MANNER IN WHICH THE EARLY HISTORY OF ROME ORIGINATED.
When Fabius began to write the Roman history, his materials consisted of the Annales Pontificum; the Fasti; the Libri Pontificum, and Augurales for the time nearer his own; of the Laudationes, and of lays. Of the scantiness of these sources we have already convinced ourselves, but what were their contents? They cannot have been less worthy of belief than our Merovingian and other ancient annals. As the Annales Pontificum commenced ab initio rerum Romanarum, or at least from Numa, they might have been very authentic. The pontiffs, as Dionysius informs us, had with the greatest accuracy recorded in them year by year from the era of the kings; in the Fasti Triumphales it was even entered on what days the kings had triumphed over their foes. The consideration, however, that the ancient history, as it lies before us, is impossible, must lead us to the question of the credibility of the oldest annals. Our task therefore is that of now showing that the earliest history contains impossibilities; that it is poetical, and that every thing in it which does not bear the impress of a poetical character is a forgery; that thence it follows that the history must be reduced to ancient songs, and to a later invented chronology, which was adapted to those lays.
The accounts of the earliest times are materially different in Livy and Dionysius. Livy wrote his first book without any division of years, and with extraordinary fairness; he also had evidently Ennius before his eyes, as one may see from a comparison of the fragments of that poet with Livy;—e. g. Lib. II, 10. with Fragm. Ennii, Teque pater Tiberine tuo cum numine sancto. Dionysius tries to make out a true history. He takes it for granted that the Roman history must be capable of being restored in its details; that a truly historical groundwork was built over with fabulous legends; and so he endeavours to reconstruct it according to his notions; in doing which he sometimes makes himself really ridiculous by his pragmatical speeches in the mythic ages. Livy, on the contrary, writes history, as he found it in the oldest books, and as it appeared to him most beautiful, giving what was the old narrative before it was spoiled by too much art; and for this reason his account is the most unadulterated source for those times.
The history of the wondrous birth of Romulus is an historical impossibility, although it was historicised by the school of Piso. This is also the case with the rape of the Sabine women, of whom, according to the original tale, there were thirty; with the removal of Romulus from the earth during an eclipse of the sun;[34] and likewise with the long reign of Numa in unbroken peace, and that marriage of his with the goddess Egeria, which in the belief of Scipio’s contemporaries was held to be quite as historical as the Punic wars. There is a poetical impress of hoar antiquity in the story of the combat between the Horatii and the Curiatii, who were born by two sisters in one day, the effect of which is already somewhat marred in Livy. We next arrive at Tarquinius Priscus, who, with Tanaquil his wife came to Rome in the eighth year of the reign of Ancus (which lasted twenty-three years), then reigned himself thirty-eight more, and being at his death upwards of eighty, left infants behind him, who were brought up during the forty-three years’ reign of Servius; so that Tarquin the Proud must have been at least fifty years old, when he killed his father-in-law. Tanaquil, who lives to see this, and exacts an oath from Servius not to resign the crown, must at that time have been a hundred and fifteen years old. One of the first things told us of Servius is this, that a flame burns round his head, for the natural explanation of which Dionysius wishes to give hints. Collatinus is stated to have been the son of a brother of Tarquinius Priscus; this brother, it is said, was born before the removal of Tarquinius Priscus to Rome, a hundred and thirty-five years previous to the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, and his son is now, more than a hundred and twenty years after his father’s birth, a young man of thirty. Brutus is described as a tribunus celerum, which was the highest office attainable by one of the equestrian body, by virtue of which he represents the king, assembles the senate, and is called upon to officiate at the highest sacrifices; and this office the king is declared to have given to a man whom he considered as half-witted and therefore deprived of the management of his own property, while Brutus, on the other hand, is said to have feigned imbecility that he might ward off the envy and covetousness of the king. He is stated to have been the son of a daughter of Tarquinius Priscus, and to have been afraid of rousing the anger of the king by taking upon himself the administration of his own possessions; yet Tarquin was not even of the same gens as himself. In the beginning of Tarquin’s reign, Brutus was a child; but immediately after the king’s expulsion, he has sons who are grown up youths.
