Historia de Roma II

1.-LTHE TUSCANS OR ETRUSCANS.

THE fears and attention of the Greeks were excited about the

time of the Persian war by the dominion of the Etruscans over the

Tyrrhenian sea; although Dionysius is mistaken in supposing it to

have been after them that the whole west of Italy was called Tyr­

rhenia by the Greeks: that name belongs to the age of the genuine

Tyrrhenians. When they were confined to Tuscany, and even

there were dependent upon Rome, their renown passed away; and

their former greatness was held to be fabulous by the contempora­

ries of Polybius 338 • In Roman history their importance is limited

to the period between the kings and the Gallic conquest; after

which they are extremely weak in comparison with the Sabellians.

By the Greeks they are mostly mentioned to their discredit, some­

times as pirates, sometimes as gluttons; by the Romans only as

diviners and artists: it is no traditional opinion which has taught

the moderns, that, independently of the extensive empire they once

held, they were one of the most remarkable nations of antiquity.

The ruins of their cities, the numerous works of art that have been

discovered, the national spirit of the Tuscans, who looked upon

them as ancestors to be proud of; even the tempting mystery of a

language utterly unknown; all this has made the moderns pay

more attention to them, than to any other of the Italian tribes; and

the Etruscans at this day are incomparably more renowned and

honoured, than they were in the time of Livy. Unhappily the

interest thus felt has not been combined with an equal degree of

judgment and impartiality: men have not chosen to be content with

knowing what their researches could discover: and no other part

of literature relating to ancient history contains so much that is

irrational and hasty, nay uncaudid, as may be found in what has

been written on the Etruscan language and history since Annius of

Viterbo.

338

II.

17.IIISTORY OF ROME.

83

I think I have sufficiently explained the origin of those erroneous

opinions on the extraction of the Etruscans, which deceived even

the Greeks, and have led the moderns much further astray, in' pro­

portion as they were anxious to get some key or other to the secrets

of a buried language. It is enough here to remind the reader, that,

from Tyrrhenia retaining its name after its conquest by the Etrus­

cans, two entirely different races were called Tyrrhenians by the

Greeks : the Pelasgians on the i:oast of Asia and on the islands in

the north of the JEgean, and the Etruscans. The latter had still

less title to the name, than the Sabellians in the south of Italy to

that of Oscans 33 9; nay exactly the same title as the English have to

that of Britons, or the Spanish Creoles to that of Mexicans or Peru­

vians: indeed the way they acquired it was precisely the same.

Now it being assumed that all the Pelasgians must have come ori­

ginally out of Greece, hence the story of the migration from Thes­

saly was invented: and since the l\:Ieonians were Tyrrhenians, and

it passed for certain at Athens and among the lonians, that these

Tyrrhenians, as well as those of Lemnos, were of the same stock

with the ancient inhabitants of Agylla and Tarquinii; since the

Meonians and Lydians moreover were confounded in the selfsame

manner as the Tyrrhenians and Etruscans 40 ; this gave birth to the

story concerning the emigration of the ancient Tyrrhenians from

J,ydia; which story Herodotus, in one of his less fortunate moments,

may perhaps have under8tood of the Etruscans.

Dionysius, though he had not detected the source of the error,

makes a stout stand against the two assumptions, which are equally

fallacious. That the story told by Herodotus had no Lydian tradi·

tion to rest upon, he proves by the unexceptionable authority of

Xanthus; that, even if there had been such a tradition, it would

deserve no credit, by the complete difference of the two nations in

language; usages, and religion. His assertion that the language

spoken by the Etruscans was a totally peculiar one, ::.nd bore no

affinity to any other, would deserve our full belief, even if we had

nothing beyond it; because the Etruscan was then, and indeed long

after, a living language, and books in it were reaclH. It is however

339 Above p. 51, note 206.

40 The Lydians, a branch of the same family with the Cariana and My­

sians, were foreign conquerors and barbarians.

41 The verses of Lucretius,

Non Tyrrhena retro volventum carmina frustra

Indicia occultro Divum percurrere mentis.

show that in his time the Etruscan books were still read in the original, from

right to left (retro). I will remark by the way that by indicia mentis Lucre­

tius means to explain indigitamenta.84

HISTORY OF ROME.

but too strongly confirmed by all our inscriptions, in the words of

which no analogy with the Greek language or with the kindred

branch of the Latin can be detected, even by the most violent ety­

mological artifices; so that nothing short of some wonderful dis­

covery will ever turn this dead treasure to account 349• In opposition

to the unanimous evidence of the ancients, who assert with equal

positiveness that the Tuscan language was distinct both from the

Sabine and from the Oscan, an opinion has arisen among the

Italian philologers, that all the nations of Italy, any remains of

whose languages occur in inscriptions, with the exception of a few

nameless races in the south, spoke only dialects of the same funda­

mental language. An unprejudiced investigation, such as there are

ample means of undertaking, will convince every one, as it has

convinced me, that the Tuscan bore just as little affinity to the

Oscan, as to Latin and Greek.·

It is in compliance with the evident usage of the ancients that I

here call the language of the Etruscans the Tuscan : nor shall I

scruple henceforward to call the people themselves Tuscans: not­

withstanding that Tuscus can be nothing but another form of Tur­

inus. In Cato's time the country was commonly styled Etruria,

the people Tusci: Etrusci in later times grew to be more usual in

books. The old name however must have continued the prevalent

one in the mouth of the people: hence under the later emperors the

name of Tuscia for the country, which till then had not been used

in writing4 8 ; and hence, since the middle ages, Toscana, and Tos­

cani for the people. Etruria and Etrusci presuppose the simple

form Etruri: and this we may hold to be the name originally given

by the Italians to the conquerors of the Tyrrhenians: although the

name both of Tuscans and Etruscans was no less foreign to the

people than that of Tyrrhenians: the one they gave themselves was

•

Rasena 44 •

342 Among all the Etruscan words said to have been made out, only two,

avil ril, vixit annos, seem to have been really explained: and it is in this very

instance that Lanzi flounders (T. u. p. 322.), because no shadow of an etymo­

logy can be found for ril meaning year. Turce is interpreted i:niu: I should

·

rather take it to be Tuscus.

43 Servius, on lEn. x. 164, censures the word as a novelty.

44 Dionysius 1. 30. The termination ena in Etruscan answers to the

Latin ius, as is shown by the gentile names (see note 922): so that the root is

Ras. This statement of Dionysius however should only be understood with

reference to the ruling people; their vassals might retain the old name of

Tyrrhenians {see note 342): even though they had exchanged their language

for that of the conquerors, like the Christians in Asia Minor.HISTORY OF ROME.

85

In the age of their greatness the Tuscans, having subdued the

more ancient Tyrrhenians and the Umbrians, dwelt in Etruria pro­

per and in the country about the Po. The Rretians too, and other

Alpine tribes were of the Tuscan race, as we are expressly assured

by Livy 845 : so, according to Strabo, were the Lepontians and Camu­

nians4&; perhaps the Euganeans also, who inhabited Venetia before

the founding of Patavium: and the language of the people of Groe­

den in the Tyrol, which, mixed as it has been with others, still

seems to stand alone in such roots as are peculiar to it, may not

unreasonably be consideted as a relic of the Etruscan 4 7, Mount

Brenner· formed the northern boundary of the Rretians, and cons·e­

quently of the Etruscan race. Ilut were these Rretians, as the

common opinion would make them••, Etruscans of the plain, who

had retired to the Alps on the invasion of the Gauls? \Ve must

suppose the vallies of the. Alps to have been almost uninhabited,

ere this can be conceivable: for a people who had not been able

to withstand the Gauls either in the field or behind their ramparts,

would have been much less able, when routed and flying, to wrest

the land of the mountaineer from its owner. But these regions were

far from being a desert: Polybius speaks of the inroads into Cis­

alpine Gaul made by the Alpine tribes immediately after the Gallic

invasion. And so long as there was still a home to receive the fugi­

tives on the other side of the Po or of the Apennines, they would

never have moved northward. It would be far easier to conceive

-and Livy's expressions are not adverse to such a supposition4 9 ­

that the mountains had been occupied by the Etruscans on the Po

as a bulwark· against irruptions from the north; as Theoderic

planted a colony of Goths in the land of the Breones. A rich peo­

ple may seize even upon barren mountains out of ambition; or may

occupy them as a precaution: but for it to send colonies sufficient

to keep down the old inhabitants, when more smiling Tegions are

inviting it50, implies the existence of an extensive and absolute au­

345 v. 33. The spelling Rlu'eti with an h is contrary to all good au­

thority.

46 He says they are of the Rretian race, 1v. p. 206. b.

47 Hormayr Geschichte von Tirol, p. 139. foll.

48 Mentioned by Pliny m. 24. and Justin xx. 5.

49 v. 33: after saying that the first abodes of the Etruscans were on the

coast of the lower sea, and that from thence they had founded twelve colonies

north of the Apennines, he proceed;i: Alpinis quoque ea gentibus haud duhie

origo est, maximeque Rretis.

· 50 Such as the plains and hills of the Venetians, which the Tuscans did

not take possession of, and the conquest of which could .not have been ren­86

IIISTORY OF ROME.

thority, such as seems quite out ·of the question in a state consist­

ing of cantons, like the Tuscan.

If Rretia on the other hand was one of the original homes of the

Etruscan people, from which it issued and spread, first in upper

Italy, and then to the south of the Apennines, it is very conceivable

that, when those migrations took place, a great part of the nation

would stay behind, because, as the Arragonese said in the introduc- ·

tion to their laws•; 1 , they were unwilling to exchange their rocky

soil for a fat hn<l, lest in leaving ~heir home they should leave their

freedom an<l their virtue: and to these, to the house of their fathers,

m~my of the lost sons may have returned, when the days of their

prosperity were gone. Even the harshness of the Etruscan lan­

guage, which seems to be still su~viving in· the Florentine dialect,

might be alleged as an argument for the people having come from

a mountainous country: for, unintelligible as are the contents of

the Etruscan inscriptions, still they bear unequivocal marks of such

a character: besides a nation in whose language consonants were

not the predominant sounds, would scarcely have adopted the orien­

tal custom of dropping the short vowels in writing. Moreover we

have historical statements, as authentic as can be required for those

times, which testify that the spreading of the Etruscans toward the

south was only by degrees.

'

In a very ancient history of the Umbrians it was related that the

Etruscans had conquered three hundred of their towns 52 : so that the

Umbrians must at one time have occupied the chief part pf the

countries which belonged to the Etruscans in the fulness of their

power. It may be said, this refers to the land between the .i\lps

and the Apennines; since, until the irruption of the Gauls, the

Umbrians retained some territory between the Apennines and the

Po. And this was certainly a part; but so likewise was Tuscany,

where we find the ancient towns of the Umbrians low down on the

left of the Tiber, and where they once dwelt as far as the Anio.

Even l\1icali 53 , though he would not part with the persuasion that his

country was the cradle of the Etruscan people, observes that the

river Umbro, at the mouth of which was a district called Umbria,

dered so difficult even by a large population and by fortified towns, as that of

Rretia was by nature and by its people.

351 Mirabeau, Essai sur le Despotisme, p. 238.

52 Pliny m. 19. Indisputably however none of the numbers in the Ita­

lian traditions will less admit of being taken literally than this: it merely

means that there were a great many of them.

53 T. 1. p. 58. comp. pp. 106, 107.IIISTORY OF ROME.

87

mentioned by Pliny 85 *, reminds him of the Umbrians. In the story

of the Lydian migration, Pisa and the whole country to the rocky

summits of the Alps are wrested by the Tyrrhenians from the Um­

hrians: and Pliny says the Umbrians were the oldest inhabitants

of Etruria, and were expelled by the Pelasgians 55 • Though it may

still be denied that Herodotus pronounces Cortona not to have been

an Etruscan city, or supposed that he is mistaken if he does; yet

Crere, Graviscre, Alsium, Saturnia, were occupied by the Etruscans

as conquerors, after driving out the people who in Italy bore the

name of Siculians, in Athens of Pelasgians and Tyrrhcnians 5_6•

Tarquinii too had belonged to the Thessalians, Perusia to the

Achreans; that is, both to the Pelasgians 57 : the founding of Clusium

is ascribed to Telemachus 5 •, and thus referred to Circe's Latins.

Populonia according to soma was a colony of the V olaterrans, who

had driven the Corsicans from this coast 59• Among the places the

Etruscans wrested from the Pelasgians; Dionysius mentions Pisa 60 :

that it was not originally an Etruscan city, lies at the bottom of the

statement of its being built by Greeks after the taking of Troy.

And allowing this story to be derived from its name seeming to be

a Greek one, yet Cato too held that the Tuscans were not its first

inhabitants 61 • From him or from Varro did Dionysius undoubtedly

borrow his accounts of the spreading of the Etruscans toward the

Tiber. But all statements, however probable in themselves and

well attested, were forced to give way to the tale of a Lydian ex­

traction. For by this the first settlement of the new-comers was

of necessity placed on the coast of the lower sea; which is also as­

sumed by Lycophron: and thus grew up the opinion, which in

Livy passes for certainty, that Tuscany was the original home of

the Etruscans, whence they moved northward across the Apen­

nines and toward the Alps. I will not dissemble, that two Latin '

writers of Etruscan history, Flaccus and Crecina, unquestionably

related, that Tarchon came from the south of the mountains and

built the twelve northern cities, among which was Mantua 62 • But

as we find Tarchon here, that is, Tyrrhenus and the l\Ieonian fable,

354

m. 8.

55 Lycophron v.1350--61. Ilerodot. 1. !)4. Pliny n1. R Even Cluver,

though his opinions in other respects are very different from mine, considera

Tuscany as only a later conquest of the Etruscans.

56 Dionysius 1. 20. 21. Strabo v. p. 225. d.

57 Justin xx. 1. See above p. 24. n. 69.

58 Servius on .lEn. x. 1G7.

59 Servius on .lEn. x. 167.

60 1. 20.

61 In Servius on .lEn. x. 179 .

. v2 Schol. Ver. on .lEn. x. 198: comparPd with Servius.88

HISTORY OF ROME.

this is not worth more than the Patavine story of Antenor in Livy.

What the native annals of the Etruscans related of their origin, we

know only negatively; so far as that they said nothing of the Lydian

legend. Among a priestridden people like the Etruscans, the an­

nals must have been in the hnnds of the priests, as even at Rome

they were in those of the pontiffs; and since they considered

Etruria as the favourite land of the Gods 868 , it was natural they

should boast to have been its primitive inhabitants.

At no time did the Etruscans possess the whole of Cisalpine Gaul.

\Vest ward their territory extended only to the Ticinus, where in

those days Ligurians were dwelling, having been driven back by

the Gauls. The land south of the Po too, nearly down to Parma,

belonged to the Ligurians, or was uninhabitable from its swamps.

Romagna was in the hands of the U mbrians, who kept it till the

Gauls broke in. But in tl~e country between the Venetians and

the Gauls, some Etruscan towns maintained themselves until they

yielded to the Romans: Verona is termed by Pliny a Rretian,

Mantua by him and by Virgil a Tuscan city 64 : thus it was in Etrus­

can cities that the most genial and the most elaborate of the Roman

poets were born. Both these may be classed among the twelve

Tuscan towns to the north of the Apennines; which number deci­

dedly included Hatria, Melpum, and Felsina. The first of these,

once eminent for its commerce, gave its name to the upper sea.

Melpum, a very rich town in the Milanese, to the north of the Po,

was destroyed by the Boii, Senones, and fasubres, on the day that

Camillus took Veii, in the year 358 65 • Bononia, under the name

of Felsina, was once the capital of EtruriallO: this too seems to argue

that the nation did not spread from the south of the Apennines.

The twelve cities south 'of the Apennines, which were united in

a confederacy as sovereigns of their respective districts, frequently

as their number is mentioned, are no where enumerated by name;

and it is doubtful, which, among several of those that seem to have

a claim to this pre-eminence, must yield to the others.

· When Livy is relating how the allies volunteered to forward

363 Vegoja, among· the fragments of the Agrimensores, Goes. p. 258.

Scias mare ex rethere remotum. Cum autem Juppiter terram Hetruriw sibi

vindicavit, &c.

·

64 Plin. m. 23. Virg. lEn. x. 199-203. So likewise by Flaccus and

Cmcina. As to Verona, we have certainly to choose between this state,ment,

and that which il.ssigns it and Brixia to the Cenomani. See the notes on

Livy v. 35.

65 Pliny 111. 21.

6G Pliny 111. 20.HISTORY OF ROME.

89

Scipio's armament, he says the Etruscan states promised to sup­

port him, each according to its means 36 7; that is to say, they all

did so: but he afterward only mentions eight cities, and what each

supplied. These were Crere, Tarquinii, Populonia, Volateme,

Arretium, Perusia, Clusium, Rusellm: that any would withdraw is

incredible; but a write11 so hasty may easily have omitted some.

Of the towns unquestionably belonging to the number of the sove­

reign twelve, Veii and Vulsinii had been destroyed: and Vetulonium

had disappeared, a city never mentioned in the historical age of

Rome, and but once in the legends; in the story, which Livy has

entirely overlooked, of a protracted war carried on by Etruria

against Tarquinius Priscus and the Romans 63 • Populonia, being a

colony from Yolateme, was not one of the original twelve cities;

it can only have come into the room of an extinct one: now if our

topography be correct in putting Vetulonium near it, then the place

of Vetulonium, which appears from report to have been powerful

of yore, supposing that its destruction was one of those early events

in Etruria which are totally forgotten, may have been taken by its

neighbour, Populonia, as that of Himera was by Thermre. Thus

the number of the twelve Achrean cities, whenever it fell short,

was made up: and. thus we find at different epochs that there were

always thirty Latin cities, and seven Frisian provinces; the whole

number being preserved; but with some new ones amongst them,

to replace such as were extinct or lost.

'

A century earlier Corton~ is called by 'l,ivy one of the chief

places of Etruria 69 : this makes us the more surprised to miss her

when he enumerates those eight. Now she may have had just as

little to do' with the Etruscans as Falerii had, and he may have'

been led into an error by her situation. But his statement may

also be well founded, and yet the one in Herodotus, which goes

120 years further back, may be no less so: if we conceive that

meanwhile, having long stood solitary and abandoned, she had at

length fallen, and been forced to receir3 an Etruscan colony;

which then, as was probably the case with Populonia, stepped into th'e

place. of some lost city, to wit of Veii. T:·.e omission of her .nam~/

h~wever in Livy cannot be a~counted for by merely supposing that

367 xxvm. 45. Etrurim populi pro suis quisque facultatibus consulem

adjuturos polliciti.

68 Dionysius m. 51.

69 1x• .37. A Perusia et Cortona et Arretio, quw ferme capita Etruriw

populorum e~ tempestate erant.

1.-M90

HISTORY OF ROME.'

he, or the historian he followed, was guilty of carelessness. The

last years of the Etruscan war, the narrative of which was contained

in Livy's eleventh book, are covered with an obscurity perfectly

impervious. If Cortona was forced at that time to submit to Rome

before the general peace, she would obtain no share in the terms

by which such places as still held out were recognized as states,

though under t~e supremacy of Rome. In that case her conditioa

must have been very different from. that of. those eight cities:

perhaps she was admitted to the inferior franchise, as the Etruscan

town of Saturnia undoubtedly was about the same time.

\Vhatever conjecture we may form on this point, two places seem

to be stiU wanting to complete the number of twelve; Whether

it was made up by Capena, or by Cossa, or by Frosulre, is a

question that cann~t be answered with certainty : it may even have

been a people different from all three, one of which in our scanty

sources of information about Etruria we find nothing but the name,

as is the case with the Salpenates 370 , or of which the very name

never occurs.

Capena certainly in the year 550 could no longer be counted

,among the Etruscan towns; since the Capenates, that is, assuredly

not merely some individuals who had gone over to the Romans,

had already been enjoying the full rights of Roman citizens for 180

years*. Previously they had waged war by themselves against

Rome; and though I think I make out in an extremely disfigured

and obscure statement derived from Cato, that their city was a

colony from Veii, and their ancestors a gencration"bound to emi­

grate by the vow of a sacred spring 71 , they might still be an inde­

pendent state: I have before mentioned the analogous case of Popu­

lonia.

But while in this instance every thing is uncertain, there is on ~he

contrary a taler.able probability for excluding the pretensions of

Cossa. Pliny calls it Cossa of the Volcicntes7~: this combined

with the mention of a people bearing almost the same name, the

Volcentes, who .are spoken of along with the Lucanians and Hirpi­

nianst, is a substantial ground for conjecturing that the original

370 Livy v. 31.

* Livy v. 4. .

71 In Servius on .lEn. vn. 6!)7. Hos dicit Cato Veientum condidisse

auxilio regis Propertii, qui eos Capenam cum adolevissent miserat. There

must be a gap after Veientum: the words dropt may have been juventutem

Juisse, oppidumque.

72 Cossa Volcientium, III. 8. In the Fasti Triumphales the name is

spelled Vulcientes.

t Livy xxvn. 15.HISTORY OF ROME.

'IH

inhabitants of Cossa were not Etruscans, but had kept their ground

against the Etruscans. It is true, that at all events this city could

not be mentioned by Livy o_n occasion of Scipio's expedition; for it

had long sinee been transformed into a Latin colony*. The ruins of

its walls, which are far beyond the dimensions of a colony, belong

to an earlier age; but they prove nothing as to the nation that raised

them; for the style of their architecture is not confined to the Etrus­

can towns.

·The walls of Fcesulce, its theatre, and other ruins that have come

to light there, display a greatness not inferior to that of any other

Etruscan city: moreover it is probable that here as elsewhere Sylla

settled his colony in the centre of a great territory, and not by the

side of a dependent town.: indeed the only ground for its being

doubtful whether the parent city of Florence was one of the twelve,

seems to me, that we must then suppose Livy overlooked her:

which in this case strikes us as more especially impossible. From

her remote situation it is quite incredible that her fall should have

been prior to the general peace.

The territory belonging to each of the sovereign cities contained

several provincial towns, some of them dependent colonies, others

inhabited by subjects, the descendants of the old subjugated popu­

lation. Now it was because the Etruscan state was founded on

conquest, that the nobles had such a multitude of clients, like the

Thessalian Penestce 373 : whom they employed in task work, and with­

out whom their colossal works could hardly have been achieved.

At Rome the relation between the patron and client was the feudal

system in its best form: but even supposing that there was a similar

law of conscience among the Etruscans, binding the patron and

protecting the client, still it was on her free plebeian estate that the

greatness of Rome rested; and none such, it is evident, existed in

any Etruscan city. We do indeed find a slight allusion, which

might be considered as indic~ting that there was a popular assembly

at Tarquinii, distinct from the general body of the ruling houses7 4 •

And this trace certainly is not to be overlooked: but who will war­

rant, that the Ro~an writer followed by Dionysius in a narrative

where all the details must be a late embellishment, did not merely

transfer to Tarquinii the relation between the Roman curies and

•

373

74

&«l J/

Livy xxvn. 10.

Dionysius IX. 5. oi Juvd.'l.,;Td.Tol To~' mv~O'T•H 1.,.,,,_6µ001.

1

Dionysius v. 3 . .,.,;v"' <rd. ,,~v~ (so the Vatic. MS.) <tQ>r Tet.p•uYITD"•

i1uiv"'' i:irl <r~v ixxl\~O'l<tv ,,."f"-X,B,/,.92

HISTORY OF ROME.

commonalty ? This is far more probable than that he, knew and

paid regard to the c~stitution of Tarquinii 3 7 5 ,

It was not by popular assemblies, nor even by deliberations of a

numerous senate, but by meetings of the chiefs of the land, the

Magnates (principes Etrurire), that the general affairs -0f the nation

were decided upon7 6, We are not to imagine that the meetings at

the temple of Voltumna were of any other kind, or corresponded

with the institutions of nations r'.'ally free, such as the Latins and

Samnites. These Etrurian chie:'.'l were the persons from whom the

young Roman nobles received instruction in the sacred sciences of

divination77; a warlike sacerdotal caste, like the Chaldeans: these

were the Lucumones by whose ::ncestors the revel~tions of Tages

had been committed to writing78• If the conduct of the priests at

Tarquinii, in sacrificing capt'.-.es, dressing themselves up like infer­

nal spirits, and hurling snakes and burning torches at the enemy,

was common among them, it was natural the name of such fanatics

and jugglers should be transferred to lunatics and madmen 79 , They

were patricians, not kings.. Lucumo of Clusium, Lucumo who

brought succour to Romulus, Lucumo in fine who removed from

Tarquinii to Rome, were represented in the old traditions as only

leading men in their respective cities. The Cilnii, the Crecinre,

were Lucumones, as the Claudii and Valerii were patricians; they

were not less noble than the latter by birth, though as Romans ac­

counted only among the commonalty.

These ruling houses were exposed to those violent revolutions,

·by which an oligarchy is every where threatened, even from1the

midst of its own body, wherever it is not upheld by some powerful

protection from without, open or dissembled. About the middle

of the fifth century the house of the Cilnii were expelled from Ar­

retium by force of arms, as the factions of the noble houses in Tus­

cany banished each other by turns in the middle ages. · It was· also

in the spirit of these unhappy feuds, for the refugees to be restored

by the mediation of the public enemy, the Romans 80 : but when

375 The same applies, and still more strongly, to the mention of the plebs

at Arretium, in Livy x. 5.

76 Livy x. 16. Postulaverunt Samnites principum Etrurire conci!ium.

Q.uo coacto, &c. '

·

77 Cicero de Divin. 1. 41. de !egg. u. 9. Val. Maximus 1. 1, 2.

78 Censorinus 4, at the end.

79 Fest. Epit. v. Lucomones quidam homines ob insaniam dicti.

80 Livy x. 3. 5.HISTORY OF ROME.

93

these had exiled the whole house of the Tarquins, the rigour of

that sentence was not to be mitigated by any foreign intercession.

Even so late as in the second Punic war, we find the government

of the Etruscan cities vested exclusively in the senators, that is, in

the noblesse. In the south ofltaly, where the supreme power was

every where shared between the senate and the people, we know

what were the sentiments of both orders at that crisi:o :. in Etruria,

when a ferment began to show itself, it was entirely suppressed by

securing the submission of the senate at Arretium : the people are

quite out of the question 381 •

Now the want of a free and respectable commonalty,-which

the Etruscans, obstinately retaining and extending their old feudal

system, never allowed to grow up,-was the occasion of the re­

markable weakness displayed by the great Etruscan cities in their

wars with the Romans, where the victory was decided by the num­

ber and strength of the infantry. The same want led to the do­

minion of the serfs at Vulsinii; the story of which, as related by the

meagre writers of doubtful credit who are our historical sources for

the period' of this strange phenomenon, sounds no less incredible

than horrible*. 'Vere that account true, nothing worse can have

been exhibited either in the time of the Anabaptists or by a negro

i.nsurrect~on: but writers who could persuade themselves ·that the

citizP.ns of Vulsinii, in order to abandon themselves to voluptuous

indulgences without interruption, would commit their arms and the

government to their slaves, are not to be trusted implicitly as to the

horrors said to have ensued. · Some report about a very unusual

state of things in an Etruscan city had been fabulously exaggerated

by Greek writers 82 ; and their fictions were foolishly adopted by

the Roman: moreover it was necessary that those for whose exter­

mination Rome had taken up arms, should be represented as ex­

tremely criminal: and lastly the virulence of party spirit was not

without its -influence. The marvel disappears, as soon as we per.­

381 Livy xxvn. 24.

* Valer. Max. IX. 1•. Orosius IV. 5.

82 The De Mirabilibus,' inserted among the works of Aristotle, and writ­

ten about 01. 130, in which, as I have already observed, (p. 20.) a great deal

is borrowed from Timams, tells (p. 123, ed. Sylb.) of a Tyrrhenian city

O iv«pt<t., which submitted to be governed by its slaves: this must undoubtedly

mean Vulsinii, whether we suppose the author or, the transcribers distorted

the name. Had the supreme power fallen into the hands of domestic slaves

who had been emancipated,-arid a Greek could scarcely help regarding the

Italian clients as such; for the Thessalians did not write books-the matter

would ~ertainly belong to the class of marvellous stories. But it is historical.

and so requires a rational interpretation.94

HISTORY OF ROME.

ceive that the insurgents must have been serfs, not domestic slaves 383 •

They had been armed by the ruling class in the Roman war: their

aid enabled Vulsinii, when deserted· by mo~t of the other .towns, to

be the only one of all the Etruscan cities that carried on an honour­

able struggle year after year against Rome ; and in a fortun::.te mo­

ment she obtained respectable terms*. For the defenders of their

common home to become citizens, was a matter of course: for them

to extend their right of citizenship to a right of inheriting from and

intermarrying with the old citizens, and to a seat in thrl senate,

was no le,;s so: and the complaints against them do not in reality

amount to more, when stripped of the colouring originally laid on by

party hatred, and monstrously overcharged by silly declamation.

The serfs on becomipg masters may have been guilty of excesses:

but what credit for candour can we give to those, who called down

destruction on their native city, because they were unwilling to

allow their fellow-countrymen an equality of rights? who cho3e

rather that their country should cease to exist, than that they should

have to share the rule of it with others. The same national impo­

tence, the same compulsory precipitate liberation of the oppressed,

the same general ruin, were the Roman patricians bringing on,

without knowing in their folly what they were doing, when they

persisted in keeping the commonalty in servitude, and denying them

their equitable rights.

The part taken by the Etruscans in Sylla's war was the act of

the whole people: the Roman franchise was enjoyed by every free

man without distinction, however the old but now expiring consti­

tutions excluded or restricted him at home: and from this war we

may see how great Etruria would have become, if all the Etruscans

had had a country some centuries earlier.

The regal office, not hereditary iri a single heroic family as in

Greece, but elective for life like the Roman, continued at Veii until

383 Neither was it on their domestic slaves that the Argives conferred the

right of citizenship, after their city had been desolated py the disaster ·in the

Hebdoma (Herodot. VI. 83)': it was assuredly on the Gymnetes, the Argi\·e

serfs (see the Lexicographers quoted by Ruhnken on Timams v. ?rlVt<rT1io6,).

