The greatest debt they owed to their new settlers was the low round arch, built with stones set in mortar in such a way that the greater the weight, the firmer the arch would be. Another Etruscan trick was plastering over the side of a drain or a bank with a mixture of small stones stirred thickly into mortar like plums in a pudding. The best of this new way of working was that it could be done so quickly. A great deal of the work could be done by stupid and ignorant laborers under the direction of those who knew how to direct. Men whom they could not employ in any sort of skilled labor could help here. Such men were glad enough to come for an allowance of food and drink. A certain task was set them, and they had their living for that; if they did more, they had an extra allowance. The task was called moenia, and since it was the lowest and least skilled labor, work of that kind later came to be known as menial, the work of slaves and servants.
The change in the face of the plain in the following years was almost like magic. The colonists built dykes to keep the river from overflowing; they built drains to carry off the heavy rains; they built culverts; they built bridges rest[pg 195]ing on solid arches; and they made one great drain which carried off so much of the overflow water that it made the Square Hill and most of the land around it safe. In fact, a part of every year thereafter was given to the improvement and protection of newly cleared farmlands by stonework. People came from a great distance to see the dyke they built, for nothing like it had been done on that side of the river. The people in the lowlands villages, relieved from the fear of floods, were proud to call themselves the servants of the Romans. In those early years a beginning was made of the great engineering work that was to endure for centuries. The people of the Square Hill were doing on a very small scale what nobody had done before them in that part of the world. In their masonry and their farming they gave all their poorer neighbors reason to be glad they were located where they were. It was a peaceful conquering of village after village.
XVII
THE WAR DANCE
When the country had grown peaceful, and there was no more need, for the time, of sending out warlike expeditions, it began to be seen that the soldiers who had come in with Romulus or had joined the troops later must have something to do. Romulus talked the matter over seriously with the fathers of the colony. If these men were to settle down as citizens, taking part in the life of the city—and some of them wished to do so—they ought to have homes; they needed wives. The family life of this people was the very heart of their religion and their society. The father was high priest in his family. The public worship was only a greater family worship, in which all had a part, old and young, living and dead. The gods themselves were often present unseen to receive prayers and offerings,—so the people believed.
The question of wives for these men was a serious one. Girls were growing up within the [pg 197]palisade on the Square Hill, but so were young men. There would be hardly enough brides for all the youths of their own generation, even if every girl found a husband. Aside from the fact that the parents would not like to see their daughters married to strangers of whom they knew nothing, the young folk themselves would be likely to object. Although theoretically, marriages were made by the elders without the girls having anything to say about it, human nature was much the same there as anywhere. In practice, the bride had some choice and the groom some independence. Any woman married against her will can make life so unpleasant for her husband and her husband’s relatives that common sense would lead a parent to avoid such a result. Care was taken to keep a young girl from knowing any men who would be unsuitable. A man did not ask any youth into his house to meet his daughters, on the spur of the moment. He met a great many men at the midday meal which the men ate together, whom he would not think of asking to a family supper. He knew a great many with whom he would not eat at all.
Here and there a soldier found a wife among the country people, but this did not usually turn out very well. The daughters of herdsmen and hut dwellers were not trained in the arts which [pg 198]made a woman dear to a civilized husband. Colonus and his friends wished the wives of the growing settlement to be women who would add to the wealth of their homes and not spoil it,—who would love their homes and their husbands, and bring up their children wisely, and live in peace and friendliness with the other women. The question which had come up was more important now than it might be later. A great deal depended on beginning with the right families. The men now coming in would be the fathers of the future Rome, and on the way in which their sons were brought up the prosperity and godliness of the people might rest.
Another possibility was in sight, and it was too nearly a probability to look very pleasant. The soldiers could get wives across the river among the Rasennae. But that would be a dangerous plan—dangerous perhaps to the men themselves and certainly to the colony. Women of a strange land, of a race so old and strong as the dark people seemed to be—a country where there was a secret council of priests who knew all sorts of things that the people did not—such women, married to settlers in the colony, would be a constant danger. They would learn from their husbands all that went on; they might persuade them to worship the strange gods; they [pg 199]might help to break down defences against the unknown power of the foreign priesthood. That was a plan not to be thought of for a minute.