the number of three hundred; the addition of a plebs ; the creation of the gentes minores ; the introduction of the census ; the overthrow of the monarchy and the founda- tion of a republic — these fundamental points of the oldest constitutional history are in all probability essentially his- torical ; although the details, and especially the numerical ones, with which they are related, as well as the causal connexion in which they are placed by the historians mav M c INTERNAL EVIDENCE. SCII\VI':ical myths. '' The etymological myth is a subordinate kind of the {TDtiological, which takes as its point of departure some given proper name, and seeks to explain its origin by suggesting for it some actual event. The early Eoman history is also very rich in myths of this sort ; a heap of the fables which it contains has been spun out of proper names. Such is the fable of Argos, the guest of Evander (whence the name of ell INTERNAL EVIDENCE. Argiletum, Sew. ^:ii. viii. rUo), and the Argive colony at Rome ; the birth of Silvius Posthiimus in the wood ; the relation of Evander, the good man, to Cacns, the bad man ; the suckling of Komulus ; the relation of the sucklings to the ruminal fig-tree ; the reputed origin of the Fossa Cluilia ; the extraction of the Tarquins from Tarquinii ; the discovery of the head of Olus ; the birth of Servius Tullius from a slave ; the building of the Tullianum by the like-named king ; the idiocy of Brutus ; Scsevola's burnt right hand ; the conquest of Corioli by Coriolanus, &c. "There is still another sort of Roman tradition, to be distinguished from the setiological and etymological myths ; such traditions as may be described as mythical clothings of actual relations and events, which thus occupy a middle place between myth and legend. To this head belongs, for example, the legend of the Sibyl who comes to Rome in the reign of the younger Tarquin, offers this king nine books of divine prophecies at a high price, being ridiculed by him burns three of them, and then another three, before his eyes, and lastly sells to the king the three still left at the price originally demanded for the nine. An actual occurrence lies doubtless at the bottom of this legend ; the fact that the Sibylline prophecies were probably brought to Rome from Cumse in the reign of the second Tarquin ; but the clothing of this fact is invention, a mean between legend and myth. Perhaps it is the same with the making of the Roman kings seven in number; these seven kings represent the seven fundamental facts of the older (pre-republican) history of Rome which remained in historical remembrance. "In f^eneral the Roman myths have the peculiar and characteristic property, that as a rule they are not unlicensed invention, nor creations of the fancy ; and particularly, not like the greater part of the narratives of the Greek mythology, myth from natural philosophy, or resting on a symbolism of nature, but that they are historical myths, that a certain aspect of actual relationships and real events lies at the bottom of them. The figures of Romulus and Tatius, for example, are indeed mythical : they never really existed ; SCHWEdLKJlS /KTIOI.OOICAL THEORY. cm but their reputed double rule contains nevertheless historical truth : it is the mythical expression of a real historical relationship, of tlie united Latino-Sabine twofold state. Tlie contest of Tarquinius Priscus with the augur Attus Xavius is to be similarly judged: it is scarcely historical in the manner in which it is related : at all events, the story of the whetstone is an evident fable: nevertheless a real event is mirrored in it ; the historical conflict of the pre-Tarquinian sacerdotal state with the political ideas of the Tarquin ian dynasty. In most of the legends and myths of the ancient Roman history, historical remembrances and appearances constitute in like manner the foundation ; they may be detached from it if one refers each myth to the general fundamental representation which forms its genetic motive. " It can scarcely be necessary to justify this conception of the early Roman history, and es])ecially the idea of the myth, against such objections as liave been recently brought against it, in which the ' levity ' and the ' vain and idle play of thoughts,' of such mythic creations have been found irrecon- cilable with the moral earnestness and the practical turn of mind of the ancient Romans. This objection would then only hit the mark if the myths were arbitrary and conscious inventions, — if, in short, they were wilful lies. They are, how- ever, so little such, that they are rather the only language in which a people in a certain grade of civilization can express its thoughts and ideas. Thus, for example, the Latin language, at that point of civilization wliich the Romans had attained at the time when such myths were invented, was unable to express exhaustively the historical conflict between the pre- Tarquinian and Tarquinian idea of a state; wherefore the conception was aided by symbolizing and bringing into view in a single significant scene this contest and the general events connected with it : a scene which, empirically taken, is at all events unhistorical, but in its foundation is histori- cally true. Let us figure to ourselves a people, which, having reached a certain stage of culture, feels the want of brinf^ino- under its contemplation its primitive existence, of sketchhig for itself a picture of its original condition, of which it has CIV INTERNAL EVIDENCK. no longer any liistorical knowledge, of tracing the causes of its present institutions and circumstances, of its political and sacerdotal traditions : liow will it be able to satisfy this want in any other way than by the invention of myths ? What out of its present consciousness it expresses about its origin it w411 be obliged — so long as it is not yet intellectually ripe enough to give these expressions in the form of historical hypotheses — to express in the form of images, that is, in mythic language. " In what precedes ^Ye have laid down the various motives and modes of origin of the Eoman legends and traditions. The legends which arose in this manner were then further spun out by intelligent reflection, and connected with one another ; and thus by degrees arose that complete whole of Eoman tradition which the Eoman historians found and noted down. The legend of Silvius Posthunuis, the ancestor of the Alban Silvii, may serve as an example of such myth- spinning. Silvius, it is said, obtained that name because he was born in a wood— evidently an etymological myth. Thus — it was further inferred — his mother Lavinia must have sojourned in the w^ood at the time of his birth : she had therefore doubtless fled thither; hence probably after the death of her husband ^neas ; thus probably for fear of her step-son Ascanius. That all these accounts rest not on real tradition, but on pure invention, is manifest. In like manner the reputed origin of the Eoman population from a runaway rabble, and the account that it was on this ground that the envoys of Eomulus, who proposed connubium to the neighbouring peoples, were repulsed with contemptuous words, were certainly only inferred from the purely mythical narra- tive of the rape of the Sabines. The reputed despotism exercised by Eomulus in tlie later years of his reign, and the body-guard with which he surrounded himself, are nothing but inferences drawn from the legend of his dismemberment (which was also mythical in its origin) in order to explain by them that enigmatical act. " It is of course understood that every single trait of the traditionaiy history cannot any longer be elucidated ; but THE ETIOLOGICAL TIIEOliV. CV the wliole manner of its coming into existence will liave become hy these preliminary remarks sufficiently clear." Tliis hypotliesis is, at all events, more plausible than the preceding ones; yet we do not think tliat it is a whit more true. We may observe at the outset that it is a mere guess or i conjecture, unsupported by a single scrap of authority. We ' may further remark that it is needlessly invented ; for, as we have already shown, there were other methods, the existence of which rests on the best ancient testimony, by which the lioman history may have come down to us,— namely, through the Annales IMaximi, the Commentaries of the Pontifices, &c. Tlie hypotliesis of Schwegler, therefore, is not only a guess, but a superfluous one. Schwegler's motive for choosing the dccemviral period as that in which he thought the history first began to be constructed is plain enough. The use of writing^'could no longer be denied, because the laws of the Twelve Tables were incontestably written laws. But, as we have seen, letters were known long previously ; and if they had been first intro- duced at this late period, some record of their introduction could hardly have been wanting. It does not, however, appear very clearly whether Schwegler supposes that the history thus invented was now first written down, or that it was merely constructed orally, and transmitted in the same manner. But to both these assumptions there are insuper- able objections. For if history now began to be written, then— excluding always the Commentarii Pontificum, which Schwegler does not appear to contemplate— Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus were not, as they are universally allowed to have been, the first annalists ; and if it was not written, then it is quite impossible that such a body of history, containing many minute details, could have been handed down orally. We may next remark that, if the theory were tenable, it would still provide us with a good deal of credible histoiy of the regal period. For the decemvirs were appointed only about half a century after the expulsion of tlie kings ; and h CVl INTERNAL EVIDENCE. oral tradition, it is commonly allowed, may be relied on for a century, and even a good deal more, when connected with and supported by usages, laws, monuments, &c. Especially a full and authentic account might be supposed to have come down of the last Tarquin, whose history must have been in the memory of many men still living. Yet of all the kings, at all events after Xuma, the reign of the last Tarquin is precisely the one wdiicli is said to bear the most traces of falsehood and poetical invention. Schwegler indeed acknowledges that certain fundamental points of the regal period may be considered as historical ; and especially a certain degree of credibility is not to be refused to constitutional traditions. Among such historical things he classes the united state of the Eomans and Sabines, the three original tribes, the three centuries of knights, the introduction of the census, the fall of the kings, &c. In short, he allows the main facts of the history, but not the manner in wdiich they are related to have come to pass • though the facts and the method of their accomplishment rest on precisely the same testimony. But round these facts, it is asserted, had entwined itself a rank growth of inventions and falsehoods, the origin of which he proceeds to discuss ; and he divides them into legends and myths. Now w^e do not mean to assert that the Eoman history is altogether free from fiction. If the exaggeration of some actual occurrence constitutes a legend, then no doubt legends are to be found in it, as they are in the early history of most nations. The progress of a story in passing from mouth to mouth is proverbial ; nor do we contend that the Romans were free from a natural, we might almost say an inevitable, failing. All we contend for is that these exaggerations do not invalidate the main outlines, the grand features, of the history. On the other hand, we altogether doubt whether it contains myths that come under Schwegler's definition ; namely, narratives of occurrences invented merely to typify some abstract idea. We agree with the objectors alluded to by Schwegler, that such inventions are entirely foreign to the Roman turn of mind. The example proposed in the THE .ETIOLOGICAL THEORY. evil story of Attus Navius ls in the highest degree improbable. The invention of a symbolical story of that nature would imply a far higlier degree of intellectual refinement and subtlety than the capacity to understand, and, consequentl}^ to express — for if it could not be expressed it could not be understood — the diffei'ence between two forms of government. Indeed, a political myth appears to us altogether an absurdity. Schw^egler is obliged to confess that it can be found only among the Romans, and that oxen with them there is some true historical fact at the bottom of it. If it be accom- panied with preternatural incidents — as, for instance, the cutting of the whetstone by Attus Navius — which give it a mythic colouring ; this circumstance admits of an easy explanation. We shall discuss this point jjresently, when we come to consider the objections wdiich have been brought against the history on the ground of the supernatural events which it contains. Every supernatural appearance, or sup- posed appearance, is not necessarily connected with a myth. Thus, for instance, the story of the phallus seen in the fire, to which was attributed the generation of Servius Tullius, may have been the result of fancy, or superstition, or many other causes. It is an extremely far-fetched and improbable supposition, that it was invented in order to express the idea that the spirit of the Roman monarchy became incarnate in Servius; perhaps, of all the Roman kings, the one least fitted to be a type of the monarchy. Schwegler admits that the greater part of the traditional historv of Rome cannot be brought under the definition either of pure myth or even of legend ; and he has therefore discovered for them an origin in what he calls the ^etiological myth. The aetiological myth is a story subtly invented in order to account for the existence of certain usages, worships, institutions, monuments, &c. Now we will not deny that some inventions of this kind are to be found in the early Roman history, and especially in that portion of it which is prior to the foundation of the city ; and it is to this period that the instances cited by Schwegler chiefly belong. It w^as a common practice among the ancients to magnify their A 2 CVlll INTERNAL EVIDENCE. origin and their primneval history. " Datur hrec venia anti- quitati, ut, miscendo humana divinis, primordia nrbimii augustiora faciat," says Livy in his Preface. But we do not believe that any {^etiological myths of this description are to be found after the foundation of the city, or at all events after the reign of Numa. AVe may further remark that the ^etiological myth cannot have been altogether baseless. For if usages, worsliips, &c. liad come down to be explained, they must have formerly existed. It is true, however, that in the narrative they may have been altered and exaggerated ; and thus a settlement of Arcadians may have been attributed to Evander, of Argives to Hercules, and so forth. Perhaps the most plausible part of Schwegler's theory is that of the etymological myth, a subordinate kind of ietio- logical myth, invented to explain the origin of proper names. This part of the theory has been very extensively adopted by Sir G. C. Lewis. But it is a purely arbitrary conjecture. If the principle is good for anything, it may be carried a great deal further than the author has carried it, and quite into the historical times. If it be asserted that the conquest of Corioli was invented to explain the name of Coriolanus, the story of Mucins burning his left hand to explain the name of Scc^evola, the account of Junius's idiocy to explain the name of Brutus, &c., then on the same grounds we may affirm that the conquest of Africa was imagined to explain Scipio's name of Africanus, the wisdom of M. Porcius to explain the name of Cato, &c. In fact the theory amounts to this, that no person can ever be named after a place, nor after some peculiarity; whereas nothing can be more natural and common than the imposition of such names. The greater part of our English surnames have no other origin ; as John Carpenter, James Butcher, William Colchester, William Ilufus, John Lackland, &c. So also it might be said that the story of a Danish settlement was invented to account for the names of St. Olave's, St. Clement Danes, &c. Further, Schweglei; neglects to observe that tradition has handed down many things that are not necessarily connected I with any proper name, usage, institution, &c., and the origin "t" .t. '^ E?- I** ■ s-y- THE ^ETIOLOGICAL THEORY. cix of which cannot be explained by any ^etiological myth Thus the religious system of the Eomans, the Cloaca Maxima the circus, the census, the Capitoline temple, &c. are not necessarily connected with the names of Numa, of Servius Tullius, of the Tarquins, nor can they be referred to those sovereigns by the invention of an £etiological myth. There must, therefore, have been a substantive tradition, uncon- nected with, and independent of, mere names. Occasions will present themselves in the sequel of this work for further examining this aitiological theory— as, for example, in its application to the story of the Horatii and Curiatii i—and we need not, therefore, pursue the subject here. Having thus considered the causes which have been assigned for the existence of the Eoman history, we will next proceed to examine the arguments which have been brouglit forward against its authenticity from its alleged general improbability. One of these arguments is based on the supernatural occur- rences which it relates. Schwegler, after examining the sources of Ptoman history, observes : 2 " By the proceeding exposition we think it has been sufficiently shown what the case is with regard to the testimony of the earliest Roman history; and that if this history has been recently claimed as 'attested,' 3 a very confused idea of historical 'attestation' lies at the bottom of such a notion. What does it signify to assert over and over again that it was once historically\anded down, and that the Piomans themselves believed it ? By the same maxim, anybody might claim the whole Grecian mytho- logy as history, since that was also handed down, and also at one time believed. By this maxim Ptomulus was actually the son of Mars, and Picus, Faunus, and Latinus were once really kings of Laurentum. Even Dionysius says : •* ' At that time Faunus reigned over the aborigines, a man of action as well as great wisdom : ' and later authors even give the years of the three Laurentine kings.^ If we are to admit at once as 1 Below, p. 190, seqq. 2 p^^j^ j^ g ^g 3 Tlir> aiiUior .seems to be alliuling to the History of Gcrlach and Baehofen. ^^'''' '• '^^' ^ Eusebius, Ilicroiiynnis, Syncellus. ex INTERNAL EVIDENCE. ARGUMENT FROM THE SUPERNATURAL. CXI historical all that the Eoman historians relate in good faith; if we are to suffer ourselves to be led in the representation of the deeds of the Eomans by the Eoman standard of know- ledge and belief ; it is much more consistent to accept, with Theod. Eyck, even Janus and Hercules as historical persons, than to draw the boundary line between the mythical and the historical so arbitrarily as it is drawn in the most recent defences of the history. This boundary line must be drawn somewhere else; it must be drawn where tlie supernatural events cease : for the miraculous, the ' dearest cliikl ' of popular belief, is the surest criterion of invention. Where miracles cease, there history begins." On this it mav be remarked that if the line is to be drawn where the supernatural ceases, then it must be placed a great deal lower than where Schwegler draws it. It is commonly allowed that the narrative of the Second Punic War is his- torical. Yet it was a general belief among the Eomans that Hannibal was conducted over the Alps by some divine being. ^ Livy records many prodigies tliat occurred in the year B.C. 169 — as a torch in the lieavens, a speaking cow, a weeping statue of Apollo, showers of stones and blood, &c.2 Such prodigies continued to be publicly recorded and expiated down to the imperial times. It is related that, a few months before the murder of elulius Csesar, there was discovered at Capua, in the reputed tomb of Capys, its founder, a brazen tablet with a Greek inscription, purporting that when the bones of Capys should be disinterred it would happen that a descendant of Julius would be killed by the hands of his relatives, and would be presently avenged amidst great calamities of Italy. This was no mere vulgar report. It rested on the testimony of Cornelius Balbus, the friend and biographer of Caesar. "^ The horses which C?esar had con- secrated on passing the Eubicon, and released from further service, were seen before his death to abstain from food and to weep abundantly. The arms of Mars, which were in his house as Pontifex Maximus, were heard to clatter in the night, and the folding doors of the chamber in which he slept 1 PolvK iii. 48. « Lib. xliii. 13. » g^p^^ q^^^ gj^ '•a , I • ?« - ■J . •.ft ■ .■§■ :i%- ir. ■ ."1. y.' -I '■v!> I' c<- . ■•■*■ f v.- opened of themselves. A wren with a laurel branch seeking refuge in Pompey's curia was torn to pieces by other birds. There were also the omens of his wife's dream, of the sooth- sayer's warning, of his own abortive sacrifices, &c.^ We might even go down to the reign of Constantino, and instance the labarum and the hosts of celestial w^arriors seen in the sky. Now these portents are quite as wonderful as those recorded in the regal period, — such as the eagle which lifted the cap of Tarquin the Elder, the story of Attus Navius and the whetstone, the miraculous generation of Servius Tullius, tlie apparition of Castor and Pollux at Lake Eegillus, &c. ; yet nobody thinks on that account of rejecting the fact of Hannibal's passage of the Alps, or of Ccesar's assassination, or of Constantine's conversion to Christianity. The boundary line between history and myth cannot, therefore, be drawn where miraculous events cease to be related ; for it is plain from these instances that they may be mixed up with the most genuine and incontestable history. It may be allowed, indeed, that as a people becomes more intellectual and rational, such events become fewer and fewer, and at last, perhaps, almost vanish altogether. But this fact militates, not for Schwegler's view, but against it. History is written from the point of view of the historian, which varies in different ages. When a German rationalis t now s its down to recompose a history of early Eome/Tie of cou rse omits all miraculous tales ; but the histor}^, for al 1 tlT at, is not half so credible as the o ld one that i t is tryin g to^sui)])la nt. In like manner, if the early history had be e n inve nted, accordint. C*s. 81, and Dion Cuss. xliv. 18. i i ex 11 IMTERXAL EVIDP:NCE. writ ers of the history. But we are not bound to believe fiese stories, like Theod. Evck, because the Iioinaiis believed them ; nor to reject the history because they believed them. In fact, the educated Eomans of the later ages, like Livy, did not believe them ; but they did not on that account reject the remainder of the history. Schwegler's argument on this subject is altogether beside the purpose. Tlie Grecian mytho- logy never pretended to be composed, like the Roman history, from records. It is not necessary for us to believe that Romulus was the son of Mars, but only that the Romans, or a great part of them, believed him to be so. If later authors have accepted some of these fables, that is an argument against their judgment, and not against the early history. Dionysius, who was an injudicious historian, believed a great many things that Livy rejected. We need not, therefore, suffer ourselves to be led " by the Roman standard of know- ledge and belief," and follow Theodore Ryck ; but neither, at the same time, need we be led by the standard set up by the modern rationalistic critics, and reject everything indis- criminately on account of a few wonderful tales. After enumerating several of these supernatural events in the early history, Schwegler proceeds to remark :i "Nobody at present any longer believes these traditions to be historical facts ; yet many still entertain the childish notion that we have only to reject these too manifest fables, and to strip off from the mythic narrative what is evidently exaggerated and impossible, and so find in the remainder genuine and actual history. They reflect not that the wonderful and super- natural is the very life, soul, and genetic motive of the myth — not the husk, but the kernel ; and that when this is stripped away the remainder is merely the caimt mortuum of the old poetic legend, and the furthest possible from an historical fact. And, in general, what right have we to regard a narra- tive which is everywhere interwoven with manifest inven- tions, as perfectly historical in all those points where the invention is not palpable, which contain nothing absolutely impossible ? Such a narrative must rather, on account of its 1 B. i. Buch i. § 21, S. 51. ARGUMENT FROM THE SUPERNATURAL. CXUl connexion with what is indubitably unhistorical, pass at least for problematical, even where it contains nothing impossible in itself." The force of this reasoning depends on the following assumptions : that the early Roman history is mythical ; and that the wonderful and supernatural stories which we find in it prove it to be so. This involves the assertion that all events connected with any supernatural story must neces- sarily be fabulous ; but we have already seen in the case of CVesar, &c. that this assertion is not true. The resolution of the question here involved depends on tliat of another— what was tlie true origin of the early Roman history? If it was nothing but a myth, then we may admit that, when it is divested of tlie wonderful and supernatural, the residue will be nothing but a cajmt mortuum. But even Schwegler himself has not ventured to assign to it a purely mythical origin. Thus in a passage in his twenty-sixth section, which we have already translated,^ he says : '* It must be recognised that certain fundamental things in the traditional history of the kings are historical, and derived from historical memory. . . . But over this foundation of facts a rank and luxuriant growth of invention has entwined itself; a growth of legends which we must now more closely examine," &c. It follows, tlien, from Schwegler's own words, that if we strip off* the rank and luxuriant inventions, the residuum will be something more than a ca2mt mortmcm : it will be, on his own showing, genuine history. In fact, there is no ground at all for assuming the early Roman history, after the foundation of the city, to be mythical. The supernatural occurrences bear, after all, a very small pro- portion to the mass of prosaic details which it contains; details as far removed as j)Ossible from poetical invention! The miracles are only such as might very readily spring up among an illiterate and superstitious people, especially when the belief in them was encouraged and propagated by priest- craft. The exploits of the Maid of Orleans are historical ; \rt few, perhaps, will believe the supernatural details with * Above, p. xcix. CXIV INTERN^VL EVIDENCE. which they are connected : her commission from heaven to achieve Charles YII.'s coronation at Eheims, her revelation to that monarch of a secret which he believed to be confined to his own breast. The story of Jeanne d'Arc is as romantic