All these details connected with dates, the list of which, down to the times of Camillus, might be vastly swelled, are so characterised by marks of inconsistency and historical impossibility, that it may safely be concluded that here we are entitled to the exercise of criticism. Let us now call to mind the twofold sources of the earliest Roman history,—the chronological ones, the Fasti, the Annales Pontificum; and the unchronological ones, the lays, Laudationes, the Libri Pontificum and Augurales. With regard to the chronological ones, we see that in the oldest accounts of Fabius, from the building of Rome to its destruction by the Gauls, 360 years are reckoned; precisely the number of the γένη in Attica, which number the Greeks already (especially Aristotle, from whom the grammarians Pollux, Harpocration, and others borrowed) declared to have been in imitation of the solar year. If we look more closely into it, 360 is the middle number between those of the days of the solar and lunar year, and the nearest to either of these capable of being conveniently divided. The time assigned for the kings, according to the older reckoning, was 240 years; that for the republic, 120. This number has the same mathematical character as those of the Indian ages of the world, the Babylonian, and other eastern numbers. The 120 years for the republic are received also by those who deem the whole period to have been 365 years. Whether these 120 years are correct, remains indeed to be decided according to one’s views with regard to the epoch of the dedication of the Capitol. That the annals of the pontiffs were destroyed when the city was burned by the Gauls, is strongly confirmed by Claudius (without doubt Claudius Quadrigarius) in Plutarch, and indirectly by Livy, who cannot state it in a direct manner, or else he would have declared his first books to be worthless. An additional proof of it is the fact, that the eclipse of the sun in the year 350 was the first one really observed which occurred in the annals; whereas all the earlier ones were calculated afterwards, and of course incorrectly, with the aid of the scientific means which then existed. For the first 240 years we have seven kings, who reigned for an immense time, most of them about forty years. Newton has already pointed out how improbable it was, that a succession of princes should have all ruled for so long a period, and he has assigned seventeen years as an average for each. The most exact parallel, however, is to be found among the doges of Venice, who also were elective princes like the Roman kings. There have been forty doges within the space of five centuries (800 to 1300), so that there were eight of these to a century. When we now look more closely at the numbers of the Roman kings, we find in them a play upon numbers, as among the eastern nations. To understand this, we must premise the following remarks.
The Etruscans had as the basis of their chronology two sorts of sæcula, physical and astronomical, of which the latter consisted of a hundred and ten years, as the received average number of the physical one. By a twofold intercalation, the calendar was rectified to within a wonderfully small fractional difference, a hundred and ten of these years very nearly corresponding to a hundred and thirty-two years of ten months; and thus an astronomical period was constituted. The length of the physical sæculum was thus fixed. The life of him who outlived all those who had been alive at the foundation of a state, marked the first sæculum; the second was determined by the longest life among those who were alive at the conclusion of the first, and so on. Now there is an old tradition in Plutarch and Dio Cassius, and in Dionysius at least an allusion to it, that Numa was born on the day of the foundation of Rome, and therefore the first sæculum at Rome probably ended with his death in the year 77.[35] If this was the case, we then see the reason why Romulus was made to reign thirty-eight years (the number of the weeks of the year of ten months), and Numa thirty-nine. For the last five kings one had historical traditions; yet they did not extend through the whole of the regal period. Rome has surely had by far more than five kings; but as a founder was wanted besides for the Ramnes, and another for the Tities, the number was chosen which had a sacred meaning, that of the planets, &c. The middle point in two hundred and forty years is the end of the hundred and twentieth, just the middle of the reign of the fourth king out of seven, evidently an artificial arrangement. Twenty-three years were given him, so that people might be able to begin to date them from the year 110, as they always wished for the beginning some distinguished number, and a hundred and ten was the sæcula number. The old year had ten months, and a hundred and thirty of those years are equal to a hundred and ten of the later ones. The reign of Ancus must therefore have been placed between 110 and 132. What is between 77 and 110, namely, thirty-two years, is now of course to be assigned to Tullus Hostilius. Tarquinius Priscus reigns until 170, half a century being added to the middle of the regal period; his reign therefore lasted thirty-eight years. The twenty-five years of the last king may be historical, or a quarter of a century may have been assigned to him in round numbers. For Servius Tullius there now remains the time from 170 to 215. But let us now suppose that the two reigns of Tarquinius Priscus and of Servius Tullius did not last so long, then every inconsistency vanishes, and the old unanimous account that Tarquinius Superbus was the son of Tarquinius Priscus reasserts its claims. We thus see how the greatest absurdities may arise from chronological restorations, as in this case there is a palpable forgery.