Aristotle instead of servants calls them ,,,.,pio1i.01: Polit. v. 3. 133. a. There

are numerous traces among the Greeks of an ancient separation between

those who afterward composed the demus, and the burghers, caused by the

bondage of the former in early times: for instance when the Samian demus,

after overpowering the aristocrats, deprived them of the right of intermarriage

(Thucyd. vm. 21); which must evidently have been an act of retaliation.

* Livy. x. 37.HISTORY OF ROME.

95

its fall 384 : at Arretium a king may have often been taken from the

house of the Cilnii 85 , A common high priest was appointed by the

twelve cities, and presided at the national festivals 86 : in enterprises

of the whole body the supreme command was committed to one of

the twelve kings, who received a lictor from each city•7, Even

Porsenna, highly as he is celebrated in the old poems, is nothing

in Roman history but king of Clusium. Yet the power of the

whole nation is set in action by him; and in earlier times a union

seems occasionally to have been effected by the power of a supreme

chief: thus all the twelve cities pay homage to Tarquin, considered

as a Lucumo; and the same is implie.d in the legends of Mezentius

and Cceles Vibenna. But from the time when Roman history as­

sumes the form of annals, the cities stand insulated; uniting only

casually and transiently. Yet loose as was the federal bond in

Etruria, it was by this that wars between the cities, of which we

do not find a single trace, were prevented.

Such being the nature of their association,, the islands of Ilva

and Corsica must have been under the dominion, not of the whole

nation, but only of the adjacent maritime cities 88 , Thus too the

Agyllceans had stood alone, when, about 220, while they were still

Tyrrhenians, they attacked the Phocceans of Alalia 89 , to dispute the

possession of Cyrnus. In order to punish the piracies of the mari­

time cities, the Syracusans overran both these islands in 2999°;

and the same must have been the cities to which Corsica is sai.d to

have paid tribute 91 • The Tuscan colony of Niccea in this island

384 Livy v. 1. Had he recollected that he had spoken of Lar Tolumnius

as king ot' Veii but 34 years before, he would not have looked upon this elec­

tion as a novelty.

'

85 Tyrrhena regum progenies.

87 Livy 1. 8. Dionysius m. 61.

86 Livy v. 1.

88 llva would belong to Populonia: and so the furnaces for its iron ore ,

must have lain within the territory of that city. The Greeks received the

story, that no ore could be smelted in that island (see Varro quoted by Servi us

on lEn. x. 174., Strabo v. p. 2"28. d.), as a marvel: even at this day it is never

~melted there; because there must be a transport of coal or of the ore, and the

latter is the more convenient: just as the copper ore is conveyed from Corn­

wall to Wales.

89 Herod. 1. 167. It is the Tyrrhenians, who stone their prisoners; the

Agyllreans, who are chastised by heaven: can Herodotus have supposed that

the sin of only one people was visited by the gods, and that others equally

guilty were left unpunished? That Agylla as then had not yet become Crere,

is clear from her consulting the Delphic oracle: the Etruscans would have

been content with their own aruspicy. The treasury of the Agyilreans at

Delphi must belong of necessity to the time when they were Pelasgians.

90 Diodorus xr. 88.

91 Diodorus v. 13.96

HISTORY OF ROME.

was perhaps an old one of the Tyrrhenians; and from th~m as­

suredly came the Greek name of Ilva, 1Eth11lia: the Tyrrhenians

mentioned among the ancient inhabitants of Sardinia, were unques­

tionably Pelasgians.

·

The same Tyrrhenians too, and not the Etruscans, must have

been the people by whose piracies the western seas were made im­

passsable for peaceful mariners, before the founding of the Greek

colonies in Sicily 8 99 , The same piracies assuredly were the prin­

cipal cause that compelled the Phocreans to employ galleys in their

voyages to Tartessus*. Subsequently all the corsairs of the lower

sea, even the Antiates, seem to have pr.ssed among the Greeks for

Tyrrhenians. But even if the Etruscans have had to ans.wer for

more than they were guilty of, still they fully .deserved to be stig­

matized and hated as pirates: Agylla (Crere) was alone exempted

from the general opprobium 93 • About 250 a station of armed ships

was established by Anaxilaus of Rhegium, near cape Scyllreum, to

blockade the straits against their corsairs 04 • As Etruria was then

at the summit of its greatness, the Tuscans had the command of

the whole Tyrrhenian sea, and sent out large fleets on naval expe­

ditions. In 278 the protection of Hiero king of Syracuse. was

invoked by Cuma against them 95 : by the great defeat that their

navy then sustained, their maritime power seems tq have been

broken, as Pindar prayed that it might .be 96 • For the naval arma­

ment of the Syracusans in the year 299, which conquered llva and

ravaged the Tuscan coast and Corsica, was not opposed by any

Tyrrhenian ships: it was by bribery that Etruria got rid of the

Greek fleet 0 7, Nor did.any naval force show itself in 368, when

Dionysius, under the pretext of punishing the corsairs, appeared

on the coast of Crere with only sixty triremes, and plundered

Pyrgi 98 • But in 448 a Tuscan squadron of eighteen ships came to

the assistance of Agathocles 99 ; probably corsairs. For about. that

time their piracies extended even into the lEgean, whe.re the naval

power of Athens had sunk, and that of Rhodes was.only beginning.

to rise. ·By destroying the Etruscan pirates' the Rhodians earned

the gratitude of the Greek nation 400 : this meritorious exploit seems

to have been achieved in the time between the death of Agathocles

Ephorus in Strabo VI. p.·267. c.

*

Strabo v. p. 220. c.

94

Diodorus XI. 51.

!j()

Diodorus VI. 88.

98

!l!l Diodorus xx. 61.

100 JEI. Aristides Rhod. 11. p. 312. a p. ;3~1'.). d. ed.

392

93

95

97

Herod. 1. 163.

Strabo v1. p. 257. a.

'f>yth. I. V. 137-141.

Diodorus xv. 14.

I

Cant.HISTORY OF ROME.

97

and the expedition of Pyrrhus: for from a prince like the former,

pirates were sure to find protection at the price of sharing their

booty; and their piracies assuredly were not tolerated by the

Romans, any more than those of the Antiates. Indeed it is proba­

ble that they were bound to deliver up all their ships of war by the

treaty; since it was from the Greek cities of southern Italy that

Rome obtained her few triremes and fifty-oar galleys at the beginning

of the first Punic wart.Di.

Treaties between the Etruscan maritime cities and Carthage were

subsisting so late as the time of Aristotle; whereby, as in that with

Rome preserved by Polybius, the right of commerce was regulated,

restricted, and secured. If they also contained stipulations about

giving assistance 2 , these can only have been valid against nations

not included in similar alliances; else Carthage could not have

continued for centuries on terms of friendship with Rome. Per­

haps however the assistance was confined to the allowing levies to

be raised: in the year 443 there were a thousand Etruscan mer­

cenaries8 in the Punic army in Sicily: so, when Pyrrhus was in

that island, levies were made in Italy for the Carthaginians; but

Rome did not send any auxiliaries.

Their fruitful land, rich in internal treasures, supplied abundant

materials for the commercial spirit of the Etruscans; and there

was a time when Tuscany must have been the staple of commerce

among the countries on the Mediterranean, the other nations of

Italy, and the remotest barbarian tribes; with which there was a

communication by a secured high-road across the Alps 4 •

The works of the Etruscans, the very ruins of which astonish

us, cannot, it is perfectly evident, have been executed in small

states without taskmasters and bondmen: but we must not overlook

the great superiority of the Etruscan rulers in this· point to the

Egyptian. , All their works that we are acquainted with, have a

great public object: they are not pyramids, obelisks, and temples,

multiplied without number: if the people suffered in its hard ser­

vice, it was not for idle purposes 5• So too and by means of like

401 Polybius 1. 20.

2 Aristotle Polit. m. 9.

3 Diodorus xix. 106.

4 As far as the Iberians. Pseud-Aristot. nep1 B<tuµ. ,;.,.w.,.µ. p. 102.

5 I grant, no expenditure was ever squandered so lavishly by the

Egyptians, as that which must have been laid out on the sepulchre of the

mythical hero Porsenna, if we might rely on the description of it taken by

Varro from native books. Pliny's expressions (xxxv1. 19. 3, 4.) show that no

trace of it can have been visible in his time: and yet so colossal an edifice

must have lasted undamaged down to this day: so that it can be nothing but

J,-N98

HISTORY OF RO.ME.

ta~kwork did Rome build, when governed by Etruscan kings: after

she became free, all great works were at a stand, until the republic

had grown rich by its victories and conquests: and when compared

with her oldest works and with those of the Etruscan cities, the

buildings of imperial R.ome make but an inconsiderable figure. The·

walls of Volterra and other capitals are constructed of huge blocks,

and, so far as they have not been studiously demolished by hostile

violence, still subsist in imperishable solidity. The thratre at Fie­

sole, and a colossal building near it, are on an equally grand scale:

yet this style is not peculiar to the Etruscans exclusively. It pre­

vails in all the monuments of Latium and ancient Rome, from the

cell of the temple at Gabii, to the wall round the forum of Augus­

tus: and the probability is rather that it was derived by the Etrus­

cans from the earlier inhabitants of Etruria.

The greatest part of Tuscany is mountainous: the rich valley

through which the Arno flows, was anciently a lake and swamp.

There was a lake from Segna to below Fiesole, and toward Prato:

the valley was blocked up by mount Gonfalina: this rock has been

cut through, and a passage opened for the stream toward Pisa 406 •

When the walls of Fiesole were built, this whole extent was still

filled with water; as is proved by the apertures for drains7, The

water covered the site where Florence now stands 8 : to refer that

city to the Etruscan age is a notion utterly untenable. But there

has also been a cut made near La Incisa, to redeem the rich fields of

the upper Val d' Arno from the water: unless it was into the Clanis

that the streams, which now form this part of the river, discharged

themselves of yore, and the purpose was to lessen the quantity

of water· in the Tiber. The swamps through which Hannibal

marched*, are those which liave now been drained on the right

bank of the lower Arno: in those days they may have served as a

barrier against the Gauls and Ligurians: perhaps they had been

drained in an earlier age, and afterward for that purpose abandoned

to the irruption of the waters. On the Po, in the neighbourhood of

Hadria, the art of turning off muddy rivers had been practised by

a dream. Indeed a building like the one described by Varro is absolutely im­

possible, and belongs to the Arabian Nights.

406 Of this even Giovanni Villani was aware: 1. 43.

7 The peasant who guides strangers there, has been led by his plain

srnse to find this out.

8 Hence the dreadful inundations the city experienced in the middle

~ges: the ground now baa been much raised.

* Livy xxu. 2.

•HISTORY OF ROME. ,

99

the Etruscans with success: which rivers, if kept shut up between

dams, are continually raising their beds, so that after the lapse of

centuries they stand on a level far above that of the adjoining coun­

try; and hence it becomes necessary to raise the dykes in the same

proportion, until the perseverance of man is at last exhausted in the

unequal contest with the powers of nature. Now one among the

useful arts carried on by the Tuscans in our days, is that of divert­

ing such waters into marshes, in order to draw them off again, when

the fertilizing deposit has been secreted: by this system the Chiana

has gradually been converted from barren pestilential swamp into

a rich plain. Where a delta however has begun to form, in the

Po, as in the Nile and the Mississippi, standing waters will collect

between the arms of the river, and its mouths are protruded into

the sea; and the further the mouths advance and diverge from each

other, the broader and deeper do the lakes and inland seas made

by these waters become. It is with reference to the overlaying of

swamps like the Chiana, a process which at the same time prevents

the bed of the river growing higher, that we must understand Pliny's

account of the stream of the Po being guided by the Tuscans into

the morasses of the Hadrians 40 9: similar works are needed there at

this day. The channels too by which the Po discharges itself,

were dug by the Tuscans or by their subjects; and their canals and

dams were the means by which its delta was constructed. An~­

ther method of gaining land in use amongst them, consisted in let­

ting off lakes that had formed in the craters of extinct volcanoes,

by tunnels cut through the sides of the hill. In the territory of

Perugia and in the Suburbicarian Tuscia there are traces of many

such lakes, which are completely dried up; the tunnels are un­

known and never cleared out, but still work.

The renown of the Etruscans, as a nation peculiarly excelling in

the arts, is so established, that I cannot expect a favourable reception

for the conjecture, that the works in bronze and clay and the bas­

reliefs attributed to them, were the produce, not of the ruling peo­

ple, but of their subject bondmen, and that the Etruscans properly

so called were no less alien from the .arts than the Romans. Yet I

believe that the striking difference we observe between the works

of Tarquinii and Arretium, is to be accounted for from the earlier

inhabitant& of northern and southern Tuscany being of different

origin. The works which are peculiar to V olaterrre were occa­

a

409 Pliny 111. 20. Omnia ea flumina fossasque primi-fecere Thusci;

egesto amnis impetu per transversum in Atrianorum paludes.100

IIISTORY OF ROME.

sioned by its stone-quarries. But the two former cities wrought

in clay: the produce of Arretium were red vases with very elegant

figures in relief, of a taste altogether peculiar 410 : those of Tarquinii

were painted, and in colour and drawing exactly like some dis­

covered near Corinth, and engraved in Dodwell*, while they dif­

fered from the Campanian in all the same particulars as the Greek.

These are only found in the district of Tarquinii; and, where they

occur, those of Arretium are never met with. Their striking re­

semblance to the Corinthian vases reminds us of the story of De­

maratus, and his companions, the potters Euchir and Eugrammus 11 ;

which is clearly meant to express that from Corinth did Tarquinii

derive her skill in handling clay, and the elegance of her drawing

on her vases. This implies the existence of a peculiar intercourse

with. Greece, such as was carried on by the ·neighbouring city of

Agylla.

The Etruscan statues in the earliest ages were of clay; like the

four-horsed chariot on the Capitoline temple, said to have been set

up at the time of its dedication. But the statues belonging to the

first ages of Rome, several of which were long preserved, were

probably uniformly of bronze 19 : and this is the material of all the

masterpieces that shed lustre on Etruscan art.

To deny that this art owed its refinement to the Greeks, is ex­

tremely idle. Its original rudeness is proved by works of a very

early date; and to the Greeks alone was that idea revealed, by

which the human body is fashioned into life and beauty. It was

from their genius that the spark proceeded, by which susceptible

natures have been kindled in every susceptible people. Hence the

subjects of the most beautiful Etruscan works of art often belong

to Greek mythology : but, having once been enlightened, the Tus­

cans were also able to treat their own conceptions in the spirit of

Greeks. One thing that strikes us, as though it were a national

characteristic, is that their drawing is often extremely correct, with­

out any regard to grace: indeed the style is exactly like that of the

Tuscan painters who lived at the revival of art in the middle agesis.

410 Works or this kind were still executed in the time or Augustus, when

the art of making the Cam,Panian vases was utterly lost.

* Tour through Greece n. 196.

11 Fictores. Pliny xxxv. 43.

12 The marble works in the oldest style, whether statues or bas-reliefs,

which are called Etruscan, are probably all Greek: for the quarry at Luna

was not worked till very late. So long as bronze was not too dear, casting

must have been preferred to the far more difficult process or sculpture.

13 On this point Micali's work is extremely valuable. The reader may

look in it at the engravings of Etruscan bas-reliefs, particularly at pl. 28, forHISTORY OF ROME.

101

Even supposing the artist who executed the she-wolf of the Capi­

tol, was not an Etruscan, still in this work, which has no coun­

terpart among those of the Greeks, we clearly see what Etruscan

art must have been about the middle of the fifth century. And this

must probably have been the age of their finest gems: every thing

that is tamer, more delicate, and softer, belongs to a later, in part

to a much later period. In the two centuries between the crisis

when the relation of Etruria to Rome was decided, and 'the time of

Sylla, the arts must have been very flourishing: the people were liv­

ing in profound peace and great wealth ; and the prosperity of the

country was only disturbed by two storms which passed rapidly

over ; in one campaign of the Cisalpine, and in the second of Han­

nibal's war.

Tuscan art had no national herioc story to work on: like that of

other countries, it sought for its subjects in the mythology of the

Greeks: so that the stories of Thebes and Ilium must have been

familiar to the people. That the circulation of Greek poems had

spread even into Etruria, is not to be questioned: the West and

Carthage itself were open to Greek literature ; Inycum, that ob­

scure town of the Sicanians, was not the only place where the

Greek sophists made money• 1•; and in earlier times a rhapsodist

must surely have been still more welcome. "When even the Romans

were reading Greek, the study would certainly be yet more preva­

lent amid the quiet of Etruria. But it was not in a foreign lan­

guage alone that the Greek stories were listened to : the works of

art are not unfrequently inscribed with the names of the heroes,

altered however to suit the forms of the Etruscan language; and

this is an unequivocal proof that they lived in the speech of the na­

tion, and in poems in the native tongue. Varro too mentions some

Tuscan tragedies by one Volnius, who, from his way of speaking

of him, seems to have lived not long before 15 : these tragedies might

have been an exercise of ingenuity with which the nation had no

concern : but on the other hand we have evidence in the theatre at

Fresulre that Greek dramas, either originals or translations, were

performed there, as they were in Latium at Tusculum and Bovillre :

the countenances. The idea of pl. 23, which is unlike any thing Greek, and

its execution, are exceedingly fine: the genius of death in pl. 44 is a perfect

cherub.

414. Plato Hipp. p. 282. c.

15 Varro de l. L. 1v. 9. p. 17. Ut 'volnius dicebat qui tragredias Tuscas

scripsit. Volnius is the reading of the Florentine MS. Volumnius, as the

editions have it, is one of the corruptions introduced by Pomponi us Lretus.102

HISTORY OF ROME.

were it not so, the construction of such a building in the Greek

form would be unaccountable. Nor can it be doubted that this

theatre was built before the time of Sylla: its size and magnificence

are far beyond the scale of a Roman military colony: besides how

could such a colony have wished for any thing but an amphithea­

tre? There seems moreover to be very good ground for the Flo­

rentine tradition, that Florence was built by Sylla's colony, and

that it did not settle on the hill. However in :µo Etruscan inscrip­

tion do we find any thing bearing the slightest resemblance to the

rhythms of the Greeks, which could not have escaped us even in

a language totally unintelligible ; nor indeed any thing bearing the

least semblance of verse•. The town from which the Fescennine

musical dialogue took its name, belonged to the Faliscans, not to

.

the Etruscans 416 •

It was from Etruria that the music of the Romans was derived:

their stage-singers too came from thence. Like the minstrel in the

middle ages, the Etruscan !tister danced and sang to instrumental

music, in which the time served as an equivalent for verse, instead

of any regular measure. Stringed instruments are to be met with

here and there on the monuments; but the proper native instrument

· was the flute.

The Etruscan characters were formed, like the Greek, from the

same alphabet, among the various ones of different origin found in

Asia, whence all the modes of writing used in Europe are derived.

That the Etruscans received it immediately from the Phenicians,

would not be proved by their custom of proceeding from right to

left: but their omitting the short vowels, and their practice of noting

doubled consonants by a single letter, as is done in all the Aramaic

systems of writing, are purely Punic: so is the want of the vowel

0 ; though nothing can be determined from this as to the sound,

which the Semitic languages have.

But the Phenicians designated numbers by letters : not so the

Etruscans. The numerals we call Roman, are Etruscan; and they

occur frequently on their monuments: they are the remnants of a

hieroglyphical art of writing, which was in use before the age of

the alphabetical, and, like the numerals of the Aztecans, represent

some object that was associated with a particular number. They

are indigenous, and belong to the time when the West was sub­

sisting with all its original peculiarities, before it experienced any·

416 Virgil JEn. vu. 695.HISTORY OF ROME.

103

influence from Asia; to the time when the Turdetanians were form­

ing their alphabet ·and their literature 41 7,

The profane sciences of Etruria likewise, her medicine, physics

and astronomy, were not borrowed either from the Greeks or the

Carthaginians : perhaps they were brought by the nation from the

North, the seat of her Gods 18 • Here we meet with the same extra­

ordinary phenomenon, which strikes us with astonishment in the

new world, an extremely accurate method of determining time; and

this method, so far as regards the cyclical year, proceeded on the

very principles observed by the framers of the ol<l Mexican com­

putation: portions of time were measured, without regard to the

phenomena of the moon, out of very long periods determined with

accuracy on astronomical grounds: among the Etruscans however

there was also a civil lunar year, the cyclical serving only as a cor­

rection for it.'

Their history, like that of the Bramins and Chaldeans, was in­

serted in an astronomico-theological outline, which included the

whole course of time, and taught, that the human race of the pre­

sent creation has eight secular days assigned to it; each day to a

fresh people ; and that during the continuance of one people pro­

phecy is to be in honour, during that of another in abasement 1 9,

The Etruscan week was of eight days; and as it is highly probable

that each secular day, like that of the Etruscans themselves 90 , con­

tained ten secles or 1100 years, 8800 years made a secular week.

The next unit immediately above the week Wa3 the year, of 38

weeks or 304 days. Thus a secular year would number 334,400

years ; and it may be co.njecture<l that this was the period assumed

for the duration of the universe; unless they went o:i to secular

secles. According to their religion, a limit and end was fixed to

,the life even of the highest gods, 91 as in the theology of the Scan­

dinavians: such a secular year then was probably the term assigned

to the life of the gods, as the natural secle was to the life of man,

the secular day to that of nations, the secular week to that of one

human race. · They taught, as we know historically, that the expi­

ration of each secular day was announced by wonders and signs,

417 Strabo m. p. 139. c. Not however that this literature was six thou­

sand years old. Instead of rop.ou' ip.p.ITpou' i~a1<T;t,11'.fair i'l"rn, whlch would

not even be Greek, we must read r. i. i.

Beside these they had histo

ries and poems.

18 Festus v. sinistrm aves.

20 Varro in Censorinus, 17.

19 Plutarch Sylla c. 7.

21 Varro in Arnobius quoted by Micali n. p. 46.

i,,.,.,,.104

HISTORY OF ROME.

intelligible to them 4 ~ 9 : so was the close of every natural sec le, ten

of which, of unequal length, made up a great day: the signs by

which each of these epochs had been announced, were recorded in

their history. This, Varro says 23 , was written in the eighth secle

of the nation. A natural secle was. measured by the duration of

man's longest life: the first secle of a state ended with the death of

the longest liver among all the persons born on the day it was

founded; the second lasted until none was left of all who were

living at the close of the first; and so forth. The first seven secles

-0f the Etruscans amounted to 781 years: but the sum total of the

years in the ten variable secles was equal to that in the ten fixed,

each of which contained llO.

In the year of the city 666 it was announced by the aruspexes

that the secular day of the Etruscan people was drawing to a close 94 :

and if we assume, what must surely be granted, that in doing this

they acted in consonance with their writings, then the Etruscan

computation of time began 434 years before Rome, the eighth secle

in the year 347, and the annals mentioned by Varro were written

about the end of the fourth century of the.city. The epoch 666

answers with singular exactness to that at which the nation actually

ceased to exist: it had been incorporated by the. Romans a short

time before, and was almost exterminated by Sylla eight years

after.

A free expansion of the intellect in poetry and science could

never take place among a people whose pride and study lay in divi­

nation and ritual worship. It was from them that the Romans had

borrowed the most important part of that science which makes use

of signs in conjecturing the will of the gods: they alone could see

through the meaning of terrific prodigies, and knew how to appease

the wrath of the celestial powers. The pure and infallible source

of this learning was supposed to be the national property of the

Etruscans, ever since the time when it was taught them by Tages;

a wise dwarf, who rose out of the ground, such as occurs in the

ancient fables of the Germans.

By the East the decrees of desfiny were read in the stars, by

Etruria and Greece in the entrails of victims: in expounding the

422 Plutarch Sylla c. 7. It wa,s in this sense that the comet which ap­

·peared after the death of Julius Cresar was regarded by the aruspex Volcatius

as the sign that announced the end of the ninth secle (Servi us on Eel. ix. 47.

£ited by Voss on Eel. 1v. 5.); although this referred to Rome, not to Etruria.

23 In Censorinus, 17.

24 Plutarch Sylla c. 7.HISTORY OF IW;\IE.

105

flight of Lirds, if the Etruscans did not ·altogether neglect it, the

Sabellians were greater masters. Ilut the peculiar secret of the

Etruscans was the interpretation of lightning: this, and all the

branches of their aruspicy, were taught in their sacerdotal schools'" 5 :

they were also laid down however in the sacred books wherein

the oral instructions of Tages \vere recorded. '

In the east and in Italy the soothsayer was a tyrant, and the

abettor of the ruling powers; he alway3 tried to keep the people in

chains. Of this yoke the stirring spirit of the Greeks soon eased

itself; although they were willing to believe that the soul is pos­

sessed. of secret faculties by which it is often enabled to· catch a

glimpse of the future in its forebodings and dreams. Ily ·the nobler

hero of the Iliad omens are treated with contempt, at the call to

defend his country: at Rome the yoke of a degrading superstition,

which was abused as an instrument of tyranny by the aristocracy,

was not broken, until infidelity was introduced by the Calabrian

Greek, Ennius, and became naturalized as morals declined. Such

is the concatenation, of human affairs, that, as the best of things

have something bad growing to them and causing their inward

decay, the extirpation of this incidental evil may afford us some

consolation, when the ruins of what once was excellent are swept

away, with all their pleasing recollections and illusions: there is no

ill without some good at its side.

The contents of the ritual books were of a different kind: they

resembled the Mosaical in prescribing the laws of the state as the

law of the gods; they ordained the course to be observed in found­

ing and building a city, in establishing and consecrating such edi­

fices and places as were to be sacred and inviolable ; they settled

the constitution of the curies, tribes, and centuries 26 , and generally

all regulations relative to war and peace 2 7, . The same too were the

laws originally obeyed by the Romans; who relaxed their' ties,

without casting them aside; and whose anxiety never to abolish

them, but to leave the appearance subsisting when the reality had

lost its meaning, was a result of their original sanctity. Those

books must undoubtedly have been the fundamental text for the

425 See above, n. 377.

26 Such is the expression of Festus: whatever that writer, who is often

mistaken about ancient customs, may have meant by it, these books can only

have related to the primitive constitution, in which the centuries were com­

posed of the equestrian houses. This constitution could not be changed:. that

of Servius Tullius might, like any other, and was so.

27 Festus v. rituales.

1.-01OG

HlSTOllY OF ROME.

main part of tl1e pontificial law: the institutions however in which

the preliminary step was to draw the limits of a temple for augu­

ries, such as the law for measuring land and for marking out a

camp, were more probably grounded on the religious books of the

Sabin es.

In the account that remains of the Roman ritual books, they are

expressly called Etruscan: but as in the Roman writings which we

possess, no distinction is ever made between Tuscan and Etruscan,

it is by no means certain that those books were derived from the

same people by whom the doctrines of Tages were preserved.

The same. uncertainty hangs over the Capitoline temple, which is

said to bear marks of the Etruscans in the union of its three deities 1

as well as in its architecture. Indisputably however it was in the

language and literature of the Etruscans that Roman youths of rank

were instructed so late as about the middle of the fifth century, as

they were subsequeptly in those of the Greeks 428 : this veneration

shifted round afterward into contempt for the old-fashioned lore,

and forgetfulness of its existence. Undoubtedly too it was from

the genuine Etruscans that the badges of the highest magistracy

were adopted by the Roman kings.

Tuscany produces all the necessaries of life in abundance, and

the Etruscans were not unwilling to enjoy what nature gave them:

the northern custom of sitting down twice a day to well-loaded

boards, was matter of surprise and scandal to the Greeks, whose

bodies were satisfied with very little nourishment. ··we have a

· description by Posidonius of the way of living in Etruria, such as

it was before Sylla's war~ from the Asiatic luxury of embroidered

carpets, silver plate, and trains of beautiful slaves richly clad 29 , we

may see how the country had thrh·en under the relations in which

r~it stood to Rome: within a few years all this wealth became the

booty of soldiers, and the towns with their territories were par­

celled out among the legions.

As to what Theopompus says concerning the shamele3s pro­

fligacy of the Etruscans,* we may join the modern Italians in

altogether rejecting it: his credulity and his fondness for telling

scandalous stories were· well known to the ancients. Even if his

statement could be partially supported by the fact, that there were

some powerful lords, who, secure of impunity, had abandoned

themselves to horrible licentiousness, such as became the fashion at

· 428 Livy 1x. 36.

29 Diodorus v. 40.· Athenreus 1v'. 153. d.

Athenreus x11. p. 517.lIISTORY OF HOl\1E.

107

Rome under the emperors, still. the body of the nation cannot have

been liable to the charge. But that associations for orgies such as

Theopompus describes-such as have been found in the Society

islands-should have existed even among the most cormpt of the

nobles, is the more improbable, since, as has been observed by

others, no licentious representations are to be found on any Etrus­

can works of art.

Etruria was standing at the summit of its greatness about the end

of the third century of Rome. In the next she lost the whole coun­

try beyond the Apennines, with Veii, and Capena: a great part of

th~ fifth century was passed in an irresolute struggle, never carried on

with warlike perseverance by any state except Vulsinii, against the

prevailing star of Rome. After this the nation enjoyed two centu­

ries of inglorious repose: even during. the second Punic war her

prosperity was so far restored, that Arretium by itself was able to

support Scipio's African expedition with arms and corn for a

whole army, and with pay for the crew of a fleet: and in this state

of ease they felt no desire for the Roman franchise, by which such

as shared it were bound to the performance of hard duties. When

they had received it however, they displayed no less fortitude tlian

the Marsians and Samni.tes in maintaining its full honour: but they

were hardly treated by fortune; and her injustice was. increased by

her consigning to oblivion the story of their heroic resistance to

Sylla.THE Ul\1BRIANS.