and incredible as anything in the early Roman history ; and in like manner its supernatural details are doubtless the product either of enthusiasm or craft. Another argument against the authenticity of the history is derived from the contradictions which it is alleged to con- tain. On this head Schwegler remarks : ^ " A further proof of the little authenticity of the earliest history of Eome is the striking contradiction of the accounts : a contradiction which displays itself in numberless points ; and not only in minor details, but also often in important facts ; and thus places the whole history of that period in a doubtful light. A period whose history is so anomalous and contradictory cannot possibly pass for historical. Take, for instance, the astounding jumble in the traditions concerning Ivomulus's descent I How can these traditions, which make the founder of Eome sometimes the son, sometimes the grandson, of JEneas, and sometimes represent him as born five hundred years later, claim the slightest pretension to historical credi- bility ? Concerning the birth of Servius Tullius, and medi- ately concerning his attaining of the throne, four different traditions are preserved, of which precisely the two that are relatively the best attested, the national Eoman tradition and that of the Tuscan Annals, are separated from each other by an immeasurable chasm, that cannot be filled up. We cannot here instance all these contradictions of tradition ; they will be spoken of in their proper places : ^ye may only remark here that the fragment of Dionysius recently found has afforded a new proof how low^ the variation and uncertainty of tradition reaches; since that the second dictatorship of Cincinnatus and all connected with it is a fable, can no longer be the subject of any well-founded doubt. AVhat in this point chiefly excites suspicion against the common tradition is, that it is found to be in contradiction with the documents, 1 B. i. F>iuli i. }{ 1(5. ARGUMENT FROM CONTRADICTIONS. CXV It: where any of these have chanced to be preserved. Neither the alliance of the younger Tarquin w4th the Gabines, nor the first commercial treaty with Carthage, nor the treaty of confederacy of Sp. Cassius, can be brought into accordance with the traditional history ; and ^ye may suspect that this tradition might be show^n to be falsified in other points in case more documents had come down to us." Let us here again remind the reader that it is far from our purpose to maintain that every incident of the early Eoman history is strictly historical. It would be absurd to claim for a narrative coming down from comparatively rude and illiterate times, and in so fragmentary a form, tlie same historical authority which may be accorded, for instance, to the history of England during the last two or three centuries. All that we contend for is that there is evidence enough to establish the main outlines of the narrative after the foundation of the city ; to prove the names of the seven kings, their order of succession, and the principal events of their reigns ; and thus to vindicate the history from being, as some modern writers have called it, a mere fantasy, or to justify its being treated as Dr. jVIommsen has done in his recent work, where the individuality of the kings is completely ignored ; and though many of the events of the history are accepted, yet they are interpreted and reconstructed in a manner often entirely new, and quite unjustified by any sound critical principles. But, after all, these alleged contradictions have been very much exaggerated, as we shall endeavour to show in the proper places, with regai'd to those instances which fall within the compass of the present work. Many of them arise from the absurdity and ignorance of Dionysius and Plutarch ; but if those writers, from their inadequate acquaintance with the Eoman history and constitution, as well as their imperfect knowledge of the T.atin tongue, made statements which are at variance with those of Latin authors, this forms no just ground of charge against the history. We wdll not deny that the carelessness of Livy may now^ and then lend a colour to the same charge ; but such instances are rare and of minor importance. '^ CXVl INTERNAL EVII>EXCE. ARGUMENT FROM CHRONOLOGY. CXVU Witli regard to the instances of contradiction alleged in the paragraph just translated, we may remark tliat we abandon at once the wliole history before the foundation of tlie city. It was invented, though perhaps from some obscure vestiges of tradition, in order to carry up the Eonian lineage to iEneas. Hence the difference of some five centuries in the birth of Eomulus ; who, as we shall endeavour to show in the proper place,^ was probably tlie son, or grandson, of a Greek wlio had landed on the Italian coast not a great many years before the foundation of Eome. Of the birth of Servius Tullius, and the mode in which he obtained the throne, we shall also speak in the proper place. The next instance of contradiction, regarding the second dictatorship of Cincinnatus, falls beyond the limits of the present work. But that the fragment of Dionysius lately discovered can be said, on any sound critical principles, to prove the account a fable, we altogether deny. All it proves is tliat one or two annalists related the matter differently, and so improbably that even Dionysius himself rejected their version of it. The other instances adduced by Schwegler will be examined in their proper places ; where in particular we shall endeavour to show that the commercial treaty with Carthage, so far from being inconsistent with the traditional history, confirms its main features in a most remarkable manner. But it will be evident that to enter further here into this subject would be to anticipate the scope of the following book. One of the chief arguments brought against the early Eoman history is founded on its chronology. On this subject Schwegler remarks : '^ '' The seven kings are related to have reigned alto- gether 240 or 244 years. It has been frequently remarked that this number contradicts all experience and probability. It gives on an average thirty-four years for the reign of each king ; whilst in Venice, from the year 805 to the year 1311, that is in five centuries, forty doges reigned ; ^ each therefore having a reign of 12| years, or about a third part of the average of the reigns of the Eoman kings. The examples which have been ^ St-e below, sec. ii. p. 23, seq. ; 28, scq. 2 IUk.Ii xviii. § 20, 8. Sm. =» Nicbuhr, Roin. Gc.s.li. i. :30], Amu. 912. "■jJJV, .T adduced to justify the traditional chronology are not to the purpose, inasmuch as the Eoman kings did not succeed to the tlirone by birth, but obtained it by election ; and consequently not as boys or youths, but in the age of manhood. Besides, it must be remarked that, of the whole seven kings, only two died a natural death, and that the last survived liis overthrow about fifteen years. The traditional chronology also stands in iiTcconcilable contradiction with the remaining tradition ; and if Tarquinius Prisons actually reigned thirty-eight years, Sei-v^ius Tullius forty-four, and the younger Tarquin twenty- five, there arises, as we have already shown,i a chain of absurdities and impossibilities. Lastly, the number of 240 years, which the older tradition gives for the regal period, stands in such a mathematical relation to the number 120, the period which elapses between the expulsion of the kings and the Gallic catastrophe, as justly to excite suspicion ; especially if one views in connexion with both numbers the twelve Eomulean birds of fate. " Under these circumstances the age of Eome cannot at all be determined. But that the origin of the city is to be dated higher than it is placed by tradition, has been rightly inferred from the Tarquinian buildings, and especially from the Cloaca ^laxima.^ " The traditional years of each king's reign are of course 1 In Buch i. § 20. 2 See vScipio I^Iaffei, Di2)lomatica clie serve d' Introduzzione all' Arte Critica, 1727, p. 60 ; Levesque, Hist. crit. de la Rej). Rom. 1807, i. p. 52; Niebuhr,' Vortr. iiber Rom. Gesch. i. 128. AVhen Schwegler cites tlie authority of MafFei, he could not have refeiTed to his work, for at p. 60 of the edition of 1727, which reference is copied from Levesque, there is nothing at all relating to the subject. After long hunting for it we found the following passage, which we sui)poFe is the one meant, at p. 251 : '*I.e Cloache di Roma fatte in tempo di Tanpiinio Frisco, opera descritta da Plinio (xxxvi. 15) per massima di tiittc V altre, e di cui recano ancora maraviglia i pochi avanzi, non mostrano per certo una Citta cominciata cencintpiant' anni avanti, ma "piu tosto rcsa gia gi'ande in lungo corso d'cth,, per numeroso popolo e per richezza." We have nothing liere but an ipse dixit of Maffei, copied by Levesque, founded on the false view that the builders of Rome could have been nothing but barbarians. The assumption rests altogether on a wrong idea of the constructive art among the ancient peoples. And let it be remembered that, though the Cloaca is^cer- taiidy a noble sewer, it was originally of no great length, extending only to the Forum, which it was intended to drain. CXVlll INTERNAL EVIDENCE. invented. On what principle the Pontifices proceeded in the fixing of them cannot now be entirely discovered. We can only see thus far, that they placed Nunia's death at the end of the first physical s^culum, and that of Tullus Ilostilius at the end of the first civil Sceculuni." ^ On this w^e may remark, that it is of no use to give us the average reigns of forty Venetian doges, unless their age at the time of their accession is also given. We know that most of the Eoman kings were young men when they began to reign. Komulus was only eighteen. Numa is said to have been born on the day that Eome was founded ; and therefore, as Komulus reigned thirty-eight years, and as there was an interregruni of a year, he would, by the common computation, have been thirty-nine when he was elected. But in the time of Komulus, at all events, the year consisted of only ten months — an allow- ance, by the way, which is never made by the critics, though it suffices of itself to throw out all the fine calculations about the speculum. Deducting, therefore, one sixth from his re- puted age, Numa would have been thirty-two at his accession, and there is nothing improbable in his long reign. Tullus Hostilius was a young man—" tum (stas viresque, tum avita quoque gloria, animuni stimulabat " -—the grandson of a con- temporary of Komulus. There is nothing by which we can determine the age of Ancus at the time of his election ; but as he was the the grandson of Numa, and as, from the active duties required of him, the Komans appear to have preferred a young man for their king, we may conclude that he was not very far advanced in life ; but even if he was, he may very well have reigned the twenty-four years assigned to him. Tarquinius may probably have reached middle age when he ascended the throne ; but there is still room for a reign of thirty-seven years. The birth of Servius Tullius is narrated when the reign of Tarquin was well advanced, and therefore he must have been a young man when he seized the throne. 1 See more in Niebuhr, Rom. Geseh. i. 253, Yortr. iiber Rom. Gesch. i. 84 ; and Schwegler, p. 557. The saeculuni civile consisted of 110 years, and Tullus Hostilius died in the year of Rome 110 ( = 38 -H 1 -h 39 -f 32). 2 Liv. i. 22. ARGUMENT FROM CHRONOLOGY. CXIX Tarquin the Proud reigned only twenty-five years, and conse- quently there is no occasion to compute his age at his accession. The principle of election, therefore, if youth and strength were among the elements which determined it, was, contrary to the assertion of Schwegler, more favourable to length of reign than hereditary succession. A father, son, and grand- son, even under favourable circumstances, can hardly expect to reign more than a century, which, at an equal average, would fix the age of accession at thirty-three. But the greater part of the Koman kings acceded considerably below that age ; and if most of them met a violent death, it must be also remembered that it was at an advanced period of life, and when they had long filled the throne. The objections to the chronology of the Tarquins will be examined under the reigns of those sovereigns. The objec- tion about the mathematical proportion between the period of the kings' reigns and that between their expulsion and the destruction of the city is nothing but what a popular writer would call a German " cobweb." For, first of all, the dura- tion commonly assigned to the regal period is not 240 years, but 244 ; and the former number is obtained by striking ofl', after Polybius, four years from the reign of Mima. Again, when this is done, we must strike off at all events six or seven years from the reign of Romulus, which w^ould reduce the kingly period either to 238 or 234 years, and again destroy the supposed mathematical proportion. The connect- ing of these years with the twelve vultures is another " cob- web," ^ as well as Niebuhr's hypothesis about the chronology having been invented according to the reckoning of the Quin- decemvirs of the physical and civil saeculum. On this subject ^ There was an old Roman prophecy, derived from the Romulean augury, about the duration of the Roman State for twelve centuries. See Censorinus, De Die Nat. c. 17 (who took it from Yarro) ; Claudian, De Bell. Get. v. 265, &c. But it is difficult to see what connexion there is between the expulsion of the kings and the capture of the city by the Gauls, or what ratio the 360 years from the foundation of Rome to its capture— even if we admit that calculation — bears to the twelve vultures. For though 360 may be divided by twelve, leaving a quotient of thirty without remainder, the meaning of such a quotient is not at all obvious to untranscendental minds. cxx INTERNAL EVIDENCE. Sclnvegler remarks : ^ " That the reigns of the first two kings form a peculiar order of things, separated from the hiter history, is in a certain manner shown by tradition, wliich makes the first sa^culum of the city expire with the death of Numa. For the first secular festival after the expulsion of the kings was celebrated, according to the Commentaries of the Quindecemvirs, in A.U.C. 298 ; and if from this point we calculate the s^culum of 110 years backwards, the beginning of the second Sieculum falls in A.u.c. 78, and this very year was according to Polybius, who is followed by Cicero, the first year after Xuma's death. Consequently the year of Numa's death was the last year of the first speculum. The old tradition that Numa was born on the day of Itome's foundation has the same meaning.^ For, according to the doctrine of the Etruscan rituals, the first sieculum of a city ended with him who, of all those born on the day of its foundation, attained the greatest age. Hence Xuma's death, as this tradition appears to intimate, forms the line of demar- cation between two epochs. And, indeed, with his death the purely mythical epoch of Eome expires, and the half-his- torical time, the dawn of history, begins : while, on the other hand, the first two kings— the one the son of a god, the other the husband of a goddess— evidently belong to a different period of the world than the ordinary one." The last sentence of this paragraph would lead us to suppose that the Quindecemviri looked upon the early Itoman history with as sceptical an eye as a modern German critic ; that they set down the first two kings as mythical, and on that account fixed on the close of the second king's reign as a chronological epoch. That, however, was not the only reason for choosing that epoch ; for the German critics are always abundantly supplied with reasons for their theories: there was another, which, by a very singular coincidence, also pointed to the same period, namely— that Numa, who, by Plutarch at least, is said to have been born on the day when Eome was founded, then closed his life. We will not stop to 1 B. i. S. 557. ■i Plut. Num. 3 ; Dion Cass. Fr. 6, 5. ARGUMENT FROM CHRONOLOGY. CXXl remark that, however mythical the foundation of Rome and the reigns of the first two kings may be said to be, they are nevertheless here made the data for a very precise chrono- logical computation, but will pass on to the general drift of tlie paragraph. And first we will ask whether we are to suppose that the early Eoman history was written in accordance with these data of the Quindecemviri ? The seventeenth chapter of Censorinus, "De Die Natali," from which all this ingenious web is spun, shows clearly that it was not. TJie Quindecem- viri stood quite alone in their opinion about the secular games having been celebrated, or at all events about their celebra- tion being due, at the expiration of every 110 years. Their cal- culation is evidently an arbitrary one, made at the time when the secular games were celebrated by the order of Augustus, and confirmed by a decree of that emperor. The Quindecem- viri had superseded the Decemviri only about sixty or seventy years previously — in the time of Sulla ; so that if it had been an old opinion among the interpreters of the Sibylline books, the authority of the Decemvirs, and not of the Quin- decemvirs, would have been cited for it. But the old annalists — the supposed inventors of the early Eoman history and chronology — from whom Livy and the other historians drew, flourished long before this time, and formed quite a different opinion of the chronology of these games ; so that the early chronology could not have been invented according to the Quindecemviral saBculum of 110 years. We subjoin the two statements. According to the Quindecemvirs, the games were celebrated as follows: a.u.c. 298, 408, 518, 628, 737.^ But according to Valerius Antias, Varro, Livy, and the historians generally, the period for the recurrence of the games should have been a century, though they were actually celebrated as follows : a.u.c. 245, 305, 504, 605,2 737. After 1 This seems to be a year short of the usual period. But perhaps Julius CjEsar's year of confusion, consisting of fifteen months, must be taken into the account. The period is confirmed by Horace's Carmen Saeculare : *' Undenos decies per annos orbis." ' There was a slight difference with regard to this celebration ; some annalists, as Piso, Cn. Gellius, and Cassius Hemina, placing it three years later, or in I cxxu INTERNAL EVlDENCi:. ARGUMENT FROM CHRONOLOGY. CXXIU the reign of Augustus the celebration took place at much shorter intervals. We may remark on the above that Valerius Antias and the other historians placed the first celebration in the year after the expulsion of the kings, which agrees with the account in Valerius Maximus/ that they were first publicly instituted by Valerius Publicola in his first consulship. The games, with sacrifices at the altar of Dis and Proserpine, at a place in the Campus Martins called Tarentum, or Terentum, had indeed been previously celebrated by an individual named Valerius, out of gratitude to, and by direction of, the gods, for the recovery of his cliildren from a pestilential disease by drinking of some warm springs at that spot : but this was a private matter, totally unconnected with the state ; and the celebration of the games by the Consul Valerius was, as we have said, the first public one. The Quindecemvirs placed tlieir origin still lower, or in a.u.c. 298. Yet Niebuhr dreams about carrying them up to the origin of the city, and thus making them a festival commemorative of the age of Eome. AVith this view, Niebuhr,^ who is followed by Schwegler in the passage already cited, mistranslates the following sentence of Censorinus : ''Primes enim ludos sieculares exactis regibus, post Ptoniam conditam annis ccxlv. a Valerio Publicola institutes esse, Valerius Antias ait ; ut xv-virorum Commentarii annis cclxxxxviii. M. Valerio, Sp. Verginio Coss. : " by rendering " the first secular festival after the expulsion of the kings was celebrated" &c. instead of, " the first secular festival was instituted after the expulsion of the kings ; " the first method of translation assuming that there had'' been celebrations during the regal period; the second, which is the only correct one, excluding any such assumption. And this mistranslation is made in contradiction of a direct statement of Censorinus only a page further on, viz. : " Cum 608 ; and as Hemiiia lived at this time, he ought to have known. But the discrepancy probably arose from some difference in fixing the foundation era. 1 Lib. ii. c. iv. s. 6. 2 B. i. S. 253 : " Das erste Sacularfest nach Yerbannung der Konige sey in Jahr 298 gef«iyert worden," u.s.n-. ;^"l ;-S ab urbis primordio ad reges exactos, annos ccxliv., (ludos), factos esse, 7ic7no sit auctor" So that this attack on the Eoman chronology is founded on the mistranslation of a common Latin book like Censorinus ! In fact ^the festival had, properly speaking, no immediate connexion with the age of Eome. And tliis w^as most dis- tinctly the opinion of Censorinus himself, who says, after recording the different a^ras of celebration before given: " Hinc animadvertere licet, neque post centum annos, ut hi referrentur ludi, statum esse, neque post centum decem. Quorum etiamsi alterutrum retro fuisset observatum, non tamen id satis argumenti esset, quo quis his ludis scecula discerni constanter affirmet, pra3sertim cum ab itrbis iwimordio, ad reges exactos, annos ccxliv. factos esse, nemo sit auctor. Quod tempus proculdubio naturali majus est sa^culo. Quod si quis credit, ludis scecularibus scecula discerni, sola nominis origine inductus ; sciat, saBCulares dici potuisse, quod ])lerumque semelfiant hominis aetate." 'Yet it is in the face of this opinion, and from the very same chapter which contains it, that Niebuhr, and after him Schwegler, have derived their fanciful theory ! in aid of which it w^as necessary to cut off four years from the received chronology of the kings, and to assume that the Tuscan notion of the physical saeculum was adopted by the Romans, of which there is not the slightest evidence. It is plain, therefore, that the early lioman chronology was not manufactured in any such capricious manner as that here assumed. That it contains serious errors and defects, — that it is, in short, the w^eakest point in the history, — must be acknow- ledged ; and it were only to be wished that a portion of the superfluous ingenuity which has been expended in not very happy attempts to explain the supposed method of its inven- tion, had been employed rather in investigating whether there might not be some w^ay of reconciling it with the probability of the history. This is the very difficult task which we here propose to ourselves ; and we must therefore claim for the attempt the candid consideration of the reader.^ ^ The WTiter has before slightly touched upon the subject in the introduction to his " History of the City of Rome." i 2 • CXXIV INTERNAL EVIDENCE. The idea of a complete astronomical year, at the end of which the sun is found in the same position in the heavens as he occupied at the beginning, is so familiar to us that it is difficult to conceive a period at which any other notion pre- vailed. But when we reflect on the vast amount of science and observation required to determine this year with any approach to accuracy, we shall not be surprised to find that among rude and imperfectly civilized nations the grossest deviations from this standard prevailed. The period of the natural day is a measure of time that is forced upon us in- voluntarily. Next to this, the revolutions of tlie moon afford the most striking indication of the lapse of time ; and hence days and months become necessary units in all calculations where time is concerned. But the duration of the astronomi- cal year is not so easily ascertained, and especially in southern latitudes, where the difference between the seasons is not so strongly marked as in more northern ones. Ten months may perhaps have been first assigned for the sun's annual course by a rude guess ; or because the scanty decimal arithmetic of a half-civilized people— counting on the ten fingers— rendered them unequal to, or indisposed for, a longer calculation ; or they may have been satisfied with such a measure, and utterly regardless of a scientific accuracy— which, indeed, they had no means of attaining— although in a few revolutions of the sun the same month w^hich had been midsummer would have become midwinter. And we know the force of habit. When such an imperfect year had become habitual among a people ; when contracts and all the usages both of civil and religious life had come to be regulated by it ; it would have been difficult to change it for a more accurate and scientific year, even if the means for calculating such a one had been at hand. Hence we are not surprised to learn that among the nations of antiquity years of various duration had been in use, and even among the Italian people. Thus the Ferentines, the Lavinians, and the Albans are said to have had different years ;^ and Laurentum, which, as we shall show, was probably the 1 Censorin. Do Die Nat. c. 20. A NEW CHRONOLOGICAL THEORY. CXXV mother city of the Eomans, had a year of ten months, extend- ing from IMarcli to December, since we learn from Macrobius that the Laurentines sacrificed to Juno, who was with them equivalent to Luna, on all the kalends of those months.^ It was almost generally agreed among the authors of antiquity that the Eoman year also, as well as the Laurentine, at first consisted of only ten months. The only authors who dis- sented from this view appear to have been Licinius IVIacer and Fenestella,^ whose opinion was followed by Scaliger, in his '* Emendatio Temporum." But it is far outweighed by more numerous and better authorities ; as Junius Gracchanus, Fulvius, Yarro, Suetonius, Livy (who says that the year of twelve months was introduced by Numa), Ovid, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, and others, with whom Censorinus agreed. On the subject of the year Ovid says : — " Nee totidem veteres, quot nunc, habuere kalendas, Ille minor geminis ineiisibus annus erat. Nonduni tradidcrat victas victoribus artes Graicia, facundum, sed male forte genus. ***** Ergo animi indociles et adhuc ratione carentes, Mensibus egerunt lustra minora decem. Annus erat decimum quum TiUna rejdeverat orbem, Hie numerus magno tunc in honore fuit Seu quia tot digiti per quos numerare solemus," &c. The question is, How long this year of ten months lasted ? The lines of Ovid would seem to imply that the astronomical year was not introduced till Greece had been conquered by the Eoman arms ; but that appears to be too late a period. The time of the Decemvirs might be a probable epoch, and they are said to have made some regulation respecting intercalation ; but there are indications that the year of ten months must have lasted beyond their time. The same indications seem to show that two sorts of years were in use at the same time at Home ; one a moon-year, consisting of »^55 days — the introduc- tion of w^hich is attributed by some writers to Numa, by others 1 "Sed et omnibus kalendis, a mense Martio ad Decembrem, huic Deaa kalendarum die supplicant." — Sat. i. 15. 