According to the general tradition, the Etruscans are suddenly seen on the Janiculum, and the Romans flee across the river. The poem does not even speak of the conquest of the Janiculum; but the Etruscan army appears at once on the banks of the Tiber, ready to pass the pons Sublicius. Here three Roman heroes stand against them; Horatius Cocles, Sp. Lartius and T. Herminius,—in all likelihood a personification of the three tribes. These resist whilst the Romans are breaking down the bridge; then two of the heroes, Lartius and Herminius, go away, and the first, one of the Ramnes, alone withstands the enemy. On this the story is told, how the Etruscans cross the river, and the consuls enticed them into an ambush on the Gabinian road. This tale is entirely borrowed from the Veientine war of 275, in which the self-same thing happens. The annalists transferred it because it did not seem to them satisfactory that the poem should not have known any thing of the war beyond the defence of the bridge. The whole account in Livy has a ridiculous exactness; the characters are the ever recurring Valerius, Lartius, and Herminius. But we find Porsena on the Janiculum; how then is it possible that Rome could have been visited by a famine such as must be presupposed for the story of Mucius Scævola, if the Etruscans lay only on that hill? The plunderers on that side of the stream could easily be kept at bay. In Livy nothing more is mentioned but that Porsena carries on the war alone; in Dionysius he makes his appearance leagued with the Latins under Octavius Mamilius,—evidently a device to account for Rome’s being beleaguered and suffering from famine. Of the hostility of the Latins there is no question at all until their grand war. In fact the Etruscans had not occupied the Janiculum only; that the famine was raging, is acknowledged by the Romans. In this distress, the poem makes Mucius Scævola undertake to kill the king; but he stabbed instead of him his secretary, as the latter was clothed in purple, a mistake which indeed is inconceivable in real history, and only pardonable in poetry. He then tells him that three hundred patrician youths (one of each gens) were like himself resolved to slay him; whereupon Porsena concludes peace, keeping the seven Veientine pagi, and leaving a garrison on the Janiculum.

If we enquire into the details, whether a Mucius Scævola had existed at all, we come to the question which Beaufort before now has correctly stated; for on the whole this war of Porsena and the time of Camillus are beautifully handled by him, and they seem to have been the chief occasion, as well as the pith and substance, of his work. How is it that Mucius is called in Livy and Dionysius a patrician, or juvenis nobilis, when on the contrary the Scævolæ were plebeians? Probably the family of the Mucii Scævolæ appropriated to themselves this Mucius: in the old poems he was certainly called Caius. As late as in the seventh century two names are mentioned, and afterwards Scævola (the left-handed one); whereas the family of the Scævolæ had got this cognomen from quite a different circumstance. Scævola in the latter instance means an amulet. It is impossible to make out how much or how little is true concerning the existence of the old Scævola. The story as we have it is evidently poetical.

Beaufort has really struck a new light, by showing that the peace of Porsena was quite a different thing from what the Romans would have us believe. Pliny states explicitly, that by it the Romans were bound to make no use of iron, except for agriculture. That hostages were given is acknowledged even in the common account. Thus we see Rome in a condition of utter subjection, arma ademta, obsides dati, an expression which so often occurs with reference to the conquest of states. Pliny has seen that treaty (nominatim comprehensum invenimus); where, is uncertain,—a tablet probably did not exist,—perhaps in Etruscan books. Just as positively does Tacitus, in his account of the burning of the Capitol, speak of the Romans having been most deeply humbled by Porsena, sede Jovis optimi maximi quam non Porsena dedita urbi neque Galli captor, temerare potuissent; and what deditionem facere means is evident from the form which Livy gives us when mentioning the submission of Collatia to Ancus Martius, from which we see that it was a complete making over of people, state, land and persons, similar to the mancipatio, or to the in manum conventio of women in the civil law. To this submission the notice in the Quæstiones Romanæ of Plutarch is to be referred, who was wont to make a very uncritical use of good materials. He says that the Romans had once paid tithes to the Etruscans, and that Hercules had freed them from the obligation. Tithes, however, were paid by those who had the usufruct of a field belonging to the state (qui publici juris factus erat). The removal of the burthen by Hercules denotes their having freed themselves by their own might: that they paid the tithes was the consequence of their having given themselves and theirs into the keeping of the Etruscans, which is the excellent German expression for complete submission (feuda oblata); a man makes himself, as it were, a minor, and becomes dependent upon another. A further, and much more important proof of the misfortunes of that time, is the loss of about one-third of the Roman territory; which is shown by the number of Servius Tullius’ tribes being reduced from thirty to twenty, to which afterwards, in the year 259, the tribus Crustumina was added as the twenty-first.[88] Among the Romans the custom was quite a common one, when a state fell beneath their sway, multandi tertiâ parte agri: it is therefore evident also in this instance, as tribes and districts correspond with each other, and we find besides only twenty tribes out of thirty left, that Rome in consequence of the deditio about the year 260 had lost a third of its territory. There are traces of it in the septem pagi agri Vejentium, the surrender of which is already mentioned. In order to conceal the conquest of the city, Porsena was made the protector of the Tarquins; whereby this advantage was gained, that it appeared as if the war had not ended after all so badly, since its main object, the restoration of the Tarquins, had not been attained.