AccoRDING to the practice of multiplying the forms of the Italian

national names, the Umbri must also have been called Umbrici:

this was pronounced Ombrici by the Greeks, who made out that it

contained an allusion to their great antiquity. The name was to

indicate that they had existed even before those rain-floods, by

which in many countries, as the Greek sages agreed with others

in believing, earlier ra!!es of men had been destroyed. This ety­

mological trifling, it is probable, was never meant seriously: it is

certain however that the Umbrians were a great nation, before the

time of the Etruscans, in that of the Sicelians, and that they have

a right to be called a most ancient and. genuine people of Italy 430•

Their city, Ameria, was built according to Cato 31 964 years before

the war with Perseus, or 381 before Rome. It is certain too that

the country they inhabited of old w.as very extensive; probably not

only what retained the name of Umbria, but also, as has been ob­

served already*, the south of Etruria; and, according to distinct·

Roman traditions, the district occupied by the Sabines between the

Apennines and the Tiber. On the north-east slope of the Apen·

nines toward the upper sea and the Po, they are said to have spread

as conquerors, to have expelled the Liburnians as well as the Sicu­

lians from the coast, and to have maintained an obstinate contest

with the Etruscans for the territory on the lower Po.

In history the Umbrians are found restricted to the left bank of

the Tiber; with some scattered towns on the coast and near the

Po, preserved to them partly, as Ravenna was, by her lagoons,

partly by paying tribute to the Gauls. The Ombrica of the

430 Antiquissima gens ltaliw: as the .iEquians too are called; by way of

contrast to the Etruscans who had immigrated, to the Latins who were a

mixed race, to the Samnites and Lucanians who owed their origin to emigra­

tion and conquest, and were likewise mixed races, and so on.

31 Pliny m. 19.

* Above p. 86.HISTORY OF ROME.

109

Greeks, bordering on the obscure regions at the top of the Adriatic,

is of a large and indefinite extent. In Herodotus it reaches to the

foot of the Alps: for it is from the country above the Ombricans.

that the rivers Carpis and Alpis, one of which may very probably

be the Inn, flow into the Ister4 3 ~. Scylax, who contracts its northern

boundary, reckons Picenum a part of it33 : in the earlier geography

of the poets it undoubtedly extended as far as mount Garganus or

Drion. For the Diomedian islands lie to the west of, that promon­

tory; and certainly Scylax had some poet before him, when he as­

cribed the worship of Tydides, which the later Greeks fancied

they found among the Daunians, to the Ombricans; although, ac­

cording to the correct chorography of his time, he assigns the coast

between the Umbrians and the Apulians to the Sabellians.

For us the name of the U mbrians is a great one that has died

away. At the time when their coast was occupied by a detach­

ment of the Gauls, the loss of these rich countries seems to have

been attended with that of their independence. Without any de­

fence toward the north, on which side Tuscany is sheltered by the

Apehnines, Umbria within its contracted limits is in all probability

one of those adjacent countries which the Gauls are said to have

reduced under their domini0~ 34 : it WaS their military road, SO long

as they made expeditions into Latium. In the first war of the

Umbrian tribes with the Romans they were subdued in a single

battle : and, though afterward hurried or compelled to take part in

the contests of more powerful nations against Rome, they did not

hold out long.

The Umbrian nation consisted of separate races 85 , some of which

dwelt in towns 86, others in rural cantons 8 7. The Camertes em­

braced the friendship of the Romans; before the latter crossed the

U mbrian borders, and they preserved it: the Sarsinates are even

mentioned as a distinct people by Polybius along with the Um­

brians38; and fighting singly against Rome they supplied her with

occasion for two triumphs.

In order to treat with the Umbrians, the Romans in the fifth

century employed an envoy acquainted with the Etruscan tongue 8 o:

yet on the Iguvine tables the language which passes, and probably

with good reason, for Umbrian, is totally different from the Etrus­

can. To us it is unintelligible, although it contains a number of

432

34

36

38

1v. 49.

33 p. 6. For he places Ancona in Ombrica.

Polybius u. 18.

35 Livy xxvm. 45. Umbrire populi.

Livy 1x. 41. Plaga. 37 Livy xxx1. 2. Tribus.

Polybius n. 24.

39 Livy IX. 36.110

HISTORY OF ROME.

words which, if not Latin, seem cognate to Latin; and if the con­

jecture I shall communicate further on as to the stock of the Um­

brians is well founded, it could not fail to contain such. The

purity with which the Sarsinate poet, Plautus, wrote Latin seems

also to suggest that the language of his countrymen, like the Oscan

spoken by Nrevius, bore an affinity to the Latin.

The characters on the coins are Etruscan; on the Iguvine tables

Latin.IAPYGIA.

lAPYGIA embraced the south-east of Italy; according to the more

ancient writers, from Metapontum, or, including that city, from the

Siris 440, to mount Garganus, or, as the Greeks call it, mount Drion;

immediately beyond which it is probable that Ombrica was placed

by their early geographers. By Polybius the Iapygian and l\Ies­

sapian troops are still classed under one head. That such an ex­

tent was ascribed to Apulia by the Romans, we do not find: else it

certainly seems evident that Iapyx and Apulus are the same name 4 J.

This extensive country is said by the Greeks to have been in­

habited by three distinct tribes, the Messapians, the Peucetians,

and the Daunians: the first on' the peninsula to the east of Taren­

tum; the Peucetians to the north of them, along the coast from

Brundusium to Barium; and, between· this and, mount Garganus,

the Daunians. The first about the beginning of the fourth century

were at enmity with the Tarentines, while the two latter tribes

were their allies. The Messapians however are divided, at least

by Strabo, into two tribes, the Sallentines and the Calabrians: the

former he places in Leuternia, on the eastern coast of the Taren­

tine gulf; the Calabrians to the north of the lapygian promontory,

on the Adriatic 49 • In the Fasti hen the Messapians and Sallen­

tines are spoken of as distinct tribes, over both of which a triumph

440 Scylax p. 5.

41 The Latin termination icus is contracted into ix in Oscan: thus

.Rpicus, the same with .Rpulus, becomes .Rpix. No good Roman writer will

ever say Iapygia instead of .!Jpulia: nor any good Greek writer the reverse.

Diodorus, who is no less careless in his use of words than in other respects,

speaks of 'A'll"W"A.U., XIX. IO, in relating the history of Rome for that year,

where he may have had Fabius before him: but it is remarkable that he should

commit the same offence against the Greek .usage in the history of the

younger Dionysius, xv1. 5. Are we justifiable in supposing that Timreus

wrote so?

42 VI. P· 277. d. 281. c. d.112

HISTORY OF ROME.

was celebrated in the year 487 : and the simplest way of explaining

this is to suppose. that, though the former name was common to

the whole nation, it is here used for the Calabrians; as that of Au·

sonians came to be confined to a single tribe, a part of the whole

people. An ancient and important statement, which, though ex­

tremely corrupt and disjointed, has been most satisfactorily re­

stored443, informs us that there were five tongues in Iapygia: two

of the tribes that spoke them are clear, the Opicans or Apulians,

and the Peucetians: two may be recognized after an easy emenda­

tion, the Leuternians and Brentesines, corresponding to Strabo's

Sallentines and Calabrians: the name of the people to whom the

fifth tongue is attributed, the Cramonians, may perhaps be written

correctly, and all trace of them may have perished: at all events

Scylax,. who extends Iapygia so far to the southwest, seems to

have meant a people between Heraclea and Tarentum, a remnant

of the Chonian Oenotrians.

The Messapians were supposed very generally, singular as the

opinion sounds, to have been Cretans. In the earlier tradition

their ancestors were Eteocretans, cast on this shore in the time of

Minos, after the unfortunate expedition to Sicania: whether they

had sailed thither with their king 44 ; or, as another tradition related,

he had gone alone in quest of D<edalus and had perished, and they

had set out in the vain intention of avenging his death on Coca­

lus45: according to other legends, they had been making an una­

vailing search after Glaucus48 : or they were a band composed of

Cretans and the offspring of the Athenian youths del,ivered up as an

expiatory offering to Minos•7: or lastly, in a story which perhaps

was confined to the Alexandrian poets, they were the adherents of

Illomeneus, led by him, and joined by some Locrians and Illyrians•s.

The last account makes express mention of the Sallentines : and to

443 By James Gronovius, who seldom made so successful a conjecture.

It has been shown above, note 293, that in Scylax, p. 5, ::i<1.uv'i'1'et1 must be

read instead of A<1.uv'i'l"ett. But the sentence £v J'i 'l"Oo'l""'-Il•u"tTli'i, must also

be removed from the place it has been thrust into, wh~re it destroys the sense

of the passage by separating J'iilx.on" .:,,.a ..-oii Tupp. ,,.,1>... 1 . .,.. AJ'p. from

the mention of the Samnites; and it must be inserted in the former section

about Iapygia, after > vu"T"''• and before iv J'f .,.~ 'Iet?T. Still /'I'.'"""""' is a

very strange word here, and yet more so the synonym ,,..,.6,,_,,,..,,,.

44 Strabo VI. p. 279. a. 282. b.

45 Herodot. vn. 170.

46 Athenreus xn. p. 522. f.

47 . Strabo vi. p. 282. b. Plutarch qurest. Grrec. 35, and Theseus c. 16.

48 Varro fragm. I. m. Antiq. rer. hum. p. 205: and Festus v. Salentini,

who has evidently copied from Varro. Compare lEn. 111. 400.HISTORY: OF ROME.

ll3

these, excluding the Calabrians and their capital Brundusium, do I

also refer the statement of Herodotus, that Hyria was the original

city of the Messapians, from which their other settlements pro­

ceeded. Varro says of the Salentines, that the nation was divided

into three parts and twelve cities 449 : parts here must mean tribes 50•

His etymology for the name of the Sallentines is after his fashion

and ridiculous·: the word clearly comes from a town Sallentum,

which in Greek must have been called Sallas or Sallus: and I have

· no doubt that it existed in ancient times; but it is no less certain

than singular, that no mention is any where made of it 51 • From

these Messapians were the Bottireans on the gulf of Thermre said

to have derived their origin: Strabo's opinion seems to be, that

Brundusium too had once been inhabited by Cretans, like the Sal­

lentines, and that this portion had migrated from thence to l\1ace­

donia59, This migration is one of those which nre totally incredible,

and which are only meant to indicate the conviction of a national

affinity: that the Calabrians however were foreign invaders, by

whom the Sallentines were expelled from Brundusium, we may·

easily believe.

·

So likewise there may be ground for the tradition, that the ear­

lier inhabitants of Tarentum, on being overpowered by Phalanthus

and his Laconians, had retired to Brundusiurn 58• It was from them

that what Tarentum acquired was wrested. After two centuries

and a half, when the Greek city had already grown very powerful,

in 279, it attempted to destroy the towns of the Messapians, and to

reduce the people to servitude. This was the war in which Car­

bina was taken, and such revolting atrocities perpetrated there by

the conquerors 54 : the vengeance of heaven by which so , many

houses in Tarentum are said to have been visited, was that fearful

overthrow whereby its power was ro; a long time broken; ,the most

449' Strabo too reckons thirteen cities in Iapygia, including Brundusium

in the number (v1. p. 281. a.): instead of 7rAnu Tip«-nH I read :irAnV TlfO'iinon

Tarentum cannot be right, since he is writing of the country which lies be­

·

.

yond it: ~ II ;;;;, 'TllfP 'I«7rUj-0>V :>c,,;,p« '" 'T. A,

50 As the Greeks use tBvor instead of <fp«-'Tpl«-, and indeed expressly

:iril.A«I (at Athens), eliir«.'Tpiltt.1 1

instead of 'fU;\.H: Pollux vm. 111. 'tpl«- ;,

j-uop.6po1, l'•p.1oupj-ol. Thus gens triplex at Mantua. Virg. lEn. x. 202.

51 Stephanus indeed has ~«-AAtnl«.: but probably the only ground for

this mention of the place was that some one formerly made the same guess as

I have done.

52 Strabo vi. p. 282. b.

53 Justin 111. 4.

54 Athenoous xn. p. 522. e. f.

;s,.

1.-P114

HISTORY OF ROME.

horrible carnage that befel any Grecian army down to that day 455•

It sounds incredible indeed, that the conquerors, in following at the

heels of the flying Rhegians who had fought against them as aux­

iliaries of the Tarentines, should ·have forced their way into Rhe­

gium: but the Messapians were evidently raised on that day from

extreme distress to a greatness they had never expected. Their

dominion must now have extended far into Oenotria; since they

contended with Tarentum for the possession of the Siritis, which

lies so far to the west of it: this must have been after the year 319,

if the mention of Heraclea is to be taken litera,lly*. The Peuce­

tians and Daunians were leagued with the Tarentines against them:

so that it was by the Messapians that the neighbouring tribes were

then filled with jealousy and alarm. By this war their power must

have been destroyed again: but they still continued long to be the

enemies of the Tarentines: which accounts for a prince of the Mes­

sapians being on friendly terms with the Athenians even before the

expedition to Sicily 5a. Thenceforward the Greek city continued

to rise, and the Messapians were no longer her rivals : indeed after

the middle of the fifth century they seem to have put themselves

under her protection by an alliance recognizing their inferiority.

Peucetius is called by the earliest Greek genealogers a brother

of Oenotrus, and his people a colony led· by him out of Arca­

dia57: that is, they adopted the form of a national pedigree, to repre­

sent the Peucetians as one of those old Pelasgian tribes, the pos­

terity of the first men, Pelasgus and Aizeus, which were said to

have issued from Arcadia. According to Pliny 58 the Pcediculians­

such was the Italian name of the Peucetians59-were descended

from nine Illyrian couples.

In.. a genealogy by the Pergamene poet Nicander 60 , as to which

however we cannot know whether he did not derive it from an ear­

lier and lost catalogue of the Lycaonids, the two brothers of Peu­

cetius, lapyx and Daunus, accompany him across the Ionian sea

with an army, chiefly of Illyrians 61 , Another story, which like

every thing of the same ki1id is from :i Greek source, brings Daunus

out of lllyria 6 ". Now if these views are borrowed from ancient

455 Herodotus V;ll. 170. Diodorus XI. 52.

* S~rabo v1..p; 281. a.

56 Thucydides vu. 33.

57 See p. 20, n. 54.

58 m. 16.

' 59 The simpler forms, Predi and Predici, do not occur in our books.

60 Who, I remark by the way, belongs to the first half of the sixth ce n­

tury of the city, not to the beginning of the next.

61 Antoninus Liberalis fab. 31.

62 Fest. Epit. v. Daunia.HISTORY OF ROME.

115

poets and traditions, it is more than probable that they did not

speak of Illyrians, but of Liburnians; who, as has been observed,

inhabited Picenum on the Italian coast, and Corcyra on the oppo­

site side*.

Further traces of the early settlers in the south-east of Italy are

afforded. by the names, Argyrippa and Sipontum: Argos, like La­

rissa, is undoubtedly a Pelasgic name. The legend of Diomedes

having landed there, was current at Arpi, as is proved beyond a

doubt by its coins: and although here again no historical inference

is to be drawn from such a legend, still in this as in all other cases

it is probable, that the places reported to have been Argive settle­

ments founded at the time of the return from Troy, were of Pelas­

gic or1gm. The kingdom of Diomedes is said to have r<iached to

Maluentum, where the head of the Calydonian boar was still shown

in the days of Procopinst; and Maluentum derived its name from

Greeks or Pelasgians 463 • No Hellenic people, so far as we know,

approached nearer to the Pelasgians than the .iEtolians did: and

the relics of the boar, the mention of Diomedes as an .iEtolian

prince 6-', are merely signs of an ..Etolian colony.

But we can by no means conclude from this, that the Opicans,

who are said to have preceded the Sabellians as masters of the

country about Beventum, were these Pelasgians : they were only

the only conquerors. The Daunians however, like Tyrrhenians

and Oenotrians, I account among the Pelasgians : it is a significant

trace in national genealogy to find that the father of Turnus was

called Daunus: their name answers to that of Danaans, and thus

Ardea is said to have been founded by Danaet. This..,.however

belongs to times antecedent to those when the Daunians appear in

history as a part of the Apulians, and when, as Strabo observes, no

difference in language and habits was discernible between them and

the genuine Apulians 65 • These genuine Apulians of Strabo dwelt

to the west of mount Garganus around the bay, in front of which

lie the Diomedean islands 66 • They are the Teanian Apulians of

Plinye1, who speaks of three distinct tribes of Apulians, the Tea­

niaus, the Daunians 68 , and the Lucanians. These last were pro­

De Bello Gothico 1. 15. p. 349.

* Above, pp. 38, 39.

· 463 Note 148.

64 This is the more evident, since the legend makes him disappear, and

so lays no stress on him individually. Strabo VI. p. 284. a.

t Note 126. ·

65 Strabo VI. p. 285. c.

66 Strabo v1. p. 285. c. and p. 283. c.

67 For here stood Teanum Apulum.

68 Pliny m. 16. Arnnis CerbalusDauniorurn finis: (if so, mount Garga­116

HISTORY OF ROME.

bably Sabellians who had occupied some towns in Apulia; either

Lucanians, or Samnites; to whom Luceria belonged there: for the

name of Lucanians, may have been a general one for the plantations

of the Samnites. Unless some boldness of divination be allowable,

all researches into the early history of nations must be abandoned:

if I am permitted to use it, liable though it be to grievous ·abuse,

I .will propose the conjecture, that the original Apulians were Opi­

cans by name and descent, who subjugated the Daunians ; and that

the legends about Diomedes, and whatever bore a Greek character

in the arts and manners of the country, continued to subsist under

their government, as similar relics did at Falerii and Ciere. As·

suming a circumstance we find related to be correct, we can hardly

avoid supposing that the Peucetians also had a mixture of Oscan

blood: for the names of the two Peucetians who designed to poison

Cleonymus, Gains and Paulus 469 , are completely Latin.

The Peucetians were divided into thirteen tribes' 0 • They were

governed by a king so late as the beginning of the Peloponnesian

war7 1, Afterward history is entirely silent concerning them, until

about 458, 01. 120. 4; when Agathocles entered into a league with

them and with the lapygians, and promoted their piracies on the

Adriatic' 9 • So thaf at that time they were independent of Rome.

Nevertheless the Roman armies had already entered the land of

the Sallentines : they had done so with hostile purposes in 447;

and in 452 to give protection against Cleonyrnus: in neither expe·

dition, any more than in the war against Pyrrhus, or afterward

when the Messapians and .Sallentines were subdued, is the name

of the Pcediculians mentioned; although the Roman generals must

needs have marched through their country.

Daunia too was under a kingly government, when it joined Ta~

renturn in the war against the Messapians. By the Romans it was

found divided under the sovereignty of a few great cities : and the

discord amongst these affords us an explanation for the otherwise

incomprehensible accounts of the relations between what is repre­

nus would have been situate wholly out of Daunia (lta Apulorum ge.nera

tria: Teani-Lucani-Dauniorum prreter supradicta, &c. .

469 See the treatise mpl Situµ. 0.K.ou~µ. p. 100. a. That these two name11

should occur together, would be a very singular hit of chance. Sylburgius

observes that in the old translation the name of Paulus is wanting: was it struck

out by a theologian? or has it been substituted by a lawyer from conjecture

for a different one?

70 Pliny m. 16.

71 Strabo v1. p. 281. a.

72. Diodorus Exe. u1. 4,HISTORY. OF ROME.

117

sented as the whole nation and the Romans. Its most powerful

city was Arpi, which must have possessed a considerable territory ;

since the district of Sipontum was forfeited to Rome as being pub­

lic land of Arpi 4 7 8 on account of the insurrection in the second Punic

war. But Canusium also had been great; and her greatness was

still attested by her walls, as that of Arpi was by hers, in the time

of Strabo~

The inscription which has beert published as Messapian, is no­

thing but an old Greek one74, carelessly copied by a person totally

ignorant of the language. That on all the coins throughout lapy­

gia is Greek: w ~ich was also spoken by the nation, the language of

its ancestors having given way for the most part, as it did in Sicily,

to the nobler one. The Canusines, like the Bruttians, spoke Greek,

together with the old dialect of the country7 5 , The Apulian works

of art, like all in this part of Italy, .have a Greek yet a peculiar

character: the earthen vessels are of a meaner sort both as to their

shape and their paintings : works in bronze have been found of

extraordinary beauty.

473 Livy uxrv. 45.

74 Lanzi, who gives it 11. p. 620, has remarked ,this

75 Horace, Sat. r. 10. 30.

..THE GREEKS IN ITALY.

. As Idomeneus and Diomedes were brought by one class of le·

gends to Italy, so were Philoctetes, Epeus, and some of the descend·

ants of Neleus, with Greek warriors and Trojan captives, by others,

which appropriated and devised applications for a variety of ·relics

and monuments. But from none of these pretended settlements did

any Grecian people arise; these Greeks must have been metamor·

phosed and have vanished, like the companions of Diomedes 476•

The most ancient Greek settlement in Italy of which history

takes note, is that of the Chalcidians at Cuma; originally planted

on Ischia and the adjacent small islands7 7, By the Alexandrian

chronologers it was assigned to times of vast antiquity; but assur·

edly this was merely owing to their connecting its founders with

the heroic genealogies. For where they were without any deter­

minate accounts, lilfo those as to the time when the Greek cities in

Sicily were founded, they had recourse to computing by genera­

tions, which pushed the earliest epochs a great deal too far back.

With regard to Cuma they did not find any era; for it had long

ceased to be a Greek city: and when this led them to calculate the

date of its foundation from the genealogies, it came out, contrary to

all credibility, long anterior to the founding of the earliest among

the colonies less remote from Greece. That the leaders of the

emigrants who settled there,· bent their course over unexplored

waters, is intimated by the legend that their ships were preceded

and guided in the daytime by a dove, and at night by the chime of

the mystic bronze: but ev.en from the eastern coast of Sicily, the

first settlement on Ischia would have been a bold adventure. The

476 Quotations, which to have any value should be extremely numerous,

seem to me out of place in this section, with a very few exceptions.

77 Thus Livy (vm. 22.) evidently made a distinction between the Pithe­

cusm and .lEnaria.HISTORY. OF ROME.

119

remote age attributed to Cuma is certainly a fiction; but the epoch

of its foundation we have no means of determining.

Dicrearchia, on the hill above Pozzuoli, was a fortified seaport

of the Cumans: if the Samians settled there in the first years of king

Dariusu•, they must have found the spot already inhabited; but

they might be very welcome to the Cumans under the pressure of

the Tyrrhenian war. Parthenope too was founded here by colo­

nists from Cuma.

·

A body of Eretrians established themselves on the islands of

Pithecusre which the Cumans had abandoned; and from them came

the settlers at N eapolis ; its name shows it was a far more recent

city than Parthenope; which was afterward called Palrepolis •. If

the Athenians did actually take a share in the founding of N eapo­

lis, we might have probable grounds for dating it about the time

of the settlement at Thurium79,

Rhegium was planted by the Cumans in common with the Chai-.

cidian colonies in. Sicily, for the sake of commanding the Faro.

It was from thence that Micythus proceeded to found the latest of

the Chalcidian towns, Pyxus, in the territory of Sybaris, which as

then was without a master.

Of the Greek cities in Oenotria the oldest· was Locri; at least

according to the tradition that the first settlers at Syracuse and

Locriaided each other" 0 , if Syracuse was really founded thirty years

before Croton 61 : so was it according to the indigenous story by

which the arrival of the founders was dated just after the first Mes­

senian war, 01; 14. 1. That is, it was related that the Locrians,

the descendants of those who followed their impious chief, Ajax,

had continued twenty years in the field against Messe.ne as allies

of the Spartans, and that when the boys they had left behind grew

up, they joined their fathers: meanwhile the wives and daughters

had been living in an unrestrained intimacy with their servants.

And when at length the men returned victorious to their homes,

478. In 01. 64. 4 : according to the. chronicle of Eusehius. Perhaps it was

somewhat later, after the death of Polycrates.

79 Their doing so however (Strabo v. 246. a.) seems to be very uncer­

tain. Tzetzes (on Lycophron v. 732.) quotes a story from Ti~reus, thatDio­

timus, the captain of an Athenian ship at the time of the Sicilian expedition,

(01. 91.) offered sacrifice at Neapolis to the Siren Parthenope by command of

an oracle, and established a torchrace there: this event may perhaps in some

way have furnished occasion for the above mentioned improbable statement.

80 Strabo v1. p. 259. b. 270. a.

,

81 Which: is contrary to the legend (Strabo v1. p. 269. c.) that the god

gave Archias and Myscellus their choice between health and riches.120

HISTORY

or ROME..

the women under the consciousness of guilt fled from their wrath

across the sea with their paramours 489 • Though sprung from an

origin so ignominious, that the malir,e of Timreus was raised even

to frenzy by Aristotle's simple account of the tradition, the Italian

Locrians by means of their lawgiver Zaleucus rose to great respect­

ability; and to such prosperity and power, as to found Hipponium

and Medma on th~ other coast; so that they were masters of the

whole country between the two seas, as far as the borders of Rhe­

gium.

The story about the origin of the founders of Locri, and of the

colony which Phalanthus is said to have settled at Tarentum in

01. 18. 1, as well as that about the followers of Theras, induce us

to suspect, that the sons of marriages contracted where no right of

intermarriage existed between the parties, were at that time dis­

turbing the peace of several of the aristocratical republics, and that

measures were taken to send them to a distance. No reflectin'g

person will believe any one of these stories in the literal sense 88 :

it would be equally inconsiderate to reject them as utterly ground­

less fabrications.

Tarentum possessed the same rights at Heraclea, which a mother

city would possess in its colonies, and she had at least an equal

share with Thurii in the joint settlement: in Messapia C~lipolis

was probably connected with her; and so was Hydrus, if it was

really a Hellenic town*•

The Achrean cities, Sybaris and Croton, are said to have been

built together, in 01. 19. 2 84• The former was mistress of the

482 That such was the story, has just been e11tablished by the Excerpt&

from Polybius xu. Tit. de sententiis p. 383. foll. ed. Maii.. Now at last we

·clearly see the meaning of those words in Dionysius Periegetes, v. 366:

"'t•'TEf~' µ1;J:_9on•' ~,..: ...,:,.,,. Eustathius in his commentary does not tell us

what war it was.

·

83 Aristotle assuredly was far from doing this: nor was Timams wrong

in refusing to believe the fact; but what he substituted for it was a scandalous

forgery, with regw:d to which he cannot have been free from guilt. An anti­

quarian indeed, like him, is more likely than others to have valuable insu­

lated pieces of information: such a piece-though subject to limitations, a.s

we learn from the Odyssey-in his remark that in ancient times ll.:Jre were

no slaves bought for money among 'the Greeks. (Athenreus VI. p. 264. c.)

Aristotle would have granted him this, but have answered that the persons

meant in his Locrian tradition were not domestie slaves, but peasants in a

* Scylax p. 5.

state of bondage.

84 According to Eusebius. But with regard to all these dates there are

contradictory statements, and we have rather to choose than to decide between

them.IIISTORY OF RO:\lE.

121

, country afterward called Lucania, and founded Posidonia and Laos:

the latter, possessing the north of Bruttium, founded Caulon on the

south toward Locri, and Terina on the western coast. Another

body of Achreans, being· invited by the Sybarites, built Metapon­

tum; which by the industrious cultivation of its luxuriantly fertile

territory attained to extraordinary wealth: these three great Achrean

cities, and probably their four colonies, were long united in a league

similar to the one which existed among the Achreans*.

Elea was built by the Phocreans who were flying from Cyrus,

when Sybaris was at the height of her power, on a coast where

they could not possibly have settled without the leave of the Syba­

rites. Elea is remarkable, not for any wars, but for its profound

thinkers, and for the peculiar good fortune which protected it when

the other Greek cities on this coast fell under the power of the

Lucanians. It was the only one that held out between Neapolis

and Rhegium,: the Romans respected it; and the last mention we

find of it is a pleasing one, as the birthplace of the ingenious Sta­

tius. Another earlier body of fugitives from, Ionia, the Colopho­

nians of Siris, seem to have lived in prosperity while under the

protection of Sybaris,,and to have been destroyed after the fall of

their protectress.

The latest Greek colony on this coast was Thurii, a common

settlement of the whole Greek nation, and a city which, though it

did not come up to what Sybaris had been, attained to great emi­

nence and power •. A couple of generations afterward Ancona was

founded further up the Adriatic, either by some Syracusans flying

from their tyrants, or by those tyrants themselves ; who planted

Greek colonies at Issa and Adria, and perhaps at Pisaurum.

The colonists sent out from Greece did not go forth, like the first

New Englanders, with their wives and children, for the sake of

dwelling in freedom amid forests which they had to clear before

them: they were mostly unmarried freebooters, who won them­

selves wives with their swords 485 : so that their posterity were a

mixed race, like the descendants of the crusaders in Palestine and

Cyprus, and those of the Spanish conquerors in America. After­

ward needy Greeks came flocking to countries where an abun­

dance of fertile ground was to be -Obtained; and they were gladly

admitted; but assuredly not to an equality-of rights. They received

allotments of land, but were forced to content themselves with what

lay at a distance: if these new citizens were distributed into tribes,

Polybius

1.-q

11.

3!).

485 Herod. r. 146.122

HISTORY OF ROME.

their franchise was certainly an inferior one: the pretensions set

up by the Sybarites at Thurii*, which were so absurd under their

circumstances, teach us how their forefathers, who had the power

in their hands, must have dealt with the citizens they received.

The constitution of the Greek cities in Italy as in Hellas was at

first aristocratical: and I think its form may be divined. The de­

scendants of the conquistadores being divided, perhaps into three

tribes, were alone eligible to any magistracy : the remaining Greek

citizens were incorporated into other tribes, and shared the right of

electing to offices, but without being eligible -themselves: in the

city there were a great number of foreign settlers, who were admit­

ted either partially or fully to the privileges of citizenst: the pea­

santry were serfs. That there was a connection between this aris­

tocracy and the Pythagorean religion is unquestionable, though its

nature is mysterious : the three hundred Pythagoreans at Croton

may be conjectured to have been the senate: the revolutions that

broke out in all these cities at the same time, were like those in Ger­

many, between the middle of the thirteenth and that of the four­

teenth c.entury, which spread from town to town, and by which the

government was transferred from the ancient houses to the guilds ;

the cause which led to them being the attempt to retain all the old

institutions unchanged, after they had lost their life and substance.

