It is impossible to conclude my comparative research, which has been rewarded by a most unexpected wealth of material, without enumerating a few facts connected with the earliest histories of Rome, ancient Ireland, Britain, Wales and Scandinavia. These brief and doubtlessly imperfect résumés will have fulfilled their purpose if they stimulate inquiry and evoke authoritative statements by learned specialists.
ANCIENT ROME.
Whether Rome “was founded by the common resolve of a Latin confederacy or by the enterprise of an individual chief, is beyond the reach even of conjecture. The date fixed upon for the commencement of the city is, of course, perfectly valueless in its [pg 462] precision” (Chambers' Encyclopædia). “According to Varro the city of Rome was founded B.C. 753, but Cato places the event four years later.... The day of its foundation was the 21st of April, which was sacred to the rural goddess Pales. There seems to be some uncertainty whether Romulus gave his name to the city or derived his own from it, but those who ascribe to the city a Grecian origin ... assert that Romulus and Roma are both derived from the Greek word for ‘strength.’ The city, we are assured, had another name which the priests were forbidden to divulge; but what that was it is now impossible to discover.[124] There is, however, some plausibility in the conjecture that it was Pallanteum, and from the great care with which the Palladium, or image of Pallas, was preserved, it seems probable that the city was supposed to be under the care of that deity. If this conjecture be correct, the Pelasgic origin of Rome cannot be doubted, for Pallas was a Pelasgic deity....
“The institution of the vestal virgins was older than the city itself and was regarded by the Romans as the most sacred part of their religious system. In the time of Numa there were but four ... their duty was to keep the sacred fire on the altar in the temple of Vesta from being extinguished and to preserve a certain sacred pledge on which the very existence of Rome was supposed to depend.[125] What this pledge was we have no means of discovering; some supposed that it was the Trojan Palladium; others, some traditional mystery brought by the Pelasgi from Samothrace. One fact is certain: that the Palatine is regarded as the oldest portion of the city and the original site and centre of the embryo mistress of the world and mother of cities, the Roma quadrata, fragments of whose walls have been brought to light.[126]
“Tradition relates that it was on the Palatine that Romulus marked out the Pomœrium, a space around the walls of the city, on which it was unlawful to erect buildings.... The next ceremony was the consecration of the comitium, or place of public assembly. A vault was built under ground and filled with the firstlings of all the natural productions that sustain human life and with [pg 463] earth which each foreign settler had brought from his home. This place was called Mundus” (History of Rome, Goldsmith's abridgment, 21st edition, by W. C. Taylor, p. 13).
This fact furnishes evidence that the sacred central cosmical vault over which a mound may have been formed by the earth contributed from different quarters, was regarded as a synopsis of all, and that sanctity was also attached to the central place of assembly where justice was administered at regular intervals, weekly markets were held and religious rites were celebrated.[127]
Tradition relates that, after the foundation of the central “Mundus,” the founder of Rome established the Sabine town which occupied the Quirinal and part of the Capitoline hills. “The name of this town most probably was Quirium ... the two cities were united on terms of equality and the double-faced Janus, stamped on the earliest Roman coins was probably a symbol of the double state.” It is significant to find not only that Janus was sometimes depicted with four faces instead of two, in which case he was called Janus Quadrifrontis, but that references are also made to the female form of Janus=Jana, the latter being identified with Diana. Considering that it was from Quirium that the Roman youths obtained Sabine wives by force, which had been refused to their entreaties, it would seem as though, originally, as elsewhere, the men and women of the community resided separately and that stringent laws regulated their intercourse. In other ancient communities it has been shown how the separation of the sexes created in time an upper and lower class, and to the same origin may perhaps be assigned the most remarkable feature of the Roman constitution, i. e. the two-fold division of the people into patricians and plebeians.
While the foregoing statements throw light upon the ideas associated with the Middle and show that Rome was originally a dual state, the following facts furnish indications of a quadruplicate division. At an early period Rome was laid out and enclosed in a square, the population was divided into four tribes and mention [pg 464] is made of “the state, under Servius Tullius, being an entity divided into four cities and twenty-six tribes ... this being strictly a geographical division analogous to our parishes. The division of the city into four tribes continued until the reign of Augustus (B.C. 29)....”[128]
The four chief religious corporations of ancient Rome, mentioned in the Century Dictionary, evidently correspond to this fourfold division and it is specially stated of one of these corporations that it was represented and governed by a group consisting of seven “septemvir epulones” who formed a “septemvirate.”
The number of septemvirs corresponded to the “seven hills” which were enclosed by Tullus Hostilius, and it is stated that there were seven places of worship in ancient Rome. It is interesting to find that between A.D. 193 and 211, Septimius Severus, a native of an ancient Punic colony in Africa, erected a Septizonium (an edifice consisting, like the Babylonian zikkurat, of seven stories) on the Palatine, where a large temple of Apollo had previously been built.[129]