It is now stated besides that Porsena, after his return, had sent his son Aruns with part of the army to Aricia, in order—as Livy says in one of those passages in which he intentionally shuts his eyes to the truth—to show, that his expedition had not been indeed quite fruitless. Yet the expedition of Porsena against Aricia seems really to have failed owing to the assistance of Cuma; for Cuman traditions also spoke of it. Aricia was a very strong place. The Romans are said to have now behaved generously to the flying Etruscans; and Porsena being moved by it became their friend, abandoned the Tarquins and gave back the seven Veientine pagi. After this Porsena is no more mentioned. Here it is obvious that a poetical fiction has been awkwardly thrust in. It was even at a very late period the custom at Rome, that before every sale by auction the goods of king Porsena were symbolically sold. Livy seems to have good sense enough to see that this does not tally with the account of Porsena and Rome, having parted friends in arms (δορύξενοι). The whole becomes quite clear if we assume that on the defeat of the Etruscans before Aricia, the Romans made an effort and freed themselves. By this the legend of Clœlia also has its right meaning; as otherwise her flight together with the rest of the hostages would have only been injurious. Connected with the great migration of the Etruscans is the account that Tyrrhenians from the Adriatic, together with Opicans and other people, had made their appearance before Cuma; concerning which there is in the common chronology a mistake of at least 15 to 20 years. The Tyrrhenians here are not the Etruscans, but the old inhabitants of the country; perhaps those of Picenum, who were pushed on by the advance of the Etruscans and threw themselves upon Cuma. The conclusion come to is this. The Romans carried on an unequal war against the Etruscans and their king Porsena, in consequence of which they submitted themselves to him as their master, lost one-third of their territory, and paid tithes of the rest. The Etruscan power broke down before Aricia, whereupon the Romans took courage and once more became free, yet without recovering that part of their territory which lay beyond the Tiber; for, long afterwards, even as late as the days of the decemvirate, the Tiber was their boundary line, except that the Janiculum probably was Roman, as is evident from the regulation concerning the sale of the slaves for debt trans Tiberim. Now it is a question of great importance, whether the war of Porsena is to be dated about the year in which it is generally placed; or else one or two years after the consecration of the Capitol; or from a later period. Livy and Dionysius contradict themselves in this respect, and are completely at variance with every one else. It is easy to see that the poem was interpolated by the annalists; since the oldest annals do not mention it at all. In the same way, the poem of the Nibelungen cannot be chronologically placed any where, and Johannes Müller had to proceed very arbitrarily before he could fix upon any chronological position for it. Such poems have nothing to do with chronology. Valerius Poplicola is named in the battle at the Regillus, and this gave occasion to assign this place to the legend. It is more likely from other statements that the war happened ten years later than is generally taken for granted, shortly before the hostilities against the plebs began. This I conclude from the accounts of the numbering of the people; for, I do not wholly reject them, though at the same time I am far from maintaining that in their present form they are authentic:—they are certainly a representation of the increase and decrease of the numbers of the Roman citizens. He, who is the first author of that statement, even if it should not be very ancient, had formed a notion of Roman history, according to which in the times mentioned the number of the citizens rose from 110,000 to 150,000, and again fell to 110,000. If this increase or decrease had harmonized with the history in the annals, it might have been said that some fabulist had set forth his own views in these statistics. Yet such a man would from vanity never have spoken of a decrease of numbers; on the contrary, just in the times when in the census the numbers decrease, there are in the annals victories and acquisitions. I believe therefore that some account, older than the annals, was intended to show in a statistical outline, how Rome and Latium were by unequal wars reduced in population. That the numbers are correct, cannot be avouched; at all events the statement independent of the annals. I therefore ascribe the notice that Rome between the battle at the Regillus and the rising of the Plebes, and for a long time afterwards, was bereft of one-third of its inhabitants, to the fact that at that very period the war of Porsena took place, and the loss of territory occasioned by it. The decrease of population all but tallies with the diminution of the territory by one-third; and it does not quite agree, perhaps for the sole reason that the numbering included the plebeians only and not the patricians, perhaps also because part of the inhabitants of the lost districts emigrated and settled in Rome.