But the revolutions among the Italian Greeks were savage and full

of horrors and atrocities. Sybaris seems to have become a demo­

cracy .a short time before its fall. The destruction of this extraor­

dinary city, which has incurred o:riprobrium probably unmerited,

and at all events exaggerated, was the first irremediable wound of

Magna Grrecia. It was followed by the bloody revolutions in

which Croton wore itself out: the Lucanians made their appear­

ance and spread over Oenotria. But from the day when the elder

Dionysius entered Italy as a conqueror thirsting for vengeance,

calamities and miseries came upon the Italiots without measure, or

end, or' pause: from that time forth, to use the expression of a

Greek historian, the unfortunate towns of Magna Grrecia were

tossed to and fro by a current from the hands of the Lucanians or

Bruttians into those of the Syracu:;an tyrants, to be laid waste by

the former, or to suffer the ruinous protection of the latter. Which

of these cities were still subsisting, and what was their condition,

when the Romans, coming in the character of protectors, began to

meddle in the affairs of these countries, I shall relate when I reach

* Diodorus xn. 11.HISTORY OF 'ROME.

123

that part of my history. In this general survey of ancient Italy, it

seemed to me that a view of their origin ought to be given, and

that a few remarks. on their peculiar character would not be mis­

placed: else their story is partly an independent one, in part belongs

to .the general history of the Greek.nation.

These Greeks, at least in some vf the cities, learnt various things

from the native Italians, who were admitted to their franchise or

who dwelt amongst them; such as their system of weights and of

mensuration 4" 6 , many words of their languages, and even some

forms of their versification and poetry. They on the other hand

diffused their arts and their literature in the peninsula, far beyond

the· countries in their i11;mediate neighbourhood : by the Opicans

the use of their language was adopted even for civil purposes.

486 This was perceived by Mazocchi from the Heraclean tables. But

from the manner of assigning the _territory of Thurii (Diodorus XII. 11.) we

might conclude that the whole principle of the Italian agrarian law had been

adopted: indeed it looks very much as if the ferment at Croton had arisen

from the patricians taking possession of the Sybarite territory for themselves,

without allotting any part to the commonalty.

,. THE LIGURIANS AND VENETIANS.

I UNITE these two nations under one head, not to intimate any

affinity between them, but because both were alike unconnected, so

least as we know, with the history of Italy, until the later

far

times of the Roman republic, and, though they dwelt to.the south

of the Alps, did so only as branches ofnations widely diffused be­

yond the borders of Italy; in very early times too they seem to

have touched in the p~ain of the Po.

The Ligurians are one of those nations which the short span of

our history embraces only in their decline. When Philistus said

the Sicelians were Ligurians, who had been driven southward by

the Umbrians und Pelasgians~• 7 , he was not only blind to the iden­

tity of the Siculians with the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians, but was no

doubt equally mistaken as to the extraction of the Ligurians : but

his mistake arose only from the very common source of c;:mfoun<l­

ing two irruptions experienced by the same country at different

times; as the nations that have inhabited Dacia in succession, the

Getes and Goths, the Huns and Hungarians, are taken one for the

other; and in obscure traditions the same people is presented at

one moment as invading, the next as driven out. During his ban­

ishment, which he spent in the countries on the Adriatic, Philistus

m3y have learnt among tlie U mbrians themselves, out of their an­

cient books, that their forefathers and the Siculians had .expelled

the Ligurians out of Tuscany ; nor should his having misunder­

stood what he heard make us treat it with. contempt. Now on this

ground we may build still further; and looking at Livy's account

of the Gauls settling on the Po, notwithstanding the indistinctness

of his conceptions, and the incurable corruptions in the text••, we

may discern thus much: that the Libuans, a Ligurian people, were

once dwelling near the lake of Garda, and that the Salvians, whom

at

487 Dionysius

1.

22.

88 v. JS: see the commentators.HISTORY OF ROME.

125

we know of in the neighbourhood of Massilia, were likewiae dwell­

ing to the North of the Po: whether we suppose they were still

living there as subjects of the Etruscans, when the Gauls made

their appearance; or 1hat here again a people which had long since

retired before the Etruscans, had transferred their name to their

conquerors. The whole of Piedmont in its present extent was in­

habited by the Ligurians : Pavia, under the name of Ticinum, was

founded by a I,igurian tribe, the Lrevians 499• When they pushed

forward their frontier among the Apennines into the Casentino 90 on

the decline of the Etruscans, they probably only recovered what

had before been wrested from them. Among the inhabitants of

of Corsica there were. Liguriansa 1•

Only half of.Ligystica was reckoned to be in Italy. The Sica­

nians, according to a Greek tradition about their origin, were an

Iberian people, who had been driven by the Ligurians from a river

called Sicanus9 9 , At all events the Ligurians and Iberians were

anciently contiguous; whereas in aftertimes they were parted by

the Gauls. We are told by Scylax, that from the borders of Ibe­

ria, that is, from the Pyrenees, to the Rhone the two nations were

dwelling interrnixedaa: and from this very region does Thucydides

seem to have supposed that the Sicanians had been driven. But it

is far more probable that the Iberians came from the south of the

Pyrenees into Lower Languedoc, as they did into Aquitaine, and

that the Ligurians were driven back by them. When the Celts

long after, moving in an opposite direction, reached the shore of

the Mediterranean, they too drove the Ligurians close down to the

coast, and dwelt as the ruling people amongst them in the country

about Avignon, as is implied by the name Celto-Ligurianso 4 , Which

of the tribes among the lower Alps were Ligurian.s, and whether

the V ocontians were so, I have no means of determining. But

from these traces it seems to be extremely probable, that this peo­

ple was dwelling of yore from "the Pyrenees to the Tiber, with the

Cevennes and the Helvetian Alps for its northern boundary.

Of their place in the family ofnations we are ignorant: we only

489 Pliny III. 21.

90 Polybius II. 16.

91 Seneca Consol. ad Helviam, 8. Fragm. Sallust. Histor. II. p. 958. ed.

Cort.

92 Thucydides v1. 2. Philistus in Diodorus v. G. Servius, on JEn. vm.

328, says some take it for the Sicoris, a river in Catalonia: this seems to me

merely a guess.

93 Sey lax p. 2.

94 Strabo 1v. p. 203. a. Instead of Aou1plwroc we must read '11.ov1{.,,o,.126

HISTORY OF ROME.

0

know that they were neither lberians nor Celts. Dionysius says,

their extraction was unknown 4 D5 , Cato seems to have made inqui­

ries amongst them, but to have heard nothing beyond stories that

were evidently groundless and clumsily fabricated: hence he stig­

matized them as illiterate, lying, and deceitfol 96 • And illiterate a

people probably was, which had to eke outlife at the cost of such

hard toil, and could not so much as till its stony ground with a

plough. The rest of Cato's rancorous opinion is in no respect

confirmed by other ancient writers: on the contrary they speak

highly of the industry, the indefatigable patience, and the content­

edness of the Ligurians, no less than of their boldness and dex­

terity97. When Cato wrote, the Romans had only just completed

the task of subduing them, which, though the contest was seldom

carried on except by one tribe at a time, had taken forty years :

during this war the inroads of the· Ligurians, like those of their

enemies, had been very desolating and cruel; and he was probably

misled by the exasperation thus produced into pronouncing a sen­

tence so contrary to justice.

At the time when the Ligurians were subjugated or exterminated,

tribe after tribe, or carried away from their mountains to be settled

in far distant plains, the Venetians were as rich as the former were

poor, as un warlike as the Ligurians· were brave. They had resigned

themselves to the protection of Rome without a stri1ggle; and they

appear as her subjects in the Cisalpine war, without our :finding

any account how they became so. They had been led to wish for

foreign protection by the incursions of the Gauls. Their abodes

were in a small part of that region which was afterward called Ve­

netia, in the plain and on the hills, scarcely reaching to the foot of

the Alps, between the Cisalpine Gauls and the formidable Tauris­

cans of Noricum*. The commercial and trading spirit of Venice

is her inheritance from her. parent city, Patavium: which having

been founded, according to tradition, long before Rome by some

Trojan emigrants, escaped uninjured amid all the wars and disor~

495 I. 10.

96 Fragm. Origg. II. in Servius on .lEn. XI. 701. 715.

97 Cicero against Rull. II. 35. Virgil Georg. II. 167. Diodorus IV. 20.

v. 39. From the last but one of these passages it appears that they engaged

themselves for hire as free day-labourers in husbandry. Such freemen who

till the ground themselves, werP called by the Athenians ttv'TOUf)'of. Thucy­

dides J. 141.

Polybius n. 15. 30.HISTORY OF ROME.

127

ders of Italy, attained to extraordinary wealth, and in the age of

Tiberius was the first city of Italy next to Rome.

That tradition about Antenor had become nationalized among the

Patavines: at least the account which is connected with it, of the

war waged before the foundrng of the city with the Euganeans am!

their king Velesus• 0•, must be homesprung: else it is manifestly of

Greek origin, being derived from the cyclic poets, who told of

Antenor's treachery and indemnity, and from the name of the· Hene­

tians in Paphlagonia. Many stories, says Polybius, are related of

the Venetians, by the tragic poets 99 • The country about the Eri­

danus, the remotest shores of the Adriatic, were renowned in poet~

ical story: this part of that sea, being inaccessible on account of the

Liburnian pirates, was considered even by the later Greeks as very

distant and vast. Scylax, who enormously exaggerates the extent

of the Adriatic, puts the Venetians on its eastern shore, about the

mouth of the Eridanus; placing that mouth beyond the innermost

recess. of the. gulf, the coast of which, he says, was inhabited by

the Celts 500 • But although these regions were very rarely visited

by the Greeks, still the ·opinion of Herodotus, that the Enetians

were an lllyrian race 1 , well deserves to be weighed: and there is a

statement quite independent of it, which names an Illyrian king

..:Enetus as their prince~.

A difficulty indeed seems to be raised by-our ii.nding that Poly­

bius, who remarks that the Venetians differed but little in customs

and dress from the Celts, though he tells us their language was not

Celtic, does not say it was Illyrian : and yet his ear would un­

doubtedly have been perfectly able to distinguish the lllyrian

tongue. This however leads us to' conjecture, that the name of

lllyrians was erroneously applied to them, and that they may have

been Liburnians: such an inacc.uracy would be a very slight one

for Herodotus. They were only separated from the Liburnians in

Dalmatia by the lstrians, before N oricum was conquered by the

Gauls; and Noricum it is evident had previously been inhabited by

Liburnian tribes. For the Vindelicians were Liburnians 9 : and

Strabo makes a distinction between them and the Breunians and

Genaunians, whom he calls Illyrians". Vi~gil's words too 5 seem

9!) II. 17.

498 Servius on lEn. 1. 243.

1 1. 196.

500 Sey lax, p. 6.

2 In Srrvius on lEn. 1. 243.

3 Servius on lEn. 1. 243.

4 1v. p. 206. b.

5 lEn. 1. 2!3. foll.-Antenor potuit---Illyricos penetrare sinus atque in­

tima tutus Regna Liburnorum.128

IIISTORY OF ROME.

distinctly to term the Venetians Liburnians: for tlie innermost realm

of the Liburnians must surely be the goal at whieh Antenor is said

to have arrived.

Now the affinity between ·the name of the Ligurians and the

Liburnians is so close, that, although I have not intended to estab·

Iish any connexion between the two nations treated of in this sec­

tion, it might seduce one to make the attempt. I call to mind that

the Sigynnai were the only people on the banks of the lster, beyond

the Venetians and Liburnians, whom Herodotus could hear of,­

which information probably came from Venetian or Liburnian

mariners,-and that he knew this was the name for merchants in

Ligurian 506 : what. if those mariners meant to say that they were

acqu~inted with none but merchants from those parts? and what if

Herodotus designed to intimate this? But I fly from the rocks of

the Sirens.

In an inscription, which is taken for Venetian, the character is

an artificial variety of the Etruscan.

506 v. 9.THE THREE ISLANDS.

IN Corsica beside the Ligurians we find Iberians 507 : the Sica­

nians too in Sicily, who were driven back by the Sicelians into the

west and south of the island, are termed Iberians by every histo­

rian•. The only dispute was as to their original home. · They

themselves asserted that they were an aboriginal native race9 : and

Timreus who· sided with them, was deemed by Diodorus 10 to have

proved the point incontrovertibly. Thucydides on the other hand

assures us it was certain, that they had been expelled by the Ligu­

rians from Iberia: and Philistus concurred with him. The posi­

tiveness with which· Thucydides pronounces, " this is ascertained

as truth," hi._ the mouth of such a man, gives great weight to the

traditions of western Europe: it can only have been those of Ligu­

ria or Hispania, that he admitted as decisive. But he too might be

misled by the above mentioned prejudice about national affinities ;

and surely, where the supposed colony is without any similar tra­

dition, the opinion of the people that claim to have given birth to

it, can scarcely be taken as evidence: vanity in such matters is very

apt to give a bias.

On the other hand there is no doubt as to the Sicelians, that they

themselves related they were sprung from the Oenotrians, and had

emigrated from Italy. There were also some Morgetes in the

island 11 ; but the more important kindred people is the only one

spoken of in history.

507 Seneca ad Helviam c. 8,

8 Ephorus too wrote that the first inhabitants of Sicily were Iberians.

Strabo VI. p. 270. b. Were not these statements so perfectly trustworthy, it

would be difficult even for such as are cautious in drawing inferences from

the names of nations, not to count it clear that the name of the Sicanians is

one and the same with that of the Siculians,just as the same people were called

both .!Equani and .!Equuli; and that consequently they were of the same race.

9 vI. 2.

IO v. 6.

. 11 Strabo VI. p.

b.

:n-o.

I.-R130

HISTORY OF ROME.

That the Elymians were Trojans, was deemed indubitable; only

there was a tradition by which some Phocians were mixed up with

their progenitors. Hellanicus alone brought thPm from Italy 519•

By the intercouse of the natives with the Sicilian Greeks, and

by whole communities being forcibly transplanted, the Greek lan­

guage became so generally known and so current in Sicily, that

the barbarian tribes entirely forgot their hereditary tongues, and

the whole island grew into a Greek country, as it continued until

late in the middle ages.

In like manner the planting of colonies made Sardinia a Punic

country, in the parts under the dominion of the Carthaginians: after

it had been 180 years under the Romans, this character was still

unaltered, and the civilized Sardinians were considered as Preni 13 •

The ge::mine Sards, who dwelt in caves and clothed themselves in

skins, maintained their footing in the highlands, living in perpetual

feuds with the inhabitants of the cultivated regions. Of these there

were three tribes, the Iolaans or Ilians, the Balarians, and the Cor­

sicans. The name of the first .in the one form gave the Greeks

occasion to invent a stpry of Iolaus bringing his kinsmen the Thes­

piads thither; in the other, to seek here again for a Trojan colony:

the former of these fables was promoted by the Punic colony rever~

ing ~ardus, a son of the Tyrian Hercules, as its founder, and by

Iolaus being connected with Hercules in the Carthaginian mytho­

logy*. The other two names point to the Balearic isles and to

Corsica: and beside this mark of an Iberian population, either pure

or mixed, there was a tradition, among those ~elating to very an­

cient times, of an Iberian colony at N ora 1 •. This race may pos­

sibly have becnme extinct in Sardinia : that it should never have

settled on an island which was encircled by the Bale ares, Corsica,

512 Dionysius 1. 22.

13 Cicero pro Scauro 42. Peyr.

* Polybius vn. 9.

14 Solinus 13: Dioq. JV. 29: and P.ausanias Phocic. c. xvu: in a prolix

digression about the various settlements in Sardinia; it is the classical passage

for these traditions. His authority was certainly Timreus ; who was also that

of Diodorus, of the book De .Mirabilibus, and even of Sallust: the last was led

to describe this island by the war of Lepidus: he in his turn is followed by So­

linus. It is an instance of the vicissitudes books are subjected to by changes

of fashion and taste, that Timreus, who in the time of Cicero was still gene­

:rally read, was confined to the studies of the learned , when Pausanias wrote;

so that Pausanias could seek in him, as in the most forgotten Atthids, for un­

known narratives to embellish his work with. What lsidorus xv. 6. c. 1178.'

d-f. and Solinus say of Sardinia, with the passage on Corsica which follows

in the former, is now properly inserted among the fragments of Sallust.HISTORY OF ROME.

131

and Sicania, is incredible. The Iolaans, we are told by Pausanias,

resembled the Lybians.

The tale of a Greek settlement under Aristmus 515 is again an in­

dication of Pelasgians ; since it was in Arcadia that this son of

Cyrene ruled 18 : Those Tyrrhenians too 1 1, who are said to have

inhabited Sardinia before .the Iolaans, were Pelasgians.

I am told that there are Cyclopian walls of a peculiar structure

on this island, which undoubtedly can neither be ascribed to the

Carthaginians nor the the lolaans. Hence we must suppose there

is something more than mere fiction in the story that, toward the

end of the fifth century of the city, Sardinia contained the ruins of

. large buildings and vaults, which the Greeks called the works of

Iolaus and his companions, the Thespiadean Heraclids. 18

If the dialect of the Sardinian mountaineers were kriown, and did

really possess any roots of a peculiar character, it might possibly

throw light on the question whether they are connected with the

Iberians or with the Libyans. The specimens of the language

. spoken in the civilized districts exhibit peculiarities which are

more tqan varieties of dialect : they indicate a Romance language

of a distinct kind; but nothing more.

515 Pausanias, as above. Diodor,us 1v. 82. Auct. deMirabilib. p. 105. b.

Sallust in Servius on Georg. 1. 13. All these however do but repeat the ac·

count of Timreus.

16 The most important passages are collected in Bochart Geogr. Sacr.

ed. 1692. c. 573. d. foll.

17 Strabo v. p. 225. a.

.

18 Auctor de Mirabilib. p. 105. b. Diodorus 1v. 30.CONCLUSION.

No one can mount up to the fountain-head of those streams by

which the tribes of the present human race have been borne down:

still less can any eye pierce through the chasm, which there severs

that order of things wherein we and our history are comprised, from

an earlier one. That a prior race of mankind has passed away,

is a general popular belief; and it was shared and cheri~hed by the

Greek philosophers : but in one thing they dissented from the peo­

ple: it was supposed by Plato and Aristotle that a few had been

preserved; like embers, from the general ruin, and that from them

a new race of mankind had sprung and spread by degrees over the

desolated earth; while by the people the renewal of the life of man

was regarded as a new creation, as we see in the' Lai of Deucalion,

and.the Myrmidons of .J.Eacus; and the extinct race were, deemed

to have been rebels against the heavenly powers, led astray by the

consciousness of their enormous strength. Thus the later Jews

dreamt of giants before the deluge ; thus the Greeks dreamt of the

Titans of Phlegra, and of those who perished in the flood of Deu­

calion or of Ogyges: thus the savages of North America fable of the

mammoth, that the world having been laid waste by him invoked·

the lightnings of heaven, and not in vain, against the reason-gifted

monster, the man of the primitive age. Thus Italy in its popular

legends had the Campanian giants, who fled into the furthest cor­

ner of Messapia, and, being pursued by the inexorable conqueror,

hid 'themselves under the _earth; out of which. venomous ichor

gushes forth, commingling with the springs, from the never-heal­

ing wounds of the thunderbolt. Now far as we are from sharing

such a belief, I still cannot forbear regr..rding the view taken by the

people as sounder in one point than that of the philosophers : the

latter assume a period which has no beginning, and wherein act

follows act; while the people acknowledges the creation of man­

kind as the beginning of new laws of life : ·to set which revolution.HISTORY OF ROME.

133

before our eyes, seems to have been the purpose why the organic

remains of earlier periods have been buried in the earth. · There

is no proof that such a creation has occurred only once: it may

have taken place, for the different races of mankind, after the earth

had been more or less extensively desolated, at widely distant

epochs in the course of those many thousand years which have

been requisite to form the alluvial land of Egypt, of llabylonia, of

Lombardy, and of Louisiana : for God does not grow old, nor weary

of creating, of preserving, of remoulding and training.

The uniform notion however was, that the times of the giants

were not parted by a gulf from those of the present human race,

but that the latter gradually gained the upper hand, while the for­

mer expired as gradually. And in fact the supposing that a race

of giants must have been the architects of the walls composed of

enormous polygonal blocks, in what are called the Cyclopian cities,

from Prreneste, and even Ardea, to Alba in the land of the Marsians,

as well as of the walls of Tiryns-which are exactly similar-such

an opinion is an expression of the simple understanding; and in

like manner the peasants in J;riesland fancy they see the works of

giants in those colossal altars which occur on the high grounds in

greater or less preservation, wherever the Teutonic tribes were for­

merly settled, and granite boulders are found.

That these walls are not the works of those tribes which our

history meets with in Latium, inasmuch as they are greatly beyond

their powers, we are certainly forced to pronounce: but we must

cont~nt ourselves with confessing that our history does not reach

back far enough. For the only difficulty is, that the powers of

those tribes were inadequate. The Etruscan walls, and the build­

ings of the Roman kings, do not yield to those works, or even ex­

ceed them in magnitude : the raising and removing the rock-hewn

obelisks was a still more gigantic undertaking, one that mocks our

mechanical powers still more. The Peruvian walls and roads too

are no Jess vast than the Cyclopian buildings: but in these cases

there is nothing incredible; because we know that many thousands,

nay hundreds of thousands, laboured at task work, and that the sae­

-rifice of lives was never thought of. Those forgotten tribes in the

country of the Cascans and Latins 519 , compared with whose archi­

519 Our finding that the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians were employed to build

a fortress on, the Acropolis at Athens, might lead us to conjecture that the

nation enjoyed a peculiar celebrity for this kind of architecture. But no ill'­

ference can be drawn from this with regard to the origin of the walls in La·

ti um; since the people who were allowed to settle at the foot of Hymettus134

HISTORY OF ROME.

tecture that of Rome under the emperors was diminutive, belong

to or precede that period in which the Greek historian of the Au­

gustan age, agreeing in principle with the philosophical historians

of the last century, conceived that this very country of the Abori­

gines contained nothing but savages scarcely possessing the faculty

of speech, the offspring of the rude young earth. In like manner

the vaulted drains of the lake Copais, which are carried for thirty

stadia thr~ugh the solid rock, and the clearing of which surpassed

the power of Bceotia in the time of Alexander, are certainly the

work of a people prior to the Greeks.

Among the cities of very great antiquity Herculanum is unques­

tionably to be ranked. It was built on a bed of tufo, exactly like

that which has buried it : beneath the former is a soil containing

unequivocal traces of tillage 520 ; and this cultivation belongs to an

age anterior to the first Greek settlement in Italy; since the Greeks

had no traditions of any eruptions from Vesuvius, although they

collected by inference that the.mountain was volcanic.

If a detailed map be framed according to mere reports, calcula­

tions, and bearings, it may deviate in every particular from absolute

geographical correctness, and yet be substantially sufficient to give

a notion of a country, and enable us to follow the events of its

history: when contracted to a small scale, its variations from a

precisely accurate one may be scarcely perceptible.. The same is

the case with regard to many things handed down to us in the his­

tory of nations: if they are detached from their dates and whatever

else is most exposed to arbitrary and falsifying alteration ; and if

we do not suffer ourselves to be disturbed by partial incongruities,

where there is no contradiction in the main ; the limits of universal

history will be greatly enlarged.

Thus the legends and traditions collected in this introduction,

concerning the seyeral tribes that flourished in the earliest times of

Italy, furnish results which enable us to survey the most important

turns of their destinies, and which carry us so far forward, that,

even beyond the Alps, some of the national movements in the west

and north of Europe come within our widening horizon.

The Pelasgians, under which general name it seems that in Italy

the Oenotrians, the Morgetes, the Siculians, the· Tyrrhenians, the

Peucetians, the Daunians, the Liburnians, and the Venetians may

were Epirot Sicilians, and had no connexion with lt.aly, as has been shown

in p. 43.

520 Diss. Isagog. in Herc. \lolumina 1. p. 9.HISTORY OF ROME.

135

be comprehended, surrounded the Adriatic with their possessions no

less than the lEgean : that tribe of them which left its name to the

lower sea, having dwelt along its whole coast up a considerable way

into Tuscany, had also a settlement in Sardinia: and in Sicily the Ely­

mians, as well as the Sicelians, belonged to the same stock. In

the interior of Europe the Pelasgians were settled on the northern

side of the Tyrolese Alps; and under the name of Preonians and

Pannonians extended as far as the Danube: that is to say, if the

Teucrians and Dardanians were the same race.

'I:hey are standing in the very earliest traditions at the summit

of their greatness. The legends that tell of their fortunes, exhibit

only their decline and fall: Jupiter had weighed their destiny and

that of the Hellens ; and the scale of the Pelasgians had risen.

The fall of Troy was the symbol of their fate.

As on the east of the Adriatic the lllyrians press forward from

the north, until they are arrested by the mountains of Epirus; so

the Tuscans, being driven onward by the Celts or Germans, come

down from the same quarter out of the Alps into Italy: in the west

of Lombardy they find the Ligurians reaching as far as the lake of

Garda: these at that time were one of the great nations of Europe,

possessing the country from thence to the foot of the Pyrenees; be.

fore this they had also inhabited Tuscany. .They now retired from

the plains on the north of the Po, behind the Ticinus and into the

Apennines. The invaders, pursuing their conquests, expelled the

Umbrians, both out of Lombardy south of the Po, and from the

inland part of northern Tuscany: from the sea coast and the south

of Etruria as far as the Tiber, they drove the Tyrrhenian Pelas­

gians. This limit they reached about the time which we mark as

the first third of the second century of Rome. The impulse of the

Tuscan irruption set in motion all the nations then in possession of

the country from the Po to the summit of the Apennines ; and

forced the Cascans and Oscans, pressed onward by the Sabines,

upon the Sicelians. And as the Pelasgians on the Tyrrhenian sea

were expelled or subjugated, so· their other tribes experienced the

same fate, in Oenotria from the Greeks, in Daunia from the Oscans,

higher up along the Adriatic from the Sabellians and U mbrians :

and the continued progress of the Sabellians subsequently occa­

sioned the Ausonian Opicans to attack the Latins, a people sprung

from an earlier emigration of other tribes belonging to their own

race. The further changes do not require a summary.PRELIMINARY HISTORY OF ROlVlE.

£NEAS AND THE TROJANS IN LATIUl\L

I Now turn with pleasure toward my proper mark, from the

wearisome task of gleaning detached and mostly unimportant no­

tices concerning the Italian nations; and I retire from the seductive

impulse to divine the nature of what has perished, by continually

renewing the examination of these often uncertain fragments. Yet

l must still linger a while on ground of the same kind with the

most insecure part of what I have just quitted, but ground belong­

ing essentially to Rome, and over which our road must needs pass

to the mythical part of Roman story; a part that must be kept sep­

arate, but may not be excluded.

If the object of an investigation concerning the Trojan colony in

Latium were to decide with historical probability, by means of di­

rect and circumstantial evidence, whether such a colony 'actually

settled on that coast, a prudent inquirer would decline it. He

would deem it absurd to expect any testimonies as to an event five

hundred years antecedent to the time when all" is still fabulous and

poetical i)l the history of Rome: and what traces could have been

preserved, to supply the place of evidence which obviously cannot

possibly exist? when the Trojans with lEneas, even according to

the account which assigns them the greatest importance, were not

an immigrating tribe.such as would alter the people it united with,

and impress its character distinctly on the new formation. In the

earliest Roman narrative they are represented as the crew of merely

a single ship: and even in the later, which might lead us to look

for a somewhat larger number, they are still no more than a small

band, for whom the fields of one village were sufficient. ThereHISTORY. OF· ROME.

137

being no trace of such a settlement to be found in Latium a thou­

sand years afterward, would be no proof against the strangers hav­

ing come thither.

The real object of this investigation is, to determine whether the

Trojan legend is ancient and homesprung, or adopted by the Latins

from the Greeks; and whether there is any chance of explaining

how it originated. Besides it is worth the while to collect the pe·

culiar features of the earliest Roman accounts, which are very little

known.

Let none look on this inquiry with scorn, from thinkl.ng that

Ilion too was a fable, and a voyage into the unknown West was

impossible. It is true, the Trojan war belongs to the region of

fable, so that we cannot select a single point among its incidents as

more or less probable than the rest: yet undeniably it had a histo·

rical foundation. That the Atrida were kings of the Peloponnesus,

is unquestionable. Nor can the voyage to Latiurn be termed im·

possible; since the boldness of mariners is by no means checked

by the imperfect condition of their vessels: nor is their knowledge

of distant regions to be measured by the notions of their country·

men who remain at home, in an age without books, or maps, or

men of learning~

·

The story that the Trojans were not utterly destroyed at the fall

of Troy, but that a part of them survived, and that this remnant

had been governed by the house of .iEneas, is as old as the Home­

ric poems. True, it does not by any means follow from this, that

the legend which makes the descendants of .iEneas rule over emi­

grants at a distance from Trpy, wa~ equally old; we can only say,

there is no contradiction between the two. All that is expressed

in the well-known passage of the Iliad*, is that a Trojan people

would continue to exist: and it would certainly be more natural to

refer the prophecy to the independent Dardanians under .iEneas,

whose situation would enable them to occupy the desolated .terri­

tory of Ilium immediately after the departure of the Greeks, than

to a distant settlement in regions which, even if they were known

to the mariner, were altogether obscure to the poet; but that Troas

and the Hellespont in the Homeric age had long been full of .iEolian

colonies. Arctinus of Miletus too, a poet contemporary with the

building of Rome, only related, unless the abstracts in the Chres­

tomathia of Proclus are incorrect, that .iEneas and his followers,

being terrified by the portentous fate of Laocoon's children, aban·

. * xx. 307-308.

1.-s138

HISTORY OF ROME.

doned the city and withdrew from the general ruin to mount Ida.

It is ce.rtainly possible that his account of what afterward befel the

fugitives, might be overlooked in those abstracts. But Dionysius

was acquainted with the poems of Arctinus, and not merely with

his /Etliiopid, but also with. his IJestruction of Troy: for he gives

us his story of the stealing of the false Palladium 521 : and he does

not combine this story with the accounts which stated that the

image had been brought by the 'rrojans into Italy. Now if the

;\1ilesian poet, whose great antiquity Dionysius expressly urges,

had related any thing about a subsequent emigration of .lEneas, it is

inconceivable that Dionysius should have neglected his evidence

for the settling of the Trojans in Italy, when he was amassing all

he could muster out of Hellanicus, Cephalon, and other·writers so

much more recent.

