Among the Romans the legend of the Trojan settlement is comparatively ancient. Nævius, in his poem on the Punic war, gave it already at considerable length; and the Ilians pleaded it with the Romans in their wars against Seleucus Callinicus. If any one should feel inclined to treat these accounts of the foundation of Rome by Æneas seriously, we cannot follow him: some traditions in them have a very national character, but the distance of time is too great between the events and those who described them. Nævius wrote from 950 to 980 years after the period at which the destruction of Troy is generally fixed. It is little known how very much Virgil changed the old legend of the settlement of Æneas in Latium, in which as a poet he was fully warranted; for its features were rude and harsh, as that Latinus had fallen in the war against Æneas, and that Lavinia, first betrothed to Æneas, and then refused, became the prize of the conqueror. The oldest tradition besides speaks of the settlement as a very small one. According to Nævius, Æneas arrived with one ship only; and the tract of land assigned to him consisted, as Cato stated, of not more than seven hundred jugera. Suppose this to have been true, how could any remembrance of it have lasted after nine hundred years?
The original tradition is that Æneas had first lived for three years in a small town called Troy; then, that taking a higher flight, he had founded Lavinium, and thirty years afterwards Alba; and that the three hundredth year after Alba, was that of the building of Rome. This regular progression of the numbers betokens a field which is not that of history. Three thousand years also were certainly fixed as the duration of Rome. There are two different numerical systems in these legends:—the Etruscan with a sæculum of a hundred and ten years, and the Greek, or the Tyrrhenian, in which the sæculum consisted of thirty years. This number thirty had at all times considerable weight on account of the period of the revolution of Saturn, which according to the then existing opinion, as Servius records, was completed within thirty years. Thirty common years constituted among the Greeks a Saturnian, and a hundred Saturnians a grand year. With this the scale of numbers from the foundation of Lavinium to the building of Rome is connected. The earliest Alban history is a nonentity, as the sagacious Dodwell (de Cyclis, diss. X.) has already shown, who indeed on other occasions only too often spoils by his subtleties what he has well begun. The chronology of the Alban-kings in Dionysius, for instance, is mere absurdity and forgery, the names of them being patched together in every possible way. This forgery, as we see from Servius, was committed in a later age by a freedman of Sylla, L. Cornelius Alexander of Miletus, who readily found acceptance at a period when people were glad to have histories of those times of which nothing could be known.
Alba, on the Alban Lake, was in my opinion the capital of the ruling conquerors. It is not accidental that it bears the same name as the town on the Lake Fucinus, from whence the Sacranians had issued. When they were obliged to yield their abode to the Sabines, they founded the Alba again on the banks of a lake; as the Pœni did a New Carthage, the Milesians a New Miletus on the Black Sea, and as is so frequently the case in the New World. This Alba Longa is therefore the seat of the Cascans or Sacranians, and the older Latin towns which lay within its territory have probably had a double fate. Some may have derived part of their population from the immigrants; others may have been subjected without receiving colonies. We find in tradition that these Latin towns had been thirty in number, all of them colonies of Alba, a tradition which is contradicted by the other, which states all of them to have been originally Argive. Both of these might be maintained in this sense, that an ἀποδασμός of the dominant race had settled in each of the towns. Be this as it may, Alba had thirty boroughs (δῆμοι) which belonged to the town as immediate dependencies or cantons: these are the populi Albenses which I have discovered in Pliny. It is not to be doubted, but that the Albans were to their dependencies as the populus of Rome to the plebs, or as Rome in later times to Latium.