2 Censorin. De Die Nat. c. 20. CXXVl INTERNAL EVIDENCE. A NEW CHKONOLOGICAL THEORY. ex XVI 1 to Tarquinius Priscus or Servius Tullius — and the Komiileaii year of 304 days. The knowledge of the former year, and, indeed, the regulation of the calendar altogether, seems to have been confined to the priests. How ignorant the laity were of the lapse of time and revolutions of the year appears from the circumstance that, far into the republican times, the consuls, or a dictator created expressly for the purpose, were accustomed to drive a nail into the wall of Minerva's cell in the Capitoline temple, on the Ides of every September, in order to mark the lapse of time, and perhaps to serve as a sort of check upon the priests. The monopoly of knowledge on the part of the priests is also shown by the circumstance that it was they who proclaimed the new moon and fixed the Ides, and who retained to themselves the knowledge of the Dies Fasti and Nefasti. After the time of Servius Tullius the cele- bration of the lustrum every fifth year, or every sixth Eomu- lean year, brought the two years into some kind of harmony ; but, as is well known, the calendar w\as a heap of confusion down to tlie time of Julius C?esar. It cannot be imagined that the Komulean year ceased to be observed, for civil purposes, after the time of Eomulus, or indeed for a long while afterwards. There were certain inveterate customs connected with it relating to some of the most habitual and important acts of life, which must have required a long period to take so firm a root. As Xiebuhr has pointed out, a year of ten months was the period during which widows mourned their husbands : ^ it was also the term for the payment of portions bequeathed by will, for credit on the sale of yearly i^rolits, for loans, and for calculating the rate of interest. Some of these things would hardly have been known in tlie reign of Romulus. A passage in Macrobius illustrates still more strikingly the year of ten months. That author relates^ that in ]\Iarch the matrons waited on their slaves at supper, as their masters did in the Saturnalia of December, in order tliat tlie honour thus accorded to them at the beginning of the year might incline them to be obedient ; for ^yhich, at the end of it, they were rewarded by the 1 Hibt. of Rome, vol. i. p. 342. » Sat. i. 12. , ■ifk". ■ Saturnalia. But there could have been few, if any, slaves at Rome in the time of Romulus. The fact of the asylum is totally at variance wdth the existence of any considerable slave-population. That the year originally began with March is shown by the names of several of the months ; as Quintilis, Sextilis, Sep- tember, &c. : for Quintilis, afterwards Julius, was the fifth month from jVIarch ; Sextilis, afterwards Augustus, the sixth, &c. : January and February were added to the end of the year. Thus Varro : ^ " Ad hos qui additi, prior a principe Deo Januarius appellatus ; posterior ab diis inferis Februarius." Cicero 2 also calls February the last month of the year: and the same fact is apparent from its being made the intercalary month ; for it was natural to add the extra days at the end of the year. There are several passages in Livy which show that, down to a very advanced period of the republic, the lustrum re- curred not every fifth but every sixth year, or consulship ; and that, consequently, the two years, the priestly year of twelve months and the civil one of ten months, nuist during that time have co-existed. There are distinct traces of the Romu- lean civil year having existed down to B.C. 293. That year was the consulship of L. Papirius Cursor and S. Carvilius Maximus, and in it the lustrum was performed by the censors, P. Cornelius Arvina and C. Marcius Rutilus.=^ But the preceding lustrum had been celebrated in the sixth previous consulship, that of M. Fulvius Psetinus and T. Manlius Tor- quatus,*by the censors, P. Sempronius Sophus and P. Sulpicius Saverrio, in B.C. 299, according to the ordinary chronology. Therefore the lustrum, which was a period of five astronomical years, contained six consulships, or, what is the same thing, six civil years of ten months. The consulships are as follows : —B.C. 299 (lustrum), M. Fulvius Retinus, T. IManlius Tor- quatus ; B.C. 298, L. Cornelius Scipio, Cn. Fulvius ; B.C. 297, Q. Fabius, P. Decius ; B.C. 296, L. Volumnius, Ap. Claudius ; B.C. 295, Fabius and Decius again ; B.C. 294, L. Postumius Megellus, M. Atilius Regulus ; B.C. 29:-> (lustrum), L. Pa]niius 1 L. L. vi. 34. ^ De Lv-. ii. 54. ^ Liv. x. 47. 4 Ibid. c. i^. CXX VIU INTERNAL EVIDENCE. A NEW CHRONOLOGICAL THEORY. CXXIX Cursor, S. Candlius IMaximus. The Fasti place this last lustrum in the preceding consulship, but our statement is taken from Livy. So also, according to Livy, six consulships before that of Fulvius Ptetinus and Manlius Torquatus, or in the consulship of Arvina and Tremulus, in the reputed year B.C. 305, M. Valerius Maximus and C. Junius Bubulcus were censors ; ^ but it is not said that the lustrum was celebrated. The lustrum, however, is no sure test. Its celebration, for some reason or other, was frequently omitted. Thus, for instance, in the year of Eome 294, though the census was taken, the lustrum was not celebrated, from religious scruples, because the Capitol had been taken and one of the consuls killed.^ Tliis census, which was not completed till the following year by the celebration of the lustrum, is said by Livy to have been only the tenth ; ^ though in due order more than twenty should have been cele- brated. And from the first lustrum, celebrated by Servius Tullius, and the last, celebrated by Vespasian in A.u.c. 827, a period of about six centuries and a half, there had been only seventy-five lustra,"^ giving an average inter\^al of between eight and nine years between them. But it may be assumed that censors were appointed every five years — or, in the early times of the republic, in every sixth consulate — as the duties of their office, such as fixing the taxes, &c., could not well be postponed. In the period between B.C. 305 and 299, we find, indeed, another pair of censors recorded by Livy ; viz. Q. Fabius and P. Decius, in the consulsliip of Sulpicius Saverrio and Sem- "pronius Sophus, in B.C. 303 :^ but these were created not for taking the census, but for an extraordinary occasion, — the creation, namely, of some new tribes, in order to put an end to forensic tumults. At this period, by the Lex Emilia, the duration of the censorship was limited to eighteen months. The censorship of Valerius Maximus and Junius Bubulcus would therefore have expired; and unless these extra censors. ^ Liv. ix. 43. 2 ij. iii, 22. 3 iijij^ 24. * Censoriii. De Die Natal, c. 18: cf. Ideler, Handb. der Chroiiologie, ii. 79, f. s Liv. ix. 46. n^. i:t had been appointed, the forensic disturbances must have con- tinued three or four years longer, till in the regular course the censors of B.C. 299 were appointed. It is not easy to trace the censorship backwards in Livy beyond the year B.C. 305. He mentions the celebrated censorship of Appius Claudius Coecus, but with an interval of only five consulships, instead of six, reaching backwards from B.C. 305. The Fasti, however, give a year in this period — B.C. 309 — in which there were no consuls, but only a dictator ; and thus we are again brought to a term of six (civil) years. But the strongest proof that Livy considered the censorship as recurring in early times every sixth consulate, is the follow- ing passage in the last chapter of his tenth book : — " Lustrum conditum eo anno est (B.C. 293) a P. Cornelio Arvina, C. Marcio Rutilo censoribus : censa capitum millia ducenta sexaginta duo trecenta viginti duo. Censores vicesimi sexti a primis censori- bus ; lustrum undevicesimum fuit." We here have another example that the lustrum did not keep pace with the censor- ship. But if these were the twenty-sixth censors — that is, bond fide censors for taking the census, without reckoning those appointed for extraordinary occasions — then, as the first censors were created in B.C. 443, there were twenty-five censors — for we must strike off either the first or last — in the period between 443 and 293, which amounts to 150 years. And 150 divided by 25 gives a quotient of six years for the regular recurrence of the censorship. We may conclude then that, in Livy's view, down to the year of liome 459, B.C. 293, six consulships only equalled five years. In the remaining portion of his work the censorships follow at an interval of five years ; but as the second decade is lost, we cannot precisely tell when this change was effected, and the duration of the consulship extended to twelve months. It seems probable, however, that it was made at, or soon after, the close of the first decade, in the before-mentioned year B.C. 293. Our reasons for this opinion, or rather we should say for this conjecture, are, that Livy's recapitulation of the years of the preceding censorships at this juncture seems to denote that it was the beginning of another system. And it ex XX INTEKNAL EVIDENCE. A NEW CIIKONOLOGICAL TIIEOJfY. CXXXl is remarkable that L. Papirius Cursor, who was one of the consuls in B.C. 293, set up the first sundial that had been seen at liome.^ As it had not been constructed for the latitude of Home, and therefore did not show the time correctly, it can only be regarded as a sort of monument, which miglit appro- priately commemorate the change from the civil to the solar year. The place in which it was erected, before the Temph^ of Quirinus, or Eomulus, the introducer of the civil year, seems to be not without significance. It may also be remem- bered that, only a few years before, the scribe C. Flavins, by publishing the calendar which he had surreptitiously obtained, had robbed the priests of their secret of the Fasti, and had thus deprived them of any interest which they might have had in opposing a change of style. That Livy did not adopt the ordinaiy Roman chronology, founded on a comparison with that of Greece, may, we think, also be shown by other circumstances. First of all we may remark that he takes no notice of the Olympiads, like Polybius and Dionysius, and even Cicero, as a means for fixing the early Eoman chronology. Again, in the few synchronisms which occur at an early period between Greek and Eoman history, his statements appear to show that he adopted a nnicli lower era than the common one, which can be explained only on the supposition that he deducted one-sixth part from the years before A.u.c. 459 or B.C. 293. To illustrate this we subjoin a comparative table of the received chronology and one reduced in this proportion. The first column contains the visual chronology, the second the reduced : — Rome founded B.C. 753 »» )» Accession of Nunia .... Tulliis Hostilius . Ancus Marcius ,, Tar. 33, seq. ^ See above, p. Ixxvi. reduced chronology, be B.C. 459, and thus fall in the period when the chief man in Sicily was Ducetius, whose reign was in B.C. 466-440 ; and it is not improbable that some of the Eoman annalists may have confounded his name with that of Dionysius of Syracuse. But at all events the error was not adopted by Livy, nor can Dionysius' amendment of it be accepted. But if the early Eoman year was one of ten months, then the duration of the regal period would have to be reduced by one sixth, thus making it only 20:3 years, a period often equalled in the reigns of seven consecutive sovereigns. And thus one of the tritest objections to the early history would be removed. To recapitulate.— As the art of writing appears to have been practised at Eome in tlie very earliest times, there is no reason to doubt the testimony of the best ancient writers that public records had been kept almost from the foundation of the city ; especially as such a practice accords with that love of precedent, as w^ell as of national glory, which is admitted to be a characteristic of the Eonians. And although a con- siderable part of these records may have perished in the Gallic conflagration, yet the fact of their existence down to the middle of the fourth century of Eome sliows that its history during that period did not rest on oral tradition : it might, therefore, have been easily reconstructed after tliat catastrophe— or at all events its leading facts — from memory, aided by such documents as had escaped the fire. To suppose that it was not so reconstructed and preserved is not only at variance with the character of tlie Eomans, as shown by the preceding records, and as painted by the sceptical critics themselves, but also with the fact that enough must have remained to substantiate the leading events, and with the evidence we possess of tlie pains taken to recover what laws and treaties had been destroyed. Further : if we deny the preservation of any public or private records, then there remains no probable method by which we can account for the existence of the early history. The first literarij annals of Fabius, Cato, and the rest, could ^x. ex XX IV INTERNAL EVIDENCE. not have been founded on oral tradition, whicli would have been totally incompetent to hand down such a mass of details, often of the most prosaic nature. That they were the pro- duct of forgery or invention is still more improbable. The high character of these early writers, who were not needy litterateurs, but men of distinction; the minor differences sometimes found in their narratives, yet the general resem- blance of them on the wdiole, showing that they drew inde- pendently from sources of recognised authority; and the check that must always have been upon them from the jealousy of the great patrician houses, could not but have insured their accounts from any flagrant perversions of his- torical truth. The methods which have been invented in order to account for the existence of the history are not only destitute of all evidence, but also inadequate and improbable. Niebuhr's theory of a poetical origin is unauthenticated, im- probable, and in great part abandoned by the author himself. The ^etiological hypothesis is also a mere invention, and altogether inadequate to account for the far greater portion of the history, which no ingenuity can torture into an ^etiological origin. To conclude : the objections which have been urged against the history on the ground of its internal improbability are altogether insufficient to invalidate its origin from contem- porary record. The argument drawn from the supernatural accounts which it contains is futile, since similar accounts are found in much later, and unquestionably authentic, history. Their greater frequency in the early ]3eriod confirms, instead of invalidating, its authenticity, as showing it to have been written in the superstitious and comparatively illiterate times which it records. Its alleged contradictions are chiefly the result of the paucity of materials, of their partial destruction, of our own ignorance, as well as the ignorance and want of judgment of Dionysius and Plutarch ; but, after all, these contradictions have been much exaggerated, and are not of a nature to obliterate the general historical picture. Lastly ^ the arguments adduced against the history from chronology are also often the result onlv of our own ignorance, or are IIECAPITL'J.ATION. CXXXV founded on the mistranshitions, niisappreliensions, and whim- sical fancies of the sceptical critics themselves. But though this part of the history is undoubtedly the weakest, yet'^it IS not of a nature to invalidate the whole narrative, nor to leave us without hopes that by careful investigation we may ultimately succeed in clearing it up. '*Bfi ■'^ .1--V h "g; V.I:- • •'i '5l THE HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. SECTION I. THE EARLY POPULATION OF ITALY. To determine how Italy was first peopled seems a liopeless task. Of the first immigration into that peninsula there is not, as Dr. Mommsen has observed, even a legend. All that can be said upon the subject must consequently rest upon inference and conjecture, and we shall therefore content our- selves with a brief outline of some of the theories respect- ing it. That Italy was peopled at a comparatively late period seems highly probable. No vestiges, it is said, are found there, as in Germany, France, England, and Scandinavia, of a savage race that subsisted by hunting and fishing, that knew not the art of working metals, and used implements of flint and bone. The geographical features of the Italian peninsula might lead us to the same conclusion. Surrounded on three sides by the sea, on the fourth by almost impassable mountains, Italy must in a barbarous age have been excluded from all commerce with the rest of the world. The wandering tribes that first overspread and peopled Europe, knowing not what they might find on the southern side of the Alps, would hardly have been tempted to encounter the difficulties and dangers of surmounting that stupendous barrier rather than direct their onward course over the plains of Germany and France. B 2 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. One tiling seems tolerably certain — that the great bulk of the early Italian population belonged to a race allied to the Greek. Niebuhr held this race to have been Pelasgians, who once, he thought, occupied the peninsulas both of Greece and Italy, till they were overwhelmed by the incursions of other tribes, and left behind them only partial traces of their exist- ence ; just as the physical features of a country are over- whelmed by a deluge, except a few hill-tops, which here and there lift themselves above it. But this theory is now ex- ploded. Schwegler has refuted it with regard to Italy,' and Dr. Mommsen, one of the latest historians of Eome, does not once mention the name of the Pelasgians. The last-named writer, to whom we thus advert par excel- lence^-iov Niebuhr's star is setting, and that of Mommsen is in the ascendant, with the last new version of Teutonic- Eoman history — is nevertheless of opinion that Italy was first peopled by a Greek race, and that they entered the peninsula by crossing the Alps. At the period of their immigration they had, he thinks, arrived at that stage of civilization which is implied in the practice of agriculture ; an opinion formed on certain analogies in the Greek and Latin languages. But, generally speaking, an agricultural people ceases to wander. Its next stage is to found large and opulent cities, and if these are near the sea, to enter upon a commercial life. As the Greeks were pre-eminently a mari- time people, it seems much more likely that whatever Hellenic elements may be discovered in Italy were introduced by sea, and that the population which entered by the Alps were of the Celtic stock ; of whose language traces have been pointed out in the Italian dialects by modern inquirers. The balance of probability whether Italy was peopled entirely by immigrants who crossed the Alps, or partly also by sea, must in a great measure depend on the antiquity of navigation. That the Greeks were capable of making long voyages at least as early as the time of the siege of Troy, is attested by the account of Ulysses having sailed to that city from Ithaca, and of his long wanderings over the sea after its 1 Romische Geschichte, Buch iii. § 4. EARLY POPULATION OF ITALY. 3 fall. It is nothing to the purpose to object that these are mere poetical legends. We do not here cite them as historical facts, though we believe them to be founded on real occur- rences. We aUude to them here merely to show that a poet who lived a great many centuries before the Christian era, believed such voyages to be possible twelve centuries l)efore that era. On the other hand. Dr. Mommsen argues* that Italy must have been totally unknown to the Hellenes in Homer's time, because he does not once mention its name. But to prove this point, a negative suffices not. An expedition of the Greeks towards the east called not for any mention of Italy ; while, if we allow Homer to have been the author of the Odyssey, he appears to have been acquainted with the still more distant Sicily, which he speaks of under the name of Thrinakia,^ The Siculi are several times mentioned in the same poem;^ and Strabo is of opinion'* that, under this name, he may allude to the people who inhabited the extremities of Italy. Such a people were at all events entirely unknown in Greece. The name of Epirus, which signifies the " mainland," in contradistinction to the islands which lie off it, appears in the Iliad.^ But to suppose that a seafaring people, acquainted with Epirus, should not have also known the coast of Italy, which is only about foi-ty miles distant, is utterly incredible. Dr. Mommsen's opinion on this subject is altogether in- comprehensible and self-contradictory. In fact, he confutes himself out of his own mouth. At the beginning of his tenth chapter he tells us that, at the time when the Homeric songs were composed, the Greeks had no certain knowledge of Italy and Sicily, though they might have heard of their existence from some storm-tossed mariner. But at the time when Hesiod's Theogony was composed, they knew, he says, the whole Italian coast, and not long afterwards they may have begun to make settlements upon it. The different theories respecting the period when Homer flourished embrace a period of no fewer than five centuries, and Dr. Mommsen tells us not what date he selects. We 1 Rom. Gesch, B. i. Kap. 2. * Odyss. XX. 38a; xxiv. 211» &c. 2 Odyss. xii. 127. * Lib. i. c.l, § 10. » ii. 635. b2 F TTISTOEY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. will, however, assume that he takes the earliest, according to which Homer flourished within a century after the Trojan war, or towards the end of the eleventh centur}^ before the Christian era. There is also a difference of more than a century in the computations of Hesiod's date ; but here also we will take the highest calculation, which places him in the middle of the ninth century B.C. Now, on Dr. Mommsen^s own showing, the Italian coast must not only have been known to, but even colonized by the Greeks long before this period. For Sybaris was, as he rightly tells us, founded in Olympiad xiv. 2, or B.C. 723 ; and in the same paragraph he further tells us, also in all probability correctly, that Cumae was founded three centuries before Sybaris ;^ which would be B.C. 1023, or nearly two hundred years before the time of Hesiod, at the very least, and within about half a century of the very highest date assigned to Homer, who is said to have been ignorant of the existence of Italy ! It matters not whether the Cumgean Greeks were, as Dr. Mommsen says, merchants, and the Sybarite Greeks agriculturists ; though it is probable that the Greeks had sailed to, and traded with, Italy, long before they began to settle there. y^ When it is considered that the Phoenicians were a great maritime and commercial nation many centuries before the reputed era of the Trojan war, it is difficult to believe that a clever and enterprising people like the Greeks should not have acquired from them the art of navigation long before that famous siege. Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century B.C., and who may therefore be supposed to have been a better judge of the capabilities of ancient navigation than we can possibly pretend to be at this day, tells us ^ that a crew of Cretans — in whose island there are traces of Phoenician set- tlements — were, on their return from Sicily, driven by stress of weather on the coast of lapygia, the Roman Calabria, and ^ "Kyme dreihundert Jahr alter ist als Sybaris" . . . "Die Griindung von Sybaris fiillt 01. 14, 2, oder 23 der Stadt," s. 89. We perceive that, in the English translation, the text is much altered here ; and, instead of the first sentence, we find only, " There is a further credible tradition that a considerable interval elapsed between the settlement at Cumae and the main Hellenic emigration." — Vol. i. p. 140. ^ \-^\^ yjj^ ^ yj^ MARITIME COLONIZATION OF ITALY. 5 there established themselves. This happened in the reign of Minos, king of Crete ; that is, in the mythical period before the Trojan war. Having no means of returning to their own country, they built, where fortune had cast them, the town of Hyria; thus becoming, says Herodotus, lapygian Messapians instead of Cretans. Whether this story be an historical fact or not, it at least exhibits the opinion of a very ancient and very inquisitive historian as to the antiquity oi Greek navi- gation, and of Greek settlements on the Italian coast. The lapygians, or Messapians, settled in this south-eastern- most peninsula, or "heel," of Italy, Dr. Mommsen considers to have been the primitive inhabitants, or reputed autochthons, of the country ; the main reason for that opinion appearing to be that though they had come in over the Alps, they had, as usually happened, been thrust down to this extremity of the land by constantly succeeding swarms of new immigi'ants. The only remains by which their ethnology can be traced are a few inscriptions in a Greek character, and bearing apparently some analogy to the Greek language; but they have never been deciphered and, according to the opinion of Dr. Mommsen, never will be. The names of certain Greek divinities, apre/xe?, Sa/marpLa, airpohtTa — that is, Artemis, Demeter, Aphrodite^ — show, we think indubitably, that the authors of the inscrip- tions must have been of an Hellenic race ; but who shall tell us whether they were the original, or autochthonic inhabitants, or immigrant Greeks, such as the Cretans mentioned by Herodotus, speaking a very primitive Hellenic dialect, cor- rupted perhaps by intercourse with barbarians ? so that the Messapians were universally regarded by the later Greeks as a barbarous people. Besides the accidental visits and settlements of the more southern and maritime Greeks, such as that just alluded to, we think it highly probable that southern Italy may also have been partly colonized at a very early period by immigrants from Epirus and the western coasts of Greece. It is true that we have no historical record, or even tradition, of any early contact between Greeks and Italiots at this point ; and, 1 Mommsen, Die Unteritalische Dialektc, p. 84. w^ 6 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. considering the state of our knowledge respecting the early history of Italy, it would be surprising if we had. But when the same names of places and tribes are found in two coun- tries, there is room, at all events, for a very strong presump- tion that one of them was peopled from the other. It can hardly be accidental that we should find in both countries a race called Chaones, or Chones, a town called Pandosia, and a river called Acheron. And if these names afford evidence of a connexion between the two lands, it is difficult to believe that it could have been established in any other way than by the sea. At the same time we are willing to allow that in ancient times there was not probably much intercourse between Greece and Italy across the Adriatic. The Epirots were a pastoral race, not much addicted to the sea ; though, with the length of coast which they possessed, it would be strange if they did not sometimes venture upon it, and even a fishing-boat might come within sight of Italy. The seafaring Greeks, however, capable of making what in those days were considered long voyages, dwelt in the Peloponnesus, in the islands of the Archipelago, on the eastern coasts of Greece, and on the shores of Asia Minor. Hence it is easy to see that no Greek navigators, with the exception, perhaps, of those dwelling on the western coast of Peloponnesus, and especially the Corin- thians, would, in steering westward for Italy, have anything to do with the Adriatic. On such a course, a vessel from any part of Greece eastward of Cape Tsenarum (now Cape Ma- tapan), would have to doable that promontory, and would thus find itself considerably to the south of Cape Pacliynus (Cape Passaro), the southernmost point of Sicily. Under these circumstances, her course would be across the Ionian Sea for Sicily ; whence she would reach the western coasts of Italy either by circumnavigating that island, or what is more probable, by passing through the Straits of Messina. That this was the usual course of Greek navigation, is evident from the situation of their Italian colonies. Leaving lapygia, or Messapia, and Venice out of the question, there is not a single Greek colony on the eastern coast of Italy, except Ancona ; J-' f: .v • I* VOYAGES OF THE GREEKS. 