In the Roman history the same events very often recur again. As after the Gallic conquest, the Latins and their allies separated from Rome; thus also after the Etruscan calamity they broke the alliance which had been brought about in the reign of Tarquin. The confederation of the two states, which we find in the days of Servius Tullius, had under Tarquin been changed into a union, which notwithstanding the obscurity of all the details, is evident from the combination of the Roman and Latin centuries into maniples. This combination is the more certain as Livy mentions it in two different places, in his account of Tarquin the Proud, and in the eighth book, wherein he describes the battle-array. The sources from which he drew contained authorities quite independent of each other, which he gives without understanding them; yet in such a manner that we may gather from them the real views of the annalists. He surely wrote the second passage without the least recollection of the first. The relation in which the parties stood may have been this, that Rome had the chief command, and the Latins received their share in the booty; or the two people may have held the imperium by turns. But in the treaty with Carthage we see the supremacy vested in Rome, and the Latins in the position of periœcians. The war, the only reminiscences of which are an historical one, the conquest of Crustumeria, and a poetical one, the battle at the Regillus, has this consequence that the Latins pass from the condition of periœcians to that of inhabitants of rural districts with equal rights: as in Gröningen the districts at last were placed on the same footing with the town, and formed only one province with it with regard to the foreigner. As the first cause of the war Tarquin and his house are named. That he was not unconnected with it, may easily be believed, as his alliance by marriage with Mamilius Octavius of Tusculum has the appearance of history; but we can by no means receive the battle at the lake Regillus as it is told. It does not enter into my thoughts to deny that the Romans tried to restore their rule by war; but it is altogether a different question, whether at the Regillus a great battle was fought under the command of the Dictator Postumius, in which the Latins were conquered and reduced to their former position. No, if we may reason from effects to causes, which is not as infallible in moral as in physical problems, the Latins were by no means defeated; for, they attained, although after a considerable time only, their object,—a completely free alliance with Rome. One might draw the opposite conclusion from the fact that Postumius, who is said to have been dictator or consul, was called Regillensis; but the Claudii are also surnamed Regillani. Cognomens borrowed from places are quite common among the patricians, as e. g. the Sergii are called Fidenatus; Regillensis was likewise derived from the town Regillus; and surnames of this kind are even taken from quarters of Rome, as Esquilinus, Aventinus, and others. Such gentes stood to these places somewhat in the relation of patrons. The appellation from victories occurs only very late: the greatest generals prior to Scipio Africanus have received no surnames from the places where they gained their victories, as Livy himself remarks at the conclusion of his thirtieth book.

That the Romans looked upon the battle as a complete victory is proved by the legend of the Dioscuri. At the Regillus, where the whole adjacent country consists of volcanic tufa, there was shown in a stone the impression of a horse’s hoof (as on the Rosstrappe in the Hartz mountains), which was said to have been the foot print of a gigantic horse of the Dioscuri,—a legend which even to Cicero’s times was in the mouths of the people. After the battle they likewise made their appearance still covered with dust and blood on the comitium; announced the victory to the people; watered their horses at the well, and vanished away. In every account which we have of this battle, there is already the attempt to make it appear as history; nevertheless we perceive that the poem distinctly shines through. In the description of the fight there is much harmony between Livy and Dionysius, which we seldom find elsewhere: in the latter, it is more in the form of a bulletin; in Livy’s lively narrative it has quite the appearance of a combat of heroes in Homer; the masses are entirely kept in the background. The peace had been renounced already a year before, in order that the many ties of friendship might be as gently severed as possible, and the foreign wives be enabled to go home; Tarquin had betaken himself to his son-in-law Mamilius Octavius; and all the Latins were excited to hostility. The dictator leads the Romans against a far superior force; Tarquin himself with his sons is in the enemy’s host. In the fray all the chiefs encounter. The Roman dictator meets Tarquin who leaves the field badly wounded; the Magister Equitum fights Mamilius. T. Herminius and the legate M. Valerius fall; and P. Valerius also, who endeavours to rescue the dead body. At last the Roman knights gain the victory by alighting from their horses and fighting on foot. The consul had offered a reward for the taking of the enemy’s camp by storm; this was done forthwith at the first assault, in which the two gigantic youths distinguished themselves.