At the mention of Alba, few are proof against the prejudice by which I also was beguiled for a long time, that so very much of the history of Alba is lost, that one can only speak of it in connexion with the Trojan or anti-Trojan times; as if every thing said of it by the Romans were based upon delusion and errors of judgment. Indeed, the foundation of Alba by Ascanius; the whole series of the Alban kings with the years of their reigns; the story of Numitor and Amulius; the account of the destruction of the town; all this does not belong to history. Yet the historical existence of Alba is for all that not in the least to be doubted, nor have the ancients ever had a doubt about it. The sacra Albana, the Albani tumuli atque luci bear witness to it. Ruins do not indeed exist any more; yet the situation of the town in the valley of Grotta Ferrata is still to be traced at this day. Between the lake and a long ridge of hills, near the convent Palazzuolo, one still sees even now the rock below towards the lake completely scarped, evidently by the hand of man, so that on that side an attack on the town was impossible; on the other side, on the summit, stood the Arx. That the Albans had the dominion over Latium is a tradition which we may deem authentic, as it rests on the authority of Cincius.[49] The Latins occupied afterwards the spot and the temple of Jupiter. The accounts also that Alba had shared with the thirty towns the flesh of the sacrifices on the Alban mount, and that the Latins after the fall of Alba, had themselves chosen their magistrates, are glimpses of history. The exceedingly ancient Emissarius is still preserved, and through its vault a canal was drawn, fossa Cluilia. In this vault, beneath the centroni, we have still a traceable work, more ancient than any Roman one. Yet that Alba was the capital; that it had the dominion over Latium; that its temple of Jupiter was the central point of the nations under its rule; and the gens Silvia the reigning family, is all that can be said about Alba and the Latins of that time.
It is not to be doubted, that the number of the Latin towns was really thirty, as well as that of the Alban boroughs. This number afterwards is again met with in the later Latin towns, and in the thirty Roman tribes; and it is also at the bottom of the account of Lavinium’s being founded by thirty households, in which the union of the two races may be traced.[50] The account that Lavinium was a Trojan colony, and afterwards abandoned, but again restored by Alba; that, moreover, the sanctuary could not be transferred from thence to Alba; however much it may bear the stamp of antiquity, is after all merely an adaptation of the Trojan and the native tradition. For, Lavinium is nothing else but a general name for Latium, as Panionion for Ionia. Latinus, Lavinus, Lavicus are one and the same name; as Servius also acknowledges. Lavinium was the central point of the Prisci Latini, and without doubt there existed in earlier times, when Alba had not yet the rule over Lavinium, a communion of worship in Alba and Lavinium; as afterwards in Rome at the temple of Diana in the Aventine, and at the Roman and Latin holidays on the Alban mount.
The characters therefore in the Trojan legend are thus to be analysed. Turnus is no other than Turinus, the Τυῤῥηνός of Dionysius; Lavinia, the beautiful maiden, is the name of the Latin people; perhaps they are so distinguished as the inhabitants of the coasts are more especially called Tyrrhenians, those of the interior country, Latins. As the Latins after the battle at the Regillus, are found together with thirty towns in the league with Rome, we cannot doubt but that the number of those towns, of which the dominion belonged in the earliest times to Alba, was also thirty. Only there were not always the same towns in this league; many afterwards perished, others were received in their stead.
Here the same instinct of substituting the fallen off members of political organizations is at work, which is to be perceived every where so long as institutions quietly go on in accordance with the old traditionary forms, and not with the actual wants of the times. Thus also in the twelve Achæan towns, in the seven Frisian maritime provinces, when one is ruined, the number is made up by splitting another. Where once a fixed number exists, although a unit may fall off, it is not given up, but it is always renewed. We may add, that the state of the Latins lost in the west, and gained in the east; we therefore take Alba as having thirty boroughs, and the thirty Latin towns as a state which at first was in league with Alba, and was afterwards subjected to its sovereignty.
The old places of the aborigines were, according to Cato’s important statement in Dionysius, small villages scattered on the hills. Such a place lay upon the Palatine, and had the name of Roma, certainly a Greek one. Not far off, there are several other places with Greek names, Pyrgi and Alsium; nor is it an erroneous supposition that Terracina had formerly been called Τραχεινή, the rough place, or that Formiæ is to be derived from ὅρμος, anchorage, roadstead. As certainly as Pyrgi meant towers, as certainly did Roma the place of strength.[51] Rome is described as a Pelasgian place where Evander lived, the founder of learning and civilization. The first step in civilization, according to the legend, began with Saturn. In the tradition found in Virgil, which is to be taken quite literally, the first men grew out of trees (gensque virum truncis et duro robore creti). As in Greece the μύρμηκες were changed into myrmidons, and the stones of Deucalion into men and women, thus the trees also by some Divine energy grew men. These half men acquired by degrees human manners, and that they owe to Saturn. Yet really liberal cultivation they considered to have originated with Evander, who must not be looked upon as coming from Arcadia, but as the good man. He was the inventor or teacher of the use of letters.