Although the other sources of the earliest history, the old lays, may not also have been tampered with, they are nevertheless altogether insufficient. We have a parallel case to this in our own Nibelungenlied, the poets of which likewise did not wish to deceive, nor did they make any pretensions whatever to be annalists. Historical characters appear in it,—Theodoric, Attila, the Burgundians; and yet of the whole poem nothing belongs to history. Nor has history any part in Romulus and Numa. They belong to the cycle of the gods, Romulus as the son of Mars, and Numa as the husband of Egeria; Romulus is merely a personification of Rome. Other poems have more historical matter in them; for instance, the Spanish romances of the Cid. Here the outlines are undoubtedly historical; but they form as it were a line only, whilst the description as given in the poem is a plane. There is also much of this in Roman history. He who utterly rejects the whole of the early Roman history, does not know what he is saying. Romulus and Numa are included within the first sæculum, because they do not at all belong to history; and therefore they form a sæculum of their own, and as it were quite a different era. From thence whatever was discovered of old traditions concerning the kings and their time, much of which was in circulation, had now its place assigned to it in the chronological cycle. Those who think this criticism doubtful, would not do so if they were more familiar with what is nearer our own times. It is well known how the romances of the middle ages about Charlemagne and his Paladins, refer to Latin chronicles the authorship of which is ascribed to the Archbishop Turpin. These are now allowed to figure as romances by the side of history; but who would believe that not a hundred and fifty years after Charlemagne, in the reign of Otho the Great, at a time therefore when the crusades were not yet in the remotest manner thought of, there appears already in the Chronicle of Benedict of Soracte a most detailed account of an expedition of Charlemagne to Jerusalem, and that without any consciousness of its falsehood. Before the extinction of the Carlovingian race, utterly fictitious expeditions across the Alps, &c., taken from the history of Charlemagne, are related at large in the Chronicles as positive facts. We are now able to disprove them, because we have contemporary annals, and the history of Eginhard; and as for the expedition to Jerusalem, even without these we may also disprove it from eastern annals.—The same thing occurs in Ireland. There also, pretended annals exist in which a succession of kings are found, among whom Niall the Great, about the time of the emperor Theodosius, conquers Britain, Gaul, and Spain, crosses the Alps, and threatens the emperor in Rome. The most decisive proof can be brought against this completely fabulous tale, as the authentic history in this case is generally known.[36] Had we likewise older books of history to check the Roman legends with, we might just as easily get the proof of the want of authenticity of the early Roman history. In the meanwhile where shall we find them? The Greeks had no intercourse with Rome, and although they knew of the Romans at a much earlier period than is generally supposed, yet they did not trouble themselves about them, precisely because they never came into contact with them. The case would be quite different with the Greeks of Southern Italy, and the Siceliotes, of whom we have, however, no more authors left. Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides can mention the Romans. There nevertheless exists a notice which gives one a sample of Roman history as it was told among other nations, quite a detached fragment of Etruscan history. The case is as follows,—Claudius, afterwards emperor, who was so unfortunate in his youth, who was disowned by his mother, and whose feeble understanding, in spite of his other good qualities, was entirely spoiled by ill-treatment, seems to have excited Livy’s pity, who gave him instruction and encouragement for writing history. Thus he wrote several works, Καρχηδονιακά, in eight, and Tυῤῥηνικά, in twenty books, certainly in Greek, the loss of which we have very much to regret. Even Pliny does no more quote this latter work. But in the sixteenth century two tablets were discovered, on which fragments of an oration of the emperor Claudius are found, wherein he proposes in the senate to give the Lugdunensian Gauls the full citizenship, and to admit them into the senate, as had long been the case already in the Provincia Romana. The inhabitants of Gaul were Roman citizens, had Roman names, yet they had not the right of admission into the senate. With this right the emperor Claudius presented Lugdunensian Gaul. The two brazen tablets are still left, out of several which contained the speech mentioned by Tacitus; and they either do not immediately join each other, or a considerable piece must be wanting at the bottom. Before the French Revolution they were still in the town hall at Lyons; whether they be still there, I know not. Lipsius had them printed in his edition of Tacitus, Gruter in the Corpus Inscriptionum; but yet they have been little read. They give us an idea of the stupidity of Claudius, so that we feel assured that the ancients have not done him injustice. In this harangue he says at full length what Tacitus very summarily condensed, that we ought not to say that this was an innovation. Innovations had been made from the beginning of the state; foreigners had ever been received, as for instance the Sabines of Titus Tatius. Even foreigners had been made kings—Numa; Tarquin the Etruscan, a descendant of the Greeks; Servius Tullius, who, according to our annals, was a Corniculensian, but according to the Tuscan ones was a Tuscan of the name of Mastarna, a follower of Cæles Vibenna. He emigrated and settled on the Mons Cælius, which was so called by him after the name of his leader, and now called himself Servius Tullius. This is therefore a direct proof of how matters stood at that time with regard to the Roman annals; for there is nothing whatever in which we can make this Etruscan Mastarna and Servius Tullius, the son of a bondwoman, tally with each other.