7 and this we know was settled by refugees from Sicily as late as the fourth century before the Christian era. In Sicily, and on the southern and western coasts of Italy, the Greek colonies were numerous, while the Adriatic was but little known to and less explored by the greater part of that nation. The Corinthians alone, from their geographical position, their gulf opening out not far from the entrance of that sea, seem to have visited it, and to have planted a few colonies on its eastern shores ; but even they appear to have abstained, from what cause we cannot explain, from colonizing the Italian coast of the Adriatic. Now, if such was the usual course of Greek navigation during the historical times, or, in other words, when the colonies of Magna Graecia were founded, there seems to be no reason why it should not also have been pursued at an earlier period, provided always that the Greeks had become sufficiently skilful sailors to make so long a voyage ; and that they had attained this skill in very remote antiquity we have already endeavoured to show. Here, then, might have been another source of Italian population, and the many legends which we have of Greek settlements in the neighbourhood of Eome before that of the people which actually built that city, seem to point to such a source. We are also of opinion that several of the races which we hear of in southern Italy, and Sicily, as the ^notrii, Siculi, I tali, &c., pro- bably Pelasgic tribes, might have been introduced by sea. We shall content ourselves, however, with indicating the possibility that some portion of the early Italian population might have been so introduced without discussing at any length how Italy was peopled. As the main object of the present work is to endeavour at ascertaining what truth there -may be in the early history of Eome, it will hardly be ex- pected that we should enter into the still more obscure question of Italian ethnography, a subject upon which, the more we investigate it, the more incompetent we feel to pro- nounce any decided opinion. If, as is supposed, there is not evidence enough to establish the history of the first few cen- turies of Eome, of which at all events there profess to be some records, how should it be possible to give a satisfactory 11 8 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. PHILOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY. account of a long antecedent period, of wliicli there are only a few traditions, and those of the most divergent and contra- dictory nature ? This circumstance, however, has not deteri-ed writers of Teutonic-Eoman history of the Niebuhr school, who profess to reconstruct it by a process of " divination/' ^ from proposing the most confident theories, built, of course, on the vaguest inductions. " When we come to examine the evidence," observes Sir George Cornewall Lewis, " on which the ethnological theories of the majority of antiquarian treatises are founded, our wonder at their wide, and indeed almost unlimited divergences, is at an end. No probability is too faint, no conjecture is too bold, no ethnology is too uncertain to resist the credulity of an antiquarian in search of evidence to support an ethnological hypothesis. Gods become men, kino's become nations, one nation becomes another nation, oppo- sites are interchanged at a stroke of th^ wand of the historical magician. Centuries are to him as minutes ; nor, indeed, is space itself of much account when national affinities are in question." ^ In the absence of all records or traditions, the great modern method of comparative philology may undoubtedly teach us something respecting ancient ethnography. It has been used with some success in discriminating the different races which, during the historical period, inhabited the Italian peninsula, but it has not as yet made much progress in demonstrating their immediate origin. For this purpose the method is so comprehensive that it teaches little or nothing specific. It is now, we believe, decided that all the peoples of ancient Italy, including the Etruscans, were of what is called the Indo- European family : that is, they spoke languages the roots of which may be traced up to the Sanscrit. This description contains witliin its comprehensive boundaries tongues now so widely different as the Greek, the Latin, the Teutonic, the Erse, the Gaelic, and several more. As these nations, however diverse their dialects, had all some words, fewer or greater in number, which belonged to them in common, it is easy to see how this fact complicates, instead of removing, the difficulty 1 Hist, of Rome, voL i. p. 152. 2 Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i. p. 270. -■* .4» ' ■.J* +- - I-- Jd ■fe I 1 ^ of settling, from philological induction, the ethnology of the early Italian races. There is, for instance, a considerable similarity between the Latin and Greek languages ; yet this would not justify us in concluding, as was formerly done, that Latin and Greek stood in the relation of mother and daughter, and that one of the races speaking those languages must have been immediately descended from the other. Eor if both sprung in a very remote age from a common stock, what words they had in common might be derived from that stock, though the Italians had never been in Greece, nor the Greeks in Italy. Both peoples might have passed independently into Italy and Greece at different and very remote periods, as we believe is now the favourite theory, carrying with them their common language, more or less altered and modified, yet still retaining considerable resemblance, although no intercourse might have taken place between them for a score of ages. Keasoning in the same manner, there would be no conclusive grounds for assuming that a German or a Celtic race had settled in Italy at a very early period because the Latin happens to have some Celtic and Teutonic words.^ Such words, it may be said, were their joint property, because in a very remote age they all sprung from the same stock ; and if they had not some such common words, they could not be ranged under the general category of Indo-European. Thus, as soon as we have so ranged them, we have gone a great way towards rendering it impossible to trace the immediate origin of specific races by means of language. The best way of meeting this difficulty, and endeavouring to make philology yield some historical results, seems to be that of classing rather than counting the words, which certain nations may possess in common; that is, to judge by their quality rather than their number. Dr. Mommsen has adopted this principle in his second chapter, where by a comparison » Professor Newman contends (Regal Rome, ch. 2), that Latin is nearer to tlie Gaelic and Celtic than either to the Greek or German. Mommsen, on the other hand, says (Rom. Gesch. B. i. Kap. 2, § 14), that Greek and Latin are nearer to each other than either tongue is to German or Celtic, but that German is next to them. 10 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. GREEK AND CELTIC ELEMENTS OF LATIN. 11 of certain classes of Greek and Latin words with one another, and with their parent Sanscrit, he has attempted to trace the progress of those peoples. This method may, indeed, be liable to some objections, and lead to not a few fallacies. From their long intercourse with the Greeks, and because their literature was almost entirely modelled on the Grecian, the Eomans no doubt adopted, at a late period, many Greek words into their language, which could not be originally found there. There is a great probability, too, as we shall endeavour to show further on, that Eome itself was a Greek settlement, which would account for a great many of the Greek words found in the Latin language. Hence in any comparison of the Italian dialects with those of Greece for ethnological purposes, Latin, it seems to us, should be omitted, and the comparison made between Greek and the Umbro- SabelHan dialects. Waiving, however, for the moment these objections, the results of the process alluded to appear to be that when the Gr^eco-Italians separated from the parent stock they had arrived at nothing more than pastoral life, since the words which they possess in common with the Sanscrit do not go further than this stage in the progress towards civiliza- tion. Mommsen next supposes that after this separation, and while the Gr^co-Italians still continued to dwell together, they arrived at the stage of agriculture, as he infers from the agricultural words which they had in common. They have also common words for things relating to domestic life, and to some elementary principles of religion, but here also religion of the more domestic kind ; as for instance the worship of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, was known both to Greeks and Italians. Here Dr. Mommsen stops short, for further than this a comparison of the Greek and Latin will not carry him. It is obvious, however, that though the preceding inves- tigation may tend to show an original community of race between the Greeks and Italians, it affords no insight what- ever into what, in an historical point of view, is much more important— their political life. The Greek and Latin terms for civil and military affairs are for the most part quite 1 •..» .^ different ; and what is singular, the Latin bear a very striking resemblance to the Gaelic and Welsh. Professor Newman has collected some of these words in the work before referred to,^ from which we extract a few that have the most striking resemblance. In military terms we find — Latin, arma, G. arm ; ^ gladius, G. claidheamli, W. clcddyr ; telum, G. tailm / galea, E. galid ; caterva, W. catorva ; sagitta, G. saigJiead ; lorica, G. luireach ; balteus, G. halt ; murus, W. mur ; vallum, W. givaly G. fal and hallc ; prgeda, W. pi^aidh, spolia, G. spuill ; corona, G. W. coron ; gloria, G. gloir ; &c. In civil affairs we have — Latin, rex, G. righ; populus, W. pohl,G.pohull ; senatus, G. seanadh ; career, W. carchar ; ordo, W. urdh ; and several more. Now as it is natural that victors should impose upon the conquered their names for military affairs and for civil government, we might hence infer that the original Italian tribes had been subdued by Celtic invaders. Dr. Prichard, in his " Physical History of Mankind," and other modern writers, have maintained that the Umbrians were a Celtic race, and this opinion is in some degree sujj- ported by an obscure tradition to the same effect mentioned by some of the later Eoman writers ; ^ an opinion, however, which philological researches into the Umbrian dialect have 'not tended to confirm. On the other hand, it might be said That the Celtic nations derived these words from the Eomans during their long struggle with and partial subjugation by that people. This, however, does not account for the manner in which the Eomans came by them ; and, besides the terms of war and politics before alluded to, there are many others relating to mere natural objects which are common to the Latin and Celtic, and not to the Greek, such as the names for earth, sea, mountain, loind, storm, ut what we take to be the strongest argument against an Alban origin in any way is, that Rome, as we shall endeavour to show, bears indubitable marks in its institutions of having been founded by Greeks who had not very long before landed in Italy, and had not yet forgotten their language and their customs. The foundation of Rome is probably placed the better part of a century too high, and should fall, perhaps, as we have already observed in the Itnroduction, in the first half of the seventh century before Christ, instead of the middle of the eighth. Greek colonization on the Italian coast was remark- ably active in the latter half of the eiglitli century, when Rhegium, Sybaris, and Tarentum were founded. This colo- nization went on two or three centuries longer. Thus we find Hyele, or Velia, founded in B.C. 544, and Buxentum even so late as B.C. 470. Hyele was founded by PhoCcTans, who also founded Massalia, probably about the same time. When Phocaea was besieged, in B.C. 546, by Harpagus, the general of Cyrus, the inhabitants embarked on board their fieet, and endeavoured to form a settlement in the islands of (Enussie, belonging to Chios ; but being repulsed by the Cliians, tliey proceeded to Alalia, in Corsica, a colony wliich they had 1 This view has been adopted by Rubiiio, Rom. Staatsverf, § 112, Anm. 2 ; Gottling, Gesch. der Rom. Staatsverf, § 44, and others. D 34 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. THE PHOC^ANS AND TARQUINIUS PRISCUS. 35 fuunded about twenty years before. After staying there five years, they went to Ehegium, and soon after founded Hyele, or Vdia.i Herodotus, who relates these events, mentions nothing about their founding Massalia ; but Pausanias repre- sents these same fugitives from tlie Medes as settling there after defeating the Carthaginians in a naval battle.^ It can hardly be doubted that this is the same battle alluded to by Herodotus and by Thucydides.^ There is, however, other evi- dence to fix the foundation of INIassalia, which is incidentally of some impoi-tance to the early chronology of Eome. Justin, the epitomizer of Trogus Pompeius, tells us that the PhoccTans, on their way, entered the mouth of the Tiber, in the reign of King Tarquinius, and contracted an alliance with the Ptomans ; and thence, sailing into the furthest gulfs of Gaul, founded Massilia among the Ligurians and the savage Gallic races.* Justin, of course, means Tarquinius Prisons. His testimony is confirmed by Livy, who relates that when the Gauls were passing into Italy, in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, they heard on their way that the Massilienses from Phocsea were attacked by the Ligurian tribe of the Salyes.^ But how shall we reconcile this account with the ordinary chronology of Tarquinius Priscus, which fixes his reign from B.C. 616 to 578? If the Phoceeans only took to their ships in B.C. 546, and founded Massalia some years afterwards, it is evident that they could never have arrived in Italy in the lifetime of the elder Tarquin. There is, indeed, an account in Scymnus Chius, which professes to be taken from Tinuneus, of a previous foundation of Massalia one hundred and twenty years before the battle of Salamis, or B.C. 600.^ But that work 1 Herod, i. 163—167. 2 x. 8, § 6. ^ Lib. i. c. 13. * " Temporibus Tarquinii regis ex Asia rbocjcensium juventus ostio Tiberis invecta amicitiam cum Eomanis jimxit : inde in ultimos Gallise sinus na\dbu3 profecta Massiliam inter Ligures et feras gentes Gallorum condidit. "— Lib. xliii. c. 3. ^ ^ Liv. V. 34. • MaffffaXia S' effr exo/^eVr/ IloAiS fieylarr} ^w/caTwr diroiKLa, 'Ev rr} AiyvaTLi/fj 5e ravrriv eKTiffav Tlph TTJs fxa-xn^ TVS cV 2aAa/xiVr; yevofxevri? "Erecriv irporfpov, ws (paaiv, Ikutou €^KO«?e<5, a stake, supposing the hill to have been originally fortified with palisades. But perhaps the most probable derivation is from Pales, the god, or goddess, of shepherds and flocks. The foundation of Rome is said to have taken place on the festival of that deity, the Palilia, celebrated on the 21st of April. 8 Lib. i. c. 34, scqq. 40 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. FOUNDATION OF LAVINIUM. 41 J commonly received account. The legend of the arrival of Hercules in these parts made, however, a deep impression on the public mind, and was perpetuated by Eoman institutions and temples in his honour. All the settlements and events which we have just recorded occurred before the time of the Trojan war. It w^as in the reign of Latinus, the successor of Faunus, that the siege of Troy took place ; and when ^Eneas arrived in Latium, Latinus was already an old man. On the landing of the Trojans, he turned his arms against them. Both the Trojans and the Latin king are, however, warned in a dream to forbear from hostilities ; and Latinus, after a colloquy with ^neas, agrees to assign to him forty stadia of gi'ound around the hill wdiich he had occupied, on condition that he should lend his aid against the Paituli. A radius of forty stadia, or five miles all round, seems to be about the usual average of territory pos- sessed by these primitive cities. In pursuance of this treaty, the Trojan leader completes the foundation of Lavinium, at a spot to which he had been directed by the flight of a wdiite pregnant sow, which, while he was offering his first sacrifice, had escaped from the hands of the priests, and rested not until she had reached this place. The new town was called Lavinium, after Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, wdiom ^neas had received in marriage. Hence, as the first stable resting-place of the Trojan Penates after their long w^anderings, Lavinium was in after ages a place of peculiar veneration for the Ptomans ; and it became customary for the consuls, praHors, and dictators of the republic to offer sacrifice there when they entered on their magistracies to the Penates and to Yesta.^ These deities show that it was the first home of the Trojans on Italian soil ; and they could not therefore have founded Laurentum, which was a later settlement. 2 P>ut Lavinia had been promised to Turnus, king of the Eutuli, a neighbouring people, who, enraged at being thus ^ Macrob. Sat. lib. lii. c. 4. 2 So Varro : " Oppidum, quod ;?nm?m conditnm in Latio stirpis HomansQ Lavinium ; nam ibi dii penates nostri. "— Ling. Lat. v. § 144. -A; 'A: IV » % ■ A.' lc? ':i M\ supplanted by a stranger, made war upon -^neas and Latinus. In a battle which ensued the Eutuli were defeated, but the Trojans and aborigines purchased their victory with the loss of Latinus. Turnus and the Eutuli now had recourse to Mezentius, king of the Etruscan city, Caere, who, jealous of the intrusion of the Trojans into Italy, readily joined his arms with those of Turnus. Such is the account of Livy.^ But as Caere was a Greek colony, and could hardly have been founded long at the time of the supposed arrival of ^neas, the story of Virgil seems to be constructed with more proba- bility, who represents IVIezentius as having been driven from his dominions by his subjects on account of his cruelty and tyranny, and as having taken refuge wdth Turnus.'^ In the face of this danger, ^.neas, in order the better to unite his subjects, gives them not only laws in common, but also a common name, calling them, after his father-in-law% Latins, ^neas defeats Turnus and Mezentius, but is himself killed, or disappears in some mysterious manner. According to some accounts, he was drowned in the river Xumicius, and at all events he is said to have been buried on its banks. After his death he was ranked among the gods, and received the name of "Jupiter Indiges," or the native Jupiter. y^ Ascanius, the son of ^neas and Lavinia, was not of an age to assume the reins of government at the time of his father's death, and his mother therefore took the direction of affairs during his minority. There is a doubt, how^ever, as we have already intimated, wdiether the name of this young prince w^as Ascanius or lulus, and whether he was the son of Creusa or Lavinia. Ascanius, w hen he came of age, finding that Lavinium had a superabundant population, abandoned it to his mother, or stepmother, and migrating with a part of the people to INIons Albanus, which is distant only a few miles from Lavinium, founded there, according to a usual custom in those early times, a new city, which, from its being seated on a long ridge, was called Alba Longa. This event 1 Lib. i. c. 2. * iEn. viii. 470, seqq. Virgil, too, with more consistency, gives the town its ancient name of Agj-lla. ^ J^ 42 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. took place thirty years after the foundation of Lavinium, which are supposed to represent the thirty pigs littered by the sow.^ We shall not inquire into the natural history of this miraculous parturition. Alba Longa is thought to have occupied the ridge wliich overhangs the eastern side of the lake of Albano, where massive fragments of what are sup- posed to have been its walls still remain. Its name is by some derived from the white sow; but it is difficult to see the animal's connexion with Alba, which more probably took its name from the nature of the place. Varro combines both these etymologies.^ The new city seems to have been founded without molestation, for the power of the Latins, particularly after the defeat of the Etruscans, had so much increased, that none of the surrounding peoples ventured to attack them. Agreeably to the treaty of peace with the Etruscans, the river Tiber, then called the Albula, was to form the boundary between the two nations. / ^ Ascanius was succeeded 'on the throne by his son Silvius Postumus ; a name which is accounted for by his having by some chance been born in the woods. It remained the family name of the Alban kings. The next two in hereditary suc- cession — for, unlike Eome, Alba was an hereditary monarchy — were ^neas Silvius and Latinus Silvius. The latter planted some colonies, whose inhabitants, according to Livy,^ were called Prisci Latini ; but it seems a more probable account that the Prisci Latini were the more ancient Latins, before the foundation of Eome.^ The successors of Latinus Silvius were Alba, Atys or Epytus, Capys, Capetus or Calpetus, Tiberinus — who gave name to the Tiber from being drowned in it — Agrippa, Eomulus or Aremulus Silvius, Aventinus — who was buried on the Aventine, and bequeathed his name to it — Procas, Numitor, and Amulius. The reigns of these sixteen Alban and Trojan kings, from ^neas to Numitor, both inclusive, occupy a period of 432 1 " Propter colorera suis et loci naturam Alba Longa dicta." — Ling. Lat. V. § 144. 2 Lib. i. c. 3 ; cf. Dionys. i. 45. 3 Paul. Diac. p. 226 ; cf. Serv. ad Mn. v. 598. BIRTH OF ROMULUS AND REMUS. 43 V years, ^ giving an average of twenty-seven years to each here- ditary reign. If we add this term to 753, the Varronian era .(B.C.) for the foundation of Eome, we have 1185 years, which exceeds by one year the era of Eratosthenes for the capture of Troy (B.C. 1184), and makes besides no allowance for the time of ^neas's wanderings. / Amulius was a usurper who dethroned his elder brother, Numitor, put Xumitor's sons to death, and compelled his daughter, Ehea Silvia, to become a vestal, in order that she might have no offspring. But Silvia was deflowered by Mars and brouglit forth male twins : whereupon Amulius cast her into prison, and directed that her babes should be drowned in the river. It chanced that the Tiller had overflowed its banks, and the slaves to whom had been committed the execution of this cruel order, exposed the boys in their cradle at a spot on the Palatine Hill, subsequently marked by the Ficus Euminalis. The neighbpurhood was at that time avast solitude. Presently the flooding waters began to recede into their channel, leaving the cradle high and dry, when a she- w^olf, that had come thither to slake her thirst, was attracted by the cries of the children, and gave them suck. At this juncture, Faustulus, a herdsman of the king's, arrived at the spot, and found the wolf licking the babes with her tongue. So he took them from her, and carried them to the cattle- sheds, where he gave them to his wife Larentia to nurse. Some have explained the miraculous story by saying that Larentia was called lupa, or wolf, from her prostitute life. X As the boys grew up they took to hunting, instead of sloth- fully tending the cattle ; and having thus acquired strength both of body and mind, instead of pursuing wild beasts they began to attack robbers laden with booty ; for Italy seems to have been almost as much infested with brigands in those remote ages as it is at present. What spoil they took they divided with the other shepherds ; and with the band of youths who grew up with them, and increased in number daily, they celebrated various sports and festivals. Among ^ The years are given by Dionysius and Diodorus ; Livy says nothing about them. 44 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. FOUNDATION OF ROME. 45 these was the Lupercal, which was celebrated on the Pahitine Hill. It is said to have been an Arcadian solemnity, in- stituted by Evander when he had possession of this district. ]N"aked youths ran about in it sportively and wantonly in honour of the Lycean Pan, afterwards called Inuus by the Eomans. These sports recurred at certain fixed periods ; and the brigands, who were enraged at the loss of their prey, availed themselves of the oj^portunity to make an attack on Eomulus and Pemus ; for such were the names of the two youths. Piomulus managed to defend himself; but Ptemus they took, and bi:oug]it him before Amulius — for they some- times showed themselves in the towns just as they do now — and they accused him, as w^ell as Eomulus, of carrying olf booty from Numitor's fields. They appear even then to have stood pretty well with the authorities, for their story was believed, and Eemus was handed over to Numitor for punishment. -/ Faustulus had all along suspected that the youths whom he was educating were of the royal race ; but he determined not to reveal his thoughts till a proper occasion should present itself : and thinking that this had now arrived, he opened the matter to Eomulus. Numitor also, on hearing the story of the youths, had begun to suspect the same thing ; and so far from punishing Eemus, was on the point of acknowledging him as his grandson. Under these circumstances, Eomulus having collected together a band of shepherds, and being aided by Eemus with another band, they made themselves masters of Alba,^ and put to death Amulius. Numitor, at the beginning of the tumult, exclaiming that enemies had entered the city, had drawn away the Alban youth under pretence of defending the citadel ; but when he beheld Eomulus and Eemus, after they had killed Amulius, approaching him with congratulations, he at once called a council, to whom he explained the whole story of his brother's wickedness, the origin, education, and discovery of his grand- sons, and the death of the tyrant, of which he declared him- 1 Cic. De Rep. lib. ii. c. 2. « fr self the author. Then Eomulus and Eemus saluted Numitor as kiniT, and the whole council did the like. Numitor being thus reinstated in his kingdom, Eomulus and Eemus were seized with a desire to build a city at the spot where they had been exposed and educated. The project was favoured by the superabundant multitude of Albans and Latins ; the shepherds also were numerous, so tliat it seemed probable that Lavinium and Alba would be but small cities in comparison with that which they should build. But these plans were disturbed by ambition, the hereditary curse of their family. Being twins, their pretensions as to which of them should give name to and reign over the new city could not be decided by priority of birth ; so they resolved to con- sult by means of augury the will of the gods ; to which end Eomulus chose the Palatine Hill as a temple, and Eemus the Aventine. As they thus stood surveying tlie heavens, six vultures appeared to Eemus ; but presently after a dozen showed themselves to Eomulus. Hereupon the followers of each saluted him king : Eemus, because the vultures had appeared first to him ; Eomulus, because he had seen the greater number. Hence a quarrel and a fight ; blood was shed, and amidst the tumult Eemus was killed. A commoner version of the story, however, is that Eomulus slew his brother for having contemptuously leapt over the rising walls of his city. Eomulus, thus become sole master, built a city on the Palatine, and named it after himself. Such was the most commonly received legend of Eome's foundation ; into the different versions of it we shall not enter. The list of the Alban kings has all tlie appearance of having been invented in order to carry up to the Trojan times the lineage of Eomulus ; though it is not improbable that a dynasty of the name of Silvius may have reigned at Alba. The story, however, acquired a firm hold on the popular belief, and, being received into the sacred books, to doubt it became a sort of heresy. So also Valcntia, the equivalent Latin name of Roma, was forbidden to be whispered ; for it might have betrayed to the ignorant the recent Greek origin 46 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. of the city, and have upset the story of its Trojan foundation through the Alban dynasty. How and when Rome's foundation legend was invented, what grains of truth there may be at the bottom of it, it is impossible to say. We have already surmised that it may have found its way into the Pontifical Commentaries at a very early date ; but all that is certainly known is, that it must have been rooted in the popular mind as an article of historical belief at least as early as the year of Eome 458 (B.C. 295), since in that year the ^diles Cn. and Q. Ogulnius caused to be erected at the Ficus Ruminalis images of Eomulus and Eemus sucking the wolf^ This fact at once upsets Plu- tarch's account ^ that the story was first introduced to the Eomans by Fabius Pictor, who took it from one Diodes of Peparethos, since Fabius Pictor flourished at least half a century later than B.C. 295. Indeed, as Schwegler remarks,^ it has all the characteristics of home growth, and could not possibly have been of Greek invention. Into the allegorical meanings which have been attributed to the legend we shall not enter ; * though it is probable enough that it symbolizes in general the warlike character of Eomulus and the early Eomans. The testimony of all antiquity that the original Eoman city stood upon the Palatine has been confirmed by modern excavations ; and, to whomsoever we may attribute its founda- tion, there can be no reasonable doubt that on this hill stood a town, or citadel, which formed the proper nucleus of Eome, and was in process of time developed into the magnificent city which became the mistress of the world. We will here pause a moment to survey the general con- dition of Italy at this period ; for unless we obtain a correct notion of the state of civilization and society when Eome was founded, we shall be apt to form very incorrect ideas of early Eoman history. The essential step towards civilization — which in its proper and primary signification means the dwelling together in Liv. X. 23. 