,

In the Laocoon of Sophocles 92 lEneas was represented as retir­

ing before the taking of the city, and as having been followed by

great numbers to new abodes, the desire of many of the Phrygians.

But even if Sophocles took the fable of his tragedy in the main

from the ancient cyclic poet I have been speaking of, still it no way

follows, that he did not in this instance exercise his customary

license, of making a free selection out of the narratives contained

in other poems on the fall of Troy.

Dionysius seems neither to have been acquainted with Pisander,

nor with the lyrical poem of Stesichorus on the destruction of llion.

If credit is due to the account, that Virgil formed the second book

of the .lEneid entirely on the model of Pisander's epic poem 28 , we

then know that the latter sang, how .lEneas after the fall of the city

made his escape with a part of the Trojans, and emigrated; and

that too not as a traitor, rior through the clemency of the Argives:

but we are not warranted in drawing any conclusions· as to a fur­

ther coincider_ce between his story and Virgil's. The age of Pi­

sander, if he was the Camirrean, is quite indeterminate, lying be­

tween that of Hesiod and the thirty-third Olympiad.

Stesichorus however sang of the emigration of .lEneas, almost in

the same way as Virgil; for the representations on the Iliac Table

seem entitled to confidence. · In them we find the hei:o preserving

his father and the holy things,-with but slight variations from

521 1. 69.

22 Quoted by Dionysius 1. 48: ·

23 Macrobius Saturn. v. 2. It is inconceivable that Macrobius should,

as has been conjectured, have taken Pisander of Laranda for older than Virgil:

if here as elsewhere he was merely a compiler, the grammarian he copied

from lived still nearer to the age of Severus.HISTORY'OF ROME.

139

Virgil's description,-and embarking with his followers for Hes­

peria. Stesichorus, who died in the fifty-sixth Olympiad, lived in

the latter half of the second century: still from the vague account

of .iEneas leading some Trojans into Hesperia, to that of his found­

ing a colony in Latium, there is certainly a wide step: and it is

very doubtful whether Stesichorus tr.ached this extreme limit. In

Arctinus at least his chief exploit was his saving the Palladium:

among the holy things too mentioned by Stesichorns, this we may

be sure was the most precious treasure: but this Palladium, the

Greeks believed, was preserved 'in the Trojan colony at Siris in

Oenotria; on the same coast where they planted so many persons

connected with Troy, Philoctetes at Petelia, Epeus at Lagaria, the

Pylians at Metapontum. Siris too was within the compass of Hes·

peria; and the first Greeks at all events who sang ofa Trojan emi­

gration to Hesperia, can scarcely have assigned it a more distant

' goal.. But Misenus in Stesichorus, unless his name on the Iliac

Table be an addition inserted out of Virgil, decidedly points to the

lower sea.

The other Greek authorities quoted by Dionysius, we are either

totally unable to arrange according to their age; or we cannot do it

with -such certainty as to fix the time when the Latins were first.

spoken of by the Greeks as a Trojan colony. His trying to up­

hold the historical truth of the legend, by appealing to the Pythian

oracles and the responses of the Sibylline books, is a piece of that

superstitious trifling by which he so often provokes us; and the

authority is quite worthless, since the old Roman Sibylline books

had perished, and those which circulated among the Greeks were

·

wretched impostures.

Gergithes on mount Ida was the only Teucrian town that re·

mained after the .iEolian iiivasion 524 : a Gergithian named Cephalon

wrote the history of his nation. In this he related, that .iEneas had

only led the Trojans as far as Pallene on the coast of Thrace; that

he died there after founding the city of .iEnea; and that Romus,

one of his four sons, built Rome along with his father's followers

in the second generation after the taking of Troy 25 • As a Teucrian,

this writer's testimony is very interesting: it would be most im­

portant, if the expression of Dionysius, who calls him "a very an­

cient historian 16 ," could be taken literally; but he applies the same

terms to Antiochus, who was more recent than Herodotus. We

524 Herodotus v. 12-2.

~6 ITWVi'f"'P•~,

VII.

43.

''"ti'"'"' ,,... vv. I. 72.

25 Dionysius

1.

49. 72.140

HISTORY OF ROME.

have no right therefore to assume that Cephalon was older than

the former, that is, than the first half of the fourth century.

The existence of other Trojan colonies in those parts was re­

garded by the Greeks of that century as historically certain.

Hellanicus indeed had ma<le the Elymians go over to Cicily from

Italy, and precede the Sicelians as inhabitants of the island 52 7: but

Thucydides, no doubt following Antiochus, states that they were

Trojans, intermixed with some Phocians, who were cast ashore

there on their return from Troy 28 : so Scylax too calls them Trojans.

Hence there can be no question that if Thucydides and the Greeks

of his age had heard tell of a Trojan colony on. the Tiber, they

would not have seen any thing surprising in it.

Within a century of this time A pollodorus of Gela, the contem·

porary of Menander, termed Romus the son of lEneas and Lavinia 2 e:

after the mi<ldle of the fifth century Callias adopted the story ~f

the Trojans settling in Latium, and uniting with the Aborigines,

which he indicated by the marriage of Roma with king Latinus• 0 •

Soon afterward Pyrrhus crossed over into Italy, and the eyes of

all nations were turned toward Rome. The notion· entertained

by Pausanias, that Pyrrhus felt himself called upon as a descendant

of lEacus to wage war against the posterity of the Trojans•i, was

very probably borrowed from some contemporary writer: from

Hieronymus or Timreus. The latter, who wrote, that the people

of Lavinium had told him, the images of the Trojan gods were

preserved in the sanctuary of their, 'temple3 2 , mantained that the

Trojan origin of the Romans was positively certain: and in en­

deavouring to get evidence of it he was deluded by that fancifulness

which often visited him, into imagining that the sacrifice of the

October horse was a memorial of the destruction of Troy by the

wooden horse 88 • From that time ~orward the belief in the Trojan

527 Dionysius 1. 22. It seems also as if he had not conducted the Trojans

under JEneas beyond the country of the Crusreans in Pallene, that is, to the

town of lEnea. See Dionysius 1. 48.

28 Thucydides VI. 2. Scylax p. 4. The same singular story of an am­

icable settlement in which the fugitives unite with the conquerors humbled

by their destiny, occurs at Siris on the coast of Oenotria.

29 In Festus v. Romam: the words are sadly corrupt.

30 Dionysius 1. 72.

31 ;rausanias Attic. o. xu.

32 Dionysius 1. 67.

33 That this notion, which we' were acquainted with,through Plutarch,

Qurest. Rom. c. 97, and Festus, v. October equus, owes its origin to Timreus,is

clear now from the Excerpta de sententiis p. 381. ed. Maii, where Polybius's at­

tack upon him is published in a state very much fuller than in the old editions :HISTORY OF ROME.

141

col,ony was quite universal among the Greeks. In the first half of

the next century it was professed by Eratosthenes 53• : it is by mere

accident that we have no Greek work in which it is expressed,

more ancient than Lycophron'11 Cassandra, which was, written

about 560 35•

But along with this there was another legend current among the

Greeks : that the Latins were one of the ancient colonies founded

in various places by Greek castaways after the Trojan war; which

colonies they supposed to have afterwards lost their connexion with

their mother-country, and to have been estranged from it: to this

class, in the south of Italy, the first city of Metapontum, Petelia,

and Arpi, were supposed to belong. Circeii, which was uniformly

taken by the Greeks for the island of Circe, and hence a place of

interest even to mariners, who recognized the grave of Elpenor in

a place overgrown with dwarf myrtles (whereas the rest of Latium

was said to produce only standards 36) brought the name of Ulysses

into these parts. Hesiod terms Latinus and his brother Agrius,

the sons of Ulysses and Circe, and the sovereigns of the renowned

Tyrrhenians 37, He. makes no mention of Telegonus, who was

p.amed in the l'OOlll of those brothers in Other fables ; fables anterior

to Sophocles*, and adopted by the later Roman poets and by the

Tusculans. Wherever Latinus, or Romus, or Roma, are spoken

of as descended from Ulysses or Telemachus 38 , the meaning of the

· fable is the same: but this notion of a Greek origin is likewise

found without any mention of Ulysses, Aristotle related 39, that

some Achreans .on their return from Troy had been cast by tempests

on the coast of Latium, a district of Opica; that, when they landed

Ilvppw

&«l µh (read µnr) b 'Toi, 'll'<fl 'TOU

7rtb.H (perhaps 7TOA,µov) ~~<Tf

Tou' p.,µ11.fou, ;'T, (insert ,.11.l) riiv ri7roµ1nµ11. 'ITOIOvp.hov, 'Tii( &11.'Tcr. 'TO ~JA101

d.71'0tAef«, t1 Hµ.ipr- rr1v' &d.'f'ctJC.QVT;~"' i7l'11'01 7roA1µ17rrffv 7Tf.o fTi;t wOA'"'' ;, rr~

&d.µ7r'!' .1<1t.Mvµiv'f', J111. 'TO 'Tii' Tpof11.g 'TH1 ,tMl•<T" 1111. 'TDV i7r7ro1· )·tri<T811.1

"Tor lo6p101 7rfO<Ttt.')-op1uoµevov. Plutarch, when recording this ingenious ex­

planation as it was delivereg by its authors;writes that the Romans would do

this as Tpr.O.,v i'YA"" "'"'" µ1µ1/'µivcr. 1ftt1<Tl Att'Tfv.,,: so that he probably

found this line in Timreus, and it must then belong to a poet who, compara­

tiv~ly speaking, was of considerable antiquity.

.

534 Servius on lEn. I. 273.

'

35 v. 1232. foll. The author'has discussed the age of Lycophron in his

KleinB Schriften p. 438-451.

·

36 Theophrast. Hist. Plant. v.,9. Scyla.x, p. 3.

37 Theogon. v. 1011-15.

* See the passages quoted among the fragments of the Nl7r'Tf«.

38 See the latter part of the section on the founding of Rome.

39 In Dionys. 1. 72.142

HISTORY OF ROME.

to winter there, the captive Trojan women set fire to their ships ;

and that this compelled them to settle in those parts. The same story

was repeated by Heraclides Lembus so late as after the year 600;

and all who before the sixth century called Rome a Grecian city,

and the Romans Greeks, must have adopted views substantially the

same.

Now it seems clear to me, that the earliest Greek tradition, of

which we may certainly consider Hesiod as the representative, by

assigning Latium to Ulysses and his descendants, excludes the

Trojans from it: while a very ancient opinion, the histbrical value

of which I may leave to rest on its own merits, brought them along

with the sacred treasures they had saved, to the Siris. If so, there

is a very great probability, that, so long as the Palladium was be·

lieved to be preserved there, that is, until the taking of Siri.s ·.by

the Ionians, about the year 75, nothing was either said or sung

among the Greeks touching a more distant migration of those who

had escaped from the flames of Ilion. But irreplaceable sacred

treasures, such as the Palladium, if they are lost, are generally

given out to have returned to light somewhere else: and then it

often happens tha~ several are· set up as the true one. Thus a

favourable hearing might be won for the legend, that .£neas had

taken refuge with the gods of Troy' in parts far mdre remote than

the Siris, where they were still preserved: but to a Teucrian~ the

report was most acceptable, and he would feel a peculiar interest

in strengthening the opinion; that a germ of ·his race had taken

root in a distant region, and that a new people was springing up

from it.

In that distant region however must the report have had its rise :

for whatever use learned Romans in the age of Augustus ·might

make of Greek poets, to show that the tradition was early known·

to the Greeks, and thereby to establish its truth; still it would be

· extremely improbable that a belief which was adopted by the whole

nation concerning its own origin, should have been borrowed from

abroad; even if it could be traced from such poems as were gene­

rally known. This however is by no means the case here,' as it is

with the fable of Ulysses coming to Latium: the latter, it is very

easy to see, was fostered by the circumstance that the house of the

Mamilii, which was transplanted to Rome from Tusculum, where

they had been princes, deduced its lineage through Telegonus from

Circe. Above all is it improbable that a belief of this kind should

be of foreign origin, when it is re.cognlzed by the state; by, a state

too so proud, and so contemptuous toward every thing foreign, asHISTORY OF ROME.

143

Rome. Of its having been so recognized we find remarkable proofs,

in collecting the earliest traces of the Trojan legend among the

Romans; proofs drawn from times when Greek literature had cer­

tainly not found admission except with a few individuals.

To the opinion that this legend was generally pi:ernlent among

the Romans, it might be objected that of all the Roman festivals

not one related to lEneas and Ilion. For though a yearly sacrifice

was offered by the pontiffs and the consuls on the banks of the

Numicius to Jupiter lndiges 540 , this no way proves that the notion

of this god being, lEneas deffied, was of any high antiquity. But

ort the other hand the worship of the Penates at Lavinium is of the

greater importance, because, as has been more than once mentioned,

Timreus, who at all events writing for Sicelian readers could not

invent fables on Roman matters, as Megasthenes did concerning

India, related, about the year 490, that he had been told by certain

inhabitants of Lavinium, there were Trojan images of clay pre­

served in their temple.

The first transaction between the Romans and the states, of

Greece, that we have any account of, is the application of the

senate to the lEtolians for the freedom of the Acarnanians, grounded

on. the plea that the Romans were bound to protect those wh9se

ancestors, alone of all the Greeks, had. taken no share in the war

against their progenitors the Trojans 41 , Owing to Justin's super­

ficial inaccuracy our means for determining the time of this event

are in such confusion, that we canno't make out whether this em­

bassy was not sent even before 509; it must not be dated later than

515 or 516. It was about· the same time that the senate wrote a

letter to king Seleucus, demanding, as the condition of entering

into a treaty of friendship and alliance with him, that the llians,

the kinsmen of the Roman people, should be exempted from tri­

bute49. The llians were also included by the Romans in their first

treaty of peace with Macedonia, in the year 549 :' fifteen years

after, when the Scipios crossed the Hellespont, the Ilians boasted

540 The Veronese Scholiast on 1En. I. 260.

41 Justin xxvm. 1. 'When my history reache~ this point, I think I shall

be able to show that the circumstances related by Dionysius in 1. 51, which

refer still more specifically to the legend of lEneas, belong to this negociation,

not to a much later period.

42 Suetonius Claud. c. 25: where that excellent critic, Oudendorp, has

proved that Seleucus, who is there named without any specific epithet, must

have been Callinicus, who reigned after 509, OJ. 133. 3. The cause that led

him to seek the friendship of Rome, was his war with Ptolemy Euergetes, or

that with Antiochus Hierax. '144

~!STORY

OF ROME.

of their affinity with the Roman people, calling them their colony;

the Romans were delighted to see their mother country, and the

consul went up to the citadel to offer a sacrifice to Athene 548 , It

would be useless to collect later instances of the llians appealing

to this pretended affinity; an appeal made dishonestly, for, they

were originally au lEolian colony, and the Macedonian kings, who

at one time enlarged the city, at another changed its site, mixed up

a concourse of people from various nations with the old inhabitants'*.

The traces that remain of C. Nreviu!c', who had served in the first

Punic war, having given a circumstantial description in his poem

of the departure and voyage of ~neas and his father, will be found

collected a couple of pages further down.

By this combination of evidence I think I have established the

correctness of the view, that the Trojan· legend was not brought

into Latium by Greek literature, but must be considered as home·

sprung: and when I have added, that in spite of this it has not the

least historical truth,-any more than the descent of the Goths from

the Getes, or that of the Franks and Saxons from the Macedonians,

all which are .related with full faith by native w,riters,-nor even

the slightest historical importance, I should wish to quit the sub·

ject. But he who brings forward inquiries of this sort, is seldom

permitted to decline expressing his suspicion, if he has one, even

where no human sagacity can arrive at a decisive solution; as on

the question what after all can have been the origin of this tradition.

The following hypothes~s is with me' not a desperate attempt to

find some escape or other from a difficulty: it is my conviction:

yet without that necessity o( speaking, I should be silent on the

subject.

· Every thing we have to, build upon in the old mythological

stories, with a view to discovering the affinities of nations, indicates

that which existed between the Trojans and the Pelasgian tribes;

the Arcadians 44, the Bpirots 45 , the Oenotrians"' 6, but more e1.1peci­

ally the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians. Dardanus comes from the city of

Corythus to Samothrace, and from thence to the Simois: Corythus

in Virgil is a Tyrrhenian, according to Hellanicus and Cephalon a

543 Livy XXIX. 12.. XXXVII, 37. XXXVIII. 39. Justin XXXI. 8. Polybius

3.

.

' · '

" i;!cylax, p. 35. Strabo xm. p. 593. foll.

.

44' Dardanus according to one tradition is sprung from Arcadia (Diony•

1ius 1. 68.): .lEneas arrives in Arcadia.

45 Helenus settles, and .lEneos stays in Epirus.

46 Polieum on the Siris is built by the Trojans.

XXIII.145

HISTORY OF ROME.

Trojan 547: this interchange, the expedition of the Trojans to J,atium

and Campania, and the wanderings of the Tyrrhenians to Lemnos,

Imbrus, and the Hellespont, may safely be interpreted as designat­

ing nothing more than national affinity. That the 'Penates at La­

vinium were the gods of Samothrace, was an opinion almost uni­

versally received: so much so, that Atticus, though he did not

controvert the story about the migration of ..iEneas, concluded that

the Penates had been brought from that island 48 : so much so, that

the- Samothracians, like the Ilians, are said to have been recognized

as the kinsmen of the 'Roman people 49 : which statement must refer,

not merely to a belief entertained by individuals, but one declared

by the government. From this community of religion as of lineage

it might ensue, that more than one branch of the nation should call

themselves Trojans, and boast of being a· colony possessing the

'frojan sacred treasures, rescued by them from destruction. For

many generations after they had bowed under the yoke of the bar­

barians, Tyrrhenians would still visit. the holy land of Samothrace;

and there Herodotus may have heard citizens of Cortona and Placia

converse; there Lavinians and Gergithians may have mutually

awakened and ~trengthened the conviction of their kindred through

their common ancestor ..iEneas. The superiority maintained by

the religion. of the Tyrrhenians and by the arms of the Cascans

when the two nations united, is implied in· the line

Sacra Deosque dabo,; socer arma Latin us habeto ~

only that Latinus himself is to be considered as a Tyrrhenian.

The Trojan descent of the Elymians is no less decided and ac­

knowledged 'than that of those in Latium: so is that of the ancient

· ·

·

Sirites of P.olieum. ·

A belief of this sort does not req~ire long to become a national

one, in spite of the most obvious facts and the clearest historical

proofs; and then thousands would· be ready to shed blood for it.

They that would introduce it, need but tell people roundly, that it

is what their forefathers knew and befo~ved, only the belief was

neglected and sank into oblivion.

The legend was altered in a v~riety of ways: even imperfect

traces of its earliest form, before, like others, it experienced the

fate of being adulterated into a tale of something historically possi­

ble, demand a place in a history of Rome.

547 Parthenius, 34.

4!) Servius on lEn. 1m 12.

J.-T

48 Schol. Veron.' on lEn.

11.

717.HISTORY OF ROME.

Nrevius had related it in an episode of his poem on the Punic

war, of which fragments and notices are preserved 550 • It is evident.

that here too, as in Arctinus and Sophocles, Anchises and JEneas

quitted the.city before it was taken: their wives passed through

the gate in the night, with their heads muffled, in tears: many fol­

lowed their example: yet JEneas found .room for his train in a

single vessel, which Mercury had built for him •. The mention of

Prochyta shows that the Campanian poet accompanied the emi­

grants to the term of their voyage: the vicissitudes which Virgil

makes them pass through before they reach it, seem in the main to

be borrowed from Nrevius. We know that the tempest, which

here too assuredly was raised by Juno, the complaint of Venus to

Jupiter, and the promises of the future with which he consoles. the

fond goddess, were imitations of Nrevius: I have no doubt that he

likew.ise brought JEneas to Carthage ; from him comes the name

of Dido's sister, Anna; it must certainly be the Punic princess, ~ho

in him too "gently and prudently inquires in what manner JEneas

left Troy:" and it is exceedingly probable that the origin of the

national enmity had already been deduced by him from her fate •

.The shield of JEneas is a fiction which might c_ertainly be readily

suggested by that of Achilles: still it is at least likely, that the

shield representing the war of the giants in the poem of Nrevius,

was an earlier similar apI>lication of the Homeric conception to the

same hero.

In Varro's story the different parts bore the mark of sources and

times totally different. Of a novel kind are the escape of JEneas to

the citadel, and his being allowed by the capitulation to depart with

as much as every man can carry 51 ; whereupon instead of his treasures

he bears off his father who had been paralysed. by lightning, and,

when the Greeks in .admiration of the deed grant him a second

choice, the clay and stone images of the gods; in honour of which

virtue they permit· him· to take away whom and what he will in

550 The fragments here referred to.m11.y be found in Hermann's E!~menta

doctr. metricm m. 9. 31. p. 629. foll. '

l

• 51

Amborum uxores noctu Troia. de (read Troia.d) exiba.nt

Capitibus opertis, flentes,

, .

Abeuntes ambm lacrimis cum multis.

2. Horum sectam sequuntur multi mortales.

3. -bla.nde et docte percontat,

lEneas quo pacto Troiam urbem liquerit.

Dionyeius mixes up thie story with that of Arctinua. ,HISTORY ·oF ROME.

147

r;afety 551 • A feature belonging to the ancient legend, -and reminding

us of those of Asia, is, that the morning star continued visible to

the Trojans all day long during the voyage, and disappeared when

they had reached their destination on the Laurentine shore 53• It is

not known who was the author that assigned four years for the

duration of this voyage 54• By the sign just mentioned, and by the

fulfilment of the Dodonrean oracle 55, when his hungry band were

devouring the herbs on which they had spread their scanty meal,

...Eneas recognized the land allotted to him by fate 56 • According to

Cato, ...Eneas and Anchises (~or he also reached the promised

land), gave the name of Troy 5 7 to the first settlement, which did

not stand where Lavinium was afterward built. Henceforward

we may discover traces of the account such as it stood in the Ori~

gins. Latinus granted 700 jugers to the Trojans: here the measure

of a plebeian hide of land is traced back io the very first origin of

the Latin nation; and it is intimated that there were but a hundred

Trojans. The harmony between the natives and the strangers was

disturbed by the wounding of a favourite stag belonging to king

Latinus. Turnus 58 , prince of the Rutulians of Ardea, united his

arms with him against the hated foreigners. But the natives were

defeated, Lauren tum was taken, Latin us fell at the· storming of the

cita<lel5 9, and Lavinia became the prize of the conqueror.· As the

552

where

53

55

56

57

Servius on lEn. II. 636: and the Veronese· Scholiast on lEn. II. 717,

we should read humarw.rum for historiarum, and aurum for arma.

Servius on lEn. 1. 381. and II. 801.

54 Servius on lEn. 1. 259.

Servius on lEn. m. 256.

This oracle is known to Lycophron: v. 1250. foll.

Servius on lEn. 1. 6. VII. 158. ·

5~ His name is nothing else than a. La.tin form of Tyrrhenus : see above

p. 43: and the readings of the V~tican manuscript show that Dionysius, 1. 64,

called him TuppHvoc, as in 1. 70 he did the shepherd Tyrrhus. Here again we

have the same duplicity introduced into the notion of the mythical ages, the

Tyrrhenians and Trojans combating each other, as the Tyrrhenians and Pe­

lasgians, the Pelasgians and Sicelians did in different legends. That Turnus

in the name of Turnus Herdonius is a. Latin promome:n, is any thing but cer­

tain : the practice of placing an uncommon cogrnnne:n before the 7Wmen ob­

tained early; and Turnus would be like Sicu)us, or Auruncus, by the side of

very old Roman names in the Fasti.

59 This story must sound so strange to the reader of the lEneid, and it

must seem so incredible that Virgil should thus have altered the old tradition,

that I transcribe the passages quoted from Cato; they are all preserved by

Servius; on lEn. iv. 620. Cato <licit juxta Laurolavinium cum lEnem socii

prmdas agerent, prrelium commissum, in quo Latinus occisus est, fugit Tur.

nus.-on I. 267. Secundum Catonem-lEneam cum patre ad Italiam venisse,

f't propter inva.soa agros contra Latinum Turnumque pugnasse, in quo prmlio148

HISTORY OF ROME.

picture was drawn in gentler ages, we find nothing of these un­

happr nuptials with the man by whose arms her father fell, and

the marriage is combined with festivities fo honour of the peace:

although Virgil does not allow himself, like Dionysius and Livy,

to make the threatened battle go off in an alliance .and union. And

certainly Lavinia in other traditions also is the mediatress of an

alliance :with foreigners; being married to Hercules, under the name

of Launa, the daughter of Evander; to Locrus, as Laurina, the

daughter of the Oenotrian king, Latinus; nay £neas himself mar­

ries her, under the name of L::gma, the daughter of Anius king of

Delos*.

The coast· of Latium is a sandbank, where nothing grows hut

wood of t~e fir kind; and. £neas might well be grieved that his

fate had orought him to so poor a country 560• But he was reminded

of the oracle, that his colony; should be guided, like the Sabellian, by

an animal to its promised seat, when the pregnant s.ow that had been

designed for a sacrifice, broke loose, and escaped. to the bushes on

a more fruitful eminence. There it farrowed. thirty young ones;

and thus not only signified the site on which. Lavinium was to be

built, but also the number of years that was to elapse before Alba

should become the capital in its ste,ad, as well as the number of the

Latin townshipse•,

At the founding of Lavinium the Gods gave signs of their pre­

sence. The forest which occupied the site of the future city,

caught fire of itself: a wolf was seen 'bringing d:i-y pieces of wood

in his mouth to feed the flame; an eagle (anned .it with his wings.

But there came also a fox, that had dipped his tail in" water, and

tried to extinguish the fire: and it was .with difficulty that the two

former, after driving him several times away, were able to get rid

of him. This implied that the people whose mother city was

building, would have hard work to establish their power against its

obstiQ.ate adversaries. Bronze images of the three fated ani1X1als

were set up in the market place of Lavinium 61 •

·

·

·The poetical story now passes over centuries .to the epoch of the

Etruscan dominion in Latium: and it was not so careless ·as we

'

periit Latinus.-on rx. 745. Si veritatem historire requiras, primo prcelio in-·

teremtus est Latinus in arce.

* Dionysius 1. 59,

560 In agrum macerrimum littorosissimumque. Fabius Maximus in Ser­

vius on lEn. 1. 3.

61 The latter in Lycophron also 1253-1260.

62 Dionysius 1. 59.HISTORY OF ROME.

149

might 'be inclined to think it, when, knowing nothing of the Greek

chronology, it brought the building of Rome very near the time of

JEneas.

·

_Turnus on his defeat fled for succour to l\Iezentius, the Etrus­

can .king of Coore, being ent,itled to require it from him, as from his

superior lord, to whom the Rutulians paid the first-fruits due to the,

gods: others say this was the price they gave. for his assistance• 0•.

With this overpowering enemy JEneas, as king of the whole Latin

. nation, fought on the N umicius; Turnus fell, but the Latins fled;

1Eneas plunged into the stream, and was never. seen more: his

spirit, being purified from.earthly cares and exalted to divinity, was

adored as Jupiter Indiges: and so long as a recollection of the an­

cient rites was preserved, · the Roman consuls went every year

with the pontiffs and offered sacrifice to him on the banks of this

river 114• After this battle Lavinium was closely besieged and re­

duced to despair; until Jupiter accepted a vow of dedicating the

produce of the next vintage 65 to him: for the whole produre of, the

vineyards was demanded by the tyranny of Mezentius, or their

first-fruits by his impiety, as the indispensable condition of peace.

He fell by thE! hand.of lulus-Ascanius was not introduced till late

and out of Greek books-and the descendants of lEneas became'

lords of Latium.· ,

These wars .are described by Virgil, who softens .whatever is

harsh in them, and alters and accelerates the succession of events,

in the latter half of the 1Eneid, Its contents were certainly na­

tional; yet it is scarcely credible that even a Roman, if impartial,

should have received any genuin~ enjoyment from• his story. To

us it is unfortunately but too apparent how little the poet has suc­

ceeded in rais.ing these shadowy names, for which .he was forced

to invent characters', into living beings, ,like the heroes o( Hom~r.

·Perhaps )t is a :problem that defies solution, to form an !!pie poem

out of an argument whjch has not lived for centuries in popular

songs and .tales as the common. property of a nation, so. that. the

"

5G3 Here again there is a great fluctuation in. the story, According to

Verrius Flaccus (Fasti Prrenestini a. d. 1x. Kai. Mai.) Mezentius took all

the wine for ever as the price of his aid: in Ovid (Fast. 1v. 879. foll.) the

ground for the tax is the same, but he limits it to half the produce: Cato in

Macrobius, m. 5, says it was an act of impiety, not of rapacity: to the lattel'

the first-fruits offered to the gods would have been an insignificant object.

G4 Schol. Veron, on JEn. 1. 2GO.

I

I

65 The variations in Macrobius and Ovid, and the atf.f'mpts of Dionysius

to give a historical colouring to the affair, it would be idle to repeat.150

HISTORY OF ROME.

cycle of stories which comprises it, and· all the persons who act

a part in it, are familiar to every one. Assuredly the problem was

beyond the ability of Virgil, whose genius wanted fertility for crea­

ting, great as was his talent for embellishing. That he himself

was conscious of this, and was content to be great in the way

adapted to his endowments, is proved by his practice of imitating

and borrowing, and by the touches he introduces of his exquisite

and extensive erudition, so much admired by the Romans, and now

so little appreciated. He who puts his materials together elabo­

rately and by piecemeal, is aware of the chinks and crevices, which

varnishing and pvlishing conceal only from the unpractised eye,

and from which the work of the master, when .it issues at once

from the mould, is free. ' Accordingly Virgil, we may be sure, felt

a misgiving, that all the foreign ornaments with which he was

decking his work, though they might enrich· the poem, were. not

his own wealth, and that this would at last be perceived by pos­

terity. When we find that, notwithstanding this fretting conscious­

ness, he strove, in the way that lay open to him, to give a poem,

which he did not write of his own free choice, the highest degree

of beauty it could receive from his hands ; . that he did not, like

Lucan, vainly and blindly affect an inspiration which nature had

denied him; that he did not allow himself to be infatuated, when: he

was idolized by all around him, and when.Propertius sang:

Yield, Roma.D. poets, bards of Greece, give way,

The Iliad soon shall own a greater lay ;

that, when the approach of death w~s releasing him f~om the fetters of

civil observances, he wished to destroy what in those solemn moments

he could not but view with melancholy, as the 'groundwork of a

false repu~tion; we feel that this' renders him worthy of our esteem,

and ought to make Ui! indulgent to all the weak points of his poem.