Undoubtedly therefore the earliest Roman history has sprung from lays. Perizonius quotes examples from other nations; even in the historical books of the Old Testament, there are such lays. With regard to the Romans, he cites the testimony of Cato, to which Cicero refers in two passages. “Would that the lays were still in existence;” Cicero writes, “for as Cato says, they were sung at table by the guests in praise of deceased men!” A third mention we find in Nonius Marcellus from Varro, that at banquets pueri honesti sang lays in praise of departed great men, either to the flute, or without any accompaniment. This evidence every one must acknowledge as authentic. Among all the nations of whose peculiar original early literature we can form any judgment, there are found either longer historical poems of the epic class, or else very short ones in praise of individual men. In order to pave the way for the assertion that we have still pieces left of both from the Romans, we must first premise some remarks on their most ancient metres.
The ancient Romans, before they adopted the Greek poetic system, made use of the Saturnian verse. Horace says of it,
Horridus ille
Defluxit numerus Saturnius
and several old grammarians have given accounts of it. Atilius Fortunatianus and others among them, who knew nothing about its structure, stuck to a couple of verses which had been preserved; particularly to the following, in which, according to the views which then prevailed, a hypercatalectical Senarius makes its appearance:
Malum dabunt Metelli Nævio Poëtæ.
Terentianus Maurus, who belongs to the end of the third century, speaks of it when treating of the Anacreontic verse, because the first division of the Saturnian bears some resemblance to it. But the real Saturnian verse is quite a different one, which I intend shortly to prove in a detailed treatise. It has many forms, and is altogether distinct from Greek metres. The Latin term for Rhythmus, which in later times only was applied to Greek metres, is numeri. But the Greek metre is based on music and quantity, while in theirs the Romans really counted, the syllables being little measured, or rather not at all: a certain degree of rhythm was, however, kept. Our ancestors, in the same way, had no idea of short and long syllables in the Greek manner; and in the old Latin church hymns likewise short syllables are made long, and vice versa. Plautus and Terence also, in their iambic and trochaic verses, really observed the ryhthmical measure only, and not the quantity. This is the case with all northern people. The pervading characteristic of the Saturnian verse is this, that it must consist of a fixed number of trisyllabic feet. Generally speaking there are four of them, in which either Bacchics or Cretics interchange with Spondees. Sometimes the Cretics and sometimes the Bacchics predominate. When kept distinct they have a very fine movement; but they are usually very much mingled together, so that it is difficult to make them out.
These verses, found from the very earliest times, are quite analogous to the Persian, Arabian, and to our own old German and northern ones, and also to those of the Anglo-Saxon, and to all in which alliteration prevails. The old German verse is divided into two halves, in the first of which two words begin with the same consonant, which once more occurs again in the second, and it has four beats. In the old Saxon Harmony of the Gospels there is this quadruple measure, and likewise in Otfrid and others; but five or six measures may also be found. In Persian poetry there are uniformly four feet of three syllables each; in Arabic this is often the case, but not unseldom there are quadrisyllabic ones also. Exactly agreeing with these are the Spanish coplas de arte major, which were in use before the introduction of the Alexandrine, and have also passed into the Flemish. In all probability this metre was also used in the longer poems of the Provençal. This old Roman syllabic measure is universal in the Roman poems down to the seventh century. I have found a long string of them, and a chapter of an old grammarian with fragments of wonderful beauty, principally from Nævius. This important treatise on the Saturnian verse I shall publish. For this grammarian has really understood that metre,[37] which in Plautus is worked up to a high degree of beauty.