2 In Romul. c. 3, 8. ^ B. i. S. 412. * The German WTiters are, of course, great on this head GENERAL CONDITION OF ITALY. 47 cities and communities — is agriculture ; for, without the sup- plies derived from this source, it is impossible for men to live together in any great numbers. But, having these supplies, they begin to build cities for their mutual protection; the division of labour is established, the useful arts of life are invented, and by degrees, as wealth begins to accumulate in a few hands, and thus to afford the means of leisure, literature and the finer arts are cultivated, the manners of society become more refined and polite, and violence and crime are repressed by laws and civil institutions. But it is soon dis- covered that the accumulation of wealth gives l)irth not only to domestic fraud and violence, but also to foreign aggression. Hence a wider horizon opens on the view of rulers and legis- lators ; they become politicians as well as lawgivers — that is, they begin to consider the relations of cities and communities to one another, and to establish alliances, leagues, unions, and confederacies, and thus arise the first beginnings of a State. The third and last step in what may be called the political progress of civilization is the formation of large kingdoms and empires. At the time when Eome was founded, neither Greece nor Italy had reached this stage. -It was only in the East, which had been much earlier civilized, that great monarchies had arisen, as the kingdom of Egypt and the Assyrian and Median empires. At the period alluded to, Italy was far l^ehind Greece in political development. This is shown, among other things, by the superabundant population of the Greek cities, which lonfr before and lon^ij after the foundation of Eome led them to plant colonies in Italy, then comparatively uncivilized and but scantily peopled. And though Greece had not yet arrived at that stage when single cities are swallowed up by, and amalgamated with, a great empire ; yet this perhaps partly arose from Greek habits of mind, as well as from the nature of their country, whose mountainous character and numerous bays helped cities to maintain their independence. Yet they had recognised the unity of the Hellenic race by a community of religious festivals, and by their Amphictyonies. In Italy the second stage of political existence had hardly 48 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. been reached at the time when Eome was founded, except in Etruria. Even in that country, however, though there can be little doubt that the Etruscan confederacy had been formed before tlie foundation of Eome, the different cities which be- longed, or were nominally subject to it, appear to have acted a very independent part, and were probably not called upon to perform any federal duties, except when some extreme and common danger threatened the well-being of the whole con- federacy. This may be seen in the wars waged between Eome and A^eii, in which the latter city does not appear to have been supported by the Etruscan confederacy, even when the Eomans deprived it of great part of its territory. We hear also of a Latin League, but this appears to have been of the same, or even, perhaps, a still looser description. Of the political constitution of the other nations which bordered upon Latium, such as the Sabines, the Hernici, the Volsci, and others, we know little or nothing ; but it seems probable that their chief, if not sole, bond of union lay in community of race. We have, therefore, to figure to ourselves Eome in its early days as closely surrounded by a vast number of small yet virtually independent cities, whose political views were almost entirely confined to their own preservation or advancement. These cities had all been established before Eome, which, as we have before intimated, was probably almost the last founded in Latium. They appear to have been, like the original Eome itself, small places, — in fact, little more than modern villages of a few thousand inhabitants ; though we are apt to form a higher idea of their importance because they were walled and fortified, and were in general ruled by a magistrate who had the title of " king.'' Thus, besides the Alban and Eoman kings, we hear of kings of such places as Ceenina, Cures, Ardea, &c. Even Alba, the ancient metropolis of Latium, was so small a city that all its population, when transferred to Eome, could be accommodated on the Ca^lian Hill. These cities, as we have before observed, possessed a territory of some ten miles in diameter ; a fact which we not only know from tradition, but of which we may immediately SMALLNESS OF ROMA QUADRATA. 49 <^ h ^^i i 'V '■< . NtV convince ourselves by inspecting a map of ancient Latium, when we shall see that, if they had had a larger territory, there would not have been room for them. Thus Strabo points out that what were originally called the towns of Collatia, Antemnse, Fidenoe, Lavicum, &c. were only thirty or forty stadia (four or five miles) distant from Eome, and had in his time become mere villages owned by private individuals.^ It is important to bear these circumstances in mind, because some authors would assign for the growth of a town like these as long a period as would be necessary for the development of a large kingdom, and hence have been led to regard as im- probable the comparatively rapid progress of Eome. It seems probable that the band of Eomulus, including the shepherds whom he had enlisted in it, did not exceed about 1,000 men, at which number they were stated by Plutarch. ^ When Dionysius ^ calls them 3,000 foot and 300 horse, he evidently takes that number, by a prolejms, from the 30 curiae of 100 men each, subsequently established by Eomulus ; for such, as we learn from Varro, was the total of the primi- tive Eoman army after the Sabine union, consisting only of one legion, to which each of the three tribes contributed 1,000 foot soldiers, and 100 horse.* The recent excavations on the Palatine, conducted by Signer Eosa for Napoleon III., have shown that the Eomulean city was confined to the western portion of the hill, or that occupied by the Farnese Gardens ; and the same fact, as the author has endeavoured to prove in another work,^ is further shown by the circumstance that all the memorials of Eomulus are confined to this district. So ^ vvv Se /cdJ/xat, Krifffis iSiiaruii/. — Lib. v. c. 3, s. 2. 2 lu Rom. 9. 3 Lib. ii. c. 2. Dionysius (ii. 6) makes Romulus establish these curiee before the amalgamation of the Romans with the Sabines ; but Livy and Cicero agree that it was done afterwards. 4 " Milites, quod trium milium primo legio fiebat, ac singulae tribus Titien- sium, Ramnium, Lucerum milia singula militum mittebant." — Ling. Lat. v. 89. " Turma, quod ter deni equites ex tribus tribubus Titiensium, Ramnium, Lucerum fiebant." — Ibid. 91. " Hist, of the City of Rome, p. 1 8, seq. 50 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. small an area would hardly have sufficed to accommodate 3,000 persons, but it was amj^ly large enough to serve as a fortress or citadel for some thousand men. We must remember that the followers of Eomulus were probably all young men. When the population of a colony such as that of Laurentum, or at whatever place on the coast the original Greek settlement may have been made, began to overflow its narrow boundaries — and in the course of even less than half a century this might easily happen — it was the youth that went forth to seek for themselves new homes. The Eomulean emigTation was forced to content itself with the site of Eonie for their settlement, for it was in fact the only choice they had, the surrounding country being now fully occupied with cities. But from the nature of the place, and with the help of a wall, 1,000 soldiers, without apparently women or other incumbrances, might easily defend themselves against any force which a neighbouring town might have thought it worth while to direct against them. Such, then, was the original Kome ; the western half of the Palatine Hill witli a wall erected round its base in a quad- rangular, or rather lozenge-like, form ; whence the name of Roma Quadrata. The wall, according to the well-known description of Tacitus,^ was built with Etruscan rites; the pomoerium, or sacred space around it, being marked out by a furrow made with a plough drawn by a cow and a bull ; the clods being carefully thrown inwards, and the plough being lifted over the profane spaces necessary for the gates ; whence, according to Cato, the name of porta, a joortaiido, because the plough was carried. 2 We are thus to consider a city founded with these religious rites as a sacred enclosure, in fact a templum, whose limits, the pomcerium, marked the extent of the city's auspices.^ This enclosure was under the protection 1 Ann. xii. 24. 2 Ap. Isidor. xv. 2, 3. 3 A tcmiilum terrestre was always of a square form — irXivQiov, Pint. Rom. 22 ; Cam. 32 ; Nagele, Studien, S. 122 ; ap. Schwegler, B.i. S. 448 ; Anm. 12. But there was also within the Palatine city, in the Area Apollinis, a 7nundus, or small square walled place, in which were deposited things considered to te of good omen in founding a city ; which place was also called Roma Quad- rata, (Fest. p. 258.) THEORY OF A COMMERCIAL EMPORIUM. 51 of a presiding deity, or deities, as Eome was — or at all events the Tarquinian Eome — under that of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. So also Veii was under the safeguard of Juno, and could not be taken, it was thought, till the deity had given her consent. Such was the original Eome; a little fortress on a hill. That it could ever have entered the head of any writer that such a city founded in such a place could have been intended for a great commercial emporium, as is maintained in a work that has attained great popularity both in this country and in Germany,^ surpasses all belief, and seems to betray total want of historical judgment. A mixed race of shepherds, we are told, partly Latin, partly Sabine, and partly of another nation represented under the name of Luceres, but also supposed to be Latin, had long dwelt together in concord and amity on these hills, till at length this pastoral people resolve to turn merchants. They choose for their place of commerce a hill- top, which, though it is, indeed, near the Tiber, yet on that side, and indeed on three sides, was a mere swamp, subject to continual inundations, wliich could never have presented any convenient landing-place, or wharf, at all events till it was drained by the Cloaca Maxima, That this sewer, which still remains one of the material evidences of early Eome, should have been coeval with the foundation of the city will, we presume, be hardly maintained even by those who reject aU historical tradition. Indeed, Dr. Mommsen is inclined to assign it, at least in its finished state, to the republican times,^ and consider the Palatine in the regal period to have been almost entirely surrounded with marsh. A fine situation for a great commercial city ! Dr. Mommsen's account of the origin of the founder and inhabitants of the city is just as incredible as that of the city itself. He accepts the tradition of early Eoman history that there must have been a union between a Eoman and a Sabine 1 Dr. Mommsen's Hist, of Rome, B. i. ch. 4. * B. i. ch. 5, p. 47. Dr. M., who does not even know the number or names of the kings, yet is certain that peperino was not employed in building in their x>eriod ! e2 52 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROMK. race. The evidence is here too strong for him ; but he rejects the method in which tradition tells us it was accomplished, and invents one of his own, which is not a hundredth part so probable, or rather which is utterly incredible. " That the Eamnians," says Dr. Mommsen,^ " were a Latm stock, cannot be doubted, for they gave their name to the new Roman commonwealth, and therefore must have substantially determined the nationality of the united community." That in a certain sense the Eamnians were a Latin stock we wdll allow. That is, they were a neio Latin stock, arising from the fusion of a tolerably recent Greek colony with the people of that part of Latium where they settled. That the Eamnians gave name to Eome we will also allow, but not in the sense that the author means. We do not believe that the words Ramnes and Romani are identical because both have an r and an m. Ramnis or Ramnes is evidently a Greek name, 'Payu^voO?, the last syllable having become Latinized, just as TTou? becomes pes. We shall not claim for these Eamnes an origin from the Attic deimis Ehamnus ; although there is a tradition which might render such an origin not altogether improbable. Emigrants from Athens, it is said, went first to Sicyon and Thespia, whence a large portion of them afterwards proceeded to Italy, and founded on the Palatine Hill a city named Valentia ; which name, when Evander and ^neas with many Greeks arrived at the same place, was changed into Roma. However absurd this story may be thought, which, by putting the Latin name first, places the cart before the horse, it nevertheless shows that, in the opinion of antiquity, its etymon was the Greek word pw/i77, and not the gentile appellative Eamnis. This account is given by Festus ^ from an author of Cum^ean history ; who, after the Latins, may be thought to have had the best infor- mation about Eome. Without, however, claiming an Attic origin for the Eomans, it is enough that their name, before the founding of the city, was evidently Greek, derived at all events, probably like that of the Attic borough, from pdfMvo<:, brier; a characteristic of a country which may have given 1 Vol. i. p. 45, Engl, transl. ^ y^c. Romara, p. 266. RAMNIANS AND ROMANS. 53 name to more than one town in Greece. We agree therefore with Dr. Mommsen, that the Eomans, before the foundation of their city, were called Eamnians ; probably also after, by those who wished to distinguish the Eomans according to their original tribes ; but we cannot admit that Romani comes from Ramnes, when it is evidently the ethnic name of those who dwelt in Roina. AVe also agree that the Eamnians " substantially determined the nationality of the united community ; " though, according to Dr. Mommsen's hypothesis, it is strange how he could have come to that conclusion. For he tells us in the next page — "It w^ould appear, therefore, that at a period very remote, when the Latin and Sabellian stocks were, beyond question, far less sharply contrasted in language, manners, and customs than were the Eomans and the Samnites of a later age, a Sabellian community entered into a Latin canton union ; and as in the older and more credible traditions, with- out exception, the Tities take precedence of the Eamnians, it is probable that the intruding Tities compelled the older Eamnians to accept their synoikismos!' According to this account, the Tities, or Sabines, are the conquering race ; for it is only those who are superior who can compel others to a synoikismos ; as Athens did in Attica. Yet we have just been told that it was the Eamnians who determined the nationality ; and the author goes on to com- pare this Sabine invasion with the voluntary settlement of Attus Clauzus, or Appius Claudius, with his few thousand followers, in the Eoman territory many centuries afterwards, when they were received by the Eomans and formed into a rural tribe ; that is, he compares a people who came in suffi- cient nimibers to be victorious, and who must have had all the power and pride of conquerors, with a small tribe form- ing not a twentieth part of the Eoman people, who came into their territory as refugees, and were glad to be received there ! How far the Latin and Sabellian stocks differed in lan<][ua(Te and customs, " at a very remote period," we do not pretend to tell ; nor do we believe that Dr. Mommsen can tell. We only w 54 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. ORIGINAL ROMAN BOUNDARIES. 55 see that his views are not always consistent, but vary accord- ing to the point that he wishes to prove. For, in his second chapter, in which he treats of the most ancient immigrations into Italy, and therefore, we presume, of a very rem.ote period, he separates the Latins from all the other Italian races, which he classes under the term Umbro-Sanmite, and tells us that the Latin dialect formed " a marked contrast " to the dialects of these races. ^ It is hardly worth while to pursue in detail a theory which rests on nothing but the wildest conjectures. We shall only briefly observe that if, as Dr. Mommsen supposes, the Sabines had been the superior race in prse-Eoman times — though, indeed, it is difficult to determine whether he considers them superior or inferior — no town taking its name from the Eomans would have been built. Further, it is impossible to suppose that such a city should have been founded by the Latin con- federacy for trading purposes ; because, as we have said, the Latin League was but very loosely bound together, and would not have united for such a purpose ; and because during the early days of the city we can trace no connexion between it and the Latins. Had there been this connexion, would the Latin Confederacy have suffered the Sabines to oppress the Eamnians, and, as we are told they did, force upon them their s7jnoikis7nos ? But the strongest reason against this com- mercial hypothesis is perhaps the fact of the total repugnance of early Eoman manners and institutions to a commercial life ; though in process of time, and when she had extended her empire to the mouth of the Tiber, Eome to some extent engaged in foreign commerce. Dr. Mommsen, indeed, is of opinion that the Eomans pos- sessed from the earliest times the country on both sides of the Tiber down to the sea, as well as the port of Ostia ; though we do not see what strength this adds to his commercial theory. According to him, one of the reasons for choosing 1 "Innerhalb des Italischen Sprachstammes aber tritt das Lateinische wieder in einen bestimmten Gegensatz zu den umbrisch-samnitischen Dialek- ten." — B. i. S. 11 ; cf. Transl. i. p. 63. We have already seen that both Samnites and Sabines were Sabellian, and in fact almost identical. *•. »f^ Eome as an entrepot was, that being so high up the river it was out of the way of pirates. But if Ostia was to be a landing- place— and if the assumption does not mean that, it means nothing — this advantage vanishes at once. As a matter of fact, however, and on Dr. Mommsen's own showing, the Eomans could not have originally possessed the territory down to the sea. "We have evidence," he says, " more trustworthy than that of legend, that the possessions on the right bank of the Tiber must have belonged to the original territory of Eome ; for in this very quarter, at the fourth milestone on the later road to the port, lay the grove of the creative goddess (Dea Dia), the primitive chief seat of the Arval Festival, and Arval Brotherhood of Eome." ^ Now the Ambai^alia were a festival of boundaries, and even in the time of the Empire, when Eome was mistress of the greater part of the world, they were celebrated at the mnginal boundaries of the Eoman State. Thus we learn from Strabo' that, in the time of the Emperor Tiberius, the Am- barvalia continued to be celebrated at various places on the borders of the primitive Ager Eomanus, and among them at Festi, which lay on the road to Alba, about five or six miles from Eome. The grove on the right bank of the Tiber, at the fourth milestone, shows, therefore, that the primitive Eoman territory did not reach a quarter of the way to the sea. And this agrees with the account of Livy,^ who tells us that the Veientines ceded to Eomulus a tract on the right bank of the Tiber ; and that the whole territory down to the sea was not acquired till the time of Ancus. According to tradition, it was Eomulus who founded the Arval Brotherhood, of which, indeed, he is himself said to have been a member. On modes of thus reconstructing ancient history like that adopted by Dr. Mommsen, Sir G. Cornewall Lewis has passed a very sensible judgment, which we shaU here extract. In such attempts, he observes, " We are called upon to believe that a modern historian is able to recast the traditions which were thus preserved through the dark ages of Eome, and to 1 Engl. Trans, vol. i. p. 49. 2 Lib. V. c. 3, s. 2. 3 Lib. i. 15, 33. 56 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. extract the truth which is imbedded in them, although in their existing form they are false. We are first to believe that a tradition was, in substance, faithfully conveyed from the eighth century before Christ to the Second Punic War, and then to believe that, although it is not literally true, it is typical of some truth which can be discerned under its cover- ing for the first time by a writer of our own age. This doctrine of historical types is more difficult to reconcile with reason and experience than even the supposition that some authentic facts may have been preserved through a long series of years, in an unaltered state, by oral tradition. It is in fact nothing more than an ingenious and refined application of the rationalist method of interpreting the marvellous legends of mythology, so much employed by the ancient historians. It is only another form of the system of reduction, by which the god jVIars in the sacred grove was converted into an armed man in disguise, who overpowered Ilia, and the wolf of Romulus was transmuted into a courtesan. One imitation may be executed by a coarse and clumsy hand ; the other may be performed with all the resources and skill of modern learning; but still they are both no better than historical forgeries." ^ Nothing can be truer than these remarks, in their general scope. We must either take the early Roman history as it stands — or nearly as it stands, rejecting only those figments which are evidently the natural product of an illiterate and superstitious age — or we must abandon it altogether, as no better than a romance from first to last. Our only hope of escape from this last alternative, lies in the circumstance that it may not rest so entirely on oral tradition as Sir G. C. Lewis supposes. Credibility, &c. vol. i. p. 440, seq. 57 SECTION III. THE REIGN OF ROMULL'S. THE PERSONALITY OF ROMULUS. Romulus, it is said, is no real person, but a fictitious eponymous hero, and this is shown by the etymology of his name. The name of Roma could not have been derived from the name of Romulus, as we are told by ancient authors, but, vice versa, the name of Romulus must have come from Roma. The former derivation is a grammatical impossibility ; for the name of a city taken from that of Romulus would have been Romulea, or Romulia, not Roma. Had tradition called Rome's founder Romanus, instead of Romulus, nobody would have doubted for an instant that it was a name derived from the city. But Romulus is just as much a derivative from it as Romanus, and has in fact the same meaning. Thus we find in the poets such expressions as " Romula tellus," " Romula hasta," " Romula gens," " Romula virtus," &c. with the same meaning as Romana. The city Roma, therefore, must have existed before the man, or reputed man, Romulus, and con- sequently he could not have been its founder.^ Remarks. — To this we answer, that the real name of Rome's founder was not Romulus, hut Romus ('Pw^og). He was a Greek, or at most the second in descent from a Greek, and is called Romus in most of the Greek traditions. We will here venture a suggestion, that the story of the city having been founded by twins may perhaps have had its origin in this double name of Romulus. Romus, in- deed, seems to have been identical not only with Romulus, hut also with Remus, which are only different forms of the same name. Thus the latter is called Romus, as we have seen above,^ in the Latin tradition given by Dionysius of the foundation of Rome. In Greek writers the form Remus hardly ever appears ; the deeds attributed ^ Schweglcr, 1 Abth. B. viii. s. 9. ' Page 24. 