With regard to M. and P. Valerius the ancients are in great perplexity; for, Marcus soon afterwards appears again as dictator, and Publius was already dead before it happened. Both of them are stated to have been sons of Poplicola; yet this also is awkward, since a P. Valerius occurs as his son once more in the Fasti. The poem takes no heed of Fasti and annals, and the sons of Poplicola are not to be thought of: they are the old heroes Maximus and Poplicola, who fight here, and meet with their death. The tradition also certainly related that Tarquin and his sons fell:—the reason why he was said to have been wounded only, is that men had read in the annals, that he had died at Cuma. And surely the dictator Postumius is likewise a mere interpolation; in the poem it was Sp. Lartius, who could not have been left out, or M. Valerius. The reward offered by the dictator refers to the legend of the Dioscuri, as in the war against the Lucanians under Fabricius, in which a youth brought the ladder and was no more seen afterwards, when the mural crown had been awarded to him.

With this battle ends the lay of the Tarquins, as that of the Nibelungen does with the doom of all the heroes. The old era is concluded by it, and a new one is ushered in. There is no fixed date for the battle: some assume 255, others 258; some make Postumius a consul, others a dictator, and this is the very proof that the account is not historical; if it were so, the Fasti must in any case have marked such an event with some exactness. It is credible that in 259 the peace with the Latins was restored; if this notice be taken literally, the victory at the Regillus is confirmed by it. We may well believe that the Latins had been beaten at the Regillus, and had been obliged to content themselves with the position which Tarquin had assigned them, but that the senate had afterwards from other reasons restored to them the constitution of Servius Tullius. However this may be, there was peace already between the Romans and the Latins before the secession of the Plebes. For years after the battle at the Regillus, Livy has nothing to tell of the Latins; whilst, on the other hand, Dionysius gives various accounts of exchanges, armistices, &c., which, however, are invented at pleasure, until the first decree of the people that their prisoners should be restored to them; yet we know nothing of the whole affair, except that under Sp. Cassius Rome concluded a treaty with the Latins by which isopolity, or jus municipii, was granted them. The meaning of the term isopolity changes in the course of ages, but in ancient times its nature was as follows. There existed between Romans and Latins, and between Romans and Cærites, this right, that whosoever wanted to emigrate into the other state, might at once claim the privileges of citizenship therein. This was called ἰσοπολιτεία, an expression which is first met with in the days of Philip, when it became desirable to combine into larger states. Even before the war, there were already definite relations between Rome and Latium, which included connubium and commercium: the citizens of the one state enjoyed in the other the full right of acquiring Quiritary property, and of carrying on in their own name, without a patron, all their business and lawsuits. They were full citizens, with the exception only of political rights. This might co-exist with equality as well as with supremacy; the change now was, that Rome acknowledged Latium as endowed with equal rights to her own. The Hernicans also soon entered into this relation, so that the three states formed one whole with regard to the foreigner. After the Gallic war this union was broken. The league made by Sp. Cassius in 261 is not to be looked upon as a treaty of peace, but as the beginning of a state of mutual rights. It is incomprehensible how this compact of 261 could have been so misunderstood, as it was even already by the ancients when occasionally mentioning it. Dionysius gives this alliance in words betokening an authenticity which we cannot doubt. He had not himself seen the tablets on the Rostra any more; for, Cicero in his Oration for Balbus speaks of having seen them, as of a thing which he recollects. Yet many Roman writers, Macer and others, must have known them: Cincius, who lived a hundred years earlier, knew them very well. Having the Swiss confederation in mind, we may call that league an everlasting one: it was to stand as long as heaven and earth should abide. But before thirty years were ended, it had become obsolete owing to the force of circumstances, and afterwards it was revived for a short time only. It stipulated perfect equality between Romans and Latins, so that they should alternately hold the chief command of the army; the party in distress was to call in the other, and the latter was to give it every support in its power; the booty was then to be divided.

