From the foregoing sketch it will appear that Latium formed a kind of focus, in which all the different races that in past centuries had been thronging into Italy converged. The Etruscans bordered on Latium to the west; the Sabines, with the Umbrians behind them, to the north; the Æquians and Volscians, Oscan tribes, to the northeast and east; while Hellenic communities are to be traced upon the coast lands. We should then expect beforehand to meet with a people formed by a commixture of divers tribes; and this expectation is confirmed.
Tradition tells us that the aborigines of Latium mingled in early times with a people calling themselves Siculians; that these Siculians, being conquered and partly expelled from Italy, took refuge in the island, which was afterwards called Sicily from them, but was at that time peopled by a tribe named Sicanians; that the conquering people were named Sacranians, and had themselves been forced down from the Sabine valleys in the neighbourhood of Reate by Sabellian invaders; and that from this mixture of aborigines, Siculians, and Sacranians arose the people known afterwards by the name of Latins. Where all is uncertain, conjecture is easy. But all conjectures bear witness to the compound nature of the Latin nation.[b]
BEGINNINGS OF ROME AND THE PRIMITIVE ROMAN COMMONWEALTH
About fourteen miles upstream from the mouth of the river Tiber, and on either bank of the latter, rise gentle slopes, the higher on the right, the lower on the left; to the latter for at least two and a half thousand years the name of the Romans has been affixed. It cannot, of course, be positively declared how and when it arose, it is only certain that in the oldest form of the name known to us, the inhabitants of the province were not called Romans but—with a change of pronunciation natural enough in the more ancient stages of a language but not continued in the Latin known to us—Ramnians or Ramnes; an eloquent witness to the immemorial antiquity of this name. The exact derivation cannot be determined; it is possible that the Ramnes are the people of the stream. But they did not dwell alone on the bank of the Tiber. In the oldest classification of the Roman citizens, we find traces showing that the nation derived its origin from the fusion into a single commonwealth of three once apparently independent tribes, the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres: that is, from a synoikismos like that whence Athens arose in Attica.[3]
Again, after the union, each of these three ancient communities, which had now become demes, owned a third of the common lands, and was similarly represented in the militia as well as in the council of the elders, whilst in the religious organisation the numbers of the six vestal virgins, the three high priests of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, are apparently to be referred to this threefold division.
The most wanton absurdities have been founded on the existence of the three elements into which the ancient Roman commonwealth was divided; the irrational idea that the Roman nation was a mixed race is connected with it, and its supporters labour in various ways to represent the three great Italian races as the component elements of ancient Rome, and to transform the people which developed its speech, its government, and its religion with a purity and national spirit attained by few others, into a confused mass of Etruscan, Sabine, Hellenic, and, still worse, even Pelasgic elements. Setting aside the sometimes contradictory, sometimes groundless hypotheses, all that can be said concerning the nationality of the various elements of the ancient Roman commonwealth may be summed up in a few words. That the Ramnes were of Latin origin cannot be doubted, since they gave their name to the new Roman commonwealth and maintained the chief place amongst the three tribes, so that they must have decided the nationality of the united community.
As to the descent of the Luceres, nothing can be said except that there is no obstacle to their being regarded as a Latin tribe like the Ramnes. On the other hand the second of these tribes is unanimously derived from that of the Sabines, doubtless on the authority of a respectable and authentic tradition of the “Titian brotherhood” which claimed to have been founded on the admission of the tribe to the confederacy for the preservation of its peculiar national ritual. Traces of such an aboriginal Sabine worship are in fact to be found in Rome; as for instance the honouring of Maurs or Mars and of Semo Sancus, side by side with the corresponding Latin Dius Fidius. It was at a very remote period, when the Latin and Sabine tribes were yet unquestionably far less distinctly unlike in language and customs than were the Roman and the Samnite later, that a Sabellian community entered into a Latin tribal union; exactly in the same way that some centuries afterwards the Sabine clan of Attus Clanzus, or Appius Claudius, and his clients emigrated to Rome, obtained a grant of land on the right bank of the Anio and was soon completely absorbed into the Roman community.
Death of Remus
(From a picture by Mirys)