58 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. NAME AND REALITY OF ROMULUS. 5^ to him are done by Romus. Cicero, in his account of the foundation of Eome,^ makes no mention of Remus, though he is aware that Romulus had a brother of that name ; and the Roman poets^ fre- quently consider Remus as identical with Romulus : as " Remi ne- potes," " domus Remi," " turba Remi," " plebs Remi," &c.2 Romulus is only a Latinized form of Romus. It was natural for the Latins to give it this form ; not so much, perhaps, as Servius says, as a diminu- tive and by way of endearment,^ but because such a termination was agreeable to the genius of their language, as is shown by the many words they have with such an ending. Like their descendants, the modern Italians, they loved parole sdrucciole— long, slippery, well vocalized words that tripped nimbly and smoothly off the tongue. Thus they changed the Greek word circus into circulus, just as they had the name of Romus. The name of Porta Romanula, instead of Romana, for the ancient gate on the Palatine, affords another striking instance. So also Tusculum, Janiculum, several rivers Albula, &c., all names belonging to early Latin times. Romulus, however, as the Latins called him, kept closer to his own Greek name of Romus when he gave it to his newly-founded city ; for •Pw/xoc, if not itself actually derived from pwfxrj, was at all events near enough to suggest it. Had his name been derived from the city by Latin inventors of a later age, he would doubtless have been called Romanus, to make him the eponymous father of the Romans, just as King Latinus was of the Latins. We do not, therefore, see any valid etymological grounds for rejecting the almost universal testimony of antiquity, that Rome was named after its founder. We might further urge how incre- dible it is that the Romans, who possessed from the earliest times the art of writing, should have forgotten in the course of a century or so the name of their founder, and been obliged to invent a new one for him. Why, any of the neighbouring cities, which were in existence long before Rome, could in all probability have refreshed their memories, had it been necessary. As Romulus is a fictitious person, so all the deeds attributed to him are mere abstractions. That the founder of Rome institutes its fundamental mihtary and political regulations, wages the first wars 1 De Rep. ii. c. 2, seq. 2 See Catull. Ivi. 5 ; Prop. iv. 1, 5; Juv. x. 73 ; Mart. x. 76, 4. 3 "Utpro Romo Romulus diceretiir, blandimenti genere factum est, quod gaudet diminutione." — Ad ^n. i. 273. .?■; — ■■*"» --. 1.K \4'- with the neighbouring cities, celebrates the first triumph, wins the first spolia opima, — all these, it is said, are abstractions arising from the idea of a founder of warlike Rome.^ From this idea, then, we learn, at all events, that the old Romana did not consider their early city to have been a commercial one. But on what grounds are we to assume the events alluded to to have been mere abstractions ? The founder of every city must, we presume, lay down some rules of civil and military conduct ; it is not unlikely that he may have to contend with offended, jealous, and suspicious neighbours ; it is far from improbable that Romulus may have been in general victorious, otherwise we do not see how his infant state could have maintained itself; and if he was vic- torious, it is not altogether incredible that he may have instituted the triumph. To assert that these acts were not real, but invented, is to beg the whole question. It is a good specimen of that magis- terial ex cathedra dictation which too often characterises German critics— as if they had just come down from the skies. The only colour for it must be derived from the assumption that Romulus was a fictitious personage, when his deeds must also be fictitious. But we have already seen that the arguments to prove him so are altogether inconclusive. iN'or do the miraculous circumstances wliich are said to have attended his birth and death prove him to have been an unhistorical person. Besides abstraction, it is said, the other element that goes to make up the history of Romulus ifi myth 2 — the wolf that gives suck, the Lupercal, the Ruminal fig-tree, the stepfather Paustulus, the stepmother Acca Larentia, the laceration of Romulus at the Goat-lake on the day of the Caprotine Xones. These mythological ideas are evidently taken from the worship of Paunus Lupercus, who, as we must assume, had the cognomen of Rumus, or Ruminus. This fecundating goat-god, Ruminus-Faunus, appears in the tra- ditional legend to have been fused into one person with Romulus, the eponymous founder of Rome. Here it occurs to ask, if the Romans considered Romulus to be identical with Faunus, how came it that they also made him a mere name, derived from the name of the city, as we have just been told they did ? The two views are utterly incompatible. The whole induction, it will be seen, rests on two conjectures : » Schweglcr, B. i. S. 425. Ibid. seq. 60 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. ETYMOLOGIES OF ROMULUS AND ROMA. 61 first, that Faunus had the name of Eumiis ; second, that Rum us is, or was supposed to be, identical with Romus, or Romuhis. If we ask for the evidence for Faunus having Lome the name of Rumus, or Ruminus, we are told ^ that two other German authors, Schwenck and Zinzow, had " conjectured " the same thing ; and that Schwegler himself had " conjectured," a few pages before, that Rumia, or Rumina, was perhaps identical with Fauna Luperca. With such evidence are these critics contented who reject, on most occasions, the much more sensible evidence of the Roman historians ! If we inquire how Romulus is connected with rumus, we find, indeed, traces in the ancient authors of some such connexion, or rather confusion. Thus Festus ^ sajs that some derived his name from the Ficus Ruminalis ; others — which is nearly the same thing — from the teat {ruma, or rumis) of the wolf by which he had been nourished. Plutarch has a notice to the same effect. Other authors reverse the derivation, as Servius,^ who says that the Ficus Rumi- nalis was named after Romulus; and Livy gives a notice to the effect that the Ficus Ruminalis is a con-up tion of Romularis.* So that the theory gains nothing here , or rather, the balance of evi- dence is against it. It would be mere learned trifling and battling with the wind to proceed with such an inquiry. It is, of course, necessary to Schwegler's theory to connect ruma with Rome. Roma, he says, has a name of the same meaning with Palatium ; it is ruma, the " nourisher," just as the name of the Palatine is derived remotely from the shepherd-goddess Pales, whose root is pal, from the Sanscrit pa (to nourish, feed).^ But, viewed with regard to its meaning, Ruma, the '* nourisher," is by no means so appropriate a name for a citadel as Roma (strength, a stronghold) ; and, viewed et^Tnologically, it requires the u to be changed into o, while Roma requires no change at all, ^^^a being the old Greek form for pw/xj;. The same remark applies to Dr. Mommsen's odd derivation from Rama,^ and this apparently from ramus ; since he considers it to mean the wood, or bush-town. Surely, the Greek name, p{^^y), adopted by Niebuhr, is a hundredfold more appropriate than these. 1 Schwegler, B. i. S. 426 ; Anm. 26. 2 p 266. 3 Ad iEn. viii. 90 ; cf. Pint. Rom. 4, 6. ** *• Ubi nunc ficus ruminalis est (Romularem vocatam ferunt)."— i. 4 "> Schwegler, B. i. S. 420, 444 ; Anm. 10. " P. i. c. 4. ■.¥:A Of course all or most of the circumstances connected with the birth of Romulus are fabulous ; we have already admitted it. Livy had said so before us ; but he does not conclude, on that account, that all the circumstances of his reign are fabulous. It is impossible to say how the legends of Romulus's birth and education may have arisen ; but it is not improbable that they may have sprung from old traditions connected with the Palatine Hill. It would be just as ii'rational, however, to reject the historical existence of Romulus, because these traditions have been tacked to his name, as it would be to doubt the existence of Edwy and Elgiva, because the monkish legends attribute some supernatural acts to St. Dunstan. Every age treats history according to its own views and convictions. A superstitious age, or an illiterate but poetical age, w^ill invent and believe many things which would be at once exploded in more cultivated times ; but it does not follow thence that the ordinary transactions of life in those periods are also to be regarded as fabulous. Nay, we will go further, and say that these mira- culous additions are a proof of good faith, and show that the tra- dition first arose in the times to which it relates, because it is framed in the spirit of the age. If of these early times a purely rationalistic account had been transmitted to us, such as a German professor or historian might have written in his study at Berlin or Leipsic, we should at once pronounce it to be the forgery of a later age. ROMULEAN CONSTITUTION. Romulus, having thus built a city on the Palatine, and named it after himself, proceeded to endow it with laws and religious ceremonies. The latter were to be performed with Alban, that is, Latin rites, — a concession, no doubt, to the usages of his Latin subjects. The only Greek rites which he retained were those in honour of Hercules ; and it is difficult to perceive why he should have preserved even these, except that he was himself of Grecian descent. The worship of Hercules was kept up in after times, and especially in the neighbourhood of the Palatine ; under which, in the sub- sequent Forum Boarium, was the Ara Maxima, besides one or two temples dedicated to that demi-god. Romulus 62 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. ROMULEAN CONSTITUTION. 63 then called his subjects together, and dictated to them cer- tain laws. According to this account the Eoman sovereign was an absolute king, the head both of Church and State. He ruled by divine right, for the gods had given him the kingdom by augury. Livy has represented these matters correctly, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus quite erroneously, ^ when he describes Eomidus as calling the people together and leaving to them the choice of a constitution. The Eoman king, like those of ancient Greece, w^as irresponsible ; his power was an apxv avvTrevOvvo^,^ wdiich it w^ould hardly have been had it been delegated to him by the people. And though after Eomulus the kings w^ere elected by the people and senate, yet the same, or very nearly the same, absolute power w^hich he had enjoyed appears to have passed on to them; as may be seen, for instance, in the examj)le of Servius Tullius, wdio bestows a new constitution of his own free will and absolute power. 2 In order to render his person more venerable, Eomulus assumed certain badges of authority and command ; as a more august dress, and especially the attendance of tw^elve lictors. Some have supposed that the number of these w^as taken from the vultures seen by Eomulus; but Livy thinks it more probable that it w^as derived from the Etruscan practice ; in w^hich nation each of the twelve cities of the confederacy supplied a lictor. This agrees, too, with the circumstance that the sella cicndis and toga p^wtexta wxre borrowed from the Etruscans. The Eomulean kingdom was theocratic ; almost as much so as that of the Jews, if the comparison of the latter with a Pagan government may be admitted. Not only is the king appointed by the w^ill of the gods, as manifested by augury, but all the institutions of the state, the senate, the centuries 1 Ant. Rom. lib. ii. c. 3. See Rubino, Rom. Staatsverfussung . 2 See Wachsmuth, Hellenische Alterthumskunde, Th. i. Abth. i. S. 8 "Nobis Romulus, ut libitum, imperitaverat ; dein Numa religionibus et divino jure populum devinxit : repertaque quajdam a Tullo et Anco ; sed prgecipuus Servius Tullius auctor legum fuit, quies etiam re^&sobtemperarent." — Tac. Ann. iii. 26. of knights, and the wdiole constitution, are founded on the same divine sanction.^ Hence its conservative nature even under the popular forms of a republic. Eor the grand plea of the patricians against the plebeians was always their sacred character, the possession of the auspices. This conservative character is manifested by the tendency to retain, in name at least, institutions which had been virtually abolished. Thus, after the expulsion of the kings a Eex Sacrificulus w^as ap- pointed for certain functions, wliich none, it was thought, but a royal priest could properly discharge ; and long after the real power of the Comitia Curiata had vanished, they still nominally retained their original powder of sanctioning and confirming. But the chief characteristic of the early monarchy is, that the king is the general of his people, their leader in war ; and that the people are but an army, wdiose principal duty it is to be prepared to obey the first summons to take the field. Thus, during the first interregnum, the chief fear of the senate is, " Ne civitatem sine imperio, cxeixitum sine dicccj multanim circa civitatum irritatis animis, vis aliqua externa adori- retur." ^ THE ASYLUM. After awhile other spots beyond the city walls began to be occupied and fortified, but rather to provide for the expected increase of the citizens, than because the present limits were too small. Among the places thus occupied was the Capito- line Hill ; since it w^as on this hill, at the spot called Inter duos lucoSy in the depression between the two summits, that Eomulus opened his Asylum. This was a place of refuge for fugitives from other communities; a contrivance not unfre- quently adopted in ancient times by the founders of cities, in 1 "Hunc (senatum) auspicato a parente et conditore urbis nostrae institu- tum . . . aceepimus." — Tac. Hist. i. 84. ** Id (centuriasequitum) quia inaugu- rate Romulus feccrat." — Liv. i. 36. *'Omnino apud veteres, qui rerum potie- bautur, iidem auguria tenebant. Ut enim sapere, sic divinare regale ducebant. Testis est nostra eivitas, in qua et reges augures, et postea privati eodem sacerdotio praediti rempublicam religionum auctoritato rexerunt. " — Cic. Div. 1. 40. 2 Liv. i. 17. '.!# 64 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. order to augment the population. Such refugees were of course commonly of the lowest class ; and hence, Livy sug- gests, may have arisen the fable of populations that sprung from the earth. Remarks. — The asylum is of course regarded by the sceptical critics as a pure invention. First, it is said, such an institution is entirely at variance with all that we know of the manners of the times. " All the peoples of antiquity lived under strong and stable regimen (in festtn Fonnen) ; the civic communities were always organized down to the lowest classes ; and the more remote the times, the more binding were these regimens, the more compact all the rela- tions of civil life. Under these circumstances it is difficult to see how these bands of adventurers, vagabonds, and dissolute fellows could have come together, which, according to the common tradi- tion, flocked to Rome from the neighbouring towns and tribes." ^ This, we must confess, appears to us a new idea of these ancient times, and hardly to be realized in any, except, perhaps, the Golden Age, those Saturnia Regna which had long passed by in Italy. It assumes that there were no such persons as insolvent debtors, brigands, pirates, criminals of all sorts, runaway slaves, persons dissatisfied with the government or with their own lot, or desirous of a change merely for the sake of novelty. We certainly hear of such classes in the ancient authors, and think it not im- probable that they might have been found at the time of Rome's foundation, just as they may now and probably ever will be. That the Roman nation should have sprung, it is further said, from a band of robbers, is contradicted by the entire character of the old Roman state.- The original state was a family state. Such a one can be made neither by legislation nor by military 1 Schwegler, B. i. S. 465. 2 We do not see how this view agrees with the passage quoted from Hegel (Philosophie d. Gesch. S. 345 f.) in support of it. Hegel appears to us to accept the robber-state, and, by means of it, to account for the severity of Roman discipline. This is precisely contrary to Schwegler's view. His v/ords are : "Dass Rom urspriinglich eine Rauberverbindung war, und sich als Rauberstaat constituirt hat, muss als wesentliche Grundlage seiner Eigenthiim- lichkeit angesehen werden. Dieser Ursprung des Staats fiihrt die harteste Pisciplin mit sich. Ein Staat, der auf Gewalt beruht, muss mit Gewalt zusammengehalten werden. Es ist da nicht ein sittlicher Zusammenhang, sondern ein gezwungener Zustand der Subordination." ' j^'JIhJ" - >^ i¥'-- THE ASYLUM. >o force, still less could it be constituted out of a rabble of refugees. If it be true that the character of every state is determined by its origin, then it is certain that a community so strongly organized as the old Roman, so closed against what was external to it — as seen by the word hostes^ which signifies both stranger and enemy — could not possibly have arisen from a mass of refugees. On this we may remark that nobody, we suppose, would main- tain that Rome sprang from a band of robbers. The refugees would have formed only a small portion of its citizens, especially after the Sabine union ; and even of this small portion, only a few, it is to be hoped, were robbers. And if it was a family state — that is, we presume, somewhat aristocratic as times then went — so much the more need would there have been of persons to do the hard and dirty work. But the assertion that Rome w^as shut against strangers is founded on a total misconception of early Roman history. This question is not to be settled by the etymology of a word, but by the tale told by her annals, from which we learn that her gates were always open to strangers. Witness the Tuscan and Latin colonies which she received within her walls, the Tuscan king which she placed upon her throne. This policy was, in fact, the secret of her rapid advance. That, in so old a matter, the name of the divinity who presided over the Asylum should be unknown, or forgotten, will hardly be regarded as a serious argument against its existence. The last objection which Schwegler brings against the asylum is, that it is not a Roman or Italian institution, but entirely a Greek one.^ No other example of it can be pointed to in the whole course of Roman history till we come to the Temple of Divus Julius ', and Dion Cassius tells us that this was unexampled since the time of Romulus. For though the asylum of that king con- tinued to exist after his death, yet it had been enclosed in such a manner that nobody could enter it.^ Dr. Ihne has adopted the same line of argument in a paper in the " Classical Museum " ^ on the Asylum of Romulus. He observes that not only are there no traces of the institution of sacred places of refuge in any Italian state, or in Rome itself, except this asylum of Romulus, but also that there is not even a word in the Latin language to designate the Greek aavXuv. Schwegler, B. i. S. 4(56. 'h. ^ Dio. Cass, xlvii. 19 ; cf. Tac. Ann. iii. 36. 3 Vol. iii. p. 190. 66 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. THE SENATE OF ROMULUS. 67 On this we will observe : first, that the Romulean Asylum coiild not then have possibly been a fiction and invention of the Romans, for no people invent an institution as established among them- selves which is entirely foreign to their habits, and for which their language has not even a name. Secondly, it could not have been invention, because the place where it stood continued to retain its name even down to the imperial times. The long survival of such names is by no means uncommon or unparalleled. We have still in London, in the Church of St. Clement's Danes, a memorial of the Danes settled in that neighbourhood more than eight centuries ago,^ as well as several others in London and other parts of England. This is a lonf^er period than that between Romulus and the imperial times. And being called the '* Asylum of Romulus," it was indissolubly connected with his name, and helped to hand it down to posterity, as that of the first Roman king ; being in this way as good a voucher of that fact, or even a better, than any written document. Thirdly, it is not likely to have been an invention, as it reflects no great credit upon the Roman people. A nation is not apt to invent stories that in some degree dishonour it, however prone it may be to the opposite course, and to imagine for instance, as the Romans did, a descent from ^neas. But if an asylum existed at Rome, it could have been no other than that of Romulus, for, as Schwegler says, the whole course of Roman history knows of none other. And here we have a natural explanation of it ; for Romulus, as we have seen, was to all intents and purposes a Greek ; and in instituting the asylum he was only following a custom of his own country. And he gave it a name from his own language, since he could find no Latin name, just as he called his city by a Greek name. Dr. Ihne, who of course supposes that the founder of Rome was a Latin, calls it a "preposterous supposition" to believe that Romulus had sufficient connexion with and knowledge of Greece, to adopt this foreign institution. We have endeavoured, and shall further endeavour, to show that he had such connexion. How much force there may be in Dr. Ihne^s remark that " even this would prove useless, for Romulus would surely never have been able to attract many suppliants from the neighbouring states, if the asylum had been something new, which nobody knew of, and to 1 See Worsaae's Danes and Norwegians in England, &;c. p. 16, seqq. «.:- v. which nobody could trust," we must leave the reader to determine. How " many " he attracted it is impossible to say, but, though the institution was a novelty, we think it would have been readily discovered, easily understood, and eagerly embraced by the class of persons for whom it was intended. THE ROMAN SENATE. — THE CONSUALIA. The city having been thus founded, its boundaries enlarged, and its population augmented, Romulus created a council, or senate, to guide him with their advice in the ruling of it. It consisted of a hundred members, a number probably deemed sufficient, or it may be that there were not more whose age and rank entitled them to enter it. These senators were called PatreSy or fathers, by way of honour or affection ; their families were to bear the title of patricii, or patricians, to distinguish them from the plehs, or general mass of the people. The functions of this new senate were merely to advise ; they shared no portion of the royal power ; their influence arose from the respect due to their judgment, which was called auctoritas, or authority.^ A city formed in the manner which we have described was necessarily ill provided with women ; and, as it did not enjoy the privilege of intermarriage wdtli the surrounding cities, although in warlike powder it was quite equal to any of them, it was evident that it could last but a single generation. In order to remedy tliis defect, Romulus, by the advice of his senate, sent ambassadors to the surrounding peoples, to request their alliance and connulmim, or the right of intermarriage ; a process wliicli seems somewhat to have resembled the re- cognition of a new state in modern times. But the applica- tion was everywhere scornfully rejected. The new city was not only despised, it was also feared, and its increasing strength 1 Cicero, De Rep. ii. 8, represents Eomiilus as instituting the senate after the Sabine War, in conjunction with Tatius, and at the same time when he divided the people into tribes and curigo ; while Dionysius relates that both the senate and the curiae were established before the Sabine War. The account in the text is taken from Livy ; but it seems probable that the full comple- ment of the senate was at least not comjdeted till after the Sabine union. E 2 { 68 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. THE CONSUALIA. 69 was looked upon as dangerous. The refusal was frequently accompanied with insult, and the ambassadors were asked, " Why they did not open an asylum for women ? In that manner they would find suitable wives." The Eoman youth could not brook this insult; it was evident that the matter must end in war and violence. Eomulus was willing to encourage this temper, but at the same time determined to provide a fitting place and oppor- tunity for its manifestation. He therefore dissembled his anger ; and in the meantime busied himself in preparing some solemn games in honour of the Equestrian Neptune, which he called Gonsualia. He then directed the spectacle to be announced among the neighbouring people; and the games were prepared with all the magnificence then known, or that lay in his power, in order to give them renown, and cause them to be looked forward to with interest and curiosity. Eemarks.— Whether the exact nature of these games has been correctly handed down to us does not seem to be a point of very vital importance as to the general credibiUty of the early Eoman history. On such a subject tradition may naturally have varied a little ; and we do not pretend that before the time of TuUus Hos- tilius the history rested on anything but tradition. Nevertheless, we do not think that the story is amenable to all the charges that modern critics have brought against it. First, it is objected ^ that the games of the Circus were not introduced till the time of Tarquin the Elder, and indeed could not have taken place in the reign of Eomulus, when the site of the Circus was nothing but a marsh. But the two professed historians of Eome, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, say not a word about the Circus. They merely state that Eomulus gave some games at Eome in honour of Neptune.^ It is probable enough that posterity may have regarded these games as the origin of those of the Circus ; and it is at all events quite certain that there could have been none earlier at Eome. It is only Cicero, amongst the classical Eoman authors, who, in the shght sketch which he gives of Eoman history in his De Kepuhlicay^ and perhaps by a slip of the pen, says that they actually took place in 1 Schwegler, B. i. S. 471. ' Li v. i. 9; Dionys. ii. 30, 3 Lib. ii. c. 7. V.'". the Circus. For though they are also alluded to by Valerius Maximus,^ and Virgil,^ under the name of circenses^ those authors say nothing about the Circus. Now Eomulus must of course have prepared some space where the chariots were driven round, the only method in which they could have been conveniently viewed by the spectators ; and this place he called in his mother tongue dpKos, a circus, or ring. In the Latin tongue he would have said 07'bis. Hence these were really the first Circensian games, though not performed in the place afterwards expressly provided for them, T)ut, it may be, in the Campus Martins, or some other suitable spot. It is further objected : How should the pastoral folk of the Pala- tine city, an inland town without navigation or commerce, have come to celebrate a festival to Neptune, of all the gods 1 Where lias ever a shepherds' festival — and such originally were the Con- sualia — concerned Neptune '? Further : an Equestrian Neptune is found only in the Greek mythology ; the Italian Neptune has no relation at all to the taming of horses. And so in the Circus ISIaximus, it was not Neptune, but Consus, that was honoured. The interpretation of Consus as Poseidon Hippios is therefore altogether unauthorized ; a mere subtlety of later archaeologists, who knew perhaps that in Greece, and especially in Thessaly and Boeotia, it was customary to give horse-races in honour of Neptune as the breeder and tamer of horses ; and accordingly they trans- ferred the games and races on horseback and in chariots, ex- hibited by Eomulus on the festival of the Consualia, to Poseidon Hippios. But this interpretation is only a new proof how com- pletely incapable the later Eomans were of understanding their antiquities.