The merit of a first attempt does not always furnish a'. measure of

a writer's talents: but Virgil's first youthful poem shows that he

cultivated his powers w'ith incredible industry, and that no faculty

expired in him through neglect. But it is wherever he speaks

from the heart, that we perceive how amiable and generous he was:

not only in the Georgics, and in all his pictures of pure still life; in

the epigram on Syron's villa: the same is no less visible in his way

of introducing those great spirits that shine in Roman story..

'

ALBA.

WHEN Jupiter in the lEneid is consoling the weeping godde1Ss,

.the mother of the hero, by revealing the future to her; and telling her

how the empire of her.son and. his posterity was to mount from

step to step, increasing in glory and greatness, up to Rome, to

which no limit and no term was assigned 588 ; the three years which

he promises for lEneas, refer, not to the interval between his land­

ing and his death, but to the duration of the little Troy on the La­

tian shore, until the two nations united and built Lavinium: though

the former period was also reckoned at the same number of years.

Thirty years afterward his successor led the. Latins from the

unhealthy low grounds on the coast to the side of Monte Cavo,

from the summit of which the eye commands a view more ample

than the dominion of Rome before the Samnite wars: in the light

of the setting sun it can reach Corsica and Sardinia, and the hill

which is still illustrated by the name of Circe, looks like an island

beneath the first rays of her heavenly sire. The site where Alba

stretched its long street between the mountain and the lake, is still dis­

tinctly marked: along this whole. extent the rock is cut away under

it right dowJ;J. to the lake. These traces of man's regulative hand

are more ancient than Rome. The surface of the lake, as it has

been reduced by the tunnel, now lies Car below the ancient city:

when Alba was standing, and before the waters swelled to a ruin·

ous height in consequence of some obstructions in the outlets, it

must have lain yet lower; for in the age of Diodorus and Diony·

'566 · JEn. 1. 261_:_279, It seems however as if three thousand years were

allotted to Rome: which, according to Servius on JEn. in. 284, was one of

the many periods assigned for the length of a great year : from a rough calcu­

lation about the periodical revolutions of' the heavenly bodies this was sup·

posed equal to a hundred times that of Satnrn. This statement has certainly

some foundation, though the reference to Cicero'• books de natura Deor>Lm

rests on an oversight.152

HISTORY OF ROME.

sius*, during extraordinary droughts, the remains of some spacious

buildings might be seen at the bottom, and the common people took

them for the palace of an impious king which had been swallowed

upt. Above the steep rock there was no need of a wall: the ap­

proaches on both sides might easily be barred. Monte Cavo was

the Capitoline hill of Alba; its summits required to be fortified, to

secure the town from above: and there is great probability in the

conjecture, that, as the citadel at Rome was distinct from the Capi­

toline temple, so the Rocca di Papa was the citadel of Alba.

This account concerning the origin of Alba stands and falls with

the Trojan legend: another tradition, according to which Lavinium

was founded by the Albans, in union with the Latin n11tion, has

been obscured by it, but may still ·be recognised. A recollection

was preserved among the ·Lavinians, that their city had been built

under the sovereignty of Alba by siX hundred families sent out for

that purpose 56 7, • The legend which tries to combine the two sto­

ries, is by no means ·an innocent poetical fiction; but was fabricated

with the express view of making out that Lavinium was the earlier

seat of the Penates. It states, that :Ascanius carried away these

gods with him, when he and all ·his people left Lavininm: but as

the images departed twice over from their new temple after its

doors had been closed, and returned to the forsaken 'one in the

desolate city, the Alban king yielded, and sent the settlers to take

up their dwelling round the sacred place.

I am not offering a hypothesis, but the plain result of unpreju­

diced observation, when I remark that Lavinium, as its name im­

plies, was the seat of congress for the Latins, who were also called

J,avines: .just as Panionium was that for the lonians ,in Asia.

When a legend contains names supposed to have belonged to indi­

viduals, this goes far toward giving it the look of being something

more than a fiction': hence mariy who othef'wise might still insist

. * . Dionysius 1 •. 71. .

t A similar legend is still current in the neighbourhood of Albano : its

outlines, 8s it was related to one of the translators by a peasant boy ~ho

guided him to Frascati, are as follows. Where the lake now lies, there once

stood a great city. Here,. when Jesus Christ eame into Italy, he begged

alms. None took compassion on him b~t an old woman, who gave him two

handfuls of meal. He bade her leave the city: she obeyed: the city instantly

sank, and the lake rose in its place. To set the truth of the story bey<md dis­

pute, the narrator added, Sta scr itto nei libri.

5G7 Dionysius 1. G7. · 'EZ"'''"''' f<l~eJ',,,..J ""'' itf"'' d.uToi; P,n«.r11.vT,;.n1;

·~ltr'fiOl,.111$TORY OF

R0~1E.

153

that the Trojan legend ought not to be absolutely rejected, may

perhaps change their views when it becomes clear to them that

Lavinia and Turnus are only personifications of two nations, and

that Lavinium is a more recent city than Alba. The same unpre·

ju<liced observation convinces me, from the number of the six hun­

dred families, that each of the thirty Alban hamlets, and each of

the thirty Latin towns sent wn: or rather that a connexion sub­

sisted, in consequence of which this was supposed to have been the

case 568 •

I have here spoken of two distinct unions, each consisting of

thirty places, the whole body of which might be called Latin: from

not making the same distinction, our historians have been led into

glaring contradictions with what they elsewhere assume to be true.

They cherish the opinion, that all the Latins proceeded from Alba;

as colonies the founding of which is ascribed to I,atinus Sylvius :

that these were the Prisci Latini, whose submission was demanded

by the Rom~n kings, on the plea of having succeeded to the su pre­

macy of Alba, and was enforced by Tarquinius .: and these Prisci La­

tini are designated as consisting like the others of thirty townscg.

And yet it is not to be mistaken that Laurentum and Ardea accord­

ing to the legend of lEneas existed long before Alba, even allow­

ing that Lavinium after its pretended restoration was regarded

as a colony: in like manner Tibur, as we see from similar legends,

was held to be older than Alba: and yet nobody would have

_doubted that all these belonged to the Prisci Latini, and to their

thirty cities. But though Livy and Dionysius contradict thcm­

sel ves, it was not so with the writers .they copied. Pliny, after

enumerating above twenty Latin towns whereof no trace remains,

subjoins to them a list of the Albian townships, consisting of the

Albans and thirty others whose names are alphabetically arranged:

5C8 That the word sexcenti should have been used to signify the greatest

possible,-or at least a very great number, is no longer surprising, when we re­

flect on the frequent occurrence of twice thirty, first among the Albans and

Latin$, and then among the Romans and Latins, where each unit contained

t<>n decuries. What completely fixed the usage, was, that for a long time a

Roman cohort consisted of six hundred men.

C9 Ab eo (Latino Sylvio) colonire aliquot deductw, Prisci Latini appellati.

Livy 1. 3. Tarquinius demands their submission as a right: quod, cum omnes

Latini ab Alba oriundi sint, in eo fredere teneantur quo res omnis Alban&

cum colonis suis in Romanum cesserit imperium. I. 52. Dionysius, m. 34,

speaking of Tullus Hostilius: '!rpllT~'" ei.11"01Tn'1..<1., ti' <rofl' .;..,,..;,.,u, <rt &<t.l

,;,,.~&ow, <1.v<rli, (,,.;;, A>..~<1.,) <rp1a'.&on<1. .,,.0>..'"· That the ;,,,.~,. ••,here a.re

the same as the ,.",,.0111.01 is proved by the particle "''·

1.-u

0154

. HISTORY OF ROME.

all these, he says, had of yore partaken along with the Latins in

the flesh of the victim on the Alban mount, and like them had pe­

rished570, Here again the name he gives them ofpopuli .(Jlbenses,

and their number, speak for themselves; and leave no doubt that

these, and not the important cities, were the thirty places said to

have been colonies from Alba. Many among them may have ac­

tually received Alban colonists, as Roman colonists were sent to

the places reduced by the first kings in the neighbourhood of Rome:

but on the whole it is evident that there was a division like that of

the thirty plebeian tribes under the legislation of Servius: they were .

the boroughs of a free commonalty.

Their partaking in the flesh of the victim along with the other

Latin states on the Alban mount, shows that the latter stood in the

same relation to Alba as they subsequently did to Rome. Most

assuredly they were depenclent neighbours, and thirty in number,

not however the very same which afterward el}tered into a confed­

eracy with Rome, but only some of these; and the number was

made up by several of the towns,· which, having fallen into the

power of the Romans, had become colonies or been destroyed, such

as l\fodullia and Cameria.

Thus the present investigation has gained the same cheering re­

sult, as has rewarded the labour spent on many out of which this

work has been composed : that which seems to be absurd, is so

only when we look at it superficially; and it covers a groundwork

of uncorrupted truth, which may be brought to light; so that a

critical treatment of history becomes much richer in facts, than the

credulous repetition of the stories that have been handed down.

No building erected by the ancient Albans has left any visible

ruins: of the temple of Jupiter Latiaris the very foundation-walls

have been destroyed, which probably must have belonged to the

earliest ages. But among the works executed by Alba one is still

the source of blessings at this day, as it was five-and-twenty-.hundrcd

years ago, and it will endure imperishably: but the present gene­

570 Pliny III. 9. Cum his camem in monte Albano soliti accipere populi

Albenses: Albani-.lEsulani, Acienses, Abolani, Bubetani, Boiani (perhaps

Bovillani), Cusuetani, Coriolani, Fidenates, Foretii, Hortenses, Latinienses,

Longulani, Manates, · Macrales, Mutucumenses, Munienses, Numinienses,

Ol!iculani, Octulani, Pedani, Polluscini, Querquetulani, Sicani, Sisolenses,

Tolerienses, Tutienses, Vimitellarii, Velienses, Venetulani, Vitellenses. I

have only altered the punctuation before and after .11.lbani, which in the edi­

tions makes nonsense of the passage, and amended JEsulani and Polluscini.

Of the whole thirty names only six or seven, which are here printed in italics,

occur in the list of the thirty towns given by Dionysius v. 61, even after

adopting ~he corrections of the Vatican manuscript and those of Lapus.HISTORY OF HOME.

155

ration have no suspicion that they are indebted for their most fruit­

ful fields to the prince of a city which, lying in remote obscurity,

even beyond the fabulous ages of Rome, has almost left its existence

a matter of doubt. The acknowledgement and gratitude due on

this account I challenge in behalf of the Cluilius, whose name ap­

pears in Roman history, but has been foisted into an extremely

unsuitable place.

The valley of Grottaferrata is, as our eyes. tell us, the site of a

marsh that has been drained, or rather of a lake that has been let

off, like the vallis Jl.ricina. Now we read of a vallis .fllbana under

the Tusculan hills 5 7 1 : and thi•s can be no other than that valley ;

which consequently belonged to the immediate territory of Alba. ·

The water from it is carried off by two channels: the one is a ·canal

which runs into the Teverone: the other a tunnel hewn through

the rock, half a mile long, in the grand style of very early ages,

leading to the Campagna7 9 , Here, where none but bad water is to

be got, and that too out of very deep wells, the water brought by

this dyke, though muddy, was at least very serviceable for the cat­

tle and the soil: its course at first ~as probably directed towards

the sea; but even in the time of the Roman kings it was turned into

the city, where it now flows through the valley of the Circus into

the Tiber, being called la JJ:larrana all the way from its origin.

The portion of this dyke known to the spot where the Romans

turned it off, is the Fossa Cluilia, so called after the Alban dictator

by whom this great work was executed: five miles from the Porta

Capena, on the Latin 'road and the Cluilian dyke, is the place

where Coriolanus encamped : and in this very spot, by the ruinous

hamlet of Settebassi, does the Latin road cross the Marrana.

The list of the Alban kings is a very late and clumsy fabrication;

a medley of names, some of them not even Italian ones, some of

them repetitions out of earlier or later times, others coined out of

geographical names; and with scarcely any thing of a story belong­

ing to them. We are told that Livy took this list from L. Corne­

lius Alexander the Polyhistor7 8 : hence it was probably this client

571 Livy m. 7. In Tusculanos colles transeunt-descendentibus ab Tus­

culano in Albanam vallem.

·

·

72 This is stated by Fabretti, an extremely trustworthy witness, De

aquis et aqureductibus n. 270: who however does not recognize the Cluilian

dyke any more than all his brother topographers. On the hill through which

the tunnel is carried, lies Centroni, an extensive ruin. Unfortunately I did

not read Fabretti's work till after my return from Rome; and I never heard

of that tunnel while I was there.

73 Servius.-on .IEn. vm. 330.156

HISTORY OF ROME.

of Sylla that introduced the imposture into history: the variations

between Livy's lists and others are not very material, and are no

proof at all of their having been more than one ancient source.

Some of the names may have been derived from older traditions:

some of the kings of the Aborigines also had names assigned

to them 5 7 4 ; and these were entirely different from those of the

Alban. Even the yel!rs that each of the Alban kings reigned,

were numbered: and the number so exactly fills up the interval

between the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome according to

the canon of Eratosthenes, as of itself to show the late age of the

imposture.

For in earlier times the Romans reckoned three hundred years

from the building of Alba to that of Rome7 5 : even if this number

occurred only in Virgil, still it would be perfectly clear that it was

a statement of much higher antiquity, and that he .did not invent

the arithmctical progression three, thirty, three hundred. He

might think himself justified in retaini~g what an earlier poet had

said: but he would never have been seduced by numerical symmetry

to assign dates, the inaccuracy of which he must have perceived

just as well as every schoolboy from the tables of Apollodorus or

Cornelius Nepos. But it is gratifying, and more than we could

have expected, to find that ingenious writer Trogus Pompeius, who

treated the origin of Rome, as he did the earliest history of other

nations, with discriminatihg freedom, reckoning in like manner no

more than three hundred years for Alba7 6 ; as did Livy himself,

when he assumed four hundred years for its duration until its de­

struction about the year 100 of Rome77, This however was not

the. only ancient chronological statement at variance with that of

the Greeks. According to one which Servius has recorded, 360

years elapsed between the fall of Troy and the building of Rome7s,

574 Stercenius for instance, unless the name be mispelt. Servius on lEn.

850.

75 lEn. I. 272.

76 Justin XLIII. 1. Alba qure trecentis annis caput regni fuit.

77 Livy I. 29. Quadringentorum annorum opus, quibus Alba steterat.

The same thing occurs iii Servius on lEn. 1. 272, as a difficulty : cum earn

quadringentis annis regnasse constet sub Albania regibus: and he solves it as

I have done in the text. Tanaquil Faber in a note on the passage of Livy

has observed its connexion with the line of Virgil ; and Duker on the same

passage refers to Dodwell de Cyclis, diss. x. p. 678, who has noticed almost

all the passages I have cited, and has perceived the nullity of the Alban line

of kings.

78 Servius on lEn. I. 267. I hope I shall not be promoting rnysticism

XI.HISTORY OF R0;\1E.

157

just as many as between the building of Rome and its capture by

the Gauls. Now we find two other 'statements, the combination of

which leads us to this second number, and at the same time recon­

ciles it with the former: the first is, that .LEneas lived seven years

after the fall of Troy, engaged in his wanderings or in war579; the

second, that Silvius could not obtain possession of the throne before

his fifty-third year 80 • · I would not pledge myself for the historical

truth of the story that a Silvian house reigned at Alba: but the fact

was assumed in the Alban records. The existence of such a house

presupposes that of a hero Silvius or Siluus. N O\V if the Latin tra­

dition, such as it was independent of the Trojan legend, maue Sil­

vius the founder of Alba, and three hundred years the interval

between the beginning of his reign and the building of .Rome; then

in order to introduce him into the Trojan legend, and to fill up the

interval of three hundred and sixty years between Troy and Rome,

it became necessary to take fifty-three years from the death of

.LEneas as the time during which Silvius, his posthumous son, was

unjustly excluded from the throne. And it is for the sake of recon­

ciling these native Alban Silvii with the Trojan legeHd, that the

posterity of Ascanius are removed out of the way by the abdication

of lulus.

From Silvius, their maternal ancestor, the Roman tradition de­

. rived the founders of the city; but it did not call the Romans a

colony from Alba.

and a childish love of trifling with numbers, when I remark the singular play

of chance, that there were just 360 years from the destruction of Rome by the

Gauls to the conquest of Alexandria, the foundation of the monarchy; and

the same number from the latter event to the dedication of Constantinople.

579 Dionysius 1. 65 : and Servius on ..!En. 1. 259; since he assumes four

years for the wandering of lEneas; to which must be added the three more

spent in the Latian town of Troy. In the ..!Eneid indeed the Trojans do not

reach Carthage till the seventh year of their voyage.

80 I am aware that Servius, on ..!En. vr. 770, relates this of Silvius

..!Eneas : but it seems quite evident that what was invented for the one Silvius,

has been transferred here to the other; who is wholly wanting in Ovid. The

same thing has happened in numberless instances.ROME.

VARIOUS TRADITIONS CONCERNING THE

FOUNDING OF THE CITY.

AMONG all the Greek cities built after the return of the Heraclids,

there was none so insignificant, that Ephorus, and the writers after

him who introduced accounts of the origin of cities into their gene­

ral histories, would have been unable to state specifically and with

sufficient certainty, from what people the colony had issued, and

who were the founders that led and gave laws to it; in far the most

cases they also fixed the epoch of the foundation. With regard to

Rome, the story ·of her foundation, though she is supposed to be

more recent than perhaps the greater part of those towns, and the

people from whom the eternal city originally sprang, are the very

points we are most ignorant of. But while it was suited to the

eternal city, that its roots should lose themselves in infinity, the

story told by the poets of the infancy and deification of Romulus

was no less in accord with the majesty of Rome. Its founder

could have been no other than a god.

Now while I acknowledge this with a feeling, the sincerity of

which none but a bigot, himself insincere, could seek to call in

question; and while I allow the heart and the imagination their

full claims; I at the same time assert the right of the reason, to

refuse to admit any thing as historical, which cannot possibly be

so; and, without excluding that noble tradition from its place at

the threshold of the history, to inquire whether it be in any degree

possible to ascertain what people the first Romans belonged to, andHISTORY OF ROME.

159

what were the changes attending the rise of that state, which, when

the light of historical truth begins to dawn, is Rome.

When the inhabitants of Roma, as their town began to emerge

from insignificance, so that they could. feel a pride in the Roman

name, looked back upon their dark period, and retraced the growth

of their community; it was natural for them to call the founder

of their nation Romus, or, with the inflexion so usual in their

language, Romulus. Supposing that there was in their neighbour­

hood a town called Remuria, inhabited by a kindred race, which

had been sometimes in alliance, sometimes ai war with them, and

which had fallen before tl1eir arms, they might consider its founder,

Remus, as the twin brother of Romulus, and as slain by him in a

fit of passionate irritation: and in proportion as their state estab­

lished itself under the peculiar character of a double state, the

more firmly fixed would be the notion which represented the city

as founded by twins. The story of Romulus might in other

respects have been the invention of foreigners, as well as of the

Romans themselves; but it is not so with this latter notion, which

does not occur in any other state, and is so peculiarly adapted to

Rome. And the story is proved to have sprung up on the very

site of the city, by the den of the shewolf, the fig tree at the roots

of which the sucklings were saved, by all the relics of Romulus,

and by that rich poem so much of which is connected with local

circumstance~ whereof foreigners knew not_hing. In what manner

all this gained a shape in the mind and on the lips of poets and

storytellers ; and how many generations passed away, during

which the traditions of other nations, and such perhaps as had long

been current, were applied to the origin of Rome, before that which

began as po,etry, became popular belief; these are points that we

must and may be satisfied to remain ignorant of. If the annals

were restored, ~nd received the chronological outline in wJ1ich we

find them, soon after the taking of the city by the Gauls, it is clear,

and indeed in other respects it does not admit of doubt, that even

thus early they represented Romulus as the first king.

Considering how few monuments have been preserved to us from

the early ages of Rome, we may regard it as an ancient testimony

of a belief living among the people and recognized by the state,

that in the year 458 bronze figures of the shewolf and the babe3

were set up near the Ficus Ruminalis ; the oldest and the finest

work of Roman art; which has reached us like the Homeric poems,

thoug:h so much that was more recent has been lost.

.

The story which settled as an article of popular belief, was, thatIGO

HISTORY OF ROME.

Rome had been built by twin brothers, who were the sons of a

princess deflowered by Mars, and who had been delivered by divine

protection from a watery death, and fostered anJ suckled by a she­

. wolf, the animal sacred to their sire. It was impossible that the

outlines of this tradition should not in course of time receive very

different modifications ; and there probably were still more than

the two main forms under which it appears to us, according as it is

connected with Alba and the Silvii, or with lEneas.

I defer yet awhile relating the former of these legends, which

every body knows, and which, if it were not in some degree inter­

esting to restore such features as· have been altered in the later re­

presentations, it would be sufficient to allude to : in the second,

which was adopted by N mvius and Ennius, the unfortunate princess

was called Ilia, the daughter of 1Eneas 581 , It may be conjectured

that in 'this also she was represented as a Vestal; else it seems·

there would have been no pretext f?r condemning her to death.

She was thrown into the Anio; ·out of which stream her fortune

rose again"~: the river god made her his bride 83 • Virgil's descrip­

tion of the generous brute, feeding and caressing the babes in her

den, was framed after Ennius 84 • This poet like other writers

called the tyrant Amulius; and that he bore the same name in

N mvius, seems hardly to be questioned; for there is a very corrupt

fragment which may readily be corrected by introducing this name,

but scarcely in any oth!)r manner 85 ; I cannot however discover the

slightest indication, whether the old poets supposed any affinity

between this Amulius and the house of lEneas; or how they ac­

counted for Ilia being his subject; or whether they made mention

of Ascanius or Silvius. In the fragment of Ennius Ilia is an or­

phan; for her father appears to her in a dream; her sister, to who~

in her disquietude she relates the nocturnal vision, is the daughter

of a Eurydice.

That. ingenious critic, Perizonius, whose subtile observations

were lost on his contemporaries, has shown that the mother of

Romulus, when she is called Ilia, is always the daughter of 1E11eas;

when Rea Silvia, an Alban princess; and that Ilia is never called

581

82

83

Od. I.

84

85

Hence came the story of lEmylia and Ares. Plutarch Romul. c. 2.

Post ex fluvio fortuna resistet: Ennius p. 124.

Servius on JE·n. 1. 274, and v1. 778. Acron and Porphyrius on Horace

3.

Servius on lEn. vm. G31.

See in Hermann Elem. doctr. metr. p. 631.HISTORY OF ROME.

161

Reasso: I add, that the reading Rhea is a corruption introduced by

the editors, who at a very unseasonable time bethought themselves

of the goddess: rea seems to have signified nothing more than the

culprit 8 7, The semblance of a proper name may indeed have arisen

early : at least it was certainly from some tradition that Virgil took

the priestess Rea, who bare Aventinus to Hercules 88 ; ·a duplicate

of the Alban Silvia, with a happier destiny ; and perhaps the daugh­

ter of Evander.

Rea Silvia has no necessary connexion with ..iEneas. That the

tradition concerning her is more ancient than the one concerning

Ilia, I conjecture, because the computation which makes 333 or 360

years intervene between Troy and Rome, is to all appearance at

least a. century and a half older than Naivius. The inexplicable

point is, how they who reckoned the years of Rome in thi~ way,

could adopt Ilia: when the Grecian computations, which extended

that interval to between 430 and 440 years, became generally

known, she necessarily disappeared. I look upon it as almost cer­

tain, that some unknown Greek poem, one of those which brought

Romulus close to the time of ..iEn,eas, was the means whereby Ilia

was imported into Latium.

A careless expression used by Plutarch, which in fact merely

asserts that one Diocles of Peparethus first made the story of Silvia

known to the Greeks*, has, from his simply adding that Diocles

was the writer mostly followed by Fabius, unaccountably given rise

to the notion that the story was the invention of this unknown

Greek, a person so insignificant that Dionysius has not even admitted

him into his host of Greek authorities. Nothing but Plutarch's

expressly asserting that Fabius, who was a senator, and whose

narrative coincided with the sacred songs 89 , had copied a Greek.,

and had himself avowed it, could compel us to yield to the evi­

dence of a fact so incredible: as no such evidence. exists, there is

nothing to prevent our supposing, that Plutarch only inferred what

he says from the agreement between the two writers, because

Diocles was perhaps a little the elder: nevertheless it was from

Romans that he heard, what the Greeks read for the first time in

his work.

Of the other Roman accounts, Dionysius mentions one, where

586

87

which

88

80

Excursus ~n lElian. V. H. VII. p. 510. ff.

Or the guilty woman: it reminds us of the expression, reafemina,

often occurs in Boccacio.

·

lEn. VII. 659.

* Romul. 3.

Dionysius 1. 79. See below note 616

1.-v162

HISTORY OF ROME.

Romulus and Remus are the grandsons of JEneas, and are delivered

up as hostages to Latinus, who leaves them a part of his king­

dom5e0: he also cites another which is copied from Cephalon 91 •

Among the Roman writers preserved to us, Sallust alone unequivo­

cally and expressly adopts the opinion which carries Rome back to

the Trojan times; undoubtedly his purpose was only to get rid of Ro·

mulus and the marveUous fable: it is a feature characteristic of such

writers, that in order to do this he admits the settlement of JEneas,

though no way more historical. If V elleius had spoken of the

armies of Latinus supporting his grandson Romulus at the found·

ing of the city, at the same time that he assumed the common era·

for the building, he would have confounded the two opinions in a

manner so thoughtless and so contrary to his custom, that we must

needs adopt the emendation proposed by Lipsius 99 ,

If the native legend however is simple in the main, the statements

of the Greeks as to the founder of Rome and the person after

whom it was named, present greater varieties than occur in the

case of any other city. It is clear that the Greeks were early

aware of the power and importance of Rome, and that too before

intercourse had made them acquainted with the Romans; so they

introducetl this people into their genealogies: but as nothing was

related of it in any poem of general 11otoriety, and it was not till

very late that the native legend crossed the sea, several writers

invented such stories as served to express their views. These

accounts do not indeed properly deserve to be called traditions;

and they might be passed over without any material loss to the

history: but as the reports of them_ are so utterly confused that no

slight pains are necessary to arrange them foi: a general view, and

as I have attempted to do so, I will allow him the inconsiderable

room which they require when reduced to order. Others will thus

be spared a troublesome task ; and unless a complete survey be

taken of them, they may seem to promise what they do not at all

afford 93 •

Among these fictions however we are by no means to class the

mention made of Rome by Antiochus, who related that Sicelus was

590 Dionysius r. 73.

91 Dionysius 1. 73. See below notes 600 and 610.

,

[)2 Adjutus legionibus Latinis avi sui; not Latini. VeiJeius 1. 8..

93 They are preserved by Dionysius 1. 72, 73; Plutarch Romul. 2. 3;

S ervius on lEn. 1. 274; and Festus v. Roma. Solinus has only made ex­

tracts, like Festus, but far more scantily, from Verrius Flaccus, who himself

i;eems chiefly to have drawn from Dionysius.HISTORY OF ROME.

163

flying from \hence when he came to the ltalian king Morges 594 •

Hereby he designates Roma to have been one of the chief cities of

the Tyrrhenian Siculians; so that he contradicts the opinion of its

Trojan origin; yet he is not on that account to be reckoned among

those who denied the settlement of the Trojans in Latium. Con­

nected with this view is the statement that Rome was founded by

the Pelasgians. They who held this people to be Greeks, said,

that being a warlike race they gave their city a name expressive of

their vigour: while such as looked upon them as an Italian tribe,

fabled that the first name was Valencia, and that afterward, when

Evander and ...:Eneas took possession of the country with their fol·

lowers who spoke Greek, it was exchanged for the corresponding

Greek word 95 • And according to that quality in traditions which

has been so often remarked, we must perceive that the Pelasgic

origin of Rome is implied in the legend that the author of the name

was Romus, a Latin tyrant, who had driven the Lydian Tyrrhe­

nians out of this regions 0• Many writers, says Dionysius, call

Rome a Tyrrhenian city 97: by this most of them, like Scylax,

probably understood an Etruscan; the earlier however may have

meant a Pelasgian.

With these exceptions, the Greeks who mentioned the founding

of Rome before Timams, were unanimous in opinion, that the city

was built immediately, or within a very few generations, after the

fall of Troy. But on one point they were divided: while most of

them considered the Trojans as the founders, either alone, or in

conjunction with the Aborigines; some on the contrary contended

for Greeks ; others for a mixed band of the two nations.

Among the advocates of the first @pinion but few named ...:Eneas

himself as the founder; a far greater number Romulus, whom they

described sometimes as his son (coming according to some writers

from foreign parts into Italy, according to others, born of an Italian

mother), sometimes as his grandson, or more remote descendant 98 •

594 Dionysius 1. 73.

95 Some anonymous writers in Plutarch: a Cuman chronicle in Festus:

Adeius (whose name apparently is mispelt) in Servius. The chronicle of

Cuma makes the Pelasgians proceed from Athens through Thespiw (in Breo­

tia) to the Tiber; while the Greeks gave their emigration precisely the oppo­

site direction. In the very corrupt passage of Festus .I venture, instead of

subjecti qui fuerint Caeximparum 'l!iri, unicarumque 'l!irium, to read subj. q. f.

Caci, improbi 'I!. un. 'I!.