Among the Romans, the conviction prevailed that Romulus, the founder of Rome, had been born of a maiden ravished by a god; that he had been wonderfully preserved alive, rescued from the floods, and suckled by a she-wolf. The ancient date of this poetry cannot be doubted. But did the legend at all times call Romulus the son of Rea Silvia, or of Ilia? Perizonius has first remarked against Ryckius, that Rea Ilia never occurred in combination; that Rea Silvia was the daughter of Numitor, Ilia of Æneas. He is perfectly right. Both Nævius and Ennius, call Romulus the son of Ilia the daughter of Æneas, as Servius in his notes on Virgil, and Porphyrion in those on Horace (Carm. 1, 2.), bear witness. Yet it must not thence be inferred, that this was also a national Roman belief; those poets who were familiar with the Greeks, might have annexed their legends to the Greek poems. But the old Romans could not possibly have made the mother of the founder of their city a daughter of Æneas, whose time was dated 333 or 360 years earlier. Dionysius says that his narrative, which was that of Fabius, is found in the sacred songs; it is also consistent with itself. Fabius cannot, as Plutarch asserts, have borrowed it from a wretched unknown Greek writer, Diocles. The statue of the she-wolf was erected in 457, long before Diocles wrote; at least a hundred years before Fabius. Certainly, therefore, this tradition is the older Roman one, and it places Rome in connection with Alba. There has lately been a monument discovered at Bovillæ, an altar which the gentiles Julii erected lege Albana; a religious reference therefore of a Roman family to Alba. The relation between the two towns goes as far back as to the founder. The well known legend, with the old poetical details of which Livy and Dionysius already leave out much, because they were afraid of accumulating marvels, is the following.
Numitor and Amulius were both of them candidates for the throne. Numitor is a prænomen; but the name of Amulius says nothing in proof of his having belonged to the gens Silvia; I question therefore if the old tradition took them for brothers. Amulius, so it is said, had got possession of the throne, and had made Rea Silvia the daughter of Numitor, a vestal, in order that the Silvian race might become extinct. This shows a want of knowledge of public law, as a daughter surely could not convey gentilician rights. The name Rea Silvia is old, yet Rea is only a cognomen; rea femina is in Boccaccio, and still to this day in Tuscany, a woman who has lost her honour. A priestess Rea in Virgil is ravished by Hercules. Whilst Rea in a grove was drawing water for a sacrifice, an eclipse of the sun took place, and she fled from a wolf into a cavern where Mars overpowered her. At her delivery, the sun is again eclipsed, and the image of Vesta covers its eyes. Livy here has left out the wonderful part. The tyrant threw Rea with her children into the Anio: she lost her life in the river; but the river god took her soul, changed her into an immortal goddess, and made her his wife. This is now modified by the tale of her imprisonment, which is prosaic enough to be of later invention. The Anio bore the cradle, just as if it were a boat, into the Tiber, on which it was drifted to the foot of the Palatine, the waters being high in consequence of a flood; and there it was overturned at the root of a fig-tree. The she-wolf takes the children forth, and suckles[52] them: Mars sends a woodpecker, which brings them food, and the bird parra,[53] who keeps them free from vermin. These details are scattered: the narrators have as much as possible stripped them of the marvellous. Faustulus, the legend goes on to say, found the boys nursed with the milk of the strong brute; he brought them up with his twelve sons, and they became the stoutest of them all. As chiefs of the herdsmen of the Palatine, they had a quarrel with those of Numitor on the Aventine;—the Palatine and the Aventine are always hostile;—Remus is led away a prisoner to Alba; Romulus rescues him; the descent from Numitor is discovered, and the latter restored to the government. They receive permission to settle at the foot of the Palatine hill, the place of their rescue.