^ Now of course nobody woidd presume to say that an old Eoman knew so much about his language and antiquities as a modern German, although he might have had many sources for studying them which are now lost, and might, therefore, possibly have had some way of connecting Consus and the Equestrian Neptune with which we are unacquainted. We see, at all events, as much diffi- culty as Schwegler does in connecting horse and chariot races with a shepherds' festival, as in connecting them with anything in the world, and therefore with Consus, whoever he may have been. We misht leave Dr. Mommsen and his followers in the mer- Lil). ii c. iv. s. -1. JEn. viii. 636. 3 >:i'lnvo^^ler, B. i. S. 472. 70 HISTOllY OF THE KINGS OF KOxME. THE AKA CONSI. 7i cantile theory to settle the ohjection ahout the pastoral mhahitants of the Palatine city celebrating a fete to Neptune, except for that second objection, that it was the Greek Equestrian Neptune ; for the Mommsenites are all pure Latins, and know nothmg about a Greek mixture in Latium. But according to our theory that Eomulus was a Greek by descent, we find no difficulty whatever in this Equestrian Neptune ; nay, it only adds to the probabHity of our view. It is said that the Consualia were originally nothing but a shepherds' festival, in which they roUed or jumped upon hides. The authority for this is Yarro, Be Vit Fop. Rom., quoted by Nonius, voc. Cernuus, p. 21 :— ^' Etiam peUesbubulas oleo perfusas percun-ebant, ibique cernuabant. A quo ille versus vetus^est m carminibus : Sibi pastores ludos faciunt coriis consualia." But against Yarro in Nonius we may set the same Yarro in his book De Lingua Latina, where he says :—" Consualia dicta a Conso, quod turn ferine publicae ei deo, et in circo ad aram ejus ab sacerdotibus ludi iUi quibus virgines Sabinae raptse." ^ Here Yarro, like aU the other best Eoman authorities, connects Consus with the Circus, and with the rape of the Sabines. And we will here venture a conjecture, which may reconcHe Yarro with himself, and which is at all events as well founded as Schwegler's, that the Consualia were originally (urspriingUch) a pastoral fete— for Yarro does not bear him out in saying that such was their origin —namely, that the shepherds, after seeing Eomulus' chariot races, made for themselves a sort of Consualia— '* si6i ludos faciunt Consualia "—in which they ran about on oiled hides and skins, in racing fashion, as they had seen the chariots run. Such a piece of mimicry would be quite in the Italian character. There can be no doubt that there was an Ara Consi in the Circus, for it existed there, at all events, down to the time of Tertullian. It appears to have been underground, and was kept covered and concealed, except at the festival of the Consualia, when, as we understand the words of Yarro, the priests gave some games there in imitation of those which accompanied the Sabine rape.^ From 1 Lib. vi. s. 20 (ed. Mlill.). « So also Dionysms : rrjy 5e rore r^ 'PwjLiuAw Kadifpccee^ffai/ topTT^j/ ert koX els ifxl &yovT€S 'Pcofialoi dieriKovv, Kcoi^aovdkia KaXovi^res, iv p Pccu6s re j;7ro7f loy t'Spu/ieVos irapct r<2 fieylaTCf rQv 'nnrodp'SiJicov, Trepi ► ..' ■EpETpov, which carries it up to Romulus. There is no Latin word from which Feretrius can be derived, the term for ^iperpov in that tongue being ferculam. The Temple of Jupiter Stator may be a more doubtful matter. The Consul Atilius in the Samnite Avar, A.U.C. idS^ is also said to have vowed a temple to that deity. ^ Almost every writer on Roman history admits a Sabine war and union. Even Mommsen allows such a union, though before the foundation of Rome ; and, as he describes it as a forced union, we may suppose that it was preceded by a war. But his account of the matter, besides being unsupported by a single scrap of evidence or tradition, is in the highest degree improbable. Sir G. Cornewall Lewis is, so far as we know, the only writer who, consistently with his principle of regarding the entire early history of Rome to be without foundation, withholds his assent to the Sabine war, and consequent union. ^ The amalgamation of two races into one nation is an historical event so striking and important, that, among a people who were not absolutely barbarians, the memory of it, even if they possessed not, as the Romans did, the art of writing, may be supposed capable of surviving several centuries, merely by oral tradition. And the value of the tradition is greatly enhanced when we find it pre- served, if not exactly by the conquered nation, at all events by that on which the union had been forced. The national vanity of the Romans would doubtless have willingly ignored the event, had not the memorials of it been too numerous and too strong to be set aside. 1 Liv. X. 36, 37. s See Credibility, &c. vol. i. p. 438. We will here enumerate some of the material evidences of the union, without going into those which must have manifested them- selves to every Roman in their language, customs, laws, religious observances, in the name Quirites coupled with and equivalent to ^ that of Roniani, d'c. On the Quirinal Hill, which had changed its ancient name of Mons Agonus to the Sabine one of Collis Quirinalis,^ were — besides the Capitolium Yetus and its temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, showing tlie city on the Quirinal to be a sub- stantive city, distinct from Rome — the following temples or fanes, sacred to Sabine deities : that of Quirinus, or the Sabine Mars, from which the hill derived its name ; that of Semo Sancus, the Latin Dius Fidius, and those of Flora, Salus, and Sol. This Sabine city on the Quirinal could not have existed, as Niebuhr suj^poses, before the foundation of Rome. It is the height of improbability, that Romulus on the one hand should have attempted to found a city in such near proximity to a foreign one, or, on the other, that Tatius and the Sabines should have permitted him to do so. There is no probable way of accounting for two dis- tinct cities being found so close together but that handed down by tradition; namely, that the Sabine city arose after the two peoples had been united by agreement and compact. The Sabines continued to retain possession of the Capitoline, which they had conquered, and, indeed, it was then united to the Quirinal by a tongue of land, subsequently removed in order to make way for Trajan's Forum. Hence the Janus Geminus at the north-eastern foot of the Capitol, afterwards converted by Kuma into a temple, the famous index of peace and war, must, from its situation, have originally formed an entrance to the Sabine city, and this is certified by the additional name of Janus Quirinus, which we frequently find attached to it.- For Quirinus was the peculiar deity of the Quirinal Hill ; and therefore his name would hardly have been given to the gate had it been a gate of Rome, as Schwegler supposes.^ The same author admits the storming and taking of the Capito- line by the Sabines.* But if the Sabines were settled on the ^ Festus, p. 254. 2 Suet. Oct. 22 ; Hor. Car. iv. 15, 9 ; Macrob. Sat. i. 19. The view in the text does not run counter to Macrobius's exphination that Janus was called (Quirinus, "quasi helloruni potens, ub hasta quam Sabini curim vocant." » Buch. i. S. 481. * Ibid. S. 484. 86 IIISTOEY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. THE THKEE TKIBErf. 87 Quirinal previously to that event, as he and I^^iebuhr assume, it is still more improbable that they should have allowed the Eomans to settle on the Capitoline than on the Palatine. For, as we have seen, the Capitoline and the Quirinal were then vu'tually one hill. The old tradition that the settlement on the Quirinal Avas made afkr the war is the only probable one. AVe will now continue the history after the amalgamation of the two peoples, down to the death of Tatius. THE SiVBINE UNION AND CONSTITUTION. The joyful peace so suddenly effected by the Sabine women after so terrible a war rendered them still dearer to their husbands and parents, and above all to Eomulus himself, on which account he affixed their names to the thirty curiie into which he divided the x^eople. The number of the women was undoubtedly larger than this ; but it has not been handed down to us how the thirty were selected, whether according to age, or the position and dignity of their husbands, or simply by lot. At the same time were enrolled three centuries of knights, called Kamnenses, Titienses, and Luceres. The Eanmenses were named after Eomulus ; the Titienses after Titus Tatius, the Sabine king. The cause and origin of the name Luceres is doubtful. So far Livy. Cicero further says that Eomulus also divided the people into three tribes, named after himself, Tatius, and Lucimio, who was an ally of Eomulus, and fell in the Sabine war.^ And as Livy himself afterwards mentions the existence of these three tribes,^ we may suppose that he knew that they were instituted at this time ; and, indeed, there is no other period to which we can conveniently assign their institution. The names of them appear to have been rather loosely used. The members of that named after Eomulus were sometimes called Eamnes, sometimes Eanmenses. The former name appears in the passage just quoted from Livy, and both in the ^ De Kep. ii. 8. 2 "Ut tres antiqujB tribus, Ramiies, Titienses, Liieeres, siuuu (pia.Hpie augurem habeant."— Lib, x. c. 6, ■>- ■M ■ "S. •':■ .« ( ■'i V;" fu'. subjoined passage of Varro. ^ Those named after Titus Tatius we find called Tatienses, Titienses, and Tities. The first two of these names occur in the passages already quoted. The name of Tities is found in Yarro, in the passage cited beloNV.'"^ Of the Luceres we will speak in the Eemarks. After the amalgamation of the two peoples, the reign of the two kings was not only common but concordant. After a few years had elapsed, some relations of King Tatius struck the ambassadors of the Laurentines ; and when these demanded the redress due to them by the law of nations, Tatius ^^'as deterred from affording it by the entreaties of his relatives and the love which he bore towards them. But by this conduct he only brought down upon his own head the punishment due to them : for, having gone to a solemn sacrifice at Lavinium, he was set upon and killed. Eomulus is said to have borne this matter with more equanimity than became him ; either because he thought that Tatius had been not unjustly killed, or because a partition of the ^supreme power can never be trusted. Eemarks. — Schwegler observes,^ that the tradition makes the union very speedily completed, and that, according to all inner pro- bability, it must have taken a much longer time to effect it. He does not, however, bring forward this as an objection to the funda- mental truth of the story, Avliich, on the contrary, he accepts. We are of opinion that objections like this sometimes arise fiom want of considering the simplicity of early ancient life as compared with our own, and the small numbers which are dealt with. It is pos- sible, however, that the time may have been longer, and that tradi- tion has given us only the results. The same author thinks that the relation of the tw^o united ^ " Agcr Itomanus iH'imum divisus ill parteLs tris, a quo Tin bus appcllata Tatieiisiuiu, liuuiniuin, Luceriim, uominatLe, ut ait Kiiiiius, Tatienses a Tatio, Kainiieuses a Ilomulo, Luceres, ut Junius, a Lueumoiie.'' — Ling. Lat. v. § 55 ^eil. Miill.). - " Tribani militim, quod tcrni tribus tribubus Kamnium, Lueenun, Titiuiu olim ad exercitum niittebantur."— Ibid. § 81 ; cf. § 91. Though some MS8. have an ahere— tacium, taccium, tatium. From this passage we may infer ihat the institution of the tribes was for military purposes. ■i B-ieh ix. S. 11. 1 88 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF KOME. THE UNITED KINGDOM. 89 peoples was at first only federative and isopolitical ; they did not form a single state in common, but a confederacy. This is apparent from the fact that each state retains its own king. ]Moreover, a credible, or at all events a sensibly devised, tradition tells us that the two kings did not immediately consult together about their common affairs, but that each of them had his own senate of one hundred men, with whom he first took counsel apart ; and it was after this that they met together for the purpose of coming to reso- lutions in common. If this is well founded— and internal proba- bility speaks hi its favour— then the later constitution, which re- cofmises only one king, one senate, and one assembly of the people, was a w^ork of gradual assimilation, and must have been produced by a series of mediations. It must have taken much longer time to accomplish the religious union of the two peoples. It may have been centuries before all differences on this subject were reconciled, and the Eoman sacra completely fused with the Sabine. On this we may remark that there are no traces of a double kingdom, except for the short period of the life of Tatius. It can hardly be imagined that if the double kingdom had lasted a consi- derable time, tradition should have preserved no memory of it. After the death of Tatius we hear only of single kings, alternately Sabine and Eoman 3 but this alternation of the two races shows that there could have been no motive for concealing a joint reign, had there really been one. It is impossible to draw any conclusion from the symbolical empty throne, with sceptre and crown, which, according to a tradition preserved by Servius,^ Eomulus placed next his own. Servius himself assigns the empty throne to Kemus ; Schwegler,- after Niebuhr, considers that it represented the dormant right of one of the two peoples. But even if this view be the true one, it admits that there was actually only one king of both Ptomans and Sabines. The "sensibly devised" tradition — it is astonishing how readily the sceptical critics adopt such traditions when favourable to their own views — of each king having held his own separate senate, rests only on the authority of Plutarch, and his follower Zonaras,^ and is totally incompatible with the other accounts of this period, such as the institution of the curiae, &c. How long it may have taken to effect the complete religious union of the two peoples it is impossible to say ; but, with the easy-going 1 A.l .Ell. i. 2 vi. 780. 2 S. 488 ; Anm. 3. M' j^Kj;'*! '^ Pint. Rom. 20 J Zonar. vii. 4. ■ ,', ; I. , faith of pnganism, the participation of such sa in as were necessary to ecpial political rights, was probably immediate. Cicero, at least, who must have been a better judge of such a subject than a modern writer, finds no difficulty in this way.^ In their relation also as towns, Schwegler proceeds to observe, the original separation only gradually ceased : Pome and the Quiri- tian settlement may have existed for a long while side by side as separate towns. Niebuhr has given several examples of towns so separated by walls : as the Phoenician Tripolis of the Sidonians, 'J'yrians, and Aradians ; in the Middle Ages the old and new towns of Dantzic ; and the three independent towns of Kouigsberg, &:c.- Dionysius tells us,'^ that after the union the swampy valley between the Capitoline and Palatine was filled up with earth and converted into a market-place ; which may be true, but we must not think of a Forum in the proper sense of the term. AVe must also suppose that, after the complete union of the two towirs, a new Pomanium was drawn, and a new miuidus laid ; but it may be c^uestioned whether the Temple of Yesta was first placed outside of Poma (Juadrata after this enlargement. Tradition also refers the Sacra Yia to the union of the two races ; but it does not a2)pear that this explanation is well founded. AVe may ask whether the relations of the two peoples were, from the commencement of their union, on a footing of political ei_[uality ?* Tradition assumes that they were ; and it is, at all events, an incontestable fact that the Pamnes and Titles were sub- se(piently on such a footing. This appears from the double king- dom, from the alternation of Poman and Sabine kings which fol- lowed it, and from the equal representation of both races in the Senate, the equestrian order, and the priesthood. The Luceres, on the other hand, appear to have been an mferior race. It is another question whether this equality was not the fruit of a long struggle. And it cannot be denied that there are many traces of the Pomans having been originally subordinate to the Sabines. In favour of this view there is, first, the general proba- * "Quo fceJere et Sabiiios iu civitatcm ascivit, sacris communicatis." — De Rep. ii. 7. 2 Niebulir, Rom. Gesch. B. i. S. 305 f. 3 Lib. ii. c. 50. * The assertion of Servius (ad JEn. viii. 709) that the Sabiues had all the rights of Roman citizensliip, except tlie sufragiam for the creation of magi- strates, seems undeserving of attention. 90 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. bility tliat the little town upon the Palatine would, in the long run, have been as little able to resist the victorious advance of the Sabines as the other towns of the valley of the Tiber and the Anio. This idea seems even to have occurred to some of the an- cient writers j and thus, for instance, A\41eius Paterculus^ thinks, that to have averted such a catastrophe, Pvomulus must have been aided by the legions of his grandfather, Xumitor. Niebuhr is of opinion that Kome must have been subject to the Sabines.^ The same state of things is apparent through the veil wliich the common tradition endeavours to throw over these events : the Sabines have seized the citadel, and Eome stands on the brink of destruction. It is probably from the memory of this subjection that Tatius appears to have been hateful to the Pvomans : Ennius ^ calls him '* tyrant ; " and, from his refusal to punish a breach of international law, he is slain at Lavinium, the city of the Lares and Penates of Latium. It has also been observed by Huschke, and others, that when all the three tribes are mentioned together, the most knowing archaeo- logists, as a rule, place the Tities first : an order of precedence which does not seem to be altogether accidental, as the Luceres, for instance, are as regularly put last.^ A still more decisive proof of the subjection of the Eonians at first would be the collective name of Quuites, if it could be shown that this name originally belonged only to the Sabines of the Quirinal ; for otherwise the conciueror always imposes his name on the conquered. Lastly, the name of Qiiirinus, given to the deified liomulus, is a significant indication of the original precedence of the Sabine race. Schwegler is also of opinion, with Kiebuhr, that the tradition of the rape of the Sabines shows a time when the city on the Palatine did not enjoy the right of connuhium with the city on the. Quirinal, and therefore must have been inferior to it ; till at length subjected Pvome extorted the right,— that is, political equality,— by arms. But, however this may be, it is significant, and doubtless not without a deep historical ground, that the Eoman tradition always takes its stand on the Palatine city, and not on that of the Sabine conquerors. We must conclude from this that the Palatine Pome was at least the stem and stock on which the rest was grafted. 1 Lib. i. 8, 5. 2 Rom. Gesch. i. 305 ; cf. Ihiie, Foisclmiigeu, S. 33. ^ Ami. i. 151. * The remark, liowever, does not hold good luiivcrsuUy, as Schwegler him- self mentions in his note, and as we have ah-eady seen from the ([notation from Yarro, L. L. § 81, where the Tities are pnt last. Above, p. 87, note 2. i-w - ■ '.V "J" THE rALATINi: AND QUIRIXAL CITIES. 91 V^\ AVith a good deal of these remarks of Schwcgler's we entirely concur. AVe think that Livy's assertion, tliat the whole govern- ment was assigned to Pome, is the reverse of the truth ; and that the Pomans, though not actually conquered, were placed, during the reign of Tatius at least, and i)erhap3 for a considerable period afterwards, in a subordinate position.- To the reasons adduced by Schwegler for this view, the following ma}', we think, be added. The tradition that makes the Sabine women rush in between the combatants was probably adopted by Livy for two reasons : first, it is picturesque, and secondly, it obviates the embarrassing question, AVhy, if the Pomans were thus driving the Sabines before them, did they stop short in theii' victorious career, and not complete their success by regaining possession of the Capitoline ] There is another tradition adopted by Cicero, that after a battle of varying success and undecided result, tliirty of the Sabuie women were de- spatched, with the consent of the Ponian Senate, to beg a peace from their countrymen.- This seems more accordant with the state of things which we find afterwards. Thus, when the people are distributed into Curia), these are designated not by Poman but by Sabine names, showing the predominance of the latter race. In like manner Tatius dedicates in all the curite a table, or altar, to Juno Quiritia, or Curis, which tables, Dionysius tells us, were extant in his time.^ Again, all the transactions during the joint reign of Pomulus and Tatius are conducted by the latter monarch, and Pomulus retreats quite into the background. Thus it is Tatius who receives the Laurentine ambassadors ; it is to Tatius, and not Pomidus, to whom the Laurentines apply to redress the insult which their ambassadors had received ; and it is Tatius also who proceeds to the solemn sacrifice at Lavinium, though that was a town peculiarly Latin, if not Poman. Dionysius, indeed, tells of a joint expedition by Pomulus and Tatius against the Alban town of Cameria,"^ wliich they subdued and converted into a Poman ^ How much more the later Romans prided themselves on their Ramnesian origin, than on their other jirogenitors, appears from the speech of Canuleius : "Hoc si poUuit nobilitatem istam vestram, (piam pleriipie oriundi ex Alhanis et Sahiais, own gencrc nee sanguinCy scd per co-optationem in Patrcs habetis," &c. — Liv. iv. 4. '■^ " Matronis ipsis, (piaj raptaj erant, orantibus," De Rej). ii. 7; and, **ex Sabinis virgines raptie — oratrices pacis et fcederis," ib. c. 8; cf. Dionys. ii. 45. ^ Lib. ii. c. 50. "* liOC. cit. 92 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF KOME. colony, transferring 4,000 of the inhabitants to Eome. But we read of this event in no other author, and Dionysius is little to be trusted except when he speaks of things that came under his own knowledge and observation. His evidence on this occasion is par- ticularly "suspicious, as we find him afterwards mentioning Cameria as reduced by Tarquin, and again by the Consul Yerginius.^ Be- sides, a joint military expedition of this kind proves notliing as to the relative superiority or inferiority of the two kings in the in- ternal government of Rome. For these reasons, as well as for some of those stated by Schwegler, we are inclined to think that Eomulus was (luite sub- ordinate during the lifetime of Tatius. But we cannot go so far as Ihne, Ampere,- and other writers, who are of opinion that Eome was absolutely conquered. Had that been the case its name would liave ceased to exist, and instead of a history from the Roman point of view, we should have had one from the Sabine point of view. The resumption of the sole power by Romulus, after the death of Tatius, and the recurrence after Xuma of a Roman king, show that the Roman power and influence, though for a time inferior, had not been annihilated. We may here remark, that originally the curiae were evidently a Rumulean institution ; however, after the Sabine union, they may have been altered and adapted to the new circumstances, and their number increased. The early Roman constitution was little more than a division of the people for military purposes. In fact, the Romulean population were to all intents and purposes an army, of which Romulus was the supreme and irresponsible commander. The term x>mf'l^ itself seems to have originally signified the army. It was the fighting men alone who at first enjoyed any civil rights at Rome, in the same manner as the ancient Germans ; among whom it was only the warriors who administrated the afiairs of State.^ In process of time, these rights were gradually extended to citizens who did not belong to the army, and hence the original military signification of popuhis became ultimately quite obsolete, and de- noted the Roman people instead of the Roman army. Its ancient signification, however, was still retained in some cognate words, as jwpularey to lay waste ; poiyidatioj a laying waste or plundering, &c. 1 Lib. iii. 51, v. 40, 49. ^ L'Hist. Rom. a Rome, t. i. p. 442, seq. 3 " Nihil eiiim uecxue publico ncquo privatte rei nisi armati agunt." — Tac. Geim. 13. THE ORIGINAL ROMAN PEOrLE. 93 ■'Mi ■ 'M- Before the Sabine union, the army of Romulus consisted probably of only about 1,000 men, distributed into ten curia?, each containing 100 men under a curio, or captain ; and this company again divided into tens under a decurio. Hence the name of miks for a soldier — one of the thousand. When we consider that this was not a standing army, but composed of men engaged in agricultural and pastoral pursuits, such an arrangement appears an excellent one both for summonhig an army quickly to the field, and for keeping it well in hand when on service : but for civil purposes it would have been totally useless and inexplicable. The word curio evidently comes from the Greek Kupto?, a lord or master, thus showing the institution to be Romulean. Each curia formed a sort of clan, under the curio as its head. It had common sacra, and hence the curio was also its priest. The head-cjuarters or places of assembly for these clans were also called curiie. Thus we find on the Palatine hill the Curia) Veteres ; the position of which shows that they were Romulean, while the epithet vettns proves that they were antecedent to the curiic erected after the Sabine union. The men who formed the ranks were called clientes, from the Greek k\vu), to hear, which is synonymous with ohey. Another proof of the Greek origin of the institution. We must not, however, coiiioxxndi i\\Q pntpuhis, or primitive Roman army, with the exercitus of later times. It rather resembled a feudal militia. All were bound to do military service, when re- quired, under their lord j but in peaceable times they cultivated their fields. Hence they also became involved in civil affairs, by the expenses and risks of agriculture, losses, disputes, lawsuits, &c. To help them in these conjunctures with advice and money, they had recourse to the head of their gens, or clan, whom they regarded as a sort of father, and called patronus. These last relations be- tween patron and client continued to subsist to a late period, long after the primitive relation of captain and common soldier had become obsolete and forgotten. There can be no doubt, as we shall show further on, that the clients gave their votes in the Comitia Curiata, or assemblies of the curies. But the clients were certainly not patricians, and conse- quently, in opposition to the dictum of Niebuhr, the term 2^opulas must always have included some plebeians. That the clients, although they voted in the cuiiic, were plebeian, ai)pears from a passage in Cicero, where he tells us that la mulus distributed the 94 niSTOEY OF THE KINGS OF KOME. THE LUCERES. 