96 Plutarch. This is another instance of an inverted fable.

97 Dionysius 1. 2~. Sey lax makes Tyrrhenia reach p.t)(.f' 'p.,p_~, ?rOAfoa,.

98 lEneas is supposed to be the founder by those who derived the name164

HISTORY OF ROME.

Callias, the historian of Agathocles, spoke of Romulus and Romus

as the founders of the city, calling them the sons of king Latinus

by a Trojan heroine, Roma, who had persuaded the women to put

an end to their wanderings by setting fire to the ships: the same

fable is alluded to by Lycophron 59 9• Even Cephalon of Gergithes,

the most ancient of the writers quoted, mentioned the names both.

of Romulus and Romus, as the two younger of the four sons of

iEneas, who is said by him to have died on the peninsula of Pal­

lene. Ascanius shares his inheritance with them ; whereupon they

emigrate, and found Rome, Capua, and two fabulous cities, Anchise

and 1Enea 600 • This was copied by a Roman whose name Diony­

sius does not mention; and who absurdly added, that this most

ancient Rome was afterwards destroyed, and was rebuilt by a second

Romulus and a second Remus.

Motley as are the changes that all the other circumstances under­

go in the Greek stories, they speak of the two brothers very early:

and hence, even when they wrote their Roman history according to

native accounts, the Remus of the Latins always goes with them by

the name of Romus.

With regard to the second opinion, which makes Rome a Gre­

cian city founded at the time of the return from Troy, I have already

of the city from his wife Roma j the daughter of Telemachus (Clinias in Ser­

vi us), of !talus, or of Telephus {Plutarch): Romulus, or Romus, or both of

them, the sons of .iEneas, and of Creusa, Priam's daughter (the old scholia

on Lycophron in Tzetzes on v. 122G ; probably also Cephalon, Agathyllus,

and Demagoras;in Dionysius) of Dexithea (Plutarch), of Lavinia (Apollodo­

rus in Festus) ; the grandsons of .iEneas, and sons of Ascanius (Eratosthenes

in Servius, Dionysius of Chalcis in Dionysius). To this account also belongs

Roma, the daughter of Ascanius: (Agathocles of Cyzicus in Festus). Ac­

cording to another account of the same Agathocles, Romulus is a still more

remote descendant of .iEneas: and one Alcimus (in Festus) called Romulus

the son of lEneas, but Rom us the grandson ofRomulus by Alba, and the founder

of the city. There is a connexion between the Trojan legend and that which

terms Rom us the son of Emathion, sent by Diomedes from Troy. Plutarch.

5[)9 v. 1252, 53: where we are clearly not at liberty to read i~o;tor pr.iµ~

'}tvo,, with some manuscripts, instead of '&~. 'Pr.iµ~' '}ivo,. Roma plays a

part in these fables under the most various forms. She sets fire to the ships

of the Trojans, or of the Greeks ; is the daughter of the virago who did so, of

Ital us, of Telephus, of Ulysses, of Telemachus, of Ascanius, of Evander (and

thus the same with Launa who married Hercules); a priestess who prophe­

sied to Evander (that is, Carmentis): and she is represented as wedded to

.iEneas, to Ascanius, and to Latin us.

600 Dionysius 1. 73. The name Anchise may perhaps have been formed

from Anxur.HISTORY OF ROME.

165

mentioned that it was related by Aristotle 601 • It is also implied in

the tale that a son of Ulysses and Circe was the founder of Rome 1 •

And this must have been the notion of Heraclides Ponticus 3 at the

beginning, and of king Demetrius Poliorcetes 4 soon after the middle

of the fifth century;. who cannot possibly have supposed that the

Romans were in any other respect of Greek origin, or a colony of

the latter strictly Greek tribes: besides according to the Greek way

of thinking, it was a politic method of acquiring influence over

powerful barbarians, who would not submit to be commanded, to

treat them as of Greek extraction: this was the last refinement of

flattery. By these accounts the Trojan legend is excluded: it was

only at a very late period that the Trojans, after they had entirely

disappeared, began to be reckoned among the Greeks : Scylax

terms the Elymians of Sicily Trojans and barbarians 5 • From this

Greek legend Roma and the burning the ships was introduced by

Callias into the Trojan one.

A similar medley prevails in Lycophron 6 , who introduces a band

of Mysians under the sons of Telephus, Tarchon and Tyrrhenus,

that is, of Tyrrhenians: Telephu3 himself was of Arcadian descent,

and the Ceteians were proba~ly a different people from the Mysians,

as the Meonians were from the Lydians. It also occurred, as

Dionysius informs us, in the chronicle which followed the succes­

sion of the Argive priestesses. In this legend the fouuders of the

colony are Trojans; in Lycophron. the brothers, the offspring of

lEneas; in the Argive chronicle lEneas himself: the Greeks are

companions of Ulysses. The latter hero continues to make his

appearance here, even in the poems of a later age : and he too was

made out to be connected with Romulus and Remus; since Latinus,

who in this shape of the story again is said to have been their father

by the Trojan heroine Roma, is termed the ,grandson of Ulysses

through Telemachus7, ·

601 Seep. 141. A writer, who related peculiarities of manners so insig­

nificant as the custon of greeting relativ~s with a kiss (Plutarch Qurest. Rom.

6. p. 2G5. b.), must have had more than a superficial knowledge of Rome,

though he ado 1 ;ted the legends of the Italian Greeks on its antiquities.

2 Romus (Xenagoras in Dionysius); Roman us (Plutarch). That Romus

is a national name here, is proved by those of his brothers Ardeas and Antias:

so that Xenagoras belongs to the number of those who asserted the Tyrrhe­

nian character of the city.

3 Plutarch Camill. 22.

4 Strabo v. p. 232. b: where we must read, 'l'ou' i<Aon<tc ""·A.

5 p. 3.

6 v. 1242. foll.

7 There are so'me other statements concerning the foundation of Rome,166

HISTORY OF ROME.

Apart from all these writers stand Syclax,-who applies the enno­

bling epithet i;.;..,l, to every city of Greek origin, even when de­

graded by barbarian conquest, and who calls the Elymians Trojans

-and others, who according to Dionysius. ascribed Rome to the

Tyrrhenians 608 : that is, if, like Scylax, they meant the Etruscans.

I have said that Tima:ms of Sicily seems to have been the first

historian among the Greeks who introduced Romulus and Remus

into history as remote descendants of JEneas. Ile wrote not many

years after Callias, but cannot have adopted his opinion; for Timmus

supposed the building of Rome contemporaneous with that of Car­

thage ; and he dated the latter nearly 380 years after the destruction

of Troy. Perhaps however· the same account was also given by

Hieronymus of Cardia, who in his history of Alexander's succes­

sors, written about the time of Timmus, gave a short relation of the

early history of Rome: Dionysius censures its meagreness, as well

as that of Timmus and Polybius, in whom the narrative was already

become more eopious 9• For himself he warns the readers of

those three writers not to suspect him of fabricating, should they

find more in him than what those three contained, but his warning

does not extend to the case of their refating what was totally differ­

ent. Yet even after their time the older Grecian legend was pre­

served among the philologers and readers of antique curiosities

who sprang up at Alexandria; among those who refused to draw

from any source but the early literature of Greece. Heraclides

Lembus, about the year 600, repeated Aristotle's account of the

Achmans and the captive Trojan women: the old scholia on Lyco­

phron, which perhaps, even in their original form, were of a still

later date, called Romulus and Ramus the sons of Creusa, the

daughter of Priam: nay, even Orus of Thebes, who cites Cepha­

lon, describes them as the sons of JEneas and founders of Rome 10.

which cannot be adapted to this arrangement: Romus is called by Antigonus

in Festus the son of Jupiter; by an anonymous author in Dionysius the son

of !talus and of Electra, the daughter of Latinus: that is to say Rome is a

primeval Italian and a Trojan city.

8 Peripl. p. 2. See above note 5!)7.

9 1. 7.

10 Etymolog. Magn. v. K«?Tu• and 'p,;p.•. Compare Sylburg's note.

A remarkable instance of the way in which the fables received from Italy

were confounded with each other, is afforded by the account taken from one

Promathion in Plutarch; where the legends concerning the birth of Romulus

and that of Servius are mixed up together in the strangest manner.ROM ULUS AND NUMA.

THE old Roman legend ran as follows : Procas king of Alba left

two sons : Numitor,, the elder, being weak and spiritless, suffered

Amulius to wrest the government from hirn, and reduce him to his

father's private estates. In the possession of these he lived rich,

and, as he desired nothing more, secure : but the usurper dreaded

the claims that might be set up by heirs of a different character.

He therefore caused Numitor's son to be murdered, and appointed

Silvia, his daughter, one of the vestal virgins.

Amulius had no children, or at least only one daughter; so that

the race of Anchises and Aphrodite seemed on the point of expiring,

when the love of a god prolonged it, in opposition to the ordinances

of man, and gave it a lustre worthy of its origin. Silvia had gone

into the sacred grove, to draw water from the spring for the ser­

vice of the temple: the sun quenched its rays ; the sight of a wolf

made her fly into a cave 61 i; there Mars overpowered the timid vir­

gin; and then consoled her with the promise of noble children, as Po­

sidon did Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus. But he did not protect

her against the tyrant, nor did her protestations of her innocence save

her : the condemnation of the unfortunate priestess seemed to be

exacted by Vesta herself; for at the moment of the childbirth her

image in the temple hid its eyes, her altar trembled, and her fire

died away 19 : and Amulius was allowed to command that the mo­

ther and her twin babes should be drowned in the river 13 • In the

611 I insist in behalf of my Romans on the right of taking the poetical

features wherever they are to be found, when they have dropt out of the

common narrative. In the present case they are preserved by Servius on

1En. 1. 274: the eclipse by Dionysius u. 56, and Plutarch Romul. c. 27.

· 12 Ovid. Fast. m. 45.

13 In poetry of this sort we have no right to ask; why she was thrown·

into the river ?-whichever of the two it may have been :-and not into the

Alban lake?168

HISTORY OF ROME.

Anio Silvia exchanged her earthly existence for deity: and the river

was enabled to carry the bole or cradle wherein the children were

laid, into the Tiber, which had at that time overflowed its banks

far and wide even to the foo~ of the woody hills. At the root of

a wild figtree, the Ficus Ruminalis, which continued to be preserved

and held sacred for many centuries at the foot of the Palatine, the

cradle overturned. A shewolf had come to slake her thirst in the

strer.m; she heard the whimpering of the children, carried them

into her den hard by 614 , made a bed for them, licked and suckled

them: when they wanted something more than milk, a woodpecker,

the bird sacred to Mars, brought them food: other birds conse­

crated to auguries hovered over the. babes, to drive aw~y noxious

insects. This marvellous spectacle· was beheld by Faustulus, the

shepherd of the royal flocks: the shewolf gave way to him, and

resigned the children to human nurture." Acea Larentia, the shep­

herd's wife, became their fostermother; they grew up along with

her twelve sons 15 on the Palatine hill, in straw huts which they built

themselves: that of Romulus was preserved by continual repairs

down to the time of Nero, as a sacred relic. They were the most

active of the shepherd lads, brave. in fighting against wild beasts

and robbers, maintaining their right against every one by their

might, and converting might into right. Their spoil they shared

with their comrades ; the adherimts of Romulus were called Quinc­

tilii ; those of. Remus Fabii : and now the seeds of· discord were

sown. Their wantonness engaged them in disputes with the shep­

herds of the wealthy Numitor, who fed their flocks on mount Aven­

tine : so that here, as in the story of Evander and Cacus, we find

the quarrel between ·the Palatine and the Aventine in the tales of

the remotest times. Remus was taken by a stratagem of these

neighbours, and dragged to Alba as a robber. A foreboding, the

remembrance of his grandsons awakened by hearing the story of

614 It is remarkable how even th'ose who did not renounce the poetry of

the narrative, endeavoured to reduce it to a minimum; to the fostering care

of the wolf at the moment when she first found the little orphans by the Ficus

Ruminalis: as if in this case, as well as that of S. Denis, every thing did not

depend on the first step. The Lupercal itself bears witness to the genuine

form of the fiction; and the conception of the two poets accorded with it.

Virgil gives a description of the cave of l\iavors: Ovid sings (Fast. m. 53.),

Lacte quis infantes nescit crevisse ferino, Et picum expositis sape tulisse cibos.

· Nor did the poetical feature escape Trogus: cum smpius ad parvulos reverte­

retur. The story of the woodpecker and its {"'µfa-µ"""" could not have beec

invented of newborn infants.

15 Masurius Sabinus in Gellius N. A. v1. 7.HISTORY OF ROME.

16!)

the two brothers, restrained N umitor from a hasty sentence: the cul­

prit's foster-father hurried with Romulus to the city, and told the old

man and the youths of their mutual relation. The youths undef"

took to avenge their own wrong and that of their house: with their

trusty comrades, whom the danger of Remus had summoned into

the city, they slew the king ; and the people of Alba became again

subject to the rule of Numitor.

This is the old tale, such as it was written by Fabius, and

sung in ancient sacred lays tlown to the time of Dionysius 616 , It

certainly belongs to any thing rather than history: its essence is

the marvellous; we may strip this of its peculiarities, and pare

away and alter, until it is reduced to a possible every day incident;

but we ought to be firmly convinced, that the caput mortuum which

will remain, will be any thing but a historical fact. .Mythological

tales of this sort are misty shapes, often no more than a Fata Mof'."

gana, the prototype of which is invisible, the law of its refraction

unknown ; and even were it not so, still it would S\lrpass any

powers of reflection, to proceed so s~btly and skilfully, ~s to divine

the unknown prototype from these strangely blended forms. But

such magical shapes are tlifferent from mere dreams, and are not

without a hidden foundation of real truth. The name of dreams

belongs only to the fictions imagined by the later Greeks, after the

tradition had become extinct, and when individuals were indulging

a wanton licence in altering the old legends; not considering that

their diversity and multiplicity had been the work of the whole

people, and .was not a matter for individual caprice to meddle

with.

Love for the home that fate had assigned them, recalled the

youths to the banks of the Tiber, to found a city there. The ter­

ritories of the more ancient towns in the neighbourhood, Antemnre,

Ficulea, Tellena, confined them to a narrow district; and that of

Rome cannot be conceived to have extended at first in the direction

of Alba so far as Festi, a place between the fifth and sixth mile­

stones; where, as to the border of the original ager Romanus, the

Ambarvalia were solemnized yearly in the reign of Tiberius 1 7,

The shepherds, their old comrades, were their first citizens ; the

story of their being joined by Albans, nay even by Trojan nobles,

is certainly no part of the ancient tradition: the Julii and other

similar houses do not ~ppear till after the destruction of Alba.

1

1. 79. b,, b rro7r 7rtLTff?1~ Up.1 ,u U;rQ l'UJµ~J.u1·

J 7 Strabo v. p. 230. a.

· 616

1

1.-w.

iTI

•xi l.'Vv

f.f"liTd.l.170

lllSTORY OF ROME.

Being left to themselves, with equal authority and power, the

brothers now disputed which was entitled to the honor of being

the founder of the city, and of calling it after his name Roma or Re­

moria; and whether it was to be built on the Palatine or the Aven­

tine; or, according to another tradition, whether on the Palatine,

or four miles further down the river 618 • Each observed the hea­

vens from the top of his chosen hill: he whom the augury should

favour, was to decide as king. A person who sought for auspices

used to rise in the stillness of midnight, to determine in his mind

the limits of the celestial temple, and then wait for presaging· ap­

pearances. The whole day passed, and the following night: at

length Remus had the first augury, and saw six vultures flying from

north to south ; but at sunrise, when these tidings were announced

to Romulus, a flock of twelve vultures flew by him. Right was

on the side of his brother: but Romulus boasted of the double

number of his birds as an evident sign of divine favour ; and his

party being the stronger confirmed his usurpation 19•

It seems as if this augury of the twelve fated birds had origin­

ally been a poetical mode of expressing an Etruscan prophecy,

that a period of twelve secles was allotted to Rome: and as if it

was not till afterward that the allegory assumed the shape of a

legend, and was then expounded back again into its first meaning:

this was done so early as Varro's time by a celebrated augur named

Vettius 20 , The prophecy was never forgotten, and in the twelfth

century of the city, which is divided between the fourth and fifth

of our era, filled all the adherents of the old religion with alarm;

as every thing was visibly verging toward ruin, and their faith was

oppressed. According to Varro's Fasti the twelfth secle, if each,

after the custom of the later Romans, was assumed equal to a cen­

tury, would end with the year 446: ~ut although the train of

618 This would probably be the hill beyond S. Paolo. I have no doubt that

there was a place called Remoria; and this eminence is very well adapted

for a town, the air being healthy. Ennius too must have had a more distant

spot in his mind ; since with him Romulus makes his observations on the

Aventine, p. 19. And this accords with the legend of the javelin which Ro·

mulus, after taking the auguries, hurled to the Palatine, where it caught root,

and where the cornel-tree that sprang from it was shown down to the time

of Caligula. Servius on lEn. m. 46. Plutarch Romul. c. 20. Argum.

Metam. xv. fob. 48.

'

19 Ennius says nothing of the birds seen by Remus: much less does his

account admit fraud on the part of Romulus.

20 Varro 1. 18. Antiquitatum, in Censorinus, 17. From his name he

should be a Marsian. See Vossius on Velleius 11. 16.HISTORY OF ROME.

171

calamities that broke in with the fifth century of our era, gave an

air of probability to this interpretation in the minds of those who

were then living, a Tuscan aruspex would nevertheless have re­

jected it. As an average· number for secles of an indefinite length

determined by the life of man, and as an astronomical cyclical

period, 110 years were properly the measure of a secle621. This

brings the sum of the years contained in twelve secles to 1320, and

the end of the term assigned to Rome to an epoch when it may be

said with strict truth that the city of Romulus ceased to exist.

According to Varro's chronology the twelfth secle would have

ended with A. D. 566: according to Cincius, to whom the Etrus­

can, on grounds that will appear further on; would probably have

given the preference, with A. n. 591, the first year of the pontifi­

cate of Gregory the Great. In either case the time expires in the

latter half of the sixth century of our era: when the. city, after

having been more than once taken by storm, saw the remnant that

the sword had spared, wasting away by hunger and pestilence;

when the senate and the old families which were still left, were

exterminated by Totila, so that scarcely the name of senator, or a

shadow of a municipal constitution survived; when Rome was

subject to the degrading rule of an Eastern exarch who resided at

a distance from her; when the old religion, and along with it all

hereditary usages, were abolished, and a new religion was preach­

ing other virtues and another kind of happiness exclusively, and

was condemning sins unreproved by the old morality; when the

ancient sciences and arts, all old memorials and monuments, were

looked upon as an abomination, the great men of ancient times

as doomed to hopeless perdition; and Rome, having been disarmed

for ever, was become the capital of a spiritual empire, which after

the lapse of twelve centuries we have seen interrupted in our days.

The Tuscan would perhaps also have interpreted the six secles

corresponding to the legitimate augury of Remus, as signifying the

duration of the legal and free constitution, and have reckoned them

down to the times of Sylla or of Cresar: for every interpretation

of a prophecy requires free room; and this might have been justi­

fied in either way.

The foundation-day of Rome was celebrated on the festival of

Pales, the 21st of April; when the country people, the earliest in­

habitants of Rome, besought the goddess of shepherds for the pro­

tection and increase of their flocks, and for pardon for the involun­

2Gl

Censorinus 17. See above, p. lo:l.172

HISTORY OF ROME.

tary violation of consecrated spots, purifying themselves by pass­

ing through a straw fire: like those which it was the custom in the

middle ages to kindle on May day.

Romulus now set about determining the pomrerium 622 : he fixed

a copper share. on a plough, yoked a bullock and a heifer to it, and

drew a furrow round the foot of the Palatine, so as to include a

considerab1e compass below the hill. The person who thus marked

out a pomrerium, was to guide the plough so that all the clods

should fall inward: he was followed by others who took care that

none was left turned another way. In the Comitium 28 a vault was

built under ground, and filled with firstlings of all the natural pro­

ductions that sustain human life, and with earth which each of the

foreign settlers had brought with him from his home : this place

was called JJfundus, and was the door of the nether world, which

was opened on three several days in the year for the spirits of the

dead 24 •

On the line of. the pomrerium the city was enclosed with a wall

and ditch. Remus, still resenting the wrong he had suffered, leapt

in scorn over the puny rampart: for this he was slain by Celer, or

by Romulus himself; and his death was an omen that none should

cross the walls but to his own destruction. Romulus however

abandoned himself to grief, rejecting comfort and food; until the

shade of Remus appeared to their foster-parents, and promised to

be reconciled to him on condition of a festival for the souls of the

departed 2 s. As a permanent mark of honour, a second throne was

set for him by the side of the king's, with the sceptre; crown, and

other badges of royalty 26 •

The new city was open to receive every stranger: exiles, and

fugitives for homicide, who commonly could only get leave to dwell

as sojourners in a foreign land, even runaway slaves and criminals,

were welcome 27. These fellows however were single au'd wanted

wives; Romulus e1~deavoured to form treaties with the neighbour­

622 I reserve what I have to say on the signification of the p~~rerium,

and on the course of the one attributed to Romulus, that I may not interrupt·

the account of the legend. See the text to note 734.

23 A line drawn between 100 and 200 paces to the south of and parallel

with one running from S. Maria Liberatrice to what was once called the tem­

ple of concord (the Basilica of the Cresars), would pass through the Comitium.

2-1 Plutarch Romul. c. u. Festus v. Mundus.

·

25 The Lemuria. Ovid. Fast. v. 461-480.

26 Servius on 1En. 1. 276.

27 Still in ancient times this rabble cannot have been conceived to have

formed any considerable part of the population: for the asylum was a smallHISTORY OF ROME.

173

ing tribes, such as were necessary in It~ly as well as in Greece, to

render marriages with foreigners legitimate 628 : but the wild suitors

were regarded with dislike, and the dangerous horde they belonged

to with disquietude. The refusal was insultingly expressed; they

who gave it, fancied, like all who think haughtily of themselves,

that the humbled party would feel conscious of deserving the re·

buke for their presumption. Hence they conceived no suspicion,

when Romulus proclaimed that festive processions and games were

to be held in celebratiou of the Consualia 20, and invited his neigh­

bours, the Latins and Sabines, to attend them ; for Rome stood

where the territorirs of those two nations ran into one another.

A number of people came as to a fair; indeed festivals of this kind

were always fairs, and in Italy, as in Greece and in the East, were

under the safeguard of religion: but neither religion nor the laws

of hospitality protected the deceived strangers, and their maidens

were carried offJ 0 , The old legend spoke of no more than thirty

captives; this cannot be denied, but it has been admitted with re·

luctance 81 ; and even by Livy, though he tells the tale of these times

like a history, without meaning it for one; his poetical feeling ena­

inclosure on the Capitoline hill, and in its quality of asylum could only af­

ford protection within its precincts.

()28 From this it is clear that in this earliest legend Rome was no way

considered as a colony of Alba or as a Latin city : much less was any thing

said about an emigration of noble houses. Had Rome been a colo~y, it would

have had the right of intermarriage with all the Latin cities from the first.

I am here still speaking only of that consistency in which old poetical fictions

are by no means deficient, and not as of historical events.

2!J This festival, sacred to the god of secret deliberations, was solemnized

symbolically by uncovering an altar buried in the earth: hence the history of

Romulus has been enriched with the tale, that his finding this altar was the

occasion or pretext of the festival.

30 The rape was almost universally placed in the fourth month of the

first year of the city. But this must not be considered.as resting on any tra­

dition : the Consualia being celebrated in Sextilis, there were four months

between that and the Palilia. Cn. Gellius alone dated the rape in the fourth

year; and not without the approbation of Dionysius (u. 31.). Now here we

have an evident falsification: his gl)od sense told him it was impossible a

stroke of this sort should have been hazarded before the city was fortified, and

he made use of the number which had been assigned to the month ; conclud­

ing that the old legend had confounded the month and the year.

31 Plutarch Romul. c. 14: and Livy I. 13. Id non traditur, cum haud

dubie aliquanto numerus major hoc mulierum fuerit, rotate an dignitatibus an

sorte Iectm sint, qum nomina curiis darent. He did not observe how uni­

formly this number, thirty, runs through the legends as well as the institu­

tions ofanciPnt Rome.174

IIISTORY OF ROME.

bling him to comprehend these ages better than those in which

historical light was beginning to dawn.

The nearest three of the outraged cities, which belonged to the

Latins or Siculians, Antemnre, Crenina, and Crustumerium, took

up arms without concert; while the Sabines lingered until they

had all three fallen one after the other, and Romulus had won the

royal spoils from Acron of Camina: whose Greek name is a proof

that Pelasgian recollections lived on in the legends of very late

times. At last the Sabine king, Titus Tatius, led a powerful army

against Rome. Unable to resist him in the field, Romulus retreated

into the city, over against which the Saturnian hill, afterward called

the Capitoline, was fortified and garrisoned: a swampy valley, the

site of the Forum, parted the two hill;;. The golden bracelets and

collars of the Sabines 632 dazzled Tarpeia: bribed by them she opened

a gate of the fortress entrusted to the command of her father : the

load of the ornaments hurled upon her crushed her, and she expia­

ted her crime by her death. Yet her grave was to be seen upon

the hill; and it was asked by wrongheaded sceptics, whether it was

. conceivable that such an honour should have been paid to a trait­

tress? they forgot that the hill continued in the hands of the Sa­

bines.

The remembrance of her guilt is still living in a popular legend.

The whole of the Capitoline hill is pierced with quarries or passa­

ges constructed in very remote times through the loose tufo : many

·of these have been blocked up ; but near the houses erected upon

the rubbish which covers the hundred steps, on the side of the Tar·

peian rock facing the forum, besides some ruinous buildings known

by the name of the Palazzaccio, several of them are still accessible.

A report that there was a well here of extraordinary depth, which

must have been older than the aqueducts, since no one would have

spent the labour on it afterward, and by which no doubt the garri­

son was supplied with water during the siege by the Gauls, attracted

me into this labyrinth : some girls from the neighbouring houses

were our guides, and told us as we went along, that in the heart of

632 The Roman poet conceived the poor Sabines to be covered with gold,

as Fauriel observes that the bards of modern, Greece do their Clepts. Here

are the marks of popular poetry too clear to be mistaken by any who have

eyes to see: it is in the very spirit that created all the splendour and the trea­

sures in the house of Menelaus.. The fiction in Propertius (1v. 4.) seems to

be a transfer, unwarranted by any tradition, from the story of the Mt>garian

Scylla.lllSTORY OF ROME.

175

the hill the fair Tarpeia 633 is sitting, covered with gold and jewels,

and bound by a spell; that no one, try as he may, can ever find

out the way to her; and that the only time she had ever been seen

was by the brother of one of the girls. The inhabitants of this

quarter are smiths and common victuallers, without the slightest

touch of that seemingly living knowledge of antiquity, which has

been drawn by other classes of the Romans from the turbid sources

afforded by vulgar books. So that genuine oral tradition has kept

Tarpeia for five and twenty hundred years in the mouth of the

common people, who for many centuries have been totally strangers

to the names of Clrelia and Cornelia.

The Sabines next attempted to storm the city: it was on the

point of falling; the gods disputed what should be its destiny and

that of the world: Juno, who was adored with peculiar honours at

Cures, was favourable to the Sabines and hostile to the race of

JEneas; she opened a gate, which no human force could shut; but

at the command of Janus a boiling spring gushed forth, and repelled

the assailants*.

The next morning Romulus made an equally fruitless attack on

the lost fortress : but it was not in yain that he vowed a temple to

the flight-staying Jupiter, when his troops had been repulsed and

had fled to the gate at the bottom of the Palatium. During the

whole day victory continued to shift from one army to the other, and

neither despaired of securing it: when the Sabine women, no longer

wishing for revenge, the time of which was past, but for a recon­

ciliation between the fathers of their children and their own, rushed

in betwixt the contending armies and brought about a peace. The

two nations were to be inseparably united into the one state of the

Romans and the Quirites, each however continuing distinct and

under its own king.: their temples and religious ceremonies were

to be common to both.

The women had been the preservers of Rome: Romulus re­

warded them with honours for themselves and the whole class of

matrons. The curies were called by the names of the Sabine

wives : an exemption was guaranteed to ~hem and to all married

women for ever from every kind of household service except spin­

ning and weaving. Every man was to make way for a matron that

met him; whoever hurt her modesty by a wanton word or look,

633 The expression la bella Tarpeia, like la bella Cen,ci, implies a feeling

of tenderness for an acknowledged criminal.

* Macrobius Satumal. 1. 9.176

HISTORY OF ROME.

was guilty of a capital offence; the right of inheriting on the same

footing with a child634 was.conferred on the wife if she wished it:

but if any husband should abuse this parental power, and sell his

wife as he was allowed to sell his child, he was devoted to the in­

fernal gods. He might divorce his wedded wife for adultery, for

poisoning his children, or for counterfeiting the keys entrusted to

her: if he put her away without any of these grounds, one half of

his property was forfeited to the woman he had injured, the other to

the temple of Ceres35 •

The Sabines built a new city on the Capitoline hill which they

had taken and on the Quirinal: Tatius resided on the former, and

dedicated temples there to his native gods. The two kings and

their senates met for important deliberations between the Capitol

and the Palatium; and the ruling houses in their combined assem­

blies must have done the ~ame : hence the name of the Comitium.

Even in tlte old tradition there seems to have been some inconsis­

tency, as to whether Tatius continued to be king of the whole

Sabine nation, or the joint sovereignty was confined to the citizens

of the double city. That sovereignty did not last long: Tatius was

killed, during a national sacrifice at Lavinium, by, some Lauren tines,

to whom he had refused satisfaction for certain acts of violence

committed by some of his kinsmen: his grave was on the Aven­

tine36. Henceforward Romulus ruled over both nations. His dila­

toriness in accepting the atonement offered for the murder of his

colleague brought a pestilence upon the Romans and the Lauren tines,

which did not cease until the guilty persons were delivered up on

both sides.'