Here we have the key of another political relation. About this time we first behold the appearance of a dictator, which is properly a Latin magistracy; for not only single towns, but also the whole of the Latin people might have a dictator, as Cato informs us. It was natural that the Romans likewise now elected a dictator who ruled alternately with the Latin one, on which account the imperium was granted for six months only. Among the Tuscans the king of each town had a lictor. The lictors of all the twelve towns, whenever they united, had to be in attendance upon the common chief. Thus, of course, the twelve Latin and the twelve Roman lictors were given to the common dictator: the consuls together had had no more than twelve lictors, who waited upon both by turns. A magister populi also at Rome is now spoken of more than once: whether he was from the beginning one and the same with the dictator, or whether he was elected for Rome alone is uncertain. The dictatorship had probably only reference to the league with Latium. A consul might have been dictator without there necessarily being a magister populi; yet if there was a magister populi, then must a dictator likewise have been appointed for the foreigner, it being contrary to usage that there should have been two names for the same office. Very likely there was for some time a dictator every year, an office which sometimes was conferred upon one of the consuls, and at others upon some one specially chosen for it.

In the history which now follows, we find ourselves upon real historical ground; we have distinct men, and distinct facts, although now and then legends are still interpolated among the Fasti. That errors have crept in, is merely the fate of all that is human; yet we are to look upon this history as we would upon any other, and we ought not to make it the subject of a silly display of scepticism. A new war breaks out in which Cora and Pometia fall into the hands of the Auruncians; they are afterwards said to have been retaken by the Romans and Latins, which is highly problematical. This war occurs twice in Livy; it has certainly happened, but whether in 251 or 258, cannot matter much to us. Whenever in the annals of the Romans a serious defeat was simply stated, their descendants found gratification for their vanity in not leaving things as they were, but making the calamity all right again by a bold lie. The most glaring, yet not the only example of this in Roman history, is the deliverance of the city by Camillus, the fictitiousness of which has been already shown by Beaufort very ably. Polybius informs us, that the Gauls had retired with their booty at the tidings of an inroad of the Venetians into their country; yet it may have been, that in very early times indeed an old Vates sang the tale in a poem on Camillus. In the Samnite wars also, every defeat of consequence, which cannot be disguised, is followed by a victory quite unconnected with any thing else; and this is likewise the case in the wars with the Volscians and Æquians. This is a common weakness of human nature, of which one has personal experience in disastrous times. The Italians of the fifteenth century wanted by every means to be genuine descendants of the ancient Romans, and therefore Charlemagne is stated by Flavius Blondus to have driven all the Lombards out of Italy. Thus, after the battle of Austerlitz, a report was generally believed in Northern Germany, that the French had indeed conquered in the early part of the day, but that in the afternoon the most complete victory had been gained by the Austrians and Russians. I have myself witnessed absurdities of the same kind in 1801 at Copenhagen. Greek history, even that of the middle ages, has been remarkably free from such fabrications.—I now believe in the invasion of the Auruncians: not only the thirty towns, the sanctuary of which was the temple of Ferentina, but also the towns on the coast, which had been Latin, and which, in the treaty with Carthage, are acknowledged as subject to Rome, fell off from it, when it was bowed beneath the Etruscan calamity. Antium therefore and Terracina, as well as the towns properly Latin, likewise threw off Roman sway, and expelled the coloni. There is no doubt but that Antium and Terracina were afterwards Volscian, yet it is erroneous to suppose that they were so originally;—they form no exception to the general Tyrrhenian population on the coast. In an old Greek Ethnology, which was certainly not an invention of Xenagoras, but derived from Italiote sources, Antium is represented as being sprung from the same stock with Rome and Ardea; Romus, Antias, and Ardeas are brothers. At a later period only, Terracina acquires the Volscian name of Anxur. These places became Volscian, either by conquest, or by voluntarily receiving, while in want of support, ἔποικοι of the Volscians; or also, because after having fallen off from Rome, they were obliged to throw themselves into their arms.