95 plehs into cUenteJce of tlie leading men, or patricians. ^ The clients, Iiowever, conld not have constituted the whole of the 2)lehs. There must have been other jilebeians of a lower grade, who did not belong to the anny, ov j'^ojudus, and who had not the franchise. The division of the people into curia? was an arbitrary political regulation ; the division of them into three tribes was dictated by the nature of the population. This may be the reason w^hy Livy did not think it necessary to mention the formation of these tribes. - Tliere is no difficulty about the Earanes and Tities ; the former being the original Greek stock of Eomulus, the latter the Sabines of Titus Tatius. But of what the Luceres were composed, and what was the origin of their name, have been matters of dispute. Livy confesses his ignorance on the subject.^ Many writers derive the name from " Lucumo," an Etruscan, and ally of Eomulus, who fell in the Sabine war;^ some from the Lucus Asyli, the origin of the refugee part of the population ;5 and one*^ from Lucerus, a king of Ardea, who aided Eomulus in his w^ar against Tatius. It is evi- dent that these are mere guesses founded on a similarity of name j and Livy, therefore, very sensibly left the point undecided. The second of the proposed derivations might seem the most probable ; since besides the Ramnes, or immediate followers of Eomulus, and the Sabines of Tatius, the early Eoman population must have also had an element composed of the shepherds who joined Eomulus, and the refugees who flocked to his asylum. This part of the population would naturally have been considered inferior to the rest ; and such was the estimation in which the Luceres stood. It is, however, not improbable that among these refugees Avas an Etruscan Lucumo named Cseles Vibenna, or C?elius Yibennus, with some followers — [cum sua manu) — to whom the !Mons Querque- tulanus was assigned as a place of residence, and deriv^ed from him the name of the Caelian Hill." AVe can hardly imagine that Eomulus had formed any regular Etruscan alliance at this early 1 "Et liabuit i)lebem in clieutelas priucipum descriptam."— De Kt'ii. ii. % 16. 3 It is extraordinary how Schwegler (S. 498, Anm, 2) can charge him with being ignorant of the existence of these tribes, wlien in the same note he ♦quotes the passage in which Livy speaks of them as such. (Lib. x. c. 6.) 3 Lib. i. c. 13. 4 Cic. De Kep. ii. 8 ; Yarr. L. L. v. 55 ; Trop. iv. 1, 29, &c. 5 Pint. Rom. 20 ; Schol. Pers. i. 20. 6 Paul. Diao. \\ 11?. ' Varr. L.L. v. s. 46. w^- >i-i f "• period ; while at the same time the Mons Coelius appears to have obtained its name before the time of ISTuma, as we find it mentioned in the sacred books relating to the Argive chapels.^ The assertion of a certain tragic poet named Volnius, recorded by Yarro,^ that all the three names of the tribes were Tuscan, is altogether absurd and inadmissible. The arguments brought by Scliwegler against the Luceres having been thus composed, do not appear to us to be of much weight. He is of opinion that the formation of a tribe out of such fugitives, with land assigned to it, and furnishing members to the Equites, is not to be thought of.^ But among these fugitives may have been political refugees of condition, like Cscles Yibenna. It is, at all events, as likely that one of the Eoman tribes should have been formed out of these persons, whom Eomulus had invited to his hospitality, as subsequently out of the conquered Albans, which is Schwegler's improbable supposition. In order to support that l)osition, Schwcgler can point out what a subordinate place the Luceres held ; and shows, that though they were admitted among the knights, yet a king was never taken from them, as from the other two tribes, and that they were not represented in the senate or the priesthood.'* Eut these arguments are equally good for the Luceres having been refugees. Schwegler's arguments, derived from there being no traces of early Etruscan influence in the Latin language or religion,'' do not affect our view ; because we do not assume that a large Etruscan colony settled at Eome on this occasion, but only, among other refugees, though perhaps the most distinguished of them, an Etrus- can Lucumo with a few followers. The circumstance of there having been a second and more regular Etruscan settlement at Itome would be no good argument against a former one ; and in such remote traditions that the name of Cailes Yibenna may have been connected with both is not very extraordinary. The division of a people iuto three tribes merely for political and administrative purposes, and not from any ditterence of race, appears to have been a frequent Grecian practice, and especially among the Dorians.® AYe might avail ourselves of this circumstance in support of our theory of the Grecian origin of Eome. We are 1 Varr. L. L. v. 47. ^ i|,ia. s. 55. ^ j^. j. s. 506. * Buch. i. S. 514. « j^i^. 509, scq. *» See the examples collected by Schwegler, 13. ix. §. 14. 96 HISTORY OF THE KIXGS OF EO.ME. of opinion, however, as we liave said before, tliat this threefokl division arose at Kome from an actual diversity of race. That the Eomans had been divided into three tribes before their union with the Sabines, though asserted by Dionysius in his imaginary sketch of the Eoman constitution, is, as Schwegler has shown, entirely contrary to the remainder of the tradition. The thirty curiai can- not be brought into accordance with the hundred patres of tlie Itomulean senate, or the thousand original settlers on the Palatine. The notion is also confuted by the undoubted identity of the Titles with the Sabines ; whilst Dionysius nowhere ventures to give the names of the three Romulean tribes.^ A better argument for Grecian origin may be derived from other parts of the Eomulean constitution ; and the Eomans are parti- cularly said to have imitated the Lacedaemonians.'^ It was not, however, imitation, but liereditary custom. Dionysius has pointed out several particulars in which the Itomulean constitution re- sembled the Spartan : as the division of the people into curia,', with common sacra for each, a curia, or curial house, in which they feasted together on festivals, and a hall, like the Greek Prytanea^ common to all the curia3. The body-guard of Itomulus had also a Spartan prototype. Dionysius likewise found a resemblance between the relations of liomulus and the Spartan kings to their senates ; but on this pomt we shall not insist, as he totally misunderstood this part of the Eoman Constitution.^ The number three, com- bined with ten, 3, 30, 300, also plays a great part in the institutions of both peoples. We will here add a few words respecting the agrarian constitu- tion of Romulus. Dionysius tells us ^ that Eomulus, after setting apart a portion of the Eoman territory for the support of the crown and of the service of the temples, and another portion as common land, divided the rest into thirty equal parts, and assigned one of them to each of the thirty curiie. We are disposed to believe this account because it tallies with scattered notices which we find in Latin authors. Thus Cicero says, that large tracts of arable land, pasturage, and wood, were set apart as royal, and were cultivated for the use of the ^ Schwegler, Band i. S. 504 ; cf. Dionys. ii. 7. 2 /xiixT}a-diJt.eyoi Kard. Trdi/ra rrju AaKidaifioviui/ TroAtretW oI'Pw/uloioi. — Athcii. vi. 106. 3 See Dionys. lib. ii. c. 13, 14, 23. "* ii. 7 ; iii. 1. ALLOTMENT OF LAND. 97 kings, in order that they might not be distracted, by the necessity of providing for their own sux)port, from devoting their wliole attention to the affairs of the people, and more particularly to the administration of justice, of which they were the fountain.^ The division of the land among the people is confirmed by Yarro and others. 2 To each member of a curia were allotted two jugtra^ "which, because on the death of the holder they fell to his heir, were called heredium.^ Schwegler objects to this account* that it is merely adopted by the Eoman waiters from the ancient practice in founding colonies, when to each man was assigned a couple of acres ; and that this practice has been retrospectively attributed to Eomulus. But it seems much more probable that the practice may have descended from antiquity than that a variety of writers should have conspired to attribute to more ancient times a comparatively modern custom. Objections like this arise only from a settled determina- tion to represent every circumstance of the ancient history as forged or invented. In fact, we know that the Eoman colonies were imitations in miniature of Eome itself, and that all their institutions were modelled after those of the metropolis.^ Before we quit this part of the subject, we must say a few words about the name of Quirites, Livy tells us,^ that by way of concession to the Sabines they were called Quirites, from the town of Cures. This is of a piece with the rest of his history of the Sabine war and union, in which he endeavours to extenuate — though perhaps in this following his ancient authorities — all that might tend to the humiliation of the Eomans. Cures is the name of a place, and, according to all ac- cuunts of the place, whence the victorious Sabines came ; and accordingly such a concession would amount only to this, that the Sabines, who evidently had the upper hand, wxre allowed to retain ^ "Jusprivati petere solebant a regibus : ob casque causas agri arvi et arbusti et pascui lati atque uberes definiebautur, qui assent regii, qui colerenturque sine regum opera et labore, ut eos nulla privati negotii cura a popiiloruni rebus abduceret." — De Rep. v. 2. 2 "Bina jugera a Eomulo primum divisa viritim," &c. — R. R. i. 10, 2. *'Bina tunc jugera populo Romano satis erant, nullique majorem moduni attribuit (Romulus)."— Plin. N. H. xviii. 2 ; cf. Paul. Diac. p. 53. 3 Varr. loc. cit. * B. i. S. 450. e See G«Uius xvi. 13, 8. « Lib. i. c. 13. 98 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. tlieir own name, instead of being compelled to assume that of the Eomans, -who were evidently inferior. Another difficulty is, why, if Tatius was king of Cures, should he have abandoned his sole and ancient monarchy, only to share the regal power with Eomulns at Rome 1 But the ancients had another derivation of Quirites from quitis, a spear ;^ whence the name would signify "spearmen," or *' warriors." Such a derivation is much more befitting the warlike Sabines ; and after all it would only put them on a level with the Romans, seeing that the term " Populus Roraanus " meant the Roman army. Professor Newman, who maintains a Gaelic, or Celtic, mixture in the ancient Italian populations, observes on this subject : ** We happen here to have a clue which the Romans had not. The Gaelic language has numerous words in common with the Latin ; and gives us Coir (sounded Qidr\ a spear; Curaidh, a warrior ; the similarity of which to Quir and Quirite sets at rest the question what Quirite meant." 2 The analogy is certainly striking ; but as the author had jnst before observ^ed, " that until it is shown that Cures cannot also have come from the same root, there is no proved disagreement in the two explanations," it is, perhaps, going too far to say that the question is entirely set at rest. On the whole, however, we accept as much the more probable one the derivation from cun.% or qniris, a spear. The Sabines were enrolled, together with the Romans and Luceres, in the thirty curiae, which now formed the military force of the entire city of some 3,000 men, with 300 horse. But as this force no longer con- sisted only of the Populus Romanus, that name was not, indeed, abolished, but was accompanied with one of eain ascended into heaven." It is w^onderful what belief this story acquired ; and how much the regret of the army and the j>/t'5s for Eomulus w^as mitigated by the certaint}' of his immortality. The reign of Eomulus lasted thirty-seven years. As a ruler, the two great works of Eomulus were the foundation of the Auspices and of the Senate. He is repre- sented as always listening to the counsels of the latter.- He kept the people in order by mulcting them in cattle rather than by severe corporal punishments. ^ He was the 1 "Patrum auctoritato coiisilioque regiiavit." — Cic. De l^ep. U. 8. 2 Ilml.O. f tT' 104 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. APOTHEOSIS OF ROMULUS. lo: founder of the Roman military s}'stem, and has the reputation of having been a very warlike prince ; which must be attri- buted to his military success, and his personal prowess; for, according to the accounts transmitted to us, he did not enter upon a single aggressive war. All his wars were in self- defence, though he may be said to have brought upon himself the earlier ones by the rape of the Sabines. Remarks. — On the end of Romulus Schwegler remarks:^ "One who had been born in so wonderful a manner could only leave the earth by miracle. In order to enhance the miraculous nature of these occurrences, the moment both of his conception and of his death is marked by an eclipse ; a coincidence which has been already observed by Dionysius^ and Plutarch.^ The Greek mythology affords a parallel in the story of Hercules ; for Hercides also is borne to heaven by a thunder-cloud ; where he is reconciled to his enemy, Hera, and marries her daughter Hebe. This, or a smiilar, story of the Greek mythology was certainly present to the minds of the Roman poets ; since the idea of an apotheosis in this form is originally as foreign to the Italian religion as the idea of sexual intercourse between gods and men, and a begetting of men by gods. Both ideas are derived from the Greek mythology ; and it was doubtless Ennius, who had received a Greek education, who first invented the apotheosis of Romulus in such a form, and domesticated the idea among the Romans." To the same effect Mommsen : * " The Greek hero-worship is entirely foreign to the Romans ; and how recently and clumsily the Romulus legend was invented, is shown by his quite un-Roman metamorphosis into Quirinus. ]S"uma, the oldest and most honoured name in Roman tradition, was never worshipped as a god at Rome, like Theseus at Athens." Nobody, of course, believes in the actual apotheosis of Romulus ; the only question is, whether such a belief was congenial to, and might have prevailed in, the times in which Romulus lived ? The very argument wliich Dr. Mommsen uses against the story proves that it could not have been a late invention, as a very Httle reflection might have shown him. l^o inventor of a story invents '..1? 1 .%^ 1 Buch X. § 10. 3 De fort. Rom. o. * Lib. ii. c. 56. * Kap. 12, p. 113. one that runs counter to the manners of the people among whom he lives. For, first of all, such an invention would not occur to him; there would be nothing to suggest it. Again, an inventor naturally wishes his story to be believed ; but how should it gain credit if it was totally foreign to the customs of the people whom he wishes to believe it? These reflections show that the story must have been the product of the age of Romulus, who with many of his followers was of Greek descent. In the very same page in which Dr. Mommsen makes this objec- tion to the legend, he mentions, without a word of comment, the worship of Hercules by the Romans, as a w^ell-attested part of the Roman religion. But who was Hercules but a deified man ? And what was his worship but hero-worship? This worship, as we liave seen, had been instituted by Romulus, and is another proof of his Greek extraction. The argument that Xuma was never worshipped by the Romans is a strange one in the mouth of Dr. Mommsen, who does not believe in his existence. But the difference is easily accounted for. Romulus was a semi-Greek, Xuma a pure Sabine. The followers of Romulus, especially the Ramnes, for whom probably his deifica- tion was principally intended, might readily believe it. Not so the Sabines of their king. And during the reign of Xuma, Rome became thoroughly Sahinized, The tradition, therefore, instead of being a late and cliunsy in- vention, bears on its face the evidence that it was not invented at all ; though of course the apotheosis itself was invented by those who had a purpose to serve. The tradition was handed down from that early period when alone hero-worship was practised, and coidd not have been invented at a long subsequent period, when it was not practised. The same answer which we have given to the objections of Dr. Mommsen applies to those of Schwegler. The latter writer, though he adduces the story of Hercules from the Greek mythology, as suggesting to Roman inventors the apotheosis of Romulus, forgets that Hercules had been early naturalized at Rome. The Ara Maxima dedicated to him was undoubtedly one of the oldest fanes in the city. It required, therefore, no Ennius to introduce among the Romans the idea of apotheosis. And it is incredible that any poet should have been able to establish such an article of popular belief among them, especially if it was quite contrary to their way m lOG HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROME. APOTHEOSIS OF ROMULUS. 107 of thinking. But, in fact, that the deification of llomulus was known among the Eojuans long before the time of Emiius appears from the circumstance that the temple dedicated to him is mentioned in the sacred Argive books : *' dictos enim collis plureis apparet ex Argeorum sacrificiis, in quibus scriptum sic est : " * Collis Quirinalis, terticeps cis ajJem Quirini.' "^ Schwegler himself recognises the high antiquity of the division of the city, according to these books ; ^ divisions wliich must of course have preceded those of Servius. We are of opinion, however, that though the belief in the apotheosis of Romulus originated at the time of his death, yet that the story of Julius Proculiis, or at least his prediction, is a more modern addition. The prophecy that nothing could resist the Roman arms, and that Rome was to be the leading city of the world, is evidently a vatlclniiun ex eventu, which must have been invented, at all events, after Rome had made considerable progress in the conquest of Italy, and was perhaps inserted by Livy himself, as a rhetorical flourish and ad ccq^tandum vulgus. During the reign of Romulus there was nothing to suggest or to justify such a pre- diction. There is nothing of the sort in the tradition as given by Cicero ; according to whom, Romulus appeared to Proculus Julius, on the Quirinal Hill, and merely requested that a temple might there be built to him ; for that he was now a god and called Quirinus.3 That a simple and primitive people like the early Romans should have believed in the deification of Romulus is nothing surprising. Many centuries afterwards, amidst all the enlightenment of the im- perial times, Julius Ciesar was, like his successors, translated among the gods, not only, says Suetonius, by the mouths of those who decreed him that honour, but also in the belief of the vulgar.-^ The descent of Romulus from a god, his own apotheosis, the colloquies of Xuma with Egeria, and other supernatural events of this description, are eagerly seized upon by the sceptical critics as ^ Varr. L. L. v. 52. The same books also mention an .EJes Romuli on the Germalus (ib. § 54) ; but it is possible this may have been the same as the Casa Romuli. 2 B. i. S. 380, Anm. 14. a De Rep. ii. 10, 20. So also Dionysius, lib. ii. c. 63. ** "In deorum numerum relatus est, uou ore modo decenieutium sud et persuasione vulgi."— Jul. Cses. c. ^d>. V, : ^-. '. •'4 •1st V* proofs of the falsehood of early Roman history. But in fact such objections only prove the thorough misconception of these critics of ancient character and manners, and especially of the ancient notion of deity. On this point we will transcribe the words of an eminent German scholar : " Notwithstanding that the use and meaning of the word deus is sufficiently known, yet we do not think it super- fluous to remind our readers that when they are thinking of the Latin deuSy they must quite throw aside the notion of the German word Gott (or the English word God). For it would lead us to very false ideas of the religious views of the ancients, if, for instance, we should regard the deification of Roman emperors according to our notions of a divine being. A deus is far from being so much as a saint ; since every person^s soul, after quitting the body, and after the performance of ceremonies like those emjjloyed in the apotheosis of an emperor, became a deus. The invisible guide assigned to every man by heaven, was called deus ; a word which denoted not only a good, but also a wicked being. According to this view, the word deus denoted in general only an invisible, or spiritual, personality. These spiritual beings were as numerous as the corporeal appearances which presented themselves to the senses ; since not only every man, but also every plant, every place, nay, every property of these creatures and objects, had, in the belief of antiquity, their spiritual counterparts." ^ According to this view, it woidd be as rational to doubt the existence of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, or any other saint in the Roman calendar, because they have been placed among the heavenly choir, as to doubt the existence of liomulus because he had been deified. And if that king is to be regarded as a mytliical personage, on account of his apotheosis, so also must Julius Caisar and the succeeding emperors, though their reality is amongst the best attested facts of history. It is true that we find no deifications during the republic ; but this happened partly because, after the Sabine mixture, superstition ran less that way, and partly because it was difficult to find anybody to deify in that period of equality. But no sooner had the empire, or the rule of a single person, been re-established, than the practice was immediately revived. For the Caesars, like Romulus, claimed a divine origin, through Venus and iEneas. There were, perhaps, fewer persons in that period who believed in the deification. The higher classes, at all events, had ^ ITnrtnng, Rcli^r^ion dcr R«"tnior, !». i. S. %\. 108 HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF ROxME. CONCERNING KING TATIUS. 109 grown more sceptical and rationalistic ; but the mass of the people were still not much advanced above the superstition which pre- vailed under the kings. We Avill now proceed to examine the remaining occurrences of the reign of Romulus. Although Tatius, it is said/ can as little pass for an historical personage as Romulus— for he is the hero eponymous of the Titles, as Romulus is of the Romans — yet there seems to be some historical ground for the double kingdom which the legend offers as the oldest constitution of the federated state. It is quite possible that a con- temporary reign of a king from both races may have preceded the alternate rule of Roman and Sabine kings. The tradition pre- served by Servius of the double Romulean throne, with a sceptre and crown, which were always placed near Romulus when he was giving his sanction to anything, seem to point this way, though others refer them, not to Romulus and Tatius, but to Romulus and Remus. 2 Can anything be more perverse than reasoning like this ? It is quite possible that there may have been a reign of w^hich tradition says nothing, like that of Romulus and Tatius, only it could not be tJte reign of those monarchs, of which tradition tells something ! Surely such arguments are begot in the very spirit of contradiction. The facts are admitted, but the persons to whom they refer are rejected as unhistoricaL Why ? We have already examined this question in the case of Romulus. The reason for rejecting Tatius is, that he is the eponymous hero of the Titles. :N'ow, if there was otherwise any weight in such an argument, let us observe that the parallel does not hold. The Romans were a nation, the Titles only a city tribe, and wanted no eponymous hero ; though it was natural enough that its name should have been taken from Tatius. But if that king had been an eponymous hero at all, it would surely have been of the Sabines, or Quirites, as a nation. Let us observe that the body of Tatius was brought to Rome and buried in a magnificent tomb on the Aventine,^ where public » Schwegler, B. x. § 5. ^ " Ob quam rem sella cuiulis ciun sceptra et corona et ceteris regni insignibus semper jiixta sancientem aliquid Romulum ponebatur, ut pariter imperaro viderentur."«Serv. yEn. i. 276 ; conf. id. vi. 780. But Servius also in these places refers the double insignia to Romulus and Remus. ^ " In eo ( Aventino) Lauretum, ab eo quod ibi sepultus est Tatius rex, qui ab Laurentibus interfectus est, vel ab silva laurea. "- Varr. L. L. v . § 152. ddirr^ra,. if'. •I' m libations still continued to be made to his manes, at least down to the time of the empire ; since Dionysius of Ilalicarnassus tells us that the practice existed in his time. Here, then, we have evidence, not only of the existence of Tatius, but also collaterally of his having perished in the way tradition tells us. For it can hardly be believed that the Romans were so besotted as to make these libations for centuries to an imaginary king, or to have made them at all, except to expiate his untimely death, which Romulus had left unavenged. For this neglect having been punished by a devastating pestilence, Romulus took this method of appeasing the anger of the gods.i The performance of these annual rites must have been handed down from the regal period ; for it is impossible to imagine that they should have been established during the republic in favour of a king, and by no means a popular one. Be it remarked that the testimony of Dionysius on this subject is only incidental. He had no point to prove, no theory to make out, for in his time nobody doubted the existence of Tatius. His merely accidental notice of the matter is, on that account, all the more valuable. Schwegler rightly observes that when Plutarch, in the passage just quoted, connects these rites to Tatius with those performed at the grove of Ferentina, on the occasion of the meeting of the Diet, or Confederate Council of Latium, this explanation is no doubt quite groundless. There appears not to have been the slightest connexion between Rome and Latium, as a confederate state, during the reigns of the first two kings of Rome. The text of Plutarch is doubtless corrupt. It runs thus in the vulgate : kol KaQapfxoi's o Pw^uXos rjyvLue rag TroXftc, ovg eri vvv KTropovaiy em tPjq