This is the end of the heroic lay, which, beginning with the

establishment of the asylum, forms a poetical whole. All the in­

cident<! are related either with determinate and nearly c?nsecutivc

634 By the conventio in manum. See Dionysius n. 25.

35 Plutarch Romul. c. 22. This head of law seetns from all analogy to be

of plebeian origin (see the .text to note 1373) : but the tradition connecting it

with the poetical tale of the Sabine women is unquestionably ancient, and

very plea.sing. When a marriage had been solemnized with the religious

sanction of the confarreatio, a divorce was so difficult a.s to be scarcely possi­

ble ; but the husband might put his guilty wife to death : when the marriage

had not been solemnly contracted, so as to produce the conventio in manum,

the parties were always allowed to separate at discretion.

36 Plutarch Romul. c. 23. There is an evident connexion between this

legend and the statement that the Sabines received settlements on the Aven­

tine from Romulus (Varro in Servi us on lEn. v11. 657) :, it is no less obvious

that the latter arotic from confounding the, Quirites with the pll'bl'ians.IIISTORY OF ROME.

177

epochs, or without mention of the interval between them, but in

such a way, that in the old tradition they must have been meant to

follow very closely on one anotlier, and to have been accomplished

with great rapidity 68 7. Totally distinct from these events stands the

account of the Etruscan wars in the long period which intervened

before the death of Romulus; a:i account unhistorical, clumsy, fab­

ulous as the romances of chivalry, without the spirit or features of a

poem. One of the campaigns, in which Fidenre is taken, is related

almost precisely in the same way as the capture of the same city in

the year 328 : such transfers from a historical to the mythical age

were frequently resorted to by the barren invention of the annalists.

Another campaign against Veii, after a number of battles, in one of

which more than half the fifteen thousand Etruscans left on the

field fall by the hand of Romulus, is ended by a truce for a hundred

years, purchased by the cession of an extensive territory and of the

saltmarshes near the coast. These wars, spread through a reign of

thirty-seven years, will never enable any one who looks upon these

accounts as historical, to recognize Romulus as the restless warlike

prince, that fame has always described him. For poetry they are

enough: thus in the German national epic poem, the Niebelungen

lay, several years are allowed to elapse without any exploits, after

the hero's fame has once been established.

The poem appears again in its full splendour when Romulus is

removed from the earth: au oetween ii;i a sorry addition.

In the old legend, which Cicero and Livy have preserved in the

greatest purity out of Ennius, there is nothing about the government

of Romulus, which if not unblemished was glorious, degenerating

into violence and tyranny. Tatius it branded as a tyrant: after his

death it makes the rule of Romulus become more legal and milder:

he consulted the senate on all matters, and chastised the refractory,

not with corporal punishments, but with fines of cattle 88 • The

Celeres, whom later writers converted into his body-guard, were

no other than the knights; nor was any thing ever known in early

. 637 ·In the Trojan wa.r the events which· precede the anger of Achilles, are

very far from filling up the nine years that had elapsed : the reader may see

in Dictys (whom by the way I recommend to his attention, among other

things as an imitator of Sallust's style-optimoruni omiulus he is called by the

great Gronovius-) how it was attempted to do this; and may there find an

example of the manner in which epic poetry is often transformed into every·

day history.

_

38 For the former point see Ennius, p. 139; for the latter Cicrro de Re

p. II. 8. 9.

r.-x178

HISTORY OF ROME.

times of his having been an object of hatred to the senate. Ennius

seems to have represented Mars imploring the father of gods and

men to deliver Ilia and his children; when Jove, to console him for

their inflexible destiny, promised to take up Romulus to heaven 689 •

The time was accomplished; Juno was reconciled to the Trojan

race, as she had been to Hercules. On the pones of Quinctilis, or

on the Quirinalia 40 , as the king was reviewing his people, the sun

withdrew its light 41 ; and while the earth wa~ lying in darkness,

Mars descended in a hurricane and tempest, and bore away his per­

fected son in a fiery chariot 4 ~ to heaven. The people had dispersed

in consternation: when the daylight returned, they sought anxiously

for their father, the child of the gods, who had brought them forth

into the realms of light 43 ; but their lamentation gave way to reli­

gious reverence, when the glorified hero had appeared to Proculus

Julius 44 , and bid him announce that he would watch over his peo­

ple as the god Quirinus.

These are the main features of the traditional tale, as it was held

sacred for centuries by the Romans, and commemorated in sacred

songs. But there came a time when simple faith had lost its

strength, and when the esteem for real history had risen in propor­

tion as the period it comprised was longer, and as the nation's po­

litical character had grown in gre~fness and importance: and then

appeared writers by whom the whole body of the old traditions

was perverted, as was this :particular one in the grossest manner.

These were the writers whom Dionysius and Plutarch mention

with approbation, calling them rational men, who related what was

probable, and held to what was natural 45 : and among their number,

the person whom I believe to have introduced this practice, although

it had earlier models among the Greeks, or who at least adopted

639 This explains the verse, Unus erit quern tu tolles ad cmrula creli, p.

:W. Compare Ovid Fast. II. 487.

40 The Quirinalia according to Ovid Fast. II. 475.

41 Cicero de Re p. 1. 16. Solis defectio qum nonis Quinctilibus fuit,

regnante Romulo; quibus-Romulum-tenebris-natura abripuit. Most of

the passages before known on this point are collected by Sca.liger Emend.

Temp. p. 395.

42 Quirin us Martis equis Acheronta fugit; Horace.-Rex patriis astra

petebat equis: Ovid Fast. n. 496.

43 Ennius in Cicero de Re p. 1. 41. If we had the first three books of

Ennius, we should know what sort ofpoet he was.

44 Between the palace ofmonte Cavallo and the Porta. Pia..

45 oi <rd ?r19<tvai-r<t<r<t '>'P"'~on"-oi <r<t µu9..;t~ ,,-4r<r<t '1Ttp1<t1poiit'T•t·

Dionysius. 'TfA>J •i1t6'T,,., ix_6µevo1. Plutar<;h.HISTORY OF ROME.

179

it more uniformly than any other annalist, was L. Piso the censor,

a contemporary of the Gracchi; in other respects a worthy and

honourable man, but who in what we know of his annals betrayed

great narrowness o~ mind anrl perversity of judgment. The wish

of these historians was to gain the whole of the mythical age for

history: their assumption, that the poetical stories always contained

a core of dry historical truth : and their system, to bring this core

to light by stripping it of every thing marvellous 6411.

The results of this attempt were extremely various: in the legend

of Romulus the turn was given principally by Livy. The way in

which the poetical tale of Silvia and her children, down to the ven·

geance inflicted on Amulius, was metamorphosed, may be seen in

Dionysius and Plutarch by any who can overcome the disgust

inspired by vulgar dulness conceited of its superiority in wisdom:

Livy has not condescended to mention it, and thereby has con·

demned it to obscurity. Unfortunately he has not treated the ex­

planation of the disappearance of Romulus with the same contempt;

and hence it has taken deep root. That a mortal man should be

clothed with a radiant body and carried up to heaven, was of course

. impossible: but with regard to the secret anecdote, that the senators

had murdered the king during the gloom of a tempest-it was not

even an eclipse-and had torn him piecemeal, as Pentheus was

torn by the Bacc~analians, and had carried away his bloody limbs

hidden under their gowns, here neither was the deed considered

as physically impossible, nor the loathsome scene of mangling

butchery as morally so. In the later writers we cannot help being

suprised at this: but that a story so atrocious should have been

fabricated in ancient Rome, is an instance how the feelings arc

poisoned by party animosity; the patricians were held to be capa­

ble of the worst enormities. The death of Remus was made out

to have been a mischance during a civil feud: the Sabine war grew,

from the contests of a few days, into a tedious hard fought campaign,

646 Happy they who in the sultry days of Augustus could refresh them­

selves with the simplicity of their ancestors! Among those who were inca­

pable of doing so, the dull falsifiers of history are not more offensive than the

men who helped themselves out with a pneumatology, such as we find traces

of in Dionysius : where instead of Mars Gradivus, whose personality they

were ashamed to admit, some demon, " whose existence was generally be­

lieved," is said to have been the deflowerer of Ilia. Men could reconcile

themselves to this kind of belief in goblins, or at least to professing it ; and so

effect a compromise and even an alliance with bigotry.180

llISTORY OF ROME.

with pitched battles between great armiea. To this war PisoG•7

referred the origin of the Curtian lake, for the sake of ridding Ro­

man history of another heroic legend: according to him Mettus

Curtius,-a Sabine, had almost sunk with his horse into the swamp:

the same Piso exalted Tarpeia from a venal traitress to a heroine,

an utterly thoughtless and mad one indeed, whose intention was

to sacrifice herself for her country 48 •

To such lengths could even .honest men go, when devoid of un­

derstanding, of feeling, and of judgment: but after these had paved

the way, came the shameless forgers, whose traces are especially

visible in the numbers. Livy himself, when speaking in general

terms, treats the enormous numbers fabricated by Valerius Antias

with contempt, though he is not on his guard against them in par­

ticular cases: as worthless as any is his statement .and that of

Juba about the number of the ravished virgins 49 ; and his silly ex­

aggerations are equally manifest in the numbers of the' armies during

the Sabine war, and that of the military force which Romulus had

at his command before his death 50,

I am sorry to have been obliged to say so much on such wretch­

ed subjects: but it is important to show the nature of that idol,

before which, so liable is fashion to change, our posterity may

perhaps be required hereafter to bend the knee.

I return to the old legend. Th!! senate at first would not allow

the election of a new king: every senator was to enjoy the royal

power in rotation as interrex. In this way a year passed; the

people, being more oppressively treated than before, were vehe­

ment in demanding the election of a sovereign to protect them:

when the senate had permitted it to be held, the Romans and Sa­

bines disputed out of which nation the king should be chosen.

It was adjusted that the former should elect him out of the latter,

and all voices concurred in naming the wise and pious Numa Pom­

pilius of Cures; to whom Tatius had married his daughter.

The discourse on the early history of Rome which Cicero puts

647 Varro de 1. 1. 1v. 32. p. 41.

48 She is described as having planned to make the Sabines deliver up

their arms and armour to her by virtue of their oath, and to consign them

when thus disarmed to the Romans: the arms were to be laid down on the

Capitol, where not a Roman, except some prisoners perhaps, was to be found.

Dionysius 11. 36. It is not superfluous to show the extreme stupidity of

much that would fain pass for history.

49 Plutarch Romul. c. 14. Dionysius 11. 30. 47.

50 46,000 foot, and about 1000 horse: Dionysius 11 16.HISTORY OF ROME.

181

into the mouth of Scipio, is entirely taken from Polybius: con­

sequently Polybius found the persuasion, that Numa had been

the disciple of Pythagoras, very generally diffused in his time ;

indeed so diffused at Rome that he tried to prove the impossibility

of the fact by a chronological deduction, which was borrowed from

him by Dionysius. The same persuasion then probably was al~o

expresed by Cato, who, even though acquainted with the chronolo­

gical tables of Eratosthenes, might very possibly be ignorant of the

age of Samian Pythagoras. Uufortunately Polybius can hardly

have learnt, that by oriental writers Pythagoras was referred to the

reign of Assarhaddon 65 1, who was co•temporary with Numa. An

impartial critic, who does not believe that the son of l\:Inesarchus

alone is to be regarded as Pythagoras ; or that what Aristoxenus

and the older writers left undecided, has been settled by chronolo­

gers having made up their minds on the question; or that there is

any kind of necessity for placing Numa in the twentieth Olympiad;

or in fine that the historical personality of Pythagoras is more cer­

tain than that of Numa; one who so thinks will be pleased witf1

the old popular opinion, and will not sacrifice it to chronology.

The senate, when in the Samnite war it erected a statue to Pytha­

goras as the wisest of the Greeks*, must probably have also looked

upon him as the teacher of Numa: the Greek books found in

Numa's grave are said to have contained Pythagorean doctrinest:

the JEmilii traced their origin to a son of the Grecian sage. On

the Greek side of the account quoted from Epicharmus 59 , that the

Romans had conferred the franchise of their city on Pythagoras,

would be extremely important, could the work containing it be

considered as genuine: even if spurious, it is evidence of a current

opinion, that the influence of the Pythagoreans had penetrated to

Rome.

·when Numa was assured by the auguries that the gods ap­

proved of his election, the first care of the pious king was directed,

not to the rites of the temples, but to human institutions. Ile

divided the lands which Romulus had conquered and had left open

to occupancy: he founded the worship of Terminus. All ancient

legislators, and above all Moses, rested the result of their ordinances

for virtue, civil order, and good manners, on securing landed pro­

perty, or at least the hereditary possession of land, to the greatest

possible number of citizens. It was not till after he had done this

6.'\l Abydenus, in the chronicle ofEusebius, Venet. ed. 1. p. 53.

* Plutarch Numa c. 8. p. 65. d.

t Livy XL. 29. Pliny xm. 27.

52 From a prose work: Plutarch Numa c. 8.182

UlSTORY OF ROME.

that Numa applied himself to legislate for religion. He was revered

as the author of the Roman ceremonial law. Instructed by the

Camena Egeria, who was espoused to him in a visible form, and

who led him into the assemblies of her sisters in the sacred grove 853 ,

he regulated the whole hierarchy; the pontiffs, who by precept and

chastisement kept watch that the laws relating to religion should

be observed both by individuals and by the state; the augurs, whose

calling it was to afford security for the counsels of men by piercing

into those of the gods; the flamens, who ministered in the temples

of the supreme deities; the chaste virgins of Vesta; the Salii, who

solemnized the worship of the gods with armed dances and songs.

He prescribed the rites with which the people, might offer such

worship and prayer as would be acceptable to the gods. To him

were revealed the conjurations for compelling Jupiter himself to

make known his will by lightnings and the flight of birds; whereas

others were forced to wait for these prodigies from the favour of

the god, who was often silent to such as were doomed to destruc­

tion. This charm he had learnt from Faun us and Picus, whom by

the advice of Egeria he had enticed and bound in chains, as Midas

bound Silenus in the rose garden. From the pious prince the god

brooked this boldness.: at the entreaty of Numa he exempted the

people from the terrible duty of offering human sacrifices: but

when the audacious Tullus presumptuously imitated his predeces­

sor, he was killed by a flash of lightning during his conjurations in

the temple of Jupiter Elicius. The thirty-nine years of N urria's

reign, which glided away in quiet happiness, without any war,

without any calamity, afforded no legends but of such marvels.

Thatinothing might break the peace of his days, the ancile fell

from:heaven when the land was threatened with a pestilence, which

disappeared as soon as Numa had ordained the ceremonies of the

Salii. Numa was not a theme of song, like Romulus; indeed he

had enjoined, that among all the Camenre the highest honours

should be paid to Tacita. · Yet a story was handed down, telling

how, when he was entertaining his guests, the plain food in the

earthenware dishes was transformed on the appearance of Egeria

into a banquet fit for gods in vessels of gold; to the end that her

divinity might be made manifest to the incredulous. The temple

of Janus, his work, continued always shut; peace was spread over

all Italy; until Numa, like the darlings of the gods in the golden

age, fell asleep, full of days: Egeria melted away in tears into a

fountain.

653 Below S. Balbina, near the Laths of Caracalla.BEGINNING AND NATURE OF THE EAR­

LIEST HISTORY.

h was recorded by the keepers of the Sibylline books, that. the

first secular festival after the expulsion of the kings was celebrated

in the year 208; and that from that time forth it always recurred

after an interval of 110 years, such being the duration of a secle 654 •

This statement is at variance with the accounts in the annals, which

recorded the celebration of the secular festivals in very different

years: but, though the annalists 'Yould have no weight at all, if they

really stood in contradiction to the authentic books, we need not

suppose that the books noted down any thing more than the close

of a secle, and the. epoch when, by the precepts of the ceremonial

law, the beginning of a new one should have been solemnized by

the people, in gratitude for the continuance of its existence into a'

new period; and they probably did so without regarding whether

the celebration was deferred from peculiar circumstances, as was

so often the case with a festival vowed ta the gods.

If we go back following the same principle from that first secu­

lar epoch of which a historical register was preserved, the end or'

the first, or rather the beginning of the second secle, falls in the

year of the city 78. I say, the beginning of the second: for it is

evidently beyond comparison more probable, that the beginning of

a new period should have been celebrated with a joyful solemnity,

-as it was by the Aztecans 55, by whom the renewal of their secle

was looked forward to with anxious doubt,-than the end of an

expiring one, which, like all decease and termination, must rather

have excited melancholy feelings. Now according to the chrono­

logy of the pontiffs this year was the first in the reign of Tullus

Hostilius: according to the pontiffs, I say; for their table was

G54 Ct'nsorinus, c. 17.

55 See the text to note 726.184

lIISTORY OF ROME.

adopted by Polybius in his Roman chronology 658 , and he is the

authority followed by Cicero in fixing the years of the Roman

kings 57. It was the pontiffs therefore, who, as Scipio does in

Cicero, assigned seven and thirty years to Romulus, nine aud

thirty to Numa 58 , between whom falls the year of the interreign;

whereas Livy and Dionysius reckon forty-three years for Numa.

This is now ascertained by the positive testimony of Cicero:

when I first undertook these inquiries, it was to be divined, with

the help of some boldness, from a trace, not indejld a very distinct

one, in Saint Jerom's translation of the chronicle .of Eusebius,

where 240 years are assigned to the reigns of the seven l{oman

kings, forty to Numa, and thirty-eight to Romulus 59. It is true,

the number of years did not come out precisely right ; and this

might appear to the overcautious a sufficient ground for shrinking

from the application and inference as rash: the certainty we have

now accidentally obtained by the discovery of the books on the

Republic, furnishes a proof that, with regard to those accounts

which have been preserved from ancient times only by ill informed

and hasty compilers, the injury they have suffered in passing

through such hands, ought not to be allowed to determine the only

shape in which we are to make use of them. In numberless cases

the original form is not too much disfigured to be guessed at: there

may frequently be hazard in such a process; but that which will

not admit of being abused, is good for nothing.

The light which I gained in a fortunate hour with regard to the

seemingly inexplicable discrepancies in Roman chronology, arose

from my remarking that the ground on which Fabius differed from

Cato, lay in his reckoning only 240 years for the time of the kings :

and for this I was indebted to the second book of the chronicle of

Eusebius. This taught me the importance of those tables, which

in great part represent the views of Apollodorus; and it would

border on ingratitude, were I to suppress the opinion I once deli­

vered on them, in consequence of the chronicle having been super­

656 In Dionysius, 1. 74, the text runs: e:>rl ..-oil :>r<t.prt. ..-.;, 'Ai'X.l1Ttu1T1

But no such town as Anchise pro­

bably ever existed save in Cephalmi's brain; assuredly it did not in the age

of Polybius. The inhabitants of Anxur he calls Tarracinites. Three Vatican

manuscripts give d.j-X,l1TT1uo-1: I read .<pX,Hp•ii..1, which word Polybius uses for

the pontiffa (xxrn. 1. 2. xxxn. 22. 5.), though Dionysius calls them i1pof<r~µom,

and not for the supreme pontiff alone.

57 This he says expressly de R~ p. 11. 14.

58 Cicero de Re p. 11. 10. 14.

59 Chronicon in ThPs. Tempor. Scaligeri, n. 1265, 1:103. 1304.

'"'~hou :>rlr<tx.G,-'l"MV ,,,.,.....,, a:>rO">..<t~•'iv.HISTORY OF ROME.

185

seded as to this point by the unhoped for 1iscovery of a purer

source. A similar discovery, which has almost entirely brought

back to light the part of the chronicle then wanting, is a call upon

our age to recognise its value, and to resume researches too much

neglected since the time of that great man, who laboured at restoring

the work of Eusebius with the confident strength of genius and

with immeasurable learning 660 , cheered and rewarded by the com­

munications of Casaubon. If in the instance before us he over­

looked what was concealed in a tradition the nature of which had

been misunderstood, it was because the abundance of his materials

was inexhaustible even for him, so that a gleaning has been left for

our inferior generation.

Now however that we find the year of Numa's death was

considered as the last in the first secle of the city, another tradi­

tion, which otherwise sounds strange and unmeaning, acquires

·a, definite import ; the tradition that he was born on the day of

the founding of Rome 61 • It was grounded on the Etruscan no­

tion of the first physical secle terminating with the death of the

person who lived the longest among all such as were born on

the day when the city was founded 62• Now the very clearness

with which this is apparent, makes it the more necessary for me to

meet an objection which an able reader might raise. Such a one

might probably remark, that, if 240 years were reckoned for the

time of the kings, and 120 from the beginning of the consulate

down to the taking by the Gauls, the year this would give for the

founding of the city, would be the one adopted by Fabius, 01. 8. I;

660 Scaliger stood at the summit of universal solid philological learning,

in a degree that none have reached since; and so high in every branch of

science, that from the resources of his own mind he coulll comprehend, apply,

and decide on whatsoever came in his way. What, when compared with

him, is the book-learned Salmasius? And why does not France set up the

name of Scaliger to match that of Leibnitz?

Out of Italy and Greece there is no ground more sacred in the eyes of a

philologer, than the hall of the university at Leyden; where the portraits of

the professors, from Scaliger in his princely purple, down to. Ruhnkenius, are

ranged around that of the great William of Orange, the father of the Univer­

sity; the erection of which was granted to the request of Leyden, as the

noblest reward for her more than human endurance and perseverance. The

general of the republican city, Baron Nordwyk, was also a great philologer ..

61 Plutarch Numa c. 3. Dion Cassius fr. 20. p. 8. Dionysius would

have been ashamed ofseeming to believe the marvellous coincidence~ but_ he

takes advantage of the belief of others to slip Numa's age, not far from forty,

by a sleight of hand into his history. 11. 58.

.

62 See above, p. 104.

J,-y186

HISTORY OF ROME.

yet that between the year 78 according to Fabius and 298 ac­

cording to Varro there intervened not 220 years, but only 214: so

that we should be deluded here by an appearance which is merely

accidental.

Nevertheless it is no deception: but the Fasti for the first fifty

years of the republic are in complete disorder ; and this may partly

have been a consequence of. their being adapted to the scheme

which estimated the period under the consuls at a third of the

whole time computed to have elapsed between the building and the

taking·-0f the city: but it may also have been to some extent una­

voidable fro~ the nature of the Fasti themselves. A given number

of official yeat3 did not by any means answer, to the same number

of astronomical; on account of the interreigns, so very frequent in

the earlier ages, by which the beginning of the year was carried

further forward every time. This led those into error, who, like

Fabius, made the two series of years parallel· to each other; but

the secle supplied the correction; this was known to the Pontiffs,

and through them to Polybius and Cato. According to the for­

mer, who dates t~e Gallic invas~on a year later than Dionysius 668 ,

· the secular year 298 was 01. Bl. 3: if from this point two secles,

55 Olympiads, are reckoned backward, the second secle begins in

01. 26. 3: which according to Polybius was the seventy-eighth

, year of Rome, and the first of king Tullus. I again remind the

reader that his statement is taken from the tables of the Pontiffs.·

Hence it seems perfectly evident, that the pontiffs themselves

distinguished the first two kings from ·the rest, as belonging to

another order of things, and separated the accounts of them from

those which were to pass for history; just as the Egyptians began

the lists of their kings with gods and demigods. Romulus was a

god, the son of a god; Numa a man, but connected with superior

beings. If the tradition however about them both is in all its parts

a poetical fiction, the fixing the pretended duration of their reigns

can only be explained by ascribing it either to mere caprice or to

numerical speculations: and although to us the former solution

might seem the more probable, the latter is far likelier to be the

correct one with regard to the ancients in early times ; above all

,where the annals were in the hands of a learned priesthood. Such

speculations characterize the chronology of Asia. Much that I

have already said, and other remarks which I shall make hereafter,

render it almo3t certain that the chronology of the Etruscans, the

663 That is, in 01. 98. 2.HISTORY OF ROME.

187

sages of ancient· Rome, was of a similar character. The cyclical

year, which is assumed to have been instituted by Romulus, and

to have obtained until Numa, was <livided into 38 nundines: it was .

an obvious thought to reckon the same number of years from the

beginning of the city to Numa. One of these was taken for the

interreign ; and only 37 were left for Romulus. Then, if twice 38

were to be allotted to the first two kings, 39 fell to Numa' s share ;

an<l this .number ha<l more than one attraction to recommend it. In

its component parts, thrice ten and thrice three, the prevailing num­

ber is that which determines the proportions in all the earliest Ro­

man institutions ; and the nearest quotient obtained from dividing

the number of days in the lunar year, 354, by 9, is 39. Such

numeric.al combinations are mere child's play or juglery: in the

present case however we have nothing.to expect but priestly sub­

tilty, which betrays perverted ingenuity much oftener than depth

of thought•• The other statement, which assigns forty-three years

to Numa, brings the length o( his life to eighty-one; the biquadrate

of three. 1'Vhen it was forgotten that this was the source of that

latter number, even Cato in his time might prefer it; because it

enabled him to carry back four years, for which he could find no

consuls, from the annual Fasti to the time of the kings : others

might be glad to take away the obvious appearance of a fabrication

from the numbers 240 and 120.

With Tullus Hostilius we reach the beginning of a new secle;

and of a narrative resting on historical ground, of a kind totally dif­

ferent from the story of the preceding period. Between the purely

poetical age, the relation of which to history is altogether irrational,

and the thoroughly historical age, there intervenes in all nations a

mixed age, which, if one wishes to designate it by a single word,

may be called the mythico-historical. It has no precise limits; but

comes down to the point where contemporary history begins: and

its character is the more strongly marked, the richer the nation has

been in heroic lays,' and the fewer the writers who have filled up

the void in its history from monuments, and authentic documents,

neglecting those lays, and without calling up in their minds any

distinct image of the past. . Hence in the history of the middle ages

we find such a character in Scandinavia and in. Spain; whereas

during the same period the history of countries which, like Italy,

possess no historical lays, scarcely contains a trace of it. Among th~

Greeks, the Persian war still displays the character of a free epical

narrative; and almost every thing before it that is stirring and attrac­

tive in their story, is poetry. In Roman history the range of pure188

HISTORY OF ROME.

fiction does not reach much lower ; although it appears again from

time to time even down to the fifth century : the disease which

preys on this history until the war with Pyrrhus, when foreigners

at least began to write it contemporaneously, is stu.died alteration.

This is sheer corruption : the poetical story is something different

from, but it is also something better than pure history, on the field

of which we only find again what wearies and worries us in life 664 •

The relation which such poetical history bears to mythology, is,

that the former always has and must have a historical foundation;

that it borrows its materials mainly from history, as transmitted in

free oraf narrative: while the latter takes hers from religion and

from poems on a larger scale, and does not profess to be a possible

history of the common order of things in the world ; although, so

long as it confines itself to the earth, it can have no other theatre.

To the latter kind for instance belong Hercules, Romulus, and

Siegfried; to the former Aristomenes, Brutus, and the Cid.

On the confines of mythology the predominant character is poeti­

cal, at the opposite end historical. Of the me~ named during the

period we are entering on, but few are imaginary: many of the

chronological statements from the yearly registers ha~e all the de­

finiteness that can be expected for so dim an age: but the historical

part of our information is limited to this. For when historians

arose, their attention was exclusively directed to what bore the name

of annals : no use was made of monuments and orignal documents ;

perhaps through carelessness ; perhaps because they could not be

brought to agree with the poetical legends; aµ.d nobody knew yet how

to appreciate the value of a fragmentary history drawn from authen­

tic documents. Among the Greeks, Ephorus in later times and the

authors of the Atthids framed histories from materials of this kind;

as did Timams, who however is frequently dishonest, concerning

Italy and Sicily; histories like many that have been written of the

middle ages; valuable indeed, but presenting no lively and distinct

image of the times: at Rome this source was but sparingly employed;

and perhaps by none but L. Cincius and C. Macer with judgment

and any degree of industry. It is true, the Roman documents of

the earliest period were scanty, in comparison with the historical

treasures of Athens and of almost all the Greek cities. For a long

time the laws were only engraven on oaken tables 65 , or painted on

6G4 It was not till yet later, about the age of Alexander, that Lysistratus

began to take portraits in sculpture: till then statues had been ideal works,

only preserving the main features of the face and figure.

65 Dionysius 111. 36.HISTORY OF ROME.

' 189

them, if they were plastered; and thus they became a prey to the

flames the more easily at the taking by the Gauls, when none had

time or presence of mind to save even the fundamental laws. The

only original documents· mentioned of the whole period under the

kings, are the treaty of Servius Tullius with the Latins 688 , that of

the last Tarquinius with the Gabines, and one with the Sabines 6 7.

That with the Gabines was painted on a wooden shield. Verrius

Flaccus cited the commentaries of Servius Tullius, which appear to

have contained the substance of the constitutional laws ascribed to

him 88 : and the collection of the laws of the kings, compiled by one

Papirius, seems unquestionably to have been of high antiquity.

From the period immediately following the expulsion of the kings,

beside the twelve tables, some other laws, and the compacts between

the patrician and plebeian orders, there were still extant in the

seventh and eighth centuries, the treaties with Carthage 69 , with the

Latins7°, and with the Ardeates7 1 : but the contents of these very

documents are such as either cannot be reconciled at all with our

historical accounts, or not without difficulty.

I am now come to the question so often raised as to the genuine­

ness and credibility of the original annals ; · a question, the discus­

sion of which has been placed on a firm ground, such as our pre­

decessors were destitute of, by the fortunate discoveries which have

enriched philology in our days.

It is well known to have been a custom, manifestly derived from

very ancient times, for the chief pontiff to note down the" events of

the year on a whited table; such as prodigies, eclipses, a pestilence,

a scarcity, campaigns, triumphs, the deaths of illustrious men; in a

word, what Livy brings together at the end of the tenth book, and

usually 'in such as remain of the following ones, when closing the

history of a year, in the plainest words and with the utmost brevity;

this statement was so dry that nothing could be more. jejune'!J: the

table was then set up in the house of the pontiff7 3 : the annals of the

several years were afterward collected in books. This custom ob­

tained until the pontificate of P. Mucius and the times of the Grae~.

chi; when it ceased, because a literature had now been formed, and

perhaps because the composing such chronicles seemed too much

below the dignity of the chief pontiff.

666