There are also shorter old poems in this measure. At the funerals of the Romans, Neniæ, as they were called, were sung to the flute, which were not doleful sentimental songs, but must have been of the same character as the Laudationes. The dead had now passed over to their illustrious ancestors; their glory was made the theme of pride and exultation; and therefore in these Neniæ praise was simply given them. When Horace says, absint inani funere neniæ, &c. this refers, if there was any singing at all at funerals, to the dirges of the later age. The Romans were not originally tender-hearted. They made even the dead man of use to the State, and from the grave itself he exhorted others to follow him in his deeds. Neniæ and Laudationes were therefore quite plain and simple, in that old style which did not yet know of any construction of periods, and they are no way to be compared to the λόγοι ἐπιτάφιοι in Thucydides and the later Greeks. Two such poems are evidently still preserved to us, in the tombs of the Scipios, which were discovered in 1780, by the Appian road. The upper story, where the sarcophagus of the younger Africanus and the statue of Ennius were, is wanting; but the lower one, which was scooped out of the hill side, was found choked up with rubbish. Here was the sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, who had been a consul in the fifth century (454). At an earlier period,[38] this tomb had been already entered from the top, and a tablet taken out, which is now built into the wall of the Barberini palace; yet this had fallen into oblivion. The bodies of the Cornelii down to Sylla were not burned in the Pelasgian, or Greek manner, but buried in coffins. On these noble sarcophagi there are verses, written indeed like prose, but divided by dashes; and on the sarcophagus of the son the verses are even arranged in lines. That they are verses is to be seen from their unequal length, as otherwise the Romans always wrote every line to its full length. These are quite plain and simple verses, yet there is still some metre in them.
Cornéliu’ Lúciu’ Scípio Barbátus,
Gnáivo prognátu’, fortis vír sapiénsque—
Consúl, censor, aédilis, quí fuit apúd vos, etc.
These are surely the Neniæ which were sung at the time, and then inscribed on the tomb. The old songs at the banquets, were for the most part quite as simple.
Now these Neniæ, together with the Laudationes kept in the Atrium, are sources for the earliest history. There were besides some longer epic poems among the Romans, as well as among other people; for instance, the Servians, &c. The modern Greek songs are only of a lyrical description, but those of the Servians are a combination of the epic with the lyric. A fragment of an heroic poem of this kind on the combat of the Horatii and Curatii, I think I have discovered in Livy. Now it is not by any means to be supposed that Livy had still seen these old heroic poems, and written from them; but he wrote, either directly or indirectly, through Varro, from the books of the pontiffs and augurs, in which very many fragments of such ancient epic lays were preserved; many of them dating even from the time of the taking of the city. In the passage of Livy alluded to, wherein the appeal to the people is related, which he had taken from these books, he speaks of lex horrendi carminis. The formulas of that time were, however, called carmina, and were written in the old measure. That Livy has indirectly or directly borrowed from these books is so much the more certain, as Cicero asserts, that the formula of the provocatio ad populum was contained in the libri augurales. The formula is
Duúmviri pérduelliónem júdicent, &c.
in which the old metre is still to be recognised.
That Cicero’s assertion, laudationibus historia nostra facta est mendosior, is acknowledged also by Livy, has been already remarked. For as every thing good may easily be turned to evil, that lofty feeling of family pride which the Romans had was also liable to be perverted, and we may well believe that saying.
After the first scanty notices from the earlier times were for the most part destroyed in the Gallic devastation, they were restored from outlines taken from the songs of the Vates; the poems were changed in passing from mouth to mouth, and from these combined with the Laudationes history arose. These are the materials which Fabius found extant.
If we look at the tenth book of Livy, we find in it a disproportionate prolixity in the account of the campaigns of Fabius Maximus Rullianus. Now this is exactly an instance of a story taken from family records. In fact not a few statements may even be pointed out, which have no other source than family vanity. People even ventured to interpolate fictitious consulships and triumphs into the family annals, as Livy himself tells us.
Again, other falsifications have arisen from national pride. The forgeries of patriotism manifest themselves among the Romans whenever they suffered great disasters; and this is particularly the case with the momentous ones of the earlier time, with the war of Porsena, the Gallic calamity, and the disgrace at Caudium, in which the whole account is a lying one. Others have sprung from that spirit of caste, which in earlier times led to continual struggles. Both parties thus brought false accusations against each other, which afterwards found their way into history; or, on the other hand, palliation was also attempted in order to disguise political or moral crimes. The blame of the worst events is laid to the people’s charge; yet it is innocent, and the guilt belongs wholly to its antagonists. Not the people, but the Curies condemned Manlius to death; these also pronounced the disgraceful decision between the Ardeates and the people of Aricia;[39] nay, we may be sure that it was the Curies which compelled Camillus to go into exile.
Such falsifications accumulate, become involved in each other, and give rise to this strange confusion. The rich materials, widely scattered indeed, because the parties did not allow of their being brought together, we may gather in order to find out by critical research the organization and the nature of the Roman nation; and on the whole to carry on their history to that point at which contemporary accounts from the Greeks begin, to the war with Pyrrhus, and the first Punic war. Much will indeed remain undecided in these inquiries; but we may exactly discriminate where this must needs be the case, and where it is otherwise.